I’m trying to convince Klara to take a shower.

“If you don’t wash your feet, they are going to stink.”

“Well, don’t smell them, Mommy,” she says reasonably. “They are not flowers.”

We are offered guest speakers to come to our classrooms and speak on the following topics:

– healthy relationships

– healthy masculinity

– domestic violence

– sexual violence

– healthy sexuality

– bystander intervention.

Note that healthy femininity is not there. The topic would sound vaguely offensive if it did. I wonder if any of the listeners think of asking who all those unhealthy males are in relationships with if unhealthy femininity doesn’t exist.

Yesterday, I actually found a form of cultural appropriation I detest.

“Borscht is Russian soup, Mommy?” Klara asked. So I had to teach her the word щи, which is the Russian equivalent of borscht but absolutely hideous. I never tried it but I studied the recipes because I wanted to cook it and it sounds disgusting. It bugs me enormously when people say borscht is Russian. Traditional Russian cuisine is a lot more healthier and delicious than Ukrainian food. Borscht is the only good thing Ukrainians have contributed to the culinary repertoire of humanity, and we are not giving up credit for that.

The traditional Russian cuisine is so healthy that in the 19th century gastrointestinal patients were sent from all over Europe to eat in Russia. I often read the recipes and weep because they sound out of this world amazing. Reading Ukrainian recipes, on the other hand, makes my blood pressure rise because that seems the only goal of this food.

I also studied Polish recipes for borscht, and they sound horrible, too. Putting smoked sausage into borscht instead of potatoes is just weird.

On the positive side, Klara now likes pelmeni. I gave her some exactly a year ago, and she hated them. So I tried again yesterday, and she finally loved them. This is good news because they are so easy to make. (If you use the store-bought ones like I do.)

It’s especially sad that an immigrant from my part of the world would feel the need to parrot these idiotic ideas about “discriminatory dating.” Attraction is discriminatory by nature. If you are equally attracted to everybody on the planet, it means you haven’t experienced any attraction to anybody yet. Berating people for their physiological responses is rooted in the fear of the body. Some folks truly can’t accept that anything about our physiology can definite us, so they discuss bodily responses in ideological terms. They are assisted in this endeavor by the neoliberal mentality that everything is a choice of freely selecting individuals.

It’s sad to see a person from my culture get roped into this idiocy.

In the United States about 70 percent of meals are consumed outside the home, and about 20 percent are eaten in the car.

This is absolutely incredible. We eat 0% of meals in the car (I never knew this was even a possibility) and I’d say about 20% outside the home or 5% if you don’t count the home cooked lunches and snacks. Klara’s daycare doesn’t even serve dinner because kids are supposed to have dinner with parents.