This observation will probably interest no one but I feel compelled to share it.

It’s a lot harder to practice Orthodox Christianity in North America than where I’m from. What makes it harder is the influence of Protestantism on how the building of the church is organized on the inside.

Protestants expect pews, so Orthodox churches in North America tend to have pews. Pews work for a short, interactive Protestant service. But for a long, very scripted and repetitive Orthodox service, pews are a very bad idea. You end up stuck in a pew, standing and sitting in a confined space, with your face turned towards the altar where not much is happening.

To entertain themselves and make the three hours of this activity bearable, the faithful stick their noses into the brochures where the script of the service is printed. It’s like a weird reading room. Everybody is glued to the booklet. To make the reading possible, the lights are on at full blast. And guess what people aren’t looking at because they are looking into the brochures instead?

The holy icons. People spend practically no time, aside from when they first come in and before leaving, with the icons. It becomes unclear why the icons are there to begin with. My parish is getting a bunch of new holy icons written but what’s the point if nobody will spend any time with them?

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

A traditional Orthodox service has no pews. People aren’t supposed to stand in place and stare either at the priest’s back or into a brochure. There is no brochure.

Instead, people circulate. They move among the icons and commune with them in the semi-darkness while the service goes on around them. The music, the penumbra, the sweet smoke, and the repetitive cadences of the service put them in a highly relaxed state where the experience of talking to the holy icons becomes really intense. There’s a bench around the perimeter for the elderly who get tired but that’s it. And the priest doesn’t have to do the service feeling the stare of every parishioner honed in on his back.

This is a clear example of religious syncretism, and as every example of it, it’s not good.

I’m watching the 1969 series Civilization with Kenneth Clark, and it’s starting to get on my nerves. The host so studiously avoids saying anything beyond “Britain and France” that he’s about to tie himself into a naval knot.

“Then Muslims invaded… And we are off to Ireland.” What it is that the Muslims invaded is never mentioned.

“Pilgrims went there on the way to Compostela.” Which was located where, exactly? And it mattered because… No, forget about it. If it isn’t in France, it might as well not exist.

“That formidable lady, Blanche of Castile, mother of St Louis.” And where is Castile? Did anything of interest ever happen there unconnected to bleeding France?

Clark finds more opportunities to mention Japan than Spain, which is frustrating. I’m only on two episodes in. Maybe it changes later on.

If it weren’t for these frustrating omissions, it would be a great series. Everybody should watch because Clark’s love towards medieval art is lovely to see.

I received my Chair evaluations, and at first I was happy but then I saw that one of the anonymous colleagues referred to me as “the most empathetic, kind person I’ve ever met.”

As far as I know, none of my colleagues have recently been discharged from the Wagner Group, so there’s no reason for them to see me as a paragon of empathy. I’m now starting to suspect the colleague was taking the piss.

On a positive side, I’m attending a mandatory meeting where we are told that we must stop complaining about students who hold different political beliefs. “It’s unprofessional to persecute students because you disagree with them,” we are told. “Stop telling us a student is racist or homophobic. It’s not your job to judge their beliefs.”

Obviously, this didn’t just happen. A brave student sued the university for First Amendment violations, and a federal district court recently ruled that her lawsuit has merit and can proceed.

I never thought I’d use the words “positive” and “mandatory meeting” in the same sentence.

Thank you, everybody, for the birthday wishes! I started the day by being threatened with legal action for resigning from an academic association that is now led by an intolerably woke person. It’s all utterly ludicrous because this is uncompensated volunteer work but this serves me right for being smug about how much I enjoy my life.

I’ve been thinking, yes, the neoliberal administrator sucks something nasty. But on the other hand, he’s done an enormous good to our campus. Nobody cares about microaggressions, anti-racism or pronouns anymore. I have literally not heard a woke proclamation in a year. The land acknowledgements that had been adopted a few months before he arrived have been abandoned completely.

An amazing feeling of solidarity has descended on us. Everybody agrees on how much we detest this guy. It’s become extremely easy to find common ground with anybody who works on campus. An uncomfortable silence can be turned into a moment of beautiful union and camaraderie with a simple, “so, what do you think about the new guy?”

I’m starting to think that if he cures us of pronouns and land acknowledgements, maybe the budget cuts are worth it. People mess around with that stuff because they are bored. Once you have actual problems, all that silliness goes away. Nobody worries about their gender identity in Bakhmut. We don’t need to let it go that far but a little taste of real-world hardship might be useful.

People say they keep seeing our Russian teacher walk around campus, holding hands with a Russian guy. It’s possible, of course, that she found a substitute for her husband but it’s not like Russian men are thick on the ground in this region. It’s more likely that her husband who ran away to Mexico to escape from the draft in Russia has crossed the border and she’s now hiding him in the dorms.

I detest these draft evaders because they are more vicious against Ukraine than those who got enlisted, so I hope not to run into him.

I thought I should do something special for my birthday tomorrow , something that I don’t normally do.

But then I realized that I really like everything I do every day. I like my life. So I’ll just do what I always do.

Ahatanhel Krymsky was a famous Ukrainian linguist who reputedly spoke 60 languages. I don’t know about 60 but he did teach every Middle Eastern language, translated from every major European language, and spoke Turkish so well that he translated Ukrainian poetry into it.

Ahatanhel was born to a Crimean Tatar family. He also had Belarusian and Polish ancestors. Krymsky had zero Ukrainian ancestors but he was completely Ukrainian not by “blood” (which isn’t a real thing anyway) but by language, culture, and worldview. It’s not my conclusion. It’s what Ahatanhel Krymsky said about himself. In today’s parlance, he “identified as” a Ukrainian.

Krymsky was born in 1871 and murdered by Stalin in the 1940s for “bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism.” The accusation wasn’t untrue. Ahatanhel was both bourgeois and a Ukrainian nationalist in the best sense of these words.

Throughout his career as a linguist, Krymsky published over 500 scholarly books and articles. He was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and worked as a director of the Ukrainian Scientific Language Institute. His family had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and before the USSR came, Krymsky was very active in the church.

But wait, there’s more. Besides being a college professor and publishing like crazy, Ahatanhel Krymsky was a prolific literary translator. And he wrote poetry and novels – really good ones. He was also a friend and correspondent of every major Ukrainian writer of the time.

How is it possible to squeeze all this into a single life? Well, Krymsky didn’t have much of a personal life. He was rumored to have been madly in love with Lesia Ukrainka, a famous poet. (She was my father’s favorite writer, by the way). Ukrainka didn’t return Ahatanhel’s feelings, and they remained friends but he never found anybody else, giving rise to rumors that he was gay. In reality, there’s no evidence he ever had any sexual relationship with a woman or a man.

Krymsky did have an adoptive son but the young man was arrested and murdered by Stalin’s regime, leaving behind a pregnant widow. Krymsky contracted a fake marriage with her to spare the baby the danger of having the same last name as an executed “enemy of the people.” Which didn’t help much because 15 years later, Krymsky himself was killed by Stalin.

A fascinating life, an incredible talent. It’s particularly curious that Ahatanhel was always physically very weak and suffered from a variety of health conditions since childhood (which might explain his lack of a personal life). But still, look how much he achieved. It would be a full-time job just to compile his list of publications. And he lived through terrible historic events. World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the destruction of the Ukrainian Republic, the USSR, Stalinism, purges, terror, World War II.

Krymsky was the epitome of a scholar, a man of letters, and an academic in the best possible meaning of the word.