I have no house key (gave it to my parents), no car (gave it to my husband), and no office key (left it at home). 

I managed to get myself home from work courtesy of Uber but I can’t get inside the house. It’s hot and I’m very thirsty. I’m sitting on the verandah, looking at a big fat bottle of mineral water in my dinner table that I can’t reach because I’m locked out.

My parents have never lived in a small American town, so they lock up so tight you’d think this is Fort Knox.

Today I’m sporting a Chilean accent, according to a new Spanish-speaking colleague.

Given that the last time I spoke to a Chilean was back in 2004, I can’t be copying anybody’s pronunciation. This tells me that I’m hypercompensating for turning many years old the day before yesterday by developing a childish lisp (which is what the Chilean accent is.)

This is very embarrassing because I don’t control the accent.

The problem with having planned out so beautifully the spring schedule and having written it down in a cool new notebook is that now I’m very ready to begin working. But I’ve got to finish out the semester instead. And that bugs me.

Turns out we’ll need to give up any of our inherited titles or orders of nobility at the naturalization ceremony. This is definitely giving us pause. We have already renounced participating in acts of genocide or crimes against humanity, and now this.

Identity is only and always about editing out parts of self.

On the positive side, the DNC decided to support Ossoff in Georgia. I just received an email signed by Tom Perez, asking for a contribution to the campaign.

On the negative side, the only argument that is being advanced is “let’s stick it to Donald [sic]”. Which to me sounds like saying that Ossoff is a shitty cnadidate who stands for nothing whatsoever. I mean, I’m sure it’s not true and he stands for something but the DNC is failing to communicate what it is.

The relationship between parents and children is always ambivalent and conflictive. The role of parents is to inscribe the children into the social order. And the social order is a system of limitations on freedom and desires of an individual.

Since infancy, parents teach children to contain themselves physically (potty-training, clothes, shoes, etc) and emotionally. They play the role of border control agents in the child’s journey towards civilization. Civilization is great but the price of access is relinquishing the right to unconstrained existence of the kind animals enjoy.

If this conflict never comes to the surface and parents and children seem to exist completely peacefully, this is a situation where parents are either not doing their job and not teaching self-containment or it’s a situation of extreme emotional abuse. A child who grew up without yelling “I hate you!” (or doing / saying something in that direction, and God, do I hate these disclaimers for the exceedingly literal) at the parents is not on the road towards anything nice.

I hope nobody interprets this as an endorsement of abusive relationships where children exist in a constant war zone. We all know how I feel about those. 

A loss in Kansas, a loss in Georgia. I don’t care if it’s a red district or not. I don’t care that the numbers look promising. I stared at promising numbers in red states throughout 2016. I don’t want promises. I want results. 

I can’t believe we are still hearing the ridiculous spiel about how great it is that this particular loss is smaller than it could have been. 

The games Klara loves the most involve fitting together small objects. She likes to take pens out of a pencil pouch, take off the caps, put them back on, and replace the pens in the pouch. She can go a good 15 minutes taking off the caps and putting them back on. (She’s 14 months, so it takes an effort.) 

She also loves it when we work on an art project. The art project involves her choosing a sticker sheet out of a bunch and giving it to me. I unpeel a sticker and stick it on her little fist. She takes it off and sticks it on a large sheet of white paper. This can easily take over 40 minutes. It’s amazing how hard she can concentrate on something like this. 

She is a very fascinating child.