This semester the campus is even emptier than in the Fall. On most days, it’s just me and maybe three or five other people in the whole building all day. It’s a large building. It used to have hundreds. I remember back in 2015 we had a tornado alarm, and it took 20 minutes to get everybody into the basement because there were so many people. Streams of people. Talking. And you could see their faces.

There was this short story by Ray Bradbury where every inhabitant of the planet disappeared and just one family was left. I feel like that family. No lines at Starbucks. No waiting for the bathroom. No annoying laughter coming from the neighboring classroom. No laughter coming from anywhere. I want the annoying laughter back!

Why doesn’t anybody else miss it? This is what I don’t get. I really miss all of it. The family in the Bradbury story missed it. But it turns out in reality almost nobody does.

It took me a while but I finally figured out Twitter. When RBG died I had not a single vile or gleeful tweet in my thread. Now that Rush Limbaugh died, I also have no vile or gleeful tweets. At most, people say, “I disagreed with her / him but what a remarkable life.”

Klara learned how to play chess at school. Her grandparents gave her a chess set for her birthday and now we play at home. It isn’t easy because she refuses to eat my pieces.

“I know I could eat this pawn, Mommy,” she says. “But I won’t because that will hurt its feelings.”

The same thing happens when I say something like, “We aren’t going to buy this butter because it’s not very good.”

“Shhhh!” she says. “You will hurt the butter’s feelings. It’s not its fault that it isn’t very good.”

Those who know me well realize that she isn’t getting this from me.

Even Bill Gates has recognized that the COVID vaccine doesn’t work:

In Israel, people in healthcare have been saying this same thing for weeks. There needs to be a third shot. We all know what happens next. It’s the same thing that happened after “two weeks to flatten the curve.” There were two weeks more, then a month more, and now it’s been a year.

We need to accept that COVID is here to stay, stop waiting for a magic solution, and just get the ef on with our lives already.

I also want to say this in what concerns the snow. It’s winter. It snowed. Let’s accept this and move on. If we need to shovel out driveways or dig out cars from under the snow, then that’s what we need to do. I’m not talking about the people who lost electricity. I’m talking about those who are in lockdown again because there’s a new excuse. People around here are acting like it’s the end of the world when it’s simply snow. In February. Oooh, let’s all go hide.

These people are all either men or childless women. No woman who actually breastfed can begin to care about such incredible crap.

The burden of a mentally unstable parent is too heavy for a child to carry. I wish people concentrated more on improving their mental stability and less on surgical and medicinal enhancements. You don’t have to breastfeed to be a good mother. But you do have to not be a malignant narcissist.

In Ukraine we regularly experienced shortages of electricity. I’m from the Northeast where the climate is like that of Montreal, Canada. Harsh, snowy winters and sweltering summers. Every winter electricity would be turned off at least once a week and we’d sit in the dark with no heating. Every summer we’d go for 3 months without hot water. One summer we had no running water at all. You can imagine the joys of that in a large industrial city of 1,5 million.

This happened because Ukraine was completely dependent for energy on a hostile neighbor. It was a poor, energy-dependent country whose population had been beaten down by 70 years of totalitarianism and didn’t know how to object. Since then, a new post-totalitarian generation grew up, and the current government is tying itself into knots to solve the energy problem.

That extremely rich states like California and Texas should have blackouts is a disgrace. Russians are not completely wrong to mock. In Ukraine, at least, nobody used the blackouts to advance some pathetic pet theory, so that was a relief.

Every natural disaster in the US means that I have to avoid going on Russian FB. I only read nice, intelligent people, yet I know that the glee is going to be intolerable.