I may be an outlier but I have always found these “men who like women” to be very off-putting. The only woman whose company I need my husband to prefer is me. I definitely don’t need him to engage in performative gestures of how “women are more interesting than men.”

We had to beg Biden for every one of these, beg him, and hear all sorts of excuses about how it was absolutely impossible.

Trump becomes president, suddenly everything is possible. The entire Ukrainian segment of the social media exists in the “wait, what?” mode. Except for the part that is doing the “I told you so” thing.

P.S. By the way, Israel acted despicably throughout the transfer, and only the recent serious pressure from the WH managed to resolve everything. It’s quite shocking that Israel would have the gall to try to mandate what the US does with the weapons it so kindly provided to the defense of Israel.

Another stupid question in the same survey:

What does this even mean? How do you “identify with a country”? It’s beyond nuts to ask such a question.

Incidentally, the list of countries they provide doesn’t even include the USSR, which is the country where I was born. Maybe pay attention to history instead of torturing words with the goal of extracting some particularly neoliberal essence out of them?

According to this, I’m a late-career academic:

This makes me feel ancient but it’s also dumb because even if I retire at the dot of turning 65, I still have more years to work than I have worked so far.

This really hurt my feelings.

This reminded me of how my sister and I were renting a car in Madrid to drive to Portugal, and the guy at the rental company tried to upsell us. He was young, and hadn’t figured out yet that you don’t sell to women like you do to men.

“This Citroën is small,” he said. “The engine is weak. I could get you something larger and more potent for a surcharge.”

My sister and I started at him blankly. What he was saying meant nothing to us.

As a teenager, my sister worked at Avis, and she found out that the best way to upsell to men is to offer them a PT Cruiser. 90% get very upset and are willing to pay extra to get something larger.

For women, the magical words aren’t “large” and “potent.” What kind of a weirdo woman wants to be large? Instead, it’s “safe, comfortable, elegant, beautiful, chic.”

“Give women huge tax breaks for having kids” is somewhere right there with “get something larger” as a sales technique for female customers.

The prospective priest is exactly the age I am and emigrated to Canada from Ukraine in the same year. He had the funniest, very Canadian ideas about the US, and I spent over an hour yesterday allaying his concerns.

“No, it’s not dangerous. No, it’s really not dangerous. I routinely forget to lock the front door it’s so safe. Healthcare is great, and you get it immediately. You can see your doctor whenever you need. You can get medical help within an hour of feeling symptoms. Schools are not dangerous at all. Classes are small. Your kids can go to college for free. You can buy a decent house for far, far less than in Toronto. I promise it’s not dangerous at all. No, this isn’t East St Louis. In fact, you never have to go to East St Louis. No, there are no gangs here. No, I don’t have a gun. Yes, I feel perfectly safe without a gun.”

The priest is wonderful, even if he’s used to doing the Church Slavonic service and isn’t used to an English-language one. I really hope he decides to adopt our parish.

Trump froze the USAID grants, and I don’t know about other countries but it’s great for Ukraine. These were all spent on ideological projects of the far left. Everybody but the very shameless in Ukraine is celebrating. The opinion on Trump is changing even among the staunchest former Dem Party whisperers.

If you need proof, go read the X feed of the Ukrainian journalist who always interviews me. And many other honest journalists who despised the USAID grants and made their living by doing serious journalism and not propaganda.

My suggestion for men on how to achieve great marital sex and avoid being deadbedded within two years of marriage is this:

Choose somebody who wants you sexually and not only as a source of a relationship. Being in a relationship means something very different to women than it does to men. It’s a source of enormous peer validation and it is sought as a value in and of itself. This is an evolutionary survival mechanism. A pregnant woman or a woman with a small child would find it hard to survive without a man to feed and protect her. Even today it’s not entirely untrue, imagine in prehistoric times.

So simply look at what is being desired, you or peer validation. If it’s very important that the wedding is just so instead of that the wedding is to you, it’s a dead giveaway. If she posts a lot of perfect relationship moments on social media, that’s another. If she looks at you like a DIY project, if the narrative about the relationship is more important than actually being with you. Like that story about a woman who was on her boyfriend’s case because he wouldn’t send her romantic text messages every morning. It wasn’t about him but about the role he was supposed to play in the enactment of a perfect relationship. If that sort of performative shit matters, deadbed is on the horizon.

I’m feeling very misunderstood. I wish nothing but the very best to the rich, the very rich, and the mega rich. I’m so supportive that I’m in favor of a flat (not progressive) income tax and have been so forever. I’m very, very wishful that the rich should be extremely happy. All I ask is that they be very happy at a distance from me.

My sensibility is very proletarian. At work, I feel most comfortable with the janitor, the cafeteria staff, and the building workers. The only time I enjoyed talking to somebody at a reception, she turned out to be the cleaner.

Now that I’m a permanent diabetic, I told everybody I know that if I become loopy, it means I missed my meal time and they need to stuff some food into me.

The problem is that I’m naturally goofy and my behavior tends to be unusual. Nobody knows when I’m diabetic loopy and when naturally loopy.