You never know where on your physique baby vomit will end up. Which means that appearing in public with a huge patch of vomit visible to everybody but you is inevitable.

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A debate between Trump and Bernie would make for great television but Trump will slaughter Bernie, and I don’t want to see Bernie hurt.

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Trying to get our Textbook Services to provide me with a textbook I will use to teach a course next semester is harder than getting Putin to release Nadiya Savchenko. Every time I try to do it, I feel like some sort of a criminal in the process of doing something untoward.

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Klara’s paternal grandmother doesn’t seem to know that Klara exists. It’s just as well because her anti-semitic heart might give out if she hears such a clearly Jewish name. 

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We now have DirecTV, and it elongates human beings on our old TV set. This makes everybody who appears on the screen look very emaciated. I’m now afraid to watch America’s Next Top Model on this set.

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N’s favorite TV show is American Greed because it feeds his nostalgia of the post-Soviet 1990s in Russia.

Reader delagar reminded me of how much I love Richard Russo, the only American writer who, in my opinion, writes the kind of literature that is not a waste of time. Russo wrote Nobody’s Fool in 1993 but the novel is scarily relevant to what is happening in the country right now.

Nobody’s Fool is a novel about men who fail. Its male characters belong to different age groups and professions, they have different levels of educational attainment but they all share an uncanny capacity to fail at absolutely everything. They fail as workers, professionals, husbands, fathers, friends, citizens, lovers, neighbors, even pet owners. And as soon as they are done failing, they start all over again.

The question that lies at the heart of this novel is whether readers will find these male characters quirky and endearing or if they will notice how casually but relentlessly these men take their frustrations out on women. Beaten, abused, jailed, humiliated, dead, discarded, and infected women are everywhere in the novel but the male characters don’t notice their suffering and only see them as obstacles to getting what they want whenever they want it. Readers will either subscribe to this vision of women or will manage to resist it.

This is a complex novel, and Russo brings to it another layer. His favorite subject that he keeps writing about is bad parents and the damage they unthinkingly inflict on their children. The novel is funny but it’s the kind of humor that covers up something so horrible, so degraded that a mere glimpse of it makes one recoil. 

Highly recommended.

So I finally read the really fun article in The New Yorker about students acting freaky at Oberlin. The article reminded me of how back in 1990, I was going on an exchange trip to Great Britain with a bunch of kids from the families of Soviet apparatchiks. I got invited because I actually spoke English, and it would have been weird to bring an entire group of students from a specialized English-language school without a single person who could at least say, “Hi, how are you?”

“I can’t believe we are going to Great Britain!” I exclaimed once we got on a train that was to take us to Moscow.

“I know!” a student sitting next to me responded. “Such a drag! I can’t believe my Dad is sending me to stupid England again. I told him a hundred times that I’m sick and tired of it.”

The girl was completely sincere, and her pain was real. She was from a class of people who traveled the world frequently and with ease, and my excitement of a regular Soviet child who saw little difference, in terms of their sheer improbability, between a trip to London and a trip to the Moon was alien to her.

Oberlin students, too, are, as they claim, in actual pain. A human being can’t exist without something to fight for, something to want, something to overcome. People begin to invent suffering when there is none in order to retain their full humanity. 

One of the students in the article did find an answer to the problem of her incurable melancholy of opulence:

She wanted to get as far away from the United States as she could. “Working my piece of land somewhere and living autonomously—that’s the dream,” she said. “Just getting the eff out of America. It’s a sinking ship.”

This, I believe, is a great solution. Maybe there should be a rotation of sorts. Those who are tired of paradise should go away and give their space up for those who haven’t had an opportunity of getting bored with problem-free opulence. 

The daughter of the Communist Party apparatchik who hated having to go to England again died a long time ago. She got into heavy drugs back in high school and did not live to see her 25th birthday. 

Nadiya means hope in Ukrainian, by the way. And so does the Russian version of her name, Nadezhda. It was super dumb of Russians to kidnap and torture a Ukrainian woman called “hope” because the symbolism of “Russians are trying to kill hope” was the first thing that came to mind whenever anybody heard of this.

They also should have figured out that a woman who managed to become a fighter pilot in Ukraine had to have dealt with so much stupid, vicious sexist shit that she’d be indestructible. 

Gosh, these idiots can’t even kidnap a person without messing things up and making themselves look like stupid fools.

I’m crying right now because this is so wonderful. 

And of course I brought everything with me: food to feed an army of hungry infants, a stack of diapers we normally use in a week, a changing pad, dummies, a change of clothes, even a rattle she still doesn’t understand.

In short, everything except for the only thing I turned out really to need: cloths to clean spitup. It’s always like that, always.

Today I took Klara to campus for the first time to witness my new computer being installed, and of course, she had to start leaking from every place the moment we left the house. So I arrived on campus not with the clean, chic baby I left home with but with a baby that looks like a victim of habitual neglect.

And obviously, the quad has got to be in the process of being dug up, so I had to lug the car seat through a much longer route.

And the baby is spitting up again, so I got to go for the moment.

It completely slipped my mind that even a tiny baby will need a passport to travel overseas. Of course, passports are only meant for children of unemployed parents because both parents have to appear in person during regular working hours.

I only just found a moment to discover this great news: Russia didn’t manage to buy the election for the far-right party in Austria that it sponsors. All of the anti-Nazi forces in Austria had to work together in a coalition but they did manage to squeeze out a win and defeat the Putinoids.

This is the second major loss for Russians who are trying to undermine Europe by sponsoring far-right parties. The first one was the trouncing Putin’s favorite puppet Marine Le Pen got last year.

Of course, if Brexit does take place, Putin will go into paroxysms of joy. This will be a huge gift to him.

People always ask me why I say I don’t have a sense of humor. I make good jokes but I can never figure out when people try to be funny or what the humorous part of their utterances is supposed to be.

Take, for example, the linked article. I did manage to figure out that the author is trying to be funny. But I don’t understand why the persona of a beaten down infantile husband of a stupid, bossy wife who is pathetically afraid of what the neighbors might think of his reading choices is supposed to be funny. If this were published on a website for seventh graders, I could understand how the title “Phenomenology of Spirit” might sound funny. But what’s so hilarious about it on a website for academics?

I feel as excluded from the human race when I read such articles as when I dropped my phone and couldn’t take any selfies for 2 months.