A blogger attended Trump’s speech at a gold club with a $200,000 membership, and this is what especially shocked him:

When Trump said, “[W]e are all suffering and we’re suffering big league and it’s getting worse,” a roomful of extremely rich fucks cheered in agreement. Yeah, they were suffering, these pampered pricks and pussies who probably made more money under the Obama administration than in the rest of their luxurious lives.

I know, the capacity of the very pampered to feel sorry for themselves is overwhelming. The children of these extraordinarily rich people are wailing “We are in pain” on college campuses as they wait for their trust funds to mature and allow them to buy their own memberships in the $200,000 country clubs. And we are all so duped by the philosophy of “everybody is what s/he says s/he is” that we believe they are the poor, marginalized victims of racism and sexism that they claim to be.

Judy Lydon had a busy routine as a maternity nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She moved from room to room taking care of women and their new babies, checking vital signs, changing diapers, helping mothers hold and feed their newborns for the first time.

Then came the new computer system.

Now, she says, she’s become a captive of the keyboard, spending far more of her time recording every blood pressure reading, every feeding, every diaper change. The demands of the new system are so taxing and time-consuming, Lydon said, that the computer has come between her and her patients.

Thank you, sweet dear computer. Anything that keeps nurses away from mothers for at least a few minutes is fantastic. I’m still traumatized by the unending stream of loud and obnoxious cheeriness that nurses were directing at me in the hospital. I know they meant well but three days of hearing their LOUD, happy chirping every 15 minutes, day and night, almost did me in.

I don’t think I will ever forget the sweet moments when the nurse would turn away to the computer and, for a few blessed moments, would stop staring at and talking to me. The few times when the computer was off, nurses did things like wake me up at 3 am to give me a repeat lecture about the importance of not taking the baby to sleep in my bed. Which I was not doing and not planning to do. There is also the endearing tradition of waking a person up to ask if she feels any pain.

The only glimmers of humanity that I could see behind this fake and LOUD cheeriness of the medical personnel would occur whenever the computer took a minute to start and a nurse would get a moment to relax into her human personality as she stared at the dark screen.

The doctors and nurses in the article whine that computer management systems slow them down. We, as patients, are asked to side with medical professionals who are upset that something throws a wrench into their conveyor-belt approach to treating patients. In my experience, though, anything that slows down a doctor or a nurse and makes them stop their mechanical dispensation of prescriptions and actually see a patient is a blessing. It is kind of sad that computers are being accused of preventing people from acting too robotic and inhuman.

In his autobiography, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa tells of an enormous influence that books by Alexandre Dumas had on him as an adolescent and a budding writer. As typical Soviet kids from families of intelligentsia, N and I also adored these books as kids. It is strange and beautiful to imagine that they were so crucial both to Llosa in the 1950s Peru and to me in the 1980s USSR. Of course, I didn’t become one of the world’s greatest writers like Llosa but my life was enriched by Dumas’s books nonetheless.

Long before the Internet or even cinema, kids all over the world shared the experience of traveling to the adventure-filled world of these books. And nobody considered them to be “young adult” or any crap like that. They were simply great books.

The bad nanny turned out to be one of those people who, in popular imagination, are usually credited with “en evil eye.” Obviously, I don’t believe in actual evil eye, witchcraft, or any silly stuff like that. What people for centuries have referred to as “evil eye” is a certain psychological constitution that dooms its holders to be shunned and disliked through no apparent fault of their own.

The nanny didn’t say or do anything bad but after spending an hour with her Klara and I were wiped out. We crawled into bed and covered ourselves with fluffy towels, after which one of us nursed for an hour ten minutes and another inhaled an ice-cream bar. (Given that, psychoanalytically, ice-cream stands for mother’s milk, we engaged in identical activities.)

I knew that I was off and decided to protect my phone by hiding it in my chest. Like the peasant Ukrainian women I come from, I hide things in my chest. (And I don’t mean my chest-of-drawers, I mean a body part). Of course, I always manage to forget where I hid the enormous Samsung Galaxy and spend hours looking for it. This time, Klara prevented this from happening by throwing up massively right into the spot where the phone was stored.

