The descent into Baltimore was long, and my ears were completely plugged. When I arrived at my hotel, I could barely hear anything. In order to avoid accidentally screaming at the receptionist, I silently handed him the paper with the reservation N had gotten for me. (He’s the hotel and flight specialist in the family.)

“Oh, hello, Mrs. N,” the receptionist said, looking at the paper. “Let’s me pull up your reservation.” 

He clicked a few keys, stared at the screen, and his face fell. He looked at me, at my paper, at the screen, clicked some more, stared some more, and started shifting uncomfortably.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. N,” he mumbled finally. “There’s something. . . erm. . . something that will possibly be upsetting that I need to communicate to you.”

“Ah, they must have given my room to somebody else because I came in late,” I thought.

But I was wrong. 

“Mrs. N, your husband seems to have placed another woman in your room,” the receptionist said, his voice trembling. “Her name is Professor Bulochkina.”

“It’s OK,” I reassured the poor receptionist who probably feared a huge scandal. “I’m Bulochkina.”

And hey, these are the Eastcoasters who think we are flyover podunksters while they can’t imagine the situation where married people have different last names. 

This is a funnier story than even my notorious one-night stand story.

All news channels and sources in my newsfeed are obsessively condemning the ACA repeal. . . and I have no idea why I’m supposed to care.

It wasn’t a secret that this would happen. Trump said he’d repeal the ACA at every rally. In fact, he often led with this statement. And people voted for him. Or they didn’t care enough to organize (or organize more actively) for somebody else, which is the same thing.

And it wasn’t just Trump. Republicans started saying they wanted the ACA repealed 7 years ago. This is, arguably, a single most unifying issue for the party. They’ve been talking about the need to repeal Obamacare at every opportunity. And in the 7 years they’ve been doing it, they kept winning every election.

There was no duplicity here, no lie. The resolve to repeal the ACA was blared from every news outlet for years. Unless you are yesterday’s immigrant from the Moon, you had to know that Republicans wanted to repeal the ACA. And still, people voted for them every time they elected a Republican for Senate, Congress, or the White House. 

So here’s what we have: people voted, voted, voted and voted for a certain party, giving it majorities everywhere. And the party in question proceeded to give the people exactly what it had been promising for the better part of a decade. That’s democracy for you. 

Zygmunt Bauman died this past January. I found out about it from a student’s presentation and almost burst down in tears. It’s very inconsiderate of Bauman to just go and die on us right when the world is ready to hear what he’s been saying for decades. He could have taken a better care of his health and not smoked like a chimney, for instance. His life didn’t belong just to himself. And yes, he was 91 when he died, so what? 91, 101 – he could have dragged it out first the sake of humanity. 

This is turning into an unwelcome trend. First, novelist Rafael Chirbes kicks the bucket way too early. Then philosopher Ulrich Beck bites it prematurely. And now it’s lights out on Bauman. And if I sound not too serious about it, that’s because I’m too upset to be serious. 

I have decided to start a Bauman collection. I’m buying and reading everything he’s written  (that has been translated into English, of course.) If there’s no more Bauman to provide insights (and nobody else of his stature I know of), I’ll have to become a Bauman onto myself and figure shit out for myself.

Taking Uber to the airport turned out to be a mistake this time. The driver, a middle-aged chicken farmer, turned out to be into extreme heat and massive amounts of perfume. The car was a cloyingly smelly sauna. And then he got lost, so the trip lasted twice as long.

I’d spent half the night watching a TV show about serial killers, and after the car ended up in an abandoned junkyard, I vividly remembered several of the show’s episodes that started just like that. 

When I finally got out of the car, I was so nauseous, I had to eat an ice-cream to avoid throwing up.

God has punished me for the sin of sloth.

At my university, we have very few international students, and those who do want to come are often turned away for the most bizarre of reasons. For instance, many foreign universities don’t calculate GPAs, and their transcripts cannot be directly relayed into an American version. So students with stellar records (and their tuition money) get turned away because their diplomas don’t look exactly like US diplomas. I personally know somebody who had this problem, and she ended up not being admitted. Of course, our huge Diversity Office has zero interest in this situation. 

