We spent the night at the ER because Klara was throwing up in a very scary way. It’s not easy to get help for her because she’s so curious and good-natured that she was smiling and beaming and making cute faces at the nurses and doctors in between the bouts of puking that nobody believed she was in great distress. It turned out she has a stomach bug and needs to take the weirdest concoction known to humanity called Pedialite. 

And of course she woke up at her usual time of 8:30, as happy and boisterous as ever. We are lucky her usual waking time isn’t 6 am at least. 

What’s really weird is that people’s awareness of ISIS – and by awareness I mean a glimmer of recognition when they hear the word – is shrinking. If 2 years ago about 70% of people had at least heard this acronym, today it’s under 30%. 

Departmental meetings are encounters where faculty members with grown children torture people with small children and people with short fuses. I uses to belong just to the short fuse category but now I’m in both. 

The funny thing, by the way, is that N has no idea how impatient and bad-tempered I am because he never sees this side of me. 

The campus is downright funereal. Some students organized a dick-smashing ceremony to alleviate the tension. I’m not usually into the carnavalesque but today I’m grateful for this because it’s getting to sad to be here. 

I never even watch the Oscars, so obviously I’m not wasting any time on the inauguration. But of course it’s on every screen at the gym, so it’s hard to avoid. I kept my eyes on my Kindle but there was a couple on treadmills right behind me, and the woman kept chattering loudly and annoyingly about how horrible Obama was, and how nasty the immigrants are, and how much she loved Reagan, and how she adores Trump. I’m not sure what the value is of a workout that allows you to talk this much and this loudly but people are weird. 

What was especially funny is that her companion – a man in his fifties in the tiniest shorts I have seen on anybody past the age of 4 – was checking me out so insistently that he kept losing the thread of the woman’s argument and had to repeat helplessly time and again, “Ah? What? I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

As for the possible elimination of the NEH, I unfortunately know how and to whom governmental scholarships in the Humanities are awarded here and in Canada and how they are spent. So in my opinion, good riddance. People have gone completely nuts trying to invent reasons why Humanities need massive influxes of cash but it’s all lies and waste. 

For as long as these scholarships – that are entirely inaccessible to most of us – exist, they can be used to persecute any one of us for not wasting our lives on hopelessly pursuing them. I’ll lose nothing but stress and annoyance once they are gone, so I have no reason to bemoan their disappearance. 

We need to stop buying into the lie that Humanities die without capital. No, we die once we give ourselves over to capital. 

If anybody wants some positive news, here it is. Trump and his billionaire cabinet will dismantle the nation-state thereby preventing the next Trump from having much influence. The really funny thing is that his supporters voted for him because they thought he’d strengthen the nation-state, and he’ll do the exact opposite. 

The thing to remember is that fabulously wealthy people are by nature opposed to the nation-state at this point in time. To them, it’s nothing but an onerous restriction on the freedom of their money. There’s no benefit it can give them since the manufacturing model of capitalism withered and died back in the 1970s. Since then, capital has done nothing but try to liquefy borders and national institutions. The time to deliver the final blow to the nation-state has come.

Hey, my town is hosting its own anti- Trump march. It’s called “Mommy March” which I find confusing. Trump never said anything specifically anti-Mommy, did he?

Putin explained that Trump had no need of cavorting with Russian prostitutes because “for many years he ran beauty contests, and there were many beautiful women there.”

Russia accused Poland for spreading “homosexual propaganda and fascist ideas” and “glorifying Hitler” in its school textbooks.

Hitler was known for being very pro-gay, of course. Also pro-Jew and pro-Slav. That bastard.