A Penile Extension for Lloyd Blankfein

So the more I think about Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs and his sad bicycle ties, the sorrier I feel for him. Imagine how minuscule the poor creature's penis should be for him to spend his life trying to compensate in such excessive ways.

Since so much government money is going to him in order to help him deal with the psychological consequences of this grave physiological shortcoming, I suggest that we deal with the issue once and for all and pay for a good, solid penile extension for this individual.
Just imagine, people, we pay for this little operation once and then we can stop handing over our money to Blankfein once and for all. With a penis of a semi-decent size, he will not need all these endless cars, boats, helicopters, houses, and red ties with bicycles.He will finally stop compensating and leave us all alone.

Come on, my friends, we can do this. Let's petition the government to establish the "Lloyd Blankfein's tiny penis fund." Look how sad and pathetic he looks in this picture. Imagine all the people he destroyed with his insane greed. Wouldn't everybody feel so much better if Blankfein's penis got to be a reasonable size?

What's More Important: My Conference or a Crook's Tie?

So it turns out that the State of Illinois owes a huge sum of money to our university and refuses to give it back. In order to keep paying salaries to people, the university had to stop all other payments to its employees. We will not get reimbursed for the books and DVDs we bought for class or for our travel expenses.It seems that for our society giving the criminal CEO of Goldman Sachs a new boat is a lot more of a priority that offering my students a chance to have a worthy education.

I will be speaking at a conference on Saturday and I wanted to be reimbursed the $360 I spent on this trip. Now this will not be possible. Even though the university had promised me this money at the time of hire, now I will not be getting it.

I went on the Hermes website and found the famous bicycle tie worn by the vile Lloyd Blankfein. Here it is although in a more subdued color scheme. It costs $170. So if this ugly little twerp were to forgo just a couple of his ridiculous ties, this could pay for my conference. I will never understand why the state prefers to pay for his ties and not for my research and educational activities.

Maybe according to these people, my work in education is less godly than being able to rob people blind while dressed in a vulgar tie.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs and God

We have been hearing the name of Goldman Sachs a lot recently. This is a company that relies on huge bailout sums dished out by the government to support the incredibly lavish lifestyles of its top management. The very existence of Goldman Sachs is the most anti-capitalist thing I have seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Strangely, people often use the example of this blood-sucking, economically unviable monster to denounce capitalism. This happens because of many people's profound ignorance about the economic workings of the USSR. The Soviet economy was based on the existence of huge, monstrous corporations that couldn't keep themselves afloat and had to rely on governmental bailouts to stay solvent.

In this sense, Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, is the biggest commie out there because he implements the Soviet economic system very successfully and unapologetically. In his recent interview with the UK's Times Online, however, Blankfein demonstrated a complete ignorance of his worthy Soviet trend-setters that paved the way for his current exploitation of governmental resources. This crook's vision of himself is far more grandiose. According to Blankfein , he is "doing God’s work." Sadly, the journalist who interviewed him forgot to ask this disgusting little criminal which god it is that he worships. But I guess the answer to this question is self-evident.

According to Maureen Dowd's today's column in The New York Times, "Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, banks that took government bailout money after throwing the entire world into crisis, have said they will dish out $30 billion in bonuses — up 60 percent from last year." As an honest, hardworking taxpayer who hated the Soviet economy and believes in the values of capitalism, I am appalled at this. It angers me beyond belief that my taxes should go towards helping ugly, ridiculous losers like Blankfein pay for his idiotic "Hermès tie with little red bicycles on it." I mean, a tie with red bicycles? And this is somebody who gets our money? Have we all gone collectively insane that we hand over our resources so easily to this snakeoil salesman?

