Clarissa's Blog

My Jewish great-granfather had a brother who emigrated after the revolution of 1917 and ended up in Peru.

Now his Peruvian great-granddaughter keeps borrowing keys from me in the online game we are both playing, and this absolutely blows my mind.

Tonight I went out on the town and finally tried the famous shrimp and grits that I keep hearing about on foodie TV shows. I’m familiar with the shrimp, of course. It’s the grits part that was mysterious to me.

Turns out grits are the same dish that was a staple of Soviet cuisine known as пшенная каша. I love it and still have tender memories of the clumpy burnt version of the dish that was served in Soviet cafeteria.

Nothing is ever really new.

I had no idea that the neighbors across the street had a kid. It turns out that she’s mentally disabled. Now that she’s entering her teens, they can no longer keep her inside. She runs up and down the street all day, dancing, laughing, and listening to something on her headphones. She looks so happy that it’s impossible to see her and not feel some of her happiness.

I had a colleague who once went to a restaurant but tried getting in through the wrong door. People at the restaurant asked him if he was there to make a delivery.

“It’s because I’m Mexican!” the colleague ranted. They see a Mexican face and assume I can only come to a fancy restaurant to make a delivery. It doesn’t occur to them I can be a college professor!”

The guy’s “Mexican face” is whiter than mine but leaving that aside, what’s so humiliating about being a delivery person? Nobody gets upset to be mistaken for a doctor. It’s pure snobbery that masquerades as political grievance.

This happened to me a bunch of times. I didn’t get upset because I don’t think it’s insulting to be taken for a service worker. Service workers aren’t inferior to professors or physicians.

The last time it happened was at Macy’s, and it was an older black woman who thought I was the store assistant. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t work here. I think the assistant is over there, let’s go ask her.” Then we had a nice little chat about what we were shopping for.

It’s sad to see physicians in such a tenuous psychological state.

I’m going to hold my very first garage sale. Or yard sale, as it’s known in other places.

Does anybody have any tips? How to go about organizing it? What are the most common mistakes?

In 1998 Philip Roth published a novel about the original cancel culture, that of the McCarthyist era. It’s titled I Married a Communist, and it’s an eerie read. Today’s McCarthyists are Democrats (leftists, progressives) and they are a lot more powerful because they have recruited the oligarchy to do their bidding. But the similarities are fascinating. S

In the novel, a young idealistic teacher gets unpersonned by the committee on anti-racism, diversity and equity House Un-American Activities Committee. The young teacher realizes that the reason why he gets cancelled isn’t even political. It’s that he cares about the students and isn’t a mindless drone:

I burned with zeal to establish the dignity of my profession. That may be what rankled them more than anything else. The personal indignity that you had to undergo as a teacher when I first started teaching—you wouldn’t believe it. Being treated like children. Whatever the superiors told you, that was law. Unquestioned.

He goes to a union protest but the protesters are treated like insurrectionists instead of legitimate protesters:

The Star-Ledger described the picketers’ appearance as ‘an invasion of forces hostile to the congressional inquiry.’ Not a legal demonstration as guaranteed by rights laid down in the Constitution but an invasion, like Hitler’s of Poland.

The people who hound the teacher are driven by an “inextinguishable need to be right.” They use against their victims “the perfect smear, the vilification that burns with a hard, gemlike flame.”

After he gets cancelled, the teacher manages to stay strong and not let the insanity claim him:

“How awful was it for those six years?” I asked him. “What did it take out of you?” “I don’t think it took anything out of me. I really don’t think so. You do a helluva lot of not sleeping at night, of course. Many nights I had a hard time sleeping. You’re thinking of all kinds of things—how do you do this, and what are you going to do next, whom do you call on, and so forth. I was always redoing what had happened and projecting what would happen. But then the morning comes, and you get up and you do what you have to do.”

Eventually, the teacher gets vindicated but he’s sure that even if he hadn’t, he would have preserved his personality and dignity intact:

I don’t think I would have been affected temperamentally [if he remained cancelled forever]. In an open society, as bad as it can get, there’s an escape. To lose your job and have the newspapers calling you a traitor—these are very unpleasant things. But it’s still not the situation that is total, which is totalitarianism. I wasn’t put in jail and I wasn’t tortured. My child wasn’t denied anything. My livelihood was taken away from me and some people stopped talking to me, but other people admired me. My wife admired me. My daughter admired me. Many of my ex-students admired me. Openly said so. And I could put up a legal fight. I had free movement, I could give interviews, raise money, hire a lawyer, make courtroom challenges. Which I did. Of course you can become so depressed and miserable that you give yourself a heart attack. But you can find alternatives, which I also did.

Beautiful writing. And really timely ideas that, sadly, are more needed now than during McCarthyism.

Why is everything about identity with people on the Left? They’ve even turned masks into an identity symbol (see below).

Why can’t they find meaning in something other than joining a superior, self-righteous, smug mob?

“Good grief!” groaned the ones who had stars at the first.
“We’re still the best Sneetches and they are the worst.
But now how in the world will we know,” they all frowned,
“If which kind is what, or the other way round?”

I surprised a group of moms yesterday by revealing that Klara dresses herself and has done so since forever. I don’t choose her clothes because why do I need that headache in my life? Even when she was a baby, I’d hold up a bunch of onesies and dress her in the one she tried to grab.

“But what if the outfit she comes up with is weird or inappropriate?”

Well, she’s going to face the consequences and either learn to live with them or make a different choice next time. It’s an important life lesson.

“But what if she ends up feeling cold? Or hot? Or the dress is too long for her to climb and run?”

Again, life lesson. She’ll have to learn to take these things into account one day. Why not now?

Klara made a turban out of warm pijama pants, tied it up with ribbons, decorated it with hair clips, and wears it to church. It actually looks really cute. And who cares anyway? She’s five.

I don’t tell her what to wear, what to eat or when or where or how. And as a result, she’s now really good at taking weather into account when she goes out.

Here’s Klara in an outfit of her own composition. The pijama pants are incorporated into a different kind of headwear:

The church doesn’t require headwear. It’s her own thing.