Clarissa's Blog

Which program, though? There is no program. We will all sprout wings and take off in flight before there is any such program or anything remotely resembling it.

See how nobody is calling you a sausage? That’s probably because you are not a sausage.

People don’t even realize what they are doing when they make these statements. It’s become so natural to them. It’s not about what things are. It’s about what you call them.

Here’s the famous bean stew, by the way:

Delicious and already gone.

The journalist who invited me is a controversial figure. One of my prospective publishers in Ukraine even asked me to remove a quote from him from my book.* Obviously, I didn’t publish with them because I’m not escaping from one form of censorship to plunge right into another one.

Matt Walsh has 2,8 million YouTube subscribers, and with the US population plus the global reach of an English-speaking journalist, you can imagine the equivalent of 500,000 subscribers for a dude in Ukraine.

* Most of Ukrainian publishers, news outlets and cultural projects exist on Soros money. The one I finally chose for my book is not a huge publisher but it’s independent and despises Soros money. As a result, nobody had a single objection to the content of the book.

I’m being invited to a show of a famous Ukrainian journalist with half a million YouTube subscribers. This is my husband’s favorite journalist, and it’s a dream of his life to see me on that show. I’ll be speaking Russian on the show, and I’ll post the link when it airs. If I don’t perish of nerves before then.

Nineteen-year-old Ruslan V. V Turko and two unnamed minors were arrested on Wednesday for first-degree malicious mischief after vandalizing the rainbow Pride mural that sits in front of Riverfront Park located in Spokane, Washington.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13513907/amp/washington-spokane-teens-jail-lgbtq-rainbow-mural-vandalism.html

The media description of what happened is, of course, extremely tendentious. These teens are facing felony charges for leaving skid marks while riding their scooters. That’s all they did. They revved their scooters and left barely visible skid marks. But the crosswalk where they left scooter marks was painted the saintly rainbow colors, so it’s now a felony to leave a scratch on it. It’s a good idea for everybody to avoid that crosswalk because what if you track mud on it? Or make a facial expression that is considered genocidal?

In the massively tolerant Canada, the support for LGBT “dropped precipitously” over the past couple of years. I wonder what the teens in Spokane will learned about the importance of tolerance from this experience.

At work, I mostly live in a bubble that I created for myself but sometimes I come across a reminder of how much my university despises research, publications, books, and everything that constitutes the life of the mind. It shouldn’t bother me too much but it does. What we do is such a farce.

To extract myself from the dumps into which this sad state of affairs plunged me, I made a bean and fish stew. I don’t use canned beans because the whole point of a bean is building a broth. There’s no reason to eat beans if there’s no broth.

Carrots, coriander chutney, a cinnamon stick, a large onion (added whole and then removed because you know why), some juniper berries, a bay leaf. A large batch of fresh spinach at the end. It didn’t really need the fish but N doesn’t like vegan, so I added something called “Vietnamese snapper” that had a shockingly attractive price at the store.

I spent so much time nursing this broth as a way of providing psychological help to myself that when the stew was done it was too late to eat. I do feel better, though, and the dish will be good for lunch tomorrow.

When Brezhnev was in steep decline and barely able to string a few words together, we used to joke that our great leader was so progressive that even his progressive dementia was the most progressive on the planet.

One has truly got to be a terrible person to engage in such a performance. Whatever one’s political beliefs or opinions, this is disgraceful. One’s first loyalty should be to fellow citizens, and creating this kind of discomfort for your own community is not OK. The people in the theater aren’t political figures. They can’t do anything to address your grievances. It’s terrible to harass them like this.

I would tear the pack out of the teenager’s hands, smoke every cigarette in it to the nub, and lick the packet clean while heaving with delight.

Which would probably put the teenager off the weed but do nothing positive for my well-being.

Sorry, I’m not in a good position to try to prevent anybody else from smoking. I’m barely managing to prevent myself.