I decided that I won’t go to the co-working space I love until I get contacted by a publishing house in Ukraine interested in publishing my book.

Because if I’m such a loser that I can’t get my book published, I don’t deserve the nice co-working space.

I also haven’t eaten any steak because if I’m such a loser that I can’t get my book published, etc, etc.

Finally, today I got contacted by the publishing house of my dreams. So I immediately reserved the co-working space for next week and I’m on my way to eat steak at my favorite steakhouse.

I’m going to meet the owner of the publishing house on Zoom on Monday. It’s impossible to predict how that will go but I feel like a lot less of a loser already.

One thing that’s disturbing in the book for 13-year-olds is the casual medicalization of normal human emotions. The main character’s mom is in a bad marriage. Whenever she has a fight with the husband, she declares she’s depressed and needs to get medicated.

“How come she keeps saying it’s a chemical imbalance but she only gets it when she and dad fight?” asks the smart teenager.

When the girl has boy trouble and starts moping in her room, the mother can’t be bothered to find out what’s going on or read a single article about teenage moodiness. She drags the girl to her own psychiatrist and gets her medicated to the gills.

The psychiatrist explains that it’s not normal for people to feel sad and they should take medicine for it. This is all described very realistically, and it’s heart-breaking.

Moping in your room because the boy you like doesn’t like you back is practically in the encyclopedia definition of what a teenage girl is. I spent many delightfully tragic hours in my room at 14, recording on my cassette player endless sad screeds addressed to a boy at school who had no idea I existed. I’m very thankful nobody back then suspected this was a disease and tried to medicate me for it.

In the USSR, it was not impossible to find readable, non-ideological fiction for the 13-16 crowd. I remember quite a few such novels. The only ideology in them was that they were not supportive of sex before marriage. Or divorce.

Without saying so for very obvious reasons, what the books advanced was a Christian worldview. They promoted kindness to others, generosity, family values, clean living, respect for old age, honesty, loyalty to friends. I would be very happy if my kid read those books as a teenager. There’s not a word in them that I’d like to edit out.

Children’s books, detective fiction and sci-fi were the genres where you could pretend that the Soviet ideology didn’t exist, and this would be a great refuge for writers and readers.

You see, Soviet ideologues were not stupid people. They knew that giving no respite from the ideology was counterproductive. In our society, there’s already such an oversaturation of wokeism that people are moving away from.

My niece is a bookish 13-year-old, and I started wondering what it is they are reading at that age. I always read one book a year from a genre I wouldn’t normally touch, and this year’s pick is a novel that’s mega popular among the 13-year-old crowd. Let nobody say my reading range is narrow.

The novel I picked was published 10 years ago to no particular fanfare. But then recently it became very popular on TikTok with its title (If He Had Been With Me) turning into a hashtag with tens of millions (yes, no typo) of mentions. The author, Laura Nowlin, is now about to release a sequel. Everybody expects it to be a mega bestseller.

Now, this is not a work of immortal literature but a very age-specific book. It didn’t appeal all that much to 13-year-olds in 2013 but it’s really appealing to today’s early teens. This is significant because teens are all in the “now”. Why would they go nuts for a book where characters burn CDs and don’t know social media exist?

That’s what made me curious about the book.

One thing I’m noticing is that the novel is refreshingly non-woke. This is not surprising given that the woke revolution happened much later. I’m now very curious about the sequel. I wonder if the author decided to woke it up to stay current. This would be ludicrous because in the sequel the events take place a decade ago, as well. But we’ll see. The original novel, though, is completely apolitical, and that’s really good.

The grammar is atrocious but that kind of makes sense, given that the narrator is a teenager. The vocabulary is limited but again, teenager. The subject matter is how to find a boyfriend, how to choose a boyfriend, how to keep a boyfriend, how to find friends to discuss the boyfriend. I would have loved that stuff at 13.

The family dynamic that’s portrayed is very American. The fathers are sources of money but absolutely nothing else. They aren’t integrated into the family in any other way. The mothers are extremely infantile and either eccentric or mentally unstable. There’s nothing remotely resembling a strong, engaged, interested mother.

The kids all pair up in very serious relationships very early in life. There’s a lot of discussions about sex but the goal of the relationships even at this early age is to get married and have children together.

To sum it up, I like the book. I’m only halfway in but it’s very enjoyable if you remember that the target audience is girls in the early teens. The novel isn’t profound but nobody at that age is or should be. I wouldn’t mind my kid reading it at that age.

I spent the day at the event where I was promoting our program to students. It’s fine, I don’t mind doing it but I can’t recognize people out of context at all. I mean, at all. They keep coming up, and I have no bloody idea if I’m supposed to know them. Nobody looks even vaguely familiar. If my own mother came up, I wouldn’t recognize her, it’s that bad.

The most embarrassing moment was when a student in the course I’m teaching stopped by and I asked her if she was interested in learning Spanish. There were also several people who seem to think we are great friends, and I have no idea who they are.

The only ray of sunshine was our new Ukrainian instructor who came up and started speaking in Ukrainian which nobody else does, so I placed her immediately.

Girls start puberty earlier than boys, and they are all clearly young ladies when their male peers are still kids. This always causes a lot of bewilderment between the ages of 12-16 when yesterday’s friends end up being in completely different age categories.

However, here in the US once they get to college, the boys catch up and get far ahead. I meet a lot of Freshmen who are already very clearly men and none who are women and not girls unless they are from other countries.

I’m not talking about anything physical but about the way they comport and present themselves. It looks like women like adolescence more than men do.

Since we started talking about child-rearing, one thing about kids is that they somehow manage to sneak a pair of atrociously stinky socks into the unlikeliest places. I routinely reach into an elegant handbag and encounter a pair of very putrid socks.

They are like cats who mark territory.

I was reading a review of a book about a radical sex cult of the 1970s when something began to sound strangely familiar:

And as the 1980s wore on, the group caused its own downfall, becoming more authoritarian. Its guidelines became more rigid and insulating, focused on the “narcissism of small differences” between correct and incorrect behavior. In response to the AIDS epidemic, members were forbidden to even eat in restaurants. As the institute’s financial straits mounted, head therapists badgered patients into becoming computer programmers, a highly lucrative emerging field. They forced members to devote time and money they couldn’t afford to the Fourth Wall, the Sullivanian radical-lefty theater company. Members, plagued by their own inner doubts but too terrified to leave the cult, became intolerant of each other. They reported on one another’s transgressions — Stasi-style — conducting physical intimidation and becoming complicit in countless forms of harm.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/the-triumph-of-the-nuclear-family/

The reviewer goes on to say that the cult dissolved in 1991 but I’m having serious doubts about that.

How interesting. I’m Gen-X but I use subtitles all the time. I thought it was just me being weird but it looks like many people do it.

I use subtitles because I get extremely bored without something to read. Do you use them and if so, then why?

That professor who on 9/11, 2001 announced in class that “ha ha, Americans attacked themselves on purpose” is now actively promoting the narrative that poor, innocent Russians were provoked into defending themselves by the evil NATO.