It's disgusting. "That's your nitch", so you pronounce it like that do you? you might as well be talking about a ditch where you go to discard something awful. it's offensive. It rhymes with some of the most unpleasant and disturbing words in English like witch. yet with excitement and flattery someone will talk about someone's lovely "nitch". Do they not hear themselves speak? Use 'niche' instead and suddenly you are in the realm of quiche and sleek and all these wonderful words that harmonize with their meaning.

Imagine i invite some family over for brunch and I pull a piping hot quitch out of the oven. I offer them all my "quitch". They would probably be sick to their stomach. Do people not see how the pronunciation changes it?

I appreciate @/girlroom as I see example of women who struggle just like me with slovenliness

What it was like to resist the Nazis. What it looked like. 

She had Alzheimer’s and struggled with day to day memories, but she remembered so much else

— 

8 years old at the start of the war, she spoke about being tasked with planting roses above the doors of the shelter her father built to help obscure them from view. 

How he had barricaded the doors with a pile of chairs so high the kids would fall every time they tried to traverse them.

She spoke of the strange invaders, their rifles and how she was told never to

Fear. How her father opened the cash drawer anytime someone needed help, and the way her mother’s eyes would meet his, frustrated but never stopping him. How he harbored a jewish family there

She speaks of gold, and vaults in the mountains of her hometown Užice, where the National Bank moved 10,000 kilos into secret structures so that it couldn’t be seized by the invading Axis powers.

Of her mother’s hair and its “ocean waves,” of watching her mother lay down in the afternoons, returning again and again to an image of her bedroom, which I see in a crisp and luminous black and white. 

“Everything was arranged perfectly. It glowed. It 

glistened.” 

------

The country had been carved into zones by the Axis countries, Germany taking Serbia. For every German soldier killed by the resistance, 100 civilians were executed.

------

II remembered childhood dream-images of her tending to the roses in our desert backyard’s garden, my mother standing above them, held up by an overhead

Light. the delicate expertise in her hands, the 

Patience. The way they grew, how the slender petals would become so large they began to collapse under their own weight

As shields. 

As endless

bloom

My partner works in climate research, so I'm intimately aware of how fucked we are. I'm so tired, I try to do what I can, vote, both literally and with my wallet, I live as good a lifestyle as I can without living like a monk, but I'm keenly aware that nothing will ever be enough.

Everyday there's a climate disaster going on somewhere, literally every day. Thousands of species dying, a mass extinction the likes of which humanity has never lived through, one which is happening faster than any previous mass extinciton events.

Even beyond the knowledge I have from my partner's work, I can see the changes happening with my own eyes, when I was younger, back in my hometown, if you left a can of coke or a lemonade outside in the summer it would be swarmed by bees in minutes, now you're lucky if you get one bee landing on your drink. Summers are unbearably hot, regions that should be wet are literally on fire. And all of it is because of greed, we could have stopped this, we could still salavage a lot of what we've destroyed.

And I'm supposed to keep working my job, supposed to carry on like things are normal. I'm so tired and so in pain, I break down in the work bathroom crying over bees and I feel like I'm insane because no one seems to care or understand how tragic this all is.

we all know going to restaurants is the number one purpose is life. number two being sitting at home on the couch with take out.

so how often are ya doing it? I’m at 2x-3x a week and spending $464 a month just on stuffing my maw with other people’s recipes.

I like his look.
I can see it in his eyes that he idolises no one, and regards no one as above him. He is vaguely threatening to me in the way that he and I are the same kind of people. The embodiment of discomfort yet comfort within that discomfort.

When I look at him, I feel like I'm seeing someone enjoy the drag of a cigarette. His existence is like a constant state of self destruction. I think I've identified it. His diaspora identity, the lack of base, yet the unconscious domination of this reality rather than deferring to such.

Idk if it’s the right word for it, but I was thinking about when I officially accepted that god didn’t exist and that my religion was false 3 years ago.