At the school where I did my BA, I had a similar problem. The university didn’t recognize the official language of my country, which is only the second largest country in Europe. Even in the presence of notarized translations of my documents, the university officials were refusing to accept my papers because their language seemed weird to them. 

Instead of promoting diversity through helping students resolve these silly bureaucratic issues, diversity offices and organizations do all kinds of insane things. For instance, at one university they create and put up vicious racist posters. Because the best way to promote diversity is to be openly racist. 

So what is the Left’s response to the problem of entire professions being robotized out of existence? 

No, of course, it isn’t to challenge the stranglehold of liquid capital that is marking off millions of people as dispensable human waste.

Instead, the Left is offering a flurry of books and articles arguing that work is oppressive and being unemployed and unemployable is hugely liberating. Shockingly, the authors of these books and articles are in no hurry to get liberated by giving up their jobs. Instead, they are selflessly sacrificing their own chance at immediate liberation from having a salary and a place in productive life. You’ve got to admire this eagerness to continue to be oppressed for the sake of others. 

And now please excuse me, I’ve got to get on a plane and go be oppressed at a conference all day tomorrow. 

I knew this was going to be a silly little book from the start because the cover said the author had done an MFA. Nothing but pompous airheads come from those programs. But Klara is teething, I’m exhausted, my brain can’t process anything complex, and I still need to read something. So a cutesy debut by an earnest little MFA graduate would be just the ticket.

Even with these low expectations, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You stunned me with its extraordinary vapidity. There is no platitude, truism or cliche that this author doesn’t love. Every sentence leaves one wondering whether Ng has really written something this predictable. This is a novel that truly keeps you up at night with its total absence of surprises and its incapacity to meet even the lowest expectations. The depiction of Chinese Americans is beyond stereotypical, which, I’m sure, is largely responsible for the novel’s success. Because in case you are unaware, this is a huge bestseller. 

And now let me go and try to get the cloyingly sweet taste of the novel’s utterly predictable happy ending out of my mouth. 

From his desk in a downtown workshop, Greg Hankerson is at war with a Chinese company half a world away. Mr. Hankerson and his wife, Sim, own Vintage Industrial, which designs and makes antique-style tables, cabinets and other furniture.

This is hilarious. The fellow makes fake antiques and is upset that Alibaba sells fakes of his fakes.

The situation is an outgrowth of the insane patent laws invented in the US. People want to patent and copyright everything including air. 

When I’m very tired, I have blackouts, like a drunk. For example, I was observing a teaching demo today, opened my palm and found a small red plastic object there that I’d never seen before. I have no idea where it came from. It was creepy as shit. I don’t know where the object is now because it left as mysteriously as it had come. 

So tonight, I come home from work and I see a large, colorful box with toddler basketball. And I don’t have any recollection of ordering it. 

I told my sister about it and she said she’d told me about buying toddler basketball for her own son.

“You said it was a great idea and you wanted to buy one, too” she explained.

I, of course, had no memory of the conversation. 

“Did you buy it and send it to me?” I asked. 

My sister is the mother of two small kids and she is even more tired than me. 

“I don’t think I sent it,” she said doubtfully. “Am I going nuts? Did I send it and forget?”

“I hope so,” I said. “I’d rather you were the nutso and not me.”

After I fretted for an hour about having gone completely crazy and buying a toy I don’t remember buying, I shared my problem with N.

“Oh, I bought it,” he said calmly.

Now I just have to convince the man to own up to sneaking onto campus and covertly placing a red plastic gewgaw in my palm to mess with my brain. 

Are life coaches a response to robotization?

The politics of rich people. 

David Brooks wrote something interesting. Yes, really. 

States are fighting the ridiculous tyranny of license agreements. 

But Hillary is fat. 

Internet is not causing political polarization. 

The source of the Obama wiretapping statement. Prepare to be shocked. No, not really. 

Why is it so shocking that conservatives vote against their financial interests when that’s exactly what every liberal does as a matter of course?

A male critic is pissing himself with delight over Beauty and the Beast.

And a female critic is pissing on the male critic and on the show. 

And I’d rather get my teeth cleaned with gauze than watch the show. 

P.S. It’s not Monday, though, is it?