Clarissa's Blog

People say I’m too negative about Canada. But there are good things, too!

For instance, my mother and sister keep turning up the heating because it’s kind of cool outside. Back where I live, it’s +32°C, and here in Canada it’s still very habitable weather.

The currency exchange with US$ is very pleasing. Canadian dollar collapsed a lot worse than the US dollar. “We don’t completely suck!” I keep exclaiming.

The only people I have interacted with were at the ICU, the funeral home and the cemetery, and none of them expected me to wear a mask.

I’ve seen some Ukrainian flags around.

Gas prices make me downright nostalgic for our gas prices back home.

Once you drive a little bit up North, the nature becomes quite Northern. Pine-trees, and all that.

Apple turnovers are vastly superior in taste to apple turnovers anywhere else in the world. US apple turnovers should crawl in a hole and wither with shame.

I’m sure I’ll notice a few more positive things soon.

We decided to bury my father at a small Orthodox cemetery in a small town near Montreal. He was a lifelong Orthodox believer, which is no small thing for somebody who lived in the USSR. The cemetery is right by a tiny Orthodox church which my father loved.

Of course, the moment we went to explore the cemetery, we discovered that there’s a large monument to “brave Russian warriors.” We had to insist that my father should be buried as far as possible from the Russian warriors monument because he was also a lifelong Ukrainian patriot. Again, for somebody born in the USSR in 1951, this wasn’t easy.

I’m sure that the Ukrainian diaspora has its own church and its own cemetery but we don’t know anybody from the diaspora. The Russian-speaking immigrants are annoying, with their Pushkin statues and all that crap, but at least they are our annoying immigrants.

Seriously, I had to spend time around two different Pushkin statues today as we were making arrangements for the funeral, which is 50 Pushkin statues more than I need in my life. My father hated Pushkin because he could never get over the pedophilia in his works.

My father’s core quality was stoicism. Not the grim, showy, self-righteous kind but the cheerful, quiet, inward-oriented one that is its own reward. You could amputate his legs with a chainsaw without anaesthesia but if you asked him how he was doing in the process, he’d say, “Amazing! Excellent. So good!” This made it hard to get him medical care because doctors would ask what ailed him, and he’d say, “oh, absolutely nothing! In fact, I’m doing fantastic!” He once had a stroke and at the emergency room still tried to reassure the medical personnel that he was feeling amazing. It didn’t work but only because by that time he was slurring his speech quite badly.

I’m not rending my garments and tearing my hair out because that would be a betrayal of my father. He really really didn’t like people who were victims. I’ve never seen him feel sorry for himself. His whole life, for example, he suffered from scleroderma, which limited his range of movements and made many basic physical operations impossible. But this was never a topic of conversation or a pretext for a pity party.

In Canada, if people have a joint bank account and one of them dies, the bank account gets frozen for months. You need to get mountains of paperwork to get it unfrozen. In the meantime, you don’t have access to your own money.

Why? Because imagine how convenient it is for the banks to have control over a multitude of accounts where they can invest the money unmolested and know that the owners won’t try to withdraw anything for up to 6 months.

People who say that there’s socialism in Canada are either clueless or use the word socialism to mean “something icky.”

At the most difficult times in life, it helps me to go into my weather app and read what the weather is like in all the places the app saved from my past visits. It’s a reminder that life goes on somewhere, with its rains, fogs, and sunrises.

My father died today. He never regained consciousness since Monday, so I didn’t get to talk to him after I arrived in Canada. But I held his hand as he drifted away, and I think he knew I was there.

People in my life tend to die on the fifth of the month. My son, my friend, now my father.

He was a wonderful father. We were always very close. This is a terrible loss.

I also have a mega ear infection that turns me quite comically deaf at the most inappropriate moments.

As always in difficult times, I appreciate distracting links, articles, tweets, and home remedies for ear infection. Yes, I will see a doctor tomorrow, although at this point I’m ready not to hear about anything medical for a long time.

But if the NATO never expanded, these Russian butchers would have been completely normal, peaceful people.

I’m hoping somebody would send this to the Pope and other “but the NATO” individuals.

People in first class start their day by chugging mimosas at 10 am. I asked for orange juice and started composing a message to my husband saying “long live the jihad” but then realized it’s not the best idea at boarding. So I substituted with “long live Arestovich.”

My husband is the cutest. Yesterday as I was packing for my sad trip, he gave the following speech:

“Arestovich says [these days we don’t start any sentence without referencing Arestovich first] that there are different ways of being a soldier of jihad. You can strap explosives to your vest and go blow up somebody. But if you can’t do that, there are other ways to wage jihad. You can do ideological propaganda. Or even just have pro-jihad thoughts that you conceal from everybody. And that, too, makes you a soldier of jihad. I’m not good with offering emotional support, so I decided to support you in other ways. For your flight tomorrow, I got you first-class airplane tickets.”

Absolutely everything he ever communicates is delivered in this form. I literally never know what will come out of his mouth at any time because he has such a different way of thinking from me. It’s endlessly fascinating.

I’m in the Admiral’s Club lounge right now, enjoying the gift from the jihad.

And this is all part of that terrible fluidity of existence that I keep talking about. Nothing is a given. Nothing just is. Everything is open to questioning. Everything is ripe for a change at any moment.

The problem is that this is intolerable to the human psyche that values stability above all. That’s why the best things in life just are. My kid is my kid. Nothing can change that. God is “ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever-existing and eternally the same.” Eternally the same, got it? The best relationships are rooted in permanence. Predictability and routines heal. Upheaval and unpredictability wound. Moving house is considered a major trauma because it is. People aren’t furniture. Although even furniture will get damaged if you drag it around all the time.

To enter Canada as a Canadian citizen, you need to download an app, upload paperwork into it, answer five million questions, receive six million stern warnings, and receive a QR code. None of which guarantees entry into the country of your citizenship.

Apparently, you no longer qualify as a citizen if you don’t have a smartphone where the app and the documents should be uploaded.

I still remember when citizenship didn’t require additional purchases, technology, and documentation. Citizenship simply was. Like biological sex. It didn’t need to be questioned and re-negotiated. But now a passport is worth nothing without vaccine passports, fresh COVID tests, quarantine plans, doctor notes, and QR codes. We have sacrificed something huge for. . . what, exactly? What has been gained? How was citizenship taken away from us just like that? The younger people won’t even remember how it used to be.

What have we done?