Clarissa's Blog

It wasn’t easy to convince my sister to get this selection of 4 ceviches to share. She was originally planning to eat the whole battery of ceviche herself.

These are phenomenal ceviches with real corvina.

By the way, I had my own neurosis surrounding beach vacations. Soviet people tend to have one because beach vacations were a big deal culturally. We went on them as often as we could but we were a sick, broken society, so we accumulated mental traumas in the process.

My beach neurosis was of the same nature as N’s but it manifested physically instead of mentally. I’d have a brilliant time but then exactly at the half-time mark I’d get sick and become incapacitated. If no illness lent itself to my neurosis, I’d start getting injured.

I’ve had everything on these vacations. Bronchitis, severe colds, gallbladder episodes, hypertension, diarrhea, allergic reactions to insect bites, cuts, burns, mysterious limps. Always at the half-time mark and always in the most intense version.

I got this cured. I’m leaving a vacation that I massively enjoyed and during which the worst physical discomfort I suffered was a mosquito bite.

As I mentioned before, my husband experienced terrible abuse as a child. One of the effects is that he’s terrified of having a good time. He feels that if he enjoys himself, a cosmic punishment in the form of some horrific calamity will be visited upon him. This gives him terrible feelings of rage and anxiety.

He’s been working on this with his psychoanalyst for a long time. These feelings receded pretty quickly in all contexts except beach vacations. He really loves beach vacations but they were all spoiled for him by what psychologists call “unbearable affects.”

It would have been easy to numb these feelings with alcohol, drugs, or medication. Alternatively, he could invent a narrative where he doesn’t go on vacation because he’s too busy at work or it’s too expensive or there’s some other excuse. But he kept working on it with the analyst.

And guess what? It helped. We are going home today after a two-week beach holiday during which unbearable affects didn’t make an appearance.

It’s very, very hard work to fix a broken psyche. It’s easier to hide behind the idea that “this is simply how I am.” But we were created with a capacity for great internal peace. We have all been given the gift of joy, tranquility and pleasure. If this capacity has been broken by life, we can recover it.

You could have never guessed what would finally sour them on their favorite president:

https://twitter.com/DrKimSue/status/1550450493918527489?t=VQr2jYzYPJY0260HwfnKnQ&s=19

Turns out that he’s too… hardworking. Who could have possibly guessed?

Truly, one can never plumb the depths of this perverted mentality.

Russians signed an agreement to let grain shipments leave Ukraine unimpeded. And then a few hours later Russia bombed the main Ukrainian port that ships grain. Just a few hours later. The few hours during which the NATO didn’t expand, I might add.

I don’t know what else needs to happen to make it clear to people that appeasement won’t work. “If I give the bully my lunch money, he’ll become sweet and won’t hurt me again” is not a workable plan.

“Why did the Russians sign the agreements if they weren’t going to honor them?” naive people ask.

They signed precisely because they weren’t going to honor them. It’s so much fun to give false hope to the people you despise and then crush it.

Finally, they are catching on but not before many people were needlessly drugged up with God knows what side effects. Of course, this can be said about all sorts of other COVID vaccines drugs.

Apparently, it’s now fashionable to take a drug called Paxlovid and inform everybody you come across about this fact. Our Dean started the annual summer meeting today by informing us that he took Paxlovid last month. This is the first time in my memory people share their medication history with a large group of people at work.

COVID did something weird to some of us. We’ve all had opportunities to take medication in our lives. But normally people don’t make reports on their meds to colleagues or distant acquaintances. And they still don’t, thank goodness, unless COVID is involved.

Eltz Castle in Germany (in the picture below) has belonged to the same family for 33 generations. More than 850 years!

I hope they start suing. But God, who even cares about that after the damage has been done? The person in the video is clearly unwell, too, because this is somebody who thinks the main problem with being unable to have an orgasm is that your relationships might suffer.

An event was cancelled on my campus today because of, and I quote, “BA.5 subvariant of the Omicron variant.” The event obviously included free food for the faculty.

You truly can’t make this stuff up.