It’s impossible to explain to the non-Orthodox what Easter means to the Orthodox people. We had services every day this week, twice yesterday and today. These are very long, grueling services. Really beautiful but physically taxing. I have no idea how our 72-year-old priest with a pacemaker is managing to do it. Even I’m exhausted, and I just stand there while he has to sing for hours every day. And carry a heavy wooden cross on his back on Thursday among other things. You can only do this out of a profound religious feeling, is what I’m saying.

The Russians, in the meantime, have gone completely rabid. They’ve been bombing residential areas like crazy. Bombing churches on Easter night. They’ve posted horrific videos of raping their own soldiers in ways I won’t describe to spare your feelings. During Holy Week! I accidentally came across one of such videos that Twitter decided not to blank, and now I’ll never be able to get out of my head. I will never understand how anybody can support something like that. I will never understand how it’s humanly possible to root for these people.

Americans are expiating their racial guilt by falsifying other people’s history:

The thought that Egyptians and Greeks aren’t an empty screen onto which Americans can project their extremely boring hangups never occurs.

This is like bringing a toddler to a birthday party and then having to explain that “You aren’t getting any gifts because it’s not your birthday. This isn’t about you.” Toddlers, however, figure it out soon enough and stop throwing tantrums at the idea that not everything is about them.

Americans, I love you, but please grow up. It’s not about you, nobody cares, get over yourselves.

One of the readers asked recently why, if austerity measures are not that profitable, they are still implemented. We can find an answer in the phenomenon of Dylan Mulvaney.

Men dressing as women for comedic effect are not new. Remember Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, or Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire? Those are excellent movies because the actors are talented and their performances are both funny and touching.

In Ukraine there’s a male actor, Andriy Danylko, whose entire career is performing a female character on stage. He sings, does standup comedy, and is very famous. Obviously, he doesn’t claim actually to be a woman. Danylko is an actor, playing a role, and he’s been very famous in Ukraine for over a quarter of a century. Brands have put him on products because he made himself famous with his talented acting.

It goes in the opposite direction, too. In The L Word, Katherine Moennig gives an outstanding performance as a butch lesbian who moves, gesticulates and talks like a man. This is not a comedic role but it’s the best cross-gender performance I have seen in my life. Like Lemmon, Hoffman and Danylko, Moennig is very talented.

Dylan Mulvaney is not. His performance is bad. He’s not funny like Danylko, touching like Williams, or convincing like Moennig. He isn’t trying to write interesting texts to accompany his role or create some sort of a variety within his act. It’s all extremely repetitive and, frankly, tedious. People have been watching Danylko’s performance for 25 years. Imagine the effort that goes into keeping an act interesting and relevant for that long. Is anybody likely to watch Mulvaney for over 2 minutes? It’s not about ideology of any sort but simply that his spiel is very boring. Mulvaney isn’t trying. He’s not working hard.

Then why choose Mulvaney to promote and put on brand-name products? Some people would say his attraction is that he pretends actually to believe he’s a woman. But there are many guys who do that and are better actors with funnier or more convincing routines.

The answer is the same as what concerns the unprofitable and counterproductive austerity measures.

It’s all about randomness.

If Mulvaney had earned his contracts with Nike and whomever else through hard work, that would have made sense. If the budget cuts actually helped the budget and made things better, that would have also made sense.

This approach makes the world more understandable and less confusing. But people who aren’t confused and disoriented are harder to rob. Put them in a situation where logic and reason are suspended and nothing makes any sense anymore, and you can do what you want to them.

It’s not supposed to make sense. These budget adventures at my school, Mulvaney’s boring videos, and other disorienting things that are mushrooming everywhere exist precisely in order not to make sense.

It’s all about randomness.

The words “transition” and “detransition” are very misleading. I just saw posts on Twitter by a young man who had his penis removed. Willingly and past the age of 18 but still, it’s impossible not to feel sad for him. He didn’t transition into anything. He simply became a guy without a penis.

