Clarissa's Blog

Started watching the Hillary forum but from the start it’s about “the damn emails” (c). Died of boredom and decided to read a new novel on Basque terrorists instead. 

Please wake me up if something less soporific is discussed. 

Artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, what rot. Nobody has even been able to invent a functioning scanning pen. I’ve been looking for decades, but they all suck in all kinds of inventive ways. 

Bresha Meadows is a 15-year-old child currently facing murder charges for shooting her father in the head with his own gun while he slept, after witnessing him violently abuse her mother for years.

I wish somebody put that mother in jail for allowing the poor child to exist in this horrible environment and making her fight her battles. 

My own cousin ended up in a mental ward after decades of defending mommy from daddy’s beatings and seeing mommy go back to daddy every single time because she loooooved him. 

I’m not big on regrets. Did a ton of stupid things in my life but I’m not sorry. It is what is, and I did what I could. 

One thing, though, I really regret. I regret that I didn’t start to have children sooner. I had no idea how enjoyable it would be. I would have been happy with five. N also feels sorry about that because he had no idea how much he’d love being a father either. He’s not into the idea of five but three would be great for him.

Of course, we might not have enjoyed it as much if he hadn’t made sure that we were psychologically healthier, and that took time and tons of money. But still, it’s a great regret.

I am so damn tired of turning on the news and hearing the stupid meme about Hillary sitting it out, not doing anything, and basing her whole campaign on waiting for Trump to screw up. She keeps releasing one detailed, thought out and crucial programmatic document after another. The most recent one was on mental health care. 

But no, for these stupid ass journalists doing something can only mean “saying some outlandish shit they can mull over for hours on their stupid shows.” Dumb fucks.

It is nothing short of shocking to see who has become the only group to fight against gender stereotypes. Read the linked article and then hold on tight for the last paragraph. This is what feminism used to be about but feminists have retreated from the battle against gender essentialism.

I think we can all agree that I’m not an ultra-liberal of any sort. There are issues on which I’m to the right of Hillary Clinton, for Pete’s sake. But whenever anything political is discussed by fellow academics at my institution (unionization, the budget, Rauner, etc), I feel like some super-duper militant progressive who is about to run away and join the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground Organization. 

So if among this crowd even I look like Bernie Sanders’s hippie sister, what does this tell us about the crowd?

My colleagues are into round one million two hundred thousand twelve of “I hate unions” correspondence. In the meanwhile, the email from HR telling us that collectors have started bothering people for unpaid medical bills as a result of our perennial lack of budget goes unnoticed and unmentioned.

Guillermo Rendueles is one of Spain’s leading psychiatrists. He says that every culture had elaborated complex webs of practices that allowed micro-communities to help people process and act out their personal grief. Once fluidity and alienation destroyed these micro-communities, people tried to share the burden of grief not with other people but with pills. 

I agree with Rendueles and have this to add. In post-industrial societies, there are no shared, collective rituals of grief. So everybody has to create their own micro-micro-community and come up with some rituals. Without rituals, we are fucked.

All day long today I’m meeting curly red-haired boys of different ages. 

Eric had curly hair, while Klara’s hair is completely straight. Other than that, they look like little copies of each other.