Ah, I will miss this election. It was so much fun.

Russian media keep reporting that Trump is winning. It is not entirely impossible that when he loses they will still announce that he won. It’s not like the majority of Russians will find a way to check.

One person after another reiterates this sentiment:

How can we think about anything else on this day but the most consequential presidential election that any of us are likely to live through?

I promise that the next election will be a lot more consequential than this one. So no need to mourn the passing of this super consequential moment. 

A gentleman strolled into the ER and said in a conversational tone, ” I sliced off 3 of my fingers. I have them right here, in an ice packet. Thank you.” 

After which he started to collapse. 

I saw myself in this fellow like a mirror reflection. Creepy.

The day after tomorrow I’m leaving for the Texas conference. The topic of the conference is borders. Everybody will be all, “Borders are bad, let’s bring them down.” And I’ll be all, “Borders are not all bad, and fluidity is cruel and unforgiving.” 

It turns out that those cheap little cell phones without a contract are not really called burners. And when you demand a burner cell phone at Walmart, people start treating you all weird.

Hey, folks, did you hear that in some places there is such a thing as “school lottery”? Next to immigration lottery, it’s probably the dumbest idea out there. 

( Sorry for linking to such an indecent website but I don’t have another source.)

 The shady oligarchs who control Ukraine have never really changed their position: They don’t want Putin to take over the country since his power would threaten their privilege and wealth. But they also don’t want Ukraine to become a true Western country, with a bunch of irritating accountants and lawyers picking over their books, taxing their profits, and generally impeding their ability to loot.

‘Cause shady oligarchs totally don’t control “true Western countries” and their privilege and wealth are very much threatened by accountants lawyers.

What is this fellow smoking because I really want some right now.

Throughout my life first in the USSR and then in Ukraine, people around me were emigrating. The ones who emigrated were always, without an exception, very much above average in terms of income. Nobody ever emigrated from poverty. 

These days, of course, there are crowds of Ukrainians and Russians trying to get shitty jobs all over EU. They are not coming from any serious poverty either but they are not immigrants anyway. These are not the people who have relinquished their Ukrainian passports forever at the border. These are people who are going back to Ukraine. And then away again. And then back. They are trying to raise their status through this sad imitation of the real mobility of transnational elites.

The ones who live in actual poverty in the FSU countries never go anywhere. They won’t go to a neighboring town, let alone to another country. Even the kind of mobility that is engaged in by seasonal workers who go to the EU or women who go to sell sexual services is accessible (not only financially but psychologically and cognitively) only to those who have a higher income and a higher educational status.

The real division these days is between those who can move around (or could if they needed to) and those who can’t. Everything else is an outdated category that has no real meaning any longer.

It turns out that the melody I’ve been singing to Klara since she was born is the Ukrainian folk music hopak. Clearly, I haven’t spent any time listening to Ukrainian folk music but it was stuck somewhere deep inside my memory.

This is precisely the kind of stuff that served as a foundation of the nation-state model.

H.L. Mencken — ‘The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.’