I’m discussing my horrible suffering with PUPPPS with my mother.

“Ah, now you see why women always hate their daughters-in-law!” she exclaims triumphantly in the midst of my monologue about the horrible suffering I experience.

“OK, how do you connect this to daughters-in-law?” I ask.

“All of this effort and suffering you undergo in your pregnancy, and then some hussy appears in your son’s life and refuses to do what you tell her! How obnoxious is that?”

I imagined how 30 years from now we’d be sitting at Eric’s wedding and I’d jump up and hurl myself at his bride, yelling “Die now, bitch!” In the meanwhile, N. would be showing everybody my pregnancy records and explaining that I had gone soft in the brain because of how hard it was.

Of course, Eric can do us all a favor and decide to marry a guy.

My mother is absolutely the best mother-in-law to her daughters’ husbands. You seriously cannot wish for anybody less intrusive, more welcoming, tactful and kind. However, I’m starting to think that it’s a good thing she never had a son because she probably would not have been the same great mother-in-law to his female partner.

The problem with breastfeeding activists is that they don’t know when to stop and, as a result, end up sounding quite ridiculous.

The woman who gave us the birth preparation classes is a very intelligent and helpful person, even if she says “we, in the lactation circles. . .” way too often. However, her eagerness to convince people to breastfeed takes her a little too far and her entire message becomes devalued.

“Studies have shown that the poop of breastfed babies smells sweet and beautiful!” she exclaimed. “And the poop of bottle-fed babies stinks!”

Of course, the ideologically correct poop always smells of roses but just try to imagine what those “studies” looked like. Scientists walked around smelling the diapers of 200 breast-fed and 200 bottle-fed babies and evaluating the pleasantness of the smell?

I’m yet to take the breastfeeding class, and I just hope that the class doesn’t turn me away from the idea. I definitely want to try breast-feeding, but I have a well-developed critical capacity, and stories about poop you can eat for dessert annoy me too much.

And I really hope nobody attempts to resuscitate that tired old canard about breast-fed babies developing better intellectual capacities than bottle-fed babies. I was never breast-fed, and I’m more than willing to have an intellectual pissing contest with anybody in that audience to see how many degrees, languages and publications their breast-feeding past has gained for them in adulthood.

I kind of resent suggestions that I’m intellectually deficient in any way when they come from people who have not yet demonstrated to me that they are any more intellectual than I am.

P.S. Sadly, N. totally bought into the good-smelling poop story and started giving my chest appreciative looks of the utilitarian variety I’m not used to be getting from him.

“‘I’ve always heard this phrase, ‘Oh, marriage is great, or relationships are great — you get to go on this journey of change together,’ ” she said. “That sounds terrible. I don’t want to go through those changes with you. I want you to have changed and become enough of your own person so that when you meet me, we can have a stable life and be very happy.”

Oh, if that is what you want, you are in luck. The world is filled with rigid, immature freaks who stop developing emotionally, intellectually and psychologically at about the age of 12. It’s great to see they are in such high demand.

This will be one of those marriages where people have veritable wars over the methods of squeezing toothpaste out of tubes and raised versus lowered toilet seats.

I always thought that “middle-aged” meant of the age I am now. But here I read a post titled “Female, Fifty, and Furious” (great post, by the way, do read it) and it suggests that “middle-aged” is fifty years old. Not that I have anything against postponing middle age by a decade or a decade and a half.

What do you mean when you say “middle-aged”?

And if I’m not middle-aged, then what am I?

Technology as Nature is a very interesting blog that always offers food for thought.

To be a great writer you nearly have to have lead an interesting life,

says the blog’s author in a recent post. I always make an effort not to find out about the lives of writers I like, so I’m not sure how true that is. Let’s join forces and share what we know about the lives of authors whose work we enjoy.

Jane Austen definitely had the most boring life ever.

Anthony Trollope held a demanding full-time job while churning out one lengthy novel after another.

Maybe somebody could see Dostoyevsky’s life as exciting due to his gambling addiction but I see it mostly as miserable and drab. Endless poverty, endless efforts to pay the bills. Sounds very unenviable.

Juan Goytisolo narrates his life in a way that makes it sound fun but, as for actual events,  I don’t know. He traveled a lot, so maybe that counts.

Hemingway’s life was fun but I don’t consider him a good writer.

Of course, Cervantes had a life and a half, so in his case the quoted statement bears out.

