Clarissa's Blog

People are posting pictures of their teaching outfits. Here is mine:

All of the crap on the table is what I’m taking with me because I’m getting Klara straight from work and we are off to the playground.

What’s very lovely to see on the local playgrounds is how often kids are out with grandmas or grandpas. These are not the tragic situations where grandparents are raising kids because parents are not available. These are extended families that live close to each other and haven’t been separated by fluidity.

Why is Biden going on “The American Promise Tour”? He had ample time to fulfill all his promises. It’s way way way too late for him to promise anything else. 

I swear to God, if the Democrats run another 70+ year old against the serving 70+ year old. . . I don’t even know how to end this sentence.

In any other circumstances, Otto Quangel, the protagonist of this novel, would be seen as a mean, stupid old bastard. But in Every Man there’s nobody more decent than he is. He, at least, is trying to resist the Nazis, even though his way of doing it is pathetically useless. 

Quangel is not the only person in the novel who tries to remain decent in Nazi Germany yet makes everything even worse. Judge Fromm, for instance, attempts to hide from the Nazis a Jewish woman but does it in such a way that she prefers suicide to his help. People fail to do the right thing because they are so isolated and suspicious of each other. But when they do manage to come together, everything gets worse. 

No matter how much you have read on Nazism, your reading will be incomplete without this novel. It’s very simply written yet extremely complex because it gives no answers. There are subjects where answers are not needed. They should remain an eternal question because they must never be put to rest. 

The only adults on the playground it’s possible to talk to are immigrants and African Americans. Today, for instance, I talked to a grandma from Gujarat, an African American mother, an African American grandma, and a mom-grandma duo from China. 

Not that I’m a chatty Cathy, but I feel decidedly weird standing shoulder to shoulder with another person next to a swing for 15 minutes and pretending she doesn’t exist. 

Kids are all making eye contact and trying to talk to each other, even when there is a big age difference. It’s only the adults that get scared if you smile at them. I don’t know if it’s region or social class that’s causing this but it’s tiresome.

There haven’t been any cutesy baby stories for a few days, so here goes. 

At the store, I always tell Klara, “We have to pay for our purchases before we leave.” So we come home and I start unloading the stuff I bought. Klara sees me hauling a sack of potatoes, points to it and announces, “Purchase!”

I don’t like baby language, so I always teach her the correct version of words. Today, for instance, she learned the word “laminated” because I needed to explain why her favorite and very tattered cards had suddenly become shiny and smooth. 

Something else that is ridiculously cute is that she always asks my permission before doing anything. On the playground, people are stunned at how she always asks first. She’s a very brave kid and throws herself into all kinds of activities. But only after making sure it’s ok. And the funniest part? I didn’t teach her that. I had no idea it was an option.  

Being a total bloody jerk is very convenient because whenever you momentarily act like only a 90% bloody jerk, people treat you like a hero. 

Rauner signed a bill making Illinois a sanctuary state and creating automatic voter registration. Yay, of course, but we can’t forget everything that came before he grew desperate and started doing not entirely cannibalistic things. He still has to go. 

I go to the gym for older people. Meaning, older than me. I’m one of the very youngest members. The reason this is our gym is that it’s the only place in town with a sauna, and N loves his sauna. 

The gym has a new owner, and finally somebody smart is managing the place. Instead of young and super buff personal trainers, they hired people in their 50s and 60s with normal bodies. They are obviously fit but they don’t look like cartoons promoting steroids. 

The receptionists are also older and mostly quite heavy. It’s actually very motivating to be greeted by a gym receptionist who is 50lbs heavier than you. It’s like, hey, I can do this! I don’t even have that much weight to lose. 

I drove myself too hard today, which is a rare occurrence because I usually know my limits. So now I’m very depleted. It doesn’t help that people conspire to annoy me. 

After the ecocritical outrage committed against my scholarly persona, I walk into my classroom and discover that the huge tripartite blackboard is covered top to bottom with crap in the vein of “men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them” and “white men / white women / brown bodies” (because “brown” always precedes “bodies” and never, say, “women” in this cloying lingo). So not only does the blackboard – and poor students’ minds – have to be polluted with this empty blabber but I get to spend the first 10 minutes of my class wiping off the white women and the pseudo-feminist ditties. Somehow it’s the most socially conscious that are the least capable of remembering the existence of other people around them. 

And it’s sweltering hot again. Drat.