I arrived too early for my lecture on Spain’s economic crisis at the local community center and had to go inside this really ratty bar where people smoke illegally and drink from plastic cups.

Then I proceeded to freak everybody out by drinking a Coke and reading a book for 40 minutes. People must think I’m insane to visit a bar in a visibly pregnant state for such a strange purpose.

I just found the most blatant example of hypocrisy I have seen in a long while:

Reproductive coercion is an abusive dynamic in intimate relationships in which one partner “pressures the other, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant.” The instinct behind reproductive coercion is not primarily (or at all) a desire to create a baby, but to create a dependency in their partners. A woman (and it is overwhelmingly women who are victimized by reproductive coercion) is easier to control, if her independence and ability to make choices that exclusively prioritize her own needs are compromised in some way.

You have really got to be a dishonest and nasty piece of work to write something so obviously and offensively wrong. Does this stupid freakazoid somehow manage not to know how many pregnancies occur because women unilaterally decide they should occur? The differences in male and female physiology make it completely unnecessary for a woman to pressure or threaten the man to make a pregnancy happen. She can just quietly make her choice, and the man will have to accept it.

I don’t even want to tell you how many women aggressively and obnoxiously suggested to me that I get pregnant without asking for N.’s consent. (For some reason, they all assumed that I had no children at 30-35 because N. was unwilling, not because I might have been unprepared or uninterested.)

“That’s how I got my baby!” they would respond angrily to my suggestion that it was wrong to do something like this. “Would you have preferred for my son or daughter not to exist?”

This reality, however, has no space in the “women are always victims of everything” that Melissa McEwan and her crowd of self-righteous idiots like to promote.

P.S. For the especially gifted, I will reiterate that the way a child was conceived has no bearing on this child’s entitlement to child-support.

Today is the 6th anniversary of the day N. and I met, and I wanted to share this touching story from the early days of our relationship.

In the first 2,5 years, we had to live apart. Initially, we lived in different countries, and I had to take the Greyhound bus from Montreal to Indiana to stay with him. I’d remain in Indiana for 6-8 weeks and then come back to Montreal for the same period of time. And then the journey would be repeated.

The first time I was staying at N.’s place in Indiana, I soon noticed there was a very unpleasant smell in his small apartment that kept intensifying. I felt bad about saying anything because I didn’t want to hurt N.’s feelings. (Yes, I can be sensitive when I want to.) N. also noticed the bad smell that appeared right after I arrived. He didn’t say anything either because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. So we both suffered in silence for weeks.

Finally, when the heat became especially high and the stench got to the point of being intolerable, N. broke the silence.

“So. . . maybe we should investigate where this funny smell comes from. . .” he volunteered.

“I know! This is disgusting!” I exclaimed, relieved that the subject was finally broached.

We walked around the apartment, trying to trace the stench and soon both arrived at the same closet.

“What do you have in there?” I asked in a whisper.

“There is nothing there but your suitcase,” N. whispered back.

“The suitcase is empty, though.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

So we went over the suitcase and eventually found a small hidden pocket that I didn’t even know existed. We opened the pocket, and the smell almost knocked us both off our feet.

In the hidden pocket of the suitcase, we found. . . several pieces of pickled fish. They had spoiled and looked even more disgusting than they smelled.

The situation was extremely bizarre. How did those pieces of fish end up in my suitcase without me knowing it?

I started sharing this weird story with people, and soon the answer was found.

“Oh, I put this fish in your suitcase,” my mother said. “I though you would eat it on the way to Indiana.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you put it there?” I asked.

“Didn’t I?” my mother asked. “I was sure I did.”

Imagine the state of this poor fish after I traveled on a Greyhound bus from Montreal to Indiana and stayed there in hot summer weather for 6 weeks.

Also imagine the strength of the romantic feeling that developed in spite of being surrounded by rotting fish.

And if you are wondering why my mother was filling the secret pockets of my suitcase with food, remember that Ukrainian people share the kind of history that makes it necessary for us to have food around us at every moment. Filling every pocket in sight with food is a reflex that we developed in response to our historical legacy.

We’ve always had these very aggressive Canadian geese on our campus. They leave their droppings everywhere. In the last couple of months, the administration cut the janitorial services in anticipation of the imaginary funding cuts that an administrator invented to force everybody to be “more creative.” As a result, the campus has been drowning in goose shit.

The geese have long made entering buildings on campus a difficult endeavor, especially during the mating and brooding season. They make their nests right in front of buildings and attack anybody who approaches. People have been bitten by the geese, the disabled students and faculty members have been prevented from entering the buildings, older and pregnant people have been scared out of their wits by angry creatures rushing at them.

The geese are such a burning issue that I use them whenever students stop paying attention in class. To get them involved in a discussion, I ask them to share their geese stories. Five seconds later, everybody is awake, engaged, and yelling at the top of their lungs.

This week, everybody noticed that the geese were not around. Immediately, a rumor got started that “the government” was removing the geese and killing them. Endless emails circulated, outlining the horrible scenarios of what was happening to the geese. They were slaughtered, starved to death, tortured, and killed.

I was cursing every time I had to open my university mailbox because I now needed to weed out legitimate, work-related emails from underneath the barrage of horrifying stories about tortured and persecuted geese. Gradually, the tone of the emails became extremely confrontational and descended into, “Oh, you are so egocentric” and “Would you just kill me off if I had cancer?”

Finally, “the government” responded saying that nothing has been done or will be done to the geese. They probably just left temporarily because of the tornado.

If you have been reading my “campus drama” stories, you probably understand that this announcement has done nothing to diminish the virulence of the Goose Drama debate.

Loving a person means seeing him according to God’s plan that his parents didn’t manage to carry out.

– Marina Tsvetaeva.

The great Modernist poet was right. Love allows one to see a person in the still-undamaged state that only exists very deep inside the person.