Our priest is very sick (please pray for Fr Andrew, he’s amazing), so he retired on January 1st. We have a prospective priest coming on a visit, and get this. He’s Ukrainian, currently residing in Toronto. Of course, the parish is eager to roll out me to make Fr Dmytro feel more welcome.

This is the first time ever the parish would have a priest who is originally Orthodox, not a convert. There’s nothing wrong with converts, of course, but I would like the experience of somebody who was always Orthodox.

Imagine a scientific advance that puts an end to sexism, racism, homophobia, and domestic violence. It also makes national borders even more porous. What can such an invention possibly be?

John Marrs’ psychological thriller The One gives an answer. A DNA test is invented that pairs people who are genetically matched to be perfect romantic partners. DNA doesn’t recognize racial or ethnic differences, and even matches two heterosexual people or people with an enormous age difference. You only have one perfect match in the whole world, and a DNA match test can help you locate that person. National governments then have to oblige and facilitate immigration for couples eager to be united with their one perfect match. Heteros have to make themselves gay if they are so matched. Marriages break up if the spouses aren’t genetically matched.

Of course, humans are more complicated than sciencey attempts to sort them neatly, and all manner of shady dealings and mysterious behavior begins. The One is a bestselling thriller that deserves its popularity. Well-intentioned efforts to use science to make humans much more predictable and controlled always end badly. The book is clumsy in its closing chapters but the premise is good and worth exploring.

Here’s an example of why I keep saying that Joyce Maynard is incapable of any degree of self-awareness.

After rehoming the two girls she carelessly adopted from Africa, Maynard felt guilty. She’d have to be a psychopath not to. A few months after getting rid of the girls, she badgered her boyfriend, a lawyer, into helping a man who had failed medical school to force the medical board to let him practice medicine. The failed wannabe doctor was from… Africa.

Maynard was so dedicated into inflicting this unqualified man on American patients that she became a sort of a legal secretary, helping her boyfriend build an Affirmative Action case to get the African an undeserved MD diploma. This took place in California, and you can imagine the depths of the man’s incompetence if even there the medical board refused to give in to the badgering or even spend much time hearing the case.

One doesn’t need to be Sigmund Freud to realize that Maynard’s extensive efforts to turn a woefully incompetent man from rural Nigeria into an American doctor constituted an attempt to make up for the damage she’d done to two African girls.

Maynard, of course, is stoically deaf to the knocks of an insight that is languishing of neglect at her doorstep. Not for her is the task of wondering, “why do I do these things? Why do I feel this?” The spectacle of a mind so unclouded by the realization that there might be a why is an awe-inspiring sight. I’m addicted to Maynard’s memoirs because it’s hard to believe she is for real.

She’s now 71, and I really hope she writes one more memoir. Her political beliefs would make a great topic. People like these saddle us with incompetent firefighters and unqualified doctors and yell at us to shut up when we protest. It’s highly instructive to observe how their brains work.

Many men don’t know that when a woman complains that a man doesn’t take initiative, what she really wants is for him to do exactly what she wants, with zero deviations, and with the greatest enthusiasm. The word “initiative” – and this is true across cultures and generations – on a woman’s lips invariably means “enthusiastic obedience.” Lack of initiative simply stands for “less than enthusiastic obedience.”

I will give am example from Joyce Maynard’s memoir, and I’m sorry, people, but she’s such a perfect illustration of so many things that I just can’t quit talking about her.

At age 60, Maynard finally married the man of her dreams and immediately proceeded to badger him about his spending, his hobbies, his daily habits, and his friends. She, and I quote, “mocked him mercilessly” for being part of an all-male club and getting together with buddies to play music around a campfire.

And do you know what Maynard’s main complaint about the husband was? That he wouldn’t take initiative. The fellow took plenty of initiative but she hated the initiative he took. What she wanted was the exact opposite of initiative. She want dog-like loyalty and obedience. Her pet name for him was “my guard dog”, and it’s a testament to the man’s forbearance that he didn’t call her “my yappy bitch” in return.

I can’t count the times I heard a female acquaintance complain that “he doesn’t take initiative.” To these complaints I invariably reply, “let’s imagine you come home today and discover that he took initiative by knocking down the wall between the living and the dining room. Great, right? Initiative!” After which it is immediately revealed that no, that’s not what she meant about initiative.

I promise I’ll get off the subject of Maynard eventually but it’s just too much fun at this point. I can’t help myself.

I’m asking people please to come up with an alternative explanation for why little girls are used in these ads because this is too disturbing to contemplate.

“Climate change” is the same kind of neoliberal austerity justification as the BLM. Budget cuts to firefighting and cleaning the forest floor are justified by saying that it’s useless to spend money on them anyway. It’s all climate change. There’s nothing the government can do.

Instead of providing services to the public, the government is now in the business of finding explanations for why providing services would be wrong, useless, immoral.

