[{"content":"Spinning and Other Existential Mistakes Last Friday night, a terrifying existential insight struck me – and it happened during an already terrifying activity: spinning class.\nAcross from me, the fitness coach was cycling with a hypnotizingly equal cadence. All around, gym-goers were dripping sweat, electrolytes and dignity. And just when I thought the cardio was approaching its grand finale, my heart rate took an unauthorized swerve upwards.\n\u0026ldquo;There is only one really serious philosophical problem,\u0026rdquo; Albert Camus once thought – and that is the question of whether life is worth living.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s not the question that got my blood boiling. I got possessed by MY feminine serious philosophical conundrum:\nDo I hate men? Or do I actually wish to become them?\nFor the Eyes\u0026rsquo; Sake My epiphany wasn\u0026rsquo;t random. After all, a guy had introduced me to this class, together with another addictive torture machine – Body Pump. And it is not the first time that taking a detour by the way of men has led me to a new hobby or micro-fixation.\nStuck in Zone 4 for another couple of minutes, I wondered – am I truly the person who goes to the gym on a Friday night? Or am I doing it because I cling to an identity I constructed for the male gaze (as well as for a particular set of eyes)?\nI\u0026rsquo;m completely lost. In fact, I\u0026rsquo;ve always been lost but I didn\u0026rsquo;t feel it before. I was busy conforming to their wishes. But I was more than half absent. I was on the other side. – Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One\nSo who am I? As I continued pedaling, and the mirror on my left side became too foggy to see clearly, I felt my identity equally muddled.\nTo make matters worse, I recently ignored the highest avalanche warning to go snowboarding with yet another questionable commitment-phobic contender for my heart. As a direct result of this high-risk courtship, my algorithm (which apparently oscillates between affirming and recreating my identity) now paints me as THE Snowboarder Girl.\nKen or Sisyphus? Since that Friday night, I\u0026rsquo;ve revisited countless past versions of myself, only to panic-realize that each Krisi version (major.minor.patch) came with a matching guy. Like, an accessory Ken to enhance Barbie\u0026rsquo;s outfit.\nOnly I am Ken. Or rather, a good-looking female Sisyphus pushing her boulder up a snowy Alpine peak\u0026hellip;\nJust to watch it fall every time it reaches the top and hit her right in the face.\nMy empirical research on the Sisyphean hike I call my dating life has generated some data points worth making an Excel sheet for:\nObject of my desire Micro-fixation that followed Did the fixation stick? Current relationship First high-school crush, a metalhead drummer Metal music\nTrying to learn the drums No and no Still doesn\u0026rsquo;t know I exist First serious boyfriend - biologist and ornithologist The Matrix\nBirdwatching Yes and wtf was I thinking NO. Occasional small talk on Facebook Jewish-American philosophy boy I had a crush on in my Bachelor\u0026rsquo;s Indoor bouldering\nThe Grateful Dead\nHistory of Marxist Zionism Yes, yes, and ¿why, God why?, did I take a History of Zionism elective after he had already rejected me? No contact Berliner hipster crush from my old climbing gym who was still sleeping with his ex! Indoor + outdoor rope climbing Yes and yes (albeit not as active) No contact French roommate lover Weight-lifting / gym Partly No contact And many more – YOU GET THE POINT.\nBoulders and ropes may break my bones, but anthropological research excites me.\nAs one might observe, the results show the ratio between hobbies and men retention (thankfully) weighs in favor of the hobbies. While surely, romance fizzling out is rarely a pleasant affair (no wonder why in Bulgarian we say farting out – \u0026ldquo;разпърдяха се нещата\u0026rdquo;), I cannot help but also be glad to have discovered some activities, music or sports along the way.\nIf spinning or snowboarding are next, so be it. But also, this year, I started trampoline and have promised a friend to try cross-country skiing – are the last two automatically more emancipating because of their origin?\nAfter all, I do not actively reminisce over the boy who got me into climbing every time I climb. Nor do I even vaguely associate my academic obsession with Jean Baudrillard\u0026rsquo;s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) with my first boyfriend with whom I first watched The Matrix, et cetera, et cetera…\n\u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s the big deal, then?\u0026rdquo; some of my friends have been kindly asking. It appears that with enough time, my life balances out and my authentic desires – I keep, and the rest – à la poubelle ! 🗑️\nMissing Data Yet, during my spinning krisis, it felt like a self-imposed slap in the face to admit to myself how I often get so absorbed by the worlds of my objects of desire that I start to unconsciously mimic them. And I am not quite certain if the inversed phenomenon occurs.\nMuch like Lara Jean Covey, I wondered: Have I left a lasting piece of myself with all the boys I\u0026rsquo;ve loved before?\nMaybe in a different way, yes, as truly getting to know somebody always leaves some marks: memories, affection, borrowed intuitions.\nBut have boys become more like me? Have they become fixated on something I was fixated on? Did they discover a new hobby by the way of me?\nI regret now it is not common practice to send an exit survey to lovers upon rupture:\nDear disqualified contender,\nThank you for your time and contributions to my life. As you prepare to leave, I would appreciate you answering a couple of questions.\nDo you feel more inclined to start your own blog?\nAre you planning to take Bulgarian folk dance lessons?\nThroughout our acquaintance, did you read a John Steinbeck novel? Elena Ferrante, Rabecca Solnit, or any author you have seen on my bookshelf?\nCan you differentiate between the terms 1) simulation, 2) simulacrum, 3) hyperreality and 4) Absolute Fake?\nYour responses will be kept anonymous.\nBisous, Krisi\nThe Hobby Gap Alas, such data points are currently missing. No exit surveys, no post-romantic peer reviews.\nI intuitively found one common trend that has been bothering me for years.\nThe men I date tend to all have A Thing. Not a casual semi-interest you are in and out of – rather, something that can at times be so all-consuming that they can talk to me about it for hours, or fully surrender to outside my presence.\nAnd me? I don\u0026rsquo;t really have one thing. Certainly not in the way these guys did.\nThe birdwatcher could identify hundreds of bird calls and name them in three languages (literally, he had an app for it and I was testing him). The Grateful Dead fan was on a personal mission to archive every live performance ever played by the group and have it on his mp3… For whatever reason I found that hot?\nSo, my self-imposed hobby-related inferiority complex made me question further: What would these guys have to absorb from me?\nI don\u0026rsquo;t really have one single lasting hobby – or a sport I am particularly above average at. And while I don\u0026rsquo;t consider myself ignorant, I also lack a subject in which I have the comparable detailed knowledge as the bird-mating-sound-recognition.\nI guess there seems to be no proper equivalent as intellectualizing your dating life, citing Slavoj Zizek, and casually doing different sports seems qualitatively different from cathedral-like fixations and mastery of rope climbing, mountain biking, trail running, caving, etc.\nTherefore, I just oscillate. Between hobbies, men, and identities…\nFor years I translated this oscillation as inadequacy. As if without one towering main fixation, I am merely a decorative extra in someone else\u0026rsquo;s documentary about Passion. That someone else being a man…\nNot One In This Sex Which is Not One (1985) – a university-assigned reading that has forever changed me – philosopher Luce Irigaray uses Alice from Through The Looking-Glass as well as Alice from the Swiss movie The Surveyors to expose the deeply disturbing struggle for women to identify themselves outside the reference points of male subjectivity.\nIn Through the Looking-Glass, Alice and the Red Queen move across the chessboard landscape when Alice enters a strange wood where things have no names. Then, she realizes in dismay that she has forgotten her own name:\nAnd now, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I am determined to do it! But being determined didn\u0026rsquo;t help her much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was: \u0026lsquo;L, I know it begins with L.\u0026rsquo;\nIn The Surveyors, Alice and another woman keep being mixed up by men, even by those who are supposed to love them. They come and go from the house, sometimes seeing Alice, sometimes the other woman, confusing them as if they were interchangeable.\nHow can I be distinguished from her? Only if I keep on pushing to the other side, if I\u0026rsquo;m always beyond, because on this side of the screen of their projections, on this plane of their representations, I can\u0026rsquo;t live. I\u0026rsquo;m stuck, paralyzed [\u0026hellip;] So either I don\u0026rsquo;t have any \u0026ldquo;self,\u0026rdquo; or else I have a multitude of \u0026ldquo;selves\u0026rdquo; appropriated by them, for them, according to their needs or desires.\nOne of Irigaray\u0026rsquo;s main claims is that what we call woman is created by the male system as its Inverted Other through which the masculine can project himself as Subject and the feminine be left the Object or multiple objects for men, to be exchanged by men.\nFurther, in this historical construction of selfhoods, in which women never took any part of, the feminine got whatever men have historically not wanted to define themselves as.\nWhich makes my spinning-class existential crisis look slightly less ridiculous…\nMaybe my intuition urges me to appropriate masculine subjectivity in order to escape the inverted projections of femininity as the pathetic scraps men didn\u0026rsquo;t want? Like, men are good at spatial orientation – women get lost; men are rational – women can\u0026rsquo;t think clearly; et cetera: a story as old as time.\nHence, if a guy I see can snowboard – so must I! (Question Mark?)\nSameness And just to be clear – whenever I speak of the male system that has defined women, I speak of a centuries-old Western culture, that I lay no blame for on the particular lover boys I have dated (most of whom I hold in good esteem and have warm feelings for).\nNobody has menaced me into liking anything. Nobody told me \u0026ldquo;You better start caring about psychedelic rock, or become better at climbing or else you have no value to me, woman!!!\u0026rdquo;\nYet, if masculine subjectivity has long been associated with mastery – with singular expertise, with the figure of the man who knows something deeply and completely – then perhaps it is not surprising that I instinctively read that model as more legitimate.\nA (scarcely) living mirror, she/it is frozen, mute. More lifelike. The ebb and flow of our lives spent in the exhausting labor of copying, miming. Dedicated to reproducing – that sameness in which we have remained for centuries, as the other. – Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One\nTo be clear – I do not wish to perpetuate the narrative that women don\u0026rsquo;t have hobbies or passions. Clearly, that is not the case and there are many women who have equally all-consuming fixations as the men I have been attracted to – my friend Rea\u0026rsquo;s lifelong nerdy devotion to Playmobil, or my sister\u0026rsquo;s fiction-writing-without-a-break can immediately testify.\nI am beyond willing to accept that they (as well as many other female readers) might not find my musings particularly relatable. I\u0026rsquo;ve even asked myself: Am I just twisting this into a gender issue, when it\u0026rsquo;s actually just a bizarre complex I personally have convinced myself of???\nBut nonetheless, I do contend there is a gendered aspect to it.\nLittle girls are socialized to be well-rounded, attentive to others, adaptable, eventually oriented toward family life. Singular obsession is rarely encouraged with the same enthusiasm.\nWhen I was a teenager, I had to wage a multi-month emotional campaign to convince my parents to let me do hip-hop dances five times a week. The negotiations involved tears, promises that my grades would not drop, and incremental escalation: first two classes per week, then three, then four.\nMeanwhile, my grandmother the other day casually informed me that nobody worries about my little cousin\u0026rsquo;s grades and he does sports every single day of the week. He has always been \u0026ldquo;the sporty one,\u0026rdquo; my grandma tells me\u0026hellip;\nConclusion It seems to me, we are stuck in the trap of women (whoever we are, whatever we are) not being able to fundamentally reflect ourselves, speak ourselves into authentic being outside the frameworks of masculine mono-subjectivity. If we embrace without questioning the dubious \u0026ldquo;feminine essence\u0026rdquo; assigned to us, we are left with a definition that was created without our participation. And if we try to liberate ourselves from it, we might end up appropriating and thus valorizing even more the \u0026ldquo;masculine essence.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich brings me back to the existential cardio question that started this entire reflection.\nDo I hate men? Or do I simply envy the clarity of their cultural script?\nWhen I first tried to articulate this intuition years ago, my friend Rea looked at me with genuine concern and asked:\nWhen you see J\u0026mdash;- with his Grateful Dead obsession, do you really think: That\u0026rsquo;s healthy. That\u0026rsquo;s what I want?\nFair point.\nAnd perhaps Irigaray would remind me that the real danger lies elsewhere: if we keep speaking in the same conceptual language that has shaped subjectivity for centuries, we risk missing ourselves entirely – becoming, as she puts it, speaking machines wrapped in identities that are not quite our own.\nWhich makes me see that my hobby-related inferiority complex might simply come from measuring myself against cultural values that were never designed for me in the first place.\nLike, what if I\u0026rsquo;m just a fairly well-rounded woman and a hybrid athlete? Also, why do men not start getting into an existential crisis about not having women\u0026rsquo;s level of emotional maturity or multi-focus?\nFinally, after forty-five minutes of cardio and weeks of distracted-from-snowboarder occasional writing, I got two revelations.\nFirst – in my life, all I need is a little bit of both: men-hating and men-over-loving.\nSecond – it became increasingly clear that the class had been grossly misnamed all along. They call it spinning… But I call it SPIRALING.\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/posts/this-girl-which-is-not-one/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"spinning-and-other-existential-mistakes\"\u003eSpinning and Other Existential Mistakes\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLast Friday night, a terrifying existential insight struck me – and it happened during an already terrifying activity: \u003cem\u003espinning class.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAcross from me, the fitness coach was cycling with a hypnotizingly equal cadence. All around, gym-goers were dripping sweat, electrolytes and dignity. And just when I thought the cardio was approaching its grand finale, my heart rate took an unauthorized swerve upwards.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u0026ldquo;There is only one really serious philosophical problem,\u0026rdquo;\u003c/em\u003e Albert Camus once thought – and that is the question of whether life is worth living.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"This Girl Which is Not One"},{"content":"In A Lover’s Discourse, my boy Roland Barthes describes the miserable trap of interpreting signs:\nBut for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted [\u0026hellip;] If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity?\nMany Question Marks One month after my first confessional on love (read here), it so happens that I, a contemporary, who is also occasionally a lover, found herself once again stranded on an island of romantic ambiguity.\nIf the other has texted me \u0026ldquo;Happy New Year!\u0026rdquo; – what was that the sign of?\nMy friends and I spent the entire first week of January interpreting our perceived cues. One girl’s ex brought his new girlfriend to a party where he knew my friend would be.\nCoincidence? Or an elaborate sign that he was not, in fact, over her?\nAnother one of us received an Instagram story reaction from yet another former romantic pursuit. A sign???\nA SIGN????\nI could end the article here and simply say: no, turns out none of these were signs of anything consequential. But I, a postmodern (over)thinker, have some structural complaints I need to file.\nM\u0026amp;M’s So, let me start the story from the beginning:\nSome time ago, I met two men in my relatively small Alpine French town. The first one – let’s call him Male Subject N.1 (or M1 for short) – I met during my first ever caving expedition, which, unlike most caving expeditions, ended in a divine underground Alpine fondue. 10/10 recommend.\nTwo days later, I met Male Subject N.2 (aka M2) in a context arguably just as extreme and risky as speleology: a Hinge date.\nWhere the former risks your life through the potentiality of falling deep inside a hole with no rapid access to medical attention, the latter risks your heart through the potentiality of its shattering into a myriad of small therapy sessions to put it back to work.\n(and as a brave girlie, I still practice both)\nSoon after, M1 and I had a friendly Christmas market date. Four glasses of mulled wine, two pretzels, and one passionate High School Musical conversation later, I confirmed he was actually gay – and, more importantly, that I was about to acquire a new friend!!! After all, how often do you meet someone who wants to do a 100-meters descent down a shady rope with you, and is equally ready to dissect Zac Efron’s attachment style?