Ouch. My sympathies on a very tough break for you, demure. Are you still living in France? Do you have friends over there to look out for you?
At 5am we were woken by a knock on our door. I opened it to be greeted with the question "How many people live in your house?" by somebody who thought he was entitled to stay here. He was in rough shape. He did not believe or did not understand that this was our house. Four and half hours later, that same person is now sitting in the armchair of the verandah of the house next door (our neighbour either is not home, is out of it or has himself chosen to steer clear), muttering loudly and angrily to himself. I'm reluctant to call the cops on him, because they're not always helpful at this sort of thing, and I don't really want to cause him any more trouble than he's found himself in, but I'm also reluctant to leave our house empty while he's there, in case he takes another crack at the place while I'm away. I figure he's only got a couple more hours of muttering to himself before he moves on, so now I'm working from home this morning to monitor the situation. So that's my morning so far.
Update: One hour later, he appears to have moved on. People have troubled childhoods that they carry into the rest of their lives and that spill over into the lives of others.
Made my own pizza dough for the first time using this fantastic recipe.. It is so gratifying to make something so common from scratch, almost like I’m finally understanding properly what I’ve been eating all those years when eating pizza. The other day I realized just how often my emotions dictate my conclusions instead of the other way around. An emotion like worry or rage subjectively seems to always arise from worrisome or enraging situations. That can be the case, but just as often in my experience is the reality the other way around: I’m worried or pissed and those emotions latch onto whatever situation I’m in. The emotion comes first, the rationalization for that emotion second.
Mindfulness exercises and cognitive behavioural therapy have helped me with realising this. I made some big breakthroughs as a young man, but It's still a struggle for me.
I had my annual appointment with my primary cardiologist today. No news except to carry on suffering. I have lost weight and don't need a CPAP so that's cool. In the waiting room there was a woman sobbing openly into her phone while her adult child she was there to support stared blankly into space, numb. I could not help but overhear that their insurance was gone, overnight. I couldn't parse if it was through the military, or a Medicare/Medicaid issue. I don't have any shred of patience tolerance or kindness left in me. I don't have the ability to tolerate the calls from pundits like Ezra Klein to find some way to cooexist peacefully with people who would see me, those I love, sick children dead from poverty and despair. A guy I went to Bible study with in college runs a network of churches here in metro Detroit and he is venerating charlie Kirk as a modern day king David, and compared his podcasting to the Psalms. What common ground is there to be made with someone like that?