And here is my own small home improvement project:

I wanted these outlets to match my fireplace but there were none to be found. So now I’m staining and lacquering them on my own. It’s been two days because you need to let them dry between coatings.

Of course, I made a mistake almost right at the start when I needed to clean my brush, glanced at the instructions, read “immerse in water”, and immediately immersed. Two seconds later I noticed the words “under no conditions” right before “immerse in water.” This reminded me that I still needed to tell my students to use the totality of textual evidence for their analyses of texts. The brush, in the meanwhile, was ruined.

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In the last six months, the word “Maidan” ceased to refer, among Ukrainians, to Kiev’s Independence Square and has come to stand for the protesters who have been occupying it since late November.

The Maidan is now not a place but a movement of people who stood up for their human dignity and brought down a corrupt regime. Many of them have decided that their mission is complete now that Ukraine has its new democratically elected president. Many, however, are unable to leave.

Today the Maidan offers a striking sight. It is filled with tents, shacks, makeshift shelters. Some people have started to build a house right in the middle of the square because they don’t envision being able to leave the Maidan for a long time to come. Clothesline, small children, household pets, pots and pans – the Maidan is slowly acquiring all of the characteristics of a slum.

Everybody in Kiev realizes that having a full-scale favela in the middle of the capital is not a good idea. The problem is that nobody knows how to get the people living in the square to leave. Removing them by force would be too reminiscent of Yanukovich’s attempts to evict the protesters from the square, and we all know how that went for the former president.

When journalists and passers-by ask the inhabitants of the Maidan when they are planning to leave, the former protesters become visibly disturbed. Most of them have families who are hoping they would finally come home, but the allure of the Maidan is stronger. This is the place where they experienced heroicism, self-abnegation, camaraderie and found a sense of purpose. Going back to the humdrum existence of trying to make a living and get by is unappealing after the experience of being responsible for the very existence of your country.

Ukrainians have always been great at the extraordinary and the grandiose. The heroics of fulfilling repetitive daily tasks and carrying one’s individual, rather than collective, burden are less attractive, though. For many of those who found their sense of purpose in the Maidan, the square might prove not a beginning of their journey towards a better life but, tragically, its end.

Some people are hinting that I’m a lousy driver but see how well I parked? And that’s on the very first try and barefoot (I was coming home from getting a pedicure).

I never try to impose my lifestyle choices on others but here I just have to say: if you get an opportunity not to learn to drive until the age of 38, please take it. Suddenly being able to go just anywhere at this advanced age is a very powerful feeling.

And now excuse me because I have to go to a home improvement store for the third time today.

Mature and well-developed nation- states are ruled by groups we can call “wealth-extracting elites.” Their existence, riches and power don’t bother anybody a whole lot for two reasons:

1. They are mostly non-hereditary and ascension to their ranks is widely seen as merit-based.

2. They fulfill the basic contract underlying the existence of a nation-state and provide everybody with a fairly good standard of living.

If the wealth-extracting elites see a threat to their capacity to extract wealth, they will yet again mobilize nationalistic fervor (which has been dwindling in recent years) in order to send the particularly impressionable to extract said wealth from someplace else. We see this scenario playing out right before our eyes in the case of Russia, for instance.

This strategy is losing its potency because every new generation is more wary, disengaged, cynical, cosmopolitan, and mobile than the previous ones. The imagined community of a country has transformed for many of us into a much more tangible online community that recognizes no national borders. “People I’ve never seen but with whom I share crucial characteristics” are no longer those who wave the same flag but those who frequent the same chat forum, social network, or blog.

This is one more reason why the nation-state is receding into the past. If people don’t identify passionately with it, there is no nation-state. What arises in its place remains to be seen.

I hate almost all discussions about Israel / Palestine because most people don’t care two straws about Israel / Palestine and just use the conflict for completely unrelated ideological purposes. I believe that it’s perfectly fine not to care. It is impossible to interiorize every conflict in the world and have an intellectual and emotional response to it. But I also believe that it would make sense for people who don’t care just to go talk about something else.

Here is an example of the kind of discussion about Israel / Palestine that I absolutely detest. It is wrong on every level to use the real suffering of real people to make some stupid “but if” point. And this is done by the supporters of both sides with equal intensity.

This is why I never talk about Israel / Palestine with anybody in RL. I always fear discovering some psychological problems I’m not equipped to address.

The state and the nation soon achieved an inter-penetration. People rushed to die for their nation, enthusiastically and for free, but in return the state assumed as its central role ensuring the well-being of the people.

The system worked so well that eventually pretty much everybody wanted their own nation-state. Soon, however, technological advances changed the equation.

The creation of the nuclear weapons (and, later, long-distance warfare) rendered unnecessary enormous armies of conscripts willing to die for their nation. Many nation-states effectively ceded their sovereignty to those countries that possessed nuclear weapons and were promising to defend them in case of invasion. (What these promises are worth we are seeing now in Ukraine’s case).

