A Gambling Story

As I was putting on this beautiful cat's-eye necklace today, I remembered that I bought it with the fruits of my single gambling experience and decided to share my gambling story with my readers.

On one of my trips to the Dominican Republic, a resort where we stayed offered all guests a promotional visit to a casino and a five-dollar coupon for the casino tokens. Since it was free and I'd never been to a casino in my entire life, I decided to use this opportunity to check it out. When I entered the casino and saw all the flashy, loud machines, I realized that I had no idea how one went about gambling. I chose one of the slot machines, put in a token and pressed a handle. Suddenly, the machine started flashing and making weird noises. Hundreds of token started falling out of it. Immediately, casino workers and patrons gathered around me and started clapping. I realized that I'd somehow broken the machine and felt completely mortified.

"I'm so sorry, I really am," I said to the casino workers. "I have no idea why it broke down. I didn't do anything to it, I think."

"No, this is good," a casino employee replied, looking at me with the kind of pity only reserved for especially dumb tourists. "You won, you just hit the jackpot on this machine. You can now exchange these tokens for money."

In order to make myself as scarce as possible, I moved to a corner where a penny-stake slot machine was hidden and started playing. In a little while, I was approached by an extremely drunk Spanish man.

"Say a number," he said while trying not to fall down.

"Eleven," I responded.

The guy left but soon came back again.

"Say a number," he said.

"Nineteen," I answered.

In a few minutes, he returned even drunker than before and reiterated his request for a number.

"Why are you asking me to say a number?" I inquired.

"I'm betting on the roulette over there," the guy explained as he was swaying wildly. "I already lost 1,500 euros on your numbers but I still have a lot of money." He got out a thick wad of euros and waved it around. "Say a number."

"I don't want to say a number and get you to lose even more money," I replied. "Where are your friends? Maybe we should go find them, huh?"

"I'm here with my girlfriend. She's asleep so I snuck out. She'll kill me when she finds out how much money I lost. Say a number."

"Three," I said in desperation and left the casino.

On the next morning, I was lying on the beach reading a book when the Spanish guy approached me.

"Hey," he said. "That was fun last night. I lost 3,200 euros. Let's do it again tonight. I'm planning to start betting big and I need you to give me the numbers."

"Why?" I asked. "Why do you want my numbers if you keep losing on them?"

Three thousand euros always seemed like a huge sum to me and I felt very guilty to have helped the guy to lose it so easily.

"Oh, I don't care about winning or losing," the guy responded. "I just enjoy the process."

I haven't been back to a casino since then but I bought this beautiful necklace with the money I won.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Happy Birthday, My Love!

Funny Story About Russian Students

To brighten up everybody's day, I want to share a story about my days as a university student back in Ukraine. I will begin with this very old joke about Russian students that my non-Russian readers have probably never heard.

Researchers ask an American student, "How long will it take you to prepare for an Advanced Placement exam in Chinese if you never studied Chinese before?" 

"Well, about 3 years," the American student responds.

"How long will it take you to prepare for an Advanced Placement exam in Chinese if you never studied Chinese before?" they ask a European student.

"Probably about 18 months," the European student answers.

Then, the researchers approach a Russian student who is smoking in front of the university and ask him the same question.

"Do you have the textbook?" the student asks.

"Yes", the researchers say.

"OK, then," the Russian student responds, "let me finish this cigarette and I'll go pass your exam."

When I was a university student in Ukraine, I hardly ever showed up for any classes. It wasn't easy to survive in the Ukraine of the 90ies, and I worked day and night to provide for myself and my husband. In every course, the final oral exam constituted 100% of the final grade. Lectures consisted of professors reading chapters from the textbook out loud. There were never any discussions or anything that even remotely resembled discussions. So, obviously, I, who was a very highly paid translator, considered these classes to be an awful waste of time. Before the finals, I'd just get th textbook, read it, memorize stuff from it, and rattle it off at the exam. I was considered a stellar student, too.

There was this course in International Relations that I didn't attend once during the semester. This course used to be titled "The History of the Communist Party" and was still taught by the same KGB guy who had taught it during the Soviet Union. The exams had this weird structure where you could show up any time over the course of several hours, get a paper with questions from the professor, prepare your answer for 15-30 minutes (without consulting anything, of course), and then recite your answers to the professor.

