What is everybody watching? We finished Dexter: New Blood, which was great and snowy, what else is good?

Neighbors who have lived two doors down from us since 2014 still think I’m married to a woman. They sent me a Christmas card addressed to “Ms [my name] and Ms [N’s name]”. Because they have convinced themselves that a male name just can’t end with an A (although, what about Ezra, Joshua, or Dana?), and no evidence of their lying eyes will convince them of the opposite.

They could have asked themselves, where is this woman I’m married to? Why does nobody ever see her? And who’s the guy who’s always around and keeps doing half-naked pushups in the backyard? But no, the intellectual process never switches on.

Curiously, N is mildly entertained by being “misgendered.” I heard people are supposed to get massively wounded when it happens but he seems immune.

Stupid Argentina. I rooted for the Netherlands. It was my father’s favorite team after Ukraine.

I watched with colleagues and they were shocked that in spite of my heavily Argentinean accent I don’t support Argentina. But I don’t control the accent. It just happened. I feel no particular connection with Argentina. The only Argentinean writer I love is Claudia Pineiro, which is slim pickings for a whole country.

Cluster munitions are called cassette bombs in Ukrainian. But my subconscious only knows cassettes in the meaning of those cassette tapes we used back in the 1980s. For younger readers, this is what they looked like:

So now when I have one of my regular dreams of being under a missile strike in Kharkiv, I see these gigantic cassette tapes floating in the sky and raining bombs on me.

It’s very disturbing.

Only an extraordinarily rich and powerful country can afford to play these games.