For months, I have been trying to drag myself to the grief support group but it just never happened. Today I  will get myself there if I have to crawl. I know it will be good for me, ultimately. But I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna.

The words “grief management” sound very cold and intellectualizing. But I find them very apt. If this state isn’t managed and even scheduled (at least, in my case), the road to darkness opens ahead of one.

I really wish I were (still) a drinking person. But this was one of the joys the analyst stole from me.

A student comes to my office.

“I think I will drop this class,” he says. “There is too much other stuff going on, so I think I should just drop.”

“Do you realize that you missed the deadline to withdraw without being charged for the course?” I ask.

“Oh, I don’t care,” the student waves his hand dismissively. “The state of Illinois pays for all that.”

The student is maybe a little younger than I am but not by a lot.

Who do you think he votes for?

I have a very very long and difficult day ahead of me, people, so I will be posting all day long because it distracts me. Those who don’t like this – all 2 of you – will have to accept my apologies.

Here is a joke I just heard.

The US President asks God, “God, when will things finally get better in the US?”

“In 7 years,” God said.

“Oh, that sucks because I won’t be in office then,” the US President said. So he started crying and walked away.

Russian President asks God, “God, when will things finally get better in Russia?”

“In 50 years,” God said.

“Oh, that sucks because I will be dead by that time,” the Russian President said. So he started crying and walked away.

The Ukrainian President asks God, “God, when will things finally get better in Ukraine?”

God heard the question, started crying and walked away.

Everybody is shocked by the pictures of shared toilets for the Olympics in Sochi that are making the rounds. Putin’s government has reacted to the international outrage by issuing really funny disclaimers.

However, these toilets are well in keeping with an old Soviet tradition of not using separate stalls in toilets. This is a toilet in one of the Russian cities that is also used by athletes at the local gym:

 

And this is from an opera theater in Vladivostok:

 

People should be grateful that there are actual commodes and not just a hole in the ground, which is what we were using at my high school (and all other schools).

Take a look at this fascinating graph I found here:

The article I got it from is stupid but the graph itself is very interesting. There is a perception of downward social mobility by the richer people and a perception of upward mobility among poorer people. Note that the stagnant progression of the lines changed quite dramatically in 2010-11. Of course, this reflects people’s perceptions which, as we all know, do not equal reality. But it is definitely curious that people perceive their class standing in this way.

The linked article concentrates solely on the perception of downward mobility among the richer Americans and does it with a certain degree of hysteria. This, of course, tells us all we need to know about the class to which the article’s author belongs. The perception of a steep upward mobility of the poorer Americans  is of no interest to him. Since I identify with the lowest classes (for obvious reasons) and my personal experience fits in perfectly with the graph, I find this information fascinating.

What say you, readers? What makes people of lower classes believe their class mobility has experienced a sharp rise in 2010-11?

Reader el asked me to comment on the following:

“But I can’t, and don’t, buy that it’s a coincidence that every time similar content is approached in two different ways for Americans and for international audiences, the people designing it for US consumption choose to dumb everything down, rob sex of its sexuality, and turn violence into a cheap visual gag reel”

This made me remember the outstanding British show Cracker with the amazing Robbie Coltrane. Does anybody else  remember it? Its American remake was bizarrely bad and just boring.

The main problem with the remake was that, instead of the talented actors who looked like normal people, the American show had plastic cyborgs whose only skill was to look pretty. American TV shows usually compensate for bad acting and cyborg-like actors with phenomenal plotting. Cracker, however, revolved around the personality of the protagonists. Once you substitute them with pretty mannequins, nothing is left of the show.

Wherever I watch movies or TV from countries other than the US, I’m shocked by how normal and human the actors look. As for the quote at the beginning of this post, there are dumb sitcoms in the US but the really popular drama TV shows are in no way dumb. The dumb people are those who want TV to be all about sex and violence and don’t notice how beautifully the US shows are written, directed and shot.

If only somebody could bring together Spanish, British, Danish or Russian actors with American writers, that would be an absolutely amazing TV show.

Now the American TV is going through its golden age. I believe it started with the best TV show of all times and epochs, Twin Peaks. Do I have readers old enough to remember it? That show was a freakin’ work of art. I’m hearing True Detective is going in that direction. Has anybody seen it yet?

Somebody placed the following item between the news about the dead woman Texas tried to keep on life support and Huckabee’s ridiculous comments about women’s out-of-control libidos:

 Kansas judge rules sperm donor is liable for child support payments even though he and the two moms signed a document ahead of time renouncing his involvement in any child.

How these news items are connected is a mystery. Of course, people cannot sign away the essential rights of other people. The judge was absolutely right to make these rulings.

Here is what a less tendentious article about this case says:

A filing Wednesday by the DCF argues the sperm donor contract overlooks “the well-established law in this state that a person cannot contract away his or her obligations to support their child.”

The right for support belongs to the child, not the parents, the filing says.

Well, duh. Many people still think that the words “child support” refer to the money a man pays to a woman. They seem to be incapable of realizing that women are not legally considered to be children any longer. As for children, we all know that, in this country, they are only considered people with rights and needs of their own before they are born.

I avoided watching Mad Men for years because I routinely saw posts about the show on a variety of websites and gathered from them that the show was a glorification of boring and outdated sexism.

Then a reader whose opinion I trust more than those websites insistently recommended the show, so I watched it. And discovered that my readers are smart and those website are stupid.

I’m almost done with season 5 of the show and there are no more on Netflix, so if there are any other recommendations, I’m very interested.