It so happened that I arrived early for the exam in this International Relations course. The classroom was empty. There was just this professor sitting there. I had no way of knowing whether he was my professor and whether I was even in the right classroom because I hadn't attended a single class that semester. 

"Are you here for the exam?" the professor asked.

"Yes," I responded tentatively. I knew I was there for an exam, I just didn't know if I was there for his exam.

"So come in and get the paper with the questions," he said.

I got the paper with the questions, hoping that the nature of the questions would elucidate whether I was in the right room with the professor who was my professor and not, say, a professor of quantum physics. When I got the paper with the questions, however, things did not become any clearer. I had no idea what the questions even meant, let alone what discipline they could belong to. There was, for example, a question about the combined tonnage of some country's warships during the 20ies. I knew that the only way out was just to bullshit my way through the responses.

When I approached the prof's table, he really saved me by asking in a severe voice, "So are you interested in international relations?" 

"Oh, I love them!" I gushed feeling happy that I was at least in the right room. Then, I made an impassioned speech about how the young people of today were criminally indifferent to the world around them and had no political stance. Our grandparents, however, really changed the world with their passionate Communist beliefs, and so on, and so forth.

"OK," the professor said. "I'm guessing that you have no idea how to answer any of these questions, right?"

"Not a clue," I confessed brightly.

"Fine, you can go," he said. "I'm giving you a B."

So if you think that people in the KGB were all humorless and cruel jerks, think twice.

My Baby

I don't know why I suddenly started posting so many little stories about my life, but here you have it.

My younger sister was born when I was six. Our parents worked a lot, so I was entrusted with taking care of her. I would come from school, get her home from daycare, feed her, play with her, take her for walks, etc. We both loved that. Once, when I was about 12, I left her at home (which in our country is not a big deal at all, so let's have no drama about that) and went to the store to sell back empty bottles. In the Soviet Union, a school teacher and a philologist who worked full time had trouble making ends meet, so it was important to sell back all the bottles because every coin mattered.

The line at the store turned out to be much longer than I'd expected. After 40 minutes or so, I got tired of waiting and told people in line, "I think I'm not going to keep waiting because I have a kid at home and she must be getting hungry." People looked at me with mute horror. I was a very small and skinny 12-year-old with an angelic look. "Let the poor child go to the front of the line, comrades," a kind lady said. "She has a baby to feed." 

When I moved to Montreal at the age of 22, my sister came to live with me full-time. After a few years of living together with her, I would often say to my colleagues, "OK, guys, I have to run because I have a kid waiting for me at home and I need to feed her." 

"Oh, we didn't know you had a baby," people would respond. "How old is she?" 

"My baby is nineteen years old," I would say proudly and everybody would look at me like I was insane.

My baby had a baby 17 months ago, so I guess I'm a grandma now.

Over It

After I separated from my first husband, people kept asking me, "Why did you guys break up? Whose fault was it?" For years, I would respond with a long detailed story about how he was a horrible person who treated me badly, betrayed me and forced me to leave him because of how nasty he was.

Then once, when somebody asked me this question, I just said, "I think we were both to blame but probably I was a little more to blame." And I felt like adding no extra details because the story had become boring. That's when I knew that I was finally over it.

So today I was answering a personal email from a colleague who mentioned my second graduate program*. And I immediately went on a long and detailed rant about how vile the experience was for me and how much I suffered there. Which means that I'm still far from being over it. I just hope that one day I will be able to say calmly, "It was not a good place for me" and stop right after that.

* My first graduate program was absolutely 100% fantastic.

Ready to Be Done Now

This was probably the best semester I had as a professor. As I accumulate more experience, I get better at managing my time, choosing teaching strategies that will work for each specific course and avoiding activities that are likely to fail. I now know much better how to fulfill the inevitable service obligations and meet the bureaucratic requirements while preventing them from occupying too much of my time. I have discovered some invaluable resources that are helping to organize my research and turn it into a much more productive direction.

