I spent the day at the event where I was promoting our program to students. It’s fine, I don’t mind doing it but I can’t recognize people out of context at all. I mean, at all. They keep coming up, and I have no bloody idea if I’m supposed to know them. Nobody looks even vaguely familiar. If my own mother came up, I wouldn’t recognize her, it’s that bad.

The most embarrassing moment was when a student in the course I’m teaching stopped by and I asked her if she was interested in learning Spanish. There were also several people who seem to think we are great friends, and I have no idea who they are.

The only ray of sunshine was our new Ukrainian instructor who came up and started speaking in Ukrainian which nobody else does, so I placed her immediately.

Girls start puberty earlier than boys, and they are all clearly young ladies when their male peers are still kids. This always causes a lot of bewilderment between the ages of 12-16 when yesterday’s friends end up being in completely different age categories.

However, here in the US once they get to college, the boys catch up and get far ahead. I meet a lot of Freshmen who are already very clearly men and none who are women and not girls unless they are from other countries.

I’m not talking about anything physical but about the way they comport and present themselves. It looks like women like adolescence more than men do.

Since we started talking about child-rearing, one thing about kids is that they somehow manage to sneak a pair of atrociously stinky socks into the unlikeliest places. I routinely reach into an elegant handbag and encounter a pair of very putrid socks.

They are like cats who mark territory.

I was reading a review of a book about a radical sex cult of the 1970s when something began to sound strangely familiar:

And as the 1980s wore on, the group caused its own downfall, becoming more authoritarian. Its guidelines became more rigid and insulating, focused on the “narcissism of small differences” between correct and incorrect behavior. In response to the AIDS epidemic, members were forbidden to even eat in restaurants. As the institute’s financial straits mounted, head therapists badgered patients into becoming computer programmers, a highly lucrative emerging field. They forced members to devote time and money they couldn’t afford to the Fourth Wall, the Sullivanian radical-lefty theater company. Members, plagued by their own inner doubts but too terrified to leave the cult, became intolerant of each other. They reported on one another’s transgressions — Stasi-style — conducting physical intimidation and becoming complicit in countless forms of harm.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/the-triumph-of-the-nuclear-family/

The reviewer goes on to say that the cult dissolved in 1991 but I’m having serious doubts about that.

How interesting. I’m Gen-X but I use subtitles all the time. I thought it was just me being weird but it looks like many people do it.

I use subtitles because I get extremely bored without something to read. Do you use them and if so, then why?

That professor who on 9/11, 2001 announced in class that “ha ha, Americans attacked themselves on purpose” is now actively promoting the narrative that poor, innocent Russians were provoked into defending themselves by the evil NATO.

It’s OK, though. As soon as all women are finally removed from women’s teams, sport will become competitive and interesting again. Sure, it will be dudes only on both male and female teams but that’s a small price to pay for true progress.

Let’s use the now infamous shakshuka video as an exercise.

Whether the woman in the video did or didn’t choose to be alone doesn’t matter. It changes reality not a whit. We are hypnotized by the concept of choice and it distracts us from what really is.

“Choice” is a story the woman on the video tells herself and others. She can change her mind about the story at any time. But that won’t change the facts.

We all create stories to make reality more palatable. There’s nothing bad in it. Actually, it’s very healthy. But there’s a growing trend where people invest some words with such strong meaning that reality fades away completely. That’s why I suggest this exercise: imagine the woman in the video saying “I chose to live like this” and then “I didn’t choose it. It just happened”. See how this is the exact same woman in the exact same situation?

Welcome to Iowa.

But hey, it’s not completely stupid. Every day I increasingly think it is, in fact, a great privilege not to be referred to as, say, “a pink body” that needs to be saved. It’s good to be a complete human person and not some colored body that requires saving. Plus, nobody depicts me as a disintegrating blob of uniform color. That’s privilege right there.