The driving school I’m planning to attend seems to have snoozed through the twenty-first century and is still living in the twentieth.

“You have to send us the application by mail,” the woman at the school explained to me on the phone.

“Can I send it by email?” I asked.

“No, of course not,” she said in an appalled voice. “We need your signature on it.”

“I can sign it online.”

“Huh? No, it needs to be your real signature.”

“It will be my real signature.”

“No, it has to be signed with a pen.”

“OK, can I drop it off in person?”

“No,” the lady persevered. “It has to arrive by mail. This is how it has always been done. And don’t forget to  print out the receipt for your PayPal payment and mail it in, too.”

Now I’m wondering whether I should have asked if they will teach me to drive an actual car or if they are still in the ox-driven carts era.

I don’t know why I’m struggling so hard to quit coffee if it might actually be good for one’s health.

I didn’t want to write about the current wave of protests in Ukraine because the subject is upsetting but everybody keeps asking, so here is what I have to say.

Ukrainians have been protesting massively in the past couple of days against the decision of the country’s pro-Russian government to reject a free trade agreement with the EU in favor of strengthening economic ties with Russia. In my opinion, both the protesters and the government are in the wrong. My poor, miserable country is squeezed between these two exploitative giants and it doesn’t stand a chance against either of them.

A free trade agreement with EU will demolish what is left of Ukraine’s economy. Closer ties with Russia will stamp out its culture, language and self-esteem that are beginning to be reborn in a slow and painful process. And they will demolish what’s left of its economy. Both choices suck something fierce. To rephrase a famous Mexican adage, poor Ukraine, so far from heaven and so close to Russia. And now, to the EU as well.

Ukraine is now experiencing what every post-colonial country has been through. It is weakened by centuries of colonial exploitation and cannot develop a robust and even remotely independent economy. As a result, vultures circle it and try to devour what’s left of it. The choice is between vultures from the West and vultures from the East. Moving in the direction of either of them will be disastrous. Tragically, in the years of independence, all Ukrainians have done is rob the state without even trying to produce anything.

I passionately wish for my country of origin to get better. I welcome any positive developments that might occur. As hard as I try, though, I’m not seeing anything even remotely hopeful in the current situation. And that’s very sad.

 

You know what happens every time I begin to read Zizek, right? Yes , it’s quote time. See the following and tell me you don’t love it:

Many Leftists hate me when I argue that twentieth-century communism might have been the biggest ethico-political fiasco in the history of humanity. I think there is no other soft explanation. . . Globally it was a fiasco

Amidst all of the pathetic attempts to salvage the terrible legacy of the Soviet, Cuban, Chinese, etc. communism, Zizek has the guts to say honestly that it was all bad. This is big.

Zizek’s has had a breakthrough. “Maybe we should accept that the United States is not always automatically the bad guy?” he asks of his Leftist friends in his new book Demanding the Impossible.

If the Leftist friends in question are Americans, they will beat up Zizek for denying them their favorite form of protagonism.

One thing that  really bugs me is  this extremely vulgar and unhygienic habit of placing a blanket on top of a sheet and bending the sheet’s edge over it. You can see it here in the photo:

When people do this to their own beds, that’s fine. One can have all manner of eccentric habits that one practices in isolation form others. What I detest is encountering this atrocity at a hotel. There is no way that a sheet will not shift during sleep. Absolutely no way whatsoever. This means that the sleeper’s body will of necessity end up touching the blanket. Given that there is zero chance that hotels wash blankets every single day, this means we all share our bed with a crowd of strangers every time we stay in such a place. And that’s all kinds of disgusting.

It is a mystery why more hotels don’t purchase actual blanket covers instead of forcing their patrons to come into direct contact with the skin cells and bodily fluids of complete strangers. Look how much better a real blanket cover looks:

My hair is now the biggest it has ever been and it takes hard work to squeeze it under the swimming cap. When I finally manage to get it all under the cap, I look like a person with hydrocephalus. I’m afraid I will one day cause a heart attack to one of the senior citizens who come in for water aerobics class.

Since I’m stuck at the dentist’s anyway, here is what I’ve been meaning to discuss. Breaking Bad offers such a passionate and angry indictment of machismo that I’m wondering what has suddenly changed to make this not only possible but relevant to so many people. The show feels like it was written either by a bunch of enraged feminists or a crowd of rabid nerds who detest traditional masculinity. Even I don’t hate patriarchal masculinity as much as the creators of this show do.

I’m now thinking that I might have made a mistake when I stopped watching television. There seems to be a huge shift in popular approaches to gender roles (probably because of the recession), and I’ve missed it.

My dentist has her office 200 feet away from my house. So whenever I try to sneak by on my way home, she pulls me in with a happy, “Since you are here anyway, let’s get some more work done!”

After the ravages pregnancy inflicted on my teeth, the dentist will have work to do for years to come.

I’m typing this from a dental chair, by the way.

I just heard on the news that Yale has been shut down due to reports of an armed man on campus. I hope this turns out to he a false scare, although nothing criminal happening in New Haven will surprise me.