However, I'm really ready to be done with this semester at this point. I have two and a half weeks of teaching left. On May 5, I will be done with the final exams and hope to have all the grades submitted by May 9. On that day, I will celebrate both the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II and my own resounding victory over my second year on the tenure-track. Then, I will have almost 4 months of complete freedom. 

Over the summer, I am planning to put in practice all the strategies that I have learned from the Stupid Motivational Tricks blog. The greatest struggle of being a newly minted academic was not knowing what was the next step I needed to take and how all of my huge plans could be put into practice. Now, however, I feel that I have a road-map that will allow me to get exactly where I want. While I faced last summer with an apprehension that told me I might get lost in a multitude of things I wanted to do (which is exactly what happened), this time I'm very confident that I know how to proceed and have the best time ever. 

I can't wait for the summer to come.

Insecurities

Most people have at least one body part that causes them to feel insecure. I have such an insecurity too and I have always kept it secret. Two people in the entire world know about it. I would have shared it more often if only I didn't know that whenever I do share it, people tend to laugh and dismiss it.

My insecurity has to do with the shape of my head. (And no, it isn't funny.) It is a very weird shape, folks. Of course, I'm lucky in that I have quite a lot of hair, so I just cover it up. The only hair-style that manages to cover the weird head shape successfully is having my hair down, so I hardly ever wear it any other way. 

More often than not, people have a scale in their head against which they measure whether one's insecurities are considered reasonable. Everything that has to do with weight takes pride of place on the insecurity scale. It is considered absolutely normal and even necessary to be insecure about one's weight being too high, too low, too moderate, etc. Noses and ears also make for acceptable sources of insecurity. The eyes, cheeks and foreheads are, however, much less acceptable in this sense. (Have you ever heard anybody say they were insecure about their forehead?)

I'm actually seriously bothered by the weird shape of my head. Nobody takes my insecurity seriously, though.

Relationships and Commuting

I made the mistake of having a long nap today, so I will now bug my readers with a multitude of posts.

My relationship with the love of my life started as a long-distance one. I had to undertake long and painful Greyhound journeys from Canada to the US to be with him. He couldn't travel to see me at all because of visa restrictions. That entire year when I was making very long and painful trips to see him and then go back was the year when I was writing my doctoral dissertation. (I'll tell the whole story of our relationship one day because its is very educational. :-)

Once, when I submitted a portion of my doctoral dissertation to my adviser, she wrote the following in response:

"Clarissa, what happened on page 86 of your dissertation? Before that page, your writing was passionate, intelligent and exciting. In the middle of page 86, it suddenly became plodding, repetitive and boring. Why did this dramatic change happen?"

My adviser was (and is) a brilliant scholar who knew what she was talking about. Page 86 coincided with the moment when I left the guy I liked and traveled back home. 

As I'm preparing to become a commuting academic yet again, I remembered this story. This memory was brought to my mind by a post on the blog of Jonathan Mayhew who  somehow managed to maintain a beautiful commuting relationship with his wife (who is one of the most highly respected and feared academics in our field) and stay extremely productive.

What's So Great About Being Young?

My husband and I will be turning 35 within the next few weeks. So tonight at dinner we started discussing how we felt about it. In spite of the common belief that everybody should bemoan getting older and want to stay young forever, we agreed that neither of us would like to go back to the age of, say, twenty for anything in the world.

Fifteen years ago I was plagued by all kinds of insecurities (and who isn't at that age?). I felt unattractive and fat, even though I weighed less than I do now. I had no idea who I was or what I wanted out of life. I was in a marriage that wasn't making me happy for the simple reason that I had no idea what I needed to be happy in a relationship. I often spent time with people I neither liked nor needed because I did not have the skills that would allow me to be in charge of my social life. Asperger's wasn't a word I knew. I just felt that something was wrong and broken about me and it had to be concealed at all costs. I was stupid and anti-intellectual and proud to be so. I still remember my passionate diatribes as to how philosophy was a total waste of time and learning Latin completely useless because it wasn't going to help me make money. Sexually, most people are profoundly miserable at that age because they have no mechanisms that allow them to choose the partners they really want as opposed to the partners who are available.

