Clarissa's Blog

Yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of my friend’s death. Her story is a study in ambiguity. She met her husband when she was 16 and spent the next 20 years being beaten and raped by him.

Finally, she left him. They both paired up with other people. At age 46 she got diagnosed with terminal cancer. My friend was not religious. There was no consolation. She spent the five years that it took the disease to kill her in a state of the darkest, most terrible depression.

And do you know who was the only person who was there for her every day of the illness? Her ex-husband. He called, came over, drove her to appointments, talked to her for hours. I felt suicidal on every occasion I spent time with her, she was in such a state. But he somehow managed to stick around. I’m not saying he’s a good person but these two people had something that was both extremely dysfunctional and bound them together like you can’t imagine.

Life is complicated. Nothing has an easy, clear answer.

This is the story that I mentioned several days ago. A career criminal with a lifetime of arrests and early releases stabbed a Ukrainian woman in the neck for no reason:

🚨 SHOCKING: Authorities have released footage showing Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska stabbed in the throat during a random attack.

❌ The suspect, repeat offender Decarlos Brown Jr., carried out the assault in Charlotte, North Carolina. pic.twitter.com/LmdCwhZXxW

— The Spy Stories (@thespystories) September 6, 2025

Of course, if she weren’t new to the country, she’d known not to turn her back like this. But that we should know and live with this knowledge is not great either.

Our town now has a boutique hotel. When I first came here, there was one bedraggled, old hotel that was almost always empty. Now there are three plus this new boutique hotel. It’s so great. We are a place where people want to come and visit.

This is a good question. We often forget that in abusive relationships between adults there’s never only a sadist. There’s always also a masochist. Some relationships bring out the best in people but others bring out the worst. Abuse is a result of the dynamic that exists between two people, and for both of them it fulfills a necessary function.

In long-term abusive relationships between adults, the masochist will go out of her way to provoke the sadist into beating her. She’ll press every button to collapse his efforts at self-control methodically and doggedly.

This does not excuse the abuser. Nothing excuses a person who beats another outside of the situations of physical self-defense. But these abusive situations can’t be resolved from one side. Two people engineer, maintain, and enjoy them. These are usually relationships where you can’t pry the participants apart under any circumstances. They fulfill each other’s neurotic need, and that binds them together like Krazy Glue.

The problem is that there’s a big taboo on what I’m saying right now. We have painted ourselves into a corner by imagining this S&M dynamic as an interaction between an angelic victim (who of course is always desperate to leave the abuser but doesn’t because she fears for her life) and a demonic abuser. People literally freak out if one tries to talk about this in a more nuanced way. It’s the same as “rape is not about sex but about power” which has now acquired the status of religious dogma in spite of being utterly dumb.

We won’t solve anything until we learn to live with the ambiguity. Unfortunately, this necessitates brains that are capable of more complex operations and are not dumbed down by staring at screens and catering to one’s worst instincts.

Love, as I keep saying, is only true if it tolerates ambiguity. If you only care about the victim if she’s a perfect angel but not if she’s a  complicated, messed-up, often very annoying human, you don’t care at all.

Another great question. I’m loving these. Please keep bringing them to me.

Dude, the cockroaches. What a curse. In the USSR, we all lived in apartments, and if your neighbors had an infestation, what could you do? My mother is maniacally clean, like only a person who grew up in great poverty can be. But we had a terrible problem in one of the apartments where we lived. She cleaned like she was possessed by the demons of cleanliness but the roaches kept coming. And of course there were no exterminator services.

Finally, my mother found some dude who worked at a secret military plant. He brought over some radioactive shit. Told us that it would kill everything for miles around. We had to move out of the apartment for a month while the radioactive shit did its work. And hey, the roaches were gone after that.

Yes, it’s a weird idea to bring a radioactive substance into an apartment where you live with your small children but it was the USSR. Nothing was normal.

I wanted to distract myself by buying clothes. Only after leaving the store did I realize that everything I’d chosen was funereal black.

I used to wear all black in my twenties but not since then. Today, though, only black outfits attracted me.

Thank you for trying to distract me. I appreciate it and it worked.

Here’s the link to the article.

I don’t know if I mentioned it but a while ago I helped a scholar with her research on surzhyk. She asked me to watch a few TV programs (news and sitcoms) and identify instances of surzhyk, which I gladly did. She’d say, “You marked “Ah!” as surzhyk. What makes you think it’s a surzhyk “ah” and not a Russian or Ukrainian “ah”?”

But I know just by the sound of it. It doesn’t sound like Ukrainian or Russian. It’s in the middle.

This isn’t voodoo science. You know immediately when Jasmine Crockett switches into her fake Ebonics twang. Or when you reach a call center and hear “hello!”, you immediately know when you are talking to somebody in India.

I can’t speak surzhyk myself but I know and recognize it. I grew up surrounded by it. My mother’s Ukrainian is mostly surzhyk.

So yeah, it’s a fascinating topic and thank you for the link.

I took a day off today. It’s very annoying to many people that I’d be off at this time in the semester. And I get it, there’s a million things to do, and it looks indulgent for me to be taking long weekends for no reason. I can’t explain the reason without falling apart, so I had to say “no, I can’t on Friday” without any explanation about 30 times in the past days.

Nobody fully knows what’s happening in another person’s life. Sometimes a person can make an impression of being a self-involved prick but there might be all sorts of shit going on with them. Or not. They might just be a prick. This is the ambivalence of a human life.

I used Copilot to edit my article in Ukrainian that I wrote for an online portal. It did a great job. But I wouldn’t do it for my research. It won’t work. Nor would I do it for writing in English because I do it much better myself.

In my field, which is literary criticism, the quality of writing is half the value of the piece. And even Claude (which is the better AI for writing) doesn’t get beyond a gushy Filipina type of writing.

The best use I have found for AI so far is to have it write a piece of code to clean out my Gmail inbox. The code only needed a small tweak to work moderately fine.

But please rest assured, every word of Neoliberal Love was written by me.