\nOver a final drink that same evening, we realized one more thing. My new friend – M1 – was, in fact, M2’s roommate! And as if that were not enough, it turned out our apartments were one street apart…\nOh, Grenoble, sweet capital of the French Alps, what is your grand plan for your Bulgarian daughter? I do like that instead of snow, it be raining men – but do please spread them out a little.\nA Series of Unfortunate Events Though life was sweet with the 2Ms for a bit, as December unfolded, M2 slowly became the main character of the abovementioned romantic ambiguity that plagued my Christmas holiday. After all, since the flu couldn’t get me this season, a man who didn’t know what he wanted did!\nWhat followed eventually was a rupture – but before the rupture made itself explicit, there was a polite indeterminacy. One that appeared to me as a slow accumulation of signs.\nFor instance, one day, I brought soup to my friend M1 who was sick and noticed my toothbrush on the living room table.\nOuch.\nA beautiful material residue, which was awkwardly downgraded from the second-floor bathroom, all the way down to its lonely display on the living room table. Clearly, a sign of something… Or a sign of nothing? Maybe it wasn’t even my toothbrush.\nOh well.\nA week later, the implicit sign metamorphosed into an uncertain, yet explicit wording: I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what I want, maybe we take it more slowly?\nThen a month of silence.\nThen \u0026ldquo;Happy New Year!\u0026rdquo;\nWas it kindness? Nostalgia? Merely a calendar event acknowledged? The amorous subject found herself condemned to interpretation of signs, and of imaginary toothbrush travel scenarios\u0026hellip;\nThe Ideology of Love One might have called the abovementioned holiday fiasco a situationship of a kind.\nI resist.\nWhenever I analyze my life through this endlessly recycled, situationship-adjacent vocabulary, I feel I am demeaning myself. By uttering the word or simply by laughing when a friend does I recognize my willing participation in a meaningless semiotic system. After all, if everything is a situationship, then nothing truly is!\nThe entire purpose of the word is to encompass the myriad possible arrangements in which, for myriad complex reasons, modern daters feel themselves in a practical approximation of a romantic relationship, but are ontologically, as far away as it gets from a real human partnership. And I mean it. Your partner in robbing a bank or your Party comrade would not leave you guessing – after all, y’all need to meaningfully collaborate!\nWhat unsettles me most about romantic ambiguity is not just its emotional toll, but how, albeit with good humour, I obediently seem to inhabit it.\nI continue to respond to its cues, to recognize myself within its logic. Which is to say: perhaps the issue is not merely semantic or personal, but ideological. Some years ago in uni, I wrote an essay on Louis Althusser – one of the most influential Marxists of the 20th century. Now, bear with me while I swear loyalty to me, myself and I… 🎶\n…by citing my own assignment:\nA few weeks ago I was outside after the pandemic-imposed curfew and a police car passed by me. The very moment when the police officer said Madame I obediently turned around. I recognized myself as subject to state authority, therefore answerable to police, because the state (acting via the police) recognized me as subject to their authority.\nAlthusser calls this ideological interpellation: the police hailed at me and I answered, going in accordance with the subject I am constructed as.\nSimilarly, whenever me and my girlfriends ask each other news of our ongoing situationships, don’t we also obediently answer to the (mostly) male call of “Wouldn’t it be fun if I could have my cake and eat it too?”\nIn her recent Substack essay, Great Egg-spectations, Emily Willcox describes the system most of us now operate in as:\na pandemic of half-interest […] a dating culture that rewards avoidance, withholding, and vague half-connections disguised as freedom\nYet, when somebody hails me with ambiguous messages or avoidance – I still answer.\nI answer, I overinterpret and I reveal myself as the contemporary lover that I am constructed as within the postmodern late-capitalist dating culture.\nIn the case of being stopped by the police: the relation between me and the police officer exists regardless of whether either of us wants it or not. They call out “Madame” and I say “Oui, Monsieur.” But does that mean that no matter how I feel about the modern dating culture I also say “Yes, Sir” and play the game anyway?\nDevastatingly for everyone involved: I do.\nSelf-Inflicted Torture Let us take, for example, the game of texting. I often operate under the implicit assumption that, in order to appear normal, I must apply a meticulous methodology to my exchanges with a potential amorous object. I cannot believe I am saying this, but somebody please take me back to the good old days of French Political Science dissertations: two parts, two sub-parts – nothing more, nothing less. Applied correctly, the strategy guaranteed a passing grade!\nBut is there a School of Thought one subscribes to when it comes to boy communication? Sending fire signals seems the most efficient one (in that I can just start directly burning their houses down), but sometimes their roommates are nice and don’t deserve to get burnt.\nAnd so, I waited. I waited an entire month for M2 to wish me happiness in the new year, convinced that if I texted first, it would amount to romantic suicide. I had learned that slow responses must be met with even slower ones, that ghosters ought to be out-ghosted.\nWhich only goes to show, none of it truly matters.\nSure, sometimes silence can be a healthy space-giving endeavour, but it often becomes a literal self-inflicted CIA-level torture method. As I write this, I sincerely hope they are not forcing Maduro to text twenty-something straight men while playing him TikToks that preach: “If he wanted to, he would.”\nIn the end, is patiently waiting your turn to slightly signal interest or lack thereof worth it?\nWell, I\u0026rsquo;d say that if Roland Barthes, my favorite gay semiotician, still fell victim to his amorous object’s mixed signals… There truly is little hope for any of us mortals.\nSo, why not just speak truthfully and directly?\nConclusion Although my writing so far could be read as a polemic against THE SIGNS, and against the foolish game they force us to play (in which there is no winning), still, I must admit that implicit hints have always been part of our vocabulary as social beings. Even if we wanted to, we would likely never be able to express ourselves faultlessly and leave no room for interpretation.\n“Tell the thing as it is,” the master orders Jacques in Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot. After which the boy blurts out at least some of the many reasons why to do so would be incredibly difficult:\nHasn\u0026rsquo;t a man his own character, his own interests, his own tastes and passions according to which he either exaggerates or understates? [\u0026hellip;] And is the person who listens better qualified to listen than the person who speaks? No.\nAnd indeed – fair enough. But I, just like Jacques’s master, am not on a mission to outlaw speaking and listening altogether. We just want to hear the story!\nWhat I would like to outlaw, however, is for the complete replacement of even trying to tell the thing as it is with a meaningless semiotic system.\nGhosting or not giving clarity is not the same as imperfectly communicating.\n“What the devil, Jacques!” I want to shake and scream to the male guests at the breadcrumb buffet, “yes, speaking truthfully is difficult but we do our fucking best and move on.”\nSo then, coming back to Monsieur Roland Barthes\u0026rsquo;s musing:\nIf the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of?\nWho cares, I say! Just telephone right away - for the pleasure of the call. Say what you have within you to say, and who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and tell the thing as it is.\nOr else, do not telephone – for the displeasure of overanalyzing the signs over the next three months.\nThe choice is yours.\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/posts/toothbrushes-and-men/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eA Lover’s Discourse\u003c/em\u003e, my boy Roland Barthes describes the miserable trap of interpreting signs:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBut for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted [\u0026hellip;] If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity?\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"If Everything Is a Sign, Nothing Is : Of Toothbrushes and Men"},{"content":"Happy New Year, my faithful readers! While your girl has been busy with some end-of-year / early-January blues, I do hope your holiday season has been as tranquil as the rich Southern matriarch Victoria from The White Lotus (when on her pills), that your friends and family showed you more affection than a love-bomber on a second date, and that your plates were as full as if it was my Bulgarian grandma filling them up for my American brother-in-law.\nNow, having anxiously cosily settled into the new year and beaming with cliché-driven zeal, let me tell you about the lessons the very last day of 2025 had in store for me.\nA Motherly Lesson “We only have 5 hours to get ready”, my mom conveyed to me with utmost urgency at 11 am on December 31st, having seriously overestimated both the accuracy of her math calculations and my will to live towards the end of the year.\nFollowing the ancient Slavic ways, I spent the last days of December caught between constant intrafamilial conflict and severe overeating. At least for me, spending holidays with family often makes for an uneasy coexistence of care and conflict. But a true Slav has learned to function in this orderly-disorderly economy of love and resentment… And as the land’s traditional hospitality dictates, to warmly receive guests even amidst the emotional minefield of tensions (colloquially referred to as напрежонка).\nOnly an hour before our lovely friends were about to arrive for a girls-only New Years Eve, me and my mom fought: the type of fight one could only ever have with their mother. Emotions were out. Extremely unlikely connections were made. Both our psychoanalysts were evoked!\nYet, no matter how infuriating, illogical, or dramatic, once the turbulence had passed, the match that first ignited our frustration quietly transformed. It became yet another great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key\u0026hellip; What did we even fight about, cry about? At this point, our therapists should do the heavy-lifting and duel it out to determine the details.\nMeanwhile, to keep my sanity, I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to hold onto an idea from Christy Wampole\u0026rsquo;s essay You Will Never Be Able to Thank Your Mother Enough read here:\nTo have a mother is to be in perpetual deficit of thanks toward her. This missing gratitude is a kind of high-interest loan that can never be paid back.\nWampole unfolds this idea through imagery of the biological and social consequences a mother bears in bringing a child to existence, yet ultimately suggests that thankfulness is not a balance sheet to be settled but rather a lifelong surrender to the imperfect, ineffable essence of maternal love.\nOf course, if you and your mom are throwing plates at each other – easier said than done, right? For me, this type of deep existential gratitude for being brought to life or whatever (by mainly causing pain to your mom, while your dad’s contribution was the fun part) – is one of those thoughts that doesn’t resolve anything, but quietly rearranges how I see things.\nIf my mother could literally grow me, the chonky little baby I was, and accept that by virtue of our biological existence, I am not conscious enough to appreciate it – shouldn’t I be able to graciously swallow her occasionally brutal, always unsolicited critiques of how I chop cucumbers?\nOne might assume so. However, the chonky baby grew to become a fit but sometimes bitter young lady with a complicated relationship to generational differences. That being so, she, as well as I assume many others, could use a little reminder around the holidays that we can indeed never thank our mothers enough. And while we are not debtors owing an immeasurable emotional loan, the complex nature of becoming a mother makes it so that, in my case at least, I would like to bring a bit more daughterly grace into 2026.\nA Fortune From my Banitsa Now, after that slightly heavy topic, let’s get back to the New Year’s Eve plotline. My mom and I had silently buried the hatchet mere minutes before we absolutely had to, and I dare say we managed to host a peaceful girlboss dinner (as true Balkan women do).\nIn Bulgaria, New Year’s Eve isn’t complete without banitsa – a flaky, savory pastry that somehow manages to taste divine and inspirational at the same time. The real fun, though, comes in the form of tiny paper fortunes tucked inside, often rhyming, always cheeky. This year, I pulled two: and yes, I will absolutely assume what they say to be 100% a prophecy because it is convenient:\nDo not look for love, do not count the days – it will come to you, you’ll see! A secret admirer will reveal himself. Simply put: the female heteronormative romantic dream.\nAnd if you\u0026rsquo;ve waded through A Contemporary Lover\u0026rsquo;s Discourse (read here) – my confessional self-proclaimed magnum opus on modern dating, you will know – this girl could use some delusionally positive forecast for 2026! Or else, as Elena Ferrante puts it:\nI’m in danger of going deaf, mute and turning nihilistic thanks to the countless failures and the unpredictability of the rare successes.\nYet, for now, I shall self-impose a non-nihilistic peace of mind given that the banitsa baaasically guaranteed my romantic triumph this year! Sure, modern romance might be pushing its luck these past 10 years, but insofar as a ChatGPT-generated fortune can still light a new hopeful spark within me, I guess I remain a devoted and optimistic contemporary lover…\nA Lesson From My Dog Later on that evening, in the midst of pleasant conversations – as the French say, de tout et de rien (of everything and nothing) – I had two thoughts. First, my tight black jumpsuit was about to explode both from the banitsa (we need many good fortunes, hey) as well as from my friend Lily’s brilliant chocolate-raspberry tart. And second, with a heavy stomach, I needed to tend to yet another girlboss in the apartment – my dog.\nMy baby, my moon and stars - Jara, had stayed alone in my bedroom while we ate because she is too socially awkward to handle more than one new person at a time. Else, she gets snappy – relatable, I know.\nSo, as I entered the room to walk her before my two girlfriends and I went out clubbing, I stumbled upon a highly unpleasant picture.\nDevastatingly for everyone involved and with an ounce of cruel irony: Jara had produced a poopy.\nI then acted on a weird impulse and announced in the living room: “Okay, listen up. I have good and bad news.” As if our guests didn’t already deal with enough disappointments in 2025, I had to quickly reveal there was in fact no good news, only bad. In all likelihood, the joke failed to amuse the audience at the no-boys-allowed dinner, since graciously handling disappointment is, after all, a skill most women cultivate over decades.\nSo what is the great annual lesson here?\nWell, firstly – do not radically change your dog’s diet before big events as they might get diarrhea and embarrass you in front of your friends and family!\nSecondly – if Jara was to ever poop herself, doesn’t it show a great existential understanding on her part that she chose to do it on December 31st 2025, and not January 1st 2026? What if I had come home at 4:30 am to discover she shat all over my 2026 vision board? Or I had woken up on January 1st, full of naïveté and hope that this year would be my year, only to have to clean dog feces?\nInstead, my dog gave me the dignity to deal with just one last messy situation and intellectualise it as the End of an Era. Sure, I might have slightly teared up in the taxi, but ultimately I choose to believe that Jara’s upset tummy was an omen for a greater wisdom:\nMay all of our shit stay in 2025 \u0026lt;3\nP.S. Shout out to the divas who shamelessly danced the year away, faced their ex’s new girlfriends in the club and graciously accepted the very first disappointment of 2026: all the cute guys at the club were gay!\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/posts/all-stays-in-2025/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHappy New Year, my faithful readers! While your girl has been busy with some end-of-year / early-January blues, I do hope your holiday season has been as tranquil as the rich Southern matriarch Victoria from \u003cem\u003eThe White Lotus\u003c/em\u003e (when on her pills), that your friends and family showed you more affection than a love-bomber on a second date, and that your plates were as full as if it was my Bulgarian grandma filling them up for my American brother-in-law.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"All Shit Stays in 2025"},{"content":"It’s December 23rd, I’m waiting for my plane to take off from the Paris CDG airport, lifting me towards my hometown for the Christmas holidays. “Girl you sweet like Fanta, Fanta” is banging in my AirPods for about 15 seconds before I anxiously switch to another short musical blurb, and then another. Whenever I find myself in a particular state of mind, when my thoughts are short, uneasy, frantically jumping from one to the other, inevitably, my Spotify playlist follows.\nIf no coherent thought manifests itself to me start-to-finish that means I am nowhere near ready to experience the present mindfully for 4 minutes straight.