My stretch of rotten November luck continued into the second day of the month. It’s hot like the dickens, and I’m lying here, stewing in my juices, and trying to avoid turning on the AC.

To distract myself, I’m musing on unrelated things, such as these:

1. I discovered today that some people have the social media notifications always on and email notifications off. I’m the opposite. My work email is always on and I love it. But I’d perceive the social media notifications as intrusive, so I have them off. I don’t let any notifications onto the locked screen at all because I need the space to display my calendar. If one invention of this century changed my life, it’s the Android calendar. I love that bastard.

2. Keto foods have experienced a quantum leap in quality within the past couple of years. They used to taste like sawdust but now I prefer keto bread to regular bread not for any dietary reasons but because it tastes better. Keto chips are actually fine, and I say it as a person who detests the very idea of chips. Keto tortillas and wraps are to regular tortillas and wraps what a Maserati is to a Lada Kalina.

3. I love men’s shampoos and shower gels. My favorite body wash is Every Man Jack. I’m so happy I managed to squeeze in between the generations of women who believe that these preferences make one a defective woman. But I’m sad that people are so into ridiculous gender stereotypes that they attach meaning to these kinds of things.

4. Klara was reading a book about a little boy who always knew what his mom looked like when she was angry. “I don’t know what my mommy looks like when she’s angry,” she mused quietly. “My mommy is always happy.” Today she lost a cardigan I bought last week and a new water bottle (see what I mean about my rotten luck?) and then walked from the car into Applebee’s barefoot because she didn’t feel like wearing shoes. Everybody stared but I was blissfully calm. Being older is great for equanimity because you simply don’t have the energy to be bothered.

5. My sister’s little boy was so impacted by Klara’s school which he briefly attended in the summer that he now started praying and showing such interest in religion that the parents are thinking of transferring him to a Christian school. Klara now started to make us pray before meals (which I didn’t even know was a thing).

If you’re looking for signs of hope in the races against incumbent Democrat governors, this morning’s poll releases have optimistic news in three races out of four. A Trafalgar poll shows Lee Zeldin now tied 48–48 with New York governor Kathy Hochul; an Insider Advantage poll shows Tudor Dixon now tied 45–45 with Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/good-polling-news-for-lee-zeldin-tudor-dixon-and-mark-ronchetti-against-incumbent-democrat-governors/

This is great news in a completely non-partisan way. Hochul and Whitmer are the Democrat version of the batty Michelle Bachmann. They should not be in office.

On the negative side, we are screwed in Illinois because our Republican challenger to the Governor JB Pritzker not only is barking mad, he’s not trying to win. There’s quite literally no campaign, no yard signs, no mailers, no effort to make his name at least a bit recognizable.

We are equally screwed in our Senate race where I’ll have to vote for the Democrat Tammy Duckworth because her Republican challenger is so cuckoo bananas that she makes my “Putin is an illegitimate son of the Rothschilds” look sane.

Both parties have an extremely active and aggressive nutty fringe that holds an enormous sway over the party and makes normal people give up on elections altogether.

I know somebody who went crazy during the COVID lockdowns. Completely lost touch with reality. It’s a quiet madness but it’s not any less sad because of it. This is a single person who ended up spending too much time alone and online during the lockdowns and now believes that everything is controlled by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers, from the unseasonably warm weather (Jewish bankers have special machines that control the weather to hurt farmers) to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Putin is a Jew) to the closure of the diner down the road whose owner retired (the Rothschilds had it in for the diner because of the FBI).

Obviously, there was some tendency to loopiness in this person before COVID but she’s now completely mentally gone.

This woman is two years younger than me, by the way.