Clarissa's Blog

Few things are more unintentionally funny than Russian people fretting about the fate of African Americans after the anti-affirmative action SCOTUS ruling.

If there was ever a bunch of people who have much more serious things to worry about, I struggle to imagine it.

Americans, I love you, but really? We are at the point of “somebody somewhere experienced a slight discomfort, so roll the presses”?

Juan Manuel de Prada is so conservative that it becomes clear that everybody we normally consider conservative is deeply infected by liberalism. He shows how bankrupt and hopeless the philosophy based on primacy of individual desires (or personal truth) is. I never really understood this before reading him.

What is it with American kids and bread crusts? How do they communicate to each other that crusts are to be disliked?

I grew up in a culture where everybody knew that the crust is the best part of bread, and here I am, endlessly sawing off crusts for my very American kid.

I was asked which one novel by Ruth Rendell I’d recommend to somebody who never read her.

I don’t even have to think: it’s The Face of Trespass.

This novel is not only exquisite, it has many of the themes to which Rendell keeps returning in her books. You read this one short book, and you immediately know if Rendell is your author.

The Face of Trespass has Rendell’s favorite theme of obsessive, unrequited love that leads a person to the brink of madness. Rendell is incredibly good at writing about obsessive, sick love. She does both male and female versions like no other author. If anybody ever wondered why there’s a Biblical prohibition on idolizing another person, Rendell’s books explain all about it.

An illicit sex-crazed infatuation is contrasted in the novel with familial love based on feelings of Christian charity. Some of Rendell’s most touching pages are to be found in this book.

Another big theme that Rendell loves and that The Face of Trespass does beautifully is the ease of slipping from normalcy into antisocial, unkempt, off-key behavior of an addict. You let a few tiny, seemingly insignificant things slip, and suddenly you are not part of the social fabric.

There’s also the theme of covetousness and why it’s the root of many evils. And there’s the very endearing English snobbishness that Rendell always writes about with gentle humor.

The gay theme that’s huge in Rendell’s books is absent from this novel. But most of the other crucial subjects are there.

I don’t know what this person is inhaling but the idea of a country where no liberal policy is allowed to exist is sounding pretty attractive right now. I think we should all take a break from liberalism because it has painted itself into a corner and there’s nowhere to go from here but into authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, liberalism is so deeply ingrained in all of us that I don’t see a turn away from it in our near future. Such a turn would require a voluntary decision on the part of many to stop being slaves to our raging desires, and nobody is ready to do that. We’ve been taught to think that virtue lies precisely in humoring our every whim. Unlearning that doesn’t seem like anything people want to do.

I decided not to be parochial and started investigating the riots in France. The first thing I discovered is that the rioters are burning libraries:

I have zero interest now in what they are protesting against. These people are absolute scum. And the government that can’t stop this from happening… is not a government at all.

For shame, when on the other side of Europe people are dying to protect the Western civilization, the French are pissing it away for fun.

For a reason I can’t fathom, I decided to engage in self-defeating behavior and agreed to have pupil dilation during my eye exam. Nobody warned me that I’d lose my eyesight for hours after that dog of a procedure.

Being completely ignorant of the aftereffects of this so-called medical test, I left the doctor’s office and found myself in hell. It’s very sunny outside, and everything had an infernal glare. I was functionally blind, and the doctor said it would last for hours.

Obviously, I realized there was no way I’d be able to drive myself back to work. I somehow managed to type a message to my secretary – or at least, I think I sent it to the secretary – telling her I’m not coming back and to cancel my meetings. I’m sure everybody knows me well enough to understand that no kind of medical emergency would induce me to make a phone call instead of writing a message.

It’s been 6 hours, and I’m better now. I still have to hide inside in heavily curtained places but at least I can read without too much pain. It also so happened that I had to write an unavoidable text today, and I did but it was like writing drunk when you have to squint to see straight.

This was all for nothing, people. I’m perfectly fine and there was never any reason to suspect I needed any testing. What, what possessed me to do this? I still feel like a wreck after all this. A whole day of reading lost. And I’m not back to normal even now.

Let this be a lesson of “if it ain’t broken, don’t dilate it”.

Many of us have a friend or a relative who is a wonderful person with a heart of gold but who’s obsessed with some tinfoil hat conspiracy theory or has a weird, embarrassing hobby. For instance, I know somebody who’s the sweetest, loveliest human you can imagine but is obsessively into urotherapy. Yes, it’s the thing where people drink their own pee because it’s supposed to be very healthy.

The worst thing about such people is that they always seek to convert others to their faith and get very monomaniacal about it. Anything can set them off, and you have to be very careful around them to avoid provoking them into a rant on how you’ll die a terrible death if you don’t immediately go drink yourself some urine.

Americans are like that about race. They are the most wonderful, kind people ever. But race is their tinfoil urotherapy. Once something sets them off on this favorite subject, there’s no helping it. They can’t be reasonable about it and they can’t resist the urge to convert the world to their faith. It’s best to accept that they are not ready to stop drinking their own urine for now and just leave them to it. There’s no other solution.

But they are great, beautiful people aside from this unfortunate fixation.

On the funnier side of the Affirmative Action decision, yesterday I received four (4) official repudiations of the decision from different levels of administrative at my university. Each started with “Although our university does not use affirmative action in its admissions process…”

We never received four whole edicts all at once for any event, holiday, commemoration or happening. Dobbs got zero. Jan 6 got two, and they were spaced out. Afghanistan withdrawal got zero. War in Ukraine – zero. Juneteenth – two. Even George Floyd only got three, and they weren’t all on one day.

There was also an edict once condemning DeSantis but I don’t remember why. It seemed very random to condemn a governor of a completely different state