All of the Ukrainian translators of Lorca (except one who died in a Soviet concentration camp) lived to be almost 100 years old. Some are still living, and they are in their nineties.

I chose a wrong profession.

P.S. I should have mentioned. They were almost all forced to leave Ukraine. So it’s in Canada, Brazil, and the US that they lived so long.

Another problem with being an old mother is that your kid sees the result but not the process. I can show my child a fully realized life but not how I got there. I can show the professional success, the financial comfort, the inner peace, the secure sense of self, the feeling of authority, and a wealth of knowledge. But I can’t demonstrate how to acquire them because I did all that before she was born. She looks at me and thinks that this is how I was from the start, that it just comes naturally and easily to people. And if it doesn’t just happen to her, it’s because she’s not as good.

How do I know all this? She told me. This is a very smart, insightful child.

Don’t wait until you are “ready” to have children. Your readiness is not a gift.

Attendees of one of Moscow’s night clubs were chanting slogans that mock Navalny’s death.

That absolute fool was certain that if he returned to Russia, there would be mass protests and the regime would fall. Now he’s dead, and the people he wanted to save are making fun of him before he’s even been buried.

It’s all Taylor Swift and Katy Perry in our house these days. I’m withering on my stem.

Then, all of a sudden, I hear real music, actual art coming out of Klara’s speaker.

“What is it?” I ask, feeling shaken. “How did you find this?”

“I asked Alexa what her favorite music is, and she said Aretha Franklin,” Klara explains.

The best taste in music in our house belongs to an inanimate object.

I just honestly. These people and their word games. How does it help Navalny to rename something after him? Give Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine and name it whatever you wish. That would be real help. Forgetting Magnitsky in favor of a more recent victim changes nothing.

Why, why do I have to engage with this absolute child, Philippe Lemoine? But OK, I will if people want me to.

Lemoine’s claim #1.

Russia would never attack a NATO country because Russians don’t feel as strongly about, say, the Baltics as they do about Ukraine.

First of all, yes, they feel very strongly about the Baltics. There’s been a single-minded obsession in Russia with how the Baltics are persecuting “ethnic Russians” and oppressing the Russian language. Lemoine doesn’t know this because he’s not part of the cultural space.

But that’s not even the important part. All of the high-minded disquisitions about how it would be irrational for Russia to do this or that are disregarding how much this is not about what’s rational. It’s about love. An irrational, single-minded, painful love.

Russians are in love with America. They were going nuts during Tucker Carlson’s visit. “He went to a store and bought something! He’s walking around in the streets! A real American person! Walking amongst us!” My priest has this level of enthusiasm when he talks about Jesus.

It was the same thing when that Scott Adams fellow visited. Nobody in Russia (or anywhere else) knows who he is but that’s not the point. He’s an American! That’s all that matters. The object of painful, unrequited love finally noticed them.

And what did Putin do during the interview with Tucker? He negged the poor guy. That’s a favorite love trick of the manosphere.

Lemoine goes on and on about how important Ukraine is for Russians and how unimportant the Baltics are. But it’s all a nothing burger because the real love object here is America. All of the Russian invasions are a love letter to America. What is the first thing you do when you fall in love? You start saying, look at me, we have so much in common, I’m the only one who understands you. This is precisely the Russian message. “You invade, and so do I. You are a big, strong country that walks over everybody else, and so am I. We are meant for each other. Why aren’t you seeing this? Why don’t you understand?”

This love is doomed to be frustrated because what does a person in love want from his love object? To have and to hold, at his healthiest. To possess, subsume and own, at his most messed up.

Why is Lemoine not getting any of this and is trying to analyze the situation in terms of “if everybody were exactly like me, then they’d act exactly like I would”? He wasn’t with us when we lived behind the Iron Curtain and invented our own vision of America. He wasn’t with us when the Iron Curtain fell and we discovered a very different America, having to make our peace with that discovery. I often see my 8-year-old trying to reason her way out of concepts she is too young to understand. “The book says rich people live in mansions. We don’t live in a mansion. We must be poor.” It’s cute in an actual child but distressing in adult men like Lemoine.

In order to make pronouncements on what people in another culture would or wouldn’t do, you need to study that culture, immerse yourself in it, and let yourself become aware of the enormous distance between yourself and that culture. We briefly mentioned philosopher John Gray on this blog today. He explained how the Enlightenment-era belief in the hyper-rational core of every human being that supposedly makes us all want the same thing and try to achieve it in identical ways led to many of today’s problems. The French were the leaders of Enlightenment, and no amount of Bataclan fiascos is teaching them anything new.

