Clarissa's Blog

We are going 100% back to campus, no social distancing or COVID capacities in the Spring of 2022!

Hallelujah!

My faculty members will be over the freaking moon. We were preparing to battle it out for the few available classrooms if we were going to be forced to observe social distancing. And now I won’t have to deal with people thinking I hate them personally if I can’t schedule them to teach in person.

Everybody has learned something.

There’s a whole generation of talented young Spanish writers (mostly women but there are some men, too) who are saying, “we were sold a lie that freedom is all about being alone, unattached, not having a family or any property. Now we are in our thirties and we are miserable. This kind of freedom sucks. We’ve been robbed.”

“I have fancy trips to Thailand when my mother at this age had a kid, a husband, a mortgage, and a bunch of kitchen appliances. And guess what? I’m miserable in a way she never was,” one such artist writes.

Most importantly, these are talented artists. They are creating art that grows out of their disillusionment with the neoliberal idea of freedom from attachment, family, and property. They aren’t buying the Great Reset slogan of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll love it” because they already figured out that they are being had.

This is why I love Spanish literature. While their Anglo counterparts are still chewing the stale cud of identity, young Spanish artists are talking about things that matter. You pick up a novel by some random unknown kid in Spain, and it’s a punch in the gut.

Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin have spoken out against the egregious mistreatment of people detained on January 6th. In the meantime, Republicans are showing little interest in these detainees.

This is why I will never tie my identity to party tribalism. Getting emotionally attached to politicians or parties is deeply stupid. I’m attached to my principles and the well-being of myself and the people I care about.

Yesterday on the playground there was one masked woman with a masked child. Everybody else was unmasked.

The woman spent an hour running after her kid and dragging her away from the unmasked children she tried to play with. Kids are cruel, so they started to play that the masked girl was a monster and tyey had to run away whenever she came close.

This isn’t about masks. It’s about a parent purposefully turning her kid into a pariah. I’m on the playgrounds a lot, and kids don’t care who’s masked and who isn’t. But they do notice neurotic, freakish behavior, and they are not kind. It would have been kinder on the masked mother’s part not to come to the playground at all.

Here’s another great quote from I Married a Communist. A father is explaining to his son why it’s important that Republicans don’t win the White House:

You despise big business, Nathan? You despise ‘the Big Boys from Wall Street’? Well, you don’t know what it is when the party of big business has its foot in the face of ordinary people. I do. I know poverty and I know hardship in ways you and your brother have been spared, thank God.”

That’s exactly what I would say today to convince a person not to vote for the Democrats.

In Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist, a kid gets mesmerized by the freedom we the which the leftist crowd expresses itself:

In his conversation, as in his brother’s, there was no invisible line of propriety observed and there were no conventional taboos. . . There was something marvelously bracing about it, a different and dangerous world, demanding, straightforward, aggressive, freed from the need to please.

Things have really changed, eh? Today’s leftism isn’t just different. It’s the exact opposite. It’s all about simpering, limited propriety.

In the meantime, the Q crowd is glowing. Things are great and about to get even greater. Everything is going according to plan. The loss of the presidency and the Senate is a small, insignificant blip. Everything points to amazing wins in the nearest future.

Delusional? Absolutely. But the delusions of happy people are a lot less dangerous than those of the desperate and the enraged.

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

A longtime Post subscriber in Virginia, one of my regular correspondents, had something to say about that in a recent email about the appointment: “Does she understand — really understand — that . . . the United States is on track to become functionally an authoritarian White Christian nationalist state in the very near future? And if the answer is ‘Yes,’ what is she prepared to do about it?” “Right now,” he added, “nothing else signifies.”

It isn’t just some crank in Virginia. The people who have all the power in the world – the Bezoses, the Wall Street, all of them – this is their animating emotion.

If you go to any place where progressives congregate online, you’ll see that they are downright desperate. Their mood is very dark. The tenor of the vast majority of conversations is that they are two seconds away from permanent Nazism. This mood of fear and desperation is being stoked by the oligarchy-owned media, as you can see in the example above.

You think they won the election and should be at least somewhat content. But to them, the existence of a single person who thinks differently is a complete loss. It’s truly a totalitarian mentality. A single dissident means they are on the verge of losing everything.

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.