The sad shells of human beings who work at Goldman Sachs recognize that they are addicted to getting more money, a lot more money, and even more money. They recognize that they are “completely money-obsessed. ... There’s always room — need — for more. If you are not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you’re falling behind. It’s an addiction.” Giving government money to these losers is like giving rent money to a heroin addict. Everybody knows an addict will not actually spend the money on rent. He will go out and buy more drugs with it. It's the same with these Wall Street vultures. The second they get the bailout money, they immediately award themselves huge bonuses (for doing an incredibly poor job in their actual employment duties). And then they need another humongous bailout. And the rest of us have to work our asses off to provide enough resources so that a stupid jerk in a red bicycle tie can keep compensating for his tiny, almost unexistent dick with buying yet another huge boat.

Was the Collapse of the Soviet Union a Disappointment?

There is an article in today's El Pais about the disappointment that many people from the former Eastern bloc feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing process of transition to a new political and economic system. Many people in the former socialist countries (especially those who belong to the older generations) lament the breakdown of the Soviet Union and think it was a negative thing that had a horrible impact on their lives. Evidently, the Soviet Union was a terrible, monstrous system that committed a lot of crimes against its own population and against the people of many other countries. It is hardly possible (or I would even say absolutely impossible) to find one redeeming feature of this system. So why do so many people feel nostalgic about the Soviet Union?

In order to find an answer to this question, we have to remember that a very special system was formed in the Soviet Union which was based on amputating certain characteristics in every one who wanted to survive under it. A huge number of people spent their lives not doing any actual work. The remuneration that they got for presenting themselves at their workplace and doing absolutely nothing there was a mere pittance. It allowed you to cover your most basic necessities but in return you could avoid doing any real work for the duration of your lifetime. When the Soviet Union collapsed, this became impossible. Everybody had to learn to work, make a living, and fend for themselves. The generations that were used to the system where their basic necessities were covered and they sismply didn't have to work at all were understandably distraught over the new reality. For the first time in generations, people had to learn what it means to write a CV and a cover letter, what job interviews feel like, and what it means to work (and I mean to work, not to sit around gossiping with your colleagues) a full working day.

One of the sad legacies of the Soviet Union is that working for a regular salary is somehow shameful. Of course, it is acceptable to work for huge amounts of money, but everybody who makes an average salary is still considered to be somewhat a loser. The Soviet system did everything in its power to kill off the spirit of entreprise, personal achievement and personal responsibility. And it succeeded in this effort. This is why there are still so many people in the former Eastern bloc countries who feel nostalgic about the communist times.

Berlin Wall

This is a little Berlin Wall that our students made to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its fall.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Roberto Bolano's 2666: A Review, Part I

by the late Chilean-Mexican writer Roberto Bolano** is, without a doubt, this amazing author's masterpiece and a worthy culmination to his incredible literary career. 2666: A Novel consists of five parts, and the author hoped that they would be published as separate novels. His heirs, however, decided to publish it as one large novel, which I think was the right decision, even though it contradicted the writer's wishes. The novel is huge, so I am going to review each of its part separately.

I. The Part about the Critics

From the moment I started reading the opening part of 2666: A Novel, I literally started moaning with pleasure. Bolano's language is mesmerizing and I would even say scrumptious. This writer's skill in constructing simply delicious sentences is incredible. This part of the novel is definitely not to be gulped down in one seating. It should be savored during long winter nights, appreciated and tasted word by word as if it were a delicious and rare wine.

"The Part about the Critics" is especially near and dear to my heart because it presents a beautiful parody of academic life. The main characters are four literary critics who are obsessed with the work of the same writer. Bolano's knowledge of the little weirdnesses, obsessions and peculiarities that drive an academic's life is profound and he makes great use of this knowledge in order to poke gentle fun at us. In their search for an elusive author in whose work they all specialize, three of the four critics find themselves in Santa Teresa, a small Mexican bordertown.There, they are confronted with the unusual for them reality of Mexico and find out about the feminicide that is taking place in Mexican bordertowns.

