One age-related change I notice is that now all of a sudden there is such thing as getting too much sleep. It feels like being hungover without a drop of alcohol.

I never thought this was even a thing.

Many people at church are related but even after several years of attending I’m still discovering people’s family relationships. It’s impossible to guess, for example, that two parishioners are mother and daughter or father and son if I never see them talking to each other. They never sit at the same table or acknowledge each other in any way.

There is an older couple who loves me and Klara. We’ve even vacationed together. They always smother Klara with hugs whenever they see her. I thought they were lonely but then I discovered that their two grandchildren attend church every Sunday. One is Klara’s age. But I never see them anywhere around each other. It’s very mystifying. These are not cold people if you judge by how they relate to us. But in their own families, it’s all kind of unusual. One woman went on and on about how a parishioner who was diagnosed with cervical cancer is stupid and deserves the diagnosis. I was shocked but then I discovered the cancer patient is her daughter. My own mother is very capable of such thoughts but she wouldn’t make them public. And she’d be plastered to my side the entire time we are church.

Here’s the article at the fancy Ukrainian portal. It can be Google Translated but then the extent of my suffering over the insufficiency of my language skills will not be understood.

I think the article is the first time that the expression “the bottom quintile” was ever used in Ukrainian.

I promised something smart today, and here goes.

It’s the end of the academic year. It’s very busy. Year-end reporting, hiring, grading, meetings, contracts. I also have my translation and now my newfound career as a Ukrainian author in addition to an intense research career I already have.

It’s a lot.

Because this is an exceptionally busy time, I switched to a 4-day work week. I now take Thursdays off. And of course, I don’t do a lick of work on weekends. When the university makes me attend something on a weekend, I take half a day off on Wednesday to compensate.

I don’t switch to a 4-day work week in spite of it being busy. I do it because it’s busy. You can’t run a marathon when you are overloaded. When you are overscheduled and overworked, you need to switch to a sprint model. In that model, you must sit idle most of the time, then switch on for an intense, short push, and then switch off again to preserve energy.

You are burned out and exhausted because you are trying to do a marathon at the exact time when you are most depleted.

Once the busy season ends, I’ll go back to my normal schedule and won’t take any days off during the week. Because that’s when a marathon is appropriate.

An exceptionally busy time is when you need the most rest and many long, slow walks among lilacs in bloom.

Birthday celebrations ended on a high note of waiting out a tornado warning in a church basement. We couldn’t get any more authentic if we tried.

The bored voices Midwesteners use to say the word “tornado” are a great contrast to the reaction one gets from people in other regions.

I don’t know why they go for this takeout theme at a very expensive café but it’s friendly to Orthodox fasters, so I went for it.

I’m not only about food, though. My first article at the fancy Ukrainian literary portal goes live tomorrow and I’ll share the link. I literally broke my brain trying to write in the most elegant Ukrainian I humanly can but all that will be lost in Google Translate.

For my birthday, N gave me a Faberge egg in Ukrainian colors that plays Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. In Russia, Swan Lake is always played on TV when the Duce of the moment croaks, so I’m hoping this is a good sign.

Mike Johnson didn’t disappoint and managed to squeeze into the Ukraine aid bill the wording that the goal is Ukraine’s victory over Russia. The next step is to massage Biden into agreeing.

So yes, good day, good news.

For my birthday breakfast, I decided to take up my sister’s tradition if eating the famous Kyiv cake. Straight from Ukraine, and as good as ever.

The beige beverage is the standard drink of Soviet oldsters called ryazhenka. It’s baked kefir, and we get it from the Amish.

The beautiful tea set is from a really kind, sweet person who gave it to me as a gift.

Yes, happy birthday to me. My OB-GYN decided to be funny and left a robotic voicemail with birthday wishes. Do you know what a woman my age thinks when she sees an unexpected message from her OB-GYN? Nothing good.

Sometimes people have the weirdest ideas.

Unlike the OB-GYN, readers of this blog are always great to hear from. Thank you, everybody. You are sensational people.

The first couple of episodes of this Netflix series make it look like standard party line propaganda but no, friends, it’s good. It’s actually kind of deep.

The series is about a young working class man who’s trying to claw his way out of a crappy job and an impossible housing situation by becoming a comedian. In the process he becomes a plaything of people with fancy educations who are perverts, rapists, paraphiliacs, and groomers. They abuse him in such terrible ways that the actor playing the role of the young man in his twenties looks like he’s 45. Anybody younger would look too disturbing in this role.

Baby Reindeer throws out all the gender mythology we are currently told to worship. I don’t know if it’s purposeful or not but it’s good. The working class man has to accept the new gender identity that was raped into him and loudly proclaim himself a fashionable sort of victim to be able to make a living and stop being a reject. But deep down he knows that all this crap about identities is a fabrication.

Has somebody watched it? What did you think? The ending simply slaughtered but I don’t want to give anything away if people want to watch. Please sit through the first two episodes. I promise it will start making sense afterwards.

My birthday gift to myself: