[early morning]

My urge to write in English seems to have faded for a while. Very strange, as I use it a good deal when I'm out and about. My Brain appears to have switched back to my mother tongue; most of my inner dialogue is now in that language. Perhaps it has something to do with the tension I feel around work. Again, not that it's especially difficult, but other people’s troubles weigh on me more than they should, to the point of insomnia. It's difficult to keep toxicity at bay. 

4:55 a.m. Time to go to sleep again.

Bronek died on Thursday.

Cat's life

The first full week after the holiday season at work exhausted me completely (again?). The weekend seemed too short, I woke up today around half two am worrying about stuff I have no control over. Of course, in daylight everything looked brighter and less messy. It's interesting that in the early morning the rational part of the human brain seems to be asleep. I've read somewhere that it's the cortisol awakening response combined with psychological patterns. Well, people have bigger challenges than that. 

Yesterday evening I called my parents and unfortunately they have serious problems with one of the young cats they adopted last summer. When I say serious, I mean life and death. When I was at my family home a while ago, everything seemed to be ok, but since then Bronek's health has rapidly deteriorated. His blood test results are very bad, he has anaemia, and worse still, his feline leukemia virus antigen test came back positive. He and his sisters are indoor cats, and all the older cats were vaccinated so there is almost no other explanation than a virus brought by their mother. My parents were very distraught by the whole situation, Mum tried to get in touch with better vet clinics to ask for help, and she finally succeeded, but the reality is we don't know whether anyone can really change Bronek's fate, not to mention that a cat's life comes at its high price in zloty. Actually, around 3500 zl ≈ € 830. For now.

Bronek is in a good place, they are giving him blood transfusion (that's how we know his blood type is A), and are doing all the necessary tests to see if there's any hope for him. I'm so sorry for the little fella.

Fidgeting strangers

Politicians who constantly invoke religion are the bane of this world. Unfortunately, as of today, one of these types is now president of Poland. Thankfully, in Poland the president doesn’t hold as much power as the prime minister does – unlike in the US. Still, it’s a worrying sign of where a portion of my compatriots seems to be heading: resentment towards immigrants, fearfulness, anti-intellectualism, nationalism, and support for other nasty things wrongly called "tradition", like hypocrisy, violence, nepotism & hierarchies. There’s not much I can do about it, I can vote and keep living on my own terms.

I’ve been reading a really good book recently, Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth. It caused quite a stir in Norway after it was published, mostly because the author’s family seemed to recognise themselves in the story, and they were quick to insist that they weren’t like that (what a hypocritical move – either you recognise yourself in a fictional story, or you don’t, either you know it’s you, or you don’t). The topic is quite heavy: what starts as a dispute over inheritance is soon overshadowed by a serious accusation involving two of the siblings who, at some point, became estranged from the rest of the family.

When I was queuing to buy a flat white and a croissant (the ones in the photo) during my lunch break, there was a guy in front of me tossing and fidgeting with impatience while one of the baristas was serving someone else. The guy kept checking the door, glancing out at the street, like he was waiting for a bus or something. Finally, he was served and went out very agitated. Thought he’d get whatever he had been expecting, but no. I saw him again twenty minutes later, walking with the same impatient energy. I realised, he wasn’t really waiting on anything. The restlessness was from within, not connected to the world.