It’s easy to laugh at poor Kyle but I have met women who said these things to me verbatim and somewhat obsessively. One had a whole system of arguments from the physiology of cats (as in, felines) to support these beliefs. I reacted to the cat argument with mild sarcasm, and she didn’t talk to me for a month.

No wonder Kyle is confused.

Klara’s school is going mask-optional starting tomorrow. The county health department finally desisted from its plan to shut down every classroom that defied the governor’s endless mandates.

I don’t fully recognize this feeling – have we won? Is this finally over? I feel numb because it seemed at times that this would never end.

If you are not a parent of a small child in a blue state, you won’t understand. What we had to do to give our children a semblance of a normal childhood when every authority conspired to punish us nobody will understand who hasn’t been in it with us.

Two years. When the shock passes, I’ll probably cry for an hour.

I really love the narrative of how “the truckers shut down the US-Canada border.”

No, you lying bastards. The truckers didn’t do it. The border has been closed for two years. I haven’t been back to Canada in two years because the border is closed to me, a citizen. Last summer, my sister, who got “fully vaccinated” only to be able to travel in peace, spent weeks unable to cross that border back into the country of which she’s a citizen. Citizens can’t freely travel within Canada, either. Even the “fully vaccinated.” Traveling from Quebec to Nova Scotia in August, for example, required filling out a bunch of complicated and constantly changing forms. Again, this was back in August. It wasn’t the truckers doing that.

For two years people haven’t been able freely to move within, out of or into the country of their citizenship. This is utterly egregious. And it wasn’t caused by truckers.

I thought I wouldn’t enjoy teaching a translation course and only agreed to do it because there’s a huge demand. But I’m actually enjoying it a lot. It’s really easy to teach and requires very little preparation. Plus, plunging into the depths of linguistic nuances is actually a lot of fun.

It’s turning out to be really hard for the students, though, because in order to translate well you need to have a good ear for the language. You need to be able to feel when something doesn’t sound right. And that’s hard for many people. If you don’t understand why “let me position this question” sounds atrocious, it’s impossible to explain.

We haven’t even gotten into literary translation yet, and that’s where it gets really hard.