A message I received from the cleaners:

“I hate asking you this and please don’t take it the wrong way but can we come tomorrow instead of Wednesday?”

Midwestern politeness is really out there.

We are knee-deep in mandatory trainings, and, God, are they ever stupid.

Take, for example, the homophobia index test. You are supposed to agree or disagree with the following statement:

“I enjoy the company of gay people.”

I definitely enjoy the company of some gay people. And definitely don’t that of many others. My enjoyment has nothing to do with their sex lives because I’m not a creep. So how am I supposed to answer it?

More importantly, how is N supposed to answer it? He doesn’t really enjoy anybody’s company except mine and our daughter’s. So in a literal sense, no, he doesn’t enjoy the company of gay people. How would he even find out if anybody is gay? Why would he retain that information?

Or this one:

“Gay people deserve what they get.”

This really depends on what they get. Promotions? I don’t know, are they good workers? Terminal illnesses? Then no, I don’t think anybody “deserves” it. It sounds like something is absent from all these questions, and that absent but turns them to mush.

Then there’s this:

“When I meet someone I try to find out if he/she is gay.”

No, it would never occur to me to do that. It will probably not occur to me to find anything out about that individual. Wouldn’t a gay person who’s looking to date be the most likely participant to be interested in finding out?

I have a question for gay people, though. Do you really want your co-workers to be interrogated about their feelings regarding gayness in this way? If somebody made a test like this about, say, Ukrainians, I’d lobby as loudly as I can to make the horror stop. I absolutely promise I never felt anything negative towards gay people in my life. Since I first found out they exist, I had nothing but good, positive feelings. This homophobia quiz, though, I gotta tell you. I started kind of realizing how one could develop negative feelings.

As we used to say in the USSR, no matter what you steal in your workplace, the only thing it’s going to be good for is to make a Kalashnikov.

A working-class man drove the car with his 3 children into a river. The kids died but the father survived. He had recently been left by the mother of the kids who’d found a better husband. He was demolished, unable to process a sudden loss of his family.

Did he murder the kids to spite the unfaithful wife? Was it a terrible accident?

Helen Garner attended the two murder trials the accused father underwent and wrote a book about it. This is a very shocking case, and Garner’s writing is as good as ever. Yet I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The first of the two trials it describes was very boring due to a large volume of technical information. Garner made sure that her readers got a full fill of the tedium she experienced in that courtroom, retelling every expert witness statement in unnecessary detail. As a result, the book is mostly a slog until the last 80 pages when it suddenly starts to shine like the sun bursting through heavy clouds. Those last 80 pages are so good, though, that the slog is totally worth it.

We’ve been talking about beautiful writing here on the blog recently. If you want beautiful writing, read Garner. I’ve only been able to find her true crime books so far but my library should deliver a novel of hers soon, and then we’ll see if she was good at fiction, as well.

Yes, this fits in with my observations perfectly. About 14% of people have a sense of humor and an IQ necessary to realize that this question deserves only mockery.

The rest are sweet, earnest individuals who do not deserve this cruel, cruel world.

I just heard DeSantis dropped out.

And once again neither party can cough up a candidate who is not an elderly man in steep mental decline.

OK, let’s give it another 4 years.

It’s actually cold outside. For 15 years, I waited for a normal winter in this region, and finally it came. I walk around in my furs. Women who drive by roll down the windows and yell, “Beautiful coat! I love fur!”

It’s the Midwest. People live to give compliments.

Many people are upset that Harvard professor Derek Penslar has been appointed as co-chair of the university’s antisemitism task force. Penslar is the author of the famous statement “Veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization” and has made a career out of explaining how violent and nasty Jews have been throughout history.

In short, he has intimate knowledge of anti-semitism as a careful practitioner of it. Penslar was appointed by Claudine Gay’s substitute in the role of university president.

In the meantime, in Ukraine there now exists pizza with 4 different types of salo:

When I left the country, the restaurant culture was just being born. There was a little restaurant that opened next to my university. It was called Burger King but had nothing whatsoever to do with the well-known chain. The owner must have seen the name on TV and liked it. The place served home-made Soviet-style salads that were actually pretty good. We were just coming out of the USSR era, and going out to eat was a practice that people couldn’t even imagine, let alone embrace.

I was making large sums of money in translation back then and going to school full-time (which in Ukraine really meant full-time, and not 3 hours a day like it does in North America). I had no time to shop for food and cook, which still was a very Soviet process in 1995-98. If you wanted chicken, you had to burn off and pluck the remaining bits of feathers, remove the head and the feet, clean the scaly feet, cut off the nails, and so on.

It’s funny that today in America cooking everything from scratch 95% of the time makes you admirable and, in higher income brackets, cool and countercultural. But in 1996 I was countercultural by going to the Burger King that wasn’t to eat beet salad with walnuts and mayonnaise.

And today, look, they have fancy humorous pizzas and everything in Ukraine. That’s really wonderful.