So if there has been such a dramatic improvement in how I feel about myself and about my life over the past 15 years, then the next couple of decades are likely to bring about a similar improvement. This is why I believe that age should be celebrated rather than bemoaned.

The only people who are genuinely happier at 20 than at 35 are, in my opinion, children of millionaires. While at twenty it is very cool  to do nothing but spend the family money, when you are in your mid-thirties it becomes unprestigious and shameful. 

What Does It Mean to Ask for Help?

Learning to ask people for help when I needed it was one of the most difficult psychological hurdles I had to overcome. I used to pride myself on being a strong, all-powerful, self-sufficient individual who was ready to offer help to others but never needed any assistance from anybody. Once, when I was regaling my sister with a self-congratulatory rant on how I saw my self-sufficiency as my best and defining quality, she got fed up with it and told me the following:

"Look," she said, "what you have is not self-sufficiency but an extreme case of hubris. You like to see yourself as superior to others who always need your help but from whom you neither need nor accept anything. You have no idea how humiliating this attitude is to people who are close to you. In normal human relationships, everybody helps each other out when need arises. You, however, love showing people how little you need them while they, poor, helpless fools, are nothing without you. Could you just stop doing this already because you are getting annoying?"

It took me a while to realize that she was completely right. Never asking for help not only allowed me to feel superior to everybody, it also gave me the perfect opportunity to indulge my drama queen streak. (There was a period in my life where I proudly used to say that I practice depression as a form of art. One day, I will write a post on depression, as well.) By not requesting timely assistance I would routinely get myself into even bigger trouble and could then engage in happy contemplation of my profound misery.

To give an example, in the summer of 2008 I was in a really bad financial shape. My Canadian and my American banks ate up my paltry savings through a series of mistakes that they recognized but refused to rectify. I was going to start working at a great, well-paying job in August, so I knew money was coming. I still, however, needed to get through June and July. At that point, I was staying with my boyfriend (who is now my husband) in Indiana. A moment came when I was left with no money whatsoever. Things were so bad that I couldn't even buy a soda during the sweltering Midwestern summer. If you don't know what it means to have exactly one dollar and fifty-seven cents to your name in the entire world, let me tell you that the feeling is not enjoyable.

To say that I worried about money is to say nothing. I was eating my heart out because of how broke I was. I couldn't sleep, I had panic attacks, I was constantly sick. At no point of that drama, however, did it occur to me to inform anybody of what was happening. I have no shortage of wonderful people in my life who would have been happy to assist me. All I needed to tide me over was a couple hundred bucks, and there were many people who would have happily loaned me the money. But solving my problem so easily would have been no fun at all. It was much more pleasant to subject everybody to my endless suffering whose causes they were not allowed to know. 

The boyfriend kept asking me why I was so miserable but I proudly refused to answer. When I finally revealed the causes of the drama, he just said "Oy", and headed to an ATM.

"No!" I proclaimed with an attitude of a bad tragic actress from low-budget movies. "Who do you think I am? Do you think I am a person who accepts money from men? I am not that kind of a person!"

"No," he said. "You are the kind of a person who will accept this small loan and pay it back when you start getting paid at your new job." 

That was my first step towards realizing that sometimes you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself and accept a helping hand.

Today, I discovered that I had unwittingly messed up and was facing some not very serious but annoying complications. My inner drama queen was about to plunge headlong into the depths of depression. Pleasing thoughts about how life has no meaning and the world is an inhospitable, nasty place started coursing through my mind. The warm, comfortable feeling of being a misunderstood, lonely genius whom the universe couldn't appreciate because of its vast limitations enveloped me. Still, I resisted, picked up the phone and dialed the number of somebody who is always there for me.

"Hey," I said. "So I messed up here. Could you help me out?"

Meet the Parents!

Readers seem to have reacted with great enthusiasm to the pictures of their favorite blogger that I posted recently. So now I will post the picture of my parents that they took last week when they celebrated the 36th anniversary of the day they applied for their marriage license. (In the Soviet Union you had to wait for several months after applying before you could get married.) I hope we all feel like celebrating the day we got our marriage licenses / met our partners/ moved in together 36 years later. And I promise that there will be no more personal pictures for a while in the future, so no need to worry. At least I don't have any kittens whose photos I could inflict on my readers. I just miss my parents a lot right now.

