Clarissa's Blog

My calendar has a single running daily task in Ukrainian and it is “розташувати ельфа. Who can guess why I put it down in Ukrainian?

https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1731511264679977452?t=JiNniIcNRTuwOoFUDy2PdA&s=19

Same here. I sincerely believed that people were so racist that they left the cities because they couldn’t stand to live near black people.

I have an excuse, though. I’m an immigrant. If Americans tell me they are like that, why should I disbelieve them? I heard this all the time, repeated like a mantra, with no other explanation offered. Why was I supposed to doubt it?

With the number of immigrants coming in, any person who can explain things beyond the ruling narrative is worth their weight in gold. We can’t turn our noses at anyone because the things that a newcomer gets told are very tendentious, and people believe them because there’s no alternative narrative anywhere.

Does anybody know why people are posting empty posts on Twitter with the date of 12/31/69? It’s so annoying because I can’t access the news over this moronic prank.

People who write often make the mistake of thinking that they need a stretch of time that’s free from their daily obligations to write. But it’s usually untrue. They keep waiting and waiting for those several completely free days or weeks when they finally will be free to just write. And then that time comes and all that massive writing they envisioned doesn’t happen.

For most people, writing works best when it’s part of their daily lives.

The long biography of the Spanish writer Carmen Laforet reads like the scariest horror novel in the last third of the book. Laforet’s life is a warning to all of us who tend to be a little weird.

Laforet was always weird. But she married young, had a lot of children, wrote a weekly magazine column, and the structured nature of this lifestyle kept her from melting into a murky puddle of strangeness.

But when she got to my age, Laforet decided that she needed complete freedom to be her true self. She ditched the husband and the children, got rid of all scheduled writing obligations, and started prancing around Europe in hopes that this lifestyle was going to release her full creative potential.

What happened in reality was the exact opposite. Laforet never wrote anything again. Without the organizing presence of her busy family life, she didn’t know how to keep her weirdness in check. Soon enough, weirdness conquered every aspect of her life. She started dressing like a bag lady, hacked her hair off to achieve an “original” hairstyle, stopped eating anything except ice-cream, and progressively slipped into such eccentricity that people would get scared off.

The space formerly occupied by husband, children, obligations, daily routines and work became filled with weirdness. Laforet’s true self turned out to be that of a lazy liar with poor hygiene.

Reading about Laforet’s unraveling is scary. None of it needed to happen. If only she hadn’t believed in the myth of complete freedom and true self, she would have been able to have a normal, productive life, surrounded by family, and not tortured with loneliness, hunger, humiliation and weirdness in the last 30 years of her life.

Professors are funny people. I’m talking on Zoom to a colleague in Florida and she says, “So, get this. I was in a car crash, and the paramedic who put me on the stretcher was a former student of mine! I asked him…”

“Wait,” I say. “You were in a car crash??”

“Oh yes,” she responds. “Broke my arm in five places. But this paramedic – he was actually my student back in 2011, and so I’m lying there on the stretcher, and all of a sudden, the paramedic says, hello, Professor B., and I say…”

“Wait!” I interrupt again. “What happened? Are you OK? How is your arm?”

“Oh, I just ran a red light, it was really stupid. The arm hurts terribly. But isn’t it cool that I would run into a former student like that? He did a Spanish minor, and I knew he was interested in the medical field…”

As part of our seasonal entertainment, we went to see a play at the community theater titled The Christmas Story. It’s supposed to be a Midwestern Christmas tradition, and it’s a story of castrated masculinity that starts in childhood and lasts all the way to adulthood. It’s kind of disturbing with all the beaten down, squashed masculinity.

N was repeating “what horror” all through the play.

There is such a deep political polarization because people are disconnected from other humans and don’t know how to feel a sense of purpose. So they use political partisanship as a substitute. It helps them feel like they are part of something.

The need for the crutch of partisanship gets to the point where people completely evacuate all capacity to act in their own interest, observe evidence and avoid being exploited.

I was talking to a woman who works for a neighboring department, and she said she really missed her adult son.

“Oh, where is he?” I asked.

“He lives two blocks away from us,” she said and explained the exact position of the houses in respect to each other.

“So what happened?” I asked, thinking there had to be some serious conflict.

“Nothing,” the woman said. “We are just so busy with our lives. He’s busy with his family.”

Another woman standing nearby piped up with a similar story about her adult children.

This strikes me as very American and very bizarre. For the life of me, I don’t understand this absolute desperation to sever all contact with one’s children the moment they turn 18.

These two women are support staff. They aren’t college-educated. With my professor friends, it’s not as bad but they pretend it is. One friend tried to conceal that her adult daughter moved in with them in the summer between college and nursing school. It took me weeks to pry it out of her. She thought I’d decide her daughter was a loser if I knew about it.

I had a very profound relationship with my father until the day he died. He knew everything about my writing, what stage each article was, the names of all my colleagues and the details of their lives. We talked every day for long stretches of time. And none of this prevented me from having my own life or made me a loser. To the contrary, it made my life enormously better.

I just don’t get how you live two minutes away from your relatives and you are too busy to see them. Busy doing what, exactly? What do people do? My sister comes with the kids to live with us for two months every summer. I go over to stay with her in Canada every time I can. How come we aren’t too busy? I know every detail of her life, the names of all her friends and colleagues, everything. I know what my mother ate for breakfast yesterday. And the day before. She’s a very difficult person but we talk. Every day. For at least an hour. And before her sisters moved in with her last September, they talked on Skype several times a day. I don’t get how people are too busy for all this.

This is a cultural thing I’ll never understand.

This is exactly what I’m talking about. Embracing the inane language of safetyism instead of talking about how merit is squeezed out of these prestigious schools by DEI is a loser strategy. For every wounded sufferer of unsafe conditions there will be 10 who are wounded and unsafe because of his very existence. You can’t win at the game of “I feel unsafe.” It’s a stupid game that needs to be abandoned.