I still remember the time when getting your first watch was a big deal. The kids who already had their watches looked down on the simpletons who didn’t have theirs yet. It was a rite of passage to get a watch and I was over the moon when I got mine at the age of 12. I felt like such a serious, adult woman. My first watch was what we called “mechanical.” It means there wasn’t a battery in it. Instead, the watch had a complex mechanism that had to be attended by a person whose job it was to peer into the insides of watches through a magnifying glass he wore over his right eye.

This was back in 1988 but I’m thinking that this might be cultural. Was getting one’s first watch still a big deal in the US? What was the last generation to see the first watch as a rite of passage? Who still remembers a transition from “real” watches to battery watches? Who has visited a real watch repairman (is there a word for this profession in English?)

I wonder if watches will really come back into fashion by the time Klara grows up. Will she want one or will most people still rely on phones to check time?

An article in the NYTIMES Magazine chides Germans for not being too welcoming to refugees. “I had no idea what people were saying,” the reporter chirps stupidly, “But it sounded like they said the word ‘refugee’ and they didn’t look pleased!” You can practically see the reporter ooze superiority to these anti-refugee bastards.

The article is accompanied by a photo featuring a group of refugees and Germans together. The photo is captioned “Evelyn Beilhack, Beni Beilhack, right, and Luca Beilhack, second from right, with refugees from Syria at the residence for asylum seekers in Eisenärzt.” Note that the refugees are not entitled to names while the Germans get the same last name repeated 3 times. Refugees are a backdrop to the Beilhacks who are treated as individuals and not as a concept.

Those who are the most self-righteous are usually the greatest bigots.

When students send me emails in which they refer to Klara as “a bundle of joy”, I have to battle the temptation to slip into the sour teacher mode and start repeating my lecture about the use of clichés.

I miss teaching.

Klara seems to have taken exception to the criticism of her sleeping habits and decided to stop sleeping altogether. Or she’s probably having a reaction to her shots. Or maybe she’s not ecstatic about my trying to graduate her from her cot to her crib. She has a sleeper, a cot, a crib and a bed (what can I say, I get a lot of gifts), and the time has come to go from a cot to a larger crib.

The end result is that I’m very loopy today.

Putin announced that the Panama papers were leaked by Goldman Sachs. Apparently, the CIA story has been dropped, and now Goldman Sachs is the new bugbear. The Süddeutsche Zeitung  newspaper is owned by Goldman, Putin said, so Goldman must be behind the leak.

Of course, like all of Putin’s lies, this one is quite clumsy. Süddeutsche Zeitung is not owned by Goldman Sachs, which became very clear very soon.

As a result, Putin’s press secretary has had to make a public apology for this lie. And that’s quite unprecedented. Putin has accused many a Western leader of a number of egregious things and never had to issue an apology. An insult to Goldman, on the other hand, has him apologizing immediately.

This is the first time in my memory that Putin shows concern over the reception the words he says to his voters get outside of the country.

My plan is to say things I never said before about these candidates. Which will be hard because there have been so many of these debates already.

Join me in efforts to be original!

20:16 – I’m watching the debate with Klara, and she’s a lot less repetitive than the candidates even though the range of sounds she can make is quite limited.

20:17 – if I were playing a game where I’d take a shot whenever Bernie gave a specific answer to a specific question I’d be as sober as I am already.

20:20 – the debate sounds like a soap opera: break up, break up, break up, put to bed, put to bed, break them up.

20:21 – if I were playing a game where I’d take a shot whenever Hillary gave a specific answer to the question about the transcripts, I’d still be very sober.

20:24 – Bernie looks a little frazzled. But why would anyone grill him on taxes so much? It’s obvious he’s very honest and doesn’t cheat on his taxes. Come on, move on already!

20:27 – fuck Verizon!

20:40 – Bernie wants to return to the 1950s and Hillary wants to return to the 1990s. Maybe by year 2050 we will accept that the twentieth century is over.

20:51 – we have minimum wage workers at my department: students who work at the lab. If the minimum wage went to $15, we’d have to fire most of them because the money is simply not there. Besides, the work is SO not worth $15 an hour. They furiously browse their Instagram and Snapchat while visitors to the lab pass their cards through the scanner. We do need somebody to make sure the cards are scanned but we don’t need it at such a cost.

20:59 – I like how Sanders speaks about climate change. He’s neither apocalyptic nor mumbly and says exactly what is needed. And what I’d say.

21:05 – hallelujah! Finally, somebody has mentioned that fracking has been crucial to keeping Russia in check. Yay!

21:09 – at this time, I was tempted to reiterate that the Pope is a dick but I won’t because I don’t want to be repetitive.

21:20 – good point on Bernie’s closeness to Trump on the issue of NATO.

21:25 – I love Hillary for finally bringing up Ukraine.

21:27 – Bernie is very good, very reasonable on Palestine. I like! That’s, once again, verbatim what I’d say on the subject. I’m pleasantly surprised for the third time in this debate.