Morning People

I need a lot of time in the morning to make myself ready for sociability of any kind. On the days when I teach, I get up at six in the morning because I need at least three hours before I'm ready to communicate with students or anybody else. This doesn't depend on when I wake up. I just need a lot of time to go into the fully awake mode. Unless I'm allowed to spend my three + hours in the morning in a happy self-absorption and silence, I will find it very difficult to walk into the classroom at 9:30 am in a fully functional mode.

As much as I try to explain this to people, though, they never seem to understand. Family members, friends, colleagues, students, people on the bus and in the coffee-shop persecute me with their morning chirpiness. For some reason, everybody seems to be eager and willing to engage in loud animated discussions with me in the morning. 

For me, the hours between midnight and 3 am are the time when I'm alert, active, sociable, and willing to communicate. I understand, though, that most people do not feel like socializing at that time. I respect this and abstain from calling them on the phone to share my midnight talkativeness with them.

While we, the night people, are always considerate with the morning folks, they never return the courtesy.

In case I didn't mention it before. . .

. . . I'm going to New York next Friday. The purpose of the trip is to celebrate my sister's birthday with her and our mutual friend who is doing a PhD in Germanic Studies in Indiana. New York City is a sort of a midpoint geographically for the three of us so we are meeting there.

I have no particular affinity with New York, to be honest. I don't have anything against it but it lacks a definitive personality, in my opinion. Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco make me a lot happier. (None of them can compete with Montreal or Toronto, of course, but that's a different subject.) My sister loves it, however, so we are going.

Here is what's on the program for this trip:

1. A shopping extravaganza. And before you condemn me, come live in my little village and then we'll talk.

2. A visit to MOMA and a dinner at MOMA's restaurant The Modern. People say it's something special but I'll tell you what I think after my visit.

3. As good luck may have it, a fellow blogger Jonathan will be giving a scholarly presentation in NYC while I'll be there. So I'll even do something intellectual during the trip.

4. Three days of walking around Manhattan. I love to walk but there is no place to walk to where I live and nothing to see on the way. Walking in Manhattan will be a different thing altogether.

Of course, I will blog about everything that happens during the trip and post pictures.

Samson Wins a Battle with a Hairdresser

I always cause an international scandal whenever I post pictures of my hair but I can't avoid showing the final results of my most recent battle with a hairdresser after I have persecuted my readers with the story of my hair-related suffering.

My color isn't quite this light.
This is just the flash from the camera

Nobody ever believes it, but both
the hair color and the
curl are completely natural

I like this picture the most because
even though you can't see the hair very well,
I at least look intelligent here, which
almost never happens

Dragging It Out

Many people make themselves intensely miserable because they don't know how to break up once and for all. It so happens that I'm witnessing several such stories around me at this moment. Instead of ending a profoundly unhappy relationship once and for all, people keep going in endless circles, arguing, fighting, crying, and making both themselves and their former partners completely miserable. 

Then, there are also those who are into "remaining friends" with their former partners and spouses. It's possible that there are cases when such "friendships" are healthy and don't serve the purpose of manipulating the next romantic partner into permanent submission, but I'm yet to see them. More often than not, such relationships are not about friendship at all. They are about people trying to make themselves feel more important at the expense of new partners.

I always warned everybody I ever dated that if the relationship were to end, it would end completely. After we are done, we don't get in touch any more in any way, form, or manner. And I also reserve the right to forget the names and faces of each and all former partners. As a result, today I don't have to drag around the useless baggage of failed relationships and marriages. 

On Love and Peaches

Everybody knows that people who are in love are intolerable. They persecute everybody with cutesy stories about the relationship that they believe to be the greatest romance of all times and that people around them consider to be a mundane and boring story. "So why do you like him?" my sister asked me once. She truly repented of asking the question when forty minutes later I was still answering it in painstaking detail. 

My readers have to recognize, though, that in the 23 months I've been blogging I have never indulged my desire to tell them about the most beautiful romance ever, which is, of course, the one I'm living right now. Today, however, I want to loosen my restraint a little and regale you with the most recent touching story of this great romance in celebration of the International Women's Day. Feel free to skip.

