It seems like horrible things are happening in Louisiana. It’s under water again. And the tragedy isn’t being covered very well by the media. Because it’s so much more important to report that Trump said some dumb thing again.

It’s terribly sad and unfair but when the same tragedy strikes a person, a group, or a place several times, it gets progressively less possible to get people to care with every new iteration of the tragedy. 

There was this woman who was raped, and everybody felt enormous sympathy and tried to help. And then she was raped for the second time, and the sympathy dwindled. People actually started to shun her. Or there was also this fellow who was diagnosed with cancer, beat it, and got diagnosed with a different kind of cancer. The irritated indifference he encountered after the second diagnosis was in a stark contrast to the helpfulness and compassion he got after the first one. 

It’s like people get angry with you if you deny them a chance to reaffirm a happy ending narrative. 

Hogarth Press has asked famous authors to write their own version of a favorite play by Shakespeare. I’m not going to read the entire series but I wanted to check out Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest. I’m not much of a Shakespeare person but this play I do know well because you can’t do any Latin American studies without being persecuted by The Tempest. It’s like Latin American essayists never read anything else, they bug you so with it.

The word I’d use to describe Atwood’s rewriting of The Tempest is cute.  And if you’ve read any Atwood you should know how uncharacteristic that is. Atwood’s writing is usually anything but cute. This novel, though, is exactly like one of those sappy Hollywood deals where a disillusioned artist / teacher comes to an inner-city school / jail / community college and through an art project he does with his atypical students achieves redemption. I kept waiting for some irony to kick in because Atwood tends to be anything but cheesy and sentimental but no, the sappy thing went on until the novel’s end. 

But hey, it’s not a bad novel. Atwood even write some Shakespeare-inspired raps for it. Yes, as I said, it’s all crazy cute. You can see that she engaged with Shakespeare on a profound level and didn’t just use him as a pretext. I even felt more enthusiastic about Shakespeare than I ever did after reading the novel. Hag-seed could be a good novel to assign to 8-graders.

I was in such a state that the owner of the school asked if I needed medical attention. Klara, on the other hand, seems not to have noticed that I was away at some point. This is a great relief because my contract starts today and I couldn’t continue not to work. 

All the way back home she was singing her baby songs in the back of the car.

I’m not posting because it’s Klara’s first day at daycare and I’m blubbering. There is no rational readonly to blubber but as my analyst used to say, not everything needs to be rational.

I will rejoin the interesting discussions that we are having on the blog after I collect her from the school and feel better. 

On the island of Corsica  (where Napoleon was from), a pregnant woman and 4 others were wounded in a massive clash between Muslim residents and tourists who were accused of trying to photograph burqaed women on the beach. 

The plague on all their houses, I only care about the pregnant lady caught between these hordes of stupid barbarians. The freaks who gawk at women on a beach are dumb. The freaks who go into a “don’t photograph my property” mode are dumb, too. 

Of all the toys we showed Klara at the store, she was the most excited about a little football. And it wasn’t even the European kind of football. It was one of those American footballs. She was so happy to see it and laughed so loudly that people from neighboring aisles came running to see what was causing this joy. 

So if you are active on Facebook, remember, it is your (second, third, etc) job. You work but aren’t getting paid through no fault of your own but because Zuckerberg is exploiting you.

What’s especially distasteful are these gushy biopics and articles that glorify Zuckerberg without ever mentioning that his entire business model is “steal people’s labor.” It’s like people think the dirty bastard is doing them a favor by robbing them. 

The most effective way of expropriating people’s labor completely for free is Facebook. Not only is Zuckerberg growing incredibly rich on stolen labor but, in order to facilitate the expropriation, he is promoting the idea that writing, photography, and building networks of human connections are not really work, especially if you enjoy these pursuits. 

Even those who shun Facebook will have to pay the price of Facebook’s philosophy of labor going mainstream. This is why I advocate ditching Facebook and Instagram in favor of platforms that do compensate workers for their labor. Even if compensation is not great, at least the idea that writing is work will be preserved. And the hateful philosophy of “if you like doing it, you shouldn’t get paid” will not be perpetuated.

Ecstatic Syrian civilians have been shaving off their beards, burning their burqas, smoking and dancing in the streets after being freed from Isis. The jubilant celebrations were seen in the Syrian city of Manbij on Friday, where militants have been driven out after months of fighting by US-backed rebel groups.

How can anybody possibly say that this is not a good thing and helping these folks experience liberation is a less worthy goal than pushing them into Europe where they will forever be stuck in ghettos, turning to burqas, beards and ISIS-like preachers out of anger and resentment?

I had to buy a new kettle and started reading reviews on Amazon. Within 30 minutes I was descending to the very depths of insanity and catching myself in the weird state of caring passionately whether there was a tiny plastic part inside a kettle that would emit noxious substances and kill us all. 

When I realized that I was getting peer-pressured into a total incapacity to find a kettle that would not pose mortal danger, I managed to snap out of it and finally buy a kettle.