I’m going on a long-awaited date with my husband (long-awaited not because we never go but because it’s long-awaited even if the last one was yesterday.) But I was warned at the hospital that until I get my gallbladder surgery, eating out is out. Everything served everywhere is high-fat (or not low-fat enough). A local restaurant everybody loves offers a weekend special on “paella with 5 different kinds of sausages from all over the world.” It’s like they are mocking me on purpose.

Of course, Japanese restaurants are always good but we can only go out at 3 pm, and they are closed at that time.

So I started browsing menus of restaurants and discovered that there is a place that I can go without ending up at the emergency room. It’s an Asian restaurant that serves soups and things like cucumber salad or steamed salmon on a pillow of butternut squash.

The date is to celebrate the filing of the taxes, which we will do for the last time as non-citizens today. Not that it changes anything for the tax-filing process, but becoming citizens will end our “taxation without representation” situation. We will finally be able to vote in exchange for our taxes. Hopefully, there’s somebody to vote for.

Somebody on FB made an extremely lucid suggestion to stop discussing politics on social media. Or since nobody really discusses anything, to stop posting slogans and links with political content. Because it kills politics and ends up giving us precisely the kind of clown politicians that we seem to be begging for.

Also, he says, why keep retweeting and reposting political articles when you know that most of them were produced in St Petersburg, Russia? Haven’t we made enough mistakes in the area of accepting and welcoming their propaganda?

The Russian troll factories don’t give a toss whether to promote pro-Trump or anti-Trump content. What they want is to disrupt, promote anger, frustration, anxiety, make you hate your neighbor. When Trump was an outsider, they promoted him. Now that he’s not, they’ll undermine him. Question is, why should we participate? The folks at the troll factories are paid little but at least they are paid. And we are doing their dirty work for free.

What the parade should really feature is row upon row of teachers, daycare workers, college professors, janitors and cafeteria workers brandishing automatic weapons and bazookas, riding in tanks and launching little nuclear missiles. That would be really fun.

The sudden interest in HBO owes to the fact that the cutesy doorstopper about terrorists I talked about the other day has inspired the very first TV series made by the HBO Spain. And that makes total sense. Cutesy mafiosos, cutesy ditzes, cutesy drug dealers. The only thing that was missing was cutesy victims of terrorism.

I’m sure it will be a very enjoyable series. I have no idea why people find it so hard to imagine that one can massively enjoy a product and still retain a critical distance from it. We do it every day with stuff like mass market sweets or fast food. We know it’s shit but we also know it tastes phenomenal.

Students in Louisiana thought a math symbol looked like a gun. Police were called.

No, it’s not from The Onion.

A great example of “cool capitalism” is HBO. It sells seemingly edgy content that allows viewers to feel rebellious while consuming the most conformist of ideas. And it’s especially telling that one has to pay extra for this fake edginess. Because being part of the financially comfortable class that can afford to access the “cool capitalist” version of capitalism is a large part of the enjoyment.

And in the meantime, really great, hard-working people experience real and completely undeserved hardship.

Fie has been denied tenure. You, folks, have no idea how dedicated, talented, and hard-working this woman is.

And it’s done under some completely bogus excuse about enrollments. The truth is that the decision is probably completely political but the school is too shy to say it honestly. Bastards.

I actually went to the bank in yoga pants. Hee hee. I put a very fancy spring coat on top, but still.

I’m feeling very local.

“Everybody only writes about success!” N protested. “If there is a discussion of failure, it’s only in the context of how it was overcome. Nobody writes about how they failed and failed and never overcame anything.”

So I introduced him to the genre of quit lit. Currently, the field of history is experiencing a boom in it. It’s exactly like every contribution to the genre: verbose, overwrought, self-pitying and superficial.

Needless to say, N was stunned because the phenomenon is unbelievable the first time you come across it.

Klara and I were building a tower with stacking cups. She took one of the cups and pretended to drink out of it saying, “I drinking coffee, Mommy.”

I took the cup and tried to put it on the tower but she took it away from me and said very seriously, “I pouring out coffee, Mommy.” She pretended to pour out the imaginary coffee and gave the cup back for me to keep building.