Is it a new customer service fad to ask shoppers what their plans are for the weekend? Three weeks in a row I stare stupidly at store assistants and cashiers without the slightest idea as to what I’m supposed to say in response to their cheerful, “So. Got any fun plans for this wonderful, sunny day?” They don’t seem to be content with a yes or a no. But I’m pretty sure it’s not a detailed account of my schedule for the day that they want to hear. I tried deflecting by asking what their plans were but it sounded like mockery given that they were clearly working.

Just as I mastered the correct way to handle the interminable hi-how-are-yous, life throws me this new sociability curveball.

N is taking Klara around the house and telling her the names of objects she sees.

“This is a computer,” he tells her. “These are books. This is the kitchen sink. And this, Klarochka,” he says, picking a package of beets, “is identity.”

People who take identity too seriously are just sad, and we want to help our Klara avoid that burden.

One of the differences between Russians and Ukrainians is that the former think borscht is soup while the latter know it’s a philosophy of existence. You can find out a lot about people based on how they make and eat their borscht.

People who come from the Ukrainian countryside, put salo in their borscht. They do hard physical labor, and need to raise the caloric content of borscht because this will be their entire meal. When people move from the countryside to a city, they drop salo from their borscht.

Ukrainians who are poor and whose borscht ends up being too thin, eat it with a very hot red pepper to mask the lack of flavor.

Russians who are poor use a different money-saving approach. They skip the step of sautéing their vegetables in sunflower oil and just dump them raw into the stock instead. For a Ukrainian, however, it’s unimaginable that borscht can be disrespected this way.

Jewish Ukrainians like to accompany their borscht with a kotleta, instead of a slice of bread.

And I always accompany it with radishes because I’m addicted to radishes and eat them 5 times a day.

To be clear the Sander’s campaign is now justifying the continued acceptance of campaign donations on the premise that the democratic system, which they have labeled “corrupt” due to the utilization of super delegates, will now salvage THEIR chances for winning by giving them the opportunity to utilize those self same super delegates.

And it’s a good thing because who wants to support a party that nominates unqualified people for high office, thereby trivializing and sullying the office in question?

In a similar vein, a friend asked me where Hillary stood on the toilet issue, and I responded that she stood wherever the most recent focus group indicated it wanted her to stand. And that is unbelievably cool. I come from a place where nobody has cared what the people want – well, ever. I only want politicians who have no opinions, no beliefs, no personality, and who exist to transmit the will of the voters. Which has enormous drawbacks since voters are dumb. But this system is massively better than any alternative.

So good job, Bernie. Things are going exactly as they should.

When people discover I have a 3-month-old, they invariably ask how I’m sleeping. Nobody has asked so far how I’m eating. As if the disruption of eating patterns was something to sneeze at.

I feel misunderstood and at odds with the rest of humanity.

P.S. This is a humorous post, by the way. Ha ha.

There is good news, too, however. On the way to the doctor’s, I passed a house with a sign in the front yard that said, “RAUNER IS WRONG.” It’s so nice to know that I’m not entirely alone in my very sane dislike of Rauner in this town.

So everyone was all like “Go to a different OB-GYN, go to somebody less religious.” So I did. And here is what the new OB-GYN came up with to make patients feel totally not judged for having aborted. Just in case you are not entirely sure how your doctor feels about your reproductive choices, lift up your eyes as you are laying on the examination table, and encounter this, you dirty whore.

I never aborted but even I felt judged because who knows what in my medical history might prompt the doctor to start praying for my sins. I’m worried that unless I’ve given virgin birth, I might not be pure enough. 

There are things people do without having verbalized or consciously accepted their intention to do them. The lack of conscious planning, however, doesn’t make the consequences of these actions any less devastating and doesn’t relieve anybody of the responsibility for them.

The elites – politicians, journalists, public figures – are probably not saying to themselves, “Let me thin out the competition that my children will be facing by holding back as many of their peers as possible.” President Obama was surely not thinking, “The joke is on you, losers” as he made impassioned speeches about the “mistaken” belief that a college degree was necessary to get a good job, all the while planning to send his daughter to Harvard. And it’s not like anybody is doubting that she won’t stop at a single degree either.

Nobody, I’m sure, is cynical enough purposefully to feed people crippling lies about the possibility of reversing the changes that have taken place since the 1970s. But the sad truth is that there is a whole class of people who are gaining huge economic advantages from perpetuating these lies. And I’m convinced that there is an unacknowledged, unconfessed desire to keep these advantages that lies at the root of the reluctance to say, “Folks, this party is dead. Time for you to move on because I already have.”

I don’t believe that anybody who is not saying this genuinely wants to reduce inequality. I feel queasy every time I see yet another weepy article about inequality whose author reaps the benefits of feeling all moral and caring while doing everything possible to ensure that inequality grows.

All of the presidential candidates are actively and shamelessly contributing to growing inequality. Hillary maybe does it a bit less, which is one reason I like her.

Inequality grows in proportion to how many people have accepted that the technological revolution is irreversible and how many are still hoping it will somehow magically go away. The former constitute a minority and are figuring out how to inscribe themselves into the present and the future. The latter are hiding from the unpleasant reality behind vapid fantasies that there is some law, some presidential decree, some decision that a benign, all-powerful authority can make to ensure that the world never moves past 1973. The longer they inhabit this fantasy world, the greater is the gap between them and those who have moved on, both metaphorically and literally.

I don’t believe that the presidential candidates are promising to bring back the past out of a consciously evil “let’s dupe the rubes” attitude. Rather, this is a result of inertia and indifference. “I’ll bring back the nation-state and manufacturing jobs” is just what you say for voters to like you. And since none of the candidates is young, their inclination to dwell on the future is limited.

Of course, history is stronger than politics, and the past is dead and gone. Voters will not see any of these promises fulfilled. They will only fall behind as they wait for fantasy to become reality. This will only make them more disaffected, lost, angry, and distrustful.

It’s disappointing that the Obama administration seriously considers issuing decrees about the deeply idiotic toilet issue but never bothered to do anything about the destruction of public education by state governments. We have students who will not be able to continue their education next year because they are not getting their grants. We have workers who can’t get seen by a doctor in spite of paying huge insurance premiums. But these are not the issues that this administration deigns to notice. And that’s quite disgusting.