Clarissa's Blog

Consider the implications:

The video is at the link.

Our army is impotent even at the outdated form of warfare, as evidenced by every conflict we entered this century, most recently in Iran. The new forms of warfare are completely out of reach. Is anybody trying to catch up?

Yes, but what if the person who is waiting for the neurodivergent has an anxiety disorder? Whose neuroses get precedence, the anxious friend’s or the time-blind friend’s? There needs to be a hierarchy of fussy snowflake entitlements.

Of course, the question is purely academic because people whose primary mode of engagement with others is outrage at not being recognized as a victim of extreme suffering clearly don’t have anybody waiting for them anywhere.

There is a growing trend of young Midwestern girls who desperately want the most traditional, stereotypical masculinity in their partner, as well as a wedding in a white dress and a bunch of kids, so they hook up with a trans man because nobody will put as much effort into performing the stereotypes of masculinity as a girl posing as a guy. A boy of their age is going to do the Ethelred the Unready thing until he’s 35, while a 22-year-old girl posing as a boy will propose eagerly and readily.

One thing everybody knows the moment they see this headline is that the French man in question is not remotely French.

Still, the charade continues.

My voice-to-speech app unsubtly points out when my accent in German becomes too obvious by transcribing my attempts to speak the language in the Cyrillic alphabet.

I have this really weird quality that when I’m sick, I go from sickness back to health instantaneously. I’ll go for days moping around, feeling terrible, drowning in mucus, devoid of all energy. And then, wabam! And I’m healthy.

This morning, I was an invalid. I tried to tape my show in the morning, and you can go look at it when it’s posted. I looked exactly as shitty as I felt while taping it. I had to mute myself several times because I was heaving with cough. In the video, I am nasal, my skin is grey, and you can see that I’m sweating with high fever. It went on like this until 4:35 p.m. At that time I became instantly cured. 

The photographic evidence of the cat update:

I’m the green and white flowers on black in the lower left-hand corner. The cat guarded me faithfully for hours as I read but finally gave up and conked out.

“How is the cat doing?” an elderly lady at church asked me in a whisper. “She still alive?”

This goes to show that nobody had a whole lot of confidence in my ability to keep the animal alive for a significant stretch of time.

The cat is doing great, by the way. From the time we got her, intermittently she had a problem where she wouldn’t be able to hold down her food in the mornings. With the help of two veterinarians and one AI tool, I finally figured out what was causing the issue and managed to solve it.

We are leaving for Florida next week, and I got the girl from across the street to be our cat sitter. She is also a student at my department (French) because this is such a tiny town. There is no likelihood that I will not be a total neurotic about the cat the entire time we’re away, but this cannot be helped.

Klara is at home. I’m sick as a dog, mulling around, reading Chirbes. N is working. Neither of us is much fun right now, so what does Klara do all day? She reads, cleans her room, reads some more, plays with her fluffy bunny toys, reads, plays with the cat, reads. We have TVs. Netflix, Prime. She could turn on the TV at any time. I never forbade it or said anything against it. But it doesn’t seem to occur to her.

People often think that it must be a constant struggle. “Isn’t it exhausting to try to keep her from watching TV all day?” somebody asked. But I never even thought about whether I should have a TV-watching policy for the summer.

It’s only hard to avoid smoking if you are a smoker. If you never got into the habit, it takes no effort at all. Instead of creating a problem and then trying to solve it heroically and failing every single time, it’s best not to create it to begin with.

I also feel vindicated on this subject:

Tucker will endorse AOC for president yet, and maybe then the people who protest whenever I say that he is a leftist will finally be convinced. Or not. Changing one’s opinion on the basis of new evidence is something that very few psyches can afford.