What I find bizarre is the habit of putting restaurant napkins in one’s lap. What purpose can they possibly serve there? Are they supposed to catch bits of food that fall out of one’s mouth? That would only work for extremely skinny, flat-chested, flat-stomached people. And if they are so thin, what is the likelihood of them eating so greedily and sloppily that clumps of food would keep plonking in their laps?

I hate this habit because the darn napkin always slips to the floor and it’s a drag to have to fish it out every five minutes.

N’s vacation is almost over and he’s getting ready to leave. I’m staying on with Klara because we are Soviet people at heart and we exist under the moral imperative to “take the kid out in nature” for as long as possible.

N is being very solicitous of me because he thinks it’s heroic I’ll be here alone with Klara. He reminded me of a scene in a famous Soviet novel set at an early collective farm in the 1920s. When a daycare was being organized at the kolkhoz, a collective farmer said that the women who were going to work there didn’t need to get paid at the same rate as other kinds of full-time work.

“It’s not like it’s hard to take care of toddlers,” he said.

The kolkhoz women were so enraged that they beat him up.

“I’d tear that motherfucker to pieces with my bare hands,” N says decisively. He stayed with Klara while I was in Seattle, and even though she’s a very easy kid, he was wiped out.

I wanted a good British thriller to read on vacation and like a total putz I trusted a review in the New York Times that gushed about Araminta Hall’s Our Kind of Cruelty. This is absolutely the last time ever I trust an NYTimes reviewer because the book stank like you have no idea.

The novel was written by a professor of creative writing, which is already a bad sign. In the author’s own words, she was motivated by rage against men and hatred of patriarchy to write the book. There is pretty little in terms of a plot, no interesting characters, no mystery, no insight into character psychology. All the readers get are vignettes that feature nasty, sex-obsessed, violent, and mean men who despise and victimize tiny, skinny, helpless and angelic women. The novel reads like an essay by an earnest freshman in a gender studies course, who can’t write yet is happy to trot out the primitive ideas and the in-group jargon she learned in class. Since the ideas are extremely shallow, all the author can do is repeat them with little variation again and again.

I should have known that an NYTimes reviewer would love this kind of a pseudo-feminist screed and consider it great literature. I was hoping that at least the book reviews would be free from the affirmations of ideological allegiance that have become all that the newspaper publishes. But I was wrong.

I wish somebody could film us going into the water here on the beach because I’m sure it’s hilarious. We look like a family of crazy bee-keepers.

We wade into the water in thick, long overcoats, wide-brimmed hats that have a long flap in the back, and often shoes. And sometimes pants. There is no netting in the face but only because we are reluctant to freak out the public even more.

People stare but what can we do if our Eastern European skin can’t tolerate sun? The first day I was here in Florida was during the subtropical storm Alberto. I was outside for about half an hour. The sky was overcast and it was drizzling. There was no sun in sight for 50 miles around. And guess what? I burned.

And please don’t say sunscreen. We use the 75. And we slather it on constantly.

Every time we are having an intense discussion on the collective faculty email. . .

at the moment when the debate over issues like the survival of our university system, the attempts to oust the president, the union-busting measures deployed against us, etc reaches the point of greatest intensity. . .

at that very moment when we feel that we are close to making an important decision. . .

there is always a colleague who decides that this is the best possible moment to add to the discussion with an email containing photos of cute kitties in need of adoption.

Oh, the sweet gains of progress! With a bunch of expensive surgeries and a team if weight-loss specialists, men can now push women out of jobs in ballet. And this is great because, as we discussed in the Individuals posts, the most important thing is to assert human triumph over nature. This is the idea that lies in the origins of capitalism, and we have to pray at that altar constantly.

President Trump called on the world’s leading economies on Friday to reinstate Russia to the Group of 7 nations four years after it was cast out for annexing Crimea, once again putting him at odds with America’s leading allies in Europe and Asia.

It’s going to please Macron and the Germans, so I’m not sure which “leading allies” are meant here. And if the UK elects Corbyn, that slobbering toady of Russia, then this will be pleasing to the UK, too.

This is the first time Trump did anything pro-Russian but it’s a pretty big something:

President Trump called on the world’s leading economies on Friday to reinstate Russia to the Group of 7 nations four years after it was cast out for annexing Crimea, once again putting him at odds with America’s leading allies in Europe and Asia.

As I said before, it would be very easy for him to give Russia the symbolic (which is the only one that matters) win over the Crimea simply because he doesn’t understand why the issue is of any importance.

And now that the excitable crowd has yelped about “collusion” for over a year, there is nothing whatsoever to stop him. The fools played all their cards too early to win anything and now have no cards to play at all.

Now Anthony Bourdain killed himself, too? What is it, open season on the rich and famous?

“Why are ladies swim in donuts?” Klara asks, pointing at two bathers in the sea who are using inflatable donuts.

“Because it’s fun to float in a donut!” I explain, trying to attract her to the idea of using in a donut instead of having me hold her in the water at all times.

“No, Mommy,” she says. “It’s because they no have a mommy to hold them.”