** Unfortunately, this site's format doesn't allow me to use diacritics, so I have to write the Chilean writer's last name in this weird way. Believe me, it annoys me more than I can say.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn: A Review

A patriarchal system invests men with the duty to talk and think about serious issues, while women are expected to dedicate their lives to trivialities. We can still see this set of expectations at work on a daily basis. During parties, men talk about politics, philosophy, and the meaning of life, while women are huddled together on the other side of the room, swapping muffin recipes. In class, female students rarely dare to offer their opinions on big-picture questions. They leave such questions to men and dedicate themselves to answering questions  that are detail-oriented. I always know that when I ask "Is Hugo Chavez good for Venezuela?", I will get no female responses. But if I ask "When did Chavez come to power?", many female students will offer an answer. This doesn't happen because women are less capable of or less interested in analyzing serious issues. For the longest time, any woman who attempted to leave the realm of muffin-baking and affirm herself in the public sphere was castigated. This is why it is still difficult for women to believe that the sphere of great endeavors and important issues is just as much theirs as men's.

The saddest thing to observe is when this happens in the realm of creative activities. Often, incredibly talented women seem not to dare to enter the world of art and assert themselves there. They prefer to limit themselves to secondary genres and pretty much waste their creative gift on producing works of art that manage to entertain but are never taken seriously.

Gillian Flynn is a perfect example of such a female writer. From the first paragraphs of her novel , it is obvious that she is an extremely talented author. Flynn writes with incredible poignancy about life on a small Kansas farm nearing bankruptcy, about the tragedy of being a teenager in rural America, about the horrible burden of childhood trauma, about the damage caused by the purity movement. Her mastery of the English language is breathtaking. Dark Places: A Novel could be a great work of literature but for one thing.

As many other female writers, Flynn unfortunately shies away from creating art. She follows in the footsteps of such talented writers as Ruth Rendell and PD James and confines herself to the realm of mystery novel. She takes what could have been a great novel and adds some mystery genre devices that are boring, conventional, and that feel completely alien to the main body of  Dark Places: A Novel. She still doesn't manage to kill the novel completely. Everything but the last couple of chapters is truly fantastic. I would even recommend stopping reading the book 20-25 pages before it ends to avoid spoiling your experience of the novel.

Flynn is a great writer in the making. I truly hope that she will lose her fear of competing in the big leagues and will allow her creative gift to unfold without being fettered by these conventional limitations that plague so meny female writers.

Bride's Special Day

I just encountered the following description on the site of a wedding organizer:

Thank You for looking me up. Hopefully this site will answer some of your questions about what I offer, rates and what other people have thought about my work. I love this job ~ Helping a bride organize her most special day is what I do. I have also done many wedding ceremonies. So if you're not having a traditional church ceremony let me know.

Get it? Helping a BRIDE organize HER special day. Evidently, there are people who do not find this weird, perplexing, or offensive. I mean, why is the bride organizing this on her own? is she getting married to herself? Or is this supposed to be a woman's job somehow? And why is it HER special day? What kind of day is is supposed to be for the groom? Non-special? Routine? Why on earth would anybody want to participate in a marriage ceremony that is special to only one of the people?


Every day we are bombarded by TV shows, movies, websites, articles, etc. that tell us how women are desperate to get married and men are either reluctant or, at best, indifferent. So many women start believing this unhealthy hype and become convinced that it is their sacred obligation to hunt for a proposal, kill herself organizing an elaborate wedding, and tolerate a man who is not all that invested into this whole thing. My question is why don't more people find all this profoundly humiliating?

The Groom on Top

 Notice how the groom's information is placed above the bride's? I've searched many of these marriage application forms and for the most part they look like this, with the groom sitting consistently on top of the bride, or, in the best of cases, the bride's and the groom's information sitting next to each other. It would only be fair to have a couple of application forms where the bride would be on top, but somehow they are nowhere to be found.

 

So what good can any one expect from an institution that puts a woman in a secondary, subservient position from the very beginning? And don't even start me on the barbaric custom where women abdicate their own last names in order to signal that they are a man's property.

