My 5 – year – old niece Klubnikis stares at me with her deep, huge eyes and asks in a solemn voice,  “Clarissa, will you be willing to try some of the food that Canadians eat? It’s good!”

“Are you Canadian?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says very seriously.

“Am I Canadian?” I ask.

Klubnikis takes a moment to examine me.

“You are Ukrainian!” she announces with conviction.

Some of my father’s readers (who are Russian ethnically and in terms of their citizenship) wrote to him to say that they were burning his books because he trashed the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and because he was a beast from hell.

It is always incredibly cute when book – burning Russians lecture Jews on how to honor the victims of the Holocaust. It is especially curious that the book – burning frenzy erupted among the Russians after my father shared a couple of mildly pro-Ukrainian articles.

The shaman was right to begin with: I spent all night stranded at airports and then Air Canada lost my suitcase. And now I’m stranded in Montreal, in the midst of an icy snowstorm without clothes, makeup, ornaments, or hairbrush.

Should have paid attention to the shaman.

People come up with all kinds of bizarre shit for their New Year’s resolutions. See this one, for instance:

So this year instead of having goals for my physical health, I’m going to make goals for my mental health. . .

1. Take my medication every day, no excuses

I take what sometimes seems like a lot of meds – prescription iron pills for my buzz-kill anemia, Zoloft for anxiety, a tiny dose of Seroquel as an adjunct mood booster and Imovane, the tiny blue angel that floats me off to dream country every night.

Consumer society at its best, seriously. Mental health equals popping pills. It would be great, of course, if one didn’t have to make the inhuman effort of putting them into one’s mouth. But that’s where the New Year’s resolutions come in. The great personal victory of the diligent consumer is to muster the strength and the presence of mind actually to swallow the pills. 

This is what consumers see as mental health care.

If you still haven’t read this interesting, well-researched article on the murderer of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, I highly recommend. The following part of the article stood out to me (emphasis mine):

“I can’t even understand why,” Althea Hood, who had been a close friend of Mr. Brinsley since 2006 and saw him in Atlanta in early December at a recording studio, said of his death. “Other than, what he did in the beginning with his girlfriend might have been a mistake, and then he lost it.”

Some people are just irredeemable, in my view. “What he did”? “Might have been a mistake”? “A mistake”?” He shot her, you stupid fuck. That’s “what he did.” At least, have the decency to name the crime you are dismissing so flippantly.

The ending of the article is very significant:

“I was shaking,” [the murderer’s mother] said. “I said, ‘Jalaa, I don’t like the feel of this.’ We were both shaking. I had a feeling he was heading this way.”

She thought he was coming for her. Instead, he came for two police officers he had never met.

The guy spent his entire life trying to murder his abusive parents. The patriarchal prohibitions were too strong, so he kept lashing out at substitute figures.