Things were going okay for a while. She stopped throwing rocks at the pigeons, and no more Maoist slogans appeared on the walls.

However, it all started to fall apart due to an argument with the neighbor that I still don't quite get. Our neighbor is very nice, he has been a communist for his entire life. He lives alone and is a senior. We share a fence between our houses, and he decided he wanted to paint it. I told him I would help, but when my girlfriend came home she started losing it, calling both of us "revisionist traitors" and then denounced us for "de-varnishification".

I was able to cool things down for a bit, but then our neighbor had an old friend over. It turns out this guy worked at the post office during Nixon's administration. She found out and hand delivered an 80 page long critique of his friend, the fence, his house, and god knows what else. Apparently anyone who worked for the federal government at this time was an "anti-communist traitor who destroyed proletarian internationalism", and I was never to be trusted again for defending that.

We've booked an appointment at a couples therapist to try to work it out. She was opposed to the idea, but I told her it was like a formal struggle session. But I am worried she'll be bringing fruits and vegetables to throw at me.

We are still together and things calmed down for a bit. There is now a moratorium on discussing China and we have painted over the Maoist slogans on the walls so my parents could visit without seeing it.

But yesterday I came home and she was outside throwing rocks at birds. I asked why, and she told me "the sparrows are bourgeois". Her victims were pigeons.

After I pointed this out she called me a "lysenkoist". I'm truly at a loss for words here.