Clarissa's Blog

Building management created a welcome mat that features the portraits of our senior administration and glued it to the floor at the entrance. Now you can’t come into the building without stomping on the faces of the chancellor, vice-chancellor, and the provost. I don’t know what the thinking was behind this project but it surely lifts the spirits of anybody who enters the building.

Another fun project my university did consisted in paying a gigantic amount of money for an enhanced police presence over the Thanksgiving break to catch drunk drivers on campus.

Guess what is entirely absent from a campus during Thanksgiving, though? Right you are! Drivers! Everybody is away. The buildings are locked. The million-dollar campaign against drunk drivers caught exactly zero drivers. Because there were no drivers.

A million dollars is the entire yearly budget of my department. It would have been better used catching birds in the classrooms because it’s annoying to have a bird fly into your face when you enter the room. (True story).

Here in Illinois, a lawyer had to go to court to get his dying patient treated with Ivermectin. The court mandated treatment, and the patient recovered and went home. The patients who don’t have a lawyer weren’t so lucky.

It’s really gotten way too insane if a cheap, widely available treatment isn’t prescribed for purely political reasons and dying patients need to send lawyers to pleas with the court to let them get the medication they need.

This patient almost died because it was convenient for somebody to make the political point that COVID is untreatable. Think about it. This should be a national scandal. There should be an investigation into how many people did die because they were refused a six-dollar pill.

The Last Anniversary is a very uncharacteristic novel for Moriarty because it’s very, very dark. There are two plot lines. One is that of a 39-year-old Sophie who is desperate to get married and have a child before it’s too late. She hides from the unbearable realization of a wasted life behind fantasies of a glamorous career and endless romantic opportunities. But the reality is that of a humdrum HR job in a lawnmower company and a terrible loneliness of a series of fruitless first dates. Moriarty’s understanding of psychology in this novel is spot-on. She shows how Sophie’s endless failures are a result of her shallow, vapid consumerism that envisions life as images from cheap commercials where good things happen by magic without any effort on your part.

No man can live up to Sophie’s fantasy of flawless, robotic perfection. Nobody can offer her a life of spotless, unmarred bliss. Even when she receives a windfall of an inheritance in the shape of a beautiful house on a paradisical island complete with a bunch of new friends and two perfect suitors, it never occurs to Sophie that she might need to put in a bit of effort to make the magic last. “Love is a decision. Not a feeling,” says a wise old woman at the beginning of the novel but that’s an insight Sophie never gets, so she continues to wait for love, fulfilment, family, and happiness to just happen to her. And of course they never do.

But this is actually the light-hearted part of the novel. The real darkness resides in Grace, a malignant narcissist who abuses her infant son and her husband. Moriarty traces the making of such a narcissist exceptionally well. Usually, even serious novelists portray severe pathology like Grace’s in the same way as Sophie understands love: it just happens for absolutely no reason. It’s all about luck.

Moriarty, however, goes pretty deep with Grace. She shows a multigenerational story of a family where a child is physically raped in the 1930s and the unspoken, unrecognized horror of that violation culminates in Grace, the great-granddaughter of the raped girl feeling entitled to rape her infant child’s mind.

The novel is all about self-involved, horrid women and mostly decent yet weak men who are trapped in the women’s boundless dysfunction. What’s particularly creepy is that the novel is narrated in a light-hearted, often saccharine tone that imitates the inner state of the extremely shallow Sophie and underscores the horrors of child rape, abuse, and all the rest of it.

I warned you it gets dark, didn’t I? I’d rather read a serial killer novel than go back to Grace and her psychopath mother Laura. This is not a light beach read but it’s very worth reading if you are prepared to catch a glimpse of real darkness.

Also, love is absolutely a decision. So is happiness. It doesn’t happen. It’s made.

When you arrive at a friend’s house, do you a) ring the doorbell, b) knock on the door, or c) text “here”?

I’m under 50 and not a FedEx delivery person, so I text. My doorbell is almost always switched off. So is the volume on my phone. Want me to open the door or pick up the phone? Text!

I find it weird that people still do the doorbell thing and then get upset I didn’t open the door. Have your thumbs been amputated? Also, what’s with the phone calls to ask a yes or no question? Just text!

Our little town is now so fancy that we have our own kolach cafe. (For the Russian speakers, it’s калач). And two new butcher shops.

From a conversation with my 5-year-old:

“Ryan seemed a little irritable on the playground today.”

“I wouldn’t say irritable, mommy. He’s irascible, which is different.”

I asked her to explain the difference, and she did so with ease.

And before people say that expensive kid shoes last longer, the previous post was prompted by me having to throw away a pair of – and I feel idiotic even writing it – $48 shoes I bought her in September. They were sturdy but. . . She’s an active 5-year-old who spends hours outside each day. There’s no shoe can survive that.

I’m kind of upset over the $48.

I used to buy Klara shoes at Walmart. She is very active, and any shoe, sneaker or boot I get her gets shredded within 2-3 months. At Walmart, I’d get her a pair for $9, she’d destroy it, I’d buy a new one, and that would be it.

Now there are no more kids’ shoes at Walmart. Their selection has dwindled to almost nothing. There’s never anything in her size. On Amazon, kid shoes cost insane amounts. $45! $30! They are cute and all but they will last her 5 weeks at the most.

I want my Walmart kid shoes back.

This is the very heart of many of our problems:

Yes, if the demographic subgroup of infants has different outcomes than the demographic subgroup of retirees, that’s bigotry. People are interchangeable widgets. Groups are all identical in everything except moral value. And that’s called diversity! Everybody is an identical cog!

We have allowed people who are congenital idiots to terrorize us into compliance.