Clarissa's Blog

So I’m at home with Klara until her HFMD clears. The bad part is that I can’t take her to any of the places where we normally like to go (the children’s museum, the bookstore’s kid corner, the playgrounds) because this virus is very contagious. So I have to entertain her at home or in depopulated areas. And she’s unwell, so she needs every ounce of my attention and more. 

Unlike many kids with this virus, she hasn’t lost her appetite, so I need to find the time to cook for her. And for us. And prepare N’s lunches that he takes to work. Plus, I can’t just suspend all work on my article. I’m on a deadline, and nobody will wait for me to finish. 

Plus, I’m in the midst of a home-improvement project that entails people coming to the house to do work.

Plus, I’m in a health-management program (diabetes prevention) and I need to see doctors.

All this means that I need to plan everything extra carefully to make sure I manage to do everything in the small pockets of time when Klara is asleep or with N. I’m literally desperate for a few minutes here and there to do stuff that needs to be done. 

And then I go to Chronicle of Higher Ed and see people bitch about the intolerable hardship of having too much free time on their hands in the summer and fret about pronouns. Dumb fuckers.

Success doesn’t mean you have no more problems. It means you have problems of a higher order. 

“In Morocco, for instance, 71 percent of men said women enjoyed sexual harassment, but only 42 percent of women agreed. Only 20 percent of Egyptian women said women enjoyed harassment, but 43 percent of men said they did.”

And in Latin America and the FSU countries the results will be even worse. So let’s keep that in mind. 

What I wish I could see one days is Gender Studies departments abandoning their rueful navel-gazing for a moment and figuring out what helped solve this problem in North America and how this recipe could be exported at least into the countries that are desperate to be seen as part of the civilized West. 

Mental health is inextricably linked to the capacity to concentrate on the current moment when times are good and moving to a long-term perspective when they are bad. 

The UK’s political developments mimic the recent US history so closely that it’s like a bad joke. A gauche, uncharismatic woman who can’t say a word without annoying voters and a flamboyant Putinoid con artist who rides to power on a contrast between his cheap populism and her unvanquishable elitism. 

Sometimes, you repeat your own talking points so much that you start to believe them. Contrary to what we hear on TV and see in the papers, voters aren’t appalled by Trump any more than they were on the day they handed him the presidential victory. Nobody gives a flap about Comey or the Russians. Nobody – aside from those who thought this on November 8, of course – thinks that Trump’s presidency is a disaster. Many people think Trump is delivering for them. 

The only way for Democrats to win is to stop running against Trump and start running on their own message. Of course, that requires coming up with one. For instance, it has become very clear that voters care about immigration. We can fret all we want about how crazy it is to care about immigration more than you do about your own health insurance, but you got to work with what you have. What’s the Democrats’ new message on immigration? Yesterday I linked an article that had some good ideas on the subject. I hope some of these ideas start appearing in the Dem nationwide platform. 

Most importantly, the message of embracing losership, of “you didn’t build this”, of “privilege” needs to go. Many people perceive it as a weapon with which the rich and the mobile try to humiliate them. Remember how often Trump repeated the word “winning” in his campaign? It’s NLP, neurolinguistic programming. It’s something to look at and borrow.

One of Klara’s favorite games is identifying parts of the body. I say, “Klarochka, where are toes?” and she shows me her toes. 

“Where are teeth?” and she touches her teeth. 

Finally, I say, “Where are eyes?”

Of course, Klara is a smart baby and she doesn’t want to poke herself in the eye. She thinks about it for a second, pokes me in the eye, and announces, “Eyes!” 

So remember the rapist in Berlin who raped a 13-year-old Russian immigrant girl and filmed the rape to use as blackmail? He was given a suspended sentence of one year and 9 months. Meaning, he won’t serve a day and is free to go rape some more kids. 

I wish people kept this in mind whenever they start peeing themselves with delight over how very progressive Europe is compared to the supposedly backwards US. Shit’s the same everywhere. 

A lady at the park asked me if I’m Klara’s babysitter. I neither dress not act youthful, so I’m thinking she must have thought I’m one of those foreign au pairs one sees in TV shows set in New York. It’s got to be the accent, right? Because there’s nothing else. 

From an interesting article on immigration in The Atlantic:

In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.”

Even for California it sounds deranged. Is it an urban myth of some sort?