Tag: humor

Meeting Latin Americans

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

I love meeting Latin American people because whenever I do the following dialogue ensues (translation is mine):

Latin American person: So where are you from?

Me: Ukraine.

Latin American person: Uruguay, you mean?

Me: No, Ukraine.

Latin American person (looking perplexed): Then you probably lived in Latin America for a long time.

Me: No, unfortunately I never got the opportunity to live in any Spanish-speaking country.

Latin American person (looking extremely perplexed): But how is this possible?

I especially love it when such conversations take place with my students standing around us and making little “wow!” sounds in the background. I can practically feel myself grow 10 inches when that happens.

Learning Spanish as fast and as well as I did is an example of human will and perseverance triumphing over an inhospitable reality, adversity, and hardship. Yes, such situations also make me very pompous. I’ll try to get over it by tomorrow but I’m not promising anything.

I’m a Soviet Engineer

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

There is this old joke about a Soviet engineer. “I tell my wife I’m with my mistress,” he says. “And I tell my mistress that I’m with my wife. In the meanwhile, I just hide in a corner and work on my engineering designs.”

I’m that Soviet engineer, people. I’m sitting right in the middle of Montreal’s beautiful Old Port, the weather is lovely, there are many cool places to visit, great stores and restaurants to patronize, friends to meet, and relatives to greet.

I, however, am stuck at home with my computer doing my committee work.

A True Air Travel Story

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments
This is a small part of the feast that awaited me upon arrival in Montreal

An elderly gentleman was traveling to Montreal through Houston, Texas. When his plane arrived in Houston, he grabbed his carry-on suitcase (or what to him looked like his suitcase) and rushed to make a connecting flight. The airport in Houston is big and hard to navigate, so the elderly gentleman was happy to reach his next airplane on time. He boarded the plane and started placing his suitcase in the overhead bin. A flight attendant approached him to help him with the suitcase and saw that it had a huge label saying “Crew” on it.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “Are you a member of the crew?”

“No, of course not,” the elderly gentleman responded.

“Then how come you have a suitcase that says “Crew” on it?”

“Oh my goodness!” the gentleman exclaimed. “I must have grabbed it by mistake, instead of my own. It looks just like my suitcase, and my eye-sight is not as good as it used to be. What shall I do now? My suitcase contains gifts for my grandchildren and my wife’s things. She will now divorce me!”

“This suitcase looks very familiar,” the flight attendant said. “Hey, Lindsay, some here! Isn’t this your suitcase?”

The second flight attendant approached and immediately recognized her suitcase. “Oh, I’m so happy you haven’t disappeared with it,” she told the elderly passenger. “I will not be getting home until Friday, and my underwear is in this suitcase. What would I do without my underwear?”

“But wait,” the passenger said. “I’m glad you have your suitcase, but where is mine?”

“It seems that both your flights are on this very plane,” the flight attendant said. “So I guess your suitcase must be right here.”

Withing 30 seconds the elderly gentleman was reunited with his suitcase. I guess both he and the flight attendant were very lucky that he chanced to be flying twice in a row on the same plane.

I was happy that these nice people found their luggage but they kept discussing this lucky eventuality during the entire flight from Houston to Montreal and prevented me from taking a nap.

Now I’m finally in Montreal, though. Since readers mentioned that they enjoy photos of food, I promise to take pictures of every meal I have and post them here. Prepare to learn everything you ever wanted and more about food in Montreal and Ottawa.

I’m Haunted by Mexicans

~ Clarissa ~ 26 Comments

Whenever my students are writing about Cubans, Uruguayans, Spaniards, Dominicans, Argentinians, Venezuelans, Colombians, etc., I always know that by the end of the essay, all these people will be mysteriously transformed into Mexicans. Often, I read statements like, “Jose Marti was an important Cuban thinker and the fighter for Cuban Independence. He loved his country of Mexico and worked hard to make it independent from Spain.”

