“Poor Eric,” I say. “I’m practically sitting on his head.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” N retorts. “I’m 37, and my mother is still sitting on my head.”

Yale Alumni Magazine has regaled its readers with an article about the university’s “grammar non-discrimination team” that advocates the acceptance of expressions like “I loves my grammar” and “he ain’t lerned nothing” as equal to the “dialect of the elite.” The dialect of the elite is, to give an example, the language I’m using on this blog.

The so-called linguist who leads the team of spoiled rich Yale brats in this “let’s condescend to the stupid proles” endeavor regales us with the ridiculous idea that the grammar of the English language is ver complex. One would think that even a Linguistics 101 student, let alone a professor, would know that English has one of the simplest gramars of all Indo-European languages. Well, what can you expect from an idiot who justifies the existence of the “grammar non-discrimination team” by saying that “we don’t wear our hair the same way as our grandparents did.” Don’t ask me how the hair-style choices of this Legally Blonde joke of a professor should be relevant to what projects the university undertakes.

As an elitist who thinks that if you speak a language, it isn’t that much trouble to learn to speak it correctly, I’m appalled at what my alma mater is becoming. Yale’s graduate school is rapidly turning into a finishing school for the children of the very rich who entertain themselves with non-discrimination teams as they wait for their trust funds to mature.

I don’t know if everybody hates these collages but I just learned to make them with photos I take around campus and they make me very happy.

Click on the collage to see the animals better. They are a family!

. . . according to the most fashionable “feminist” website:

We love the bump-watches and the ridiculous celebrity baby names and the stories about the impending royal child because we’re human beings, and we’d be in a bad place as a species if most of us weren’t at least a little predisposed to getting excited about the entry of a new human into the world.

I’m so totally not one of those “we” that even the word “bump-watch” makes me want to vomit. And I wouldn’t read a story about “impending royal children” to save my life.

Make sure you do as many bump-watches as you can, folks, to compensate for the traitors to the species such as myself. I will go work on my new article instead.

My association with the Ukrainian Diaspora broke down completely after a group of young people I knew traveled to Ukraine. We talked a lot before the trip and I helped them prepare, telling them what to expect and how to get around.

When my friends came back from Ukraine, though, it became clear we weren’t going to be friends any longer.

“Why on Earth did you tell us that the situation is bad in Ukraine and that the economy is very problematic?” they asked me. “We bought a lot of great stuff very cheaply. Unlike what you said, life in Ukraine is very cheap. And everybody was super nice to us and very much into Ukrainian culture. We taught several families how to celebrate the traditional Ukrainian holidays correctly.”

Obviously, the deluded and self-congratulatory obliviousness of the tourists who think a country’s economy rocks if they can condescend to people after waving around a wad of dollar bills did not seem attractive to me.

The price of any collective identification, I have found, is always an amputation of a part of one’s cerebral function. You can be very happy as a member of a group if you agree to stupidify yourself to an extent.

Somebody asked me if I’m in touch with the Ukrainian immigrant community. There is a very large Ukrainian Diaspora in Canada, and I did hang out with with people belonging to it when I first emigrated to Canada.

Ukrainian Diaspora deserves admiration for a variety of things. The way these immigrants – who mostly left Ukraine generations ago – preserve their culture is worthy of every respect. I spent time with a group of young people of my age (this was in 1999-2000) whose great-grandparents had left Ukraine around the time of the October Revolution. These great-grandchildren, however, all spoke and read fluent, albeit somewhat outdated, Ukrainian. How many immigrant communities do you know where this happens?

There were reasons, though, why I parted ways with the Ukrainian Diaspora. The first reason was the pervasive anti-Semitism that sounded very shocking in the environment of the ultra-tolerant Montreal. I felt that, in a way, Diasporans believed that anti-Semitism was an integral part of Ukrainian identity. They didn’t realy have anything against Jews, but simply acted out their Ukrainianness in this way.

Another problem I had with the Diaspora was that its members hadn’t managed to snap out of the “I have been cruelly separated from my Homeland” role that made very little sense after 1991. I was once interviewed by a Ukrainian radio station in Montreal. Unlike everybody else at the station, I was a very recent immigrant.

“You must miss our beautiful Mother Ukraine terribly,” the interviewer said with real tears glistening in her eyes. “It must have been so painful to be forced to leave!”

“No, I chose to emigrate,” I explained. “I hated living there.”

I was approached later by somebody who had heard the interview.

“How could you say you chose to leave Ukraine?” he exclaimed. “Oh, what wouldn’t I give to go back to our lovely country!”

I decided not to inform this kind but somewhat deluded gentleman that since 1991 there was absolutely nothing preventing him from traveling to Ukraine or even moving there if he so wished.

[To be continued. . .]

N. bought a new used car and before handing over the payment, created this parody of posters about the Russian nouveau riches:

At the age of 20, I knew the exact day when the new issues of Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie-Claire, and Glamour were due to come out each month and bought them all. Today I can’t get through two pages of any of them without feeling like I’m losing faith in humanity.

If that isn’t a successful self-improvement project, I don’t know what is.

So the No Stress Test that I now have to undergo twice a week at the hospital is not that bad. I have to lie in bed listening to the heart-beat and waiting for fetal movements. When they happen, I press a button. It’s like having a weird form of a dialogue with little Eric.

The disturbing part is not the test itself but having a lady of a very advanced age assigned to cart me around in a wheel-chair. The lady is called Sonia and even if she is a life-long four-packs-a-day smoker and suntanning addict, she cannot be a day under eighty. Sonia is not an athletic 80 either but, rather, a shaky, fragile 80.

Together with Eric, belly and my book-filled bag, I weigh about as much as three Sonias would. She makes very scary heaving sounds just to budge the wheelchair and then begins to wheeze as she struggles to push me down the corridor. It would make a lot more sense for me to cart Sonia around. And it would be good for my health, too, I’m sure.

In spite of all the pregnancy-related symptoms, I look very healthy. This is my curse: I always bloom like a May rose no matter what happens. People who encounter me and Sonia in the hallway look at me with the kind of contempt that nasty exploiters of fragile elderly ladies deserve.

I squirm in the wheelchair, feeling like a horrible person, and tell Sonia that I really don’t mind walking to the ultrasound unit on my own.

“Yes, but then what would I do with myself all day long? I have to justify being kept on in this job,” Sonia says quietly.

N. has a typically Russian name that ends with an “a.” In Russian, your last name has to end with an “a” for you to be a woman, not the first name.

So yesterday N. called an insurance company and introduced himself. Let’s imagine that his name is “Misha Ivanov.”

As soon as the insurance company employee heard this name, she started addressing him as “Mrs. Ivanov.”

N. felt it would sound stupid to respond with something like “I’m a man”, so he decided to drop a hint and mentioned that his wife was also going to drive the car he was insuring (even though I don’t drive yet.)

Still, the insurance company employee continued addressing him as “Mrs. Misha” and “Mrs. Ivanov.” Apparently, it was easier for her to accept gay marriage than recognize the possibility that a male name can end with an “a.”

“What about Santa Claus, though?” my father asked when he heard this story. I didn’t know what to respond. I get to sign for N.’s packages all the time because postal workers refuse to believe that a big, burly man can be called “Misha.”