What possesses people to write such bizarre things? Child support already exists. In exactly this form.

And this isn’t just one person. I’ve seen this argument reiterated endlessly. Do people not know that child support exists?

Another disturbing argument is “the Supreme Court has banned abortion!” Really? Are you sure? No abortions will take place tomorrow?

No, the Supreme Court hasn’t banned anything. I wish it banned needless, annoying hysteria but it’s covered by the freedom of speech right.

After 47 years of marriage that started when she was 22, my mother has no idea how not to be married. She can’t check her voicemail because it was my father’s responsibility, and she doesn’t know the passcode. She has no idea how the financial aspect of life works. And by no idea I mean that she refuses to comprehend that a $1,000 pension can’t cover a $1,300 mortgage. She really has no idea. She drives but she can’t enter an address into the GPS. My Dad didn’t drive but he entered the addresses.

My father was just as helpless without her but in different areas of life. Together, they functioned like a single, perfectly adjusted organism. With one half gone, it isn’t working.

Genetics is real. My 12-year-old niece and I went to a huge Bath & Body Works sale. Separately, we walked by mountains of products and independently of each other both chose the exact same scent.

We also look funny at Michaels stores where we stop in front of the same shelf and stare at it with the same facial expression.

It’s a completely different feeling watching a movie about World War I since February 24. It no longer feels distant and incomprehensible.

A hundred years later, and the problem WWI was trying to solve (i.e. splitting up the 3 unwieldy, unmodernizable empires in Europe) is still not solved in full. And there’s still brutal fighting to accomplish it. Two of those empires long gone but one still remains.

In 1937, Dmitry Friedrichsburg and Wilhelm Zorgenfrei were arrested during Stalinist purges. What else could they expect with annoying, anti-Soviet names like that, right?

But it was even worse. Dmitry was a chemistry student, which nobody should be with a politically unreliable last name like Friedrichsburg. And Wilhelm was a literary critic who specialized in the work of Alexander Blok, one of the greatest poet’s of Russian modernism.

Zorgenfrei died in prison. Friedrichsburg uncharacteristically survived. But while they were tortured in jail where they ended up sharing a cell, they both wrote poetry. Knowing that survival was unlikely, they somehow managed to write down a few of the poems on tiny scraps of paper and sew them into the seams of the shirts they sent back to Dmitry’s mother. It was mortally dangerous to keep the scraps of paper, so they were destroyed. Thankfully, one of the only two people who had had a chance to read Zorgenfrei’s last poem had a good memory and remembered it by heart.

In 1991, she finally had the freedom to publish the poem and the story. It was a brief period of time when people cared about Stalinist crimes and wanted to hear from the victims. Since then, these two poets (and all other victims of Stalinism) have been forgotten a lot more effectively than even in Soviet times.

The problem with the American cultural scene is that it’s completely obsessed with servicing every political dad that crops up. At first, everybody wrote “in the age of #MeToo” novels. Now everybody is writing “in the era of George Floyd” ones.

Not only does this make for boring, conveyor-belt writing, the plots are ludicrous because nothing short of complete lunacy can sustain the #MeToo and GF narratives.

When I finish my translation, I’ll miss it. I won’t miss the text because it’s not my kind of literature, let’s put it that way. But I’ll miss the process of translation.

This kind of translation is about 15 IQ points under mine, so doing it hits the sweet spot where it’s easy yet not boring. Writing research articles is about 10 IQ points over, so it’s always painful.

Out of an urgent need for escapism, N and I started watching Peaky Blinders. Brits should be commended for keeping things realistic, finding actors who look like underfed, ugly degenerates to play gangsters. If these were Americans, they’d flash $80,000 perfect smiles and sport dewy, flawless skin as they crawl around in miserable slums.

I particularly like American TV cowboys who have soft, gentle skin that has never seen direct sunshine and trailer park girls whose hair is a product of three generations of wealth.

Television will be unwatchable and the social media unreadable today, so my decision to buy an unnecessary book is looking better with every passing moment.

Why everything has to cause bouts of uncontrollable mass hysteria I will never understand.

I’ve had a very long, hard week. And it’s devilishly hot here, which saps my already depleted stocks of energy. But I finally met in person some great people I’ve only known from online communication before and this gives me energy to do something nice for myself. I’ll go to the bookstore and buy a completely unnecessary book that’s utterly unrelated to work. Or even two books.