Klara is eager to play with other kids, especially older ones but she doesn’t know how to make friends yet. So I have to scour the beach and the pool area to procure friends for her. I use the word “procure” consciously because it does feel weird to approach 8-11-year-olds (Klara’s favorite age group) and strike up conversations.

Because of my profession, I’m good with kids of all ages, so kids enjoy talking to me and make efforts to include Klara in their games to impress me. But it’s precisely being good at it that makes it feel uncomfortable. It’s like I’m almost grooming these kids, or something.

In the time I’ve been here, these older kids have taught me a bunch of games and a lot of interesting factoids about sea creatures. I also witnessed a truly Borgesian debate today on whether the tiny mollusks the kids were observing on the beach are aware of the existence of humans and how these mollusks perceive us. These are very happy kids because they were extremely careful not to harm even the tiniest of these sea critters. At their age, my idea of fun was squashing critters to death on a mass scale.

So what it was like to be a professor of Spanish literature, say, back in the 1920s or 1930s?

For one, teaching loads were higher than they are now. Leading research universities had their famous research superstars teach more than we do right now at most of the teaching institutions with non-existent research requirements. Everybody taught lower-level language courses. In a semester, a professor might teach two advanced literature courses and two Spanish 101 courses. Language courses required more hours per week than they do now. Nobody expected to teach only or mostly in their area of specialization.

I’m starting to think that maybe we are spoiled to bitch about workloads like mine. By “we” I mean myself. Hmm.

The Minister of Education of Ukraine is ordering the rewriting of school textbooks to remove the words “parents” and pictures that feature the daddy-mommy-kids families. Because it’s important to be inclusive and not hurt the feelings of the kids who don’t live with both parents. 40% of school children in Ukraine don’t live with their fathers, apparently.

I never thought that this particular type of crazy would spread to Ukraine.

Of course, Trudeau provoked Trump on purpose. That’s the kind of thing he likes to do. All he ever does are grand gestures aimed at getting him cheap popularity.

But it’s a total shame to allow oneself to be provoked by silly childish pranks of somebody as pathetically predictable as Trudeau.

In the end, these are two rich, spoiled pricks who are competing for social media likes. Neither has the brains to understand the big picture or even to conceive that anything bigger than their vanity exists. One is playing a bad boy role while the other one poses as a good boy but it’s all posturing.

There is this old Soviet joke where people ask a baby dragon,

“Dragon, did you eat your mommy?”

“Yes,” sniffles the dragon.

“Did you eat your daddy?”

“Yes. . .”

“Did you eat your brothers and sisters?”

“Yeah. . .”

“And why did you do that?”

“I just felt like it.”

“And so what does this make you?”

“A poor little orphan!”

People are going all, but why did Trump yell at everybody at the G7? Is he trying to break up the NATO? Is he trying to destroy the West?

Poor fools, they are still looking for the depth that is simply not there.

And that’s what I’m afraid it’s going to be like not only in the next election but in every one since now and until forever:

One hundred and fifty days and then I don’t want to hear anymore about how you just weren’t excited to vote for the Democrat you had the chance to vote for, they didn’t tickle your liberal fancy just right, the fucking earth is caving in so either get over yourself and show up for your immigrant, minority, gay, trans brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus or get the fuck off my Internet.

It’s sad that there are people who still buy into this vapid sloganeering but it’s even sadder that this is the entirety of the political space right now.

At least I now know what purpose this apocalyptic bleating serves. People need it to convince themselves to go vote for mega rich champions of globalization. The only way anybody can muster the enthusiasm to vote for a candidate like, say, Pritzker is to pretend that it’s Pritzker or the apocalypse.

What is the point of writing such inane, silly articles as today’s massively linked ““Why can’t we hate men?”

To make people think that gender studies is a ridiculous field? They already do.

To get permission to hate men? It’s hardly needed. Hate them, don’t hate them, whatever.

To convince men not to run for political office? That’s even more ridiculous than gender studies.

To make money? Surely, it can’t be that hard to make money without making a complete fool out of oneself.

To get all the hits and links? If that’s the goal, a couple of naked photos would produce a better effect in a lot less time.

It’s just such a silly, pathetic thing to do.

I know a woman who was sexually harassed by her boss. She was a single mother of three and really struggling. He said if she didn’t sleep with him, he’d get her fired. When he failed to get her fired, he said he’d turn the workplace into hell for her. And he did. She still didn’t sleep with him and fought like a lioness for her job. It was either staying employed or going back on food stamps to feed the kids. This went on for years. The boss’s buddies joined the hounding, and it got even worse. The story has a good ending but she suffered a lot in the process.

If the women who sleep with their bosses or professors to get promoted, published, funded, noticed, etc are harassed, then what was my friend? There is a fundamental difference between women who whored themselves out unsuccessfully or uncomfortably and women who didn’t. There’s got to be a recognition that there’s a very different degree of suffering here.

There’s also an obvious class difference between women like my friend and the spoiled drama queens who are now telling us that the sex acts they willingly engaged in seem wrong 20 years later because they are becoming aware of “the power differential.” Women who have to feed 3 kids on an almost-minimum-wage job don’t have the luxury of slowly figuring out the power differential. It’s kind of always there for them.

It scares me that there are people who can seriously write this kind of utterly ridiculous crap:

The power differential between a 22-year-old intern and a 49-year-old boss makes any sexual interaction wrong. And if you throw in the fact that he was president — the country’s parent and someone serving in loco parentis for the youngest White House staffers — it’s an inexcusable abuse of power.

And this is being sold to us as some sort of a feminist advance. Unbelievable.

If Bill Clinton is guilty of rape, it should be investigated and discussed. But seeing sexual harassment in the Monica Lewinsky brouhaha is almost as crazy as suggesting that women need a daddy in the workplace to protect them from having sex.

I find the current hollowing out of the concept of sexual harassment so disturbing because I now don’t have words to describe what I experienced back in Ukraine and other places.

“I was harassed but not in the sense of chasing after rich married men. And not in the sense of being upset that a former boyfriend dedicated a shorter paragraph to me than to his other girlfriend in an essay. And not in the sense of a boyfriend refusing to helping me get published.”

If people want to engage in a protracted collective spectacle of re-infantilizing women, what are you going to do? But could they at least invent a new vocabulary for doing it? Because this is getting beyond ridiculous.

Bill Clinton published a mystery novel? Well, since his wife ventured into the fantasy genre, why not?

If only he didn’t get James Patterson – aka the least gifted author of all times – to write it for him, I might have leafed through it. Couldn’t be much worse than the horrific Araminta Hall book.

Is anybody on the blog going to confess to reading it? Or is it going to be like being a Trump supporter, which people conceal on phone polls, skewing the results?