Clarissa's Blog

Did you see the new iPad ad? It’s as ugly as the minds of the techie overlords but very honest.

This is a good article but it presupposes that the White House is under a sincere delusion that these strikes would have a negative impact on energy markets. That is not the case. Such level of almost childish ignorance does not exist in Washington. The effort to protect Russian oil refineries from Ukrainian strikes is not economic or energy-related.

We have a much, much deeper problem than “Biden doesn’t understand energy markets.”

For the 3 people on here who understand Russian, I want to share this wonderful joke:

Everything about it is priceless and absolutely untranslatable.

This is why I’ll never be successful on Twitter. I can’t come up with anything pithy and funny on the spot. N can. He’s amazing at this kind of thing but he doesn’t share his gift with the world.

I apologize to the people who don’t understand the language.

Hmm, I don’t know. I heard that “America” is a word that triggers many victims as badly as “boys.” And “scouting” is offensive to Native Americans. Or Mexicans, I’m not sure. Plus, the new name doesn’t reference either African Americans or Palestinians, and we all know that silence is violence.

So maybe its best to rebrand into not having a name at all because whatever it is should probably be cancelled anyway.

N is beefing up in his self-defense skills for our trip to Spain because he’s afraid of his former compatriots who are numerous and unhinged in Western Europe. He wears a lot of Ukrainian symbolics (a lot more than I do) and isn’t willing to take it off for the trip. He is also looking into the Spanish legislation regarding self-defense with a weapon. Yes, I asked him not to but I have zero influence over the man.

I actually think I’m theoretically in greater danger because I also wear an Israeli flag on my wrist, and Spain can’t stop symbolically expelling its Jews, going on for yet another round at the present time. I’m not really scared because I’m aggressive, and people steer clear.

People keep asking me in hushed tones where I got my Israeli flag. What do they think, I got it from Mossad? Where do people get stuff in America?

Who’s ready…

… for Eurovision 2024?

I love giving talks to the retiree crowd. Today, at the Ukrainian talk du jour where I wasn’t the speaker but more of a question answerer, an older woman came up to ask what Russia’s goals in Ukraine are.

“Do they want to take over and rule it themselves?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “They only want to destroy. It’s blind rage and destruction. Violence for its own sake.”

She struggled with it for a bit but then her face lit up.

“So, it’s like our BLM?” she said. “OK, now I get it.”

I have this weird physiological condition where my eyes start to close when I’m bored. They literally can’t stay open and I have to hold them open with fingers. Since I’m only ever bored when I talk to people, this is very embarrassing.

The moment the conversation stops being boring (which is rare), my eyes pop right open.

My husband doesn’t believe me because he’s never around when it happens. Or rather, it doesn’t happen when he’s around.

Another great question. What is it today with all the great questions?

OK, so what is a solution? If you have a major, persistent problem in your life, how do you solve it?

I don’t know anything about your life so let’s use mine as an example of problem-solving. I left my first husband when I was 22. For the next 9 years, I dated. A lot. But every relationship I entered followed the exact same pattern that I’d had with my ex-husband. I chose men of different nationalities, languages, age groups, etc. But the result was always identical. It was so identical that it would actually be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. I blamed the men – they are bad, they are low-quality. I blamed my bad luck. The actual problem was obvious to everybody around me except for me because I didn’t want to name the actual problem.

Then I finally got over myself and diagnosed the actual issue. I confessed to myself that I needed to replay my first marriage in miniature. This was a powerful need that I had, so I kept engineering these situations with a blind dedication.

Once I correctly named the problem, it was gone. I almost immediately met N and we have had a completely different kind of relationship for 17 years and counting.

Correctly naming the problem is the solution. If you are stating what the problem is and the solution doesn’t materialize, it means you haven’t yet named it right.

Look at what people do in AA, for example. They go to meetings where they repeat, “hi, my name is Johnny, and I’m an alcoholic.” Then they talk about what alcohol means to them, and that’s how they solve their problem of alcoholism.

Even in terms of an individual life, solving a persistent problem is extremely hard because the brain loves nothing more than the status quo. It will throw up all sorts of defences to prevent you from seeing the actual problem. “I’m lazy, I’m not good at this, society oppresses me, etc.” This becomes even harder at the level of society where, barring a deeply traumatic collective experience, you’ll have millions of people putting up defences to avoid seeing the truth.

We don’t want a traumatic collective event here in America, so we’ll have to plow through patiently and for a long time before we can all name the problem and move away from it.

This is an excellent question.

Religion is about history and memory to an enormous extent. You need to go into a house of worship and feel connected to your great-great-grandmother who stood in the same kind of church and listened to the exact same service. Otherwise, you lose a gigantic part of what it’s supposed to be.

In American Orthodox churches the pews and the bright lights keep throwing me off because they are a nod to the ubiquitous Protestantism and not natural to how we practice Orthodoxy. But when I close my eyes, it’s like I’ve been hearing this same chant for hundreds of years. I feel connected to generations upon generations of my family. I feel their presence in myself.

I attended Catholic mass several times as part of learning about the Spanish culture. I attend Lutheran services regularly because my kid’s in a Lutheran school. I like them. They are all very nice. But I don’t feel anything in particular. In an Orthodox church, especially a real one without the blasted rows of pews, I feel everything.

And I don’t even need to be inside to feel it. During COVID lockdowns, I prowled around the church building because even just seeing the architecture plugs me in big time.