Why can’t I imagine myself being part of any country?
Why am I okay with my screenplay going nowhere?
Why does society claiming that love and physical intimacy are the same bother me?
What is it about cars that I reject?
So it isn’t the numbers. It’s the specific kind of social signaling that does the damage.
Is it safe to trust someone who appears exactly when you need them? Or does it feel too much like they’ve been lying in wait, coiled like a serpent.
Gretel & Hansel
2022
How do I answer the question Where are you from?
How do I feel about having become a resident of Montenegro?
I’m all for tolerating people who believe in fairy stories, but I do draw the line at joining in with the delusion.
Zoë Heller
Notes on a Scandal
Why does seeing what women are like in Bar bugs me?
What does Star Trek: Voyager mean for me?
I can’t believe how readily and irreversibly people get into being drivers for life and make traffic noise and cars their sole environment. I can no longer survive it.
I left Canada. Now I am in Montenegro and have a tough time here too. How can I be uncomfortable with two such different places?
Why do I like Mandy so much, the British comedy series?
I’d love to know what it feels like to be a citizen of something you don’t fear or resent.
Hiking in Montenegro, I discovered that there are still places on the planet not ravaged by humans. It is mountains, which can’t be easily exploited or “developed”.
Why don’t I look at any of the news websites? (No disaster? Not interested.)
What is it I see when walking down the Bar’s seaside promenade, that makes me hate my life?
My biggest dream is for all the cars in the world to stop working — for good.
You can’t love anything in this world, because somebody will take it from you or destroy it.
I look at Montenegrin men in Bar and I wonder if it’s the indoctrination that makes a local woman choose one to spend her life with or that she is that dim. I think it’s both.
Immigration is people running from the hellhole they were born in to a hellhole with different ways of subjugation.
The nagging discomfort I feel when on the street among those I couldn’t imagine and didn’t choose to be with is not me being bad, it’s my body scanning for threats and setting off alarms.
I listen to the tunes from my Soviet childhood or to classical music and cringe from the thought that I have to go outside and face the Bar zombies.
Remembering Coco, the blue and gold macaw we had, Meg said that she would rather be a parrot. I added that they are so much better than humans and caught myself thinking that I actually believe it. And then I acutely felt that I hate people. Admitting it to myself felt liberating.