Clarissa's Blog

Finally, I had some bread that’s actually bread. It’s homemade and sold at the farmer’s market. All the ingredients are simple and normal. Flour, salt, sugar, yeast, egg. It almost made me want to start baking bread if only the activity weren’t spoiled by the pro-lockdown crowd.

Translation: mommy didn’t love me but I’m too immature to recognize it. We need to treat such people with compassion but be firm in reminding them that their dysfunction is their private issue and should be resolved with a psychologist paid for with their own money.

There’s altogether too much of people strewing around their mental rot because they are too cheap or too stupid to seek paid help in cleaning up their psyches.

Today Klara asked me if the grass minds that we walk on it. She would have really enjoyed more of her grandfather’s company because he’s the only person I ever knew who could understand this kind of concern.

The downside to being capable of deriving great joy from the most mundane things is that you personalize them and feel both the good and the bad more intensely.

For a translation company I’m working for, I need to do certification tests where you get a series of sentences and their translations. Each translation contains one mistake, and you have to edit the sentence to eliminate it.

I have easily passed the tests in the Ukrainian=>English and Ukrainian=>Spanish language pairs but I completely bombed the Ukrainian=>Russian test. I tried English=>Russian and bombed, too. There are three tries for each test, and the tests are very simple. So I now failed the Russian test 6 times.

Apparently, I speak the language too well. I can’t identify what the test-makers see as the single mistake I need to correct. I see 5 mistakes in each sentence and have no idea which one to choose.

People are scared of meditation because they think it means sitting all slackjawed, staring at the wall and trying not to think about how much you’d rather scroll through your Twitter feed. But there are many other types of meditation that work better for people who are incapable of feeling anything other than antsy and bored during regular meditation sessions.

My version of meditation is bullet journaling. I find it sensationally relaxing. In my job, I work with words, so having a little outlet that’s not about words but colors and shapes is very pleasing. Ten-fifteen minutes a day make an enormous difference. If I’m worried about a public appearance or a meeting, decorating the notes I made for it in my bullet journal turns the meeting into an enjoyable event. Or there’s this class I really didn’t want to teach. I started putting the class plans in the bullet journal and decorating them into the infinity. I now really enjoy the class. My brain associates it with the enjoyable act of decorating my planner.

In Florida, I used another form of meditation where I’d float on my back in the swimming pool and observe how the sharp edge of a tall building sliced up the sky. Two minutes of that were an equivalent of an hour-long nap. Hardcore.

Laid-Off HBO Max Execs Reveal Warner Bros. Discovery Is Killing Off Diversity and Courting ‘Middle America’. . .

Discovery CEO David Zaslav was charged with helping Warner crawl out of a $50 billion hole. He came in like a wrecking ball, tearing up CNN’s $300 million streaming service CNN+ and vowing to pull the Warner-owned news channel away from “advocacy” journalism. It all points to the same end, they say: A rejection of left-wing or highly diverse content in favor of more homogenous, Middle America-friendly fare. There was just a massive, ‘We don’t need you [creators of woke shows]. You’re not offering the things we’re focused on.’”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/laid-off-hbo-max-execs-reveal-warner-bros-discovery-is-killing-off-diversity-and-courting-middle-america

Things are looking up, my friends.

The linked article is hilarious, though. The author seems to be completely stunned by the realization that woke shows attract nobody but fussy neurotics. And there are not that many of them, thank God.

In the past month, the first million tonnes of food have been exported from Ukraine. A huge famine has been prevented. This is the first time since February 24 that food managed to leave Ukraine.

And just to think that while these feats of incredible bravery, these deeply moving moments were happening in Ukraine in February, March, April, there were people in the US who instead of being inspired by this greatness were gleefully waving around pouty articles about a date stamp on a photo of a Ukrainian girl and investigative reports on when the President of Ukraine first started wearing a khaki shirt.

They could have been looking at the skies but they chose to gaze intently at the lint in their navels. History is happening right next to them but they no longer know how to notice it. Seeing this brings to mind an image of some crusty curmudgeon during the American Revolutionary War who is convinced that nothing would come of the American struggle for sovereignty because George Washington’s boots aren’t polished the right way.

This is the kind of stoicism that’s plain stupid:

Hard should not be the point. Easy, joyful and enjoyable is. Also, it’s sad that a strong, young man – not an invalid recovering from a terrible illness – should congratulate himself for something so primitive. What’s next, being proud of flossing?

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba gave a long interview recently and told about what the first days of the war were like for him. He was in the White House the day before the war. Suddenly, the door opened and Biden walked in with his cabinet. That’s when Kuleba knew that things were really bad. Presidents meet with presidents. They don’t make unexpected visits to Foreign Ministers.

Kuleba says everybody at the White House treated him like he had terminal cancer. Biden showed him a photo of his dead son and said, “You have to think about your children.” Nobody expected Ukraine to survive the first 72 hours. Look at the map of Eastern Europe, and you’ll understand why. Kuleba listened to the President of the United States say farewell to him, went home, and went to work.

That’s why it was such a big deal when Zelensky filmed himself and his cabinet in the streets of Kyiv in the first days of the war saying, “I’m here, we are all here, the party leader is here, the entire cabinet is here. We haven’t left, we are staying, and we will fight.” I never thought he would leave. Even at the lowest point of my esteem for Zelensky, I would have never suspected him of leaving. My fear was that he’d be captured and murdered in some horrible, humiliating way. Seeing him stand outside with his whole cabinet and reassure everybody meant everything. I have now watched that short video maybe a hundred times. I believe that the most important lesson in life is to be able to say, “I’m here and I’ll keep fighting.”

Arestovich also said he wasn’t expecting to survive the first two weeks of the war.

Think about this. He knew he would die but he went on YouTube every day to reassure millions of people and carry us through those terrible days with nothing but the force of his personality. This is enormously beyond any stoicism. You can decide not to whine and meet death with strength. But to carry millions of people out of despair and into a certainty of a win while you are preparing to be killed, you’ve got to have something inside yourself that makes it possible. Obviously, Arestovich is a deeply religious person but there are many religious people who couldn’t do this.

Here’s Kuleba’s interview with English subtitles. The translation is not great but still understandable:

And then I see people who think it’s OK to claim they are harmed by the presence of Ben Shapiro, and. . . Yeah. Don’t be like them. Be like Kuleba, is all I can say. The future belongs to the brave, not to pathetic little snowflakes who “feel unsafe.”

Look at Kuleba, too. He’s only 41. He has young children. This is not a ripped, muscular hero. Kuleba is nothing like, for example, Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Zaluzhny who is huge and tough and looks like an armored vehicle. Kuleba is a nerdy, soft guy in eyeglasses. But his quiet, dignified bravery is stunning.

Think, also, about how it happened that the entire Ukrainian leadership consists of these young, extremely strong people who speak languages, have a vision, and have proven to be completely unbreakable. This is not an accident. There is an entire philosophy of life behind this phenomenon. The way they explain it is that they are what the West really is, not as a region but as a way of being in the world. And if what traditionally counts as the West has forgotten about it, we will keep it alive because we are here.

We are all here, we haven’t left, we are staying, and we will keep fighting.