Same-Sex Marriage

I've been having such a good day and then I heard these incredibly sad news from Maine. A public referendum repealed the state law allowing same-sex marriages. It is so incredibly frustrating to see how many miserable, mean, and retrograde individuals there still are in the world.

I've tried long and hard to understand why anybody would want to prevent other people from enjoying the same rights that one has. How can any reasonable individual be opposed to a couple in love getting married? How can they live with themselves? How do they explain and justify the atrocity of living in the world where their fellow citizens are routinely discriminated against and persecuted? How do they deal with the shame of this situation?

Thankfully, I don't have any anti-gay bigots around me. This is understandable, since I can't imagine being friendly with this kind of hater. Since my world is so different, it always shocks me profoundly to discover how many people are still building their lives around hatred.

Asperger's, Part II: The Negative Side

Of course, all of the great things listed in Part I of this post come with some negatives attached to them. Once again, everybody manifests in different ways, and mine are different from many other people's. Since I love classifying information, I have worked out 2 different areas where my characteristics manifest themselves: communicative, neurological, and emotional. So here they are.

1. Communicative: This is actually the part that I worked on long and hard and now I mostly have it figured out to the degree where many people see me as "extremely sociable," "cheerful," "bubbly," and even "the life of the party." I can be all of these things, although after I make the effort to be this way, I have to rest for a long time and spend a lot of time alone.

• I'm good at planned communications. When I have a scheduled meeting, I can prepare for them psychologically, and then it's mostly fine.
• I'm very good at communications that are hierarchical. When I am with my students, are roles are strictly defined, and there is no confusion about whose turn it is to speak or things like that.

• Unscheduled contacts, however, are very difficult for me. When I try to leave my house and hear that my neighbors are also going out, I hide and wait until they leave. I find it hard to have to respond when people stop me abruptly and ask something, or even greet me. 

      2. Neurological: This is the most challenging part for me because there isn't much that I can do to control it.

• I have good days and bad days. On bad days, I find it very hard to speak in any of my 3 languages. Sentences come out all garbled, and the words are somehow all wrong. If I have to teach on that day, I always give the students a writing assignment or make them talk among themselves. On bad days, I'm even more accidents prone than normally. I have to make an effort not to walk into things, drop them, trip, or fall. My vision gets a little blurry and my hearing worsens.
• I have a huge problem judging distances. So driving is out of the question.
• I find it very hard to keep my balance even when I'm walking (especially on bad days). So biking is also out of the question. 

      3. Emotional: According to the common myth about us, we are unemotional and detached. This is so completely and utterly untrue. I have lots of emotions. They are just a little different and I express them differently.

• I have trouble calling people by their first name, even in e-mails. I haven't called my boyfriend by his first name even once in our entire relationship (thankfully, he doesn't mind). I can't explain why this happens, it just does. I didn't even know that this was characteristic of Asperger's until very recently. My parents have always bugged me about this to no end. And now it turns out that this is just one of my symptoms.
• It takes me a lot longer than other people to get attached to human beings (as opposed to objects) and it takes me a lot shorter to get unattached. This is especially difficult for a woman with Asperger's. Everybody expects women to be emotional and when you are not demonstrative with your feelings, people think that it somehow detracts from your femininity. I've been told so many times that I act "just like a man." Which, of course, is very annoying.

P.S. I am very grateful for the great response I got from my readers and other bloggers about this series of posts. I will be continuing them because I have a lot more to say on the subject.

Asperger's, Part I: The Positive Side

It's difficult for me to write about this because when I try to talk to people about the way I am, I only get the kind of reactions that really annoy me. But I feel that the time has come for me to "come out" because I have spent so much time making heroic efforts to conceal this from everybody and I'm sick and tired of doing this. So the reasons why I want to write about this are:

1. it helps me to talk about it because I'm tired of self-imposed silence;
2. it might help other people who share the same characteristics;
3. it might help educate people who aren't like me to understand what Asperger's means. 

