The folks I feel really badly about are the unfortunate characters who came here for the long weekend. It looks like it will rain non-stop way past the Memorial day. I’m here until almost July, so I don’t mind a few rainy days but for the people who were counting on this weekend to be able to swim and sunbathe, it is tough. They would have been better off wherever they came from.

Estero was getting repaired before Klara was born. It’s still being repaired today and looking more broken than ever. I wonder if it gets repaired by the time Klara goes to college.

Seeing oneself as an autonomous individual is not a natural state for human beings. This vision of the self had to be engineered and battled for, and it’s a pretty recent construction.

The reason why it was constructed is that it’s needed for the development of capitalism. Capitalism requires individuals who are alienated from the fruits and the process of their labor, from each other, and from nature.

Our whole vision of ourselves as freely acting individuals who are separate from everything else and don’t recognize any natural order that exists beyond themselves is completely manufactured and very recent.

This Michael Pollan fellow is like the guru of smug, self-involved consumerism. No wonder he’s so popular.

In the current economic system, the losers read Jordan Petersen and the winners read Polan. Neither group is very appealing.

I’m not writing about Ireland’s abortion referendum because I have always believed that abortion rights should only ever be discussed by people who might one day need an abortion.

There is no likelihood of an accidental, unwanted pregnancy at my age, so I’m out of this particular discussion. The events in Ireland are a big deal, but they are not my big deal any more. I think it’s important to know when it’s time to exit a discussion and leave it to others.

This should be front-page news in all newspapers, not just one unknown source in Arizona. This is unbelievably shameful and deeply immoral:

The Trump administration recently announced a new, get-tough policy that will separate parents from their children if the family is caught crossing the border illegally. It was a big news story. So big it overshadowed the fact that the federal government has lost – yes, lost – 1,475 migrant children in its custody.

I have no doubt that this will all be blamed on Trump and nobody will suffer any consequences.

I’m binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy, and there are often patients with cholecystitis. They are all 95 years old and most of them croak during surgery. Maybe this is not the right show for me to watch.

Why don’t they ever have anybody not completely ancient with this illness?

The greatest amount of strategizing during packing involves Klara’s books. Her bedtime ritual is as follows:

– first, N and I read books to her on our bed.

– then, N gives her a bath and reads books to her.

– after the bath, I take her back to our bedroom and read books to her there.

– then I take her to her room and read books to her there.

– then I leave, N comes and reads one last story to her. And then she sleeps.

There are never any battles, tears or arguments around bedtime. We are very very fortunate people in that respect. But the ritual is inviolable.

So you can imagine how much reading matter we need to bring for a 3-week trip. It’s not only for her but also for us. Last vacation I had to read the same book to her about 5,000 times and I still detest that book. She loved the repetition but I was going nuts.

The head of the excavation team that is repairing our leak gave me a piece of the tube he removed to show my husband so that he can see the cracks in it. The cracks are very visible, and anyway, I have a better vision than N who wears glasses. The foreman starts every sentence with “please tell your husband for me,” even though he never saw the husband, and N and I agreed that taking care of the leak is my responsibility.

I find it very cute when older working-class men treat me like a tender flower who can’t comprehend the functioning of tubes. It’s like when a plumber came out to repair the toilet and asked me to leave because it was going “to smell real bad for a pretty lady like you.” The plumber knew I had a small child and was as used to dealing with fecal matter as he, but still he wanted to protect me from the ugliness. It was nice.

Novelistic depictions of child-rearing are very bizarre. I recently finished a novel where a 3-month-old baby sits in a high-chair playing with a toy. At 3 months. And she somehow manages to hold the toy.

Then the baby is taken home and she falls asleep. And doesn’t wake up until well after breakfast. Leaving her parents free to get drunk, take long showers together, watch TV, and fall drunkenly asleep. And it’s like that every night.

The author is a woman and the intended readership is clearly female. I don’t know what kind of a woman can read this and not get angry. This is more annoying than those TV shows where extremely thin actresses gorge on extreme quantities of junk food all day for 9 seasons while getting thinner and thinner.