just a blog

I don't speak to my family except for legal matters or when someone dies. It's been like this for some fifteen years now, which is about the half of my life.  My uncle died, as it turns out. Hadn't thought of him for years. Suddenly I was faced with the gaping difference of my opinion of him as a child versus now, judging from the same facts.  Yes! He's dead and I'm going to speak bad about him. Shocking, I know. Earlier this year I met a woman who reminded me of my cousin. I never meet women who remind me of her! A butch but soft-hearted lesbian with a buzz cut. When we were kids everyone thought she was a boy.  This woman was just like that, even the stories she shared about her family were quite familiar.  It's been years since my cousin got her heart broken. The love of her life, possibly. They were so good together, I enjoyed hanging out with them together more than with each separately. The girlfriend broke off the engagement because my cousin's family...

  That was probably the most validating book I ever read. Would definitely recommend this to every autistic or ADHD person regardless of gender. This validated my worst fears but you gotta face them including the empirically very evident fact that therapy does not help.  As the book puts it, when someone abusive goes to therapy they will leave as a "very happy and well adjusted abuser " because therapy focuses on validating people's feelings and giving them unconditional acceptance.  But the only thing that works on abusive people is giving them consequences: Dump them. Report their threats. Report their violence. Report their stalking and coercive behavior. This is why abusive people usually put most effort into those who are marginalized, isolated or illegal immigrants: The chance that they will be reported is low. If you put an abuser into therapy, he or she will get an insane amount of psychological tools they will use against their victims to gaslight them, and to p...

My current legal bullshit has nothing to do with romance. It's about large remittances, tax exempt income and expired contracts incurring fines.  It's just that it's glaringly obvious to me that even this activity, as stressful as it is, is more enjoyable than romance.  No matter how bad things get in business, you always have control. In business, people can't just decide and randomly harm you. You can't be randomly put in jail. Even during my communist Czechoslovak childhood dealings with the secret police, they could at best threaten to lock you up in a mental hospital. But you had to actually psychologically break down for them to be able to do it. If you didn't, they were forced to stick to increasingly empty threats. There are always things to do. Chances are that when the situation looks hopeless you are probably just poorly informed or inarticulate, but then you can hire someone to do that for you.  Romance sucks. No matter what you do or don't do, p...

Here's an article from a psychologist to debunk the twin flame ezo trend that has been everywhere lately.  A twin flame is commonly spoken of as someone whom one quickly feels fast chemistry but may more realistically struggle with a sense of self, healthy boundaries, automatic trust, personal independence, personal power, internalizing core values, and understanding concepts of compatibility which often comes with life experience and/or being modeled and taught this as a child A woo-woo professional using woo-woo bullsh1t to prove that another woo-woo bullsh1t is indeed a woo-woo bullsh1t. What a fascinating modern age we live in. In the end the article circles to the usual therapy cliche... Relationship with self is a practice: every day we practice being in a relationship with ourselves. ...Where the relationships you get are the reflection of the relationship you have with yourself. Sure! Or the reflection of your skin color, ethnicity, class origin or neurotype. Healthy, wel...

I don't know if this is village hick empathy or Slavic empathy or autistic empathy, but there's such a thing where you can tell what people are actually like in their heart.  The problem is that people usually don't choose to act on that. It's inconvenient, uneducated and so on. Over time they lose contact with this core self and they finally become "well adjusted" and "mentally healthy": no feelings, no joy, but OTOH all business as usual, no surprises. All regularized and safe. It's like when people take a break from a relationship to figure stuff out. There's no such thing. They will never come back. They'll think about it and find that life is better without love, because it is. Frankly I don't know why people think they want love.  When you don't care about anyone, nobody can disappoint you, you're not risking anything. Besides, what's a feeling. We're not savages, no? Sex is worth jack when there are no emotions ...

  A lot in this book is familiar.  One of the authors is a soldier, the other a sociologist, so that's a fair combination of hands on and theory. They will usually take a real example from the US army - either training or combat - and show how the character and leadership of the people in charge contributed to either the failure or the success of the project.  Army is strictly hierarchical, so it's mostly giving that bad character of the commander eventually leads to character breakdown of the whole unit. People will at best stop communicating, usually start low-key abusing each other in a way that still can pass off as a joke and at worst commit violent crimes and so on.  I like the conclusion they make, which is (obviously?) to fucking stay away from people with a characterless sort of behavior. If you work with them, you've got to find something reportable on them to get rid of them. If they are your friends, you need new friends. If they are your entire neighborh...