The culmination of this trend was achieved in the passage I read today: “Jose Enrique Rodo, a thinker and educator from Uruguay, hated the United States and Mexico. Mexico was part of the United States, which is why he hated it. As a Mexican, he hated his own nation and wrote critically about it.”

Is there a way I can politely bring to my students’ attention the Earth-shattering news that not all Spanish-speakers are Mexican?

Through the Eyes of a Stranger: Stories From an American Party

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

I know people enjoy my party stories, so I will share a few experiences from today’s Halloween party at a colleague’s house.

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The moment we arrive at the party people start uttering what to me sounds like a very cryptic phrase, “Go Cardinals!”

“This is strange,” I think. “I know these people, and I’m fairly certain nobody here is Catholic. So why are they all interested in cardinals all of  a sudden?”

I approach a group of people and say, “You know, a student submitted a paper to me this morning. The topic was supposed to be Latin American national identities, but instead of the title, he wrote what you are saying, “GO CARDINALS!” Could you tell me what this means?”

People looked at me with a compassion normally reserved for the terminally ill.

“The St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series last night,” a kind soul explained.

“Cool!” I said. “It was a series of what, exactly?”

*****************************

After figuring out that the Cardinals were a baseball team, I approached the Chair’s husband.

“So,” I said, “are you a Cardinals fan?”

“Yes!” he replied. “The moment we discovered our team won last night we drove to St. Louis and partied until 3 am!”

“That’s so great,” I said. “Now I realize why my neighbors kept screaming all night long. I thought they were just excited about the midterms. I hear that baseball is a very intellectual game, is that true?”

The Chair’s husband plunged into a passionate discussion of baseball. I decided that now that I had him pegged as a baseball fan I had something to contribute to the discussion.

“Baseball rocks,” I said. “Unlike this totally weird American football. I mean, have you ever seen anything stranger than that weird game?”

“Erm. . .,” this ultra-polite man responded, “I’m not sure if you are aware that I’m a football player. I coach our high-school football team.”

**************************

N. got . . . erm, tipsy enough to share the following story (even though he is Russian, he is no drinker, so I never heard this before).

“I was talking to my former thesis adviser,” N. said, “and I mentioned that I had gotten married.”

“Oh, who is your wife?” the thesis adviser asked.

“She is the rising star of Hispanic Studies at X University!” N. proudly responded.

“Wow,” the adviser said. “I had no idea you were married to Professor C.R.!”

Professor C.R. was at the party and she cast a terrorized look in my direction when N. shared his story.

“Your thesis adviser knew what he was talking about,” I answered. “Professor C.R. is a star.”

**************************

The main difference between an American party and a Russian-speaking party is that everybody is so nice, kind and welcoming that even an autistic and an ultra-intravert feel comfortable and happy. It is unbelievable but during the entire party nobody made a single snide comment or a critical remark about me, N., or anybody else.

Funny Stories About Alcohol

~ Clarissa ~ 44 Comments

I just discovered an interesting new drink called Southern Comfort. This is a very busy week for me, so this new drink is a timely find. It tastes a bit like cough syrup but not even close to how much the Argentinean Fernet tastes of it. This reminds me of three funny alcohol-related stories I wanted to share with you.

Story 1.

My friend from Argentina always wanted to introduce me to her favorite Argentinean beverage. “Just wait till I bring real Fernet for you from Argentina!” she kept saying. “Then you will realize what good alcohol tastes like.”

After her trip back to Lujan, she asked me to her house and presented me with a bottle of Fernet.

“Oh, I’m so envious right now!” she said. “The experience of tasting Fernet for the very first time in one’s life is priceless.”

She opened the bottle and poured me a drink. I tasted it and gagged. It was the nastiest beverage I could have ever imagined.

“I’m sorry,” I told my friend. “I think they sold you a fake Fernet. Did you go to a licensed store to get it?”

“Really?” she asked. “This never happened to me before. Let me try it.”

