Julia > Recent Status Updates

Mam’s latest “domestic” freak out is that she always has to put all the food that’s in the fridge at the very outer edges of the racks so that it’s entirely visible to grandma, otherwise grandma thinks there is no food because she can’t see it, … and then she orders take it-out or just eats ice cream and bacon and handfuls of cereal from the box

Grandma likes to sit on the top step of our front porch and water the flowers and fall asleep in the sun. She tilts her head way back to feel the warm sun on her face. The instant she falls asleep she loses her grip on the hose and it flips all over the place and sprays her awake and then she knows that she’s had her nap and also accomplished a “household task”

Grandma skips over pertinent details because “she’s got five minutes left to live” and doesn’t want to waste it on the small picture

Grandma lives with us now. She has one foot in the grave. She’s not afraid of anything. I asked her where you were and she said that’s the $64,000 question. She said she misses grandpa.

NP, let’s see

Hard to read a novel whose characters are you cannot connect to…

Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us.

“I’ll marry her when she gets out of jail”

What’s going to become of them? How will these children cope? And how will I cope? After all, I’m like them too. My life’s harvest is not the building material for anything, neither in my time, now, or in any other, never.

(I wonder how many people read the astrology bits :)

But to him I was just an old woman, gone off her rocker living in the wilderness. Useless and unimportant.

2/2 The people there are capable of discussing things calmly and nobody quarrels with anyone else. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t, because their language isn’t suited to quarrelling.

No, no, people in our country don’t have the ability to club together to form a community, not even under the banner of the penny bun. This is the land of neurotic egoists, each of whom, as soon as he finds himself among others, starts to instruct, criticise, offend, and show off his undoubted superiority.
I think in the Czech Republic it’s totally different. 1/2

And then, knowing that his German wife had trouble pronouncing her own new surname, driven by some vengeful emotion that’s quite incomprehensible nowadays, the engineer gave his son the old-fashioned Slavic name Świętopełk.

For several days I missed him very much… He called every day. Then less often… I calmly watched as the image of Borio, entomologist and taphonomist, faded and evaporated, until all that was left of him was a little grey pigtail hanging in mid-air, ridiculous. Everything will pass.

We were sitting in the orchard under an old apple tree on which the apples were already fruiting. The orchard was fragrant and soughed in the wind. I had lost my sense of time, and each break between utterances seemed endless. Great gulf of time opened before us. We chattered the whole centuries, talking non-stop about the same thing over and over.

Boros’ presence reminded me what it’s like to live with someone. And how awkward it is. How much it diverts you from your own thoughts and distracts you. How another Person starts to irritate you without actually doing anything annoying, but simply by being there.

So far an easy and pleasant read (hear :) that engages and relaxes

Children are soft and subtle, open-minded and unpretentious. And they don’t engage in sort of small talk in which every adult is able to gabble their life away.

He was one of those ironists who don’t like pathos, so they button their lip to avoid being infected by it. They fear pathos more than anything

2/2 … isn’t it scandalous that last time a doctor wanted to check what was happening in my stomach he made me have a gastroscopy?… The angels, if they really exist, mist be splitting their sides laughing at us. Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There is no instruction manual.

I have a Theory. It’s that an awful thing has happened - our cerebellum has not been correctly connected to our brain… If our cerebellum were connected to our brain, we would possess full knowledge of our own anatomy, of what was happening inside our bodies. Oh, we’d say to ourselves, the level of potassium in my blood has fallen. My 3rd cervical vertebra is feeling tension. My blood pressure is low today. 1/2

Turkish suffix -mish attached to verbs to indicate that you didn’t witness the action personally (subjectivity)

Majorly irritating at this point. Eating human flesh? Burrito symbolising a phallus? Come on. I know it’s not about this so will give it another try but come on

(An insight into what it is like to be the one locals think is crazy? She does have lots of points though! :)

So much to recognise 😅 Uni, Russians, linguistics…

I find this division of people into three groups – skiers, allergy sufferers and drivers– very convincing. It is a good, straightforward topology. Skiers are hedonists. They are carries down the slopes. Whereas drivers prefer to take their fate in their hands, although their spines offen suffer as a result;we all know life is hard. Whereas the allergy sufferers are always at war.

From the windows I saw snowplough locally known as “the Belarusian” driving up from the direction of the village

I didn’t yet know what I was going to do. Sometimes, when a Person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger put things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which is hard to attain in any other state

2/2 He developed an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he is drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes