A famous Spanish writer says on Facebook, “Trump is a danger to all living creatures on this planet, and his children are even worse.” I’m not sure what can be worse than endangering all living creatures and I’m afraid to ask. I published two articles on her novels, and I don’t want to feel like a total idiot for doing that. 

P.S. And I just submitted the third article on her. So yeah. It’s nice not to know anything about writers outside of their books. 

What’s good about me is that when I fail at something, I move on fast. I realized I will never beat the record of blog visits from years ago. It’s nobody’s fault, blog visits are down for everybody for obvious reasons.

So I started archiving all the old posts. This means I can see them (for sentimental reasons) but nobody is can. Most of the posts for 2009-10 are already gone. This will completely tank the visitor stats but if I can’t break the record anyway, I don’t care. 

Now that extreme self-righteousness is the dominant mode of online engagement and it’s spilling into RL, I see no reason to subject myself to the outbursts of idiots who disinter an ancient post on fluffy kittens and exclaim triumphantly, “So you are saying that you admire Hitler! You are a proud Nazi!”

If you look at the most recent comments, you’ll see an example of this. Some idiot read an old guest post and concluded that I “object to the existence of transgender people.” Not only does this post never mention transgender people, it wasn’t even written by me. But I’ll be damned if I enter into a discussion on whether I object to the existence of people because the end of that journey is total insanity. 

Enjoy the old posts for now because they will all be disappearing soon. 

“What are you doing?!?” I exclaim when I see Klara trying to pour the milk out of her sippy cup on the floor. 

“I’m making a mess,” she says conversationally.

What slaughters me is that not only is her comment situationally appropriate, but it’s also completely grammatically correct. In no time, she will be saying things like “it’s situationally appropriate.”

The most shamelessly, ridiculously, offensively consumerist thing in the world are the surprise subscription boxes that are so popular right now. In case you live on a different planet, a subscription service sends you clothes, books, coffee, writing supplies, toys, and even organizers and planners of their (not yours, theirs, hence the surprise) choosing once a month. Just in case your consumer fantasy is exhausted and out of ideas what else you can possibly buy. 

I find these subscription boxes to be incredibly attractive, and I’m ashamed of myself.

Why is Ceasar salad still on menus? Does anybody order it still? It seems so year 2002. Which, I believe, was the last time I had it. 

Food fashions are even funnier than clothes trends. 

I find the idea of abolishing grades cooky and weird. You abolish grades, you lose students like me. I’m competitive, I respond very well to hierarchies and evaluations. None of this had prevented me from being a life-long voracious learner and an adventurous, risk-taking student and scholar. 

What’s the payoff that can be gained from this “there are no winners here, everybody who participated wins!” approach? When is the time to let students know that that’s not how life works? What’s the point of preparing them for the kind of world that doesn’t exist?

The analyst says that great psychological harm is caused to children by chaotic environments. Unpredictable mealtimes and bedtimes, unpredictable emotional reactions on the part of the parents, chaotic personal lives of parents, all that kind of stuff. 

This is all obvious and barely needs to be pointed out.

However, there’s another type of chaos that is just as damaging but not as obvious to the naked eye. A child’s life can look very organized and orderly, yet one or both parents can have disordered, chaotic minds, and that is something that the child will perceive and feel anxious. 

When both kinds of chaos – the external and the internal – come together, that’s where the worst damage is done. 

Also, important advice that I got: if you are OCD (I am, obviously), make sure your child doesn’t see your OCD rituals. That creates a lot of anxiety for a kid. I didn’t know this, and it was really useful.

Another piece of advice: never connect your emotional states with the child’s actions. (e.g. “I’m sad because you did this.”) Of course, this one I already knew. 

I was deeply saddened when I saw that after the Franken bombshell one Democrat after another started releasing these identical, copy-pasted statements of fake condemnation and asking for the ridiculous “Ethics Commission” in an identical voice. Gillibrand, Schumer, both of my senators, Durbin and Duckworth. OK, Duckworth is notoriously dumb but Durbin? I kind of liked him. 

Of course, I also liked Franken. I read his book, followed his fraught first election, subscribed to his site. But he turned out to be a disgusting creep. And the party that rallies – entirely needlessly because nothing is lost in political terms if he resigns – to his defense after pilloring others for these and much smaller transgressions simply stinks. 

At the very least, I hope that nobody will now have the gall to mention the stupid pussy-grabbing tape. 

Either Franken is asked to resign right now, or everybody needs to shut up about Roy Moore. 

Al Franken, too? Gosh, what a letdown. And what a creep, with his mealy-mouthed statements of support for victims of sexual harassment.

I thought I had reached my saturation point and couldn’t find it in me to care any longer but this one surely is a disappointment.