Today, as Klara was getting ready for school, I jokingly reminded her to carry the one during the math lesson.

“Mommy,” Klara exclaimed, looking pleasantly surprised. “You know about carrying the one! You must be pretty smart.”

I have finally managed to impress my 7-year-old with my intelligence.

This is exactly what happened to my Ukrainian grandparents in the USSR.

I looked at the primary finalists, and it’s sad, folks. I’m very politicized but aside from DeSantis, I don’t know who these people are. Were they put on the stage for diversity reasons? Because they don’t have national name recognition for absolute sure. Most normies have no idea who DeSantis is, let alone the rest of them.

Where are people with executive experience? Governors, mayors? Yes, again, DeSantis, great. But where are the alternatives? DeSantis can’t win. Where is the alternative that can?

That Nikki Hayley person. God. If you want to run a woman, that’s fine but the woman can’t simultaneously be a diversity candidate. Democrats played this game with Kamala Harris, and look what it is costing them. And they are Democrats. Their voters love diversity for its own sake. And even then it’s been impossible to sell Kamala to anybody.

The Tim Scott fellow. I’ve been following US politics maniacally for 20 years, and I have zero name recognition for him. The Ramaswamy guy, what is this, some sort of a joke? Yes, it’s possible to run a no-name candidate with a weird name and have him win. Obama, obviously, is an example. But to do it successfully, your candidate needs to be a powerful symbolic figure for a large constituency plus have a strong charismatic personality. It’s very hard to overcome zero recognizability in politics. It’s possible but hard. You need to have a personality that pops off a screen. You need somebody who can become a brand.

The fact that the field is enormously worse on the Democrat side is not an excuse. Democrats hold the press and the entertainment industry. They can afford to run duds. We can’t. We have nobody electable, and we are not even trying.

It turns out that the ladies at church call me “the flamboyant one.” I have no idea how I’m managing to be flamboyant at church. We aren’t Protestants. We are Orthodox, which means that parishioners stand in complete silence for 3 hours during service. We don’t speak, loudly confess our sins, exclaim “preach, brother!”, speak in tongues, wriggle on the floor, or lift our arms even when the choir sings “let’s lift our arms up to the Lord.”

My perception of myself has always been dramatically different from how others see me.

My event today went phenomenally well. It was the university’s annual languages day that never in its entire history had my department participate. But this year the whole event was completely ours. Because I know people and I got them to agree to give the event to me.

We had 9 booths, one for each of the languages we teach. Each booth had language-related activities, games and prizes. And there was free food!

The second best part was that my department didn’t have to pay a dime for any of it. I got the diversity office to pay. They are rolling in money, and I brought them African music, Chinese hieroglyphics, Mexican bingo, Ukrainian art, and so on. That’s mega diverse.

I think we had at least 300 students come through the booths. The professors were in heaven because they love being the center of attention and having students crowd around them. I don’t but I’m unusual.

The actual best part, though, was that I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t conduct any activities at all. I delegated everything. It’s paradise. We had a reporter, a professional photographer, 15 volunteers. It was so good.

The Provost came, looked around, left, and when the event was wrapping up I received an email from her granting my entire hiring request for the next semester. Now I don’t know what to do because I had inflated my request massively on purpose. We are in a hiring freeze, so I was hoping maybe to have 25% of the request granted if I was lucky. Now I’ll have more people than I know what to do with.

I can’t believe that I’m now this person who organizes big events. It’s very funny if you think about it.

Our students created this collective artifact as a culmination of our very first semester ever of teaching Ukrainian:

The big, bold writing in the middle is, of course, mine.

“Analyzing this text in the context of Professor Bulochkina will help the analysis of the neoliberal subjectivity in the text.”

As Professor Bulochkina, I very much object to things being analyzed in the context of me.

Also, do people not realize that “text-context-text” sounds atrocious in the same sentence?

I had to reject yet another article for publication. And I feel bad because I used to write exactly like this author. “The characters are forced to realize that the forced labor that they are forced to perform…” I wrote like this, and it feels like rejecting myself, version circa 2007.

Terrible, terrible writing. It goes on like this for 28 excruciating pages, with “in this article I will analyze” repeated on every single bloody page from 1 to 12.

Formal measures of intelligence matter because they reflect reality. Intellectual capacity is genetic and determines a lot of things in our life. It’s as real and immutable as height or eye color. Accepting the physical reality of your intellectual capacity is as important as accepting the physical reality of your sex.

Conservatism is about accepting reality and not assuming godlike qualities which pitch you in an endless, unwinnable battle against it.

N’s sister finalized her second divorce and called him to share. I’m glad they are talking because for the longest time there’s been no relationship at all. It’s weird, though, because the conversation eventually turned into an advice session where the sister started to give N advice on how to avoid problems in his personal life.

Poor woman, she recently went to a clinic to get her eggs frozen “for the future” when she will finally be ready to have children. She’s in her forties, so obviously, it turned out there are no more eggs to freeze. She’s shocked because she had no idea that the egg supply isn’t limitless. (Yes, N ended up with the entire brain supply of the whole family).

The reason why I’m sharing all this is because N had had this dynamic with his mother and sister forever until he met me. These exceptionally unsuccessful women who failed at everything in life would endlessly criticize and try to improve the son and brother who was much better at everything than them. The mom who weighs 300 lbs would pester him with healthy living advice and the sister who never worked a day in her life would proffer endless tips on career advancement. Now, on the day of yet another divorce, she’s regaling the brother who is in a very successful marriage with advice on … how to stay married. There hasn’t been any parenting advice yet but I’m sure it’s coming.

At this point, N knows how to treat these behaviors with the mockery they deserve but when we first met, he sincerely thought he was a loser and these two women the queens of the universe. Family dynamics can be completely messed up. It’s hard to imagine just how messed up until you see this for yourself.