Spanish-speaking people are better than anybody else at handling emotions. In terms of emotional IQ, Spanish speakers surpass people of my culture in the same degree as my intelligence surpasses that of a door-knob. This is probably the main reason why I became so attracted to the Hispanic culture.

This is what Spanish-speakers taught me about dealing with grief: when something damages you, it needs to be put into words and narrated as many times as possible. If you need to tell the story a hundred, a thousand, a million times to make it lose its poisonous power over you, then that’s what you should do.

The most devastating moment for me happened during the last ultrasound when the doctor turned to me and said, “I’m sorry.” This was the moment when I felt that my life was broken in two. Everything was great before that moment and everything became horrible after it.

At first, I couldn’t even think about this instance without wailing and screaming. I knew that if I didn’t do something about it, it would tear me to shreds from the inside. If you take a piece of broken glass with jagged edges and bury it in the sand at the edge of the sea, the waves will beat it and toss it around until the edges become smooth and lose the power to cut. The same thing happens with grief. If you describe the horrible experience many times, it doesn’t go away, but it becomes possible to carry it inside yourself without it demolishing you.

So I described the devastating moment to different people. And I wrote about it on the blog. And I wrote about it on paper. And then I talked  to more people. And wrote some more. And I’m writing about it now.

Of course, nothing will turn this experience into a good one. It will always be a devastating moment in my life. But it will be one that I processed and absorbed as part of my life journey. I don’t need to deny it, fear it, or pretend it didn’t happen. It happened to me and now I can live with it.

As we say in my country, get an idiot to pray and she will bruise her forehead (extra points for guessing what a forehead has to do with praying). I have many errands today and I like that because I haven’t had any time to get sad. One of the errands was to get N.’s former car towed to the car service. N. tried getting it towed in the morning but the towing company went someplace else and seems to have towed somebody else’s car. So I had to contact the only other towing service in town. That’s when it became clear that I know nothing about the car I have been riding for over 6 years.

“What is the make and model of the car?” the lady from the towing company asked.

“Erm. . . It’s a Honda?” I suggested, realizing that I was turning into one of those annoying folks who make every statement sound like a question.

“And the model?”

“Erm. . . And by model you mean. . .?”

“Is it a Civic, an Accord, or another model?”

Accord sounded like a nice name for a car, so I said it was an Accord.

“What year is it?” the lady kept torturing me.

“Two thousand something,” I said. “I think.”

“And the color?” she asked in a very patient tone.

“White!” I yelled, happy to be back in my straight-A student role. “It’s definitely white!”

Of course, when the towing truck came by there were exactly two cars parked next to each other. One was a Honda Civic and another one a Honda Accord. And as usual, I had guessed all wrong. Ours was a Civic. In six years, it had never occurred to me to find out.

I did manage to stop the towers before they tried to take away the neighbors’ car, though, so the story ended well.

Does anybody know what these products called “Memo Pads” are supposed to be doing? What is their purpose in life?

One of the side effects of what happened is that I haven’t been able to read. I stare at a page and nothing happens, which is a great hardship for me. So I decided to read something completely unfamiliar to see if it brings me back into the reading mode. I promised people a long time ago I would venture into the fantasy genre, and now it made sense to engage in  some good, solid escapism.

Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind did serve its purpose in that it got me back into reading. It is entertaining, it reads easily, and it also confirmed my suspicion that fantasy is the genre for lazy authors. Writing fantasy liberates them from the need to do any research and, supposedly, offers an opportunity to write with complete freedom about anything they want, creating alternative universes and fashioning them according to their own will.

Rothfuss’s alternative universe is, however, more secondary and unoriginal than any strictly realist work of fiction I can think of. The parts of the book that are not based on an uninspired retelling of Christian mythology (a virgin birth, a God who is the son and the father at the same time and who sacrifices himself to save humanity, quotes lifted directly from the Bible, etc.) are based on Judaic mythology (kabbalah).

Of course, the most important myth that informs the novel is that of the American Dream. The protagonist overcomes enormous hardship, pulls himself up by the bootstraps from horrifying poverty, puts himself through college and even manages to achieve the impossible and gets a scholarship to attend University (can you get any more American than this?), accomplishes incredible feats of strength and resilience, and is finally rewarded with the most wonderful thing existence can give an individual – his own business. Of course, it isn’t a very successful business. Not even epic heroes end up owning multi-national corporations these days. All that the world’s savior can hope to acquire as a result of his heroism is a dinky little bar with no customers. Still, it’s a bar, and how cool is it to be in charge of dispensing alcohol?

Another problem with the novel is that the construction of the plot is extremely haphazard. As I said, the author is lazy and doesn’t even try to make things conform to some sort of an internal logic of the novel. Sometimes he makes a half-hearted attempt to explain the contradictions that crop up in every chapter but soon tires of the effort. It’s as if Rothfuss took excerpts from books that made an impression on him, changed the names of the characters, and arranged these often incompatible bits and parts of other books in a random pattern.

Reading this novel was comforting in the sense that it offered absolutely no surprises. One knows exactly how each scene will develop. This defeats the escapist goals one might have, but it’s not a bad way to pass the time when you are incapable of doing much else. I know people love this genre and I don’t want to hurt anybody’s sensibilities. Originality is not Rothfuss’s forte but it might be there in other books belonging to the genre.

One regret I have is that I didn’t have access to such books when I was 11. I would have really enjoyed them then.

