People in Florida are so pleasant, kind, and welcoming that even the proverbially nice Midwesterners begin to look like gruff, unsociable grinches by their side.

I wonder if there are people who are even pleasanter than this and what that would look like.

I’m also happy that I first emigrated to the somewhat aloof Montréal because I think I’d have had a mental breakdown if I’d had to face the super friendly Floridians straight off the boat. I could barely keep myself together when every store attendant in my early immigration days said, “Hi, how are you?” I suspected them of harboring evil designs on my person and meager property because why else would they smile at me?

Turns out there’s a ban on exporting crude oil from the US. Extreme weirdness. Everybody needs to export as much oil and gas as possible to help Putin collapse like a rotted-out carcass already.

Yes, burnt out light bulbs were used to steal good ones at work.  Everybody stole something at work. I remember thinking that something must have been deeply wrong with my parents since they never stole anything at their work.

Congratulations to reader Tom Benjamin for giving the perfect answer.

OK, folks, let’s see how well you understand Soviet mentality.

In the USSR, there were constant shortages of consumer goods. People had to come up with inventive ways to get all kinds of small household items.

At some point, people started selling burnt out light bulbs. New, functioning light bulbs were impossible to purchase so people bought burnt out bulbs on the black market.

Question: how did Soviet people use the burnt out light bulbs?

I’m getting really tired of the endless articles that claim young people are increasingly likely to be emotionally fragile to the point of near incapacitation because professors make them this way. This is patently ridiculous because our students are way to old for us to mold their personalities. They come to us like this, and all we can do is find ways to educate them in spite of this grave defect.

The reason why people get this way are consumerism and death of Fordism.

1. Consumerism.

A student was writing a quiz once but was unprepared and couldn’t answer some of the questions. He became extremely agitated and demanded I give him his money back (sic!) because I made him feel (sic!!!) stupid.

Consumer mentality suggests that emotions are a consumer good, just like a cell phone, a bike or a hamburger. Just like hamburgers, emotions originate outside of oneself and can be obtained from their creators in exchange for money. The student was convinced that he’d paid not to be assisted in acquiring knowledge but to be given positive emotions that professors will manufacture for him. When he experienced negative emotions instead, he perceived the situation as an aggrieved consumer who’d been sold a malfunctioning call phone.

I managed to talk the student down from his enraged and erratic behavior by addressing him like a two-year-old: processing his emotions for him and returning them back to him in a safe format. Obviously, I’d rather not have to do that but what can I do if instead of being taught this useful skill in childhood, the fellow was handed a credit card and told to go buy himself pleasant emotions?

2. Death of Fordism.

The time when the market valued uniformity and conveyor – belt behavior on the part of workers is long gone. As Zygmunt Bauman pointed out, today people go on the job market to sell their complex and unusual personalities. But since most don’t have interesting personalities, they sell idiosyncrasies and invented collections of traumas instead.

When a consumer meets a post-Fordist worker, we get these showily fragile individuals who fake being overly emotional because they believe it sells.

The Hunger Games poster had to be dropped for obvious reasons:

As my sister says, it’s not that hard to be successful given how utterly incompetent many people are.

As usual, the resort ‘ s guests ignore the beautiful baby – powder sand beach and cram into a chlorinated pool. A country music band is belting out infernally loud songs at the edge of the pool.

“This is how I will be punished for my sins in hell,” I tell N. “Stuck in a pool with a crowd of people and forced to listen to this horrible noise for all eternity.”

In a battle against my own rigidity, I decided to forego a hotel and stay at a beach condo this time. This is a big deal for me because I’m extremely particular about the places I choose to stay during vacations.

The condo where we are staying is enormous. It has two separate bathrooms, a huge balcony, a bedroom, a living – room and a kitchen.

The moment I saw the condo I almost doubled with laughter because I remembered how when I was 14, we once went on a family vacation to the beach back in Ukraine.

We rented a single small room for us all to stay for 2 weeks. By “us all” I mean my mother, my sister, me, my aunt Vera and her daughter, my aunt Natasha and her 2 kids, and my aunt Larissa and her son. Obviously, there weren’t nearly enough beds for all of these people, so most of us slept on the floor right next to each other. There wasn’t an inch of floor left that wasn’t covered by human bodies.

The worst thing about this vacation wasn’t that the conditions were so horrible but that I was the only person who detested this kind of life. Everybody else loved the trip and has the fondest memories of it. I felt like I was from a different planet than everybody else.

And that was the only reason why I eventually emigrated. People around me were enjoying things. No water, no electricity, dog shit and rats everywhere – and still everybody was having fun. Except me.

But hey, people who keep wanting more are the ones who make all progress happen.

Here’s the view from my balcony:

I walk a lot and as I walk I observe how people of different social classes live around here.

For the first 5 years in this town, I resided in what I can schematically call a working-class neighborhood (WN). This was an area of rental apartments where bus drivers, university support staff, janitors, and people who lost their houses in the Recession lived.

For the past year, I’ve been living in a typical middle-class neighborhood  (MN), with big detached houses, pretty lawns, etc.

Right in front of my subdivision, there’s our upper-class neighborhood  (UC), with houses that cost between $600,000 and $900,000 (which is a lot for our region).

All 3 neighborhoods are extremely safe and clean. Their differences lie elsewhere.

Continue reading “Flâneuse” →

I just watched parts of Hillary’s speech in Iowa and I’m very impressed. She’s an extremely hard worker, managing to squeeze every ounce of charisma out of a very modest natural gift.

Hillary looks young, vibrant, energetic, and her stylist is an absolute genius. The outfits are perfect.

Can we just skip to the moment when she’s inaugurated and spare ourselves the mountains of silliness that will take place between now and then?