Finally, I met another family walking with a pram. Usually, I walk with Klara in her pram through empty residential areas and the few people who come outside stare at me like I’m weird.

Of course, the family with a pram (baby carriage, stroller, whatever) I met today was immigrant. Is it simply not a customary thing for people here in the Midwest to walk with their infants? Where is everybody? I know for a fact that there is a newborn baby two doors down from me but I don’t see him outside.

How is a person supposed to lay down groundwork for future play dates if prospective play daters are hiding indoors?

Ukraine, however, also has its share of crazy. A representative of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church issued a statement warning that Ukraine is in danger of falling apart and ceasing to exist.

Because of gay marriage.

Forget the Russian invasion and the harshest economic crisis in decades. Forget the war and the annexation of the Crimea. Gay marriage is the real danger to Ukraine.

Of course, there is no gay marriage in Ukraine. It’s illegal. But the Orthodox fellow does not let these little details stand in the way of his predictions. He is convinced that Ukraine is about to be done in by gay marriage and can’t stop ranting about it.

This tone-deafness is one of many reasons why so few people in Ukraine have no interest in joining the church. 

The poor addled brains of Russian journalists have succumbed under the pressure, and today one of the commentators on Russia’s leading TV channel informed the public that Turkish troops attacked a platoon of Kurds in the Southeast of Ukraine.

The idiot freaks can keep the countries they are currently invaded straight. They haven’t issued any clarification either because it’s not like the audience cares much whether Kurds have been attacked in Syria, Ukraine or on Mars.

Trump’s passionate detractors need him as much as his ardent supporters. He serves as a screen onto which we can project all of our nastiest impulses and feel cleansed and virtuous as a result.

It seemed for a moment that an honest conversation about the role racism plays in this society was inevitable. But that prospect was so scary that we collectively conjured Trump and can now gleefully congratulate ourselves with not being like him. Of course, not being endorsed by the KKK is a bit of a low bar to set but that’s the whole point. We will not allow Trump to fade away because it’s so damn easy to feel good when comparing oneself to him and his supporters. We can now award ourselves medals all day long for being so much more virtuous than Trump and his supporters.

The black sheep dynamic that we so often see in families works the same way in larger groups. When the status quo is threatened in any way and a group faces the need to acknowledge its demons, it often chooses to avoid unwelcome change by dissociating from these demons. And the best way to dissociate is to project them onto the safe, inaccessible space of a black sheep. The black sheep becomes a sort of a black hole where these negative feelings can be kept safe from analysis or change.

After Michael Brown, a discussion of race became inevitable. But that prospect was so unwelcome that we all collectively obviated it through locking ourselves into the loop of being scandalized by Trump and congratulating ourselves for being better than him.

My hope that Klara’s incredibly expressive hands augur to her a future as a conductor of a symphonic orchestra has been dashed. Her grandparents arrived, looked at her, and said they’d seen these expressive little hands 39 years earlier.

And I’m not in the least gesticulatively gifted any longer.

It turns out that the Russian-speaking immigrant community really detests Hillary. According to them, she is anti-Israel.

She must be an even better candidate than I thought to get these folks to hate her.

A growing number of states, alarmed by the rising death toll from prescription painkillers and frustrated by a lack of federal action, are moving to limit how these drugs are prescribed. On Thursday, Massachusetts lawmakers passed a bill expected to be signed next week that would sharply restrict the number of pain pills a doctor can prescribe after surgery or an injury to a seven-day supply.

Finally! A whole culture has developed of doctors dispensing this vicious garbage like candy and people happily guzzling it like it’s a normal thing to do. There is not even a vague suspicion visiting anybody that pain can be addressed in any other way than mindless pill popping.

I turned away for two seconds and it seems like the political field became even more chaotic than before. Carson endorsed Trump, somebody got beaten bloody at the St. Louis Trump rally, there is a hullabaloo over Obama not visiting yet another funeral of an insignificant corpse, somebody grabbed Trump’s leg at the Chicago rally and he freaked – have a missed any more insanity?

À propos Trump’s rallies, it looks like these protesters are either dumbass idiots or stooges manipulated into energizing the political Right and helping it win the general election. Or both.

I haven’t had time to read Obama’s foreign policy interview yet but I hear it’s being wildly celebrated in Russia as very complimentary towards Putin. Of course, even if Obama said, “I wish Putin just died already,” Russian media would report it as “Obama praised Putin for being very lively.”

For now, I can just say that the Russian media report that Obama praised Putin for being smart, punctual and decisive. What actual quotes this spin is based on I don’t know yet.

A really tough moment for me was when the breast milk was coming in at 5-7 days post partum. There was this horrible night when I suddenly felt as if my blood had turned to ice and all I could do was shiver uncontrollably under a mountain of blankets. It’s good that N was here to take care of the baby because I was incapacitated.

And then there were the hormonal changes that were putting me in depressive states. In short, it was not pleasant. It took me until now (so about a month) to make breastfeeding work.

I always detested the useless freaks who shamed and guilt-tripped women for not breastfeeding but now my hatred of them has a deeply personal basis. If women choose not to sacrifice their physical and mental health for something that has no proven benefits for anybody, that’s a smart, legitimate decision that they are entitled to make.

I’m lucky in that I had very good, laid-back, intelligent lactation specialists help me at the hospital. Their philosophy was, “Breastfeed, pump, supplement, do whatever works for you, it’s all good, don’t worry, be happy.” Unfortunately, there are women who get badgered about these choices from day one. And that’s inexcusable.

P.S. I’m not a mental health professional and can’t help people with their psychological issues. If the word “breastfeeding” makes you emotional or agitated, please discuss it with your mental health specialist and not with me.