Imagine if you had a radio commentator analyzing every move you made, everything you did or didn’t do, in critical terms. “Jonathan is not having a very good day, no.  Look, he’s procrastinating again. Why can’t he do better, I just don’t understand it….” When you went out of the house, you would get more criticism from this radio narrator about yourself, your inadequacies and failings of various kinds, and it wouldn’t stop all day long. You would probably want to turn the radio off, right?

A lot of people have that, though, in their own heads, and don’t know how to turn it off.

I have this radio in my head, too. But what it tells me is, “You are beautiful, you look fantastic. Wow, that was such a brilliant thing you just said. You rock! This was such a smart thing to do! Amazing!”

As I shared before, I had a group of adoring grandparents and great-grandparents who would gather around me throughout my childhood and stare at me with an almost religious adoration, discussing me in hushed voices in these superlative terms. Their voices are now my inner voice. It’s the best thing I have going for me in my life. I haven’t made it happen in any way, and it’s not my achievement. But it’s a cool thing to have.

I’m pretty much the only woman I know who is so completely happy with the way I look and with my intellectual capacities. Come to think of it, I don’t know any men who’d have such a happy sense of self either. I have many other challenges but at least this is not one. And so this inner voice is what I want to give to Klara. Because it’s the best thing I can offer to her. This is why she thinks Beautiful is a descriptor that is linked specifically to her as a measure of all beauty in the world.

Because once you do have the unhappy radio in your head, switching it off is extraordinarily hard.

So many words to say simply that if the sex stinks, people tend to not come back for more.

A “new” trend in dating. People are hilarious. And as clueless as anybody since dating was first invented.

Klara is transfixed by her new Beauty and the Beast book with sliding panels that reveal pictures under pictures.

“This is Beauty,” I explain. “And this is Beast.”

Suddenly, her face lights up.

“Beauty! Like Klara!” she says. “Beast not beauty. Not like Klara.”

The only new releases where I actually count down the hours before I can finally see them on my Kindle are mysteries by Elizabeth George.

The fresh one will drop at 2 am tonight, which blows because tomorrow is my busiest day of the week. I get to be on the constant move from 7 am to 8 pm. Even the usually slow office hours will be populated tomorrow.

I love books.

I have turned out to be a careful and responsible, if a somewhat aggressive, driver. Except for one thing. I keep parking with the front too close to the curb and end up tearing off the bumper. I keep forgetting that the car is longer than it looks from the driver seat.

I feel ridiculous coming to the mechanic, a Frenchman called Monsieur Bonjour, with the torn out bits of the bumper yet again. And it’s the only damage I ever cause but I cause it a lot.

Lest anybody thinks we are country bumpkins here, there’s a new seminar that is being offered on my campus:

#metoo: Understanding the Intersectional Identities in Higher Education

What a great book, folks! Cameron Watson’s Modern Basque History: Eighteenth Century to the Present is a textbook that includes reading assignments and discussion questions after each chapter, so it can be used in a classroom. The writing is beautiful, very clear, and quite free of ideology, which is not easy given the subject. I enjoyed reading it enormously. It’s fascinating to look at the history of Spain, France and Europe at large from the Basque point of view. Just as an exercise for the mind it’s a great thing. Cameron Watson is a brilliant scholar and a talented writer.

The book was published by the Center for Basque Studies at the U of Nevada in Reno. They offer a scholarship for academics who want to come and work on their research into the Basque culture. I’d love to go because the scholarship sounds like it was made for me. But you have to go for 3 weeks at least, and obviously I can’t do that while Klara is so small.

I am trying to work it out in my head exactly what Trump has done in the last month or so that could have improved his image even by four points.

People have seen their paychecks and have noticed the salary increase due to the lower federal withdrawals because of the new tax bill. Nobody cares about some prostitute and the ridiculous scandal surrounding how she does her business. Everybody’s individual paycheck matters more to them.

Another Basque writer, as you already guessed from the title, and another novel that fucking blew my mind, folks. The fellow writes like he’s got a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Zola, a Galdós and a Dostoyevsky standing behind him in his literary tradition. But he doesn’t, and the whole novel is about him being very aware that he doesn’t. He writes like he’s got nothing to prove, and I’m loving it.

The novel’s protagonist is a professor of Basque philology who comes to Alaska to teach a course on the Basque culture. But Basque history is boring and the literature is non-existent, so he invents a history and a literature, taking a supreme piss out of the myths of the Basque nation-building. But the very fact that he can take the piss with such confidence and brilliance is the best proof that there is a fully viable nation there. I’m not explaining this very well because I just finished reading and I’m overcome with emotion. But this novel goes into my new book for sure.

The book has a Spanish translation but it won’t be as funny if you don’t know Basque history and literature.

This is how a voting poll looks in Russia. People are attracted to voting with a delicious spread.