Are you completely ready to enjoy the living daylights out of the season?

I’m coughing, wheezing and wobbling but I’m starting to enjoy the season nonetheless.

Now contrast this with the way things are done in Spain. I contributed an article to a monographic issue because the editors asked me. They specifically asked me. And I did.

After receiving no news since May, I emailed them to ask for an update.

“Yes!” was the chirpy response. “We’ve had the results of your peer-review available since August. But we forgot to send them to you. Make changes and return the article to us by Thursday at the latest.”

Thursday in Spain is Wednesday here, so I have until the day after tomorrow. And I happen to be sick and unable to do intellectual work. I have no idea how I’ll do it but of course I’ll do it.

Obviously, I received no apology or “God, this is embarrassing.”

Another thing I want to mention in regards to my Ukrainian correspondents is their exceptional tactfulness. They only send me emails during my working hours. I never asked for this but every time a person calculates the time difference and proceeds on the basis of my convenience and not theirs.

When I contrast this approach with the entitled, rude tone of those Cali students I posted yesterday, we can immediately see a difference.

Folks, you’ve got to see this. This a random page from the proofs of my new Ukrainian book:

How pretty is this?

Very.

And so fast! I’ve never seen anybody work this incredibly fast. When the editor told me they’ll have the book out by the end of the year, I thought he was… embellishing. But no, these are very serious people.

I’m so psyched.

There was an attempted armed robbery at a store in town. The robbers were two 20-year-old dudes, one 18-year-old and one 12-year-old kid. A neighbor who was at the store during the robbery said she was shocked to see the gun-wielding 12-year-old because he’s so scrawny she thought he was 8.

Obviously, the dumb bastards are from out of town because the store they decided to hold up is right in front of the police station. They were apprehended immediately.

The robbers were Jewish.

No, not very believable, is it?

They were from India.

Not believable either, eh?

Greeks. They were immigrants from Greece.

Doesn’t work, does it?

It’s not even that he was disinvited. It’s the exceptionally rude and contemptuous tone of the letter that’s shocking. Americans don’t talk to each other like this in professional settings. These are students who are addressing a much older, very accomplished gentleman. It’s not normal that they speak to him in this pissy, hectoring tone.

Leaving aside the political aspect of the conflict altogether, this is a collapse of all norms of sociability. It’s the sociophobia that Spanish sociologist César Rendueles warned us about a decade ago. Adult people are incapable of exercising age-appropriate social skills and are unaware of how horrid they look.

80% of Ukrainians support Israel.

2% support Palestinians.

The rest don’t have an opinion.

And the funniest thing is that the same leftist crowd that accused Ukrainians of being Nazis in the pages of the NYTimes and WashPo is now harassing Jews all over America.

I don’t understand why leftist protests are always about punishing regular people and creating discomfort for others.

In all of the pro-Ukrainian events, protests, manifestations and activities that I’ve participated, we never tried to be a nuisance. We always make sure we aren’t in anybody’s way. We always clean up after ourselves. The events are positive in spirit. We never try to guilt or scare anybody. We always discuss in advance that the goal is to make passers-by feel better at the end of the event than before they came across it.

And it works. People don’t run away from us in fear because that’s a normal reaction to unhinged behavior. We don’t act unhinged, so we always get a lot of positive engagement. At the most recent event, people were flocking to us because they felt that something good was happening.

If the goal is to make people hate your cause, then you’d behave like these leftist protesters. Stopping the traffic, vandalizing works of art, attacking Christmas trees, scaring kids at the mall – isn’t it obvious that people are going to dislike you and whatever you stand for?

Nobody owes you anything. Nobody owes you attention, support, interest, time, or anything else. If people do decide to give what they don’t have to, you should be grateful. You should never lose the feeling of wonderment at how big their hearts are if they want to give when they don’t have to.

People who think it’s OK to get in the face of complete strangers and wreck their day have a totalitarian mentality. They have lost the capacity to understand that their biggest thing doesn’t have to matter to others because others have their own biggest thing. They can’t accept that nobody has to feel their pain.

Truly, you couldn’t hurt your cause any more than by doing this kind of infantile tantruming.

Friends, I have the perfect Christmas Day book for you. It’s beautiful, touching, human, and it’s about things that really matter.

The novel has been translated into English, Spanish, Italian, and French. It received the Dublin Literary Award for 2023. And it shows that people are desperate for good books about normal lives of normal people.

The novel’s narrator is a failed writer who trains as a chiropodist at the age of 45 and starts working at a small salon in Marzahn, a Soviet-era residential area in the former GDR. Her clients are mostly elderly people, and she listens to their stories – funny, tragic, uplifting, or silly – realizing what a gift it is to come in touch with these amazing old people.

What starts as Katja’s midlife crisis, turns into a life rich with tenderness and humanity.

Can you remember your midlife crisis – the fuzzy years, when you were turning around, at a loss, flagging from the tedium of swimming? Can you remember the fear of sinking in the middle of the big lake without a sound and without a cause – when you could see no land anywhere, no coastline, no shore, when you dropped to the bottom?

Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

The novel is autobiographical, and it’s written with such simplicity and unpretentiousness that it really gets to you. It transmits an incredible sense of peacefulness and comfort. I’ll never be able to achieve even a tenth of the inner peace that Katja feels normally but at least I can read about it.

I can’t imagine anything better to read on Christmas than this beautiful novel. Grab some hot chocolate, curl up under something exceptionally fuzzy, and lose yourself in Marzahn.