There is this saying that is offensive to both Russians and Ukrainians: “While a Russian sleeps, a Ukrainian eats.” The message it conveys is that Russians are lazy and Ukrainians are greedy and crafty.

In our family, though, the saying has always been literally true. The only thing that turns N. from the gentle, sweet and kind person he always is into a scary, irate creature is waking him ten minutes earlier than planned. And the only time N. saw me freaking out – I don’t mean angry, sad, upset or experiencing any normal emotions but freaking out irrationally – is when we were moving to Baltimore and didn’t have dinner at the time I’m used to eating. N. eats a lot less than I do and I need less sleep not only than N. but than a regular person.

Now, however, the impossible has happened: I lost all interest in food and acquired an interest in sleep. I had already allowed the Russian pronunciation to substitute my heavy Ukrainian accent and now find it funny to hear my own parents talk. And I’m a convert to constant tea-drinking. Now all that is left for me to do is to buy a Russian flag and start quoting Pushkin at least 10 times a day. Of course, I will never become Russianized to the point where I will refer to borscht as “soup”, which, by the way, is the most offensive thing you can say to a Ukrainian.

I finally remembered what texts translated by Google Translate reminded me of. They are exactly the same as word-for-word translations from Latin.

We went to a convenience store two days ago, and as I was waiting for N. outside I saw three young men of about 18 or 20 come out of the store and get into a car. And that was the most horrible moment I have had so far. I can deal with the operation, the scar, the emotional pain, the loss, but knowing that Eric will never grow up to go to a store with his buddies – that is the really intolerable, impossible, unacceptable thing. This is the real tragedy.

Yesterday was not a bad day but today is very difficult. I can’t stop thinking about those young men at the store.

I think I will try to get some more sleep because this is very exhausting.

I like Susan Faludi and read her books. I also dislike Sheryl Sandberg and would never read hers. (Yes, I’m a snob, let’s get over that already.) But this attack Faludi makes on Sandberg and her Lean In movement is petty and pathetic.

The only criticisms Faludi seems to be able to make of Sandberg is that she wears ballet flats (there is quite an obsession with them in Faludi’s article) and that she has everybody who wants to participate in the movement register through Facebook. I don’t like Facebook but I can definitely understand expecting people to be in touch with you and keeping track of your ideas through the medium of your choosing. If people want to keep track of my life, they should come to the blog and not expect me to post things on tumblr or Instagram.

What I find especially unattractive about Faludi’s article is how gleefully she ridicules women who participate in Sandberg’s Lean In program. She offers a selection of particularly gushy quotes that make these women sound like a bunch of stupid air-heads. This probably serves some hugely feminist purpose in Faludi’s opinion but I can’t figure out what that purpose can be.

In the article, Faludi creates a completely specious dichotomy between fighting for structural changes in society and vanquishing personal insecurities that stem from interiorized patriarchal discourse. Having a career, making money, getting promoted at work, enjoying life and buying gold necklaces – let alone the scary ballet flats – somehow transforms into an incapacity to be politically active. It is as if Faludi needed to see women being permanently miserable in all areas of their lives.

Faludi, who is a very successful writer and who doesn’t seem to be living in dire poverty and extreme obscurity, begrudges other women the kind of success that has made her life comfortable and gave her a voice. She rants against the women who are good at harnessing the forces of capitalism to serve their individual needs but forgets to mention that she is one of such women. Even Sandberg, who at least doesn’t rely on the dishonest rhetoric of 99% versus 1% to conceal that she is richer than the absolute majority of people in her audience, looks good by Faludi’s side.

The ongoing debate on whether memorization is a good learning strategy misses one crucial point: everybody’s learning style is different. I can’t memorize worth a damn. It takes me years to remember my own address and phone number. I need to understand how things work in order to process them. Other people, however, are brilliant at memorizing and find it very useful. For some, memorization is an effective tool that unlocks their creativity.

This is why I always give my students two options when we study grammar. If they find it easier, they can memorize all of the cases where the subjunctive (to give one example) is used. If, however, they are like me and are incapable of retaining a list of rules in their heads, I explain to them the basic principles that govern the use of the subjunctive and they never have to remember a single rule. There is usually an equal number of people who choose each method.

The temptation to look for a single teaching method that will work for every student and transform the education system is huge. But we have got to realize that we are wasting our time looking for a single solution or a single recipe. The complexity of teaching is due precisely to the uniqueness of individual learning strategies and individual teaching methods. The only recipe here is to let each student and each teacher explore what will work for them.

Teaching is like love. There is no algorithm governing it.

Even very bright people often succumb to the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. Here is an example:

I was talking to a friend a while ago about how life in academia leads one to think that one is constantly below average. It doesn’t matter what post docs one gets, or how many publications, or how one’s talks are received at conferences. Too many successful academics, like competitive runners, get where they are by keeping an eye on the person just ahead.

No situation – no matter how horrible or traumatic – can bring out in a person what wasn’t there to begin with. If you have a deep inner conviction that you are constantly below average, you will feel this way in academia, in sales, at home, or on your own island in the middle of an ocean.

If you think about it, this is really good news. You can’t single-handedly change academia or sales (although it’s a very good idea to get together with others and try) but you can do a lot to stop feeling incompetent, worthless, or below average. Such feelings are never situational. They exist at the core of your being. Others cannot access that core but you can.