I’m also not that into the excessive use of the word “work.”

“Are you still working on that dessert?”

No, I’m not working on it. The person who made it worked on it. I’m eating it, and it’s not that hard.

“We’ve been working on this TV series all winter long.” And this is not coming from people who created the show. It comes from viewers.

It’s just a way of speaking, you’ll say. But remember, a language is not just a collection of signs and sounds. It’s a universe of meanings. When everything needs to be positioned as work, it betrays an incapacity to accept that rest is as great and important as work.

It’s OK not to work every second of every day. Let’s all just relax already.

Parents of infants often use first person plural to talk about their babies. It’s not a big deal, although they might end up sounding confusing (“Our tummy hurts”) or kind of creepy (“We pooped twice today!”). Problem is, some people can’t stop doing it long after it’s even marginally OK.

“We are taking two AP courses this year because we want to start filling out our college applications early.”

Or even, “We just started going out with our first boyfriend!”  And it takes everything I’ve got not to respond, “Lady, your first boyfriend happened before the Vietnam War. Stop creeping me out.”

Reality follows words, and the temptation to be an active presence in our college applications or our relationship with the boyfriend will be very hard to vanquish. And “our poop” will gradually transform into a younger person’s pooped up life of which she or he doesn’t feel fully in control.

So all of these angry idiots who wave Mexican flags in front of Trump’s rallies, assault female Trump supporters, burn American flags – what are they trying to do exactly? Help Trump get elected?

Their idiotic fit of passionate love for Mexico begs the question of why they are not right now in that Mexico they so love. Do they need Trump to get elected and take them back there and away from the US that they are finding so horrible?

Who are these losers and why aren’t they getting their heads examined ASAP?

Unsurprisingly, Klara hates my hair. It gets into her mouth or coils around her little fingers. So I realized that I have to start getting it under control. Which is not easy given how thick it is. One thing I found is this flexi clip in the Mega size. Marketed to people with dreadlocks, it kindly accommodated my hair.

The color of the hair is weird because of electricity.

Amazon will be opening 2 warehouses right where I live. The mayor of the town is super happy: they are promising 1,000 jobs. Those jobs sound pretty horrible, though. I have no idea who in this town where even teenagers charge a fortune for babysitting will be tempted. And the town is pretty cut off from the rest of the region by design. The design being to keep “those people” out, of course.

Clinton in her foreign policy speech:  “We should try to find common ground with Russia when we can.” Even as a talking point it’s not funny. Putin will hear it as, “My strategy to get Americans to rule the world together is working! They are ready to look for common ground! Let me invade some more to convince Americans completely.” One has to be very careful with what message one sends to Russians.

She referred to Putin as “a tyrant”, at least, so that’s good.

I decided to make my American experience of the day complete and had French toast for the first time in my life. It was. . . difficult to understand. Not bad or anything but I’m not sure I got the point of the whole thing.

Maybe I should now try waffles.

Of course, there is no excuse for the murder Mainak Sarkar committed on the UCLA campus. This was a horrible crime.

I wish, though, that all college professors got at least the most basic training in pedagogy. We are laboring under the erroneous belief that a good specialist in a discipline will make a good teacher. That’s completely wrong, however. There are crowds of brilliant scholars who drive their students to mental breakdowns because they are ignorant about pedagogy and clumsy in human relations.

Obviously, you can only drive to a mental breakdown somebody who is already a very traumatized person. Still, when we are talking about graduate students especially, the combination of their age with the power a professor has to ruin their lives, makes it likely that a professor who has no understanding of pedagogy and has shitty people skills (i.e. 90% of scholar professors) might push an unstable person over the edge.

“I need to see you guys’s IDs,” said the young woman at the county clerk’s office and praised my hair ties in the colors of the American flag.

“I decorated my bedroom in the colors of the flag,” she shared.

After filing for the baby’s American passport, we went for breakfast to a typical American diner.