Once again, I do not consider Asperger's to be a disease. This is just a way of being. It has its limitations but if somebody offered me a magic pill that would "cure" it, I would run away from the "cure." This way of being makes me who I am and in many ways I really like it. I honestly would not want to be without it.

So I'm going to list the bad things and the good things about it. And, of course, Asperger's manifests in many different way, so my reality might be very different from somebody else's.

The great things about having Asperger's are:

• I have a talent for amassing, retaining, categorizing, and reproducing huge chunks of information. If you ask me about a book or a painting or a philosopher, I have a colored three-dimensional picture of the history of world literature, art, history and philosophy in my head that allows me to place this work of art or author in her philosophical, social, and historical context immediately. As a result, I never have to prepare for my classes. I can reproduce information about any of my subjects on the spur of the moment.
• I have an unbreakable concentration on my subject of interest. I can sit in a loud bar, with music blaring and people screaming at each other, or an airport, or a boring meeting, and work on my research. When I concentrate, it's like I go into a bubble that protects me from any extraneous noise. I actually worked out the ideas and the basic structure of my doctoral dissertation at a noisy bar.
• I have an area of interest that I pursue single-mindedly and with an obsessive dedication. I've been extremely lucky in being able to turn this interest into a well-paying job. Now, all of a sudden, all of the weird and freaky ways in which I pursue this interest have suddenly become respectable and people even want to imitate them. (I say weird and freaky on purpose, because I prefer to have power over these words, rather than allow them to have power over me.)
• I can be alone for long stretches of time and enjoy it profoundly. Once I spent two entire weeks with no human contact, and it was blissful. So I am not dependent on whether any one wants to spend time with me. 
• I have a very logical, analytical way of thinking about things. I also have a very original and unusual way of seeing things that is also very helpful in my profession.
  

P.S. Let me reiterate that it isn't easy for me to talk about this and I would really appreciate people holding their hatred in check and not posting hateful comments.

Plagiarism

Altogether, I am the most tolerant teacher you will ever meet. I don't mind student absences or tardiness. I allow them to hand in assignments late, or sometimes very late. I give them a chance to redo the exams that they failed. I'm always nice, welcoming, and understanding.

There is one thing, however, that awakens the monster in me. And that is plagiarism. Yesterday, I discovered two separate groups of plagiarists in one single course. I don't know what they were thinking handing in 5 identical assignments in a Spanish course. They could not have possibly thought that I wouldn't notice. Or did they? The thing that annoys me the most in the whole world is when people take me for a fool.

So now I'm off to class and I will dedicate a large portion of it to a conversation about plagiarism.

P.S. The point of the entire post was to vent. Urrrghhh, I'm so angry.

Another Disappointment from Barbara Ehrenreich: A Review of "Bright-sided", Part II

I also believe that all of my health problems (not anybody else's, just mine) are psychosomatic in nature. I don't impose my beliefs on anybody and don't think anybody is stupid for taking care of their health in a different way. Ehrenreich's argument that one's state of mind doesn't influence one's health doesn't convince me not because I have been brainwashed by anybody (as Ehrenreich suggests), but simply because that is what my entire life experience has taught me. When I was finishing my dissertation and looking for a job, for example, I was constantly sick. I kept falling from one disease into another all the time. I had the weirdest, completely unexplainable symptoms. And then I found a job and all those health problems went away as if by magic. I don't really care whether there are enough studies proving the causation because nobody will be able to convince me that living in a state of constant terror of unemployment had nothing to do with my health issues.
Ehrenreich's argument that the current economic crisis was caused by the "gullibility and optimism of ordinary individuals" is at best uninsightful and at worst represents a nasty instance of victim-blaming. We heard political conservatives of every stripe that the inhabitants of Main Street behaved irresponsibly (how dare those losers want to have their own homes?) and caused the meltdown. We all know, however, that the real problem didn't lie with the middle-class or aspiring middle-class Americans. The bunch of Bush's cronies received a free pass on robbing us all blind and that's exactly what they did. It is also kind of disturbing that Ehrenreich would talk about the people duped by the Wall Street crooks as "ordinary." Evidently, you have to work for Goldman Sachs (and not as a janitor) for this author to consider you extraordinary.

