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.

Whoever recommended we watch Goliath, huge thanks to you, kind person. We are loving it. It’s so good we are going to breeze through it in no time and I’ll be back here begging for more recommendations.

My kid is so different from me. She’s thoughtful and caring. One of the girls at today’s playdate is new to the group. I never gave it a second thought but Klara did and devised a strategy to introduce the new girl and make her part of the group. The strategy worked and the girl integrated beautifully.

Curiously, my analyst predicted she was going to be this way when she was a few weeks old. I thought he was sayng it to be kind to me but he was spot on. He also predicted when she was an infant that she’d draw and paint. Nobody else in the family ever had any interest in drawing. How he knew is a mystery. He never said she’d be into group sports, for instance, which is another thing nobody in the family does. Or that she’d sing or love music or sculpt. Out of all the things that we don’t do he picked drawing and it turned out to be true.

Social sciences are absolutely falsifiable, although many people don’t believe it.

These are troops stationed in Western Ukraine, half a continent away from the Russian border. They are at absolutely no risk of anything. Especially since nothing is happening.

The Biden administration is doing absolutely everything to manufacture a conflict. This is immoral and criminal. But Biden is getting a pass because the opposition has swallowed the lie that Biden supports Ukraine.

It’s so easy to dupe this kind of knee-jerk, overly emotional opposition.

A playdate for 6-year-old girls is much easier to organize than one for 12-year-olds. The 12yo playdate has to have an ironclad structure and organization. An adult needs to supervise every minute and fill it with pre-planned activities. Because if you let the girls fend for themselves, they’ll form cliques and start excluding somebody. That’s all that girls at this age want to do. Form cliques and exclude. I literally did nothing else between the ages of 11-13.

It’s normal and healthy but can ruin any playdate.

Six-year-olds are very low-maintenance in comparison. I released them into the wild, and they’ve been perfectly fine. No fights, no tears, no unpleasantness.

One of the kids arrived in a mask.

“She doesn’t mind,” the mother explained.

The moment the mom left, the kid who “doesn’t mind” tore off the mask and chucked it behind the couch.

This is the only kid in the group with a speech delay.

Of course, the clown we invited just has to wear a mask, which kind of defeats the whole purpose but at least nobody expects the kids to be masked.

The moms of Klara’s friends all turned out to be the kind of women I like, dropped the girls off at the birthday party, and cleared out so fast like they were being chased by a pack of ferocious wolverines. I’m so happy nobody thought of staying!

I asked N to order pizza for the kids’ birthday party, and it turned out he doesn’t know how to do it. Because he’s never done it in his life.

Klara hates piñatas. Or rather, the custom of breaking them apart with sticks. (“It hurts the piñata’s feelings, Mommy!”)

As a result, she invented her own way of enjoying the 🪅, known as the “lifetime piñata.”

The way to play lifetime piñata is this. You fill a bowl with candy, cover it with a paper towel, and put the piñata on top. Then you give the piñata gentle touches, gently remove it, and eat the candy. And then spend a lifetime playing with the piñata.

“But Mommy, are you sure that it doesn’t hurt the candy’s feelings that we eat it?”

I have the perfect answer to this (we give food eternal life by eating it and making it part of our bodies, then our children’s bodies, etc), so we don’t have to play lifetime food and give it gentle touches.