Today Klara and her BFF Luke pranked the teacher. They were grabbing the toys from the shelves and throwing them around while the teacher was running after them and trying to put the toys in order. Klara and Luke found this very funny and laughed. By the time I arrived, the room was trashed and the two little pranksters were happy as clams.

This is the first time Klara engaged in collective action with a comrade. I’m very proud because I was 35 before I could work with another person.

The teacher is getting a VERY good Christmas gift, by the way.

Do “nighttime” cold medications contain some sort of a sleeping aid? I took a nighttime Theraflu yesterday and it was the weirdest thing  ever.  It robbed me of my soul and knocked me right out. Creepy shit.

This is a book where one of the chapters was written by me. Look at the price. I’ll get one copy, and if I want more, I’ll have to pay the insane price, just like anybody else.

I hate academic publishers.

And a bit more on logic and consistency of principle. I see one person after another bemoan the following news:

Economists and sociologists from Stanford, Harvard and the University of California set out to measure the strength of what they define as the American Dream, and found the dream was fading. They identified the income of 30-year-olds starting in 1970, using tax and census data, and compared it with the earnings of their parents when they were about the same age. In 1970, 92% of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did at a similar age, they found. In 2014, that number fell to 51%.

If everybody who believes this is bad news is a climate change denialist, then OK, I get that. I obviously don’t agree with the position that can be summed up as “Climate change is a hoax, so let’s go on consuming like crazy because resources are limitless” but it’s a logically consistent and honest position. These are people you can argue with and hope to convince because they don’t deny the very existence of cause and effect. 

If, however, you care even a bit about the environment, the quoted piece can’t be anything but very good news. By gosh, Americans are already devouring half the planet. Do we really need to consume more? Do we really need to see our consumption levels explode in EVERY generation? And if that doesn’t happen, then the dream is dead? Because that’s what the dream is? Gobbling up increasing quantities of stuff while bemoaning the destruction of the environment by unbridled consumption?

It’s like those people who say they are huge environmentalists and then throw a fit when the local grocery store stops giving out plastic bags. You can’t talk to them about anything because the connections in their brains seem not function the way they should.

One of the huge houses in the neighborhood is inhabited by Mom, Dad, and toddler. The house has 4 garages. My question is: when the toddler grows up, will his parents consider their lives to have been a failure if he can’t afford a house with 5 garages? Is that a reasonable position to have? Or will there come a point when we can start measuring success in different currency than dumb, senseless consumption?

When I observe passionate discussions about the wrongness of the electoral college model and the importance of the popular vote, I wonder whether the participants would be making the sane argument just as passionately if the situation was reversed and their candidate won the college and lost the popular count. I don’t believe that they would. Their anger and conviction seem situational rather than principled.

I know I wouldn’t be clamoring to give the victory to Trump had he lost the college and won the popular vote even by 10 million votes. Which is why I don’t wear the cloak of righteous outrage about the college right now.

And it’s the same with Big Business subverting governmental policy. You can’t be against it when you don’t like the nature of the subversion and then forget all about that principle when Big Business turns against the admittedly ridiculous RFRA and toilet bills.

Or just admit that you don’t have any principles and only care about winning no matter what. That’s a position that is deeply immoral but I’d respect it more than the hypocritical situational outrage.

Zizek’s new book on the refugees is far from perfect but it’s better than anything else I’ve seen on the subject. Amidst the requisite platitudes that are obsessively rolled out by anybody who approaches the issue, there are things that nobody explores but that are crucial. Example:

What we do know is that there is a complex economy of refugee transportation (an industry worth billions of dollars); so who is financing it, streamlining it? Where are the European intelligence services to explore this dark netherworld? The fact that refugees are in a desperate situation in no way excludes the possibility that their flow is part of a well-planned project.

Where the book fails is Zizek’s belief that migratory flows will stop once the situation in the refugees’ home countries improves. What the writer forgers is that people don’t always move exclusively away from something. Sometimes, what they are moving towards is equally or more important to them. 

More on this later.

From an email sent out by my professional organization:

This edited volume will focus on issues of social justice in theatrical works of Golden Age Spain.

In case you don’t know, Golden Age Spain is 16th and 17th centuries.

Pediatricians have this annoying questionnaire they give you during the regular wellness checkups that seems designed to prey on parents’ insecurities.

Does she talk?

Does she walk?

Does she stand up unassisted?

And my favorite: does  she feed herself with a spoon?

Has anybody even seen a little freak who feeds herself with a spoon at 9 months? [Of course, with my luck somebody will be reading this whose baby fed herself with a spoon at 3 months of age, and the post will make them angry. Be honest, though, do you believe it’s to be expected that such small children know how to use a spoon?]

After answering “no, no, she does not, no, she can’t do that, no” and trying to make oneself feel better with a pathetic little joke [“No, she doesn’t drink from a sippy cup. We only have one and I’m using it”], the chastened parent grabs the baby who has already disappointed the world by not having sat for the bar exam before turning 1 year old and crawls away. 

My Klara just learned to clap her hands, by the way. And it feels a lot more age-appropriate than conducting conversations while standing unassisted and eating with a spoon.

While I work on my book in my office, I watch Russian trash TV . The TV show I’m watching is opened in a window that sits alongside the window with the text of the book. I’m very lucky that our Russian program closed down 10 years ago because now nobody can understand the language and guess that I’m watching the equivalent of the American Maury show.

It must be because I forgot to have breakfast that instead of the word “stakeholders” I twice wrote “steakholders.”