My friend tasted the Fernet and gave me a look of a person whose most tender sentiments had been horribly insulted. “This is how real Fernet tastes. And it’s delicious.”

Nine years have passed since then, and I have a feeling she has almost forgiven me for that horrible faux pas. Almost.

Story 2.

In grad school, we were the hardest partying department in all of the Humanities. Our parties were legendary. Once, I arrived at one of our parties and discovered my male colleagues in a state of happy commotion. “We’ve been really lucky!” they announced. “We found some real aguardiente for our party. Aguardiente is so strong that very few people can drink it without dropping unconscious!”

As I observed my colleagues take small shots of this beverage, I realized it must have truly been a strong drink. After just one shot, each of my male colleagues would drop onto the floor and yell, “Oh my God! This is the strongest drink ever!” Within five minutes, they were acting extremely drunk. So, obviously, I also decided that I needed to try the aguardiente.

“Just take very small sips and breathe in before you do that,” warned me my colleagues who knew that I can’t drink undiluted hard liquor.

So I took a small sip of the aguardiente and felt nothing. Then I took a bigger sip and felt even less. I downed the entire shot glass of the beverage. It had a faint alcoholic taste but nothing more.

My colleagues were dumbfounded. They looked at me in horror.

“Wow,” one of them said. “These Russians really can drink. I’ve seen Latino peasants fall under the table after drinking this, and you seem completely sober.”

“Hey, everybody!” another colleague called out. “Come here! Clarissa will show you something amazing.”

Everybody gathered around me. I downed another shot and again felt very little.

“OK, give us back the bottle,” one of my colleagues said. “This aguardiente is wasted on you, Russians.”

After the bottle was finished, a quiet sober colleague picked it up and looked carefully at the label.

“Hey guys,” he said. “It says here that this isn’t real aguardiente. This is an aguardiente-based drink and its alcohol content is 5,5%.”

I’d never seen my macho colleagues look this embarrassed.

Story 3.

This story happened to my father when he was working on his dissertation. His thesis adviser lived in Russia, so my father had to travel to meet him. Once, when my father arrived at his adviser’s university, this kind old scholar took him to the university cafeteria for breakfast.

“So Michael,” the professor said. “How much should I order for you, 150 grams? Or let’s go all out and get 200 grams?”

My father was petrified. “I’m sorry, professor,” he said. “I don’t want to be bad company but I don’t drink alcohol for breakfast.”

“Good for you,” the professor responded. “I was just wondering how much sour-cream you wanted for your pancakes, but never mind.”

And which alcoholic beverages do you enjoy?

A Weird Job Search

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

This is a longish story and it didn’t happen to me, but it’s so hilarious that I simply had to share it with my readers. I got the story from here and I received permission from the blog’s owner to repost the story. Just keep reading, for it gets better with every line. So here comes the weirdest, funniest story of a job search I have ever heard:

The phone interview with these guys was very strange. They weren’t interested in talking about anything I had actually done in my career, nor anything I was currently doing. The position was for a systems engineering role, but 100% of the questions they asked me were DBA (data base administration) questions. For instance, they kept asking me to design complex SQL queries. Detailed questions about normalization techniques, etc. I asked if the interview was for a Linux systems role or a DBA role. They said systems, of course, but kept on with the DBA questions. Later, I told the recruiter that I thought they gave me the wrong interview. They told her that they only asked me exactly one database-related question, and that the rest were systems questions. Curious, eh?

Curiouser still… they said they loved me and wanted me in for a face-to-face.

At first I resisted, saying I wasn’t interested, but the recruiter ultimately convinced me to give them a second chance.

So, this past week I went in to see them.

Upon my arrival, they shuffled me into a room with two people waiting. The first person to talk introduced herself as “a database administrator.” I thought it was going to be a repeat of the phone interview.

But she then started asking me some programming questions — python libraries and what not, finally getting to “tell me a really cool one-line hack that you’ve done.”

