Actually, I’m glad that the surgery had to be rescheduled for much earlier. Yes, my vacation had to be cut short but it’s good not to have anything looming ahead of me any longer. I’m not a patient person, and it’s much easier for me just to get it over with.

I was worried Klara wouldn’t understand why I suddenly can’t pick her up or come get her from school. I play-acted the situation with dolls, showing her how a doll gets surgery and then can’t pick up the baby dolly for a while. And she understood it extremely well. She’s a very bright child.

My sister and niece are arriving on Monday to help me with Klara. I can’t be left alone with her at all because I can’t lift her.

I can’t wait to get back to work.

The term “black people” [черные люди] had widespread recorded usage in Russian between 12th and 17th centuries.

Initially, it meant “people of the lowest classes who weren’t exempt from any taxes.” There are different explanations for why they were called “black.” One explanation was that they cultivated land and the most fertile lands in Russian are referred to as “black earth” [чернозем]. Other version is that their faces were black with soot.

By the 18th century, the term was shortened to “blacks” [чернь] and was used to refer to the lowest social classes. Catherine the Great, for instance, kept ranting against the folks who thought it made sense to teach “blacks” to read and write.

Traces of this usage remain in Russian today. The term for somebody who does unqualified manual labor is “a black worker” [чернорабочий].

The distinction between “black bone” (people who do manual labor) and “white bone” (those who don’t) also still exists.

By the 1960s, a racialized usage of “blacks” was in use to refer to the slightly more swarthy inhabitants of the Transcaucasus region. All of the racial stereotypes about the “oversexed, lazy, dishonest, thuggish blacks” were attributed to them. Unlike the original usage that had no racial content, this is already a recognizably racialized one.

I started feeling shitty in the late afternoon but I put in a pair of shiny, dangly earrings, and I feel enormously better. I’m now going to apply elaborate makeup. There’s nobody here to enjoy the sight but it’s helping me to feel in control.

I’m not taking any meds today at least until nighttime because I have an addiction-prone brain and I have to be more careful than most.

I’ve rewatched Gone Girl and I’ll now fresh-watch Zodiac. I guess seing characters get cut up for non-medical reasons is somehow helpful.

When people say Facebook has more than 2 billion active users, is it accounts that they are talking about or actual humans?

Crowds of people have multiple accounts on FB. My very tiny feed would be 30% its current size without these multiple accounts run by a single human.

In countries where there’s any form of censorship or political persecution, everybody has a bunch of FB accounts. Also, in countries and among groups where people aren’t used to the intricacies of American political correctness, users have several profiles because FB suspends them constantly for not talking like an SJW priss-pot at all times. Every single Russian-speaking or Ukrainian-speaking Facebooker I follow has been suspended and used a fake account in this year alone. Every single one. Including folks who post mostly about cats.

The protocol on prescribing opioids has changed for the better.

Two years ago, it was, “Here’s a prescription. Take it whenever you feel any pain. Oh, it’s just a painkiller. It’s just a bit stronger than ibuprofen, so take it in case the pain is a bit stronger.”

Nowadays, it’s “this is oxycodone. It’s different from ibuprofen in that it’s a narcotic.”

So it’s better. It still lacks the crucial words “opioid, extremely addictive, etc” and some stats on how many people develop an addiction after a certain number of pills and how many convert to heroin in under two years. Ideally, every patient would hear it verbally from a doctor (and in cases of surgery, BEFORE surgery), be given a brochure explaining this with pictures, and have a short resume attached to the bottle. This would be a real measure to battle the opioid epidemic. And it can all be done legislatively state by state. It should be done through hospitals, not pharma companies.

As you prepare to vote, ask your candidates if they are getting behind this kind of measures. Don’t take the empty verbiage about how they are heartbroken over the opioid crisis and will give money to help the victims without taking any measures to prevent drug companies from profiting even more from manufacturing new victims.

Chances of curing this addiction are extremely small. Only after two years of complete sobriety does an addict get a small chance of getting cured. The best way to go is to prevent it. Don’t believe anybody who is telling you otherwise. A candidate who talks about the opioid crisis and doesn’t discuss prevention is fucking with you. Don’t vote for the bastard.

Folks, I’m pretty intellectually sophisticated and very interested in the issue. Yet the first time I took an opioid, I had no idea what it was and how addictive it is. Nobody used the word opioid. It was all oxy-clonopotoxy, which meant nothing to me at the time, and I was fresh out of surgery and very groggy.

Even I didn’t know. What chance does a working class person, who trusts doctors implicitly, stand? Remember that we are talking about a person in pain who is already not thinking straight.

We all know how public opinion shifted on smoking. These days you’ve got to live in a literal cave not to know that smoking is very addictive and very unhealthy. But it’s easier with opioids because we don’t have to wait until lawsuits against companies settle. It can all be done through hospitals, raising awareness, online information campaigns, etc.

You have no idea how many people are still completely unaware of what the oft-discussed opioid epidemic entails and how you can get addicted after filling a legitimate prescription from a real doctor. Even people who have addicted relatives have told me that the addiction happened because their relatives didn’t have enough will power. It’s heartbreaking, folks. Whole villages around here dying out.

P. S. It would also be a good idea to let people sell back unused opioids (for destruction and not reuse, obviously) at a good price. Like a gun buyback thing.

P. P. S. I know everybody’s detests long posts and I try not to publish too many but in seeing this around me all the time, and it’s killing me.

I just read a NYTimes story that discussed at length the breaking news that Melania Trump wore a Zara coat instead of a Ralph Lauren one. Plus, it’s last season, which must mean something.

Turned on the TV and discovered a bunch of grim faced pundits discussing the same darn coat.

If I didn’t know for sure I was out of anaesthesia, I’d think I was hallucinating this.

People who are really interested in the way literature works often love true crime novels.

True crime novels are still very much novels. The author takes facts and arranges them in a way that support the author’s narrative. The narrative often has to do with whether the accused is guilty or not. In case it’s impossible to create doubt about guilt, the narrative is about motive. The author creates a motive and arranges the facts to support it.

These texts tend to lack any aesthetic merit, and as a result, all of the technical aspects of fiction writing are open to view. True crime novels are like autopsies of the novelistic genre. [I had surgery today, so please don’t expect very elegant writing from me. Just expect lots of it as I’m recovering in bed.]

It gives me almost physiological pleasure to rummage in the innards of fiction writing as I read true crime novels.

A couple had 3 stillborn children one after another. Years later, the husband killed himself.

“I have no idea what could have caused it,” the wife chirped. “He hasn’t had any significant trauma.”

I’m sure trying to grieve the death of three children with such a thick-skinned emotional hippopotamus of a wife by his side had absolutely nothing to do with the man’s suicide.

And I’m home. Yay!

The hospital personnel allows people to keep their phones until the very moment they are carted off to the surgery room. I guess they understand they’ll need to call a psych team if they separate people from their devices long before they are knocked out by general anaesthesia.

Also, one would hope that a Humanities scholar, of all things, would be more aware of how neoliberal mentality manufactures human alienation and promotes the belief that everybody is your enemy, everybody is out to hurt you, nobody can be trusted, we are all isolated individuals who have to look out for themselves because community is dead. Maybe a good way to resist this mentality is not to assume that the colleagues who are interested in your career path are racist dipshits and to be a little more open to the possibility that they are simply being curious.

Yet the reality is that it’s precisely the Humanities folks who are eager to push the narrative that everybody is an evildoer on the lookout to sabotage you.