My colleagues are into round one million two hundred thousand twelve of “I hate unions” correspondence. In the meanwhile, the email from HR telling us that collectors have started bothering people for unpaid medical bills as a result of our perennial lack of budget goes unnoticed and unmentioned.

Guillermo Rendueles is one of Spain’s leading psychiatrists. He says that every culture had elaborated complex webs of practices that allowed micro-communities to help people process and act out their personal grief. Once fluidity and alienation destroyed these micro-communities, people tried to share the burden of grief not with other people but with pills. 

I agree with Rendueles and have this to add. In post-industrial societies, there are no shared, collective rituals of grief. So everybody has to create their own micro-micro-community and come up with some rituals. Without rituals, we are fucked.

All day long today I’m meeting curly red-haired boys of different ages. 

Eric had curly hair, while Klara’s hair is completely straight. Other than that, they look like little copies of each other. 

Klara must have felt something was wrong, so last night she decided to prevent me from sleeping. Until 4 am, she simply refused to sleep. She didn’t cry or want anything. She simply stayed awake, playing and singing songs. And only when I was too exhausted to feel anything like grief, she fell asleep. Nothing like this ever happened before, by the way. 

Today is the third anniversary of our Eric’s death. Now that we have Klara, it’s become a lot clearer what we lost. 

Addicts in recovery were injecting Portsmouth with what other American cities relied on Mexican immigrants to provide: energy, optimism, gratitude for an opportunity. 

This is one of the closing sentences from Dreamland, a book I’ve been quoting for a while and that I finally finished. Its author is a remarkable journalist of the kind I thought didn’t exist any more. He grabs a story like a pit bull and doesn’t let go until every aspect of it gets explored. 

It’s sensationally good, people. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It feels weird to say that I enjoyed reading a book about such horrible suffering but I did enjoy it because the writing is so good and there is hope in the very fact that these terrible crimes are being investigated and brought to light. 

P.S. Just read the book before you ever say “but if opiates don’t get prescribed what will people with chronic pain do?” ever again. You will discover that this sentence was manufactured by vile drug dealers and put into your head by them a very short time ago. An entire society was brainwashed by these monsters who ended up killing countless people to feed their greed. 

One really fun thing I’m doing is writing letters to Klara. These are real pen-to-paper letters that are sealed until she is ready to read them. I started when I was pregnant and I write a letter every couple of months. 

And today I got something even cooler: a notebook that has questions about my life, my pregnancy, my feelings about Klara, stories from my childhood. I fill it out by hand and it will end up being a sort of a handwritten story of my life that I wrote just for her. 

Klara and I have been displaced from our place of abode by air duct cleaners. N won’t be able to find things to do with a 6-month-old outside the house for 5 hours and I will, so we set out together on a fun adventure. 

I’m blessed with the calmest, easiest to please baby known to humanity, so I don’t even think this will be hard. 

We’ve already visited Michael’s and looked at autumn decorations. Now we are at the bookstore, and one of us is asleep. 

You know how when you are poor you feel like an extra 40 bucks here and there would make all the difference? Right now I feel like an extra 40 or even 20 minutes every once in a while would have a huge impact.

​When Abu Omar al-Shishani, one of the organization’s top military leaders, was killed, his place was taken by Gulmurod Khalimov, known also as al-Tajiki. Both men are Russian-speakers and both are related, through their wives, to the governments of their respective post-Soviet regions, Chechnya and Tajikistan.

The enormous number of Russian-speakers in ISIS, both among the regular soldiers and the leadership, is a phenomenon in need of being studied.