I spent the whole morning translating the testimony of a Ukrainian mother whose 8-year-old daughter was torn to pieces by Russians and managing the complaints of faculty too traumatized by the threat of COVID to teach in person in 2024.

If anybody can’t contain the need to reiterate their favorite slogans about “the proxy war”, “the need for peace negotiations”, “the military-industrial complex”, “Russia is winning” and “NATO expansion”, now is the perfect time because I’m just in the mood.

I saw the whole video, too. And many, many others that are much worse. Shame on you, low-IQ bits of fluff who chirp stupidly about “a proxy war” because it makes you feel like less of a moron to use smart-sounding vocabulary.

And good morning, everybody else! I’m back home and have moved to a different app because the WordPress app has been discontinued. If you notice any glitches or anything unusual, please let me know.

Somebody is happy that mommy is home:

I’m now home, and the grocery bill no longer brings lovely surprises.

There are other surprises, tough. A while ago, our old and rickety deck collapsed. Fell down like a house of cards. So we had to build a new one.

A couple of months after we were done, the neighbors next door tore down their new and shiny deck and started building an even newer one.

Now I come back and 3 more houses in the street are building new decks.

I never thought I’d be one of those Joneses people try to keep up with.

Two little sisters, Klara’s friends, came by to play today. As American children tend to be, they are extremely polite, well-behaved and trouble-free.

The hard part wasn’t minding the kids but exchanging a dozen text messages with their mother who kept expressing extreme gratitude for my offer to have the kids over. I’m not very polite by nature, so I soon ran out of steam in this competition of mutual reassurances. No, you are not in the least imposing. Yes, I’m completely sure. No, I don’t mind in the least. Yes, I’ll tell you the moment it gets too overwhelming. No, I don’t think you are rude or abusing my kindness. Yes, I’m 100% certain. No, it’s not at all exhausting.

But the children are an absolute joy. Even the text message grilling was almost bearable.

The WH press secretary is making one embarrassing mistake after another. Recently, she referred to Russia as “the People’s Republic of Russia.”

Or who knows, maybe she meant China.

Or maybe she’s suggesting that the two countries have blended into one.

There’s also a possibility she was talking about New Zealand. Or split pea soup. It’s all equally likely.

I don’t like Karen jokes but here one is begging to be made.

The inventor of the Russian COVID vaccine Sputnik (meaning, “companion”) has been strangled by his… erm, companion whom he picked up where such gentlemen normally sell their companionable services.

As you can imagine, jokes about vaccine injury have never been as popular. Some people suspect shady business but I think that a virologist is just as likely to be strangled by a male escort as anybody else.

Santiago Roncagliolo is my favorite young Peruvian writer. I mean, young, he’s my age but for a writer that’s still quite young. Lejos is a collection of his short stories, and I loved it more than anything by him I ever read.

The collection is supposed to be about people who travel, emigrate or move away, hence the title which means “far”. But there’s a much stronger theme that binds almost all of the stories in the collection – Peruvian manhood. The characters in these stories try to maneuver between a wild, out-of-control existence among men that is likely to kill them and an orderly, controlled life with women that often castrates them. Men and women in Roncagliolo’s stories are engaged in a mortal battle. They are truly from different planets, and the only way for them to stop destroying each other is to come together over the love for a child they create together.

The only story in the collection that is protagonized by a woman reads like a literary rendition on my recent post about female maturation. In this story, we see how a girl whose mother tramples all over her attempt to grow becomes a failed woman in adulthood. There’s even a wolf in the story. It’s uncanny.

Lejos is extremely funny. I scared half the airplane, gasping for air as I read the book. A flight attendant thought I was having a panic attack and that’s what was causing the wheezing noises I was making. I want to give a couple of quotes to share the joy:

The woman was around 60 years old, and it was clear she didn’t care what she looked like. Her husband was leafing through a book with a look of complete indifference. Gerardo tried to imagine this man experiencing some sort of erotic feeling but failed. He realized that the wife could let herself go all she wanted because it makes no sense to decorate an abode nobody will ever enter.

“Man in Water”

“Chino, what are you doing?”
“The police signaled that I should stop. So I stopped.”
“Chino, concentrate. We are driving with a bag of marijuana, 20 grams of cocaine, a bunch of pills of all kinds, 3 guns, and a dead body. Do me the favor and just step on the gas.”

“Internal Affairs”

Peruvian poets always kill themselves. Luis Hernández threw himself in front of a train. Vallejo was a living corpse. Moro went to work at a military school while gay.

“Pinned Butterflies”

Lord in heaven, on the flight I’m sitting next to a guy, probably late twenties, who placed two paper books and one magazine into his seat pocket in preparation for the flight. What’s going on? Did I oversleep my flight and am now dreaming?

Folks, you will not believe what I just saw. A young guy, late teens, maybe very early twenties, reading a paper book. Just sitting there and reading it. Turning the pages, and all. Not a textbook, but a regular fiction book, judging by the cover. He and I are the only freaks of nature here at the airport, reading paper books.