If Ukraine never existed at all, Russia would be invading somebody. Tantruming, making itself noticed. Ukraine doesn’t solve its problem of wanting to be desired as passionately by America as Russia desires it. That’s a huge problem, and no amount of rationalizing will make it go away.

Hey, you asked for a long posts. Don’t complain now.

Here’s a question I received in the comments:

If Biden will massively increase US aid to Ukraine, couldn’t Russia massively increase its own spending on the war as well, possibly even up to the point of it spending 25+% of its total GDP on this war? That’s what Russia previously did during WWI before it descended into revolution.

There’s another question as to whether I think Russia might deliver a nuclear strike against Ukraine.

These are good questions, and I want to answer them seriously, as they deserve, because I don’t think people are thinking this through.

Yes, both these things are possible but please look at this from the other side. Imagine you are a 30-million nation that’s about to be genocided. Imagine that your infants are about to be gang-raped in front of you. This already happened in the occupied territories, so we know it’s coming. Imagine your entire cultural legacy, your cities, your people are about to be destroyed. And you are a high-IQ people with extraordinary courage and decisiveness.

What would you do?

Would you let yourself be genocided quietly? Or would you take the enemy and the indifferent bystanders who let you get slaughtered with you?

You think only Russia has nuclear? Are you aware that there are many nuclear power plants in Ukraine and Russia? What do you think will happen if they blow up? If you don’t mind a world without Ukraine, don’t you think Ukrainians, placed at the brink of extinction, would be fine with a world without Europe?

Let me tell you, this decision has already been made. Not by any government but by the people who refuse to go quietly into the sunset.

Why do you think Denmark is sending its entire artillery to Ukraine? Because they want to survive. It makes sense to be scared of nuclear. But all of it, not just a small part you’ve selectively chosen to fear.

I was asked to respond to a post by a pro-Russian fellow in France. I might do that later today but for now I want people to sit for a little bit with this thought. If Ukraine loses this war, Monsieur Lemoine is gone, too. Dude is not seriously considering how much he wants to survive and what needs to be done to guarantee that survival. He’s a spoiled Western brat with a completely neoliberalized brain. I’ve known him for a while, and there was never a chance he’d abandon fantasy and join us in reality. His entire way of thinking is based on the idea that people are interchangeable widgets. It’s all “I don’t believe this is rational, so everybody else must think the exact same way.” France, you know? You’d think they should know better by this time but nothing is managing to teach them that cultural differences exist.

Maksym Kryvtsov is a Ukrainian poet killed by the Russians in January. I am helping a Ukrainian publisher (not mine but also a very good one) to put out a translation of his poetry into English. Here is my favorite poem:

He’s in the Armed Forces

she’s in Territorial Defense

they were kissing in the subway

it’s been only a month since

crossing

squares and river Dnipro

Kyiv’s quiet and peaceful core.

She puts on

her army boots and the uniform

the vest is concealing

her slight form

heavy weaponry

tactical meaning

she’s waiting for a quiet evening.

He puts on

his army boots and armament

the sky’s so clear

it’s transparent

the wind is crazy

and the raven knows,

enemy’s hiding

somewhere close.

Guys in the village

holding the line

while he reloads

his gun,

leaving the field of losses

and heading to the cross hill

where for our boys is waiting

Peter the Apostle.

She’s in Territorial Defense he’s in the Armed Forces.

Under the break (or on page 2 in some browsers), I placed the original translation. It doesn’t preserve the rhyme, and I hate to lose the rhyme because it changes the poem completely.

Many regions have contributed to the creation of the most disgusting food ever, and mine leads the pack. St Louis area is famous for the infernal concoction called “toasted ravioli”:

This deep-fried atrocity acquires the consistency and the taste of red brick. Why it is necessary to make a pasta dish hard and dry is a mystery. Another mystery is how I managed to avoid chipping a tooth on these gravel-like ravioli.

There are whole eateries around here where people get together and consume this kind of rock-solid, desert-dry fare. I believe they do it to avoid having to speak to each other.

What are your region’s most disgusting culinary exertions?

Pictures are welcome.

Here is a good deep focus activity. In the morning, pour yourself whatever makes you happy at that time of day and step outside (or open the window and look outside). Start imagining the enjoyable points of the coming day. It can be a morning hug from your child, a candy you are going to eat at lunch, a walk you will take in the evening. Imagine these moments in great detail. Try to experience what you will feel, taste, smell.

If you manage to do it and go deep into the images, you have experienced the deep focus. Now the task is to repeat the activity often enough to make deep focus a habit.