I responded that my programming style is most influenced by my early work in Ada and embedded systems, which means that I write code in an extremely deliberate (and hence readable) fashion, so I really don’t do one-liner hacks. That got her angry. I mean angry.

Then she started in with the DBA questions. I guess as punishment.

Finally, the other guy in the room spoke up asking me, “so tell me everything you did at your job yesterday.” I said “my day started out with a call to our partners in India, where I am organizing a data center migration. Then, I had another call with some Ugandans, where I am working to set up point-to-point microwave connectivity between two schools and training the local IT staff on virtualization.”

The guy interrupted me after my second sentence with “OK… we’ve heard enough.” With that, both of them got up and walked out of the room.

Weird, I though.

But it got weirder.

Two new people entered the room. These guys started telling me why their company was so wonderful, and why I would be a fool to want to work anywhere else.

I learned that this company was without question, the most wonderful place on Earth. The best place to work in our city. The smartest people in the industry. Best at everything. And, they are all super-best-friends. So much so that a lot of them share apartments together. This sharing, this social awesomeness, is evident in their “face-wall”, they told me.

“What is a ‘face-wall’?” I ask.

That’s when they let me out of the room and showed me.

This “face-wall” is a wall in the office filled with a grid of mug shots of all the employees along with their name and start date.

So imagine your face, with your name printed right below it, with a calendar date below that. It looked like one of those memorial walls you see at the site of some massacre like 9-11 or the Holocaust. Wicked creepy.

What’s worse was that all of the photos were relatively nice, well-behaved shots. No one was doing anything off colour for the camera. No costumes, no loopy expressions. Nothing. Rien. Nada.

I turned to one of the guys and said “so has anyone defaced this?”

“NO!… why would they” he said.

“‘Cause it’d be funny” I responded. “Come on… are you seriously telling me you have never… even once… had the urge to vandalize anything on this wall? Not even adding a little ‘make-up’ here and there?”

“ABSOLUTELY NOT! I wouldn’t even THINK of that.”

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“Wow!… Really? Not even a virtual kidnapping spree? Ransom notes?”

“A lot of these people are our friends… why would we do that?” … the guy was clearly getting a little offended, so I dialed it back and said how awesome I thought the wall was.

Then they gave me the tour.

Get this. The company didn’t have any desks. That’s right. No desks.

There were basically four or five very large rooms filled with long picnic tables on wheels. Each room had maybe 50 people in it.
I asked why no desks, to which they responded that they want to encourage people to socialize and get to know each other, so when you come to work, you just find a spot on one of the tables, fire up your laptop, and that’s where you work. That’s why they also have the scary “face-wall”, they said.

Now, when I was taking this tour, it was already 6pm, and the office was packed full of people. So my last question was ” as is the case with many start-ups, I imagine you guys work a lot, so how do you manage a work-life balance here?”

“We do an awesome job with that here” one guy said.

“Give me some examples” I asked.

“Well, just this week, my whole department went out after work together to play billiards. Most groups like going out to lunch and dinner together at least one or two times a week.”

I responded with “well, the ‘life’ part of my ‘work-life’ balance usually doesn’t involve work people. I really like hanging out with my family.”
To which I got a “well, everyone here is cool, you’ll make a lot of friends here.”

“I rarely see my own friends because I still like my family better” I said. To which I got some blank stares.

And there we have it…

The recruiter called me after and asked how it went. I said “they were nice enough, but frankly, I already have a religion that works just fine for me. I don’t need a new one.”

I’m American

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

Which is why I:

Believe that the US politics is the most fascinating politics in the world.

Feel a rush of emotions whenever I read the Constitution of the United States.

Reread the Constitution of the United States often.

Love being a consumer. (If you want to be critical of that, please make sure you know what it feels like to be born in the Soviet Union. If you can’t manage that, then please, forever hold your peace.)

Adore ordering stuff online and watch infomercials for fun. (If you don’t know what an infomercial is, you are definitely not American.)

Have very emotional relationships with different US cities and regions.

