Clarissa's Blog

I’m starting 2018 with a trip to NYC. I’m leaving on Wednesday and will come back on Monday. In NYC I will:

1. Speak at a conference
2. Visit the book fair where my book is sold
3. Have lunch with a friend from Ukraine I haven’t seen for exactly 20 years
4. See a Broadway show with my sister
5. Visit ABC Kitchens and enjoy their fresh seafood
6. Meet up with a friend who’s been coming to this conference for years to interview for jobs and now will finally come as a TT professor who already has a job
7. Go to an exhibition of Ukrainian art
8. Visit MOMA (which is the only place in NYC I invariably like)
9. Go to a place called “Corn on the Cob” because my sister swears by it

If somebody knows of any other NYC pastimes I will enjoy, please give suggestions. My Sunday afternoon and evening will be wide open.

Turns out there are bald eagles in this area. And I thought these creatures I was seeing were vultures. 

In the closing weeks of 2017, I conducted a mental experiment. I imagined I was working for a less obscure college somewhere on the coasts. And the result was that I couldn’t write anything at all on the blog. I’m sure everybody here noticed. There’s nothing I want to say that can survive the censorship that exists in those places. 

If I hadn’t come to work here, in the deep Midwest, 9 years ago, I would have thought that this kind of area is where fanaticism and intolerance live. But now I know different.

And yes, except for papas a la huancaina, I cooked all of this myself, from scratch, as always. I rule. 

The fantasy I cherished of Klara and her 2-year-old cousin playing happily together while we all admire their friendship and love for each other collapsed under the weight of full-blown sibling rivalry. 

Klara always shares her toys with friends and even strange kids. But the sight of her cousin touching any of her belongings – or any of his own belongings – makes her very angry. The kids fight constantly. If one of them stands in a certain spot, the other urgently needs to stand in that same spot. And the pushing, kicking and screaming begins. How they know that the other kid is not just any kid but a relative and thus needs to be bugged and hounded is a mystery. 

So instead of admiring cute scenes of happy babies playing together, we get to run after them, trying to prevent them from gouging each other’s eyes out. After engaging in this pastime for several days, N announced he urgently wants more kids. I have no idea how he arrived at that conclusion but here you have it. 

Shop your way to equality!

Not surprisingly, Trudeau’s approval ratings are in the toilet. 

We aren’t destroying the Earth. 

Beautiful paper dresses from a Ukrainian artist. 

It’s not good to laugh at dumb people but this one is irresistible.

Oh, so they’ve always been this apocalyptic. Good to know. 

I’ve got to do something about my news feed so that in the new year it brings me the kind of articles that I like and not the self-pitying garbage I see so often in it. 

The New Year is almost here, folks! I hope everybody is ready to celebrate. And I hope everybody’s lists of resolutions are done. I’m going with monthly resolutions, instead of the yearly ones because that way they are easier to control. 

What a great holiday.

I’m reading Disrupted by Dan Lyons and loving it. He’s ridiculing the “peppy, effervescent, relentlessly positive, incredibly hubristic and overconfident attitude” at techy startups, and I feel a pang of envy. I’m in a profession where everything is great except for the environment of apocalyptic, tragic, dejected gloominess that is entirely divorced from reality. If only it got a bit more fashionable to be peppy and effervescent, I’d be very happy.

After I spent an hour and a half picking up toys, food remnants, and bits of torn tissue that three kids left created in the process of actively playing for 4 hours, N came in, looked around, and said, “Wow, the kids really changed since last year. The place is spotless! They made no mess at all. Incredible!”