Clarissa's Blog

I submitted my long-suffering piece today, so now I can do more Grey’s Anatomy. I’m on season 9, so spoiler alert!

In this season, Christina finally finds a substitute daddy and gets a chance to grow up. Yay!

The character I hate in the show is Arizona. I liked her at first because I love the actress but after the plane crash she turned into the kind of person I hate the most. Everybody has shitty things happen to them. That’s the nature of human experience. Some of us have shittier things happen than others. But that’s not an excuse to treat your wife or anybody else like garbage.

As I keep saying, tragedy reveals who we really are. It’s easy to be a nice person when everything is great. But whether the niceness is just a mask hiding a pile of excrement is only revealed during hard times.

What I like about Grey’s Anatomy is its psychological plausibility. I hate shows based on the philosophy of “just because” where nobody tries to provide any explanation for what the characters do or feel.

Meredith is constantly depressed and suicidal because her mother never wanted her. She tries to get symbolically unborn by drowning, which stands for a return to the womb. This happens because her mother says she’s ordinary, which might seem like an insignificant thing to those who don’t understand how the human psyche works.

Only when her mother dies and Meredith fantasizes a symbolic acceptance by the mother can she continue to live. Meredith undergoes psychoanalysis and becomes a lot more resilient than Christina, who is from a much better family.

Christina becomes an instant slave to any man who looks at her kindly because her father died when she was a kid. She is emotionally and socially frozen at the age when her father died.

The only thing that makes no sense is Bailey’s unabiding popularity with beautiful men. It’s not entirely impossible that a short, fat, dumpy woman with bad skin and sparse hair would attract crowds of tall, beautiful, adoring, kind men with large salaries. But that woman needs either to be a sexual femme fatale (which Bailey, with her limited sexual experience and anorgasmy until her mid-thirties doesn’t have) or a woman who lights up the sun with her enveloping warmth (which Bailey definitely isn’t) or a deeply nurturing, motherly type (which she also definitely isn’t.)

A Christian journalist writes:

With oozing condescension, they lament that someone otherwise so smart and perceptive — i.e., someone who agrees with them on the issues — can’t let go of faith... I find it interesting that folks who would never judge a Muslim by the lunatics who share her faith are so ready to judge me by the lunatics who share mine.

He’s right. In academia, people find it easy to make the kind of asinine jokes and comments or to scoff openly in the face of a Christian colleague that they’d never do to a Muslim or Hindu one.

The reason is that a Muslim or a Hindu are seen as an irreducible other while a Christian is treated with the familiarity of a wayward sibling. The condescension and the idiocy stem from the residual guilt of having committed apostasy. I’m not saying anybody should feel guilt but that the attitude shows they do.

I agree with this blogger, this kind of sweeping judgments isn’t doing anybody any good:

“There is no greater threat to a child’s emotional well-being than being separated from a primary caregiver. Even if it was for a short period, for a child, that’s an eternity,” said Johanna Bick, a psychology professor at the University of Houston who studies adverse experiences in childhood.

It’s possible that the professor was misquoted or edited in some way. If that’s the case, she should make a big stink because she’s being portrayed as a quack. I mean, children of what age can’t be away from mommy even for a short time? Two days, two months, two years, seven years? Fifteen? And what’s a short time? Two minutes or two months?

No self-respecting scholar would make such grandiose pronouncements in a professional context.

What triggers me are toddlers in TV shows. Hate those little buggers. They never pay any attention to their parents. Because obviously the actors are not their real parents. And it would do nothing for the plot to show endless scenes with a toddler fighting the battle of Somme for mommy’s attention.

I get all that but it’s still very annoying to watch the scenes where mommy comes into the room, and her two-year-old continues to play placidly and silently in the corner without even noticing her. I keep yelling at the TV, “Lady, wake up! Aren’t you supposed to be a doctor? (I’m watching Grey’s Anatomy.) Your kid is seriously unwell. Do something about it!”

You, folks, told me to take it easy after the surgery, so I’m back to my TV-watching marathon.

Are there any Grey’s Anatomy fans here? Because I’ve got things to say and nobody to discuss it with.

After a colleague posted the article on trigger warnings I linked earlier on academic discussion boards, it took under 3 hours for other colleagues to start screaming like banshees that he’s “belittling sufferers” and offering a string of truly strange accusations. And that’s in summer, when most people are away and not checking the work email all the time.

This is the real issue with trigger warnings and this is why I keep posting about it. Look at the normal, civilized discussion we’ve had on the blog in these 3 hours of this very link. But it doesn’t work this way in professional settings. People are using these discussions, probably without realizing what they are doing, to prep their arsenal for the job wars where getting and staying employed in prestigious professions will hinge on the capacity loudly to proclaim one’s unwavering support for the most recent dogma.

Russian is impossible to teach because all the words are extremely long and most have the ы sound. To understand what it sounds like, take the vowel in “big” and just your lower jaw out while making the sound as strong as possible. Horrible, eh?

Klara now asks, “how do you say that in Russian?”, but loses interest when she hears that the simplest English words sound like an endless jumble of a million ы-containing syllables. Take, for instance, the word toes. Do you know what it is in Russian? Пальцы ног. How crazy is it? And this is without commonly used diminutive suffixes.

What a stupid language.

Maybe everybody knows this already but I recently figured it out and it’s making me happy.

So you know when toddlers learn to ignore you? Like when you ask something and they pretend you are not there? And you say it 15 times more and they act like you don’t exist? And then you get angry and acquire an annoying didactic tone? Maybe you don’t but I’m a college professor. When I open my mouth, people shut up and start taking notes. I’m not mentally equipped for being ignored.

I went on the FB mom page, and everybody has this problem, but nobody offers a solution that doesn’t sound like it’s fit for military barracks. So I thought about it and realized: if she’s ignoring me, this means she doesn’t need me. And I’m free to do whatever I need while she concentrates on something other than me for a change while building a crucial life skill of being alone with herself and her thoughts. Why am I trying to be needed when I don’t even like it? So I stopped trying to get myself noticed, and it’s been a huge relief.

This is the best thing I’ve discovered since the life-changing idea to stop saying things like “Time to get dressed / brush teeth / put on shoes, etc”, which are invariably met with a firm “NO!!” and instead ask “which toothpaste do you prefer today, Elmo or Mickey Mouse?” Getting her up and out of the door in the mornings now takes exactly 10 minutes. (Another hack is never to let them sit down for any purpose on the way between bed and car seat in the morning. Once they sat down, you’re screwed for the morning.)