I’m the only person in the group who doesn’t complain about Florida heat. After our weather back home, whatever they have here in Florida doesn’t feel like heat. It feels like a blissful respite from the heat.

Also, for the first time, fruit and vegetables are cheaper here in the resort grocery store than in Illinois. Not because they have gone any cheaper here but because everything in Illinois has skyrocketed.

Hey, get this: all three of my books have been banned in California! How do I know? Well, they aren’t on the 3rd-grade curriculum. According to the definition of a book ban that Newsom is using, not putting a book on the curriculum means banning it.

I’m so bored by these completely invented, meaningless scandals. Books have been banned! Democracy is in danger!

In the USSR we had real book bans, and it’s extremely annoying when people pretend to know what they are like when they know nothing but an easy, enjoyable, completely uncensored existence.

One habit of daily life that I don’t understand is putting fruit and bread into the refrigerator. It makes them taste horrid!

I thought it was a Russian thing, to be honest. But my sister’s husband is Peruvian and she says he does it, too. I feel strangely relieved.

I also have a weird habit, which is putting cinnamon and cumin seeds into kefir. It makes the kefir look ugly. But I like the taste.

The Hispanic people who are genuinely upset / bothered / annoyed / insulted by the “breakfast tacos” comment are not really Hispanic people. They are pouty Anglos posing as “people of color” for clout.

The idea that people should collapse and die of outrage the second anybody brings up food that is associated with their culture (whether correctly or not) is an Anglo fad. Nobody else cares. I’ve had people bring up borscht whenever I show up more times than there are hairs on my uncommonly hairy head. And I find it sweet and endearing.

Klara has the exact same outfit as the girl in the pink shorts, so this photo really got to me. The building in the background looks very much like the one I lived in. It’s not the same building but it’s just like it.

One thing I find frustrating in contemporary American literature is the endless procession of strung-out characters. Between yesterday and today I moved from the highly postmodern Goon Squad by a 60-year-old female writer to a neorealist novel Ohio by a male author 20 years her junior. But in both novels there are page after page after repetitive page describing the characters ingesting all sorts of drugs and experiencing their effects. I don’t understand what the point is supposed to be. None of this is shocking or original any more. It’s repetitive and boring, that’s all.

Both are great novels, by the way. But I’d enjoy them more without the exhausting drug scenes.