April is the cruelest month because it comes on the heels of February and March. In our hemisphere, this means that we arrive in April after months of very little direct sunlight, suffering from avitaminosis, low energy, excessive weight put on during the limited mobility of the snowy winter, and exhaustion. All of this affects our mental health and makes us sluggish, moody, and sad.

This is why I’m starting a 13-week challenge that will help me get through the difficult months of February, March and April and arrive in May in an energized, healthy state of mind and body.

Everybody is welcome to do the SELF-CARE AND HAPPINESS challenge with me. It will consist of weekly sub-challenges that can be started or abandoned at any point. It will start with easier tasks and grow a little harder, but just a little. Feel free to do all of them, some of them, or none of them. The goal of the challenge is to practice consistent self-care and psychological hygiene.

I warn you, though, that for people who don’t love themselves a whole lot, this challenge might present quite a challenge.

Apart from the weekly challenges that will appear before the start of the week, there will be middle of the week check-ins and unscheduled exercises.

Here are the weekly challenges:

WEEK I: SHEDDING THE OLD SKIN

WEEK II: MEET THE SKY

WEEK III: PROTECT THE FIRE

I use my time at the gym to catch up on my TV watching. Today, I was at one of those stationary bikes that have little TVs attached to them and watched a Fox News program on the 2016 election campaign. The show discussed whether a certain issue should be central to Hillary Clinton’s possible election bid in 2016. I thought I would ask you, folks, as a riddle what that crucial issue was but I realized it wasn’t humanly possible to guess.

The issue in question was the Monica Lewinsky scandal because, apparently, “that was real war on women.”

The idea that Monica Lewinsky should be discussed at length if Hillary decides to run was initially introduced by Rand Paul, another presidential hopeful. His PR team sucks something major (and yes, I could have made many very dirty jokes here but I took the high road). After this comment, poor Rand Paul has opened himself to endless discussions of how Bill’s oral sex act 15 years ago was the most memorable sexual experience Rand Paul has had in all these years. For somebody as pinch-faced and fussy as Rand Paul, this is a dangerous image to cultivate.

I’m not passive and my extremely aggressive attacks on anybody who annoys me are notorious. Still, I don’t hate the word “problematic.” Do you? Do you agree it’s a word for meek women?

Facebook is no treat to blogging, but this is. We need to protest and denounce these kinds of things wherever they appear. We need to save blogging because its power is significant.

We were invited to watch the Superbowl by a local family but we are not going. I’m too afraid of people going all scarily religious on me.

BBC celebrates “the year of the whores.”

Pornographic tiles from the XVIIIth century are too sexy for us to look at in the XXIst. What sexual revolution?

If you subscribe to the Economist, you are wasting your money. That is a magazine written by complete idiots who project their silly beliefs about the US onto other cultures without even trying to analyze how things work elsewhere. Here is a shining example: “The state is one of the chief obstacles to Russia’s modernisation. During the 2000s the number of bureaucrats almost doubled. A quarter of the workforce is employed in the public sector.” And from the same article:  “Although Russia still boasts some of the most entrepreneurial and hardy businessmen, who are determined to succeed and continue to invest, many burn out and leave. Economic activity in the country is waning, mergers and acquisitions are drying up and capital and brains are flowing out of the country.” I could keep quoting because every word of that article is an exercise in complete idiocy.

Some discussions on blogs are even better than the posts they follow. See this: “The women assistant professors complain about the oppression they suffer from second wave feminists who made it possible for them to get jobs en masse. I of course like Kimberlé Crenshaw but I am not at all impressed with intersectionality used as weapon in the battle of competitive misery.” Brilliant.

“There will be no net gain over the long term in manufacturing jobs in the US on in China. In fact in thirty years, there will be nearly no humans working in manufacturing anywhere on the planet.” Exactly. A Bachelor’s degree will be the new high-school diploma. If you don’t have one, you will get lumpenized for sure.

An interesting discussion of what constitutes “making it.” Do you agree that it is not knowing how much things cost?

A survivor discusses what makes people join oppressive patriarchal religious groups.

People at the link are having a hissy fit over the following comment even though it is absolutely right: “There are millions of jobs that are available and others that are emerging that require skills that people don’t have now and if they had them they could fill those jobs.”

Banks prevent people from accessing their own money. Everybody is shocked, but in Canada, with its mafia-controlled banking, this has been the case forever.

Western Europeans are hopeless, my friends. Even the extremely talented Helen Graham ends her new book with the completely idiotic statement that the reasons why ultra-nationalism is on the rise today everywhere in Europe are the depoliticization of the majority and lack of knowledge about the past.

Immigration is not mentioned even as a contributing factor. Graham pretends to have no idea that those who know nothing about a society’s past and are not integrated enough to participate politically are likely to be found in massive numbers among immigrants.

People seem terrified of their own shadow.

So whose husband heard his wife mention to her sister on the phone that she’d been staring at Michael Kors handbags online for two hours, got up at 6 am, researched said handbags, and bought one for the adored person?

Yes.

Butter is the most fashionable brand of beauty products this season. In the photo you can see my new Butter nail polish. When I first wore it to class last Tuesday, students kept grabbing my hands to see it because it’s pretty.

And this is how fresh and recent it looks on Day 5 of wear. Of course, it’s a lot expensive than regular nail polish. However, I’m not rich enough to buy cheap polish that will start chipping on Day 2.

Nothing is worse than high-maintenance polish that requires constant attention after you apply it. The ideal polish gives you no reason to think about it for days on end. You end up using a lot less of it because it requires no touch-ups, so it isn’t really that much more expensive than the cheap flakey brands.

The color I’m wearing here is Molly Coddled but I will show others when this one wears off.

How weird is it that a restaurant should be called “Old Spaghetti Factory”? I see “old spaghetti” and I feel like avoiding it at all costs.

Spaghetti probably get more disgusting than any other food when it’s old. If anything should be eaten immediately, it’s spaghetti.

There is also a metaphysical reason why Germany is doing so well. This is the only country that is dedicated to making at least some kind of reparations for the damage it caused with its totalitarian past. Germans have taken a responsibility for the crimes of their progenitors and are expiating their collective guilt. The result can only be a healthier society that, of course, produces more.

Germans have sought out everybody whose labor was exploited by the Third Reich and is paying out reparations. Back in Ukraine, an illiterate Baba Motya whose apartment was across the landing from ours started receiving cheques from Germany back in 1990s. She had been forced to go to Germany to work on a farm for no pay during the WWII, and now Germans were trying to pay her for that work.

In the meanwhile, it took Spain forever to grant citizenship to the members of the International Brigades who had defended democracy in Spain in 1936-9. It isn’t like the country is so overpopulated that there won’t be any room for the few surviving brigadists (who are probably not planning to move in anyways). But even making this inexpensive gesture of recognition took a lot of effort.

And in my part of the world nobody is getting compensated or recognized in any form whatsoever.

This is why hopes are high for Germany’s future, not too low for Spain’s, and non-existent for us.

I think that the trend of taking away features and choice from software users is not a singular phenomenon. This authoritarian mindset must come from somewhere, and I believe it mirrors the move towards surveillance and control in society at large.

There is no reason for developers to remove features that many users depend on other than the desire to control.

I agree completely with this blogger. This is definitely a real trend. As the identities become more fluid and less prescribed, people begin to feel panicky and terrified. They need an organizing principle, a controlling authority because too much freedom is scary. So the same society that is shedding the limitations of identities (gender, sexual, racial, class, regional, etc.) is choosing to discipline itself through other forms of control.

This is a form of collective self-flagellation.