The author's hatred of motivational speakers is so profound that she is even willing to present the most notorious Wall Street criminals as poor unwitting victims of the "positive thinking" movement. According to Ehrenreich, Joe Gregory, the former president of Lehman's Brothers, is not really guilty of his company's collapse. It's the bad, mean, positive-thinking ideology that makes people believe they can achieve anything they want that is to blame for his actions and the company's demise. It is very surprising to see a hard-core liberal like Ehrenreich giving an absolution to a bunch of greedy individuals like Gregory, but there it is.

It seems that Ehrenreich read too many self-help books in the process of doing research for Bright-sided and couldn't help but borrow some of their tricks. She decides to end her book with a piece of advice on how we should conduct our lives: "The alternative to both [positive thinking and depression] is to try to get outside of ourselves and see things 'as they are,' or as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies." At least, Ehrenreich has the good sense of putting "as they are" in quotation marks. This demonstrates that the author herself is a little ashamed of her childishly naive way of offering advice to people whose worldview might be a little bit more complicated than her reductive materialism.

To summarize: the book is boring, uninsightful, poorly constructed, unconvincing, and intellectually barren.

Another Disappointment from Barbara Ehrenreich: A Review of "Bright-sided", Part I

For some unfathomable reason, I keep hoping that Barbara Ehrenreich will finally produce an insightful analysis of something. This never happens, however, and the only thing I take away from her books is a sense of disappointment. Ehrenreich's latest subject seemed so promising that I bought her book . She takes on the perennial cheerfulness, perkiness, and optimism that characterizes (to use Terry Eagleton's beautiful phrase) "the genetically upbeat Americans."

Positive thinking, says Ehrenreich, is "beginning to be an obligation imposed on all American adults." Ehrenreich describes the constant efforts to promote positive thinking within companies that, according to her, are now seeping into the academic world. I don't know much about the corporate world and whether the cheery mood is obligatory there. I do know, however, that Ehrenreich is completely wrong when she says that cheerfulness and positive thinking are becoming popular in academia. Academics are the whiniest bunch of people you will ever meet. We love bitching, complaining, moaning, and sighing. Recently, I have been feeling simply ecstatic about my new job, but I can see that even the people who gave me the job in question are being repelled by my enthusiasm. Everybody expects me to complain and when I don't my fellow academics seem a little disoriented.

Ehrenreich believes that human beings are nothing more than tiny little objects at the mercy of blind forces beyond our comprehension. She is a fierce materialist who believes that our circumstances are the only thing that defines our lives. She is consequently very annoyed by any worldview that believes in the possible victory of spirit over matter. In her opinion, thinking that you can achieve anything you want if you work really hard at it and want it really badly is wrong because it obscures reality. Apparently, she cannot accept that everybody's version of reality is very different and that some people might be justified in shaping their own reality.


Ehrenreich's one-dimensional materialism seems boring and overly aggressive. She insists that your happiness depends on your income, an idea that is profoundly alien to me. I accept her right to be an atheist and a materialist. I don't think that any one deserves scorn and ridicule for possessing this worldview. It would be nice to see Ehrenreich respond in kind to people who are religious and/or seek other explanations than the purely materialistic type that she promotes. I, for one, do believe that human beings have a lot more agency in the world that Ehrenreich allows for (I mean, I have a lot more agency. If Ehrenreich doesn't want this agency, then she definitely shouldn't try to exercise it.) I believe that my financial problems (mine only, I am not extrapolating this on anybody else) are caused exclusively by my profound need for them.