\nUnder the Bridge by Red Hot happens to shuffle in next, which is funny as it would also make for a good soundtrack of this moment. I never worry, now that is a lie… (as I am currently very anxious). Take me to the place I looove, take me all the waaay\u0026hellip; (as I am flying to a nice city, and it would be impractical for the plane to land half-way).\nDespite the lack of coherent reflexions, I stay true to my usual writing process: simply start with no plans ahead, see where things go.\n“Заповядайте за Вас малко чоколет” — my already scattered flow of mind is interrupted by Bulgaria Air’s flight attendant offering me a piece of low-quality milk chocolate.\nI accept.\nNot infrequently, it seems to me, a writer can have inspiration, yet their inspiration being so indirect and evasive, one needs to enter polite negotiations with their intuition, convincing her to give a little – a tiny bit, a breadcrumb. The same we ask of our objects of desire, frankly…\nBefore I got on the plane, I underlined a paragraph from Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo, cited in Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins I am currently reading:\nNow, having dined, comfortably lying in my overstuffed lounge chair, I am holding a pencil and a piece of paper. My brow is unfurrowed because I have dismissed all concern from my mind. My thinking seems something separate from me. I can see it. It rises and falls… that is its only activity. To remind it that it is my thinking and its duty is to make itself evident, I grasp the pencil. Now my brow does wrinkle, because each word is made up of so many letters and the imperious present looms up and blots out the past.\nIt captures how I sometimes feel in front of my laptop, staring at the blank Google Docs file, my thoughts separate from me. It is as if I am fighting relentlessly in order to formulate something so intuitively simple: easy for my inner understanding, which produced the thought one second ago, but convoluted for the outsider who now writes.\nMoreover, I feel myself somewhat of an imposter in the world of writing, as I have never been the inventor of fictional worlds — no foreign lands with beautiful yet weird creatures, no magic or fighting evil, not even a single character that is neither myself, nor a wish-fulfilling proxy for myself!\nI remember when I was younger, me and my sister used to play the video game Sims 2: my first ever entry into Hyperreality. And in this hyperreal realm of Sims, my older sister was always knitting complex webs of life trajectories and plot twists for her characters, downloading extensions, unlocking all kinds of interesting universe modifications: enchantments, castles, vampires, zombies…\nMeanwhile, the only characters I ever played were:\nMe Me in university Me as a straight guy Me with children My self-representing Sim was always conventionally pretty and unhealthily skinny. An A+ student. She had a cute boyfriend (or was the cute boyfriend) who, after the right amount of small talk and flirting (including serenades), would eventually ask her hand in marriage. She would say yes, get married and Woo-Hoo (a lot). The End.\nUnsurprisingly, my sister now writes fantasy books and short-stories, which I find all wildly creative. And I, write about how we used to play Sims 2!\nAfter more than one year of having the blog, I turn to reflecting on why I started it and why I still do it.\nThe truthful answer is: I have no clue? While at the same time: It is obvious to me? The calling to put my thoughts in the format of a blog article or personal essay (be it inspired by a book, a reality TV show, or a long flight), is quite similar to my thoughts while I write: outside myself, I only watch it rise or fall.\nWhile I feel incredibly shy to compare my writing to American essayist and writer Rebecca Solnit, I remember how when I first read her collection A Field Guide to Getting Lost, I found a teeny similarity (at least with what type of personal essays I aim to publish). Her nonfiction is autobiographical and personal, while using a particular example (historical episode, personal anecdote, artwork or myth) as a lens through which to build upon and think, philosophize, or offer a way to reclaim a meaning and make new sense of it. She does so in a beautiful and enchanting way, and has thus shown me both that there is value in that endeavor, and that there is nothing embarrassing in using your life experiences, or somebody else’s artwork as a framework or inspiration. Yet, with a background as a historian, Solnit’s examples tend to be more sophisticated, and I never cease to be impressed by how masterfully she entangles them in an ever-flowing imaginative exposition.\nSo, since I often bring up stuff like Hinge dates, Sims 2, the Bulgarian edition of the reality TV show The Bachelor, in a 0-filter, unliterary kind of way - what kind of writer am I? I still wonder.\nMaybe the problem was never that I lack imagination, but that my imagination insists on staying close to the ground. On what is already there. On the ordinary, the awkward, the slightly embarrassing.\nI do not invent worlds like my sister, but I linger in them – following “the tickle” as my high school Philosophy teacher used to say, and trusting that meaning sometimes emerges not from invention, but from attention.\nAs the plane has just landed at the Sofia International Airport, and the superstitious Bulgarians on board have finished applauding the flight’s crew, I feel as if the process described by Zeno’s Conscience has reversed… While I was not writing, my brow was wrinkled and my anxious mind scattered. Now that I have filled up the previously empty Google Docs, I have dismissed all concerns and, even though my musings didn’t fully make themselves evident, my brow is now serenely unfurrowed.\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/posts/airplane/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt’s December 23rd, I’m waiting for my plane to take off from the Paris CDG airport, lifting me towards my hometown for the Christmas holidays. \u003cem\u003e“Girl you sweet like Fanta, Fanta”\u003c/em\u003e is banging in my AirPods for about 15 seconds before I anxiously switch to another short musical blurb, and then another. Whenever I find myself in a particular state of mind, when my thoughts are short, uneasy, frantically jumping from one to the other, inevitably, my Spotify playlist follows.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Writing: My Airplane Musings"},{"content":" Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this!\nThe very first lines of Miranda July’s second novel All Fours quickly got under my skin. It was early February of 2025 and while I was in a bookstore in Wellington, New Zealand, I was carefully reading the first pages all books that made the finals of my pre-selection process. All Fours’s beginning most intensely left me wanting more.\nYes, trouble me too! I thought, whoever says that, whatever the note is about. We all want for exciting things to happen in our lives, for our routines to be disrupted – I need this even, in order to convince myself on a monthly basis that I am totally not living in a VR-simulated game.\nEven though superficially, nothing about the book’s protagonist seemed relatable to me, I felt incredibly drawn to her. Unnamed, July\u0026rsquo;s female narrator is an American artist, rather famous, but not the level of fame that people stop you on the streets for. Rather, she possesses the Carrie-Bradshow-esque pretentious semi-fame, which grants access to trendy parties, social functions, highbrow art, and merits many – albeit often performative – compliments for her artistry. And yes, I am bringing up SATC again, sue me! On top of that, she is a rich 45-years-old queer woman, who after having almost exclusively dated women, is now married to a man, Harris, whom she loves, and who is the father of their non-binary kid – Sam. Yet, their relationship is described as that of “two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink”:\nThe evenings with Sam and Harris being the most treacherous as I mimed my way through interactions that should have been second nature, a perpetual houseguest nervously trying to demonstrate how at ease she felt. And then it was the dead of night and I understood how truly forsaken I was, having lost my bond to my actual family and formed an alliance with someone who might as well be fictional.\n(Not exactly the feeling Taylor Swift writes songs about, nor what Roland Barthes based A Lover’s Discourse on, but who am I to judge – I rarely get past the honeymoon phase.)\nOn the Impossibility of Being Blissful While Parking Your Car A few days after receiving the “Sorry to trouble you” note, the heroine’s husband Harris casually yet eloquently exposes his take on why some people seem unsatisfied in their lives, while others are happy and content. Little did he know his words would push his wife into wanting to spend weeks on her own, driving cross-country from Los Angeles to New York, experiencing her epitome of freedom and self-discovery!\nA person with a journeying, experimental soul should be living a life that allowed for it.\nIn life, there are two types of people, he says – Parkers and Drivers. In his metaphor the driver is a calmer and more stable person, whereas the parker is a sensation-seeker who needs lots of validation as well as some subtle troubles in order to feel alive:\nDrivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don’t need applause for every little thing – they can get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that’s enough. This kind of person can do cross-country drives.\nParkers, on the other hand” – and he looked at me – ‘need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause. ‘Bravo,’ someone might say after they fit the car into an especially tight spot. ‘Amazing.’ The rest of the time they’re bored and fundamentally kind of… “he looked at the ceiling, trying to think of the right word, “disappointed. A Parker can’t drive across the country. But Parkers are good in emergencies,” he added. “They like to save the day.\nFormulated in this way, it is difficult not to play favorites – difficult for that distinction not to be condescending and patronizing towards the parkers. At least I have always found myself romanticising the \u0026ldquo;drivers\u0026rdquo; of the world – people who can just live their lives without much drama.\nSome weirdos out there just seem to effortlessly embody wide-spread wisdoms such as being grateful for the small things and not worrying for things that are outside your control. And about a year ago, just as I was reading All Fours, I happened to be dating one of them.\nEven though (as I confirmed with my therapist) this metaphor is just a metaphor and not a seriously researched temperament distinction, I gotta say, it hit the spot! My guy in question was genuinely content to play video games all day, go to the gym and repeat. He wasn’t 100% foreign to the concept of anxiety, but I’d say mostly a foreigner in that realm. He moved through life with a certainty that things will be okay and that if he wanted to do something, he simply could, so why worry or ruminate? Next to him I often found myself inspired to be more philosophically laid back, but also, ironically, I would get existential anxiety attacks (or krises, for short), persuaded that if I am not innately zen like this dude, I am doomed to live my entire life perpetually unhappy.\nThat being so, I couldn’t help but wonder: Do some of us actually need some discrete tasks that seem impossible, in order to move through life? And do they keep us both discretely troubled enough to be reassured in the reality of things yet endlessly a little disappointed?\nThe terror of being qualified as a Parker is what pushed Miranda July’s heroine to drive across the United States in an attempt to rediscover herself as an easy-going, never-anxious Driver who totally can be by themselves weeks at a time and just be at peace with their own thoughts… Reminds me of when I was trying to rediscover myself, believing that: 1. listening to the Grateful Dead + 2. reading philosophy + 3. cutting all ties with messaging apps = Cool Girl Who Doesn’t Need Anybody To Be Happy.\nEmbarrassing, I know. But in a way, what I identify most is not the label of a Parker but with her frantic determination to transition to the side of chill happy-go-lucky folk, implying that there is a winning personality out of the two.\nDoes the girlboss artist succeed? Hell no! But throughout her month-long trip (which spoiler alert: does not get her across the country but little outside of LA) she confronts the strangeness of aging, as well as a totally new type of intimacy with somebody she meets on the way – “a narcotic high; sexual without sex”:\nI could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.\nOn Matching Life’s Weirdness All Fours is a quirky yet pertinant portrayal of aging, but also an erotic surrealist masterpiece, which addresses the strangeness of how intimacy changes over time.\nThroughout the novel, the narrator goes on to display some pretty unhinged (borderline deranged) behavior as she starts dealing with what is related to (but not reduced to) perimenopause symptoms. So, crazy though she may be at times, there is just something about her! She is brutally honest about her insecurities, disappointments, sexual fantasies and yearnings. With near-zero grace she oscillates between desperation and elation – and albeit not 45 years of age, and not a semi-famous LA artist in a midlife crisis, I often found reading her beautiful chaos to be somewhat liberating, as her reflexions on her particular stage in her life gave her a \u0026ldquo;weird elation\u0026rdquo;:\nI felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.\nOn Days That Don’t Change Anything July’s writing is rich with moments where you feel the ground shift just a little under your feet, even when nothing much is happening on the surface. Like simply a woman putting on concealer in the restroom:\nOur eyes met in the mirror and I could tell she was hoping something good would happen to her tonight, but it probably wouldn’t. Not that she wasn’t cute and there wasn’t someone for everyone, but what were the odds? Mostly you put concealer on and then later take it off and nothing life-changing happens in between.\nMaybe life really does arrange itself into these small, self-contained episodes - each one beginning with putting concealer under my eyes, and ending with washing it off before bed. The middle is where things are supposed to happen, but mostly they don’t. Mostly, you move through the day carrying the faint hope that something might shift, and then it doesn’t. And no one notices the concealer anyway!\nAll Fours was great in all kinds of ways, but I admit it’s this Parker/Driver metaphor that has stuck with me the most, like a little burn in the fabric of my mind. Not because it’s neat or definitive – quite the opposite. Because it reminds me how often we try to \u0026ldquo;graduate\u0026rdquo; from who we are, to get promoted from Parker to Driver, from anxious to serene, from needy to self-sufficient. And how maybe the point isn’t to win at being a Driver (or a detached Grateful Dead loner) at all, but to stop seeing the Parker parts of ourselves as something broken to be fixed.\nMaybe needing to be troubled, needing to squeeze into impossible parking spaces just for the sheer absurd triumph of it, needing a little bit of chaos to feel real. Something worth putting concealer on for, even if most days it comes off again at night, unchanged, unnoticed.\nThe book is never really about self-improvement. It’s about witnessing yourself mid-transition, mid-delusion, mid-glory, and allowing all of it to exist.\nIf this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls– but the apex, the peak, is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling.\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/posts/all-fours/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this!\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe very first lines of Miranda July’s second novel \u003ca href=\"https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/197798168-all-fours\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAll Fours\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e quickly got under my skin. It was early February of 2025 and while I was in a bookstore in Wellington, New Zealand, I was carefully reading the first pages all books that made the finals of my pre-selection process. \u003cem\u003eAll Fours’s\u003c/em\u003e beginning most intensely left me wanting more.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"All Fours by Miranda July: A Person with an Experimental Soul Should be Living a Life that Allows For It"},{"content":"Would Kierkegaard say Roland Barthes Was Anxiously Attached? In reflecting on the Adorable, the unique quality that draws us to our objects of desire, 20th-century French theorist Roland Barthes writes in A Lover\u0026rsquo;s Discourse:\nHerein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: Why is it that I desire So-and-so? Why is it that I desire So-and-so lastingly, longingly?\nOr to paraphrase it the way Sex and the City protagonist Carrie Bradshaw would have said it: I couldn\u0026rsquo;t help but wonder… Why am I utterly and ridiculously obsessed with Mr. Big?\nBarthes, Bradshaw, and even Žižek would probably agree that the enigma has no real answer unless seen as a tautological statement: What I love about Mr. Big is his unique quality of being Mr. Big himself. This \u0026ldquo;fatigue of language,\u0026rdquo; as Barthes calls it, makes it so that \u0026ldquo;[\u0026hellip;] what is proper to the desire, can only produce impropriety of the utterance.\u0026rdquo; Ah, thinking about love and desire… Sure, using one\u0026rsquo;s words may be a doomed endeavor, but the fact of the matter is that I am still having experiences, and I need to describe them! Famously, that\u0026rsquo;s what my blog is about.