Clarissa's Blog

Why is it that a tomato tastes so much better when you eat it whole, like an apple, without cutting it up?

Here are some hilarious slogans for college majors:

Chemistry: Where alcohol IS a solution.

Biochemistry: Spend 4 years aspiring to discover the cure for cancer, and the rest of your life manufacturing shampoo.

Archaeology: If you don’t know what it is, it’s probably ceremonial.

Information Technology: Let me google that for you.

Linguistics: Studied 17 languages, am fluent in none of them.

Criminal Justice: We’re here because of Law & Order reruns.

Photography: It’s worth a shot.

Astrophysics: “Eh, I’m within an order of magnitude.”

Creative Writing: Because job security is for pussies.

Latin: Because useful is overrated.

Physics: “Everything you learned last week is wrong.”

Nursing: Learning to save other’s lives while struggling not to take your own.

Accounting: Selling your soul for money.

Finance: “Accounting was too hard.”

Journalism: Learn how to construct an argument that no one will pay to listen to.

Art History: And you thought MAKING art was pointless!

Music Performance: If you don’t hate yourself, you’re doing it wrong.

There’s more at the link!

In Spain, there is a whole genre of the literature of the crisis, and writers are producing great works of literature that readers are actively discussing. There is very a vibrant and rich cultural life happening around the literature of the crisis.

And here in the US there’s nothing of the kind. All we get is either sensationalist garbage or novels about bratty rich people endlessly nitpicking their way through extremely trivial problems. Even Toni Morrison ‘ s recent novel is about rich people. Always and forever, rich people.

Of course, our recession was nothing like Spain ‘ s crisis but let’s look at the big picture. We are all undergoing an enormous societal transformation. The nation-state is crumbling for Americans just as much (and actually more) as for everybody else. But where is our literature about real lives of real people? Hello, literature, where are you?

But no, there’s nothing but boring old escapism here. I’m very happy I didn’t choose to specialize in American literature because I would have perished of tedium.

I never considered the possibility that the idiotic Fat Acceptance Movement might be sponsored by corporations that peddle junk food but the idea makes a lot of sense. There is so much cynicism behind the movement’s tenets that somebody has got to be making a packet from it.

Of course, this whole problem started when it occurred to some idiot to invite Greece into the Eurozone. Greece was obviously not prepared, either economically or ideologically, for being a responsible member of Europe. And now the entire EU is trying to coddle and pacify the stupid Greeks while Putin rejoices and celebrates.

What a stupid debacle this is.

And I only wish that Spain uses this as an example of a very dangerous road that is to be avoided at all costs.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a brilliant writer but his most recent article in The Atlantic made me cringe. People who are incapable of approaching their family history critically should just abstain from mentioning it altogether, in my opinion. Otherwise, it all becomes about justifying Mommy and Daddy (whom nobody has even accused of anything), and the whole piece turns into a dialogue of one’s terrified five-year-old persona with an older version of the self that is still too scared to break free.

Here are the paragraphs from the article that I’m referring to specifically:

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. . . What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age.

You’ll say that the essay is not about this at all. But for me, the second I see child abuse mentioned, everything else fades away. And if you can’t find it in yourself to say “My father was a stupid piece of garbage who brutalized kids because he derived pleasure from torturing human beings,” it’s better not to mention it at all. These snippets poison the entire long article, making me think that it is all about justifying the child-beating daddy, and everything else is just fluff that hides this tragic truth.

I also hope that the article’s title of “Letter To My Son” is just a rhetorical device and isn’t directed to a real child.

On a positive note, it’s becoming unfashionable in Ukraine to be anti-feminist, homophobic or racist. These attitudes are associated with the Russians, and nobody wants to be like the Eastern neighbor any longer.

“Why are you saying this racist shit?” people ask. “What are you, a Putinoid?”

“In Ukrainian, female forms of nouns denoting professions don’t carry a pejorative meaning like they do in Russian, so just use them. Or are you a Putinoid who despises women?”

And that’s a great development.

Trump is surging in the polls with 1 in 10 people actively supporting him.

Something is so deeply wrong with people that I don’t even know what to say. I have no idea what sort of severe neurological damage one has to sustain to begin taking Trump seriously.

Russian police will from now on be allowed to stop and frisk anybody they want at any time. Police officers will also be allowed to enter private residences at will whenever they like and conduct searches of people, property, and vehicles without due cause. The state is investing the police with “the presumption that every action they commit in the course of performing their duties is justified.”

The Russian police will now be allowed to fire into the crowd whenever they feel it’s justified.

Recently, two Russian police officers brutalized a “black”* man because he laughed while talking on the phone and that annoyed them.

The Russian police are also known for the extraordinarily brutal ways they treat peaceful protesters and journalists. Several passersby who had the misfortune of walking past a political protest back in May of 2012 are still in jail for subversive activities.

* This was a man from the Caucasus region. In Russia, people from that region are referred to as “black”, even though they are obviously not, and are treated in a very vicious, racist way. This just goes to show that even when there are no black people in sight to hate, they are invented.

“They are probably on a beach somewhere, sipping vodka,” the narrator  of the TV show Greed: The Fugitives enunciated, and N and I doubled over with laughter. The idea that somebody might sip vodka is too bizarre.

The only correct way to drink vodka is to inhale deeply, then exhale and throw the entire shot inside on the inhale. Vodka is not savored. It is drunk for the effect, not for the taste. If you want to savor, get a cognac or something of the kind.

“And how about all those flavored vodkas?” you might ask.

Those are weird inventions of weird people that have nothing to do with the art of drinking vodka.