Now he realized it was a terrible mistake and wants to “detransition.” But it’s impossible. He will now forever remain a guy without a penis.

We don’t have to speak the tortured language of people who refuse to accept material reality. It becomes so much clearer when you describe exactly what happened without meaningless terminology. A man had his penis and testicles cut off. Let’s not play language games.

Even Russians aren’t stupid enough to buy this propaganda:

Neither is Tucker but he knows that his audience will eat it up.

A first-grade teacher in Montreal: “You must speak French, not English.”

My 7-year-old nephew: “But how about my freedom of speech?”

The way things are, kids need to learn the words “freedom of speech” before they learn to walk.

We talked recently about how a disruption in bonding with the mother in infancy/early childhood results in people who can’t bond with places and other humans. These individuals won’t form families easily and will always be on the move. The perfect neoliberal workforce.

Obviously, mothers incapable of bonding with their infants always existed. But what if they became mass-produced? What if something happened to make the mother who is capable of bonding an exception and the one who can’t the norm?

A child is formed by the mother’s gaze. A new mother always keeps the child in her line of vision. Their communication is very intense. At every moment, the mother soothes, reassures, and nourishes physically, emotionally and intellectually without needing to say anything. Even when she sleeps, the mother keeps the infant within the focus of her attention. If you are a mother, you know exactly what I mean.

The attention, the focus, the sustained, unbroken concentration – this is what’s needed to make the bonding happen. (And a functioning endocrine system to start it all up, obviously).

OK, so how’s your focus been lately? Honestly? In all likelihood, as shit as everybody else’s. There’s now an obstacle between mother and child. Look around, it’s everywhere. Child stares at mom, mom stares at a screen. I know it’s a huge taboo topic because mothers can do no wrong but seriously, when’s the bonding supposed to happen?

But hey, it’s all good. It’s better to be lonely, isolated, easily transportable, and drugged to the gills anyway, right?

Americans have some weird sense of inferiority towards Europe. I keep hearing that “Europeans aren’t parochial like we are, they speak languages, they are interested in what happens in the world, I heard everybody in Europe speaks several languages.”

But that’s not true. I’ve never met people who are collectively more interested and engaged intellectually with the world than Americans. When I was in Spain last month, literally nobody evinced even 5% of the interest in Ukraine that I routinely get in the US. The guy who works at a local Dollar Store knows enormously more about the situation in Ukraine than all the academics I spoke to in Spain combined. This is a young fellow who has such complex, interested view of foreign relations that I haven’t seen in many Spanish professors. And Americans over the age of 60 are better informed than many European political commentators. I’m talking about regular people, not scholars or politicians. I get more enjoyment from talking about foreign policy with my plumber than any academic from Germany, the UK or Spain.

And it isn’t only the war in Ukraine. Americans ask more questions, they are more curious. And more likely to modify their views when they receive new information. They are excited to get new information like nobody else.

American position of leadership in the world is a direct result of this curiosity and openness.

And by the way, most people in Europe (like everywhere else) speak only their own language, and not extremely well at that.

“How is your fish?” I ask Klara.

“If a fish could be as delicious as you are nice, that’s how it would taste. Amazing!” she says.

Here’s more fun info from yesterday’s talk by our chief administrator.

At the beginning of the fiscal year, we had an 18-million budget shortfall. As a result of creating an enormous, unwieldy bureaucracy around hiring and crippling Advisement, Admissions, Library services, graduate programs etc with worker shortages, we saved a little over 400,000. Which is next to nothing if we take into account the entire shortfall. This happened because huge gaps in workforce ended up costing more, in many cases, than was saved. Also, student counts dropped as students can’t take the courses they need at convenient times. So money was actually lost as a result.

What did the administration do when it received this data?

It decided to plough on with the exact same bureaucratic hiring procedures.

It’s not about money, folks. Marx was wrong. Many things – most things, actually – aren’t about money at all.