Yesterday, the male protagonist of the great romance was passing his SAS certification exam while the female protagonist was working on her next article. After passing the test with flying colors, what do you think the male protagonist did to celebrate? Went out drinking with his buddies? Bought himself a gift? Plopped himself on the couch in front of the television? (All these, of course, would be great ways to celebrate that I would support wholeheartedly.) No, he remembered that the day before the female protagonist, who is also a passionate lover of peaches, couldn't find any at the local supermarket. So he went on a hunt for peaches, found them, and brought them home to the peach-loving female protagonist.

Peaches are not only my favorite food ever. They also carry a host of literary allusions. (You want to live with a literary critic, get used to the fact that everything carries a literary allusion). Giving peaches to a person symbolizes sacrifice in the name of love, the kind of sacrifice that doesn't perceive itself as such and that exists for its own sake. Here is a link to a short story on love and peaches from O Henry, one of our favorite authors ever, that inspired this symbolism of peaches for us.

And now I solemnly promise not to share any more romantic stories for a while.

A Trivial Post About the Weather

Four days ago it was -20C. And today it's +19C. I came to work in a short-sleeved blouse, and I'm really hot. Especially since the heating in my office is still on full blast. I have a meeting about my merit review in 5 minutes, and I don't want it to look like I'm sweating because I have things to conceal. Especially since as an autistic I don't know how to conceal anything.

A high BP sufferer like me finds it hard to deal with such radical changes in weather.

Wow, I think I finally managed to write at least one non-controversial post.

Happy St. Valentine's!

This is what I'm giving my husband for Valentine's Day. He's giving me a trip to an Indian restaurant. I'm addicted to Indian food, but the only Indian restaurant we have in our town is really horrible. All their food is of this nasty grayish tint, which is the opposite of what Indian food should be like. It also tastes like paper. Rimi has a wonderful blog with really good recipes of Indian food. To my shame, I haven't been able to reproduce these recipes. Everything I make just turns bland for some unfathomable reason. But at least today we will drive all  the way to a real Indian restaurant. 

Valentine's Day need not be an occasion for the coupled people only. There is absolutely no need to relinquish this holiday only to them. If this is a day when love is celebrated, then there is absolutely nothing wrong with celebrating your love for yourself, your friends, your pet, your Kindle, or anything and anybody that makes you happy. One of the best Valentine's in my life was when a group of female friends and I suddenly all found ourselves single on this day and decided to celebrate. We went to a really nice place together, got a red rose each, and swapped funny stories about guys and dating.

Happy Valentine's Day, and don't forget to celebrate with the person you love the most - yourself.

A Dating Story

I went on a date once with a guy from my university's medical school. He looked completely normal, and I was having fun until we got to the restaurant and he launched into an endless diatribe about "those nasty Jews who have overtaken Hollywood and mass media to spread their propaganda and their values of greed and capitalist competition."

"Well, you know what they are like," my date concluded his impassioned speech.

"Oh yes, I do," I said. "I know exactly what they are like given that I see one of them every time I look in the mirror. By the way, I always pay for my own meal, but you made me remember that I'm a greedy Jew. So now I will go back to my friends to discuss our Jewish conspiracy to overtake the world, and you can pay the bill."

And then I left while he sat there in astonishment. I'm sure that now he is telling people that Jews are so sneaky that we often look in ways that makes it impossible to recognize us.

Bye-bye, My Syllabi!

So the classes were cancelled. Again. Since the beginning of the semester, I have only taught one class per week because of all these cancellations. I have no idea why the classes were cancelled today, since there isn't even any snow on the ground, and it's quite warm. Now I'm walking around the house, singing, "Bye-bye, my syllabi." It's very difficult to teach when you have to keep cutting things out of the syllabus.Continuity is key in my literature survey course. I am yet to rise to the level of Fray Luis de Leon, who after a five-year-long imprisonment at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition walked into the classroom and continued his lecture that had been interrupted years ago by his incarceration with the words, "As we were saying yesterday. . ."

Oh well. At least now I will be able to write at least four more pages of my article.