People around here are very happy to see me in my Ukrainian fur coat. Passersby light up when they see it. I get endless compliments.

What I don’t get is, why don’t people wear them if they like them so much? And please don’t tell me they can’t afford. Every woman in Ukraine can afford a fur coat, and Americans can’t? We afforded them even in the USSR. I thought maybe people are opposed on ideological grounds around here but judging by the reaction, they aren’t.

It’s so warm in a fur coat, if you never tried, you have no idea. Warm, light, roomy. We are having the coldest winter since I moved to the area, and I can’t believe it’s actually cold enough for the fur.

This is a true crime book by a Canadian journalist and it details a 1997 murder of a teenage girl Reena in Vancouver by her classmates.

There was absolutely no reason for Kelly and Warren to murder their school mate Reena. In fact, it seems that they never had contact with her before the murder. The absolute horror and the senselessness of a 14-year-old child being murdered by the only somewhat older Warren and Kelly shocked everybody in Canada. Rebecca Godfrey researched the story for years and wrote this book about it in 2006. She is a gifted author, and Under the Bridge is beautifully written. The real mystery in it, however, is not why Warren and Kelly murdered Reena. It is, rather, why Godfrey writes about Warren like she’s in love with him.

The entire point of the book seems to be to vilify Kelly and whitewash Warren. The descriptions of the teenaged Warren that Godfrey provides seem to have been written by a besotted groupie and not an adult journalist. Even the collection of photos at the end of the book starts with a picture of Warren and ends with another picture of Warren posing next to Godfrey. The victim is an afterthought. For Godfrey, the suffering, wounded hero of the story is the murderous Warren.

In spite of Godfrey’s efforts to make him sound angelic, Warren seems to be a right sociopath who played the Canadian justice system like a violin. Understanding the Canadian obsession with the natives, he invented an indigenous heritage for himself and got early release as a result.

This is a beautiful book but you’ve got to read it as a fictional account because Godfrey got so emotionally involved with the participants that the actual story is almost entirely lost.

I’ll tell you honestly, I don’t feel poetry in English like I do in Russian and, to a lesser extent, in Spanish. The meter is so different that I don’t process it as poetry. The only English-language poet that I feel is Seamus Heaney.

A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.

Other than Heaney, I just don’t read English-language poetry for enjoyment. Walt Whitman I definitely could never understand, even though I love several Russian and Hispanic poets who were inspired by him.

This is not, of course, a criticism of Whitman but, rather, of my own limitations.

A gossip article somehow floated across my newsfeed. I don’t know anything about these people but I was shocked to discover that the dude left the cute woman in the middle for the bald skeleton on the right and not vice versa.

The Jewish fellow must be rich for women to compete over him like that. The skeleton is unlikely to have functioning hormonal processes, so I can’t imagine her actually feeling attracted.

The comment was stuck in Spam but I rescued it. Please, everybody, always let me know if moderation eats a comment. I’ll go and rescue it then.

Also, after I approve somebody manually, it should be easier for them to comment.

Meaty comments! I like meaty comments.

Here is a funny true story about today’s video.

My mother’s friends watched the video, saw the artificial background, decided it was a picture of my actual house, and started calling my mother en masse to say, “Your daughter is rich! Why did you never say??”

“I didn’t want to brag,” said my mother modestly, even though she likes nothing more.

“And there’s a baby grand piano!” friends kept exclaiming. “Who plays in her family?”

“My son-in-law is an amazing pianist,” my mother answered, even though N never played anything beyond the accordion that every Soviet child was forced to play. “My daughter also plays but not as well.”

Do I need to mention I don’t play?

So please feel free to head over to the video and look at the house where I don’t live and the piano I don’t play.

My new video titled “Is Wokism Doomed?”

I now have a regular spot on Friday mornings on this channel. 

By the way, I’m not making any money from these appearances. If I were to get paid, I’d have to fill out paperwork where I’d explain to our new woke chief administrator what it is I’m doing. And something tells me that “I now work as a pro-Trump pundit on social media” will not endear me to him.

The only reason I’m doing these appearances is because I have discovered late in life that I really, really enjoy doing them. If somebody told me at this time last year that I’d have this new hobby, I wouldn’t have believed them.

And also I want to remind everybody that all of this started because I was on a bus on Spain two years ago and I decided not to read or do anything and just sit there in silence for 5 hours, not consuming any media or texts. In the process of sitting there and not doing anything, I invented my Ukrainian book, and then things developed from there. You don’t know what’s hiding deep inside your brain. Give it a chance to come out by staying silent for several hours straight.

This week at work has been paradisiacal. The building is empty. I walk around, loudly doing my German exercises, which by the way:

I read, work on my book, take naps, walk more, do more German exercises. The building will be locked starting today and until everybody shows up in January. I will be expelled from this paradise in a few hours.

In Gisèle Pelicot’s place, I would completely refuse the trial, the publicity, all of it. Mind you, I’m not saying she should have refused. I’m saying I would have. In my worldview, I’m at least equally responsible for the relationships I create. Once again, I’m not saying Pelicot is responsible. I’m saying I am. I’m an active agent of my life, and if my half-a-century marriage were to lead to such ugliness, I’d care about nothing before figuring out why I constituted it this way. I’d definitely not want to spend the last few good years of my life on being a public spectacle.

I respect Pelicot’s choice but I really don’t get her lionization on social media. People are wailing that she’s the person of the century but that would be really sad for the century. A decade of being completely asleep to her own life and a passivity of extraordinary proportions do not merit all the gushing.

Education is a very faddy field. The newest fad has the clunky title of “social-emotional learning”, and it’s as dumb as you can gather from the title:

Much of what is termed “social-emotional learning” does not stem from developmental psychology, cognitive science, or neurology. The creators of these programs often lack the academic or professional background necessary to navigate this “social-emotional” space, yet they create programs that promise to address kids’ cognitive and emotional needs. They treat correlation as causation, reduce complex processes to linear constructs, and lack a developmental lens.

Most social-emotional curricula promise that kids will become little high-functioning adults—calm, organized, optimistic, and rational problem-solvers—forgetting that young people are still growing and learning (and that they are human). Yet, these expensive programs are apparently too compelling for administrators to pass up.

https://x.com/KarinMariaPsyD/status/1869715601872089524?t=wFzCPYASkPF89BJ0yGEt1Q&s=19

Most adults are not “calm, organized, optimistic, and rational problem-solvers.” To expect children to be that way is nuts. It’s not even a desirable thing that children should be like that. Experimenters in the field of education are promising to engineer away childhood, and they’ll fail. We need to stop humoring them and tolerating their inept theorizing.