A couple more extra cute baby stories. 

Yesterday, Klara was playing with a soft toy. She was slapping it with her hand like a drum. So I joined in. She’d slap it a few times, and then I would imitate her actions. At first, she didn’t understand what was happening but then, I think, she realized that I was playing with her. And she started laughing like she’d never laughed before. She was literally ecstatic. It was very cool to make this kind of a connection with her. 

Over the weekend, there was a time she fell asleep in the pram. Once she was ready to wake up, N and I came up to the pram and stood by its sides. As she was waking up, Klara was cranky. But then she spotted N and me, standing there on both sides and grinning at her. She looked at him, at me, at him again, then back at me. And she really loved it that we were there, smiling at her. She lit up and was so happy. It was beyond cute. 

The teachers at the daycare love Klara. During those moments when all kids in the group begin to wail simultaneously, she sits in the middle of the room with all the toys around her and looks at the screaming kids with a slightly supercilious expression. 

And I know they are not just saying it to please me. She’s like that. When other children cry, she looks at them with curiosity that is almost condescending in nature. 

Yes, yes, I’m totally projecting.

The great philosopher Jacques Ranciere says that the idea that people will get overstimulated or overloaded by all of the images and sounds and information flows coming at them dates back to the 19th century. It originated with the elites who feared the spread of literacy and expressed their anxiety that the unwashed masses would learn to read and write through a fake concern over this so-called overload. 

So according to Ranciere, whenever you hear about the sensory overload or people being bombarded by information you need to know that those who say it want to keep you down, controlled and uninformed. 

Yeah, I’m simplifying but it’s 10:20 pm, and if you can retell Ranciere any better at this hour, go ahead. 

So, my question: if Ranciere is right, then all of these parents who are fretting that children will get overstimulated by screens, Internet, phones, TV, etc, what is it that they really fear?

I wish people laid off food analogies. The kindest thing that can be said about them is that they are dumb. The Skittles meme was idiotic back when it was used to make the point that all men are rapists and it’s equally idiotic when used to discuss refugees. 

It’s not cute to be dumb. 

Hey, folks, did you hear how the Wells Fargo CEO explained why each customer had to have eight (and not 7 or 9) accounts? 

Because eight means great! 

I told N but he doesn’t believe me. 

What makes me nauseous is when I see this way of doing things seep into academia.

Terence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott – it’s happening literally every day. And then people ask me why I support reparations to African Americans but not, say, to the descendants of serfs in the Russian Empire. Because for the serfs it ended back in 1861. While here it is far from truly and completely ending. 

Instead of an email I’m very eager to get, I got one telling me what paperwork I need to file with the university in order to use my drone. I feel very ancient because I have no drone and don’t feel a need for one. 

N and I are conducting an experiment where we agreed not to buy anything for a week. Today was Day 1.

Today it was easy not to buy anything because I was at home with Klara all day. I had to ask the egg man not to bring any eggs tomorrow. Plus, there was a book I was tempted to buy but I ordered it from the interlibrary loan instead. But that was it in what concerns temptations. Will report how things develop tomorrow. 

Here’s the thing. You can’t be a partial anti-semite. You begin with proposing “a shutdown on Muslims” and end up joyfully repeating Nazi-era rhetoric about evil Jews. A couple of years ago, this same road took Bibi right to “Hitler was not that much to blame for the Holocaust.”