Go confidently in the direction of your dreams

Nature arms each person with some faculty which enables them to do easily some feat impossible to any other. 

~Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Joyful International Day of Happiness, dearest denizens. I hope you find your bliss. 💙

Unity

It's International Women's Day and I'm exchanging clinking glasses, kisses, hugs and flexed biceps emojis with friends. It's a celebration, a chance to lift and carry one another, but one laced with sisterly sorrow. The world keeps torturing women in such subtle and sadistic ways that it's hard not to take it personally. The mere knowledge of millennia of torment can be dispiriting and debilitating, as if we can feel the fates of our foremothers in our bones.

And to those now thinking "I'm sorry but it's 2021, get over it and get on with it": I'm sorry but I can't help you, I simply don't have time to educate you, get smart and then get cracking, it's an emergency and we are all on call. 2020 was a major setback for women and women's rights (women's rights!! we need a separate term for what ought to be universal and inalienable, for fuck's sake) and we will keep on sliding in 2021.

In a perfect world we present our case, a perfectly justified one, and presto, the world tips the scales and we find ourselves on an equal footing. In the real world life is a steeplechase without handicaps; men have a disproportionate, institutionalized, age-old advantage over women. It's possibly the stupidest thing humanity has ever invented and perpetuated. Gender inequality hurts women and men alike. Our lives would be easier, happier, more prosperous and peaceful were women given a fair chance. Gender equality is in everyone's best interest, economically, ethically and environmentally. Every vote, voice and act against gender equality is self-defeating and self-destructive.

And if you still don't know what I'm talking about then you've just figured out what I'm talking about: men and women share a planet but live in two different realities.

What becomes of the brokenhearted

Temperature: a sunshiny 7.5/45.5 degrees, but the Arctic cold is making a comeback. Oh well, spring is coming. Spring is coming!

Eating: Is it too early to start sampling Easter eggs? Just so you’ll be a discerning buyer in April? What about mämmi? It looks like something scraped straight out of a diaper, but pour some vanilla cream on it et voilà, it’s an Easter delicacy worth a try. Plus rye is good for you! And vanilla cream is good period so what can you lose?

Drinking: maté

Watching: The Fall

Listening: to Bolsonaro’s unconscionable BS re: the Brazilian government’s Covid response.

Reading: Sebastian Fitzek. If you like Thomas Harris, you’ll gobble up Herr Fitzek.

Thinking: On a scale of mellow to oh-my-fucking-god-I-am-so-done-with-this, how stressed out are you, sweetie darlings? I’ve been feeling a bit down lately, worrying over relatives who are feeling even more down after a year of unease and isolation with no end date in sight. Yes, it’s coming, but when? When will we be together again? What will life look like from now on? Will we have to live in fear of catching our deaths for the rest of our lives? Pretty much, yes, just like we’ve had to reconcile ourselves to the risk of influenza, dengue, and everything else out there.

Feeling: my son’s pain. He is nursing a broken heart, his first major breakup. Remember yours? How sure you were the world was ending and how you knew you’d never be happy again? With his limited life experience, with how much of a chain of frustrated hopes and plans the past twelve months have been, I can’t help but worry, so I’ll be watching him closely.