\nInspiration found me through sporadically reading Barthes\u0026rsquo; A Lover\u0026rsquo;s Discourse, as well as a Blythe Roberson\u0026rsquo;s comedy-philosophy How to Date Men When You Hate Men. Which was, by the way, GIFTED to me??? A bit similar to gifting a treadmill or soap, like, what are you trying to tell me?\nHow to Date Men When You Have Read Too Much Philosophy But anywho, this spark of inspiration has led me to faux-academize my intuitions, hardships and occasional triumphs in the modern world of dating, since for better or worse, I have not been significantly partnered in a while (but neither was Roland Barthes when he wrote A Lover\u0026rsquo;s Discourse, so shut up!)\nErgo, I decided to go back on the quest for love, or \u0026ldquo;on the apps\u0026rdquo; as kids say these days. From this Hinge iteration onwards (as we all know the app is made to be uninstalled, then reinstalled 50000 times), I decided to reject the commonly established terminology of referring to dudes as \u0026ldquo;matches\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;dates\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;situationships\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;crushes\u0026rdquo;. No, no, no. I am an intellectual. That makes people my \u0026ldquo;objects of desire\u0026rdquo;. Or for those who have read Bunny by Mona Awad: \u0026ldquo;my drafts\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;my darlings\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;my bunnies\u0026rdquo; are also acceptable alternatives, pointing to what in the plotline of Bunny are soulless bunny-humanoid mutants, emerging from a violent art project.\nThat said, if you who are reading this are the draft who stood me up on November 8th, for me, you shall always be a soulless bunny-humanoid mutant with a receding hairline!!!\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want therapy, I want revenge!\nMy life is Just an Anthropological Experiment I Am Not Being Paid For Just last week, as I was giving dating updates (of being stood up) to one of my guy friends, who has never in his life been on a dating app (the lucky bastard!), I realized he deemed my stories important from an anthropological point of view: rituals, ethics, faux-pas, matching, swiping, passing on Whatsapp, ghosting… Modern dating is a world of its own. A jungle to be precise. So, I thought – if my personal experiences can tell us anything anthropologically or philosophically interesting about the collective reality of dating as a woman in your 20s, in the year 2025, primarily oriented towards men – alright, put me in a zoo. I volunteer!\nBut before we all have even arrived at the dating scene, we (as in the collective of women similar to me in privilege, culture, $$$ \u0026amp; other societal characteristics) are all already influenced by mostly made-up narratives, books, TV, The Bachelor and so forth. And then there are some particular details, which contributed to the way I, myself (as a concrete human weirdo), have been molded into the confused modern woman I am still constantly becoming.\nMy catalog of contributing factors is including but not limited to:\nA random yet lucky elective I took in Sciences Po Bachelors: La séduction dans les arts: politique et intimité.\nMy parents always asking why am I rejecting the long line of suitors who must be begging to date me (I dare you to find them, Mom)\nMyriads of rewatchings of Sex and The City episodes, which let\u0026rsquo;s be real, has been the single most influential piece of art for me, and for my equally lost female friends.\nBoys breaking up with me.\nMy brother-in-law’s pick-me-up speech after my first boyfriend broke up with me: I was profoundly convinced that I would never ever find anybody to have sex with ever again!! Scary. But this man, embodying the same irrefutable rational certainty he uses when talking about train models, computer servers or Marxism, told me that if I ever had a doubt of whether a straight guy wants to sleep with me, a FEMALE, one should always assume YES, unless the guy has a six-pack, in which case one should assume MAYBE 🙏\nSo, within this list, my faithful readers, lies partly an answer to \u0026ldquo;Why is it that I am So-and-so?\u0026rdquo; – how I have arrived at the strange conviction that I am, at once, the object of everybody\u0026rsquo;s desire (aka everybody has a crush on me) and yet, fundamentally unlovable. Ontologically doomed for perpetual emotional malfunction!\nHow Kierkegaard F*cked Me Up In the academic context of my La seduction dans les arts (Seduction In Arts) class at Sciences Po I read Diary of a Seducer by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. His oeuvre installed (or confirmed?) in my head the narrative, shared by How to Date Men When You Hate Men, that boys are manipulating me over text with a psychological-experiment-level of efficiency!\nLet me set the scene: He was a bourgeois bachelor in early 19th-century Copenhagen. She was a respectable middle-class lady. He was a punk. She did ballet. What more can I say?\nIn Diary of a Seducer, Kierkegaard describes Johannes, a cunning aesthete, who meticulously plots the step-by-step seduction of a young woman named Cordelia. How does he do that before pick-up-artistry, you may be wondering? Well, by writing her a plethora of well-thought-out letters! (Aka the ancestors of texts)\nWe could say that Johannes saw dating as a sick aesthetic project – provoking Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s desire and affection with a combined psycho-attack of poetic letters, strategic withdrawal, timing his responses and treating the objective of her falling in love with him as a behavioural study:\nWhat I feared most was that the whole process might take me too long. I see, however, that Cordelia is making great progress; yes, that it will be necessary to mobilize everything to keep her mind on the job. She mustn\u0026rsquo;t for all the world lose interest before time, that is, before the time when time has passed for her.\nOnce he had achieved his goal - her total emotional devotion - he goes \u0026ldquo;Huh, that was fun. Now I shall continue to wistfully stroll in Copenhagen and be an aesthete. \u0026quot;\nWell, that sounds awfully familiar… If you take my last couple of dating attempts, you\u0026rsquo;d think those bunnies read Kierkegaard! Yet, I\u0026rsquo;m almost sure they don\u0026rsquo;t know who that is… So, I am guessing they all just naturally came to the agreement that a collaborative academic paper needs writing: A Study on Mating Selections In a Time of Krisis.\nTwo more theories that would literally make more sense than the last dudes I\u0026rsquo;ve dated being real people:\nA) I died during my first caving expedition and I was sent to the Bad Place.\nB) I live in a VR-simulated environment running on a buggy algorithm, which allows for players to court me only until I start liking them back, at which point they spontaneously combust or get transferred to another side quest.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s OK, Reading Barthes Healed Me Even as he obsessively asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that the loved object does love him but does not tell him so.\n— Roland Barthes (the OG Delulu King)\nUnlike Kierkegaard who writes the main point of view as that of the lover-seducer holding all the power, Roland Barthes, a major 20th-century literary theorist, paints a way more identifiable portrait – a lover who finds themselves powerless in sight of their beloved: the figure \u0026ldquo;[\u0026hellip;] of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.\u0026rdquo;\nBarthes, like me, was a softie.\nIn A Lover\u0026rsquo;s Discourse, he describes a short fragmented path of a riddled man, who intensely experiences the good and the bad of his amorous relationship. And doing so in an almost uncomfortably honest way, positioning himself as the one who is madly and anxiously in love but whose feelings aren\u0026rsquo;t sure to be reciprocated. Similar to this type lover figure I also found Giovanna, the female protagonist of The Lying Life of Adults\u0026rsquo;s, who was portrayed with an intensely sincere inner world, in which she saw herself as the amorous subject convinced her object of desire is always out of reach; that she had to read, improve herself, learn about communism and religion in order to not appear unintelligent in front of her crush!\nI think growing up I never believed people other than me had obsessive all-consuming crushes (or deep inner worlds of their own, for that matter.) That being so, I later found myself being most drawn exactly to fictional characters or, like in Barthe\u0026rsquo;s case – unnamed discursive personas, who carry their romantic insecurity so courageously that it is poetic. They aren\u0026rsquo;t always graceful but there is just something incredibly cathartic about reading a way more beautifully phrased version of:\nAhhhghh I have so many feelings, I don\u0026rsquo;t know what to do with them! I am anxious! Is he going to text me? I bet he\u0026rsquo;ll never like me back!!!\nThat, but make it a well-written 1978 semiotic analysis:\nAm I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn\u0026rsquo;t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover\u0026rsquo;s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.\n— Roland Barthes\nWe moderns (or those who are too modern, if you ask me) would simply diagnose Roland Barthes as having an anxious attachment style and his lover as being an avoidant. It makes partial sense that we see the world through this lens, since the anxious / avoidant distinction is the #1 self-help pop psychology tool that has addressed our entire generation\u0026rsquo;s issues with dating and commitment! And I\u0026rsquo;m not saying it isn\u0026rsquo;t often on point.\nBut that is where my innate intuition about people simply having authentic feelings and experiencing them gets intertwined with the noise of dating in our day and age. Sure, maybe the author was indeed in a toxic relationship, which was forcing him into the role of the one who anxiously waits, for whom trying to appear nonchalant was a theatrical game destined to fail. Or, maybe, just maybe, he also captured something genuine about the human condition when in love… Be it securely, anxiously or avoidantly attached (+[insert other options if they exist]), ultimately the lover\u0026rsquo;s path is composed of many and complex episodes, many of them featuring some form of anxiety. If you have ever been strongly enamoured with somebody – a crush, a partner, a bunny – you likely have gone through deliriums, ambiguity, stress.\nAnd as Blythe Robertson reminded me recently, dating tells your brain: \u0026ldquo;I am not a fish! Fish definitely don\u0026rsquo;t feel that way!\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s all part of the human experience.\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/posts/dating-a-contemporary-lovers-discourse/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"would-kierkegaard-say-roland-barthes-was-anxiously-attached\"\u003eWould Kierkegaard say Roland Barthes Was Anxiously Attached?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn reflecting on \u003cem\u003ethe Adorable,\u003c/em\u003e the unique quality that draws us to our objects of desire, 20th-century French theorist Roland Barthes writes in \u003cem\u003eA Lover\u0026rsquo;s Discourse\u003c/em\u003e:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHerein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: Why is it that I desire So-and-so? Why is it that I desire So-and-so lastingly, longingly?\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOr to paraphrase it the way \u003cem\u003eSex and the City\u003c/em\u003e protagonist Carrie Bradshaw would have said it: I couldn\u0026rsquo;t help but wonder… Why am I utterly and ridiculously obsessed with Mr. Big?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Contemporary Lover's Discourse"},{"content":"Badass women are running the political stage in a pre-colonial-Filipino-inspired universe. Let me tell you about Black Salt Queen, my summer read that got me back into reading contemporary fantasy.\n⚠️ Contains spoilers! Let me first start off by saying that I am no fantasy genre expert. When I read for pleasure I tend to gravitate more towards family sagas, coming-of-age novels and classics. Yet, of course, my taste in books is an ever-changing mish-mash of genres, rivaled in its inconsistency only by my 2025 Spotify Wrapped. From John Steinbeck to Miranda July, and from books on eels to landscape architecture academia, the most important and unifying feature of my preferences as a reader is simple: I take recommendations seriously. IRL. From friends and foe, but not from Goodreads algorithms!\nWhich brings me to earlier this year, when I discovered that the partner of a coworker had gotten a publishing deal and her debut novel would be coming out in June 2025. I got genuinely quite excited and immediately pre-ordered her novel as I told myself: How cool is that?! How often do we get to read books of new authors, or of people we have a connection with?\nThat is how I found myself with my first official summer read in June – Black Salt Queen, a fantasy / romantasy story set in a fictional precolonial Philippines-inspired island named Maynara.\nThe story\u0026rsquo;s main character is named Laya – princess or dayang, second daughter of the ruling royal family Gatdula, yet heir to their throne. Her bloodline stays in power by virtue of its kin possessing divine ancestral magic – Laya “wields the enormous power of the skies with fickle indifference”, her mother Hara Duja moves the Earth, and her younger sister Eti shapes metal. The eldest sister Bulan, however, was born without any magic, thus making Laya the heir to Maynara’s throne.\nThroughout the book, we follow a Romeo-and-Juliette type romance between Laya and Luntok Kulaw, the son of a rival treacherous house, while in the background a House-of-the-Dragon political saga unfolds between the two lovers’ families. More precisely, between the two houses’ matriarchs, Duja Gatdula and Imeria Kulaw. And let me just say, Imeria was no doubt the most interesting character of Black Salt Queen – a queer mommy with hidden powers of her own, and the unshakable conviction that\u0026hellip; Her baby boy Luntok is the best baby boy and deserves to be king! Really giving Alicent Hightower and I was there for it!!!\nAs opposed to Imeria, the underdog of Maynaran aristocracy, who defies all odds by single-handedly organizing a revolution – Dayang Laya is a bit of an unlikeable girlie. I don’t feel bad pointing it out, as the protagonist seems to be intentionally problematic, described as petty and arrogant in the book’s blurb. And here is even the author asking \u0026ldquo;Why do so many people dislike unlikable female characters?\u0026rdquo;:\n\u0026ldquo;So many people dislike Laya, and I get it, she can be really mean, she can be really selfish [\u0026hellip;] but when you read or write characters who act on every single horrible impulse, I think there is something so cathartic about that\u0026rdquo;\nSo yeah, something about the way Laya’s character was written that is both bold and cool, yet makes it difficult to root for her, is that from the very start, she has it all. Luntok, the strongest young warrior, has been her secret boyfriend and has been obsessed with her long before the storyline begins. She is described as beautiful and incredibly intelligent, albeit a bit conceited. Laya is also considered extraordinarily powerful, even for her family’s established divine strength, and she is soon to become queen (Ok, that’s where she is relatable, as I too am an overly powerful princess with a secret hot boyfriend).\nYet, right off the bat her only problems are that she could not formally marry her lover and her mom isn’t including her in royal councils as much as she would have liked\u0026hellip;question mark? That’s about all the problems she has. Even though I agree with the author that Laya was always unapologetically herself, and NOT a people pleaser like most of us (which is cool), understandably, I was still more inclined to root for Imeria’s political and personal cause as the underdog, or even for the non-magical Bulan! While Laya did have her moments, I wish to have seen her a bit more punished by the plot for her arrogance, or to have been given really something not going for her.\nAs a whole, I found the pace of the story extremely readable – every chapter’s finale (especially Imeria’s) leaving me wanting more and anxiously moving on to the next character’s pov. I read on a Goodreads review some people felt the pace a bit slow, which as somebody who doesn’t read fantasy as a main genre, I found crazy! The Book of Eels took me way longer to get hooked, so I was happy with the pace\u0026hellip; Maybe I should read more fantasy, is what Black Salt Queen made me think, which is a compliment not to be underestimated.\nIn the end, I was shown that a novel can be enjoyable even if you are not on the main protagonist’s side. While the novel is marked as a “romantasy” and indeed, there is a fair share of love and lust in there, I definitely felt its most defining and intriguing plot line was the behind-the-scenes political revolution and the complex love-hate relationship between Imeria and Duja. On top of that, I found captivating the dynamics between Maynara’s different houses, who once possessed their own unusual powers, the Filipino-inspired culture and the divine magic, as well as, of course, the notion that women in Black Salt Queen were the main warriors in their own battles, be it for the throne, for recognition or for love. They weren’t merely pulling the strings from the dark, as we often see female characters portrayed, but actually being the ones who do both the plotting and the fighting!