I finally removed the Bernie sticker from my car’s bumper. I couldn’t throw it away for sentimental reasons, so I placed it inside on the dashboard.

I realized that if he’d ran against anybody but Hillary, I would have totally supported Bernie. Even though I insist that his college plan is bizarre. But since it’s Hillary, I didn’t have a choice.

What I don’t get is the existence of such an insane number of short-sleeved onesies. When is a baby supposed to wear all of them? In winter it’s too cold and in summer it’s way too cold because of the AC. We just end up rotating the same few long-sleeved ones in the end.

I thought N would like the show Numbers because one of the characters is a mathematician but he hated it for that very reason. He doesn’t like the sacred name of mathematics to be taken in vain.

The disgusting daughter of the disgusting Fujimori conceded defeat in the presidential election in Peru. I know nothing about her opponent but I’m glad that, at least, she’s been defeated. Maybe there is hope for Latin America, after all.

A blogger attended Trump’s speech at a gold club with a $200,000 membership, and this is what especially shocked him:

When Trump said, “[W]e are all suffering and we’re suffering big league and it’s getting worse,” a roomful of extremely rich fucks cheered in agreement. Yeah, they were suffering, these pampered pricks and pussies who probably made more money under the Obama administration than in the rest of their luxurious lives.

I know, the capacity of the very pampered to feel sorry for themselves is overwhelming. The children of these extraordinarily rich people are wailing “We are in pain” on college campuses as they wait for their trust funds to mature and allow them to buy their own memberships in the $200,000 country clubs. And we are all so duped by the philosophy of “everybody is what s/he says s/he is” that we believe they are the poor, marginalized victims of racism and sexism that they claim to be.

Judy Lydon had a busy routine as a maternity nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She moved from room to room taking care of women and their new babies, checking vital signs, changing diapers, helping mothers hold and feed their newborns for the first time.

Then came the new computer system.

Now, she says, she’s become a captive of the keyboard, spending far more of her time recording every blood pressure reading, every feeding, every diaper change. The demands of the new system are so taxing and time-consuming, Lydon said, that the computer has come between her and her patients.

Thank you, sweet dear computer. Anything that keeps nurses away from mothers for at least a few minutes is fantastic. I’m still traumatized by the unending stream of loud and obnoxious cheeriness that nurses were directing at me in the hospital. I know they meant well but three days of hearing their LOUD, happy chirping every 15 minutes, day and night, almost did me in.

I don’t think I will ever forget the sweet moments when the nurse would turn away to the computer and, for a few blessed moments, would stop staring at and talking to me. The few times when the computer was off, nurses did things like wake me up at 3 am to give me a repeat lecture about the importance of not taking the baby to sleep in my bed. Which I was not doing and not planning to do. There is also the endearing tradition of waking a person up to ask if she feels any pain.

The only glimmers of humanity that I could see behind this fake and LOUD cheeriness of the medical personnel would occur whenever the computer took a minute to start and a nurse would get a moment to relax into her human personality as she stared at the dark screen.

The doctors and nurses in the article whine that computer management systems slow them down. We, as patients, are asked to side with medical professionals who are upset that something throws a wrench into their conveyor-belt approach to treating patients. In my experience, though, anything that slows down a doctor or a nurse and makes them stop their mechanical dispensation of prescriptions and actually see a patient is a blessing. It is kind of sad that computers are being accused of preventing people from acting too robotic and inhuman.

In his autobiography, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa tells of an enormous influence that books by Alexandre Dumas had on him as an adolescent and a budding writer. As typical Soviet kids from families of intelligentsia, N and I also adored these books as kids. It is strange and beautiful to imagine that they were so crucial both to Llosa in the 1950s Peru and to me in the 1980s USSR. Of course, I didn’t become one of the world’s greatest writers like Llosa but my life was enriched by Dumas’s books nonetheless.

Long before the Internet or even cinema, kids all over the world shared the experience of traveling to the adventure-filled world of these books. And nobody considered them to be “young adult” or any crap like that. They were simply great books.