Does anybody have Samsung Galaxy Note? Do you recommend? One thing I really care about is battery life.

P.S. I’ve been using Samsung Glide, and that device has been the bane of my existence. It has the worst battery known to humanity and it just sucks on every level.

She makes you look crazy. If you try to confront her about something she’s done, she’ll tell you that you have “a very vivid imagination” (this is a phrase commonly used by abusers of all sorts to invalidate your experience of their abuse) that you don’t know what you’re talking about, or that she has no idea what you’re talking about. She will claim not to remember even very memorable events, flatly denying they ever happened, nor will she ever acknowledge any possibility that she might have forgotten. This is an extremely aggressive and exceptionally infuriating tactic called “gaslighting,” common to abusers of all kinds. Your perceptions of reality are continually undermined so that you end up without any confidence in your intuition, your memory or your powers of reasoning. This makes you a much better victim for the abuser.

To give some comic relief to the heavy stuff in these posts, I want to share a funny story. My mother gave me a beautiful and expensive China set as a wedding gift. The set is very expensive, so she couldn’t get it in its entirety. This is obviously perfectly fine with me. I’m sure you know that I’m not the kind of person to criticize gift-givers for not giving me even more expensive gifts.

Since then, my mother and my aunt have been giving me the missing pieces as gifts for other occasions (a sugar basin, a creamer, etc.) A couple of months ago, my mother asked me over the phone if there was anything else the set was missing that she could get me.

“It would be great to have some soup bowls,” I said. “We eat soup all the time, and bowls would come in handy.”

“What do you mean?” my mother exclaimed. “Of course the set has soup bowls.”

“No,” I explained. “No soup bowls. There are saucers but they are really tiny.”

“I’m telling you, there are soup bowls in that set,” she kept insisting.

“Mom,” I said, “I use this China set all the time. I promise you, there are no soup bowls. Please don’t think I’m being critical of the set. I love the set. I only mentioned that there were no bowls because you asked. But I can go on living very happily without the bowls. Let’s just forget about them.”

“There are soup bowls in that set!” my mother yelled. “Go look at it right now and you will see the soup bowls!”

I went to look at the set, and, of course, there were no soup bowls.

“Mom, I’m very sorry,” I said. “There are no soup bowls here.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she wailed. “I’m telling you there are soup bowls there. They are right in front of you. Look closer! LOOK! Can’t you see them?”

At this point I started to feel like I was losing touch with reality.

“OK,” I said, “let me turn on Skype and I will show you the set. You will see there are no soup bowls.”

“No!” she exclaimed. “I don’t need Skype! I know that there are soup bowls there and you are just doing this to annoy me. Why do you always have to undermine everything I say?”

This does sound like a funny little misunderstanding, and that’s exactly what it would be if this kind of situation didn’t happen all the time. Since that conversation, I examined the China set dozens of times, trying to find the soup bowls that I know perfectly well are not there. And it shames me to say that I have also asked several people to look at the set and tell me if there were soup bowls in it. Mostly, people look scared and uncomfortable, and I don’t judge them. It is a great personal victory for me that I managed to resist the overpowering need to accompany this post with a photo of the China set in question.

As I mentioned before, I’m on the committee that distributes research grants to faculty members. This year I have observed a disturbing trend. The number of research projects in the Humanities has dropped off a cliff. We received almost 3 times (!) fewer research projects in the Humanities this year than we had back in 2012. (I wasn’t on the committee in the Fall of 2013, for obvious reasons.)

There is one field of knowledge, however, where the number of research projects has soared. This is the field that has the greatest number of projects than any other. Can you guess what this field is?

Finally, I have found a colleague after my own heart. In the meeting of subcommittee leaders, she and I resolved everything concerning our panel in under 8 minutes and cleared out. The rest of people stared at us in confusion. An hour and 50 minutes had been set aside for this meeting.