The nation-state has served its purpose. It was an important purpose, and the world is obviously a better place now than it was in 1680. However, the basic contract between a member of a nation and the state makes little sense today. Regions that are pursuing a nation-state today are hopelessly behind the times.

We are witnessing a move in the direction opposite that of the nation-states. The borders that nation-states fought so hard to draw and secure once and for all are becoming porous. Attachments to national symbols are eroding. Huge migratory flows have turned the idea of “national character” into a joke.

A student asked in class today, “But didn’t Ferdinand and Isabella care that people they ruled were living in dire poverty?”

The student is a Freshman and doesn’t yet realize that the mentality which expects “the people in charge” to be interested in whether those under their rule are starving is historically quite new and would have been entirely alien to Medieval Iberians.

Three hundred years after the times of Ferdinand and Isabella, the empire they created got into a state of such a decline that it became obvious to everybody that Spain’s model of territorial expansion was unsustainable. The times when a ruler paid a group of indifferent and shiftless mercenaries to fight a war the ruler’s subject had no interest in were gone.

It took about 120 years to design a new model. Now instead of loosely defined territories inhabited by people who had little in common, there would be nations. Nations would be united by a (completely invented) common purpose, a (completely invented) august history and venerable artistic tradition, a (completely invented) shared way of life and set of shared characteristics, and a set of symbols embodying this unity.

A comprehensive system of public education that accompanied the birth of the nation-state instilled a deep emotional attachment to these (completely invented) symbols and values. This emotional attachment would provide the very thing the creation of the nation-state pursued: free and limitless cannon fodder.

The brilliant political journalist from Russia Lilia Shevtsova is disgusted by Obama’s recent pronouncements on Ukraine, and so am I. It’s one thing to go back on your solemn promises and on the diplomatic agreements your country signed, but it’s quite another degree of hubris to pretend that you didn’t break your oath when the whole world was there to see you breaking it. Here is what Obama had to say:

In Ukraine, Russia’s recent actions recall the days when Soviet tanks rolled into Eastern Europe. But this isn’t the Cold War. Our ability to shape world opinion helped isolate Russia right away. Because of American leadership, the world immediately condemned the Russian actions. Europe and the G-7 joined us to impose sanctions. NATO reinforced our commitment to Eastern European allies. The IMF is helping to stabilize Ukraine’s economy. OSCE monitors brought the eyes of the world to unstable parts of Ukraine. And this mobilization of world opinion and international institutions served as a counterweight to Russian propaganda and Russian troops on the border and armed militias in ski masks.

No, there was no “counterweight.” The Russian propaganda is ongoing and relentless. Putin is winning the propaganda war. He will be shaking hands with the Western leaders in the celebrations of the joint European fight over Nazism, and nobody will as much as blink.

But wait, there is more. Obama even went as far as attributing the success of the Ukrainian elections to. . . himself:

Standing with our allies on behalf of international order, working with international institutions, has given a chance for the Ukrainian people to choose their future—without us firing a shot.

This was the best gift Obama could have given to Putin. Putin has been praying for Obama to say exactly this, and for some unfathomable reason the US President decided to oblige. Now Putin has all the proof he ever needed that Ukrainian elections were organized solely by Americans and, hence, are illegitimate.

We have all realized a long time ago that Obama will not be doing anything to halt Russia’s accession to world dominance. He’s got better things to do, OK, we got it. But could he at least try not to play on Putin’s side so obviously?

As Shevtsova says,

Now the U.S. President wants to privatize the Ukrainians’ achievement: Wasn’t there anything else he could find to boast about?

“This is American leadership. This is American strength”, concluded Obama. If this is what passes for “leadership” and “strength”, then I’m worried for the United States, and for the world.

And I really have to agree. Do read Shevtsova’s article because it shows Obama repeating the most egregious lies of Putin’s propaganda as if they were accepted facts. The whole thing is just bizarre. I have no idea what he is doing any longer. These pronouncements on Ukraine plus the higher ed reform all sound like nothing other than gross incompetence and impotent flailing of somebody who is seriously out of his depth. We keep hearing about all the governmental bureaucracy, so where is it? Why is nobody advising the President how not to make a fool out of himself?

I have many plans for The Hedgehogs, people. For one, I’m ditching the formal living and dining rooms because on what planet can I ever need formal dining?

Instead, I’m painting the former formal dining room pale orchid and turning it into a study/library. And the former formal living room (attached to the former formal dining) will now be my reading room.

One of the bedrooms will be transformed into a spa room. I’m painting it very pale green because that seems like the best color for a spa room.

In case anybody is wondering why I stopped posting, that’s because I have moved to Lowe’s, a place where everybody calls me “sweetheart” and tries to touch me.

“I need a crowbar, where can I find it?” I asked one of the perky store assistants of my father’s age.

“So who are you planning to whack over the head with it?” he guffawed with delight.

As usual when people subject me to the unexpected bouts of sociability, I blurted out, “My husband is asking for it.”

You can imagine the extreme delight this pronouncement caused to the store assistant.