Love it that people never call me after 10 pm and never come to visit my house unannounced.

Adore the higher education system in the US, which, in my opinion, is the best in the world.

Agree that the US is “still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy.”  And believe that it’s  a great thing.

Love it how easy it is to shut up any opposition by saying, “But in my culture. . .”

Enjoy everybody’s curiosity about the customs and traditions of my culture.

Love it how whenever I mention I’m from Ukraine, the response is, “Oh, that’s great. Maybe you will tell me what I’m doing wrong with my borscht.”

Totally dig the American Dream.

Love it how money has nothing to do with one’s social status (just like in my country!).

Am totally in thrall to the fact that the freedom of speech is respected here like nowhere else on this planet. (I’m a blogger, so what do you expect?)

Adore the fact that a random Ukrainian immigrant can start a blog and crowds of people will listen, read, and comment. And nobody has told me they hate me for being an immigrant. (Totally unlike in my country.)

Love it that my university’s officials will jump through hoops to make sure I never felt oppressed, discriminated against, or downtrodden because of my immigrant (or any other kind) status.

Enjoy the fact that I can find Indian, Russian, and Peruvian food within 100 miles of any place I inhabit in this country.

I am absolutely convinced that this is the best country ever to live in for me.

I’m Not American

~ Clarissa ~ 61 Comments

Which is why I:

Don’t believe that every life choice is equally valid and, therefore, feel no compunction for criticizing those life choices that I find to be stupid or ridiculous.

Don’t believe that counting everything (calories, sex partners, vitamins and minerals) improves the quality of one’s life.

Feel vicarious shame whenever I see anybody unfurl a national flag, sing an anthem, or recite the Pledge of Allegiance to any country. When people place their hands on their hearts while participating in these activities, I get more embarrassed than if they engaged in group sex right in front of me.

Don’t think that alcoholism is a disease.

Don’t think that weight and income are dirty topics that need to be covered with embarrassed silence.

Believe that unless you have a body like Beyonce’s, jeans invariably make you look horrible.

Believe that cereal is not food. Unless you want to feed it to some birds that you really hate.

Love arguing about politics or religion with people I just met.

Don’t think that being on 3 prescription medications by the age of 40 is normal.

Don’t consider “Are you OK?” an appropriate response when I see a colleague crying in the bathroom.

Don’t consider that pretending not to notice anything is an appropriate response when I see a stranger crying in the bathroom.

Don’t see the “paper or plastic” issue as a field of an important ideological battle.

Don’t consider American football and baseball to be sports.

Feel very embarrassed when people begin to argue seriously that cheer-leading is a sport.

Believe that being supportive as a friend doesn’t mean repeating mechanically, “Good for you! I know you can do it! Everything will be fine!” but, rather, letting my friends know what I really think about their situation.

Believe that it’s better to ask for a loan from a relative or a friend than from a bank.

Hate Hollywood movies.

Consider people who use the gym to be eccentric.

Consider people who drive to the gym to be very eccentric.

Eat hamburgers and pizza with a knife and a fork.

Get cranky if I have to spend an entire day without eating any fresh fruit or vegetables.

Believe that beverages served at Starbucks don’t deserved to be called “coffee.”

Don’t understand the point of going to coffee-shops that don’t have an outside terrace.

Don’t eat while walking, running, or standing.

Feel scared when I hear the word “deep-fried.”

Am terrified by the words “networking,” “support groups,” “grief counselling,” “life coach,” and “brainstorming.”

Realized that I needed to add a tag to this post to explain its intentions.

Greek

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

A student comes up to me and says, “I’m sorry, I’m Greek, which means I need you to fill out a form saying how many absences I’ve had.”

“Oh my God,” I think. “This is horrible. I had no idea that Greek students were discriminated against on our campus!”

“Are you sure about this?” I ask the student, preparing to unleash my fury on the haters of Greece at our university.

“Yes,” he says and hands me a paper that bears the name of his fraternity.