All this was caused by spending a limited amount of time with a woman who probably has no idea what effect she has on people. I always feel sad for such folks because nobody tells them how heavily they weigh on others even during the most superficial contact. These are people who depress everybody around them simply by existing.

. . . dislikes the federal government. You’ll ask how I know but it was hard not to since she was more into talking about the federal government than into anything else.

One thing this nanny is not into is babies. She doesn’t like them or understand them. For instance, she told Klara to grab the key chain and expected the almost-4-month-old to understand and follow the verbal command. Which at this age is simply ridiculous.

The baby clearly didn’t get a positive vibe from her either. Now that the nanny left, the child is fussy and unhappy.

Ukrainians are working hard to join the civilized world. They are now organizing their own Pride in the capital. There will be 4 law enforcement per each participant, working to ensure that the less civilized don’t hassle the participants.

Nanny #1 asked how I feel about the TV being on around Klara. I’d decided long ago that I wasn’t going to turn our lives into a useless battle over screens. Screens exist, and trying to manufacture for a kid a reality where they don’t is a waste of time.

I will offer Klara interesting alternatives to screens. And when I can’t or don’t have time or lack the energy, I won’t try to assuage my feelings of guilt through artificial screen-time limits or things of that nature.

The nanny said I was extremely laid back in everything that concerns the baby, and it’s true. My goal is to figure out her needs and cater to them while helping her learn to satisfy her needs on her own. For instance, this week she fell asleep without any help during the day twice. It’s a huge milestone because she usually needs quite a bit of help with falling asleep. I’m happy that I noticed she was ready to start doing it on her own and gave her space to do it.

One good thing about being an old parent of an infant is that all of my self-representational goals were solved a long time ago. I don’t need to use the baby to cultivate a certain image of myself because I’m so past that stage in my life. So when people ask when I will start teaching her to read or to speak Spanish, I have nothing to say to them because I’m not thinking about Klara this way. I just want to spend time with her, making sure she is happy and has fun. I don’t need her to be a sort of a trained poodle who makes me feel special by demonstrating knowledge of 5 languages at the age of five (or at any age) or crazy things like that. As for reading, it will happen when it needs to happen. Klara’s father, by the way, didn’t even know his letters until the age of 7 but he went on to become a passionate reader and a PhD.

And if it turns out that she’s not into reading, that’s fine, too. Maybe she’ll be into drawing or sports or plants or even puppies. I’m not looking to make her into a little clone of me. As I said, I’m way too ancient for that way of thinking.

Even literary critics can be very clumsy writers. “After the writer’s sudden disappearance in August of 2015. . .” writes one critic. In reality, the writer didn’t suddenly disappear. He died of lung cancer. People who don’t know what happened to the writer might conclude he was kidnapped or went missing.

We all need to be very careful with our writing. And I say it as somebody who is still wriggling with shame after writing, “Since Franco’s downfall, Spain has established a working democracy.” As my thesis advisor pointed out when she read this atrocious sentence, “What downfall? He died.”

The first nanny came in for her interview, and she is stunned with how advanced and developed Klara is. She even asked me if I was sure she is only going to be 4 months old this weekend. And I know she isn’t just saying it to flatter me. N and I constantly remark that Klara looks like somebody who is ready to get up, walk to the door and say, “Dad, can I have $40 and the car keys?” She has a very alert and intelligent look.

What’s really throwing me for a big, plump loop, though, is that Klara seems to adore this nanny. She smiles and laughs at her like she’s her long-lost relative. And I like this nanny, too. This is very disconcerting because I was prepared for a long and painful search. I have two more nannies coming in this week and the next. Can it be possible that the very first one is the best one?

Oh, the incredible kindness of the economy where a journalist stays employed after writing something as profoundly dumb as the following:

Donald Trump Had to Use a Teleprompter: And it was somehow even more unsettling than his usual nonsense.

No, you brainless piece of idiotic loser, it’s not about who uses teleprompters and who doesn’t. This isn’t a reality TV show, you dumb fuck. And if you can’t figure that out on your own, find a job where you can keep silent and not subject the world to your terrifying stupidity.