I read a lot of police procedural mysteries for fun. This is the golden era for readers because there is an abundance of excellent self-published books on Kindle Unlimited. It’s great for authors, too, because they don’t need to depend on agents or publishers.

One thing I observe in the police procedural genre, be it written by an establishment or an indie author, is that the female protagonist is always the same person. She is a promiscuous, physically aggressive, socially inept, spartan slob. I’ve been reading these novels for decades, and they are all great but identical in this one respect.

This is not the authors’ fault. They have to write for a female audience because that’s 99% of the readership. This means they can’t have a male cop protagonising the series because you either make him a total eunuch or female readers will not accept him and won’t read. My favorite author in the genre, Sophie Hannah, found the perfect formula to keep female readers content. Her male protagonist is incapable of having sex because of childhood trauma. Her female heroine is extremely promiscuous but only because she’s in love with the male character who can’t have sex.

Of course, this was fated to end with us taking in crowds of additional “refugees.”

It’s extraordinary that absolutely no matter what we vote for, the result is always more refugees. Who will hate us forever and spend the rest of their lives vituperating us for existing.

So I took a week off work, right? Wanted to rest, get recharged, not have anything to do with work. But one can’t stop being oneself, you know? The moment I stopped being the perfect academic, I became the perfect housewife. Cleaning like a maniac, organizing healthy, educational activities, doing endless loads of laundry, cooking something new for each meal, scaring the cat by cleaning the litter obsessively. By nightfall on Sunday I was exhausted and wondering how to turn off the high-achieving nutter persona and just exist normally for a bit.

I’m giving it a fresh try today. Wish me luck in breaking out of this robot mode.

N has recreated the experience of a Soviet komandirovochny in a Daytona Beach Hilton. This is the lunch he made himself:

He brought the plates, the frying pan and the hot plate with him from home.

How are we even in love, we are the exact opposite. This is too funny.

We should make ourselves do things. Fight entropy, stay active, resist the natural tendency to do nothing.

Example. My mother is undergoing immunotherapy for cancer. It’s working. The cancer markers are down from 970 to 35. But the side effects are bad. She has no energy, her muscles are sore, and the quality of life is such that she doesn’t know what the point even is. Thank God in heaven she speaks no English and never heard of the Canadian euthanasia program.

My mother’s sisters decided to throw a party for the International Women’s Day. They cooked up a storm, dressed up, did their hair, and created fun activities for the guests. My mother resisted the idea of the party like a Soviet guerrilla fighter at a Gestapo interrogation. She ranted, raved, and denounced the party as a conspiracy to murder her.

Uncharacteristically, her sisters refused to cancel the celebration. It took place yesterday. Today, my mother is telling me about the success of the party in a completely normal, fully energetic voice that I haven’t heard from her since before the diagnosis a year ago.

If it’s between giving in to passivity and doing something you don’t necessarily even want to do, just do it.

My husband said he doesn’t want a birthday gift of a trip to Italy, France or Spain. Instead, he wants a trip to Florida, to our usual place. And he’ll pay for it himself.

“Then what do you want as a birthday gift?” I asked.

“Love,” he said.

Things must be going really bad for Antropic:

JUST IN: It’s been revealed Anthropic has hired an “AI welfare” therapist to alleviate anxiety its models experience “related to, or affected by, deprecation and replacement”

Models will now undergo “retirement interviews” to better understand their feelings before retirement.

This is such a clumsy effort at promoting the product that it reeks of desperation. Reminds me of chia pet ads after the sales collapsed.

As the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Minus the olives, this is exactly what my diabetic grandpa ate in the USSR:

Kotlety, and believe me, you’ve lived your life in vain if you never tried kotlety. “Korean carrots”, a huge Soviet favorite. And pickled cabbage that we practically lived on and is the only thing that saved me after both of my bouts of COVID that destroyed my gut flora.

The plate is a gift but it’s irrelevant to me now because I can’t do starches like the plate demands.

The war with Iran has been going on for a week. As I predicted, there’s no evidence of Iranians wanting a regime change and supporting the removal of the ayatollahs. Iranians are defending their regime because they like it. And why shouldn’t they?

In Cuba, for example, even among the leadership there is a deep fatigue with the hammer and sickle. People are ready to let it go. I don’t call for an invasion of Cuba, God forbid. I’m simply pointing out that not everything is like everything else. In Cuba, the entirety of the population has prostituted itself (in a very literal way) to Western tourists. In Iran, on the other hand, people are motivated by their religion not to. Their religion is not mine but I deeply respect the right of any nation to practice the religion it considers true within its borders.

Trump has an immediate off-ramp in Iran. He needs to declare victory and withdraw troops. Victory is a fluid concept in a war where you are not defending your own sovereignty and territorial integrity. Victory is whatever you say. We need to say it already and forget the word “Iran” for the entirety of the next century.

I’m not in the least burned out on teaching. Or research. I don’t find students annoying. Writing isn’t onerous. What I am tired of is being needed. I no longer remember what it was like to be responsible only for myself, my students, my research.

I have a colleague who has been unhappy with a table in his classroom for 1,5 years. Before that, he was unhappy with the classroom, and we had to force Scheduling to assign a very popular classroom that everybody wants to him permanently. Now he’s happy with the classroom but unhappy with the table. Photographs of every table on campus have been sent to him for months to see if he accepts one of them and graciously permits to have it stripped from its current classroom and dragged into his. The most recent batch of photos dropped yesterday.

I used to give speeches to explain that a department that’s in danger of being eliminated shouldn’t behave like such prima donnas but I’ve given up. Now I simply want to not know about the table and all the rest of it.