I suffered terribly from jet lag when I was younger. Some trips were almost completely eaten by it.

Strangely, with age I stopped getting jet-lagged. Even though I’m physiologically incapable of sleeping on airplanes, I switch over to local time with great ease both going there and returning.

That night, Ally was absorbed in the book she’d been reading the last two weeks. Thora had seen a lot of people carrying the book around the Center: making a big deal of bringing it to lunch, women squeezing the hardcover tightly to their chests as they walked to Restorative Yoga.

“Can I see?” Thora said.

Ally passed it over. Thora read just a few pages. It was about a plucky doll-maker in occupied Paris during World War II. It seemed like a book for people who hated books.

– Emma Cline, Daddy

It is no secret that I consider Emma Cline to be the most talented author writing in America today. The queen of understatement and self-control, she can write about the most mundane moments in life with a surgical precision that slices your heart. Daddy is a short story collection written closer to the style of Cline’s extraordinary The Guest than her less successful The Girls.

What’s really interesting about the very young Cline is that she writes about the middle age a lot more convincingly than about childhood and teenage years. “Marion”, the only unsuccessful story in Daddy is a Bildungsroman, and not a particularly great one.

The subject that Cline dominates to absolute perfection is that of middle-aged men whose relationships with their young adult children have grown distant, leaving the fathers bereft, confused, and close to exploding with pain. She never looks at the father – child relationship through the eyes of the child. In Daddy, fathers’ pain spills all over the pages.

Not all stories are about fatherhood. A few are about young people not being able to handle cancel culture and other online phenomena. There’s a story that gently mocks #MeTootery, without ever naming it, and leaving the readers a lot of space to figure out their own meaning.

A sensationally talented writer.

Dude, we’ve all read detailed descriptions of your vagina’s adventures. We figured out you are “she/her” a quarter of a century ago. No need to clarify at this late date.

Why do people even do this? I mean those who are given a choice, of course. It’s embarrassing. It’s especially embarrassing to call attention to your genitals when all anybody knows about you are the things you did with those genitals.

A lesbian couple gets beat up in Halifax for being lesbian. The perpetrators are identified in the press as “a group of men.” One wonders, of course, why would random residents of Halifax beat lesbians all of a sudden? This is truly strange behavior for the exceptionally placid Nova Scotians.

Can anybody venture a guess who these lesbian-hating men in Halifax are? It’s such a mystery, I just can’t figure it out. (It’s a joke, of course. I found the answer in the tabloids).

The very fat governor of Illinois made Ozempic and other similar drugs free for state workers. I got a gushy notification yesterday. This will cost hundreds of millions to the taxpayers of an already broke state. Nobody has the slightest idea what long-term damage these drugs do but nobody cares. It’s the current magic pill, and no cost is too large to pump people full of this garbage.

To prepare for her cousin’s visit, Klara bought a Pokemon card pack because he collects them. She thought it would give them an interest in common. Then she discovered that she has no idea how to play them. I tried looking up the rules online but I’d picked up a bad cold on my travels and my brain doesn’t process.

As a result, she invented a bunch of the girliest games in existence to play with the Pokemon cards. First, we sorted them into mommies, daddies, and babies. Then we played a game where we traded them in a way where everybody got their favorites and nobody could possibly lose. Then we told fortunes with them. We haven’t yet started creating outfits and hairstyles for them but I’m sure it’s coming.

Canada Day celebrations in Montreal today are the palest of shadows of what they used to be.

I blame much of it on COVID lockdowns that made people forget what it was like to get together to celebrate and enjoy togetherness.

There is a point in Beatriz Serrano’s novel Unhappiness when its protagonist Marisa goes to a museum and admires a painting. One gets so tired of Marisa’s incapacity to care about anything that it’s a heartening moment when she tries to enjoy a work of art. However, the reader’s hopes that there’s some substance to Marisa’s otherwise vacuous personality are dashed when she explains what she likes about it.

The painting Marisa admires is Hieronimus Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”:

She has no use for the first and the third parts of the triptych because a religious message bores her. Instead, Marisa concentrates on the central panel that represents her idea of what the world should be like. Lots of sex in the most bizarre permutations and absolutely no other activity whatsoever! What’s not to like? Interestingly, Marisa herself is not very sexual. Her sensuality is almost entirely limited to food. Plus, she’s on heavy tranquilizers that don’t lead to great libidos. This is not the case of a very sexual woman beaten down by a repressive society. Marisa’s situation is the exact opposite: she’s almost entirely unsexed in the world of extreme sexual permissiveness.

Marisa’s explanation for why she believes that the central panel of the triptych would represent the world at its best is, as always, a meaningless slogan. “Such a world would be diverse and friendly [diverso y amable]” she says, oblivious to how much of an oxymoron this is. Diverse means heavily and often irreconcilably conflicted, grating, uneasy. Marisa is too sociophobic to have a normal conversation with anybody who’s identical to her in culture, language and upbringing. In a diverse environment, she’d be even more lost.

The core of Marisa’s personality is at full view in this scene. She was told she must be in favor of sex-centered lifestyles and diversity. And even though she has absolutely no use for either and actually couldn’t tolerate them, age will cheer for them mindlessly and aggressively. The mystery of women who advocate for the destruction of women’s sports or depolicing is solved! They are all Marisa.

And that’s quite scary.

Spain won’t stop cramming its propaganda down our gullers even at the airport:

I wouldn’t have noticed if the bloody rainbow hadn’t been thrust at us in every public space for two weeks.

I’m starting to suspect that the whole “Pride month” thing is a conspiracy by a group of rabid homophobes.

Leaving Spain tomorrow.

I’ll deeply miss:

– beautiful views

– slow mornings and intense evenings

– walking 10+ km each day

– absence of terrible heat. Normal human summer weather and not the atrocious 8-month-long heatwave where I live

– carrots that taste as they should and not as if they were a relative of plastic

– sweet cherries at €2.30 a kilo. Not a pound. A kilo! It’s $5.99 a pound where I live.

– real ice-cream

– good coffee

– low prices

– sociable people

– books I want to buy

– no insects

– stylish old ladies

– architecture

– indescribably beautiful manicures for €14

– anchovies that are not only edible but actually enjoyable

– ease of buying very comfortable footwear that doesn’t make one look like an elderly duck

I will not miss:

– the perennial “our kitchen is closed and won’t open until 8 pm”

– everything reeking of smoke

– high salt intake

– scarcity of public toilets

– the suspicion that somebody vomited rainbow and Palestinian flags everywhere

– unattainability of eggs cooked overeasy. Or any eggs that aren’t scrambled into cardboard state or poured into scary “potato tortillas”

– shelf milk. I did try it and Lord have mercy

– absence of kids’ menus

– inability to straighten my hair and having to go everywhere with an out-of-control Jewfro

– laundry problems

– sadness and emptiness of malls

– ugly windmills destroying the landscape

– inability to buy a book for Klara

– terrible salads that seem utterly unconnected to the amazing produce

– old men walking around holding hands with very young black boys

– extremely emotional cab drivers

– no Uber except in Madrid

– no Ukrainian flags anywhere

– terrible little Chinese stores on every corner

– being deprived of soup