Why did people stop going to indoor malls? Is it Amazon? Going to the mall and hanging out for hours was half the 80s. It was friggin awesome. pic.twitter.com/9LC6GwMTNK

— Kron (@Kronykal) April 1, 2026

Eighties, schmeighties. We go all the time. It’s so much fun. They are really quaint little stores in there. We walk around, explore, laugh. We have our mall jokes and our mall routines. There are tons of people there, all clearly in the middle of their own mall rituals. There are teenage girls choosing squishies with the grim determination of fighter pilots. Very young couples on their first dates. Tween girls flocking to Claire’s (that curse of every mother of girls) for their BFF bracelets. Young dudes poring over dusty DVD collections. A father of four little kids sells his 3D-printed apple toys at ridiculously low prices. A single mother bustles in her pop-up wrapping kiosk. A black lady does brisk business of selling dessert pickles.

People sit around pouting instead of just going and doing things like tasting the mall lady’s dessert pickles. Yes, they taste something horrid but you make memories to last a lifetime.

We had a preacher on campus today. He had a megaphone and large posters with messages about Jesus. Many students gathered to listen. Some agreed, some didn’t but I was particularly struck by a female student with a sort of a handmade halo on her head with a transgender flag on one stand a Palestinian flag on the other.

Klara is on spring break so she was with me, and this gave me a great opening to explain what freedom of speech is and why speech that upsets people shouldn’t be banned.

The secretary is on her day off, and Klara went all out to prepare cute surprises for her:

This is only part of the exhibit.

I feel so embarrassed over the bullying to which my colleagues subjected the secretary over textbook orders that I’m happy at least my child is friendly towards her.

This hits hard:

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

– Thomas Mann

Have you, people, every tried pine cone jam? The little pine cones are so tasty.

Somebody asked me why I’m learning German if you can use AI or a digital interpreter app to talk “to anybody in any language.”

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve had people stick their phones into my face to try to talk through an interpreter app. When that happened, I immediately lost all interest in talking to them about anything. It’s tiresome, it’s yet another screen, it’s all constantly interrupted because you need to press this or that. The frisson of excitement that wow, I actually managed to have a conversation with an actual German, is gone. With the app, you can possibly get directions while traveling but you aren’t making any friends, let alone improving your intellectual capacity.

I don’t want a hundred superficial, stilted app exchanges in German. I want to become a German speaker. I want to grow a whole part of my personality that thinks, dreams and expresses itself in German. It’s extremely hard but it’s such an amazing adventure. It’s like what we talked about before. I don’t want an app to live my life for me. I like my life. I don’t mind that things get hard. It’s good to overcome. It’s good to confront hardship. And it’s really good to feel that for the first time you are managing to establish a real connection with another person in a new language.

The excuse for the apps is that “you can save so much time.” But to do what? Save time on exercising your brain, forming new neural pathways, having fun… to what end? What would I be doing instead if I weren’t living my life?

Happy Palm Sunday or Easter, and let’s remain human.

The problem is that people love slop. This is then justified through a populist suspicion of the hierarchical distinction of taste. But the solution lies not in creating an elite consumptive class but in the radical notion that people can be learn to unlove slop.

— Alexander Avila (@aretheygay) April 3, 2026

High culture was always and will always be enjoyed only by a tiny minority. Most people don’t have the IQ and the depth of subjectivity to understand or derive any pleasure from it.

We don’t need a solution for this situation just like we don’t need a solution to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population isn’t physically capable of playing in the NBA. The idea that “anybody can be whatever they choose” is cute in middle school but it’s not based in reality. Most people (including me) can never become neurosurgeons, professional athletes, or opera singers no matter how hard we try. And that’s perfectly fine.

As to whether you can cultivate your taste in art, it’s like your taste in food. You can definitely improve your palate. You’ll always hanker for a boiled sausage that’s familiar from your childhood. So it’s possible to an extent without ever becoming a mass phenomena.

We should abandon the ludicrous idea that hierarchies are bad. This idea, and not “slop”, is the real problem. Hierarchies are good and important everywhere. At home, at work, in church, at school, everywhere.

A couple of months ago, I bought this package of boiled sausage at the Global Foods store.

But then when I wanted to eat it, it was nowhere to be found. Nobody else in the house has any interest in it, not even the cat. I was worried. I thought, dude, if I ate two pounds of boiled sausage and retained no memory of the event, this isn’t good. My blood sugars must be a lot less controlled than I think. Forgetting what you ate like this is evidence of being hypoglycemic. I was genuinely concerned. And sad to be deprived of the experience of eating the boiled sausage.

The other day, I spotted something bright colored under the driver’s seat of my car. And yes, it was the lost boiled sausage. It must have rolled out of the shopping bag on the way home from Global Foods. And stayed there, sad and uneaten. Fortunately, the wrapping is very hermetic. We’ve had a few scorchers recently and…. you can imagine.

I have three big events next week, none of which I want to attend. My mother in Canada is threatening to MAID herself out of spite. I won’t be able to go to Holy Week services on Tuesday or Friday. Both at work and at church people are bickering like they get paid to do it. If I hear one more complaint about the placement of the panikhida table, I’ll blow, and then somebody else will need an urgent panikhida. There’s so much to do at work, I feel like a deer in highlights. So today I put on a pink skirt with heart appliques and took the 67 all the way to the Global Foods store for two packages of boiled sausage. And a bunch of very healthy stuff too including pine cone jam for my husband, of course. So now I feel better.

The newspaper of record doesn’t know what the letters in NATO stand for. We have truly arrived at heights of egregious incompetence.

There’s a whole bunch of people responsible for putting out the paper, and none of them caught it? I’m very interested in hearing what their salaries are to publish this absolute slop.

When Klara was a baby, she would watch me and N have a conversation and then make gurgles at us in the most conversational tone imaginable. She probably thought, “The large warm creatures routinely look at each other and take turns to make a series of noises. I should do that, too.”

I often feel like that when people make obligatory conversational noises at each other for no practical reason whatsoever.