Clarissa's Blog

I made the mistake of turning on the NPR and heard a bunch of castrated fools gush about how professional, respected and amazing Comey was. As if it weren’t because of Comey that we are saddled with President Trump. 

Darn losers. 

We have fantastic playgrounds in our small town, and today I took Klara to one of them for the first time. My goal, aside from entertaining her, was to meet mommies. Which is also for her sake because, as we all know, my interest in meeting new people is lower than being bitten by sharks. 

I met mommies, so that part of the goal is going ok. The problem is that I feel extremely out of place. Mommies are all decades younger than me and tell stories that go,  “I has my first child by accident at 18 and the second also by accident 10 months later. Then I had my third at 21 and fourth at 22, and im thinking of having the next one soon because I don’t like big age differences among siblings. My husband’s four brothers and 2 sisters were all much older, and that was no fun for him. I only had 3 siblings but we were close in age.” (This is a literal rendition of one of the stories I heard today, and the rest were similar.) 

Hearing about all this boundless fertility makes me feel guilty and deficient. Which is not a feeling I’m used to experiencing. I urgently need to go work on my research to restore my self-esteem. 

We have fantastic playgrounds in our small town, and today I took Klara to one of them for the first time. My goal, aside from entertaining her, was to meet mommies. Which is also for her sake because, as we all know, my interest in meeting new people is lower than being bitten by sharks. 

I met mommies, so that part of the goal is going ok. The problem is that I feel extremely out of place. Mommies are all decades younger than me and tell stories that go,  “I has my first child by accident at 18 and the second also by accident 10 months later. Then I had my third at 21 and fourth at 22, and im thinking of having the next one soon because I don’t like big age differences among siblings. My husband’s four brothers and 2 sisters were all much older, and that was no fun for him. I only had 3 siblings but we were close in age.” (This is a literal rendition of one of the stories I heard today, and the rest were similar.) 

Hearing about all this boundless fertility makes me feel guilty and deficient. Which is not a feeling I’m used to experiencing. I urgently need to go work on my research to restore my self-esteem. 

I see a general reluctance among students to look at anything beyond the very immediate. It’s such a strange way of thinking about things.

I ask students who are graduating this semester what they will do after graduation, and they look at me like I’m crazy. “I have no idea,” they say in the same tone of voice as if I asked them what they’d do if aliens from another galaxy disembarked in front of them. And it’s clear that they have honestly not given it a thought. I guess this is the mind-frame needed to succeed in a fluid world, so good for them. But for me, with my 5 and 10 year career plans, this is insanity.

Russians have made it a crime to say in public that God doesn’t exist. Because it hurts the feelings of religious people (who make up 2% of the population). 

It is not a crime to say in public that God does exist, no matter how much it might wound atheists.

I can’t fully explain how very funny this is because in order to get the hilarity one needs to know how utterly unreligious the country is and has been for a century.

Leaving the Russians aside, the criminalization of hurt feelings is cropping up everywhere around the world, and it’s very scary.

It took me an uncharacteristically long time to finish this novel by Sophie Hannah. It took me so long that I had the time to reread all but two of her preceding novel’s while struggling with this one. (This is what I always do during the end of the academic year: reread my favorite mysteries as a way of clearing my mind amidst tons of work). 

The problem with The Narrow Bed is not the premise or the plotting – both of which are superb. What bugged me is that there were excerpts from a comedian’s memoir in it, and I hate memoirs, especially ones that try to be funny. Not even a great parody on a Melissa McEwen type of feminist, which is this novel’s greatest find, reconciled me with the need to slog through the memoir. 

Hannah is brilliant at creating relatable images of selfish women, and a reminder that there’s nothing wrong with female selfishness is sorely needed. This novel’s selfish character – the memoirist comedienne – however is so boring that one wonders why she’s in the novel at all. 

But hey, not everybody hates memoirs, so this might be a fantastic novel for many readers. 

Our daycare sends us daily reports with photos about everything Klara did during the day: what she ate, how long she slept, etc. And yesterday I made the huge mistake of not looking at the report for once. 

Klara was very cranky, and I went out of my way to entertain her. But everything was making her even more upset. She especially hated it when I put on her favorite CD, which usually is a surefire way to make her happy. It was only after 7 pm when I found a second to look at the report and discovered she’d only gotten 30 minutes of sleep at the daycare. She was sleepy, and of course, music bothered her and so did the swimming pool. Would you like to sit in a puddle of water when you are extremely sleepy? Probably not.

Of course, I feel like an idiot because I could have spared us both the aggravation and put her down for a nap. My only excuse is that it was very hot yesterday, and I’d spent the day running around town like a crazed bunny. The heat makes me think and move much more slowly. 

When religious people get married, they get sick a lot. Find out why from this fascinating article.

Oklahoma Republicans try to fill thrir budget hole: “Tops on the list, the group said, is to eliminate all non-essential, non-instructional employees in higher education. They said that would save $328 million.” This sounds like paradise. 

The most important six words to use when feeding a child. 
And the pearl-clutching over what Bernie said about someone who said something about abortion. 

Will the 2020 census flop? 

This is not the way to fight racism. 

In case shaking salt is too onerous, there’s an app for that. 

The free-range kids movement sounds like an ok idea until you actually read their statements and realize it’s not about the kids as much as it’s about parents trying to use the kids to relive their own childhoods. Creepy. 

Finally somebody tries to put one of the weird faddy people in their place. 

George Mason U does great on graduating black students at the same rate as white. 

[Russian] Yes, there were acts of terror in the USSR, and they were all about loooove.

A great post on why there’s such a taboo in the US on revealing your salary. Which is why I always reveal mine.

I spent two hours inflating a toddler pool. Got one hell of a workout. Went out and saw it’s about to rain. 

Ideally, the Democrats would acknowledge that there is a real, legitimate and very painful terror of the changes brought by the economic and social fluidity that accompanies the erosion of the nation-state. People are freaking out, and it doesn’t look pretty, but their concerns are valid and need to be addressed. Both major political forces are using the fact that people who are scared of the changes direct their anger against immigrants or anybody else who embodies fluidity (e.g. transgender people). They are using it to strengthen their respective brands – whether through shaming the malcontents for their misplaced rage or stoking that rage. 

I see no evidence of any political force in the US even trying to acknowledge that fluidity should be checked, at least to an extent. Ultimately, if we have no other plan but to embrace fluidity, then, as cynical as it sounds, the only way of avoiding violent explosions is to stun the malcontents into a mute, resentful obedience. This is why, the more I think about it, the more I support Trump’s wall. Let it be built because it does zero harm but at least it will serve as a symbolic bastion against inevitable change. And when those who want it will see that it doesn’t work, they will be stunned into silence until such rapidly approaching moment when fluidity will triumph completely. 

Also, the people who are feeling so darn superior for adapting so well to fluidity and who keep mocking those who are less physically and intellectually fluid, your time, too, will come. And then the younger, the more agile, the more unburdened and the more rootless competitors will laugh at you just as loudly as you are laughing now. Neoliberalism divides and conquers. And it already defeated everybody who celebrates their sophistication and superiority over some other poor schmuck who is simply left behind (economically or philosophically, it’s all the same) two minutes earlier.