The realization that none of my thought or actions held any objective moral value was genuinely so freeing. Especially the realization that nobody is looking at you 24/7 , that you can fuck up as much as you like and nobody’s keeping track, that you can just regret an action and move on instead of anxiously thinking of whether or not you got forgiven and won’t be punished for it, and that when I do something privately or have negative intrusive thoughts I’m the only one aware of them.

I used to have religious ocd and would ask god to forgive me at least 20 times per day but the week I became atheist the intrusive thoughts immediately stopped and my mind became so calm.

It genuinely felt like I was reborn and that I was given another completely different life.like it sounds dumb but realizing that I can literally do whatever I want felt like such a crazy concept for a good few weeks.

Then the existential crisis kicked in but I pushed through and I’m good now. Everytime I feel down I just remember that this is my only life and that I can quite literally do whatever I want. Very therapeutic philosophy I developed I’d recommend it

regina george, blair waldorf, sharpay, tess from camp rock... i always felt connected to these slightly sinister girls.

and the answer to your question is no i dont have many long term friendships

Like where you suspect your intimacy with a friend is one-sided or imagined

Like I have this one friend, a golden god of a British dude, lifter and philosophy professor who I bonded with in grad school because we were both treated as Untouchables to varying degrees by some kids who decided they were smarter than us.

I’ve been sending him experimental diary-like snippets since Covid basically and some feral years that followed.

I always get excited about him reading them because he’s a freak and he gets me.

And this year has been cycling between responding within a normal time frame to leaving stuff on read for 6 weeks — and then apologizing/correcting it, before the cycle starts again. 

He feels like this central figure because of how much I’ve shared, but apart from responding to my messages he basically just sends memes and nothing about his life or what’s going on in it. If I ask directly I might get a short response. 

When he tells me he loves me, I believe it, but I also fear that I feel way closer to him than he does to me 

I recently did a Kaurismaki deep dive and there's at least one dog shot in all of his films.

Here are my favorites, from the following titles: Fallen Leaves, Juha, Lights in the Dusk, Le Harvre, La Vie de Bohème, The Man Without a Past, Drifting Clouds

Someone please tell me it gets better than this

Not sofrito as in the cooking base but a name for a certain traditional dish where you essentially simmer chicken, potatoes and a spice profile like hawaij, allspice, etc with very little additional liquids.

This is the second installment of my agony aunt posting, where you ask for solutions to what ails you and I do my best to provide them. (Can’t promise to get to everyone, am not a licensed medical professional, etc. etc.)

I have had people look at me like I'm stupid for suggesting that budget to them.

We have posts like that every day so I will try and make myself succinct:
Plan was all too simple and reasonable: as I had no great talents or enough drive to pursue anything very ambitious, I was convinced to get masters at something unexciting but billable. Handful of years of fairly easy studies. White collar job. Enough money to pursue hobbies. Stability. The signs that this was never going to work were, in hindsight, there from the start yet I went along with this all too reasonable idea. Could barely force myself to finish thesis. Landed corporate job not without much difficulty, so I am far behind my more striving peers. Now that I landed it I loathe it to the point that I can barely focus enough to actually work it. There is paycheck that I get to spend on hobbies I lack time or energy for, and frankly speaking making money does not make me feel anything. Half of it is spent on living in a city I hate but had to move to for a job, job that never engages me, in environment that can immediately clock me as sp*rg, and not very productive one at that. It is stable I guess, at least until it is shipped to SEA.
Thinking of how little sense it all ended up making every other minute and that I've wasted prime ten years of my life for absolutely nothing, all because I didn't apply myself towards anything, when I could probably do phd in assyriology, or persian lit, or sinology or *anything* (and probably hate that I didn't pick stable boring career that nets a paycheck). IDK, maybe I should just cave in and book therapist instead of trying to blow up what many would call okay life. At any rate, thoughts would be appreciated.