Clarissa's Blog

N’s colleagues gave him a round of applause for having the baby when he came to work after the leave. I haven’t gotten any applause so far even though I was the person shooting up insulin in 7 separate shots every day.

Life is unfair.

We all thought this was going to be a boring election, and here we are watching one Republican politician after another forced to answer the question, “And how do you feel about white supremacy?” while one candidate makes penis jokes about another candidate. Let’s confess that none of us expected any of this.

And this is only March 1. By next November, things might get even more crazy.

Unlike many people, I don’t identify with Hillary. Her personality is the exact opposite of mine, and her life is incomprehensible to me.

I identify with Bernie. I’m angry, irritable, passionate, idealistic like Bernie. I’m known for an obsessive hatred of Goldman Sachs, and I tend to be a little one-note in my interests.

However, I’d never base my support of a candidate on their similarity to myself. I mean, I like me but not to the point of needing to see a reflection of myself everywhere I turn. The world doesn’t need to be my mirror to make me feel more real.

Has anybody here used Windows 10? Is it worse, the same as or not as bad as Windows 8?

Windows 8 was the worst computing experience I have has in my entire life. I’d rather go back to the screechy, slow modems of 1995 than use Windows 8 again. Is Windows 10 an improvement on that hellacious experience?

I’m sure it’s a total coincidence and has nothing whatsoever to do with hating women that every single middle-aged Liberal man in my blogroll virulently detests Hillary.

Cruz is spending a whopping six times more than Trump on Super Tuesday ads. And we all know what their respective numbers are.

If this isn’t proof that “big money in politics” is a non-issue, then I don’t know what is. We are getting caught up in our own consumerist mentality that becomes a dark labyrinth where the light of reason doesn’t penetrate. Consumers need to believe that everything is for sale, and they will keep trying to buy things that nobody is trying to sell.

I’m back at work, people! 

Of course, I didn’t actually go anywhere, I’m working from my home office while the baby sleeps next to my office chair. This is a very weird experience. Everything is exactly like it has been since May but there is suddenly a baby added to the scene. Weirdness.

My profession is great for baby care. I don’t have to be back on campus until late August when Klara will be 6,5 months old. And even then, I will only be teaching 2 days a week for the next academic year. Everybody suspects that I timed the pregnancy on purpose so that I would go straight from a sabbatical to  maternity leave to the summer break but, honestly, who has the kind of health and fertility at the age of 39 to make such precise planning possible? 

Still, I already had 3 people ask me how I managed to plan everything so perfectly. 

Who is Hillary Clinton?

is a fascinating time-lapse depiction of the leading Democratic presidential candidate as seen from the left. But it is also much more than that. A carefully-edited anthology of The Nation’s coverage of Clinton’s career, it’s a rigorous and painstaking study of one our most enigmatic public figures.

Enigmatic? Seriously? Do people just throw around stupid clichés without thinking or do they actually consider Hillary enigmatic? Because I’m not sure which is more pathetic.

Spain’s greatest living writer Juan Goytisolo says that Putin keeps winning in Syria because he knows exactly what he wants to achieve there, and Americans are losing because they only know what they don’t want to happen. Obama doesn’t want to be embroiled in another endless Iraq/Afghanistan type of conflict. But there is no proactive, concrete vision of what the US does want to happen in Syria. Putin, on the other hand, has a very specific goal: to position Russia as a superpower and get the US to forget about the sanctions.

You can’t exist without a specific, detailed and clear foreign policy. If all you have is strictly reactive, you’ll keep ending up in situations where you hemorrhage resources and achieve nothing.

But even the most educated, intelligent Americans don’t care about foreign policy. And elected officials have no reason to fashion a foreign policy agenda. Which means that we have many Afghanistans and Syrias in our future.

A colleague and her daughter came to see Klara and brought a mountain of gifts and food. When I first saw them, I thought they were moving in, with all the stuff they were carrying.

“Guys, you didn’t have to bring all of this,” I said modestly.

“Yes, we did,” the colleague replied. “Because we are Americans. We bring things.”