After having a kid, my and N’s incapacity to understand what the absolute ef was wrong with our parents reached cosmic proportions.

To give a single example, there is absolutely no way in the known universe that I would leave my kid at home alone with an infant, even now that she is ten. Imagining her babysitting a baby at the age of six, like I routinely did, is an impossibility. For the longest time, I thought it was cute and normal that my parents had me do that at such an early age. It’s only after my kid became six, seven, eight, and so on that I truly understood how insane that situation was. There were no harsh objective conditions that led to this, by the way. My parents did it simply because they wanted to go out and have fun. They were not lumpens or alcoholics. They were completely sober, highly educated, very intelligent people.

And this is only one small thing. There are many, many others.

So instead of saying, “Ah, now I finally get it,” I feel more like, “Wait, what?” My whole life acquires a completely different meaning now that I see it from the side of a parent.

I am truly puzzled by the phenomenon of mothers who object to their children playing with other kids in public places. Time and again, we run across a child at a playground or by the swimming pool, like today, who is eager to play with Klara, but the mom guards the kid like a hawk and prevents any shared play.

The justification is always, “I am teaching him not to bother strangers.” No amount of explanations that we’re not bothered and that we are very happy for the kids to play together suffices. This boy at the swimming pool today was desperate to play with other children, but any time he would approach somebody and a game would begin, the mom would pounce and drag him away. The mom in question had two other kids with her who were tiny, and they needed her attention. You would think she’d be happy for the eldest son to have somebody to play with, but that was not the case.

Ah, I see Dems are #MeTooting their heterosexual version of Zohran Mamdani in Maine. Any straight white guy who still hopes to get somewhere in the Dem hierarchy must be oblivious to the point of complete blindness.

You know what else is enormously better in Florida?

The CVS.

[For our Canadian readers, it’s the American Pharmaprix.]

Our CVS back home is a dump. I go there because it houses my pharmacy, but I never buy anything there aside from when I experience moments of pure desperation. The store is ugly, and none of the products are interesting.

But the CVS we frequent in Florida is a gem of a store. Everything I buy there is of excellent quality. There are tons of unexpected brands at inexplicably friendly prices. It’s like a store for fancy people on a budget. I found a product that I couldn’t afford at home at $128 for $20. I thought I had spent too much time in the sun and was hallucinating.

One of Chirbes’s favorite quotes from Carson McCullers (and here I’m translating back from Spanish) is this:

Writing isn’t only my way of making my living. It’s a way of making my soul.

Wow, I’m the exact opposite:

I don’t do it on purpose or anything. But at home, I’m with two people whose company actually brings me joy. People at work, in the meantime, are wonderful people, but I don’t exactly need them around.

Also, at home I’m very goofy. If I indulged in that kind of goofiness at work, it would get creepy.

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886 – 1965) published prolifically in the 1920s and 1930s, and most of his novels have been translated either to English or to Spanish. Still, I never heard of him until I came across his name in Rafael Chirbes’s diaries. The discovery of Tanizaki has been added to a long list of things for which I am grateful to Chirbes. He is an exceptionally talented author. Naomi (1925) is a sort of a rewriting of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915) in a way that both honors the English author and makes the result completely Japanese. I haven’t had any time to research this, so I don’t know if Tanizaki’s indebtedness to Maugham is mentioned anywhere, but it’s very clear once you start reading Naomi.

The main character of Naomi is Jōji Kawai, an engineer and a dutiful son who is bored with his straitjacketed existence of idealized Japanese righteousness and wants to experience Western culture. He picks up Naomi, a fifteen-year-old girl from a miserable, neglectful family and projects onto her his fantasy of Western life. To Kawai, Western means dissipated, whorish, uncontrolled, wasteful, and utterly irresistible. The novel shows how he is demolished by his shuddering, painful love of this imaginary West.

I highly recommend this author, but I have to warn you that a new and very unpleasant phenomenon has arisen as a result of AI. Shitty, dishonest people publish AI summaries of Tanizaki’s novels on Kindle Unlimited. If you download such an AI version by mistake, please don’t think that the author is terrible. Tanizaki was seriously talented. His writing is irresistible. If you are reading something that claims to be by Tanizaki and it’s complete garbage, this means that you have stumbled upon one of those nasty AI retellings.

I love Somerset Maugham and it’s an extraordinary gift to read a book by a Japanese writer who was so inspired by one of Maugham’s novels that he based his own on it.

I have now been contacted from three different countries to congratulate me on Taylor Swift’s wedding. I feel painfully, deeply misunderstood.

You know what I don’t understand? Who is the target audience for the movie Supergirl? Girls are very rarely into superheroes. Superheroes are boy-coded, so girls make a point of despising the genre. I asked Klara if she’s interested in this movie, and she reacted with a wave of extreme fifth-grade sarcasm.

Yes, there are always outliers, but for a movie to be successful, there needs to be a large baked-in audience.

I’m really into sleepwear. Nightgowns. I have a collection of them. Different colors, patterns, lengths. Nightgowns become better, softer with age, so I keep them for a while.

In preparation for my Florida trip, I thought and strategized which part of the collection to bring with me. I did that so intensely that I ended up bringing everything except a single nightgown. Now I don’t have any at all. This is not the first time this is happening. It’s like a curse of the missing nightgown.

What am I supposed to sleep in now? Please don’t say a t-shirt. I’m not in possession of any such item. The most ridiculous thing is that this happened before. Every time I travel, I forget to bring either a house dress (another item of which I have a whole collection) or a nightgown.

On the positive side, the temperature in Florida is 20 degrees lower than at home. As usual, we are loving this wonderful state. I am very worried about what happens when DeSantis’s term runs out. Can he run again? Not now, but if he skips a term?