There’s no difference between claiming that a hurricane was unleashed on New Orleans a punishment for homosexuality and claiming that Pacific Palisades burned as punishment for climate change.

I know that some people will be tempted to inform me virtuously that climate change is real as if it being real justified defunding fire departments instead of giving them more funding. For such people, the reality of climate change presupposes the profound immorality of doing anything to counteract that thing they say is very real and definitely exists. Their “climate change is real” is the equivalent of a Muslim’s “Allah illallah.” It’s a statement of faith that doesn’t necessitate anything other than being made on regular occasions.

A predatory paedophile who raped a girl in east London may have had further victims, police have warned.

Mustafa Mehmet, 34, was found guilty of repeatedly raping the young girl after exploiting a relationship with her mother.

The pedophile started raping the girl when she was only 8 years old and continued for three years.

Now that Elon Musk managed to draw attention to the indifference of the British authorities towards pedophilia, there’s a chance that Mehmet will get at least a somewhat serious prison sentence.

The sentencing is scheduled for January 31.

I’m going on vacation on Wednesday. My husband gave my sister and me a gift of roundtrip tickets to Spain. And my sister is giving me a gift of driving me across Spain and Portugal so that I don’t have to touch the wheel. And she’s planned the whole trip. I don’t even know the itinerary.

Those who remember my story about the bathroom cabinet that I stubbornly refused to find for several years will agree that embarking on a trip whose itinerary I don’t know is a huge victory in my fight against everyday rigidity.

“I don’t understand how somebody who changes her political beliefs to the complete opposite every few years, starts and drops new professions, constantly learns languages, and embarks on completely new research topics can be so resistant to trying a new place for lunch or using a different gas station,” a friend says. “Intellectually, you are the most adventurous person I know but you are also the most rigid in daily life.”

It’s true. Once I decide there is only one grocery store in the neighborhood, I will not notice the other five grocery stores no matter how useful it might be to notice them. And the need to use a new car wash will alarm me for weeks. I deleted a book that I had written to 75% completion without skipping a beat. But I’ve been struggling for days whether to get rid of a stained old shirt. I’m just attached to it. It’s homey.

So imagine. I’ll be somewhere in Europe but no idea where exactly. For the first time ever, I have not read every single review on every platform for every place where we will stay. Because I don’t know their names. I’m defeating the ghost of the bathroom cabinet. Maybe I’ll even get closer to relinquishing the old shirt.

It goes on in the same vein. The woman who composed the list often writes about robots but doesn’t seem to be a robot herself in spite of her poor grasp of human nature.

In my dating life, I’ve met men who made enormous efforts with candles, elaborately cooked meals, and turntables. And I fell madly in love with a dude who wouldn’t be able to decipher the phrase “buy candles” or consider the uses of hand towels. If it’s meant to be, you don’t really need to try so hard. To the contrary, trying too hard is not very appealing.

Really, the only conclusion N would draw from the suggestion to buy candles is that this is a preparation for electricity outages.

I can’t imagine experiencing the birth of attraction because a man has a throw blanket. I don’t even think I know any men who buy throw blankets for their own use.

If you have to make efforts to convince somebody to want you, that’s not the person for you, is my advice. For somebody who is really into you, your bare walls and diluted liquid soap would be majestically appealing.

I started listening to Joyce Maynard’s most recent memoir The Best of Us in a lighthearted mood. She’s one of the most clueless people ever to hold a pen but she describes her exercises in superficiality in a sincere and charming manner. It’s all good fun, I thought.

By chapter 7, however, the book took a very dark turn. Maynard’s ex-husband remarried and had another child. She wanted to have a baby, too, to equal the score but she was past the child-bearing age. To address this problem, Maynard traveled to Ethiopia and purchased two girls who were supposed to help her pretend that she was “a 35-year-old single mother” instead of a very spoilt and careless woman in her late fifties.

But wait, it gets worse.

Within a few months, Maynard tired of the children and rehomed them with people she had casually met a single time in the past. One wouldn’t gift a pet cat to a complete stranger because the cat proved to be unsatisfactory.

International adoptions are a terrible thing. Rich, clueless people purchase children as accessories, separate them from their families, and often even rename them like they are not even human. Then, once they get bored, they can just palm the kids off on somebody else. It’s very similar to how you sell a used coffee-maker on Facebook Marketplace.

There’s no likelihood that children subjected to all this will integrate well and make a positive contribution to society. Maynard herself says it was deeply irresponsible to allow a 58-year-old single woman with an uncertain income to adopt two kids. She never knew and obviously didn’t try to learn their language. She had a very vague idea of what their actual age was. And the next family to which she outsourced these girls knew as little about them. This is breeding ground for all sorts of abuse and unsavory situations.

There are many abandoned children in the US. There’s no reason not to foster an American child and instead trudge to another continent and purchase a kid whom you don’t understand linguistically or culturally.