Hell and Israel

Today in baby-related news it’s what we, Russian-speaking Jews, call “hell and Israel.” She screams, barfs, and gives me angry, resentful looks in between these exciting pastimes. My eardrums hurt because I keep forgetting that in order not to be rendered deaf by the sound of artillery fire, soldiers should keep their mouths open.

Today is the 9th anniversary of the day N and I met but the day started with N’s car refusing to start and proceeded right into “hell and Israel” for me. We will now try to salvage the anniversary of the best relationship known to humanity with a massive takeout order of sashimi and alcohol-free Guinness beer.

P.S. I hope nobody takes offence to “hell and Israel.” We are a culture of inventive, sarcastic ways of speaking.

Equally to Blame

I won’t even link to New York Times’s stupid, stupid, STUPID 😠😈😬👹 article on public colleges in Illinois. Blah, blah, the governor and the Democrats in the Congress can’t reach an agreement, blah blah. Yeah, the psycho murderer and his hostages did not reach an agreement. They are totally equally to blame.

And this is how many people in the state think. Although I don’t know how advanced one’s dementia has to be for one to forget that while we had a Dem governor we did have a budget. And with stupid Rauner we don’t have a budget. But yeah, it’s totally both sides’ fault.

Idiots abound.

A Great Surprise

Talking about Hispanics, I just saw a group of 5 Hispanic men working on a construction project down the street. This was so unusual that I stopped right there with my pram and gawked. There are many construction projects going on in the area but I never saw a single Hispanic anywhere. I would almost feel less surprised if I saw a group of 5 elephants hanging around that construction site.

It’s Not All on Trump

Let’s not blame only on Trump the existence of a worldview where a fellow born in Indiana is not treated like all the rest of folks born in Indiana because his parents were Mexican. Let’s not attribute to Trump the idea that having a Mexican relative somewhere in your genealogy makes you prone to experiencing a mental collapse whenever Mexico is mentioned.

It was not Trump who inspired a crowd of overfed brats to wail about the horrible damage the Clinton campaign’s use of the word abuela caused to the very special psyches they inherited from their Mexican great-grandparents. It wasn’t Trump who came up with the idea that a third cousin twice removed with a vaguely Hispanic last name entitles one to bully and persecute a colleague for referring to soccer as football.

All Trump did was take the “identity above all” philosophy to its logical conclusion. If having a Mexican (Salvadoran, Moroccan, Estonian, etc) grandma makes you uniquely sensitive to the word Mexico (Salvador,  etc), then maybe you can’t be a judge. Maybe you should nurse the psychic wounds caused by the presence of a debilitating Mexicanness in your family tree somewhere outside the public realm.

Whenever you make the argument that your sensibilities are tragically damaged by microaggresions of all sorts because you are related to a Mexican (or because you are a woman), prepare for this argument to be used against you.