I don’t know why they go for this takeout theme at a very expensive café but it’s friendly to Orthodox fasters, so I went for it.

I’m not only about food, though. My first article at the fancy Ukrainian literary portal goes live tomorrow and I’ll share the link. I literally broke my brain trying to write in the most elegant Ukrainian I humanly can but all that will be lost in Google Translate.

For my birthday, N gave me a Faberge egg in Ukrainian colors that plays Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. In Russia, Swan Lake is always played on TV when the Duce of the moment croaks, so I’m hoping this is a good sign.

Mike Johnson didn’t disappoint and managed to squeeze into the Ukraine aid bill the wording that the goal is Ukraine’s victory over Russia. The next step is to massage Biden into agreeing.

So yes, good day, good news.

For my birthday breakfast, I decided to take up my sister’s tradition if eating the famous Kyiv cake. Straight from Ukraine, and as good as ever.

The beige beverage is the standard drink of Soviet oldsters called ryazhenka. It’s baked kefir, and we get it from the Amish.

The beautiful tea set is from a really kind, sweet person who gave it to me as a gift.

Yes, happy birthday to me. My OB-GYN decided to be funny and left a robotic voicemail with birthday wishes. Do you know what a woman my age thinks when she sees an unexpected message from her OB-GYN? Nothing good.

Sometimes people have the weirdest ideas.

Unlike the OB-GYN, readers of this blog are always great to hear from. Thank you, everybody. You are sensational people.

The first couple of episodes of this Netflix series make it look like standard party line propaganda but no, friends, it’s good. It’s actually kind of deep.

The series is about a young working class man who’s trying to claw his way out of a crappy job and an impossible housing situation by becoming a comedian. In the process he becomes a plaything of people with fancy educations who are perverts, rapists, paraphiliacs, and groomers. They abuse him in such terrible ways that the actor playing the role of the young man in his twenties looks like he’s 45. Anybody younger would look too disturbing in this role.

Baby Reindeer throws out all the gender mythology we are currently told to worship. I don’t know if it’s purposeful or not but it’s good. The working class man has to accept the new gender identity that was raped into him and loudly proclaim himself a fashionable sort of victim to be able to make a living and stop being a reject. But deep down he knows that all this crap about identities is a fabrication.

Has somebody watched it? What did you think? The ending simply slaughtered but I don’t want to give anything away if people want to watch. Please sit through the first two episodes. I promise it will start making sense afterwards.

My birthday gift to myself:

My Ukrainian instructor gave a talk today and we both cried like belugas during the talk. I wasn’t planning to because I draw the line at crying once a day. Twice is an overkill. But she showed some footage from the area my mother is from, and it got to me.

On the positive side, N’s favorite Ukrainian journalist read my interview, and N is very happy. He doesn’t want to be famous but he really wants me to be.

I promise to calm down and come up with something smart to say for my birthday tomorrow.

There was a massive strike on Chernihiv. Many dead and wounded. I have friends there. They were actually my father’s friends but I took over after he died.

With fingers in a spasm, I try to type out, “are you OK? Are you alive?”

My friends write back to say they are alive. I’m trying to make breakfast for my child but my eyes are so swollen I can barely see the pan.

I have one lecture, two meetings, a committee lunch, and an event after that. And I’ll be present, cheerful, and entertaining at all of them.

Tomorrow’s my birthday, by the way.

I have explained at great length why the formula “XYZ entity has a right to ABC action” is shallow and childish. I have explained that it holds no interest to me by virtue of its superficiality.

There are only two possibilities why you would want to keep trying to engage me in a conversation that I clearly and repeatedly dismissed as being too primitive for my liking:

A. You do not have the intellectual capacity to understand my explanations.

B. You are trolling.

You have my sympathy whatever the option closest to the truth.

To people who can understand, I want to propose an exercise. Whenever you start formulating a thought about rights, try to see if you can express your idea without using this word. “Rights” has become a lazy substitute for an amalgamation of concepts that nobody wants to untangle because there are inconvenient things hiding in there.

If you want to explore this further, you can’t do any better than reading Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement. He talks about how the spread of invented “rights” eviscerated the US Constitution. Or at least, read this post from when I was talking about Caldwell incessantly. We do not need to invent the wheel when others have done it a long time ago.

I was doing poorly but then I went to the grocery store, and they had pickling cucumbers. So I pickled my guts out, and it helped.

It’s just a way of speaking. No actual guts went into the pickled cucumbers. The process of pickling is what helps.

I gave my first talk to Ukrainian hispanists today. It was good but one of the attendees was in Kharkiv, and we are at the time of day when nightly shelling usually begins. And I’m thinking there can be a missile strike at any moment. I didn’t fall apart at the talk because people have enough problems without me howling like a wounded monkey. But now after the talk, I did fall apart.

I don’t know why I’m such a goose. My child is completely safe, I’m safe. But this hurts like the bloody dickens.

Fucking stupid Russians.