Clarissa's Blog

I don’t know how anybody can think this is a spiral if the image very clearly shows circles.

What are you seeing? Circles or a spiral?

The nanny disappeared. On Friday, she loved the job, loved the baby, was super happy, everything was great. And today she didn’t show up. No phone call, no text message, nothing.

I’ve scheduled tours of local daycares, but this is making me very sad. I don’t want any comments because this is a sensitive subject and I’m honestly truly upset about this.

Question. Why is the taxpayers’ money being wasted on body cams if they are never on when shootings actually happen? Is the point of those cameras to exist in a switched off state or to record what is going on?

A group of over 500 women from Venezuela, desperate because of the food shortages in their country, broke through the border between Venezuela and Colombia. Colombian border guards tried to stop them but the hungry women rammed through the border controls.

After making purchases in a Colombian supermarket, the women returned to Venezuela. On their way back they were singing the national anthem.

This is the way we all are at the moment. We sweep away the obstacles that the nation-state puts in the way of our comfort and convenience, but as we do it, we keep expressing our nostalgia for the disappearing nation-state. 

Turns out 11 Russians have been charged with organizing the recent act of terror in Istanbul. 

It’s not surprising that Erdogan rushed to beg Putin for forgiveness, seeing as Europeans are too busy taking the union apart and putting it back together to stay engaged in the world. 

I got an email from a 27-year-old man in New Jersey who wants to be our live-in nanny. His CV shows that he spent the last ten years going from one state to another and working as a live-in nanny. I wish there were a cover letter that explained his story. 

The title of this post will be clear to my fellow post-Soviet people. 

A fellow fusses in the NY TIMES:

I sometimes get calls and emails from friends seeking help in landing internships for their children. I understand what they’re doing; this is part of being a parent. Still, it’s a reminder that America’s current internship system, in which contacts and money matter more than talent, contributes to an economy in which access and opportunity go to the people who already have the most of both.

Don’t worry, Mr. Fussball. Your friends have already crippled their children to the point where their chance of succeeding at anything other than developing a host of addictions is tending towards zero. Their solicitous parents are handing them a handicap, not a privilege. And no, turning your child into a useless layabout is not “part of being a parent.” It’s part of being an insecure jerk who needs to have a loser child in order to feel more accomplished against such a background. 

I’m not in the least an anti-gendered baby clothes maniac but people are truly taking it too far with pink vs blue.

Klara has many pink outfits. But she also has clothes in other colors because we’d both go nuts if it were only pink all the time. So today I put powder-blue pants and a grey onesie on her for her walk.

Outside, we met a woman with a 6-month-old granddaughter. I told her I also had a girl and that my daughter’s name was Klara. Still, throughout the conversation, the woman kept referring to Klara as “your boy” and “son.” I’d gently correct her, and she’d look at Klara’s blue pants. Every time. (She didn’t see anything but the pants because Klara’s upper body was shielded from the sun by a muslin sheet.)

Her granddaughter’s name is Emerson, like in Ralph Waldo. Yet I managed to retain the information that she’s a girl on a first try. It’s weird that people would be so enthralled by the color blue that they would disregard clear verbal clues as to a child’s sex in favor of what they think the color of the clothes tells them.

The FBI director just said that no reasonable prosecutor would bring any charges against Hillary in the email brouhaha. The soporific scandal is dying down in spite of the pathetic efforts to keep it alive. 

“Opinions are irrelevant. Only facts matter,” he said. 

Hillary is in the clear as we all knew she’d be. 

The article this quote comes from is all kinds of stupid but it contained an expression I never heard:

Kim Mitchell of Mantua, N.J., dropped out of college twice because it was impossible to balance schoolwork with a demanding software-trainer job and her role as lead parent to two children.

What’s “a lead parent”? Does anybody know? I never encountered this before.