\nEven though I don’t personally know Samantha Bansil, reading her debut Black Salt Queen is the closest I have ever been to feeling connected to the current literary world – pre-ordering, receiving an annotated first chapter in advance, then reading the whole thing, while knowing that a sequel is in the making\u0026hellip;\nHonestly, it was exciting! And I am looking forward to reading Part 2. While, of course, I still do love my classics and annual rereading of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, focusing primarily on books written by authors who are long dead, could make one miss out on the writers du jour. So, I am intentionally on the train of reading more contemporary fiction!\nTo my friends complaining they have nothing to read that keeps them interested – if you’re looking for a story with bold women, high-stakes politics, and a dash of romance, I’d definitely recommend giving Black Salt Queen a try. Whether you usually stick to contemporary fiction, classics, or anything in-between, this debut novel is an exciting reminder that sometimes the best reads come from stepping outside your usual type.\nFinally, dear readers, please share with me your recommendations (via the Contact page) – no matter the genre.\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/posts/romantasy-yes-and-i-blame-black-salt-queen/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBadass women are running the political stage in a pre-colonial-Filipino-inspired universe. Let me tell you about Black Salt Queen, my summer read that got me back into reading contemporary fantasy.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"callout-warning\"\u003e\n  \u003cspan class=\"callout-warning-icon\"\u003e⚠️\u003c/span\u003e\n  \u003cdiv class=\"callout-warning-content\"\u003e\n    Contains spoilers!\n  \u003c/div\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eLet me first start off by saying that I am no fantasy genre expert. When I read for pleasure I tend to gravitate more towards family sagas, coming-of-age novels and classics. Yet, of course, my taste in books is an ever-changing mish-mash of genres, rivaled in its inconsistency only by my 2025 Spotify Wrapped. From John Steinbeck to Miranda July, and from books on eels to landscape architecture academia, the most important and unifying feature of my preferences as a reader is simple: \u003cem\u003eI take recommendations seriously.\u003c/em\u003e IRL. From friends and foe, but not from Goodreads algorithms!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Romantasy? Yes, and I Blame Black Salt Queen"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I\u0026rsquo;m trying to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life, every week.\u0026rdquo;\nIt is on this optimistic, high-vibe note that my favorite host, Robert Evans, welcomes listeners. And don\u0026rsquo;t you dare expect things to be any less grim in this article! Produced by Cool Zone Media, Behind the Bastards delves into the lives of some of the worst people to have ever plagued humanity and marks more than a million downloads monthly.\nAs I am writing, I am literally hooked on their \u0026ldquo;light-hearted\u0026rdquo; six-part series on Nazi SS leader Heindrich Himmler, the first three episodes of which I listened to twice, since I imposed the podcast on a 7-hour road trip to Italy last weekend…\nAdmirable as it is, my dedication to knowing ridiculous facts about Nazi leaders is not unique. Bad guys (and gals) are just way more fascinating than good people, aren\u0026rsquo;t they? The popularity of this podcast, but also our broader cultural obsession with the true crime genre, Ted Bundy documentaries, or Netflix\u0026rsquo;s Unsolved Mysteries, show us just how engrossed we are in the quest of understanding evil_. Archives, testimonies, diaries and all methods a biographer employs, allow us to examine people\u0026rsquo;s past and analyze what factors led them to the monstrosities they committed. But also – when they weren\u0026rsquo;t committing the horrific acts we know them for, in what ways were they humans and not monsters.\n\u0026quot;[Ridiculous stories] \u0026hellip; puncture the myths. We mythologize and make these people into just these huge icons of, you know, Darth Vader type of people. And actually, they have bowel problems.\u0026quot;\nSaddam Hussein – Iraq\u0026rsquo;s authoritarian dictator between 1979 and 2003, had a side career as an erotic romance novelist, while Adolf Hitler had a life-long obsession with cringy young adult novels about cowboys in the American wild west\u0026hellip; And oh boy, am I a sucker for knowing the most random facts about these assholes and many more – Tzar Nicholas II, Jeffrey Epstein, King Leopold of Belgium or Steve Jobs? I say SPILL. THE. TEA.\nSeveral years of listening to Evans\u0026rsquo;s excruciatingly detailed episodes and filling my precious brain space with darkness, have left me wondering: How do we grapple with this contrast, most often as humorous as it is disturbing, between somebody\u0026rsquo;s day-to-day humanity and their evilness?\nAnswering this question means zooming out to the bigger picture of Evil and History – but first, we need to set the stage with some baseline definitions.\nIn Behind the Bastards, Robert Evans doesn\u0026rsquo;t shy away from throwing around phrases such as \u0026ldquo;worst people in history\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;bastards\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;monsters\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;evil\u0026rdquo;, and so forth. And there is beauty in these words being intuitive – after all, I don\u0026rsquo;t need anybody to linguistically justify themselves in calling Hitler a bad person. Please go ahead and do that. However, understanding the philosophical traditions of thinking about evil helps us understand the implicit connotations evil-related terms carry.\nWillfully Problematic: Evil as Personal Agency\nLet\u0026rsquo;s take the word bastard – in its literal, historic sense it refers to an illegitimate child, one born outside of lawful marriage. Today, Urban Dictionary gives us the following definition:\nDerogatory for a willfully problematic person not only intent on not helping anyone but himself, but doing things to hinder others.\nModern-day bastardness can thus be directly linked to Emmanuel Kant\u0026rsquo;s definition of evil from Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (1973), where he describes evil as an innate human propensity to subordinate the moral law to self-interest.\nThe connotation behind both definitions frame the notions as individualistic – a deliberate inversion of moral principles of any one person, who uses their freedom to harm others and benefit themselves.\nWhen Evil Becomes Systematic\nWhile it is often tempting to point a finger at bad guys and think, well, they simply were willfully problematic, another approach often juxtaposed to the individualistic view is what Hannah Arendt coined the banality of evil. In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt reported on Nazi official Adolf Eichmann\u0026rsquo;s trial for his crimes against humanity, as he led the logistical operation of sending Jewish people to concentration camps and ghettos. What was shocking at the time is that she depicted him as banal, as a normal guy who wasn\u0026rsquo;t a terrifying anti-semite monster himself, but rather a boring bureaucrat following orders and organizing logistics.\n*Small caveat: the accuracy of her work has since been heavily criticized, notably by Bettina Stangneth who wrote Eichmann Before Jerusalim in 2011. Stangneth as well as many other historians have shown that Eichmann was anything but a banal bureaucratic participant in the mass extermination of Jews. Evidence shows he was a deeply involved, intentional and driven leader in the evils committed.\nThat being said – the term banality of evil itself is still a very useful definition to describe the human tendency to willingly participate in systems, which bring about atrocious crimes against humanity, without getting most individual\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;hands dirty.\u0026rdquo; A better example might be an Amazon employee who is working on fixing an AWS cloud feature to be used by the Israeli military.\nThis contrast between a monster versus a banal contributor shows the extremes of the two ways in which people tend to understand evil – either as the result of individual agency, or as embedded within persistent historical and social structures.\nBoth Things Can Be True\nWhat I love about Behind the Bastards is that Evans actually often focuses exactly on this duality in historiography. Most nightmarish acts are both the result of certain individual choices and maliciousness, as well as of the deeply-rooted structural predispositions. Sometimes within a one-hour-and-a-half episode we hear only about the political context of a country, or certain family history – maaayybe part of the reason why my friends on the Italy roadtrip hated me…\nBut the highly detailed stories allow for listeners to understand the various dynamics between these factors depending on the bastard. Some had objectively traumatizing, grim childhood experiences as well as lived in an era, which predisposed them to an extent to which it would be surprising to say the least, if they turned out to become decent law-abiding citizens. Others, on the contrary, were not necessarily destined to be monsters.\nAdolf Eichmann, for instance, grew up in a milieu where family members and friends had married into Jewish families, with whom he had interacted many times. Yet, later on one of his personal obsessions became ensuring that no individual Jews are exempted from the final solution, that no SS members were saving \u0026ldquo;a good Jew\u0026rdquo; here and there. Meanwhile, even Hitler intervened to save his childhood Jewish doctor! When it comes to his \u0026ldquo;day-to-day humanity\u0026rdquo; , the podcast has short-lived moments, in which it makes me slightly empathetic towards some of the worst people in history, but more often than not it feeds me more reasons to despise humanity (and let\u0026rsquo;s be real, especially men). I don\u0026rsquo;t feel that bad knowing that nobody wanted to sit with Eichmann at lunchtime in the Nazi party headquarters knowing that he went out of his way to be a bastard and police other people (who were already pretty terrible) to make sure they did not get a moment of softness, God forbid!\nSometimes, it can be as simple as that. Sometimes, people just suck. There I said it. (*me imagining receiving a Pulitzer prize for this brave thought*)\nOther bastards, like Heindrich Himmler, teach me something else – like, the fragility and societal danger ordinary insecure weirdos pose to our world.\nWhile also a very intentional bastard, don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong – it seems like if Heinrich Himmler were to be born in a different time and place, could have just become a toxic nerd obsessed with discussing Lord of the Rings on Reddit, and playing Dungeons and Dragons (not that these interests are toxic in themselves).\n\u0026ldquo;If Gebhardt was raising Heinrich Himmler today, Heinrich would be sitting on his lap as he sends death threats to Disney for putting women in Star Wars. That is the kind of dude.\u0026rdquo;\nBoy was deeply consumed by stories of magic and knights, which is totally fine, I do not claim otherwise. But as an example – J. R. R. Tolkien used his interest in Germanic myths and mysticism to create a fictional world. While Himmler, reading the same heroic tales that inspired Tolkien_,_ made sense of his real world by… imagining himself to be the reincarnation of an old Germanic prince??? Which obsession then led to ugh… some wild conclusions about race purity and we all know how the story ends.\nA Lot to Just Goggle At\nNot to say we should be suspicious of all people interested in mysticism, paganism, or esoterics today…(ok, maybe just a little). Yet, hey, Hitler being into cowboy novels and Saddam Hussein into erotica doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean I will proclaim all people with similar hobbies as potential threats to humanity.\nNonetheless, it is just interesting to sit down and let yourself be transported into the past worlds from this perspective of weird facts that – well, sometimes mean something, sometimes not. While the beautiful layer of absurdity doesn\u0026rsquo;t always find proof of somebody being destined to become evil, does it mean a detailed biographical approach with a special focus on their quirks, is a useless endeavor? No!\nI believe the ridiculous stories add so much color to these people\u0026rsquo;s lives and just gives you a deeper understanding of the world, reflecting on things you would have never ever thought about. And to be honest there is a lot to just goggle at.\nSo where does this leave us in our quest to better understand evil? Who knows, but I know my soul will only be at peace about a hundred years after I die, knowing that I did not make it on Robert Evan\u0026rsquo;s bastard list. Or that I made it on one of the yearly Christmas special non-bastard episodes! That\u0026rsquo;s all one can morally strive for. Being a Non-Bastard, innit?\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2025/11/10/sometimes-people-just-suck-on-behind-the-bastards/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u0026ldquo;Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I\u0026rsquo;m trying to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life, every week.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is on this optimistic, high-vibe note that my favorite host, Robert Evans, welcomes listeners. And don\u0026rsquo;t you dare expect things to be any less grim in this article! Produced by Cool Zone Media, Behind the Bastards delves into the lives of some of the worst people to have ever plagued humanity and marks more than a million downloads monthly.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Sometimes People Just Suck: On Behind the Bastards"},{"content":"As I am starting to write, I have no answer in mind.\nThe Bulgarian Ergen is our national version of the American reality TV show The Bachelor– a show that runs on a fundamentally offensive premise. Namely, that a plethora of drop dead gorgeous women need to audition for one single male, who ultimately decides which one he wants to marry. In this fabricated TV environment, women tend to transform into these unwatchable, needy, kiss-assy creatures, while the male is portrayed as a God to be put on a pedestal.\nBachelor Move GIF\nSmall caveat – the Bulgarian Ergen Season 4 was not like the other girls, it wanted to be special. So, they found not one but three mediocre emotionally immature bachelors! I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been. Set out to thus be less sexist and give more choice to the women, it actually changed absolutely nothing in the concept as all the women were separated in three cohorts each geared towards one God-male.\nYet, despite all this evil, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, I religiously watched every new episode the moment it came out … So, I couldn’t help but wonder – truly, why?\nI am an educated modern woman living in France. I call out dudes that mansplain to me why my dog eats grass. One of my favorite philosophers is Luce Irigaray who centered her thesis around dismissing Lacan and Freud’s stupid phallocentrism. In short, in my day-to-day I get angry about way less and ideologically speaking, I am disgusted by the Bachelor.\nAnd yet, I kept on watching…\nI would have loved to be able to say, like most of my friends claim, that I just watch to ridicule the participants. But I believe there is something more enchanting to it, something – or combination of things – that overpower my natural frustration as a self-respecting woman (or just as a women-respecting human). I am hence compelled to find words for that something.\nAll the Eye Candy? Maybe let me start with the first obvious piece of the puzzle that could constitute the reality show’s appeal – the many glamorous and radiant women… as well as the one decent-looking man (even though they were supposed to be three this season, I stand behind “one decent-looking man”).\nBeauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold. — Shakespeare, As You Like It\nStaring at most of the female contestants I find myself either mesmerized as a pure admirer of beauty, or anxiously caught in the trap of comparing myself to the people who were selected chiefly because of their conventional prettiness. Now, before you dismiss me – maybe not all girls on the show are super models. Some of them were set up by the production to stir drama, serve as comic relief or storytellers. Yet, overall the cast is a collection of conventionally attractive, effortlessly skinny and lavishly well-dressed women – certainly not the worst sight. While this isn’t the main reason I was hooked, I believe the pure eye-candy factor cannot be denied its proper place!\nA Climber-Reader-Golden-Retriever-Personality-Polyglot-with-a-Trust-Fund? But if it is not that, then I am thinking – what is it in the storyline that makes my blood boil? Could it be a subconscious desire to be in that, I can’t stress this enough, horrific plot?\nWhenever I get obsessed with any story, be it a book, film, or even real-life, my ego-centrism leads me to imagine myself as the main character in it. I thus fuel my infatuation with scenarios to daydream about in the waking hours that I am not watching or reading said story. On account of that tendency, in my head I have starred the humble roles of Arya Stark, Katniss Everdeen, Temari, Harry Potter, Yennefer of Vengerberg, Vanya Grigorova and many others.\nWhen it comes to the Bachelor, who would anybody like to be? The obvious choice is the Bachelor, the correct one is absolutely nobody. But I admit, I sometimes daydream about being a contestant… who is an undercover journalist writing a book about all the horrors behind the set!\nThat being so, well, I obviously wouldn’t want to be one of the contestants who gets kicked out after one week – that just wouldn’t give me enough content for my book! Nor would it be a great ego-boost… So then I fall into the trap of imagining myself as one of the rather “successful” participants, thereby performing humiliating rituals such as waiting to be called by the only available dude in sight and given a rose that allows me to “keep fighting for the Bachelor’s heart”!!!