The bookstore is filled to the brim with customers hauling out stacks of books with such grim determination you’d think books are about to be banned. Normally, my father would be here with me, and he’d say, as usual, “Ah, so these are the stupid, soulless Americans who don’t read that propaganda always tells us about!”

This year we are starting with Soviet-era decorated salads early in the season. This one is called “Snow mounds”. Boiled potatoes, beef, mushrooms, boiled carrots, garlic and herb stuffed eggs, shaved parmesan, and the substance for the ingestion of which all Soviet recipes existed. (Whoever knows what substance I mean wins).

I wanted to browse some news in a free moment but it turns out there’s yet another round of Elon drama, so it’s impossible to weed through the madness to get to actual news.

On the positive side, I’m taking a really great course on conservatism vs leftism in my Ukrainian philosophy school. Nobody there has any politically correct speech constraints, it’s an absolute joy. Experiencing how free people can be in thinking and speaking is magical.

At this point, all of my colleagues except one (who has a reason to want to live far away) have agreed that remote teaching has been an unqualified disaster for foreign languages. Students simply didn’t learn enough to pass to the next stage. Most of the learning in language courses happens through small group conversation practice in class, and there’s no way to make that happen on Zoom.

At least, people are not denying it now that it’s become obvious.

Students figured it out earlier, and in-person enrollments have been unusually high while Zoom enrollments are in the toilet.

Short-term, easy pleasure leads to long-term, deep suffering while short-term suffering leads to long-term pleasure.

For the examples of the former, think smoking a cigarette or taking a hit of cocaine.

For the latter, think being pregnant and giving birth that leads to the most intense pleasure in life which is having children. Or something simpler, such as working out or learning another language.

As Arestovich says, the greatest fear of the perennially scared and the perpetually harmed is living without fear. Being terrified is the only organizing principle they have.

Assisted dying has been legal since 2016. And then, in March of 2021, it expanded so that you no longer needed what was called a reasonably foreseeable natural death. . . In March of 2023 patients with only a mental disorder as the basis of their suffering can request and receive [assisted death] if they meet all the eligibility criteria.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/11/1142141146/canada-is-expanding-categories-for-medically-assisted-death

I think we should go ahead and throw off a cliff everybody who isn’t completely healthy, happy and 100% productive all the time. Also, everybody who is imperfect in some way.

The Argentinean dictator Juan Domingo Perón easily changed his beliefs from rightist to leftist and back but he never departed from insisting that everything in the country should revolve around his name and his persona. You couldn’t engage in any act of public life, be it academic, professional, religious, athletic, or of any other kind, without simultaneously engaging with the image of Perón. Literary critic Carlos Granés calls this “symbolic jail” or “a jail of symbols.” You have the freedom of physical movement but your consciousness is imprisoned by the peronist imagery.

Today we live in the jail of far-left symbols. We have to work hard to create a tiny place we can crawl in to take a little respite from them. We have to devise strategies to hide our children, protect our livelihoods, and enjoy life. And the absolutely maddening thing is that it’s all done for the benefit of the tiniest slivers of the population. Juan Domingo Perón, at least, appealed to the masses. Millions of people sincerely worshipped him. Dumb they might have been but they existed. The “anti-police nonbinary drag artist” from yesterday’s White House ceremony, on the other hand, does not have majority support. I’m sure that Biden himself is convinced that “the artist” belongs in a bar and not at a serious event. I mean, imagine being 80 years old, finally becoming POTUS, and then having to pretend your role in life is to promote a guy whose job is to jump up and down in a dress singing “Show Me Your Dick.”

Neither we nor Biden have a choice, though. We can avoid coming across all kinds of art but we cannot avoid the dick artist unless we make extraordinary efforts to avoid all news, all screens, and all humans.

It’s normal and good to come together over the symbols we share and that have relevance to us. We are all about to come together over the shared symbolism of Christmas, which is a celebration of the very foundation of our civilization. But when every mother suddenly starts devising strategies to talk to her kids about puberty blockers – which are not a foundation of anything and haven’t even existed until 3 seconds ago – there’s something wrong here.

Why is it that a computer problem that plagued me for weeks resolves immediately and spontaneously the moment I hear the words, “the IT guy is on the way and will be here in five”?

It truly feels as if the computer were trying to give the IT guy a chance to laugh at me.

In a hilarious development, you now have to pay to attend the wokest event on campus. Tickets are $50 a pop, which immediately prices out students and staff who have better ways of spending hard-earned $50 than listening to woke speeches for 3 hours.

Since academic departments and programs have received exactly zero dollars and zero cents for the fiscal year that started on July 1, 2022 and can no longer buy even a pack of printer paper without a lengthy bureaucratic process, it’s impossible to buy the tickets with institutional funds.

As a result, the event will become a showcase of who on campus is really scared of losing their job. Nothing but abject fear of demotion or redundancy can motivate people to fork over their own money to be lectured on how evil and oppressive they are.

No, I’m obviously not going. I have marketable skills and great ideas for what to do with my $50.