At the dance lesson, a parent brought a plate of cookies for the kids and left them by the door. I carried Klara straight by the plate without taking any because there had already been Hershey kisses, a lollipop and Welch’s from other kids.

Very calmly Klara showed me her little palm and pointed her finger at the middle.

“Right here, mommy,” she said.

“Right here what?” I asked.

“Cookie goes right here,” she explained. “Put the cookie right here.”

So of course I had to go back for the cookie.

I already let Klara down twice because I didn’t realize I needed to bring gifts for the kids at the dance lesson either for Christmas or for Valentine’s. I can’t screw up one more time. So please, folks, tell me, when is the next gift-giving occasion. Easter? When is it and what’s appropriate to give?

A person on the job market in my field is bitterly complaining that at the job interview all of the questions were in Spanish. This candidate’s conclusion is that this means that the profession is horribly corrupt.

Yes, those corrupt bastards. How dare they expect that a professor of Spanish wouldn’t mind speaking in Spanish.

Now I have really seen it all.

I have discovered a cure for post-tenure blues. It’s called “becoming active in service to the profession.” I was moping and moaning until I became an Assistant Editor for a scholarly journal and got into the leadership of a scholarly organization. Now I have new problems to solve and new tasks to complete every week. And it’s work that brings tangible results and immediate, clear rewards. Plus, it makes me feel competent and important.

The New York Times has truly outdone itself in shitty reporting:

Mr. Navalny’s team scoured social media accounts belonging to a 21-year-old Belarus-born blogger, Anastasia Vashukevich, who posted videos in 2016 that showed Mr. Deripaska sailing on his yacht around Norway with a deputy prime minister, Sergei E. Prikhodko. At one point, Mr. Deripaska appears to be explaining to the blogger why relations between Russia and the United States are so bad.

The “Belarus blogger” is actually a prostitute. The videos she posted are not of the oligarch “sailing on his yacht with a deputy prime minister” but actually of the three of them having sex. This piece sounds like the oligarch was being interviewed by a journalist on his yacht when the reality is that this was a sex orgy during which a leading Russian politician got covertly filmed while ordering the oligarch to blackmail Manafort. The prostitute claims she was gang-raped. The neo-Nazi Navalny broke the story in the Russian media. Even more hardcore Russian neo-Nazis took it and conducted a series of breakthrough reporting on the corruption that originated in Russia and spread across the ocean.

There is a million juicy angles here yet the hapless NYTimes reporter makes it about Internet freedom and YouTube. It’s incredible. I understand that mentioning Manafort might be tricky but orgies, prostitutes, pickup artists (who are also a huge part of the story), gang rape, neo-Nazis, a Russian minister having sex with an oligarch! And all you talk is YouTube? Words fail me.

After I gave birth to Klara, I had this weird feeling that I had forgotten how to eat and sleep and that I’d never learn again.

On the third day, the nurse said she was taking Klara away for a car seat test and that she’d keep her at the nursery for a couple of hours to give me a chance to sleep.

So she took her away, and I crashed onto the bed, thinking “Yippee! Finally, I can conk out. Sweet dreams, here I come!!!”

I was almost asleep when suddenly a wave of the most horrible, howling anxiety grabbed me and dragged me off the bed. It was the bonding hormones that decided to come in at that time because, of course, they couldn’t have possibly waited until I actually slept.

So I crawled out of the room with my IV, my drug bag, and my ass hanging out in the air in the mesh panties for all the world to see. I saw my disheveled, swollen, half-naked reflection in the mirror and thought, “God, there sure are some ugly old hags trawling these halls at 3 am.”

A nurse caught me and tried to stuff me back into my room but I warded her off with my IV stand. “That’s my baby crying,” I vociferated. “I can hear her!”

“There’s a whole nursery full of babies,” the nurse said. “It can be any one of them.”

I was right, though. It was my Klara screaming. I found her and dragged her back to the room.

Since then, I unfortunately found out that I know how to eat better than ever.

It’s Klara’s birthday! We went to the pediatric dentist, which does seem like a weird birthday activity but it had to be done, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. Then we had lunch at Panera to celebrate. After Klara’s nap, we are going to the kids’ gym.

I read so much about tofu that I got scared of it, so I ended up making tofu and French lentil soup. I wanted to try something completely outrageous and almost made pelmeni and tofu soup but I’m not allowed to have pelmeni right now, unfortunately.

It’s incredible that it’s been two whole years and Klara already visits dentists and eats tofu and lentil soup.

Do you, folks, know that US air force killed 100 Russian troops in Syria the other day? Is it being reported here? These are literally the same troops that fought in Ukraine and the were transferred to Syria when it became clear that the war in Ukraine wasn’t winnable for Russia. They are elite special forces. Or were, I guess. The name of the group is ChVK Wagner.

Southern New Hampshire University has fired an online adjunct professor and apologized to an Idaho student after the professor gave the student a failing grade and insisted that Australia is not a country.

Maybe this will teach people not to waste time and money on online diploma mills.

This is the cutey-cute 650-page bestseller novel about Basque terrorism that I mentioned before and that I read twice in a row for work. Yes, the degree of tear-jerker sentimentality in the novel is through the roof. The happy ending is sugar meets artificial sweetener meets honey.

But hey, 27 editions in under 2 years, and there’s not a single sex scene or even a chaste love story in this doorstopper of a book. There’s got to be something to it if people are so eager to read it. I mean, I actually had trouble buying the book. Amazon regretfully had to inform me it wasn’t able to fulfill the order because it had run out of copies. This literally never happened before with a book I bought.

I’m going to write my next article about this novel. My best pieces have been about novels I don’t massively admire. Patria is not a great work of art but I enjoyed reading it and I do recommend because it’s a pleasant read and Aramburu is very good at holding the reader’s attention.