I know I am showing extreme ignorance but seeking knowledge is never as shameful as not seeking it.

Does anybody know what this impossibly ugly building in Madrid is? And whose brilliant idea it was to stick it in the midst of beautiful buildings and monuments? It looks like an ugly mushroom that tried to be a pagoda and failed miserably. In Madrid, every building is a work of art in itself. This is why it is very jarring to encounter the ugly mushroom.

When an insecurity in one’s own gender meets a profound unhappiness in one’s personal life with an attendant heavy dose of repressed aggression, transphobia happens.

Of course, it is easier to fixate on other people’s genitals than to resolve one’s own issues. But it’s a road to nowhere.

I’m watching a Spanish TV show right now about a man who is a compulsive cheater. He was married, had a daughter, kept cheating on his wife, so she kicked him out. The worst part is that the wife kept their daughter from having any contact with the father. The daughter hasn’t seen her father for 15 years.

Then the man got married to another woman, had two daughters with her, and kept cheating. So she kicked him out and told the daughters that their father was dead. The poor kids had to visit a psychologist for years.

Now they are all grown women and their father has invited them to the program to get reunited. All three daughters are extremely happy to see their father, all three say he has nothing to apologize for, all three say that their mothers will be livid when they see the show but they don’t care because they are very happy to be back in touch with their father. And the sisters are especially content to have met each other. All of this happiness has been stolen from them by selfish, self-centered mothers and a weak, pathetic father who has only dared to get in touch with his daughters now after suffering from a life-threatening disease.

It is very sad when people are so incapable of getting over their partners’ cheating that they take revenge on the children and force them to pay the price of their unhappy relationships. The really tragic part is that both mothers have long since remarried. The daughters, in the meanwhile, have continued to pay for their parents’ incapacity to be happy together 15+ years ago.

This is why I always laugh whenever I hear people mention maternal instinct. (I would also laugh if people talked about paternal instinct but that myth doesn’t really exist.) There are too many people who are incapable of noticing that their children are human beings with needs and interests of their own.

On a Spanish TV show, a woman called Guadalupe has asked for help in finding a long-lost friend. Guadalupe lost touch with her best friend Lucia when she started spreading rumors and saying mean things about Lucia. Now she wants to apologize for her meanness and get back in touch.

The program found Lucia and showed Guadalupe an interview with her former friend.

“This is your friend Lucia,” the show host announced. “She is here to meet you! What do you think?”

“God, she really let herself go!” Guadalupe exclaimed. “She looks horrible.”

Moral of the story: time doesn’t cure aggression. It makes it worse.

Here is the beautiful Indian blanket I told you about:

 

And here are two ultra cute small vases:

 

And here are the embroidered tablecloths:

 

My body has understood the time change to mean that I now need to sleep both during the day and in the night. In between the bouts of sleeping, however, I managed to visit Madrid’s phenomenal flea market called El Rastro:

 

“How much are you saying these are?” I kept asking a gentleman who was selling beautiful embroidered table napkins for 3 euro.

The gentleman must have thought I was trying to haggle. “I can give you a discount,” he said hastily.

Everything I saw in tourist souvenir stores can be found in El Rastro at about 1/10 of the price.

Of course, I bought everything in sight including a beautiful Indian blanket that I saw costing exactly 5 times more in St. Louis. And then I started walking along the beautiful little streets of Madrid’s city center.

 

The photo was taken on a beautiful Sunday morning when everything was still closed. Including these cute stores:

 

 

Finally, I arrived at Plaza Mayor which, as usual, is filled with tourists and numismatists. Numismatists are very special people. And so are philatelists who can also be found at Plaza Mayor on Sundays.

 

If you don’t think this is beautiful, I don’t know what is wrong with you.

 

Of course, I decided to be as touristy as I could and had chocolate con churros on Plaza Mayor:

 

This beautiful experience was somewhat marred by the thoughts of how much darling N. would have loved dunking these delicious pastries into the hot chocolate.

My sister is arriving on Monday morning and I can’t wait because she will finally feed me. I still haven’t figured out where to eat around here. If it weren’t for the nice Turkish people who, to my greatest joy, have opened döner kebap stores on every corner of every street in Europe, I would have starved in Madrid.

Student writes: “In both of these short stories, female characters are the ones who cheat on their husbands. This is strange because normally men cheat while women remain faithful.”

I comment: “Who do these men cheat with, then? Other men? What if they are heterosexual?”

This is, of course, a male student.

Oh youth, oh innocence.

One effect that the economic crisis has had on the madrileños is that the service has become really amazing. Entering a coffee-shop, a restaurant or a store is not a traumatic experience as it used to be. Everybody is now so polite and welcoming that you feel like you are in Sevilla and not in Madrid.

What is weird is the enormous number of people with dogs in the streets. I have never seen anything of the kind in a major city. Surely, the crisis can’t be all that bad if people can afford this strange luxury. Most of the dogs are really big, of the kind that is more expensive to feed than me.

A lot of Russian can be heard around every major tourist attraction. Souvenir stores offer guidebooks in Spanish and Russian. Sometimes, but not as often, in English. No other languages are as prominently featured. I guess the Russians are the only ones in Europe right now with lots of money that they can spend on tourism.

The bookstores are filled with veritable crowds of people who are buying books with such abandon as if there were some book apocalypse scheduled for the nearest future. I had to stand in line for almost ten minutes just to get a chance to approach the section with new history books. Have you ever seen a crowd battling over thick scholarly volumes on history? This is a really beautiful thing.

What I really like in Madrid is the communal approach to child-minding. When a child appears on the scene, everybody is immediately ready to get involved. A couple with a very small baby entered the coffee-shop where I was having a cup of sensational Spanish coffee. Immediately, everybody, including the patrons and the waiters, started taking care of the little girl, playing with her, showing her around, talking to her, etc., giving the young parents an opportunity to eat and talk with each other in peace. On the subway, a couple entered a train with a baby in a pram. The baby was hot but the parents couldn’t reach over to unbutton its coat because the train was full. So several passengers started busying themselves around the baby, making sure it was comfortable. An older gentleman started singing to the kid. There was nothing of this very American approach where everybody studiously pretends not to notice a child while the child’s parents glare aggressively at everybody, making sure that nobody establishes any contact with their kid.

 

And how amazing is this:

 

But, of course, you can also feel the crisis. This store suggests that the customers battle the crisis with a good selection of meats:

 

And here is one of the really ugly facets of the crisis. Fascist slogans are becoming more common:

 

It isn’t surprising that a military general (a representative of Spain’s most retrograde and dangerous class) said the other day, “Vaterland is more important than democracy and the Constitution is just a law.” Then he proceeded to threaten a military overtake of power. Because those function so well for Spain. Just ask the people who still remember the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco who used to say the same kind of crap.

A popular self-help book asks the readers to imagine what they would like people to say about them at their funeral. I don’t care what people say about me while I’m alive, and the idea of structuring my existence around what people might say after I’m not around to care any longer is really bizarre.

What is especially funny is that the book’s next two chapters explain the importance of becoming less dependent on the opinions of others.