Take Your Clairvoyance And Apply It To Your Life In The Physical, Presumptuous Half-hearted Homunculus,

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Any social entrepreneurs worth their (fair-trade, alder-smoked) sea salt will have an "our story" section on their website, explaining how a college trip to Guatemala or a grandmother's devotion to fresh produce inspired the company's current mission. "It's not just 'my candles are great', it's 'and then I went to Java and discovered this wax and this is a part of my journey, here's a picture,'" says Deresiewicz. "Goods now all have to be experiences.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown aka. "smoothie catharsis will solve your existential crisis"

friendship with russians is when they conquer your land through a genocide and then say: “we can live in peace, but acting like your culture is equal with mine is russophobic. speak russian, please”

Madonna Kolhbenschlag, in Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye, however, pleased me very much when she explained that in the original version of the Frog Prince story, the frog was transformed not by a kiss but only when the princess acknowledged her disgust, picked him up, and threw him in the fire. I have seen more men changed, I think, when their wives stopped putting up with their chauvinism than through their acceptance of it. I have seen children change when their parents thought enough of them to demand that they act in keeping with their inner wisdom, or at least common sense. I think love, wise love, sometimes demands a transformative toss into the fire, rather than the reinforcement of beastliness or froggishness in people.

Carol S. Pearson

Every winter an absent joy pains you and you walk under the rain one in two: you and the person you were in another winter. You speak secretly to yourself words you don’t understand because of memory’s inability to retrieve a previous emotion, and because of longing’s ability to add what did not exist to what existed. Such as the tree becoming a forest and the stone a quail, such as being happy in a prison cell you see wider than a public garden, and the past standing waiting for you tomorrow like a loyal dog. Longing lies and it doesn’t tire of lying because it lies truthfully. The lying of longing is a profession. ... It is the fusion of instinct in the conscious and the unconscious. It is lost time complaining of the sadism of the present.

Mahmoud Darwish 'In the Presence of Abence' Translated by Sinan Antoon

The Princess and the Trolls –The Changeling, by John Bauer, 1913.

The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.

Roald Dahl

I've started noticing online how people from countries that don't need national defense really do not understand the nature of mandatory military service and wartime duty.

I had happened to scroll my way into a discussion on some american influencer family, who are all about being wealthy Conservative Christians who homeschool their kids so they won't get exposed to any other kind of values. Anyway one of the daughters married a man from Ukraine because there's no sufficiently white, conservative and christian men left in America I guess.

And originally this girl (who was sheltered, homeschooled, didn't speak any other language than english, and had zero experience of living independently) was supposed to move to Ukraine to live with her new husband, but then shit hit the fan. So they shipped their little family back to the US to live cozy on her parents' money.

So I happened to scroll into discussion about the Ukraine husband and the apparent vitrol happening online among the people who keep tabs on this family out of sheer curiosity. And there was someone, an american I guess from their writing style, who was baffled by the community's attitude towards him dodging the draft in his homeland. Like yeah the guy is a smug homophobic jackass, but isn't it fucked up to demand that he should volunteer to go fucking die??

And I kind of paused right there, having a kind of epiphany about how different worlds we come from, and how I really could not begin to explain this to someone who did not grow up this way. I'm not from Ukraine and I've never personally known war, but coming from Finland, I've got an understanding of how countries with a border and history with Russia are raised to think about war.

War isn't something you volunteer for. It's not something you can opt in or opt out of. It's something that comes to you, inevitably and eventually, and you're just lucky if it doesn't happen during your time. But if it does, that's just the cards that were dealt to you.

From the perspective of an invader, it's easy to equate "volunteering to fight" with "volunteering to die". It's easy to think that if you simply refuse to fight in war, there will be no war. That's not what it's like for those being invaded. When the war is brought to you, your choice is between "get shot in combat" and "get shot in your living room". Death is not voluntary, you only get to choose when and where.

Choosing to shake off that sense of duty doesn't make it disappear, it simply drops the weight on someone else's shoulders. Somone who may be more capable than you or less capable than you. If you were in a room with a button, knowing that there's a chance that you might die if you don't push it, but that there's a stranger in the next room, who has an equal chance of dying if you do push it. You don't know what those odds are, but if you decide to save yourself, you've chosen to rather risk the stranger.

Resenting someone from dodging military duty when their country is being invaded isn't a matter of hating someone for wanting to live. It's about knowing that this person decided: "Someone else's son deserves to die more than I do."