Clarissa's Blog

I reconnected with a long-lost acquaintance and mentioned I’d had COVID.

“Before or after getting vaccinated?” the acquaintance asked.

“Instead of,” I answered.

In 1988 – already perestroika but still USSR – I’d go to the underpass and buy a packet of bubble gum for a rouble. Just so you understand what a rouble was, my father made 110 roubles a month before taxes. It wasn’t easy for a kid to come across a whole rouble to spend on illegal underpass purchases.

I don’t like gum, so that isn’t why I bought it. The gum packets had inserts with pictures of Disney characters. But I didn’t know them, so this wasn’t the reason either.

I bought the gum because of the colors. The inserts were very bright, and I’d never seen such colors before. Looking at them was an escape from the drab Soviet reality to a world of color. I stored the inserts in a matchbox and spent hours contemplating them.

A couple of years later we were finally allowed to have “private cooperatives” (tiny proto-businesses), and they flooded the city with neon green and orange blouses and skirts. We all looked like road repair crews but we we were desperate not to look grey any more.

Women were also finally allowed to feel like women and not industrial cogs, and it all resulted in everybody dressing like neon-bright streetwalkers for a few years because we didn’t know how else to manifest our newfound womanness.

The private cooperatives started making shoelaces which had been impossible to find in the USSR. They colored the shoelaces in the same neon orange and green, and we wore them as hair ties, necklaces, and bracelets. It was as if suddenly the whole world had exploded in color.

The reason why I signed up to teach a winter course is because normally the money it makes goes directly to your department. Last year, we made enough in winter to buy everybody a printer and all the books and movies they could wish for. It was so nice! Membership fees, journal subscriptions, research materials, gadgets – I could pay for everything. We don’t get any money for any of it otherwise. And there’s always stuff you need. I have photocopy costs from the National Library of Spain. A colleague is in Film Studies and needs boatloads of movies. And so on.

But now we aren’t getting any of this money. Bupkes, zero dollars zero cents. These winter courses are hard to prepare and teach. We teach 7 days a week from December 20 to January 8. And of course we were only told that the money was being taken away after we signed our contracts and students registered, so it’s too late to get out of it.

I only have 10 students in the winter course but a colleague has 65. Imagine the grading and everything. He only took it on to help the department.

This is “free college.” Thank you, Governor Pritzker.

It’s quite an experience when you talk on the phone to your 70-year-old dad and you hear your 68-year-old mom yelling in the background, “The test is showing only one line! We are fine, it was a false alarm!”

Sad thoughts about Alzheimer’s started visiting me until I realized that retirees now have their own alternative to a pregnancy test, and home COVID tests operate in a similar way.

Instead of real books, our library now has this fake fireplace:

I understand the idea of reading in front of a fireplace. It’s one of my favorite pursuits. But in order to read in front of a fireplace, you need books. And books were destroyed to make place for the fake fireplace. Not surprisingly, there are no people congregating in front of it even though its finals week and the library is very populated.

What kind of a bleating idiot thinks that our students need more screens in their lives?

Six months ago, if asked what they understood by “woke”, most French people would have assumed it had something to do with Chinese cooking. And yet today in Paris, the notion of “le wokisme” is suddenly all the rage. The government warns of a new cultural totalitarianism creeping in from the “Anglosphere”. The education minister has set up a Laboratory of the Republic, dubbed an “anti-woke think tank”, to co-ordinate the fightback. And everywhere the precursors of what might be to come are being reported in the media: a new gender-neutral pronoun, a threatened statue of a dead statesman or a meeting on campus only for black students. For the French, these signifiers of what critics in the UK and US have termed “woke” are all very new and unfamiliar.

Well, good. In Spain, too, there’s a movement to resist this Anglo-inspired garbage. The Spanish government is in thrall to the woke mania but there’s a whole intellectual and artistic movement by the young artists and scholars to oppose it.

Hmm, remember my story about Gorbachev trying to prohibit alcohol and creating a much larger problem?

Somebody is trying to manufacture a drug addiction epidemic in New Zealand. Somebody has gotten a bribe. Somebody needs a drugged population that will be even easier to manipulate.

As we joked in the USSR, the best method of contraception is a condom worn over another condom plus complete abstinence.

Or, the best method of contraception is tomato juice. Before or after sex, you ask? The answer is, instead of!

See you in 6 years, Canadians. Or whatever remains of you by then.