\nIt is also incredibly difficult and unrealistic to imagine oneself as both the favorite of the man, and as being well-liked by the other women! It takes me a lot of delusional brain power to adjust these scenarios because, as we have already established, I am pro-women! Ergo, I wouldn’t wish to be disliked by my sisters in Stockholm syndrome.\nHere, I believe I am getting closer to establishing some form of conflict, which could explain my fondness of the show – my psyche is stimulated because of this divide. The Ergen production both steps on my toes with its blatant unfairness to women, but it also allows my imagination to run wild in so many directions! I could also get my romance wish-fulfillment imaginary going with an adjusted bachelor to my liking – an emotionally mature climber-reader golden-retriever-personality-polyglot-with-a-trust-fund! But I could also keep my feminist self-perception by imagining myself as somebody who is there to expose the injustice from within, to thrive within a solidary sisterhood that stands together.\nWhy Do Men Love Bitches? And last but not least we cannot ignore the more concrete inter-personal drama that was often entertaining. In my eyes, what kept the Season 4 watchable was mainly the controversy around one of the bachelors – Martin (the rich 40-something clown), and his favorite contestant – Daniela, who is the author of a Bulgarian self-help book called Million Dollar Baby (basically the Bulgarian version of Why Men Love Bitches, that instructs women how to attract quality men, duh!).\nOne could argue that the love game between Martin and Daniela was very much a by the book chasing game, where Daniela was the only one who was playing hard to get, therefore the Alpha-male-hunter-narcissist mobilized all effort to win her over. And as her book would have predicted, it worked. Men are simple creatures, we are told…\nI haven’t read her book because I value my time and I don’t want my eyes to bleed out from the bullshit… but if I do one day (out of curiosity and fairness) I’ll be sure to write about it. That being said, the ideology that her TV persona disseminated was strictly anti second-wave feminism, pro men being the sole financial providers, as well as pro traditional gender roles of real men being strong and real women only serving as beautiful muses to inspire them to work and provide! One would expect that she would be a trad wife influencer, but she was actually like:\nI do not cook or clean. You give money for us to hire a cook and cleaner, and eat at expensive restaurants![to be read in a heavy Eastern European accent]\nFor which… I guess slay!\nYou Are Part of The Same Game I wouldn’t have thought that the Bachelor would be so meta, but it actually is. First, the show already conceptually valorizes men for their success (implying at least intelligence and other qualities) and women principally for their beauty. Then, it shows us a woman who makes explicit this same ideology – I will sit and be pretty supporting you while you provide luxury for me and our future children. In translation – men hold value and subjectivity through various qualities and active experiences in the world, while women hold value only as their reflected Other, only existing to passively inspire them as subjects.\nThat being the case, in my view, it was fascinating to see the moral lynching of Daniela by all of the participants, because well, Hello!!? You are all already part of the same game!! In fact, ideology is more dangerous when hiddenly permeated in cultural signifiers rather than explicitly stated.\nAs confusing as it was for me, I empathized a lot with Daniela even though I myself value my independence and don’t require a partner to be rich (it’s just a bonus! ;)). However, I’d argue she was more feminist in some other ways than all of the others… For once, she didn’t bully other women and she didn’t immediately glorify a man. Really, she was until the end extremely skeptical of him – as we all should. Most men suck. Moral of story? Why not, it’s not a bad moral.\nIn the end, did I answer myself the big Why? Why I watched the Bachelor, why would I do that with my one wild and precious life? In line with my recent reflection on Doing Less, Worrying More, it seems highly unlikely I will wake up one day in my old age thinking “Oh, how I wish I spent more time watching the Bachelor, instead of going out and talking to people!” But I guess now that I have written about it, I can officially console myself that Hey! I was an undercover journalist after all…\nI hope you enjoyed my poorly structured stream of consciousness, the product of my intense restlessness to share how I feel.\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2025/06/01/why-was-i-obsessed-with-the-bulgarian-bachelor/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAs I am starting to write, I have no answer in mind.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Bulgarian \u003cem\u003eErgen\u003c/em\u003e is our national version of the American reality TV show \u003cem\u003eThe Bachelor\u003c/em\u003e– a show that runs on a fundamentally offensive premise. Namely, that a plethora of drop dead gorgeous women need to audition for one single \u003cem\u003emale\u003c/em\u003e, who ultimately decides which one he wants to marry. In this fabricated TV environment, women tend to transform into these unwatchable, needy, kiss-assy creatures, while the \u003cem\u003emale\u003c/em\u003e is portrayed as a God to be put on a pedestal.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why Was I Obsessed With the Bulgarian Bachelor?"},{"content":"“The fact that human beings create such things as gardens is strange [\u0026hellip;]” reflects Robert Harrison in his 2008 book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition – a book that was recommended to me by my partner in weird academic interests, Rea! (psstt, who now also has a blog)\n“Why would gardens be strange, you weirdos?” you might be thinking. As the author puts it – they mark a bizarre and somewhat conflicting (but not fully antithetical) human desire to both represent nature as well as to transfigure it! Many of us, especially those born and raised in cities, are used to considering a walk in a garden or park as quasi-wilderness where we could get some… #nature #hotgirlwalk.\nA Feeling of Nature? Admittedly, compared to “restaurants shaped like hats and hamburgers, and four-level freeways with ten thousand ramps” (which is how Umberto Eco describes California), green spaces within cities might truly feel like nature.\nAnd why shouldn’t they? What is nature? Now, a 25-year-old blogger can’t claim to define what different cultures, philosophers and a plethora of other disciplines have tried to define for centuries. But I can claim that there is, my intuition tells me, a difference between a hike in the mountains and a walk in a city park that resembles an outside mall, or a walk in a well-curated garden.\nLet’s look at one example. My close Bulgarian friend Ellie, a passionate hiker, lived in Germany for some years where she also felt disoriented in her perception of what nature was. She had told me that the well-maintained Alpine forest paths were in fact so well groomed, so accessible and at parts even asphalted, that she sort of felt like walking in a park instead of real mountains.\nOr, likewise, near the Bulgarian village where I used to spend my summers as a kid, a fortress remains were discovered in the foothills of Rila mountain. So, to aid and encourage tourists, a well-constructed path appeared with wooden benches at every few meters, trash cans, and signs to indicate how long is left until the top. Bulgarians from the region quickly boasted about how “Western” this site has become. As if it were no longer the same mountain hill - it had now become civilized. But doesn’t this show just the cultural element of being in nature? It was already partly the product of human work – paths and signs were there, just now there is also a funicular… as well as a coffee shop.\nNot saying it is necessarily a bad thing or that I haven’t enjoyed my hot chocolate alongside my kartofki with sirene at that coffee shop myself, but one could argue that all of this is “unnatural”.\nYet, we have to admit that whether our hikes have newer benches and shiny signs in English or not, these are still places where humans have intervened. It just matters howit is done, which subjectivizes how people perceive it.\nA Part of the City That Didn’t Get Built On That said, much like this sentiment of unnaturalness in what is supposed to be nature, we can feel naturalness in what is supposed to be non-nature. Another one of Rea’s finds – the landscape architect Thomas Woltz articulates this intuition in an interview to the New York Social Diary:\nI realize they [people in general] don\u0026rsquo;t think public parks are constructed spaces. They think they\u0026rsquo;re just the part of the city that didn\u0026rsquo;t get built on.\nPoor landscape architects… for many people seem to be practically blind to the results of their labor.\nAnd I swear, it’s a real job! I’ll save you the UN\u0026rsquo;s International Labour Organization definition, but my friend Rea rightly observed that once you get into landscape architecture (LA) academia it seems as if it is all propaganda for the field itself.\nCouldn\u0026rsquo;t be more true if we read Yue Xing \u0026amp; al. \u0026rsquo;s definition who calls the practice of landscape architecture (LA):\na beautiful place where humans and nature are integrated\nWell, that’s rich! When have humans and nature ever been integrated??!\nDefinitions aside, the secret LA agents are doing their thing and constructing green spaces and most of us, city children who need to have city jobs in order to live a normal life, will at minimum a few times a year want to go to a park, a garden or an accessible hike.\nBut is landscape architecture getting us any closer to understanding nature or is it getting us further away? If the lines have globally been blurred between what we see as nature and what we see as artifice, don’t we risk, or even already experience, a progressive desensitization to experiencing nature? Maybe sometimes LA doesn’t aim to mimic unconstructed nature, maybe other times it does. Nevertheless, in both cases, the result is thatgreen spaces are both somewhat simulating untouched nature but also transforming it into something different that no longer reflects the reality of nature.\nAs Henry David Thoreau writes in Walden, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality!”. But in response to this, Harrison’s essay on gardens adds the equal craving to “[\u0026hellip;] adorn it with costume and illusion, and thereby to respiritualize our experience of it.”\nIn other words, WEIRD!\nIn Part 2 I will not only continue to shamelessly quote my friends and use their personal experiences for examples but I will also get to AI in landscape architecture as well as, the one and only, Jean Baudrillard. Thank you for reading and, as always, if you enjoyed please like, subscribe \u0026amp; let me know what you think!\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2025/05/09/my-thoughts-about-nature-part-1-are-parks-weird/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e“The fact that human beings create such things as gardens is strange [\u0026hellip;]” reflects Robert Harrison in his 2008 book \u003cem\u003eGardens: An Essay on the Human Condition\u003c/em\u003e – a book that was recommended to me by my partner in weird academic interests, Rea! (psstt, who now also has a \u003ca href=\"https://rschweppe.blog/\"\u003eblog\u003c/a\u003e)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Why would gardens be strange, you weirdos?” you might be thinking. As the author puts it – they mark a bizarre and somewhat conflicting (but not fully antithetical) human desire to both represent nature as well as to transfigure it! Many of us, especially those born and raised in cities, are used to considering a walk in a garden or park as quasi-wilderness where we could get some… \u003cem\u003e#nature #hotgirlwalk.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"My Thoughts On Nature Part 1: Are Parks Weird?"},{"content":" You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything writes Greg McKeown in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.\nSure, practically everything is unimportant, yet virtually most things have a formidable way of overwhelming me and convincing me of their Targaryenesque birthright to be on top of my to-do list.\nJust a few days ago I was cooking at home and almost without noticing, I was mentally going through all of the projects I had to focus on in the coming months. My anxiety was growing as my thoughts were physically bouncing on and off emails I had to write, books I wanted to read, and even bigger musings such as who I wanted to become. Did I want to be a teacher, or work in tech, or organize kids summer camps in Bulgaria? Then, let’s throw in the mix the 23 podcast episodes I have saved to listen to, blog article ideas, wanting to adopt a dog, get into woodwork, move apartments, and let us not forget my addiction to mindlessly scrolling on dating apps or refreshing WhatsApp!\nPhilosophical Breakthroughs Come to the Vacationeers My conclusion to what felt like a quiet storm progressing into a headache was: I need vacation. I need an escape. Give me a month outside of society to catch up on life and then I can live life.\nThe only problem with this logic? I literally just had a one month vacation about a month ago! I was hiking in New Zealand national parks, I disconnected and had no mobile data for the most part, read six books, and had many meaningful conversations with amazing people. In short, I believe if there were to be a magical reboot program to make you reflect on what you want of your life, I likely did it. Riding on the beautiful new year inspiration wave, I went to the end of the world and had a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime vacation free of the noise and distractions. I thought I had it all figured out – what my ideal routine would look like once I’m back, how many books I would read each month, where my focus and energy would be going (only cool places, of course, like climbing, philosophy, volunteering and leftist podcasts).\nHowever, to paraphrase one uplifting trekker I met in New Zealand:\nEvery time you embark on a big journey and take a step back from your daily life you think you have solved all of the world\u0026rsquo;s problems and it is all true until… you come back from vacation!\nHow could it be that in the rare occasions in which we do get the space to breathe, we reach the apex of mindfulness and inspiration, but then struggle to bring whatever brilliant and true-to-oneself revelations we had back to the practicalities of “real life”?\nTell me, what is it you plan to do\nwith your one wild and precious life?\n– Mary Oliver\nSince universal basic income sadly doesn’t seem to be knocking on our door anytime soon, I am getting really anxious about what to do with this non-vacation life – with my one wild and precious life as a part of the productive workforce (before I retire at age 90 judging from where global politics are heading).\nAnd after having been back home in Grenoble for a few weeks, it is precisely in this état d’esprit of a Krisis, that I started operating, promptly getting further away from my vacation clarity. So I resorted to something I rarely do.\nI started reading a self-help book .\nI discovered Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown through my go-to Youtuber for anything health, sport and wellness related – Keltie O’Conner. I often enjoy Keltie’s content because she is honest in portraying her struggles and will try anything before judging. Just like me, she sometimes feels overwhelmed by the myriad of projects or life improvements she sets herself on vanquishing.\nAnd to our rescue comes the practice of essentialism, which, in McKeown’s usage of the word, preaches living one’s life with a strong and disciplined focus on only what is most essential and thus accepting we’ll do less things but we’ll do them better – not to be confused with gender essentialism (the belief that gender is intrinsically and definitively locked in biology), nor with Aristotelian essentialism (the belief that each entity has a fundamental essence)!\nJust (Don’t) Do It In the self-help version of this notion, the author’s ideas vary from obvious elementary wisdom to some rather illuminating insights and beliefs. When I first told my roommate what I was reading, he had a mocking reaction of “It’s sort of obvious that if you do less things you will do them better, no?”\nWhile I don’t disagree here – the basic premise is nothing new or revolutionary, it is an important reminder for anxiety-prone people who often stretch thin on a multitude of priorities. In summary, McKeown tells us:\nWe should choose to do only what is essential instead of half-assing the myriad of not-so-important things. We should be ready to slow down and dedicate time and space for reflection to find what is essential. We should accept that we can’t have it all – we will have to give up opportunities that are really good but just not essential. But are these principles really applicable? I admit, I find some aspects compelling while others very frustrating.\nThrough the first key message, for instance, we are told that most things we worry about we simply shouldn’t do. Just Don’t Do It, an alternative Nike motto could sound like!\nIt is unlikely you will wake up one day and say, \u0026lsquo;I wish I had been less true to myself and had done all the non-essential things others expected of me!