I check the weather forecast in Germany every day but it’s useless because I can no longer believe it can be under 30°C anywhere. It’s not real to me any more.

God, I hate this disgusting climate. Everybody is sweaty and stinky all the time, and I’m unusually sensitive to smell.

In larger terms, this was all supposedly done to protect Roe, right? That’s the rationale for withholding the letter, for dragging the process out. But what we saw today set the advancement of women decades behind.

If even a daughter of immense privilege, a woman of the highest educational qualifications, a woman who has known nothing but luxury can’t find a way to deal with something very bad that happened a very long time ago without letting it turn her into a shaking, cowering mess decades later, how can you trust women to carry out any tasks of responsibility?

Shitty things happen to human beings all the time. Things that are a lot shittier than this can happen. If women are reduced to a sea of uncontrollable emotions for decades and decades by such things, then it kind of makes sense to keep them away from responsible positions.

Obviously, this is not true. Obviously, women are resilient and very capable of holding their shit together. Every single woman I know closely is carrying a heavier burden than what we heard today and is doing it with strength, authority and courage. I just wish so badly that we saw such women on TV. Because this is what actual women really are.

Her voice at times was high, her manner deferential, even solicitous. And for a moment, it was possible to hear that 15-year-old girl trying to escape a bedroom where two older, bigger boys had terrorized her.

Yes. That’s exactly what I saw. And that’s exactly why it felt fake. This is a highly educated, successful academic. With a buttload of degrees in psychology and experience in public speaking. This cannot possibly be her public speaking persona. Is she a teaching professor? Because it’s not possible to keep control of a classroom with this shrinking violet spiel. You step out in front of an audience, and your public persona switches on. It’s automatic, it’s inescapable even when you are dying inside because something horrific happened to you last month.

It’s definitely puzzling.

Folks, when did we become the party that is horrified by teenagers making flatulence jokes? Isn’t that what the other side is supposed to be? Something’s not right here.

I can’t tear myself away, it’s too good.

“You made jokes about flatulence?!?!?”

“We were 16, sir.”

The prissily horrified expression on the face of a grown man when he says the word “flatulence” is out of this world.

Made me want to go make jokes about flatulence before they are outlawed.

Durbin is such a dick.

“Why would you oppose an FBI investigation if you are innocent?”

Because agreeing to an FBI investigation now is exactly the same as renouncing the nomination. After the election in November, he won’t be nominated no matter what the FBI finds.

A few minutes turned into a watching marathon. Kavanaugh is a good writer. I can’t resist a strong text. It was also fun to see how he had Feinstein on the ropes and sounding apologetic in under two minutes.

If he’s a total liar and is being consciously dishonest, I still admire the hutzpa.

I need to stop watching. I have a mountain of work.

OK, I did watch an excerpt of Ford’s testimony. And now I wish I didn’t. Because I can no longer say I 100% believe her. This means nothing, personal impressions of witness testimony are notoriously wackadoodle. People project all kinds of shit on speakers. But it all seemed fake as a snake to me.

I do better with written texts than visual images. When I read the text of her testimony, I completely believed it. The text spoke to me with a searing power. But after watching her actually deliver these same words. . . Yeah. . .

To remain fair, I’m now watching a few minutes of Kavanaugh’s response. He’s very obviously pissed. [I just discovered he was an only child. An only one! It’s not even that the parents had 5 kids and were understandably overwhelmed.] In any case, yeah, he could be lying. Or not. If he was as much of an alcoholic as many people say he was, it’s very possible he blacked it out. Which means they are both telling the truth, as they perceive it.

Completely sober people also erase uncomfortable memories, memories that contradict the view of themselves they can live with. As Dr Ford said, human memory is a complex thing. I’ve been in situations where I say, “But you did this. I was there. That’s what you did.” And they stare at me with honest, limpid eyes, and swear on their lives it never happened. And then I think I’m going nuts because they look completely sincere and crushed by the accusation.

I didn’t watch the testimony. I don’t see the point. I never doubted that Ford was telling the truth. I believe that full responsibility for this really horrible event lies with the adults who had these minors in their care and couldn’t be bothered to parent them with a minimum of responsibility. These are not parents who live in deep poverty and have to work four jobs so they just can’t keep track of their kids. These are very rich people who should know better. Unfortunately, that’s not the discussion that’s happening right now or ever.

She answered clinically with a description of how memories of traumatic events form in the brain: “Just basic memory functions and also just the level of norepinephrine and the epinephrine in the brain that sort of, as you know, encodes — that neurotransmitter that codes memories into the hippocampus and so the trauma-related experience is locked there whereas other details kind of drift.”

She’s just like me in the sense that I also intellectualize trauma in order to process it. I totally get it.