N and I just had a disturbing “Back in USSR” moment at the local Best Buy. We wanted to buy a refrigerator, a washer and a dryer, which – and correct me if I’m wrong – has always seemed like a fairly big, expensive purchase to me.

We selected our appliances and proceeded to pay for them. And that’s when problems started. The washer I selected was nowhere to be found. The warehouse and the other stores in the region didn’t have it.

“Just give me the one you have right here in the store, then,” I suggested.

“No, we can’t do this,” the manager said. “We can’t remove items from display.”

“Why not?” I persisted. “It’s right here, I want it, what’s the problem?”

But the idea of selling me the washer “from display” seemed to be too disturbing.

So we decided just to buy the refrigerator. For an hour we walked around the store while the manager struggled with the computer.

“I’m sorry, what seems to be the problem?” I finally asked.

“The system is down. I can’t get the purchase to go through.”

“Can we just pay and you will put the purchase into the computer later?”

“No!” the manager exclaimed. “We have a system and we have to follow the system.”

I always thought that “the system” was called capitalism and was quite simple: I give you money and you give me goods in return. Supply and demand, I demand, you supply. But no, it seems like bureaucracy has penetrated into the most sacred redoubts of the capitalist society. Now people who want to get rid of a significant amount of cash can’t do that until mountains of correct paperwork get filled out.

So we just left having purchased nothing.

“In the USSR we also couldn’t purchase any appliances,” N commented. “But there at least they didn’t torture us by showing us this enormous selection of goods and then refusing to sell them.”

In developed countries, people in their sixties are enormously healthier than their peers from, say, 100 years ago (or from today’s Ukraine). They are active, energetic, engaged, they look and feel young. Good healthcare, good cosmetics, good hygiene, and good abundant food retard physical aging dramatically. I remember the feeling of complete shock when my mother and I traveled to her native village in Ukraine and met an ancient old lady who turned out to be my mother’s former classmate. The woman looked like she could easily be my mother’s grandmother.

The greatest problem of aging lies in the area where you can’t buy off disintegration with money or technological advances. A tendency towards intellectual rigidity sets in human beings at around the age of 35. If very specific efforts are not made to combat it, we see beautiful, physically agile and spry 60-year-olds who, sadly, are nowhere nearly as agile intellectually.

Intellectual labor doesn’t stave off this rigidity. All of those professors who keep teaching pretty much the same thing for decades, scholars who keep rewriting the same idea they had 30 years ago, and intellectuals who recycle the old instead of generating the new are all products of this affliction.

Intellectual rigidity makes people incapable of finding fresh solutions to problems, gets them bogged down in endless feuds that last forever and start because of something incredibly trivial, and makes them an intolerable burden on collagues and family members. Since these folks possess a lot of physical energy, they can create quite a lot of disruption.

It is very important to start battling intellectual rigidity as early as possible. Most people don’t even notice the moment when their reading list begins to slide more and more towards the Franzens, the Wolitzers, mystery, sci fi, fantasy, or YA. I know several academics who honestly believe they read a lot but who have not read more than 3 serious books last year. And this is just one area where rigidity sets in. What people watch, what they talk about, what they do in their free time – it is easy to get bogged down but it’s hard to get one’s intellect back to full-time work once it’s been idling for a while.

Some people really love their husbands and prepare beautiful surprises for them to celebrate the anniversaries of their relationship.

Seven years is usually a critical time in a relationship. People who manage to withstand the crisis of 7 years stay together. Until 15 and 25, which are also considered dangerous to relationships. I’m not feeling the crisis yet but it’s only day 1 of the eighth year.

We are continuing the celebrations tonight with some really cool folks who are coming over to explore our town and its manifold culinary possibilities.

Have you heard of this?

FLOTUS for Senate?

It wasn’t that long ago that such a slogan would seem absurd, but political wags are beginning to wonder whether Michelle Obama is mulling a run for Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk’s seat in 2016.

I’m still living in “not that long ago” because the whole thing sounds beyond absurd to me. I happen to live in Illinois and I kind of prefer to have people representing our state who are actual politicians. I must be horribly outdated and not ready to face the reality of politics turning into an unadulterated reality-TV show that I myself predicted recently.

I’m so upset right now, people, that I need to vent here on the blog because I’m not very fit to talk live to human beings at this moment. I have a lot to do today and it’s a very tough day as it is, so I need to get over this soon.

Today is the 9-month anniversary of my C-section, so I’m already just hanging in there, kind of. And then I just had to find out that an acquaintance has been using what happened to me, my tragedy, for manipulative purposes. It tuns out that this creature was so traumatized by what I had do undergo that this is somehow an excuse for her treating people in a shitty way. It is not a nice feeling to find out that I’m being trotted out, without even being informed about it, to justify stinky behavior on somebody’s part.

I’ve been making enormous efforts not to turn my tragedy into everybody else’s. I have been completely professional at work and never shirked my duties even minimally, although if everybody ever had an excuse to do so, that would be me. I have not forced anybody to become a hostage of my emotional states, I have not treated anybody shabbily because I’m sad, I’m dealing with everything with the help of people who have offered help. And now this sorry excuse for a human being is using the death of my child as a self-serving mechanism. 