\u0026rsquo;\nI kept this quote as I believe it serves as a reminder that looking back through the lens of time, we often have a clearer outlook on what was truly important. Yet, even without being on my deathbed, I can certainly say that it is unlikely I will regret going to the hospital with a friend; however, I might slightly regret the accumulated time spent on boring Hinge dates. To a similar logic, I have a friend who worked for 10 years as a physiotherapist – a stable career path pushed by her parents, but then she decided to start over with a philosophy degree, which was always her authentic want. I am not saying people have to regret following their passion later than when they are 18 years old, but understandably, she does feel like she could have spent more time being true to herself.\nSo in that way, the first principle can be seen as an empowering push to detach ourselves from paths, activities, even people who don’t align with what we want.\nMish-Mash! However, what I find problematic is this seemingly obvious distinction between:\nessential = true to oneself, authenticnon-essential = useless, forced upon from society, inauthentic\nWhereas sometimes, being true to yourself and pleasing society overlap! Or other times, we want to want things because it is expected of us or because it is well sold and aestheticized, and then it becomes hard to tell if you truly, deeply, authentically, from the bottom of your heart want to go to the climbing gym or watch the Bachelor? In my case, oftentimes authentic desire ends up being an indistinguishable mish-mash even for what are supposed to be easy choices such as activities I love.\nFor example, I love reading. And I believe reading comes most naturally when we allow ourselves to just read what we actually want to and let go of what is expected of us to read. McKeown would tell us to read only what is essential to us instead of buying books that sound smart, that fit into a particular perception of ourselves, or that your crush reads. That is one of the messages one can take away from Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. When considering my next books maybe I ask myself “Do I feel deeply inspired to read this? Or do I just want to project myself as the cool girl who reads niche political science theory with her espresso?”\nHowever, I do also find applying this logic all the time somewhat problematic. Partly thanks to the infinity of content accessible 24/7 online and the illusion of capitalist opportunities, we have developed a sense of high opportunity cost for our time. We know we could theoretically be choosing a myriad of other options at all times.\nThere will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than anything in one\u0026rsquo;s immediate actual circumstances.\n– Jonathan Crary\nIn this merciless battle for our attention books are already fighting with archers on horseback while the Internet wields missiles, commands drones and algorithms. So, if we always follow our gut of what we feel 100% inspired to read, don\u0026rsquo;t we risk only reading the books which get closest to the fast-paced dynamic of reels? The practice of reading can oftentimes be engrossing and make time fly seamlessly, but most times getting to that stage requires discipline and habit, the art of slowing down and fully focusing.\nStill, in this particular example I believe the practice of essentialism mostly works (considering this small caveat). And as I am writing, I am getting more and more motivated to do some Marie Kondō-ing of my personal library, or at least of my future books, the way minimalists do for their wardrobe – asking myself: Would I truly love reading this? Would it be essential to my research interest? Does it align with my values?\nWhile it can be challenging to have a balanced approach to life, I’d say the main moral I will take away from Essentialism is that it is ultimately important to figure out what is crucial to you and focus your wild \u0026amp; precious time alive mostly doing that. HOWEVER, this moral being taken with a huge grain of salt, we should apply that in tune with both our personal and global circumstances. The book made it sound too easy. Almost as if, if you’re not courageously doing only what most deeply matters to you, that sounds like a you problem! _\n_\nSo, is it technicallyessential in the grand scheme of my life to look at this reel? Of course not, but I am still subject to the numerous power structures that make it extremely difficult to never watch reels. Is it essential that I spend time with my loved ones or that I write emails? Surely the answer is loved ones, but that doesn’t mean I can just leave society and never open a laptop ever again. I believe essentialism, despite the big claims for a life-changing overall worldview, actually works best on a micro level and should be applied maybe 80% of the time for small choices and 20% for big things. The bigger chunk of its value is that it is helpful in guiding us which book to choose, which work task is most important, or answer the question “Is it essential for me to buy this sports bra, almost identical to the one I already own?” And the smaller chunk – yes, we could and absolutely should also reflect on what is essential in the grand scheme of things, but very, very often the essential is out of our immediate control. Let us not beat ourselves up for it.\nMy vibe is essential-ish.\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2025/04/30/doing-less-worrying-more/","summary":"\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything writes Greg McKeown in \u003cem\u003eEssentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSure, practically everything is unimportant, yet virtually most things have a formidable way of overwhelming me and convincing me of their Targaryenesque birthright to be on top of my to-do list.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJust a few days ago I was cooking at home and almost without noticing, I was mentally going through all of the projects I had to focus on in the coming months. My anxiety was growing as my thoughts were physically bouncing on and off emails I had to write, books I wanted to read, and even bigger musings such as who I wanted to become. Did I want to be a teacher, or work in tech, or organize kids summer camps in Bulgaria? Then, let’s throw in the mix the 23 podcast episodes I have saved to listen to, blog article ideas, wanting to adopt a dog, get into woodwork, move apartments, and let us not forget my addiction to mindlessly scrolling on dating apps or refreshing WhatsApp!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Doing Less, Worrying More"},{"content":" Have you ever asked yourself if 2008’s DreamWorks animation Kung Fu Panda could be read as “a somewhat naive, but nonetheless basically accurate illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory”? Well, if you are still reading Žižek with me, hello and welcome to page 69, section title Les non-dupes errent!\nSlowly making my way through Living in the End Times, I could not have been more excited to start reading a subpart where the author’s analytical might is focused on one of the funniest cartoon blockbusters from my childhood, namely Kung Fu Panda (2008, John Stevensoon and Mark Osborne). Žižek has once and for all put a fictional goose’s “special noodle soup” as a serious intellectual example in my head and there is no going back\u0026hellip;\nA Kung Fu Fanatic with Secret Dreams Žižek starts by reminding us of the basic plot: \u0026ldquo;Po is a panda who works in a noodle restaurant owned by his goose father Ping, in the Valley of Peace in China. He is a Kung Fu fanatic with secret dreams of becoming a great master in the discipline; his weight and clumsiness however, seem to make this goal unattainable. Ping dreams that one day Po will take over the family restaurant and eagerly awaits the right moment to reveal the secret ingredient in his family\u0026rsquo;s noodle recipe. Meanwhile, Master Oogway, the wise tortoise and spiritual guide of the Valley, foresees the return of Tai Lung, a fierce leopard warrior and former student of Shifu, the red panda master. Oogway fears Tai Lung will break free from prison to menace the Valley of Peace, so he calls for a ceremonial selection to choose the powerful Dragon Warrior, the only one capable of defeating Tai Lung. [\u0026hellip;] to everyone\u0026rsquo;s shock the old master tortoise designates Po the Dragon Warrior.\u0026rdquo;\nOnce designated the Dragon Warrior, we see a classic transformation story of a clumsy protagonist somehow becoming incredibly strong - in this case Po reveals himself to be capable of impressive physical feats when motivated by food. Afterwards, having become a worthy enough fighter, Shifu finally gives him the sacred Dragon Scroll, which promises great power to the possessor. But upon opening it, the panda discovers that the scroll is just a blank reflective surface. Both him and Shifu immediately despair and Po even initially gives up trying to face the enemy.\nThen, however, comes a key moment: Po\u0026rsquo;s father decides to cheer him up by finally revealing the secret ingredient of the family\u0026rsquo;s noodle soup: nothing.\nThings become special, he explains, because people believe them to be special. Realizing that precisely this is the very point of the Dragon Scroll, Po rushes off to challenge Tai Lung.\nDuring their long-awaited battle, Po fights well but Tai Lung is obviously stronger and eventually succeeds in taking the sacred scroll. When he sees it is empty he fails to understand its symbolism and surrenders to a violent frustration, which allows Po to counter-attack and defeat him. Finally, Po becomes the village’s hero! (Surprise, surprise)\nThe Signifier Falls into the Signified Now, let’s start from this metaphor of the special soup or the empty scroll. As Po himself figured it out - both carry the same meaning. Here, especially given the film is made for kids, it is all too easy to interpret the message as purely psychological. I find it even borderline New-Age-manifest-y: if you believe in yourself, that’s all that matters! If you believe that your soup is the best in town and exert that confidence people will gravitate towards you and believe it as well!\nHowever, Žižek shows there may be more. A soup can be special not through its ingredients put together in a bowl but through an ineffable je ne sais quoi that “cannot be adequately translated into any explicit positive determinations.” That is objet petit a in Lacan’s terms, or the object-cause of desire.\nNote that I am not an expert in Lacanian theory but I am simply taking you through both the chapter in place and my train of thought as I was reading it. We will later get to the answer of whether Kung Fu Panda is indeed proto-Lacanian or not.\nThe je ne sais quoi reminded me of an old Black Mirror episode - “Be Right Back.” In it, a young woman named Marta discovers an AI chatbot, which perfectly simulates her recently deceased boyfriend Ash. At first, the AI only chats but later Marta upgrades to a version in which the software is able to talk on the phone with her dead partner’s voice, and ultimately, upgrades to a synthetic double - a human-robot-double of Ash. After some time of comforting herself by interacting with this double, Marta realizes that even if you take all of her boyfriend’s properties, qualities, features and synthetically recreate a double, that will never be them. You cannot recreate the je ne sais quoi.\nYou have this objet petit a, which is in nature immanent to language. The fact that the special ingredient to Ping’s soup is nothing holds in itself a repetition. Instead of saying “nothing” one could say the special ingredient is the special ingredient itself. Therefore, the signifier falls into the signified itself. Ash is not just a combination of his qualities - being a caring person, funny, etc. Nor is he the synthesis of words, actions, performances. The proper answer to “Who is Ash?” is simply - Ash.\nThis signifying repetition generates the specter of an ineffable X \u0026lsquo;beyond words.\u0026rsquo; The paradox is thus that language reaches beyond itself, to the reality of objects and processes in the world, when it designates these objects and proceeds by means of clear denotative/discursive meanings; but when it refers to an ineffable transcendent X \u0026lsquo;beyond words,\u0026rsquo; it is caught in itself.\nTherefore, when Kung Fu Panda reveals that the secret knowledge of the Dragon Scroll is nothing, or is only itself, the film plays into Lacan’s theory that the objet petit a is ultimately an illusory attraction, “a stand-in for the void at the very heart of the symbolic order.” However, we are presented with two possible reactions to the emptiness of the scroll. On the one hand, there is the tiger Tai Lung who miserably fails to get the symbolism. What happens then is that he continues to act as if there should be another meaning, as if the signified cannot be equal to the signifier. The tiger twists and turns the scroll looking at it from all angles until he loses control. He is overwhelmed by the need to grasp the ungraspable.\nThis is how capitalism works, this is the material efficiency of capitalist ideology: even when we know how things are, we continue to act upon our false beliefs\nOn the other hand, there is Po who truly realizes “to make something special you just have to believe it’s special” (even though it took him a minute). He came back to fight a seemingly undefeatable enemy. By understanding the symbolism of the emptiness Zizek hints that Po could have realized a “wild traversée du fantasme, breaking its spell.” After all, it is a childrens’ film as Po does defeat Tai Lung and becomes the superior warrior. He achieves this not without any physical effort or training, but still with significantly less years of kung fu practice compared to the other warriors in the film (the Furious Five), hence reaffirming that the main factor was him making himself special through belief.\nPo Should Have Died Question Mark? Now, Zizek ultimately returns to answer the initial question of “Could Kung Fu Panda be read as ‘a somewhat naive, but nonetheless basically accurate illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory’?” And his answer is essentially “Not really.” Or, if I may rephrase in Gen Z language: simply “-ish.” If we take “Believe in yourself and you’ll achieve the impossible!” as the final conclusion of the film, that is definitely not the point of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Po doesn’t quite traverse the fantasy.\nBut after all it is only a childrens’ movie. For Zizek, the rupture with Lacanian theory is what he calls the “elementary wisdom” Kung Fu Panda preaches, which is what I initially intuited as “New-Age-manifest-y”.\nTo traverse the fantasy as far as I understand Lacan’s term, is to cease assuming that the Other has taken the \u0026rsquo;lost\u0026rsquo; object of desire (objet petit a). So to say, to rupture with the idea of a particular substance of the je ne sais quoi. While if we depart from this definition, it still seems to me that there were moments, which appear to capture a genuine traversée du fantasme. When Po hears his father’s secret ingredient is nothing and then looks at the scroll with new eyes, he is able to connect the two: on the one hand, a form of object-cause of desire reveals itself as an empty signifier, which he has considered as solid knowledge probably since early childhood (the uniqueness of the praised soup the whole village loves) and on the other, the object-cause of desire representing the deepest wisdom in the fictional universe also reveals itself to be purely self-reflective. He thus breaks the spell. Maybe it is not that Po realizes he just needed to have more confidence in himself but he understood that the signifier falls into the signified, the very basis upon which we go through life is more fluid than the panda thought!\nIt is not that nothing is real anymore, but that the properties he attributed to the idea of a Dragon Warrior or more broadly to the idea of a Kung Fu hero aren’t anything tangible he could have just accessed even through the most powerful spiritual text. The same way that the dead Ash couldn’t be accessed by Marta even through the most powerful technology we could ever imagine. With that realization at hand, doesn’t it follow that one is liberated from the fantasmatic allure? Po is simply free from the fear of not possessing the legendary characteristics as he realizes they are self-reflective abstractions.\nYet finally, my intuition tells me that even if we traverse the fantasy we won’t traverse the physical boundaries our bodies dictate. Therefore, the heroic defeat of Tai Lung presupposes Po underwent a form of miracle allowing him to surpass fleshly limitations. While it would have been completely crazy for DreamWorks to do, my take is that Po should have died in trying to defeat the evil leopard! Not much more to say here - just my hot take.\nTo follow good old tortoise Oogway’s way of being and accept the vanity of all reality, I’ll end on this somber note\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2025/02/14/part-3-of-reading-zizek-what-if-po-died-in-kung-fu-panda-and-lacan-was-right-about-everything/","summary":"\u003cfigure\u003e\n    \u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"panda2.png#center\"/\u003e \n\u003c/figure\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHave you ever asked yourself if 2008’s DreamWorks animation Kung Fu Panda could be read as “a somewhat naive, but nonetheless basically accurate illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory”? Well, if you are still reading Žižek with me, hello and welcome to page 69, section title \u003cem\u003eLes non-dupes errent!\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSlowly making my way through \u003cem\u003eLiving in the End Times,\u003c/em\u003e I could not have been more excited to start reading a subpart where the author’s analytical might is focused on one of the funniest cartoon blockbusters from my childhood, namely \u003cem\u003eKung Fu Panda\u003c/em\u003e (2008, John Stevensoon and Mark Osborne). Žižek has once and for all put a fictional goose’s “special noodle soup” as a serious intellectual example in my head and there is no going back\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Part 3 of Reading Žižek: What if Po Died in Kung Fu Panda and Lacan Was Right About Everything?"