Your Dad is a 5th degree black belt when it comes to sexual impropriety allegations.
In fact… I once had a party at the Plaza Hotel… your father showed up uninvited & hit on my wife… invited her on his helicopter to Atlantic City.

OK, what exactly is “sexually improper” about making advances to a conscious, adult person? And how can one find any moral equivalency between this and groping a sleeping person while filming her? 

It looks like what started as a good and important conversation about sexual assault and harassment is devolving into a prissy fit where people posture as paragons of moral virtue seconds before somebody triumphantly reveals that they, too, had once done something that might be either really evil or vaguely sexual. Nobody seems to care about the difference any more. 

From a hilarious article on a new translation of Homer:

Wilson chose to use plain, relatively contemporary language in part to “invite readers to respond more actively with the text,” she writes in a translator’s note. “Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.”

The rest even funnier. But hey, you do what you got to do to sell the classics to bored, sated consumers. 

The reason why I keep going back to Basque literature is that I’m not done discussing nationalism. It’s something that is truly worth discussing.

What has become of nationalism in the age of consumerism? Nationalism and consumerism were born at the same time but one of them is eating the other alive. Nationalism can’t exist without the belief that there is something bigger than the self. Consumerism can’t tolerate this belief.

Of course, consumerism has no interest in eradicating nationalism altogether. It just wants to empty it of all meaning and leave it on the shelves as one of the endless consumer choices. This is why the language of consumerism (“it’s their choice. Why shouldn’t they have whatever they choose”, etc) is conquering the discussion of nationalist movements.

For the first time ever, I had no plan for Thanksgiving dinner and I had no anxiety about it. For me, it’s an enormous victory and a great relief not to be constantly worried that food will run out. 

So what we did was just wander aimlessly, among closed restaurants. And then we saw one that was open and had all the traditional Thanksgiving dishes. Turkey, baked ham, stuffed grouper. 

I’ll never be entirely free from food trauma but this is a big victory.

Our Thanksgiving this year is so wholesome that I have no food to photograph. Because there is no food! 

I think I’ll make lentils with tomatoes and butter lettuce. Because that’s literally all there is in the room. 

It’s very unusual not to be completely in thrall to food. 

The analyst says that the best thing we can do to avoid hyperactivity problems is not to have any screens present in our interactions with Klara. No cell phones, Kindles, no TV or computer in the background. Not that I was an obsessive screen user around Klara before this (I am an obsessive user when I’m not around her), but now I’m abstaining altogether. And it’s proving to be quite easy. Enjoyable, even. 

The exuberant politeness of the Midwest has become so attached to me that I freak out people all over the resort with, “Have a beautiful day! Enjoy the rest of your stay!” People respond with, “Oh. Oh. Yes! You, too! Have a beautiful day! Yes!!”

After meeting a particularly grumpy Eastern European fellow yesterday, I’m even more eager to let people see that one can be from Eastern Europe and not be in a nasty mood all the time.

Today was the first time I told Klara a story and she loved it. The story went on for over 30 minutes because she kept asking for more. The story was about Klara and her toy bear and it went as follows:

The bear asked,”Klara, Klara, what did you do at the beach today?” And Klara said, “Bear, bear, I played a game called “Find Your Toes.”” And the bear asked, “Klara, Klara, how do you play “Find Your Toes”?” And so on. 

It’s unbelievable that she’s only 21 months, and she’s already into stories.  

Suleiman Kerimov, a Russian senator and a mega-bandit, has been arrested in France! His mansion has been searched by the French police. He’s being investigated for fraud and money laundering.

Of course, Russians are arguing he has diplomatic immunity but it’s amazing that the French actually dared to detain a Russian oligarch. Kerimov is one of the worst, a real gangster, a horrible horrible person. This is fantastic news because these nasty characters pollute the world with their criminal activities, and European or US governments just smile vapidly in response. 

I need to be working on my new research project but instead I’m obsessively reading Basque literature and books about Basque literature. So what does this tell us about my new research project?