Clarissa's Blog

All of a sudden, signs saying “273” appeared all over campus. That’s all they say, “273”.

The first time I saw “273” was by the parking lot. Immediately, I panicked. 273! What does it mean? Should I not park here? We have been having major parking lot renovations, so it’s confusing.

But then I saw the “273” sign everywhere. Nobody had any idea what it meant. And especially why money was spent on letting us know that it’s 273 o’clock in the midst of a severe budget crisis.

A week later, the top administrator explained. 273 is the number of students we need to recruit or retain or whatever for him to have good numbers for his yearly report. And he ordered these signs to keep the number at the forefront of everybody’s minds because that’s somehow magically supposed to make the number come true.

It’s clearly something he learned at the business seminars that come up with these new fads. They teach you to plaster every wall with your desired profit, and that’s supposed to condition people to attain it.

It’s all stupid, corporate voodoo that has exactly zero place at a higher learning institution where we should be in favor of rationality and reason.

All of these leftist initiatives – the BLM, the “green turn”, the gender idiocy, etc – end up hurting and even killing people. They aren’t simply illogical and stupid. They are deadly. They exist to serve the vanity of humans who want to believe they are in complete control of reality. We are paying a heavy, tragic price for their insane hubris.

Morale was very high, as it so often is in a community where tragedy is present.

Elizabeth Taylor, “Spry Old Character”

Human beings are so strange. We feel sorry for ourselves when things are great and flourish when they are bad.

Folk music in a Kyiv subway station:

Yesterday we had to sit for two hours and stare at a list of drop-fail percentages in our large intro courses. Calculus 1, Intro Bio, English 101, Intro Chem, Intro Psych, Intro bloody Theater.

The percentage of black students who drop or fail them is 85-90%. The percentage of all students taken together (including African-Americans) who drop / fail them is around 45%.

These are 25 large courses in very different disciplines, and the result is the same in all of them.

We were asked to explain why this happens. A Middle Eastern professor tried to venture an explanation but everybody was too horrified for him to continue.

We were sent home to think about our racism that makes us fail these students for bigoted reasons.

‘You are old enough to be her father,’ Muriel had once said; but those scornful, recriminating, wife’s words never sear and wither as they are meant to. They presented him instead with his first surprised elation.

Elizabeth Taylor, “Hester Lilly”

This is a great observation by Taylor. The wife here is projecting her own perceptions onto her husband and makes a mistake. He doesn’t feel humiliated by the idea of courting a much younger girl. He feels invigorated by it.

It’s humiliating for a woman to be with a guy half her age. But it’s not for a man. Women lose status from being the financial donor in a romantic relationship. Men gain status from it. I’m not expressing any sort of joy about this. I’m simply stating a fact.

And by the way, woke as Richard Russo has become, in his most recent novel he keeps slipping and honestly depicting how things really work. Men in the novel signal their readiness to enter into a relationship with women by doing things for them. They shovel snow, help to pay the rent, beat up an abusive ex, and take charge of a complicated relative. And women signal that they are interested by accepting these offers. Even Russo still knows that a woman who starts shoveling snow to impress a guy would scare the poor dude into another time zone.

Those end up being the best scenes in Russo’s novel because he doesn’t try to massage reality into weird shapes.

My Ukrainian instructor arrived today. Of course, I went over to her residence hall with gigantic bags full of food. But it’s so funny. She’s from Bakhmut, which was a small town, not fancy. I come over, and she says, “It’s so beautiful here.* I really love it. But could I trouble you to show me how to turn off this wind?”

She’s not used to the AC. To me the AC is sacred. I’d rather rip my beating heart out than turn off the AC in August. But I respect cultural differences, so I did the unthinkable and flipped off the air.

* Our student housing is stunning. It’s in the woods, and you can sit on a balcony, looking at a beautiful lake, surrounded by pine trees. I have never seen better student housing anywhere.

We get exactly the kind of journalism we deserve.

Here’s the op-ed in question, and I want to remind everybody that Kasparov detests Trump. This is not a partisan thing.

And here we go again with the “territory”. It’s not about “territory”, you incredible doofuses. It’s about people who live there. People who are sent to torture chambers, raped, get their children stolen. “Ceding territory” means leaving people to endure ethnic cleansing. Substitute “people” for “territory” in your statements, and everything will become very clear.

We are having the mildest, coolest summer since I’ve come to this region. We still have extremely hot days but we also have normal days. Kids haven’t been cooped up inside for months. In the evenings, they play volleyball in the backyard, which is normally unheard of in this area from May till late October. I’m very glad because usually they get prison pallor in summers.

I’m not saying this to make a political statement but simply to express gladness in response to surrounding reality. However, when I mention the nice weather to people on campus, the reaction is almost always a panicked “But this doesn’t mean there’s no global warming!!”

No, it doesn’t. I wasn’t saying it did. In fact, I was making absolutely no generalizations about the state of humanity. I was simply remarking upon something that we all know is a big problem in this region. Everybody who lives here knows that we have very specific geographic conditions that create the high heat / extreme high humidity problem. People who are healthy as horses start having blood pressure issues when they come here. It’s a bad local climate, and one should be able to mention it without being drawn into a debate on global climate.

People are so afraid of unorthodox acts of speech that they freak out when they suspect they are about to witness one. But even the fact that they jump with fear when a colleague says, “Hey, nice weather today” doesn’t help them see that something is very wrong.