My most favorite writer in the world, Volodimir Vinnychenko, had a fascinating existence. He went from a family of illiterate starving workers to become the Prime Minister of the Ukrainian Republic and the most famous Ukrainian writer of his time – and all that without any formal schooling.

Do you know about anybody else’s life?

The reason why I’m getting so hung up on the linked post is that I just discovered that the Russian poet Lermontov owned two slaves. To me it means that I will not be reading this particular poet aloud to Eric. And I really liked his poetry. But now it’s all spoiled for me.

Some people know how to narrate the most trivial, insignificant little events in a manner that makes them sound fascinating. And then there are those who experience fascinating things but don’t know how to put them in words in a way that would make anybody interested in reading about them.

The NYTimes is convulsing in the throes of a fit of intense prissiness:

Until recently, those who studied the rise of hookup culture had generally assumed that it was driven by men, and that women were reluctant participants, more interested in romance than in casual sexual encounters. But there is an increasing realization that young women are propelling it, too.

Yes, this is Earth-shattering news for the backwards and frumpy authors of the stupid rag: women enjoy sex, too.

But wait, even scarier realizations were to follow:

Almost universally, the women said they did not plan to marry until their late 20s or early 30s.

Yes, women are actually intelligent. Who could have known? They are finally clocking on to the idea that getting married at 19 is about the dumbest thing you can do. (Please do not argue with me about this unless you are a woman who got married at 19 like I did.)

And here comes the most terrifying news of all:

In this context, some women, like A., seized the opportunity to have sex without relationships, preferring “hookup buddies” (regular sexual partners with little emotional commitment) to boyfriends. Others longed for boyfriends and deeper attachment.

Yes, different women have different preferences. One cannot make pronouncements about what all women in the world want and avoid looking like a total idiot. This is truly tragic. The universe has turned out to be more complex than NYTimes is ready to digest.

At the class for Dads, every couple’s spokesperson is a woman.* Except for us. We get introduced and spoken for by N. I believe that it is never too early to butt out of a father’s relationship with a child. So I truthfully informed N that I’m as clueless as he is and I will not be managing his fatherhood.

* There are no gay couples here but there is a single mother with her own parents as a support group and a couple accompanied by the mother’s twin sister.

I think the following is absolutely spot-on:

White  people don’t think Zimmerman is white. He looks mostly Mexican. But for the purposes of race warfare he will come in handy as a kind of intermediate between “real” white people and blacks. That way white people can keep their white hands clean and comfort themselves that people they think of as goons are doing their dirty work for them. 
Mexicans have got to reject this role of “enforcer” for The Man.

The efforts to co-opt Hispanic people for the lousiest, shittiest, vilest causes in this country should stop.

I now have 12 peer-reviewed publications altogether. Seven of them have been done since I started my tenure-track four years ago. I also have 2 pieces out awaiting decision and one under construction.

Two more years to go until tenure.

Also, 7 1/2 more weeks to suffer with this horrible rash. This is why I need to be listing my achievements in this obnoxious way.

I’m suffering so badly with PUPPPs (search for it in Google Images but I warn you, this shit is scary, don’t look at it before you eat) that I was overdue for some good news. And good news I got: a long-standing dream of mine has come true, and I will finally have a publication in French. This will be possible thanks to my dear friend Ol., a French-speaker from Montreal, who graciously offered to translate the piece for me.

Thank you, dear friend!

Speaking about Yale (where Ol. and I met), I finally figured out why I did the following odd things while living in New Haven:

1. Refused to accept that the heating control system in my apartment wasn’t a barometer and preferred to suffer from cold, barking angrily at anybody who tried to turn up the heat in the freezing apartment, “Leave my barometer in peace already, shall you?!?”

2. Convinced myself that the door to my apartment was too narrow to allow me to buy a sofa or a couch and bring it inside, even knowing for a fact that everybody else in the building did manage to buy a sofa and bring it through the exact same kind of doors.

3. Complained for 4 years that there was no bathroom cabinet in the apartment instead of checking and finding out that there was a really good and spacious one.

4. Managed to disregard the existence of 3 stores selling fresh produce on the very block where I lived and instead complained to all and sundry how I couldn’t buy any fresh produce anywhere in town.

I now know that I wasn’t acting irrationally when I did all these things. I had a very powerful reason to do them. Being at the department was so disappointing, unpleasant, and hateful that I needed to motivate myself to leave the house and go there every day. The only way of doing that was to make the home environment so intolerable that I’d have no choice but leave home.

I have come with some really bizarre motivational mechanisms over the years.