Did you know there is an app that puts you in touch with random strangers who want to cuddle?

I’m very glad I’m not on the dating market any longer because if I were and people started revealing that they’d used such a service, I would be too creeped out to consider seeing them again. This is similar to how I feel about people who have used the services of sex workers. Not that the activities are similar but they betray a mentality that is so alien to mine that I wouldn’t be able to be around them.

I have fulfilled a long-standing dream of mine and decorated the house for Halloween:

Now, whenever I step outside, I get completely spooked by my own scarecrow, ghosts, and skeletons. I’m always very deep in thought, so when I notice them out of the corner of my eye, I freak out.

I guess the decorations are serving their purpose.

Philosophy is a booming field, so philosophers don’t need to worry about the job market. As a result, they are entertaining themselves with public unravelings. The most recent scandal in philosophy has to do with a professor who posted a statement of principles on her blog and a colleague who took her post personally. He wrote an email to her that she made public.

I’m used to academics behaving in weird ways in public and not caring about the consequences because, hey, they’ve got tenure, their field is doing great, so who cares what the consequences are for everybody else? But I find it beyond strange that philosophers would be so oblivious to the concept of ethics that they would publish personal emails online. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they also snoop through their children’s pockets, spouses’ email accounts, and colleagues’ briefcases.

At this time in my life, I’ve pretty much had it with academics who get upset over nothing and start freaking out publicly and obnoxiously without any care as to whom and what they damage. 

Who’s going to see the Gone Girl movie on Friday?

I’m definitely going because the book it is based on represents an extremely important pop culture phenomenon that nobody (but me) is noticing.

You probably don’t know this (because you are an intellectual and way above such things) but Gone Girl is a megabestseller. It’s poorly written, it’s badly plotted, it’s clumsy in every single way.

Still. After decades of Bridget Jones, Sex and the City, Friends, Gilmore Girls, etc, the enormous commercial success of this book demonstrates that women have finally had it with reading about and watching these crowds of pathetic women who fixate on a pair of pants and worship at its altar.

Gone Girl offers a tiny little rebellion – and it is even successful to some minuscule degree – against this life scenario. This is a book of female rage, and that alone makes it an interesting phenomenon.

I’m also very curious how Hollywood will deal with the book’s lack of happy ending.

Finally, the monument to Lenin in my native city of Kharkiv has been toppled. This was the biggest Lenin statue in Ukraine.

And it only took 23 years.

Russians, in the meanwhile, can’t let the corpse of poor Lenin escape from the necrophiliac exercises they have been subjecting it to for 90 years. Contrary to Lenin’s wishes, he hasn’t been buried next to his mother. The guy hasn’t been buried anywhere because the Russians just can’t let him go. Whenever anybody mentions the need to just bury poor Lenin already, half of Russia goes batshit crazy protesting against the hugely shocking idea that torturing the corpses of people who have been dead for almost a century might be a weird collective pastime.

Also from Romain Gary: the only things that turn into monstrosities with age are. . .

Hint: it’s a very profound statement.

Is the same as that of tomato juice. If one happens to forgive one’s abuser(s) in the course of therapy, that’s fine. If not, that’s also fine.

However, trying to make oneself forgive is extremely damaging. Mandatory forgiveness reinforces original trauma. Any therapist who promotes the idea that “you have to forgive in order to move on” is definitely a quack and possibly a religious fanatic.

A police officer was wounded in the arm in Ferguson tonight. The wound seems to be light and there isn’t any threat to the police’s life.

There has been some pretty serious protesting in Ferguson in the past two days. It was provoked by the video of an apology by the chief of police in Ferguson. I’ve been sick, so not on top of the developments as much as usual but I listened to part of the apology, felt frustrated by the mood of “yes, but” that dominated that video, and turned it off.

For now, nobody knows who wounded the Ferguson police or why.