A hilarious link contributed by reader el tells the story of a min-scandal on LiveJournal, the Russian-language blogging community. An American woman decided to tone-police the Russian bloggers who are unfamiliar with trigger warnings and the mellifluous, saccharine writing style that is widely accepted among the most primitive of the English-language bloggers. 

In the condescending tone of a kindly missionary offering a string of beads to savages and expecting eternal gratitude, the woman chides Russian-speaking bloggers for not being the way she wants them to be. Of course, when the savages do not respond with wholehearted worship of this valiant benefactor, she, like all missionaries, becomes very angry, referring to the Russian-speaking bloggers as animals and attacking them. 

I thought this scenario was dead and buried but now I’m witnessing colonizer mentality in action and it’s creepy. 

P.S. The link is mostly in English.

She will deliver generalized barbs that are almost impossible to rebut (always in a loving, caring tone): “You were always difficult” “You can be very difficult to love” “You never seemed to be able to finish anything” “You were very hard to live with” “You’re always causing trouble” “No one could put up with the things you do.” She will deliver slams in a sidelong way – for example she’ll complain about how “no one” loves her, does anything for her, or cares about her, or she’ll complain that “everyone” is so selfish, when you’re the only person in the room. As always, this combines criticism with deniability.

A narcissist creates an image of yourself that she then uses to guilt you into submission. Here is how the process works:

1. “You are unsociable, taciturn, and melancholy by mature,” the narcissist informs you and keeps repeating the message until you believe that this is what you are really like.

2. When you start behaving in accordance with this image of yourself, the narcissist sighs, “Why do you have to be so unsociable, taciturn, and melancholy? I so wish you were different. 

3. The message you take away from this is that you are, by your very nature, a profound disappointment.

She minimizes, discounts or ignores your opinions and experiences. Your insights are met with condescension, denials and accusations (“I think you read too much!”) and she will brush off your information even on subjects on which you are an acknowledged expert. Whatever you say is met with smirks and amused sounding or exaggerated exclamations (“Uh hunh!” “You don’t say!” “Really!”). She’ll then make it clear that she didn’t listen to a word you said.

The most crucial feature of this is, once again, deniability. Nothing is easier than making one feel completely insane by saying, “What do you mean? You are imagining all this. Of course, I supported you.”

The point of the series on narcissism is to help me. However, I don’t want to be helped at the expense of other people and their progress in dealing with their issues. So if after reading these posts, you find yourself going in the direction of “I haven’t experienced anything as hard-core, so what do I have to complain about?”, please stop. I don’t want you to go in this direction. This is counterproductive and sad.

Remember, the only measure of parenting success is the happiness of a grown child. Are you ecstatically happy in your personal and professional life? Are you unfamiliar with feelings of constant guilt and anxiety? Do you never experience chronic fatigue, apathy, inexplicable sadness? If so, then congratulations, your parents did an amazing job, I’m happy for you.

However, if you constantly feel that things are not working out for you, if you are unhappy in the major areas of human existence, if you are constantly exhausted even after having tons of rest, if you engage in addictive compensatory behaviors (smoking, drinking, gaming, gambling, high-risk behaviors, overeating, cutting, etc.), if you experience anxiety on a regular level, then it’s time to grow up and realize that this is not normal. Somebody fucked up really bad for you to be in this place. Of course, this doesn’t mean that somebody in your family had to be a narcissist. There is a million and one ways of messing up a person that don’t have anything to do with narcissism. 

Things will only start getting better when you recognize that living in misery is not normal. Happiness is the only normal state of human existence. After acknowledging this, you will be able to start walking away from misery.

And for those who have narcissists in their lives, remember: narcissism is a personality disorder. It has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t in any way depend on what you do or don’t do. The narcissist is this way because of his or her own narcissistic trauma that predates your existence. Every day, a narcissist makes a choice to keep victimizing people instead of getting better. This is not about you. You are not to blame. You can’t help a narcissist because she or he is not asking for help. The narcissist is having a blast while you cringe in misery. The only person here in need of help is you.