Enchanted April seems to be von Arnim’s best-known novel. There’s even a movie based on it. To me, it’s her weakest book of all I read, including the one where she lists all the dogs she ever had.

Enchanted April is cute. It goes on being unwaveringly cute from the first page to the last. So much unrelieved cuteness gets depressing after a while but the novel is mercifully short. There were moments when I rolled my eyes so hard they almost hurt. I mean, it’s not a bad novel. I wish I had it with me when I was sick with COVID and had brain fog and no energy. It’s a perfect COVID book, not least because the possibility of death seems a lot less daunting if it can liberate one from so much cuteness.

I bought a bunch of flank steak because it was cheaper than other cuts. I was thinking that it’s so lean and stringy that nobody would be able to eat a lot at once, and it was going to last until the midweek.

But then the dickens possessed me to do this spice rub with brown sugar, olive oil, paprika, garlic, and ground allspice, and put the whole thing in the slow cooker for 6 hours.

As a result, it lasted under 24 hours, it’s so good. It’s the curse of being a good cook.

Here’s the result of the “territories for peace” exchange with Russia. Luhansk has been under Russian occupation for 9 years. It was ceded to Russia under the pressure from the Obama administration that believed in “territories for peace”. This is what has been done to the people in those territories:

Nine years of unbridled Russian banditism, gang rapes, torture chambers, and summary executions in the streets. As a result, people are completely inured to death and don’t care anymore.

And the really funny thing – there’s no peace.

This method doesn’t work. And people who keep suggesting it almost a decade into the process are clinical morons.

Here’s an important weekly reminder that the expression “the US sends money to Ukraine” is misleading since over 95% of that money never leaves the US. What’s actually being sent is old, outdated weaponry in that amount of money. Then, to replace that weaponry with new and up-to-date kind, the money in question is being spent here in the US. This helps curb inflation which otherwise would be a lot higher.

It’s truly shocking how many educated, usually not dumb people actually think that all that money is really sent to Ukraine as money. One person I talked to even said that cash was being sent. To my question of how cash can help win a war, the answer was, “I don’t know”. The poor individual probably imagined Ukrainian soldiers throwing rolls of banknotes at the enemy.

Sadly, the Biden administration can’t explain all this to its voters. There are too many people among them who would start pouting at the idea of the US actively replenishing its military arsenal. As a result, noxious stories are fabricated and the administration can’t tout its own very conservative and successful strategy.

So our administrators are now into manifesting, right? If you live like a rich person and throw money around, you’ll magically become rich. If you refashion the course schedule to adapt it to a record-large Freshman class, that class will materialize.

We actually did cancel a large number of higher-level courses to open up sections upon sections for the extra-big Freshman class we were trying to materialize. Or manifest, whatever.

I know everybody here will be mega shocked but guess what? It didn’t work. Not only didn’t we get more students than ever, our enrollment actually dropped. The administration cooked the books, creating fake numbers but even then there was a large drop. Incomprehensible, I know.

I’m very very embarrassed to work for a school whose leadership believes in this inane voodoo magic. I understand when teenage girls on TikTok play this. But for adult people with jobs to take this seriously is humiliating.

If I could swing it, the next book would be Contemporary American Literature for Ukrainians. That would be so much fun to write. I’d talk about the tension between American realism and American postmodernism and how it reflects the growing abyss between regular people and intellectual elites in the country. Imagine if the book appeared on the eve of the US elections. That would so make sense.

And after that, I’d do Contemporary Latin American Literature for Ukrainians, completing the series.

In my language course, I assign short stories by excellent writers as homework and then we use the stories to work on grammar/ vocabulary. The stories are 1-3 pages long and are written by Cela, Pardo Bazán, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Paz Soldán, Díaz Valcárcel, Eduardo Berti, etc.

And here’s what I noticed. Students very often copy the stories by hand as a way of working on them. They intuitively understand that this will help process the text. It’s truly brilliant. I see them time and again in class push away the printout of the story and use their own handwritten copy. Almost no one chooses to work with the text off a screen.

I’m very glad. The materiality of the written word is a huge part of its magic, and it’s excellent that the very young understand it.

I have a friend who is a mega-MAGA. This is a person who’s completely, unwaveringly, 100% pro-Trump. You literally don’t get more MAGA than she. Please believe me when I say that this is a very dedicated, completely serious follower.

We were talking today, and she said without any prompting on my part that the Biden presidency turned out not that bad at all. Nothing horrible is happening. The friend is still completely pro-Trump. But she doesn’t have a problem seeing reality and acknowledging it freely.

It would be fantastic to see the same kind of reasonableness from the other side. I’d love to hear, “I’m against Trump but his presidency was fine. Nothing terrible happened.” Obviously, COVID happened but that happened to everybody on the planet. Trump specifically did nothing particularly bad. And neither has Biden. We can have gripes about either or both but there’s no disaster that they caused.

With that kind of reasonableness, we could all stop wailing at the moon and start getting along better.

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.