And if this at least were a relative or a close friend who does have a genuine emotional response to the situation, I could understand that. This person, however, is a very distant acquaintance with whom I have maybe talked a dozen times in my entire life. And by the way, right after it happened, she behaved in a very poor way towards me, too. 

It’s OK, I will deal with it, just like I’ve always dealt with everything else. But God, how I hate these spoiled divas who need to exploit the problems of others because they’ve never had any of their own.

Why does the new President of Ukraine have to be sworn in on the Bible? What’s with the stupid parroting of the Americans? The Bible means something to many Americans, which is why there is at least a logic to having it at the inauguration. In Ukraine, the Bible has meant nothing to the overwhelming majority for almost 100 years.

Nothing disgusts me more that this ridiculous need to fake an interest in religion among the post-Soviet people. Whenever I see Putin make the sign of the cross, I just feel creeped out. Do Ukrainians have to follow down this path of complete idiocy (and sacrilegious profanation, by the way)?

I spend so much time at the gym these days and there are so many TV screens there that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is now like a relative. Fox News can now abandon the dead-end stories about Benghazi and IRS investigations and clamp on to a scandal that, if covered correctly, can actually have an impact at the elections of 2014 and 2016. The story is being picked up by the international press because, unlike Benghazi, this is something capable of attracting many people’s attention.

We have no access to the information available to the military, so we cannot possibly know what happened. The danger of the Bergdahl debacle is that it falls neatly into the vision of the President as somebody who decides to improve a situation he doesn’t understand, rushes in half-cocked, and messes everything up completely. There have been five years to figure out what to do about Bergdahl, yet his rescue looks unprepared, uncoordinated, and pushed through without any consideration of the consequences. This is the same pattern we have seen just the other week with the President’s plan to “rescue” higher ed. The higher ed has been there for a long time, it has suffered from serious structural problems for at least two decades, this is not something that just emerged. There has been time to address these problems in a measured and step-by-step manner.

We all know that there is great demand for stories that would make Obama look incompetent and flailing. But he’s doing all he can to make sure these stories are easy to concoct. There was not a great supporter of Obama than me both times when he was elected (mostly because of the “But just look at the other guy, brrrrr” approach) but I can’t deny that I’ve started avoiding American news because I don’t want to see yet another story that would make me even more disappointed.

P.S. I have started doing the same thing concerning Obama that I have been doing for years regarding the Canadian government of Stephen Harper. Whenever a fresh story about either Obama or the Harperites gets reported, I start mumbling under my breath, “The economy, the economy, at least they managed to improve the economy. (Or prevent it from getting to the point where it would need improvement, as in Harper’s case.”)

So let’s discuss. Do you feel less or more enthusiastic about Obama than you were back in 2008? Did he live up to your expectations? What was the biggest disappointment (if any)?

And here is my own small home improvement project:

I wanted these outlets to match my fireplace but there were none to be found. So now I’m staining and lacquering them on my own. It’s been two days because you need to let them dry between coatings.

Of course, I made a mistake almost right at the start when I needed to clean my brush, glanced at the instructions, read “immerse in water”, and immediately immersed. Two seconds later I noticed the words “under no conditions” right before “immerse in water.” This reminded me that I still needed to tell my students to use the totality of textual evidence for their analyses of texts. The brush, in the meanwhile, was ruined.

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In the last six months, the word “Maidan” ceased to refer, among Ukrainians, to Kiev’s Independence Square and has come to stand for the protesters who have been occupying it since late November.

The Maidan is now not a place but a movement of people who stood up for their human dignity and brought down a corrupt regime. Many of them have decided that their mission is complete now that Ukraine has its new democratically elected president. Many, however, are unable to leave.

Today the Maidan offers a striking sight. It is filled with tents, shacks, makeshift shelters. Some people have started to build a house right in the middle of the square because they don’t envision being able to leave the Maidan for a long time to come. Clothesline, small children, household pets, pots and pans – the Maidan is slowly acquiring all of the characteristics of a slum.

Everybody in Kiev realizes that having a full-scale favela in the middle of the capital is not a good idea. The problem is that nobody knows how to get the people living in the square to leave. Removing them by force would be too reminiscent of Yanukovich’s attempts to evict the protesters from the square, and we all know how that went for the former president.

When journalists and passers-by ask the inhabitants of the Maidan when they are planning to leave, the former protesters become visibly disturbed. Most of them have families who are hoping they would finally come home, but the allure of the Maidan is stronger. This is the place where they experienced heroicism, self-abnegation, camaraderie and found a sense of purpose. Going back to the humdrum existence of trying to make a living and get by is unappealing after the experience of being responsible for the very existence of your country.

Ukrainians have always been great at the extraordinary and the grandiose. The heroics of fulfilling repetitive daily tasks and carrying one’s individual, rather than collective, burden are less attractive, though. For many of those who found their sense of purpose in the Maidan, the square might prove not a beginning of their journey towards a better life but, tragically, its end.

Some people are hinting that I’m a lousy driver but see how well I parked? And that’s on the very first try and barefoot (I was coming home from getting a pedicure).

I never try to impose my lifestyle choices on others but here I just have to say: if you get an opportunity not to learn to drive until the age of 38, please take it. Suddenly being able to go just anywhere at this advanced age is a very powerful feeling.

And now excuse me because I have to go to a home improvement store for the third time today.