Today is the one year anniversary of the day I found out I was pregnant with Klara.

Happiness. 

I will baptize Klara in the Russian Orthodox Church. And yes, I know, it sounds bizarre after everything I always have to say about ROC. But what else can I do? It’s not like I can show up at an Anglican church or whatever and demand that a baptism be conducted. There is got to be some connection to the church in the family. There has got to be somebody who at least is kind of trying to practice. And for us, that is only the Russian Orthodox Church.

People keep asking about Judaism but we lost our connection to it so long ago that it means nothing to us. Orthodox Christianity feels right in its meaning, even if the practice is elusive. But Judaism feels entirely alien.

The good news is that there is this really good Orthodox priest whom my parents have known for years, and whatever ROC is or isn’t, this particular priest is everything that a priest should be.

It’s not our fault that we have been robbed of a possibility to exist within an unbroken religious tradition that would feel organic and meaningful to us. What I want to do is create for Klara a possibility of inscribing herself into a symbolic order if she so wishes. And if not, then, obviously, that’s a choice that will have to be respected as well.

This is a long and roundabout way of informing everybody that since the situation in Ukraine stabilized, the last three months of blog earnings have gone to buy Klara’s baptismal robe, bonnet, blanket and cross cord. The blog’s readers will be rewarded by a photo of Klara in the outfit.

Mandelbaum says that societies rooted in corruption exist because their inhabitants can’t move past the idea that private, familial and friendly allegiances are more important than one’s allegiance to the impersonal concepts of law and order. I heard this explanation before and I don’t buy it.

In the former USSR, corruption is insanely wide-spread. And familial, etc allegiances are non-existent since the era of stalinism when people learned to hate nobody more than their family members and close friends. My people aren’t corrupt because they want to do something nice for friends and relatives. They’ll screw over friends and relatives with great gusto before they screw over anybody else.

And what about India? India is very corrupt but at the same time Indians make the most law-abiding, honest immigrants anybody has known. It should be the other way round if Mandelbaum’s theory held because immigration brings out the need to stick close to one’s own but it doesn’t work this way either for Indians or my people.

So it turns out that the terrorists who blew up the airport in Turkey are all former USSR. Two of them are from Russia. And after talking on the phone to Erdogan after the explosion, Putin announced to Russians that it was now safe to travel to Turkey and removed the prohibition on selling package trips to Turkey. Because nothing makes a country safer for vacationers than an act of terror perpetrated by their compatriots.

And by the way, Vargas Llosa is still politically active if not in Peru. Right now he is traveling in the occupied Palestinian territories and publishing gut-wrenching reports on the suffering of the displaced and abused people (I’m not linking because they are in Spanish.)

At least, the fellow is doing something real with his fame. Garcia Marquez’s entire vaunted political activism was reduced to boozing it up with Fidel.

The CIA opposed Vargas Llosa’s candidacy. “This fellow is going on and on about free markets, privatization, shock therapy,” they said. “And of course we’ll end up being blamed because people hear these words and immediately think of United States. We can’t afford being blamed for something else in Latin America.” 

This baby is something special. She just learned to take her dummy out of her mouth with her hand and put it back in. It is very hard and she struggles because both the mouth and the dummy are tiny but she’s persevering. I’m not helping because she needs to figure it out on her own.

Oh God, she just did it again. Wow. Four and a half months old.

In his autobiography, Mario Vargas Llosa tells of his failed presidential campaign of 1990. The poor fellow was desperate to talk about the economy in an indigent country ravaged by terrorism. Instead, he found himself in the midst of a religious war. All of a sudden, the Catholic Church decided to support the openly and proudly agnostic Llosa while the Evangelicals rallied against him.

Bishops were going on TV to praise Llosa and explain how his agnosticism was a sign of being even more Catholic than practicing Catholics. The Pope was trying to lure Llosa to visit him in the Vatican. Llosa’s supporters were plotting ways to make a wooden figure of Jesus during a Catholic procession open its mouth and say Llosa’s name. It was 1990, one could easily make Jesus speak with the help of a tape recorder. In the end, the still-stubbornly- agnostic Llosa was begging his comrades to stop blaspheming.

He lost the election to a fellow who disbanded the parliament, canceled future elections, and became a dictator. 

Because the hilarious and endearing magic of Latin American reality invariably rests on blood, corruption, and hopelessness. 

This is an email I just got from Hillary’s campaign. I guess we all know what this means. 

💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💖💖💖💝💝💝🌞☉🌜🎉🎊🎄🏆

Sorry, I just discovered all these emoticons and need time to get it out of my system.

I’m getting tired of hearing how people are supporting Trump out of “economic desperation”✋. Do you know any Trump supporters? Are they really that impoverished?Because the ones I know are anything but. 

My feeling is that the truly economically desperate in this country tend not to vote at all. And the folks who have the spare cash to buy a Trump baseball hat don’t count as desperate.

✋ This is a quote from today’s NY TIMES.