The pediatrician was shocked that Klara doesn’t sleep through the night. And I was shocked that she was shocked because I had no idea 2-month-olds regularly sleep through the night. I was so glad that Klara slept for 4-5 hours straight at night but the pediatrician made me feel like something was wrong with me for not expecting longer stretches of sleep.

Folks, am I completely crazy here? Do two-month-olds regularly sleep through the night? I understand that it might happen occasionally but on a regular basis?

We all know what a “syndrome of life delayed” is, right?

I will

• wear these clothes
• read these books
• use this dinnerware set
• start going to a gym
• write a novel, etc.

when

• I lose weight
• there is time
• on a special occasion
• when I get tenure
• when this trial period ends and my real life begins, etc.

Do you have something that you will use or do when you real life begins? I had this syndrome big time for pretty much ever. Now I have mostly defeated it except in one area: notebooks. I love notebooks and have a whole collection of really beautiful ones. I can’t even say what special moment I’m waiting for in order to start writing in them.

 

John Kasich lectures Talmudic scholars. What a likable fellow he is. Not.

[Russian] An Israeli journalist searches for anti-Semites in Ukraine. Very funny.

Why everybody read Sanders’s Daily News interview and nobody read or heard of Clinton’s interview with them. I have to confess, I’m one of the thrill-seekers who skipped the boring, well-informed piece in favor of the shocking one.

“The report also warned that child marriage is common in Lebanon among Syrian communities where families cannot afford to care for their future and see marriage as their only coping strategy. “Child marriage is done as a coping strategy. But not only for financial security; also because they perceive the threat of their daughter getting raped if single.‘” Yes, the girls are getting handed over to rapists in order to save them from rape. Makes total sense. I detest this mealy-mouthed dishonesty that prevents people from stating openly that girls are being sold to parent-approved rapists before their market value is lowered by non-parent-approved rapists.

The post is in Russian but the text doesn’t matter. It’s all about the photos that illustrate how traumatized people recreate their trauma in order to keep reliving it. In the linked post, Israeli Jews recreate the European ghetto because they can’t escape from their trauma. But we all do that, if not in such a striking and visible way. The painful experiences in our lives that keep getting replayed are an equivalent of this manufactured ghetto.

As I’ve been saying, young women don’t vote for Clinton because they haven’t had an opportunity yet to experience sexism.

“It is hard to resist the symbolism of the Islamic State establishing a base for its murderous designs in the so-called capital of Europe at a time when the European idea is weaker than at any time since the 1950s. A jihadi loves a vacuum, as Syria demonstrates. Belgium as a state, and Belgium as the heart of the European Union are as close to a vacuum as Europe offers these days.”

“Solutions are proposed as the shockwave of the new industrial revolution becomes visible on the horizon. Naturally, we first get small and comfortable ones — such as a guaranteed minimum income, which guarantee high and growing levels of inequality. We might even implement these, leaving the resulting social turmoil for the next generation.” At least, somebody understands what a disaster GMI will be.

“The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts heard a case yesterday involving one teen encouraging another teen to go ahead and commit suicide, which he eventually did. She is arguing that she shouldn’t be prosecuted for this criminally, and I agree.” Me, too! Saying things is not and cannot be a crime.

A more nuanced look at NAFTA than what we hear today from politicians who like to pander to the voters who are disturbed by  the world’s complexity.

Father who have baby boys are much more likely to take paternity leave than fathers who have baby girls. That’s just weird. Every man I know is more excited about daughters than sons. Which, unsurprisingly, mimics my father’s desire to have daughters and not sons. Seriously, we only encounter whatever we expect to encounter in the world.

Dinesh D’Souza never heard of logic.

And a real treat: this is a post that every academic or aspiring academic should read. And then read again. And possibly memorize. Because it will be invaluable in a scholar’s career.

Laura Lippman used to write really good police procedurals set in Baltimore. I love Baltimore and always enjoyed the novels because they brought back pleasant memories of this great city. Plus, they were well-written and fun to read. 

Then, for some bizarre reason, Lippman decided to stop writing in this genre and switched to publishing novels about boring rich people. Wilde Lake is her most recent novel, and its characters take the prize in dreary rich-people assholery. The protagonist is a woman who spends the entire novel moaning about the intense insecurity she feels because of being thin and having big boobs. Yes, what a horrible tragedy for a woman to have this body type. My compassion is profound. All of the problems the novel’s characters experience are of this kind. Their black Mammy-type servant is not accommodating enough. The children they purchased require a bit of attention sometimes. A colleague has longer legs. Are there that many readers who can identify with this kind of existence or feel much interest towards it? If so, I’m not one of them.

This novel is even worse than After I’m Gone, Lippman’s preceding foray into the boring rich people genre. I so wish she’d just stop writing about these useless, superficial creatures and their petty dramas and go back to writing about normal people and their normal, interesting lives.