My infected ear turned into another illness which, in turn, brought on yet another health complication. It’s clear that at this point this is psychosomatic. The illnesses began at the exact moment when I realized my father was going to die. I didn’t let myself fall apart emotionally, so now I’m falling apart physically to compensate. I can control the emotional, so the physical rebels because I can’t control it.

I’m hoping that recording this insight will lead to a cure because I’m tired of being an invalid. These are really uncomfortable conditions. I’m very ready to not have them. And yes, I have another doctor’s appointment. They’ve only made things worse so far. They prescribe stuff that gives me side effects that turn into another illness and we are off to the races.

The very moment I tried to check out the US news, this is what I found:

I’m going back to my Ukrainian news because at least there are no snowflakes getting massive air time there.

As Arestovich said in today’s devastating interview,

The problem isn’t that the West doesn’t know what to do with Russia. The problem is that the West doesn’t know what to do with the West.

The West doesn’t see why it deserves to win. It doesn’t see why civilization is better than barbarity.

The dynamic in the class I’m taking in Spain is identical to what I saw in the Ukraine of my youth. The women are speaking, arguing, and feeling completely comfortable to express themselves. Even when they we don’t have much to say, we go on and on, admiring the sound of hearing ourselves speak. In short, we act like American male scholars.

The men in our class giggle uncomfortably and say nothing beyond, “oh, I don’t know. I never thought about it. Hee hee.” In short, they act like American female scholars.

Everybody in the class is Spanish except for me and a female scholar from Poland. Obviously, the female scholar from Poland never shuts up. And clearly thinks I speak too much.

I know very well what makes men (and I mean collectively, not individually) lose their capacity to speak. Once stable employment and familial responsibilities go out of reach, this is what happens to them. Spain is suffering enormously from precarity and the subsequent collapse of the family. And here’s the result.

Let’s draw some hope that school shootings will drop in popularity like serial killings did. Look at the serial murders graph across the decades:

There does seem to be something like a fad (or a Zeitgeist, if we want to put it more respectfully) governing this kind of thing. And curiously, my part of the world seems to follow the US graph of serial killers. All of the really famous ones are from the 1980s.