Talks with My Students

I love my students. Whatever happens, they always know how to make me laugh. So here are some of the recent stories:

Story 1.

Student (describing a painting by Velasquez): So here we see some woman and she is breastfeeding this baby. And there are these three other men with gifts standing around them. I have no idea why he painted this.

Me: So who are the mother and the baby?

Student (indignantly): How should I know?

Me: Virgin Mary and Jesus.

Student (incredulously): You think??

Story 2.

Me: And this is yet another instance of the pernicious influence of the US in Latin America.

Student (in utter exasperation): Why, why do we, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, always have to mess with other people and cause them misery???

Me: You'are asking me?? Why do you, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, always have to do it?

Crazy

The obviously mentally unstable Elizabeth Hasselbeck is the reason why I stopped watching The View a long time ago. This recent interview with her published by US Magazine shows that she has not seeked any help for her mental issues since then:

"If something happened and I was pregnant again ... I don’t know how that would happen, because I'm clearly avoiding my husband," former NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck.
Not getting intimate is tough. "He's so cute," Hasselbeck, 32, said. "This is the problem ... he's very cute."
Asked if she's ever heard of birth control, Hasselbeck replied, "Yeah, I have. It takes a while to kick in once you start one. But in the meantime, I just find him incredibly attractive. So, it's not like I'm that disciplined, so right now, my strategy is dressing in a way that will not get me pregnant."
How does she dress so that she doesn't get pregnant? "Nothing too cute," she said. "I'm trying to wear nothing too revealing."
 
Whether she is being honest or is doing her cutesy-dumb-blonde thing in order to advance her career is unimportant.What matters is the frequency with which brainless-bimbo-type women (or the ones who pretend to be this way) are thrust upon us everywhere we turn by the media. Being a dumb, illiterate, giggly, winky, inarticulate fool can bring you fame and fortune very fast, as we all have seen in Sarah Palin's example. Given Palin's incredible rise to prominence, it is no wonder that Hasselbeck is going around flaunting her stupidity as well.

If You Have a Child with Asperger's

When I was a little girl, nobody knew the word Asperger's. My way of being was called "weird," "strange," "slow" and other equally nice things. Today, we are finally getting to understand that not everybody is neurotypical, that the variety of human difference is huge, and that, most importantly, it's ok.

Everybody on the spectrum is different. There is no single list of characteristics that would encompass all of us. Still, when I think about it, there is a whole range of things that people around me could have done when I was a child to make my existence easier. So if you have a child who might have Asperger's, these are the things you should consider:

1. First and foremost, it is not the end of the world, a tragedy, or a reason to feel miserable. It isn't a disease or "a public health crisis", as some ignoramuses claim. It's a way of being that is in no way worse or inferior to yours. I believe that in some ways it might actually be better. There is nothing in this condition to prevent your child from being happy. Of course, she will be happy on her own terms and within her own way of understanding happiness.
2. I understand the need that parents have to kiss and hug their child. Remember, however, that a child with Asperger's might feel a deep, visceral rejection for anybody's touch. This isn't personal, this isn't directed at you in any way. There are other ways to show affection. Why not show your child how much you love him by giving him the gift of life that is free from excessive touching?
3. If you find your child staring at the wall and rocking, don't panic and, most importantly, don't interrupt her. This is her coping mechanism and, once again, it is in no way worse or less acceptable than your coping mechanisms. You might cope through over-eating, chocolate, shopping, alcohol, medication, your child copes in this way. And it should just be accepted.
4. These children desperately need their own space that will be respected and that will feel safe at all times. If you can't afford to give your child a separate room, you can mark off a corner of a room with screens, you can give him a box or a drawer where he can keep his things in the order that makes sense to him.
5. When I was little, the scariest thing I could hear was "Go play with other kids." I remember the feeling of wordless desperation and deep terror at this command. My parents made desperate efforts to make me more sociable. I understand that they were worried about me but their attempts to make me what I simply cannot be were very hurtful. Asperger's doesn't mean that your child will not be able to have a social life. She will if she chooses to. But it will be on her terms and in a way that will make her comfortable.
6. When I was 6, my music teacher told my mother that I was "cold and heartless," which made my mother cry for days. It also made me believe that soemthing was profoundly wrong with me, when, in fact, something was wrong with this nasty teacher. In reality, our main difficulty lies not with having emotions but with expressing them in socially acceptable ways. Your child isn't cold or unemotional, he just doesn't express himself the way you do. And who is to say that your way is in any way better?
7. The word I heard a lot to describe me when I was a child was "slow." Please remember that Asperger's comes with a set of neurological peculiarities (poor balance and coordination, difficulties with judging distances, etc.) that may vary from one person to another. This in no way reflects upon your child's intellectual capacities. We often have very high IQs and some very special and valuable skills. The price we pay for that often entails having difficulties with things that come very easily to other people. When you think about it, what's more useful: being able to ride a bicycle and tie your shoelaces in less than 10 minutes, or knowing how to amass, absorb, classify, categorize and be able to reproduce instantly huge masses of complex information?
8. One of the central characteristics of our way of being is that we often develop an all-encompassing inetrest that we pursue single-mindedly and obssessively. When somebody interrupts our deep conceentration on this interest, it feels physically painful. Just let her do whatever it is that interests her. One day this obssessive interest might even turn itno a profession that will allow her to make a very good living (as happened in my case.)

Accepting somebody's right to be different from you, to experience the world and to define happiness in a completely different - and sometimes in exactly the opposite - way is the greatest manifestation of love there can possibly be.

Read more about this here and here.

P.S. I kindly request the haters to refrain from leaving comments. I never delete comments, except when they contain unsolicited advertisements. Here, however, I am willing to start deleting comments whose only goal is to promote hatred. Everybody else is welcome to leave comments about their experiences and suggestions.

Mothers and Weddings

When I was getting married (many many years ago), my mother took me shopping for a wedding dress. Since I had no interest in the dress, the wedding, or the marriage itself, it was entirely my mother's project and she was passionately invested in it. So while she was flying around the wedding-gown store, snatching dresses, throwing them down, criticizing gowns for not being good enough and me for not being interested enough, I had the following conversation with the store owner.

Store owner: Your mother-in-law is a very difficult person.
Me: Oh, it isn't my mother-in-law. It's my mother.
Store owner: Poor child! If this is how your mother treats you, I can't imagine what your mother-in-law should be like.

The point of this little anecdote is that often mothers have profoundly unhealthy attitudes to their daughters' weddings. This tendency is especially strong in cases of women who arrive at middle age with no life of their own. I often see my friends' mothers go completely nuts over their daughters' weddings. We live in a culture that repeats obssessively how a wedding is a most important day of a woman's life (which sounds prety scary. Does it mean that it's all downhill after that? That nothing of importance will ever happen to you again?). For the most part, women come out of weddings profoundly disappointed. The actuall wedding day turns into being all about the invitations, the menu, the center-piece, and the myriad little details that are boring, annoying , and have nothing to do with love and romance.

Women feel cheated out of this profound, crucial and life-changing experience that they were promised on a wedding day. So when their daughters get married, they see it as an opportunity to relive the experience and finally try to make it right. And, of course, it still doesn't work because they way weddings are traditionally envisioned, organized and experienced can only lead to disappontment and frustration.

Then again, there are always the granddaughters.

More Idiocy from Texas

It isn't like I'm looking for these things on purpose but I keep hearing extremely weird things about Texas every day.

I just discovered that there is a university there that offers ONLINE beginners courses in the Spanish language. These people actually think that language can be taught online. Has anybody heard anything so ridiculous? Where did they get inspired by this idea? Was it the President Bush's claim that he spoke Spanish? Well, people, he didn't. And neither will your miserable students whom you are cheating out of an education.

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