Whenever Klara arrives at her changing table, she looks up and to the left. She sees something there that makes her very happy. She laughs, makes happy faces, and babbles for as long as we let her, staring at a mysterious interlocutor N and I don’t see. She doesn’t do that anywhere else in the house. It’s just this particular spot between the ceiling and the wall of her room where something very attractive to her but unseen to us is located.

We have arrived at a conclusion that there must be a portal to another dimension in that spot that only Klara has access to.

I wonder, are the folks who are ranting against “immoral” aborting women on campus email contacting their representatives in the Congress and urging them to pass the measures that will stop the spread of the horrible Zika virus? The virus that is destroying the actual lives of actual babies?

No, it’s not true, I don’t wonder. I know the answer. They don’t give a shit about babies. Fucking hypocrites.

There is a long article in the NY TIMES about a bunch of pouty, entitled men who are bored out of their heads and are excited over the possibility of inflicting Trump on the rest of us in order to punish us for not providing them with as much luxury as they believe they deserve. It’s really scary shit, folks. One can try to break through conviction, belief, opinion, anything. But there is no arguing with pouty entitlement.

I go to my work email, and what do I discover? A few colleagues noticed a goose with a broken wing on campus and decided to help it. Other colleagues asked for advice on how to protect a goose nest that they saw around campus. All was well and good until a couple of people decided to pollute the discussion with moaning about immoral women destroying “unborn life in the womb” and asking if this is what American soldiers have been dying for overseas. No, I don’t see the connection either. 

This is work email, mind you. It’s one thing to discuss working conditions on campus (of which conditions geese are a huge part, as you know from my previous posts). But I would be pilloried if I sent out any pro-abortion messages to the university community (and rightfully so because the work email exists for other purposes). In the meanwhile, we have to sit by quietly as we are publicly berated for being immoral women and for supposedly disrespecting soldiers because we believe we have the right to decide what occurs inside our own bodies. For fuck’s sake, is that the liberal academia I’m hearing so much about?

Of course, I sent out an email in response insisting that I not be exposed to this sort of propaganda in the workplace. I’m very angry right now.

Instead of addressing the director of the university press where I submitted my manuscript as “Dear Greg”, I addressed him as “Fear Greg.” Twice. I don’t think I need to get back in touch with my analyst to interpret the meaning of this slip.

You never know where on your physique baby vomit will end up. Which means that appearing in public with a huge patch of vomit visible to everybody but you is inevitable.

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A debate between Trump and Bernie would make for great television but Trump will slaughter Bernie, and I don’t want to see Bernie hurt.

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Trying to get our Textbook Services to provide me with a textbook I will use to teach a course next semester is harder than getting Putin to release Nadiya Savchenko. Every time I try to do it, I feel like some sort of a criminal in the process of doing something untoward.

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Klara’s paternal grandmother doesn’t seem to know that Klara exists. It’s just as well because her anti-semitic heart might give out if she hears such a clearly Jewish name. 

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We now have DirecTV, and it elongates human beings on our old TV set. This makes everybody who appears on the screen look very emaciated. I’m now afraid to watch America’s Next Top Model on this set.

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N’s favorite TV show is American Greed because it feeds his nostalgia of the post-Soviet 1990s in Russia.

Reader delagar reminded me of how much I love Richard Russo, the only American writer who, in my opinion, writes the kind of literature that is not a waste of time. Russo wrote Nobody’s Fool in 1993 but the novel is scarily relevant to what is happening in the country right now.

Nobody’s Fool is a novel about men who fail. Its male characters belong to different age groups and professions, they have different levels of educational attainment but they all share an uncanny capacity to fail at absolutely everything. They fail as workers, professionals, husbands, fathers, friends, citizens, lovers, neighbors, even pet owners. And as soon as they are done failing, they start all over again.

The question that lies at the heart of this novel is whether readers will find these male characters quirky and endearing or if they will notice how casually but relentlessly these men take their frustrations out on women. Beaten, abused, jailed, humiliated, dead, discarded, and infected women are everywhere in the novel but the male characters don’t notice their suffering and only see them as obstacles to getting what they want whenever they want it. Readers will either subscribe to this vision of women or will manage to resist it.

This is a complex novel, and Russo brings to it another layer. His favorite subject that he keeps writing about is bad parents and the damage they unthinkingly inflict on their children. The novel is funny but it’s the kind of humor that covers up something so horrible, so degraded that a mere glimpse of it makes one recoil. 

Highly recommended.

So I finally read the really fun article in The New Yorker about students acting freaky at Oberlin. The article reminded me of how back in 1990, I was going on an exchange trip to Great Britain with a bunch of kids from the families of Soviet apparatchiks. I got invited because I actually spoke English, and it would have been weird to bring an entire group of students from a specialized English-language school without a single person who could at least say, “Hi, how are you?”

“I can’t believe we are going to Great Britain!” I exclaimed once we got on a train that was to take us to Moscow.

“I know!” a student sitting next to me responded. “Such a drag! I can’t believe my Dad is sending me to stupid England again. I told him a hundred times that I’m sick and tired of it.”

The girl was completely sincere, and her pain was real. She was from a class of people who traveled the world frequently and with ease, and my excitement of a regular Soviet child who saw little difference, in terms of their sheer improbability, between a trip to London and a trip to the Moon was alien to her.

Oberlin students, too, are, as they claim, in actual pain. A human being can’t exist without something to fight for, something to want, something to overcome. People begin to invent suffering when there is none in order to retain their full humanity. 

One of the students in the article did find an answer to the problem of her incurable melancholy of opulence:

She wanted to get as far away from the United States as she could. “Working my piece of land somewhere and living autonomously—that’s the dream,” she said. “Just getting the eff out of America. It’s a sinking ship.”

This, I believe, is a great solution. Maybe there should be a rotation of sorts. Those who are tired of paradise should go away and give their space up for those who haven’t had an opportunity of getting bored with problem-free opulence. 

The daughter of the Communist Party apparatchik who hated having to go to England again died a long time ago. She got into heavy drugs back in high school and did not live to see her 25th birthday. 

Nadiya means hope in Ukrainian, by the way. And so does the Russian version of her name, Nadezhda. It was super dumb of Russians to kidnap and torture a Ukrainian woman called “hope” because the symbolism of “Russians are trying to kill hope” was the first thing that came to mind whenever anybody heard of this.

They also should have figured out that a woman who managed to become a fighter pilot in Ukraine had to have dealt with so much stupid, vicious sexist shit that she’d be indestructible. 

Gosh, these idiots can’t even kidnap a person without messing things up and making themselves look like stupid fools.

I’m crying right now because this is so wonderful.