I have the weirdest internal clock, people. It is set for me to be awake at night and sleep during the day. I have done all I could to re-set it but the success has been minimal. No matter how sleepy and tired I might feel all day long, at 10 pm, I magically come wide awake. And stay on full alert at least until 5 am. It’s been like this for years and years.

It doesn’t bother me a whole lot because I don’t have the kind of job where I need to be at work at 8 am every day. I’m just curious why this happens. Might the reason be that I emigrated from one continent to another and still live in the time-zone where I was born? If you also emigrated with a significant time-zone change (six, seven hours), do you have a problem with your circadian rhythm?

Other than this, my internal clock is very good. I can always tell exactly what time it is, with the precision of about 5 minutes, even after I wake up. It’s just this annoying nightly wakefulness that bugs me.

This might look like a boring photo but I will be looking at it during our next eternal summer and reminding myself that snow exists.

The answer is simple: in the 1980s the feminist backlash begins and at the exact same time Dr. Sears starts to peddle his attachment parenting crap. His The Baby Book came out in 1993. This means that the infantile layabouts produced by these phenomena would now be about 20 years old.

Unless we see a massive withdrawal from Sears’s pernicious experiment and a massive realization that parents who have no other interest in life than attaching themselves permanently to their child, we will continue observing a growing number of adults who can’t tie their shoelaces without their Mommy supervising the process.

Not even in my culture – which is known for really extreme forms of enmeshment between adult children and their parents – have I heard of the following cases:

Walking into a job interview with a Canadian architectural firm, a young candidate brings something unexpected: mom.

An employee with the British Columbia company says it was the first time she had seen a parent shadow the hiring process, describing what ensued as “a bit of an awkward situation.” But she adds that there have been at least five or six recent occasions in which a mother or father sat with their grown child in the waiting room before an interview.

Dear parents, please stop and consider that if your adult child is incapable of going through a job interview without you being present, then something must have gone really wrong. Have you tried asking yourselves why crowds of young people raised by somebody other than you manage to find jobs and develop their careers without their parents’ involvement? Doesn’t your child, who can’t do the same, seem deprived of something important to you? Something like maturity, responsibility, independence?

Are you still helping the little darling use the potty? Or is it something your 25-year-old baby can handle without any help?

P.S. I linked to the article but don’t read it, it’s stupid to the point where I suspect that its author was just such a coddled over-grown baby whose parents found a job for their gray-haired baby. Its only use is to testify to the existence of a phenomenon the author’s impotent brains cannot analyze.

These parents in Quebec who are suing because they are too cheap to spend fifty bucks PER YEAR to buy their kids a dictionary and a calculator really shock me.

If you don’t have $50-150 PER YEAR to spend on dictionaries for your kid, then maybe it’s a good idea to consult the amazing birth control options available in Quebec.

Just imagine how guilty these kids feel knowing that their parents are engaged in a legal battle to avoid paying $50 PER YEAR for a calculator they need.

I don’t even want to think what kind of kids these immature parents will end up inflicting upon us.

A little girl’s father is away on a business trip. Her mother buys her a gift to cheer her up.

“I have a gift for you, my little one,” she says.

“What is it?” the three-year-old asks.

“It’s something that you like more than anything in the world,” the mother says.

The little girl’s face lights up like an opera-house chandelier.

“Daddy?” she asks breathlessly.

So, two novels. One is filled with the ideology and politics I hate. And when I say hate, I mean really, really detest.

Another is written in response to the first, addresses the same issues, denounces and corrects the tragic historic injustice perpetuated by it.

Ideologically, I applaud the second novel and hate the first to the point where I keep throwing it against the wall. Literally.

However, the first novel is so well-written and so touching that I weep every time I read it. And I’ve read it five times.

The second novel, while very professionally done and the writer is obviously talented, failed to touch me to the point that I fell asleep 4 pages before its end.

I get on the bus and discover that the driver and the passengers are involved in a discussion of the Holocaust. Everybody is sharing stories of how they first learned about it and how it made them feel.

“We should not let it happen again!” one elderly lady exclaims.

After that, the discussion segues into a conversation of how crucial it is to ban guns. Every passenger agrees vehemently, including two young men.

Somebody proposes that BB guns be banned as well. The passengers agree loudly and passionately.

After a small pause, the discussion of the Holocaust resumes and passengers begin recommending movies and books.

By the way, I’m the only passenger who got off on campus. The rest of the people were going elsewhere.

By huge popular demand (well, actually it was more like a request from one reader, but still), I am offering to your attention this list of positive things I have to say about Russia.

1. First and foremost, I have to thank the country of Russia for producing my husband N., a.k.a. the most wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, talented, and phenomenal man in the universe. Such an amazing man justifies a country’s entire existence.

2. Food. Did you know that the traditional Russian cuisine was always considered among the healthiest in the world? Of course, it was destroyed after 1917 and many of the traditional recipes were lost. However, today there are many talented young chefs in Russia who are recovering the culinary traditions. This is really great food, folks. The Russian cuisine uses  all kinds of seafood, very little beef, a lot of poultry. The traditional baked goods are to die for. Maybe I will share a couple of recipes with you in the future.

3. Film. I always say that movies are not art. However, the people who have come the closest to making movies that are works of art are, without any doubt, the Russians. I have not seen a film director anywhere in the world who would deserve to clean the Russian directors’ boots. Almodovar is a little boy compared to them. And the kind of actors you see in Russia are not to be find anywhere else. Of course, I can’t drag myself to a Hollywood movie more than once a year after being raised on this amazing film tradition.

4. Tea-time. Of course, many cultures drink tea. However, for Russians, tea-time is a very special ritual. In the evening, a family gathers round a table, drinks tea, and talks. The entire thing lasts for hours. We don’t have anything like this in Ukraine, and I always envied the Russians their tea-time.

5. Intelligentsia. This is a very special social class that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. You don’t get membership to it through possessing a certain amount of money, a certain kind of education, a certain profession. This social class is indifferent to riches, social distinctions, or any formalities. The only way to be a member is to possess a certain kind of sensibilities, a heightened sense of tact, a special inflection to one’s voice, a certain code of behavior. As vague as this sounds, I know within 20 seconds of meeting a person whether they are part of this social class, and this is not something one can fake. It makes a lot more sense to me to distinguish among people on the basis of their sensibilities than their income bracket.

I can’t think of anything else right now, but this is a good start.

I just read in the Smithsonian that there is a community of people who speak Aramaic in Skokie, IL.

You gotta love this country. Could I ever imagine I would be sharing a state with speakers of Aramaic?