},{"content":"As I am writing this, it is the final week of the year, it is snowing outside and in an hour from now I will be having coffee with the biggest reader of my family - my great-aunt Nina. Even though in the past months, I have felt as if I am mainlystress-reading academic articles and juggling between different responsibilities, something about this beautiful snowy morning gave me the muse to remember and share some of the wonderful books I had the privilege and pleasure of reading this past year.\nTo some of my friends, I am known to often cite one iconic Bulgarian rapper, Keranov, in the closing remarks of his magnum opus - Failure:\nFor me, it was a privilege and a pleasure… well, mostly a privilege, less of a pleasure.\nLooking back at 2024, there are definitely months that felt like mostly a privilege, less of a pleasure. But if there is one thing that got me through hard times, it was the pleasure of slow reading, of leaving my phone aside and getting immersed in a book. Sometimes it was anxiously so before I go to bed, others happily in the company of a friend or my favorite matcha latte…\nFar from devising a quantitative report à la “Everything I Read In 2024”, with this article I rather want to look at how the three major periods of my year can be reflected on through the lens of what I was reading at the time. While a bigger multiplicity of books could better capture each micro-krisis and each small realisation, I decided to embrace the mantra of less is sometimes more. And maybe less is much needed in a world where I saw a guy bragging on his Hinge profile with a Spotify wrapped listening time of 333 856 minutes… Or about 15 hours a day on average!\nWithout further ado, the first book, which was with me and helped me be in 2024 is Ruptures by Claire Marin.\nRuptures Though I am unsure if I technically read it in the last weeks of 2023 or first weeks of 2024, I couldn’t help but start my wrapped-esque affair with the book that best paralleled my emotional starting point. As one might have figured by the title, my year’s beginning was marked by a rupture (my romantic breakup), the pain of which haunted me throughout the first few months of 2024.\nIn a nutshell, the book is an exploration of how moments of rupture, whether tolerable or violent, in good or bad spirits, visible or invisible, move us through life and shape our changing identities. Even though it is a very short read that I finished in two afternoons, it stayed with me for a long, long time.\nAfter a relationship ends, it might feel as if a limp has been suddenly amputated. Until yesterday your world’s horizon included a particular language of inside jokes, references that have been built for long, memories and future projections. Post-rupture, one adapts to a new reality , which is full of questions and uncertainties about itself - are you funny if your main audience is no longer there to laugh? Are you a good and caring person if you no longer express love and affection towards a significant other?\nRuptures helped me connect these musings to the broader and profoundly human phenomenon of feeling a violent fracture from what used to be a constant and grappling with the unpredictable.\nMarin shows how all types of ruptures are experiences of the perceived security of the oneness being split into the multiple and thus changing fundamental pillars of your identity. Imagine spending 20 years in the army and then having to start anew, moving cities, giving birth and hence rupturing with what life was before, or living through a natural catastrophe. The book asks what remains after such ruptures and what newness emanates from them?\nApricots Fast forward to… let’s say, end of May, into my Rebecca Solnit Era. Solnit is no doubt the most important author I discovered this year, one of the authors I now identify so strongly with that I almost question “Who was I before I was a Rebecca Solnit fan?”\nThe way Claire Marin’s Ruptures helped me navigate through the difficult feelings after a breakup and I will always connect it to that part of my path, The Faraway Nearby I associate with a way more cheerful and inspired period.\nI remember being in a routine of mostly working from home, which left room for a lot of reading over lunch time or before work at my favorite coffee shop. I wouldn’t say it was a completely carefree time, but I now see how my routine of consistent reading and relative peace of mind (compared to the beginning of the year), made me receptive to reflection and a deeper staring into the world.\nIt was at that time that I received my first Solnit book as a gift from my dear friend and former professor, Liliane. Well, it wasn’t the title in questionbut it lit up the path towards it, for which I will be eternally grateful!\nThe Faraway Nearby truly touched me. Rebecca Solnit reflects on storytelling, and through her masterful intertwining of stories itself, put me in a disposition to puzzle over what is my own story. How stories that I tell myself shape me? What are the elements in my life, symbolic rather than practical, that merit a deeper look into?\nThough it might seem strange, the apricots on the book’s orange cover are such an element for the author. Throughout the collection of essays, which constitute The Faraway Nearby, Solnit intertwines the experience of her mother’s worsening Alzheimer\u0026rsquo;s disease with the last harvest of her apricot tree that she “inherited”. Every time she looks at the pile of apricots she stares deeply both into their physical reality as well as their quality of a living organism that tells its own story:\nThis abundance of unstable apricots seemed to be not only a task set for me, but my birthright, my fairy-tale inheritance from my mother who had given me almost nothing since my childhood. It was a last harvest, a heap of fruit from a family tree, like the enigmatic gifts of fairy tales: a magic seed, a key to an unknown door, a summoning incantation. Bottling, canning, composting, freezing, eating, and distilling them was the least of the tasks they posed. The apricots were a riddle I had to decipher, a tale whose meaning I had to make over the course of the next twelve months as almost everything went wrong.\nIt is this level of intensity of looking that inspires me.\nKnow that is just a glimpse of what The Faraway Nearby. As a final temptation to inspire you to read it here are some surprising elements I bet you didn’t expect would come up such clearly personal essays: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans, Che Guevara\u0026rsquo;s motorcycle travels around South America, Mary Shelley\u0026rsquo;s fascinating biography as well as some disturbing yet fascinating stories of survival in Icelandic mountains…\nFinally, in Solnit’s personal story during this difficult period, one special moment brings her to adopt a lasting motto: “Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason!”\nI would lie if I said the words haven’t come to my mind on many, many occasions in 2024…\nGeometry Speaking of adventures, between the beginning of September and last week, I attended a philosophy seminar focused specifically on The Origins of Geometry by Edmund Husserl!\nThis last text (it’s actually an essay, part of a book and different collections of his texts) I chose to share because it played a special role in the last period of the year for me - namely, my journey back to reading philosophy.\nWhile I realize that it is now the three out of three significant reads in 2024 I have decided to share are non-fiction, I promise I am a normal human and still mostly read novels! Yet, looking back at the beginning of the year and the path I walked towards the last 3 months, it was a step by step process for me to acknowledge in front of myself that I also read real philosophy…\nSo, standing initially intimidated in front of my copy of The Origins of Geometry, I started reading Husserl’s attempt to find the original sense of geometry, and thus implicitly to all exact sciences. Taking the ready-made geometry we all use and starting to question backwards, he doesn’t do a historical analysis but rather a phenomenological inquiry asking: What are the conditions that allowed for ideality, which is objective for all people at all times, to come about and persist through generations?\nThis path of questioning turned out to be fascinating and full of paradoxes even though I am the first to admit the topic didn’t soundparticularly sexy at first…\nYet, what I love about reading and what The Origins of Geometry is a good example of, is how slowly exploring a text, reading and rereading, and discussing with others can really take you to unexpected places. I read and discussed these only around 40 pages for three whole months!\nThat said, what I would mostly take out of them, I believe, is the inspiration and partly the methodology for a slow and rigorous questioning of the origin and original sense of things.\nFor instance, at one point Husserl grapples with the issue of how geometry could be at the same time alive and authentic. Could it, on the one hand, be capable to grow, develop, have new discoveries (alive) and on the other, stay conscient of its first original sense (authentic)? Clearly, geometry is not really fully authentic if people write entire essays and later books looking for this original sense. Yet it has obviously been fully possible for it to step on former discoveries and develop further.\nSimilarly, we don’t need to understand the original sense of any technology in order to use it. We don’t even have to have a clue of how it works in order to push a button! We also don’t need to philosophize about love or its origin in order to love somebody.\nYet, the complex interplay between aliveness and authenticity of traditions of knowledge has shown me that there is value in trying to reconnect with origins, while it shouldn’t stop us from keeping things alive.\nFinally, if that short but mighty list is later used against me once the revolution has broken out, just like with Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads account, so be it! I genuinely hope my reflections on these three reads have been well… both a privilege and a pleasure! But if it has been mostly the former, here is another Keranov rap song to cheer you up: Short Autobiography\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2024/12/27/ruptures-apricots-and-philosophy-how-three-books-defined-my-year/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAs I am writing this, it is the final week of the year, it is snowing outside and in an hour from now I will be having coffee with the biggest reader of my family - my great-aunt \u003cem\u003eNina\u003c/em\u003e. Even though in the past months, I have felt as if I am mainlystress-reading academic articles and juggling between different responsibilities, something about this beautiful snowy morning gave me the muse to remember and share some of the wonderful books I had the privilege and pleasure of reading this past year.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Ruptures, Apricots, and Geometry: How Three Books Defined My Year"},{"content":"Isn’t it funny realizing the consequences of seemingly insignificant day to day choices? We often consume the narrative à la How I Met Your Mother where every tiny event, new encounter, romantic disappointment leads the protagonist Ted Mosby one step closer to the moment he meets the future mother of his children (which would be impossible without every random occurrence beforehand). Well, I feel that I had my own little HIMYM loop closed the other day when [drum rolls] I finally got on Reddit! And what was the tiny seemingly insignificant step leading to it? None other than me picking up Žižek’s Living in The End Times at a moment where I had all of my books packed in boxes.\nStill in the Denial chapter, there exists a section called “Legal Luck, or, the Loop of the Act”, which threw me right in the arms of the Žižek Subreddit!\nIn Part 1 of this series, I briefed and mused on living in this era of ideological denial for matters turned to the present moment - such as getting an ad to donate for charity and what that implies. In Part 2, ideology casts her spell on us in our relation to the past moments.\nLove Triangles: Was the Past Ever True? Žižekpresents us with a logical paradox taken from Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s analysis of Vertigo (1958). I admit, I initially struggled to understand how it related to the prisms of denial or ideology. Hence, me going on Reddit for help understand the section, starting with:\nAn object possesses a property x until the time t, after t, it is not only the object no longer has the property x; it is that it is not true that it possessed x at any time.‘\nBeautifully, Dupouy’s text is titled “When I Die Nothing of Our Love Would Have Ever Existed” ( ‘Quand je mourrai, rien de notre amour n’aura jamais existé’). I am a big fan of the statement because it is radical enough to make me truly reflect on whether I subscribe to it or not.\nIf we were to take it on its own, it easily sounds even a bit crazy. We have all cared deeply for, loved even, people who are no longer in our lives. Thus, to blatantly claim a sentiment never existed sounds unnatural. But Dupouy and Žižek show its significance, of course, inextricably linked to the context of Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo.\nI am yet to watch it (I shall!), but since this is the third time I read about it, I feel quasi-qualified to give a briefing. Let’s say, what matters is there is Madeleine whom the main guy, Scottie, was in love with but has lost. Then, he recreated her in another woman - Judy, who was a fake. At the end of the film, Judy is revealed to have been the real Madeleine and the original Madeleine to have been a fake. Here, this is as simple as I could do it!\nWhat this loop shows is quite literally Madeleine possessed property x (being Madeleine) until time t (until she dies), but when we reveal at another time t2 Madeleine not only no longer had x - she never had it to begin with.\nWhile for most of us (I sincerely hope) such tricky love configurations will remain only on screen, the philosophy behind that example remains pertinent. Once we fall out of love, even in the most amicable circumstances, we inevitably change the narrative and stories we tell ourselves.\nYet, for me it is much easier to see it in the inverted version - falling in love:\nFalling in love changes the past: as if I always-already loved you, our love was destined to be, is ‘the answer of the real’ My present love changes the past which gave birth to it.”\nIf that is so, falling out of love also changes the past by retroactively creating possibilities, recontextualizing reality - making what the past was no longer what it was, the property x never having existed in this exact way. Maybe in saying love never truly was we see an object that had something close to x, yet it never had x.\nAll that said, surprisingly, I found myself subscribing to the quote “When I die, nothing of our love would have ever existed.” Not from a place of bitterness or because I am a vengeful ex but because I believe love rewrites the past, present, and future, and its illogical nature makes even paradoxes to be true. A special shout-out to the good people of Reddit’s r/Žižek for helping me understand this passage!\nSo it’s not necessarily that all love must disappear after death. Stories can be told, like Romeo and Juliet, where the statement “Romeo and Juliet loved one another” makes sense after their deaths. But meaning is never stable, the past is always subject to revision, is something that keeps being created anew.”\npluralofjackinthebox On that long note, the central question Žižek answers is in a way, from the standpoint of the here and now, did what was before ever possess the qualities it enunciated?\nRestoring Madeleine: Modern Gyms or Farm Life? As we saw, the past is revealed to be dynamic and changeable. That being so, do we all not bear a disorienting similarity to Scottie from Vertigo in our denial of both the past and precisely its alterable nature?\nIn wanting to recreate the lost order, to make a new and distinguished Madeleine out of today\u0026rsquo;s promiscuous and vulgar Judy, they [today\u0026rsquo;s ethico-legal conservatives] will sooner or later be forced to admit not that it is impossible to restore Madeleine (old traditional mores) to life, but that Madeleine was already Judy: the corruption they are fighting in the modern, permissive, secular, egotistic, etc., society was present from the very beginning. One can compare with Zen Buddhism: those who criticize the Westernized New Age image and practice of Zen - its reduction to a relaxation technique - as a betrayal of authentic Japanese Zen, forget the fact that the features they deplore in Westernized Zen were already there in \u0026ldquo;true\u0026rdquo; Japanese Zen: after World War II, Japanese Zen Buddhists immediately started to organize Zen courses for business managers, whilst during the war the majority supported Japanese militarism, and so on.\nThis point holds true not only for the “ethico-legal conservatives” Žižek talks about above but for a multitude of cases, in which ideology masks itself as neutral knowledge, opposing itself or being ironically positioned in regards to what is perceived as “common ideology”, the common understanding of the past and so forth.\nThis year, I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” and in a chapter focusing on modern day treadmills and overall gym exercises, I found an intriguing notion. In my case, running on the treadmill or doing an endless series of squats at the gym have both made me question “Why the hell am I doing this?” However, not only in the context of an exacerbated, miserable gasp for air but also in the genuine wonder: Why did we, as a society, end up incorporating such unnatural activities?\nWalking on the treadmill in an enclosed space dedicated for leisure exercise fulfills a physical necessity but also performatively replaces the function of walking in a cultural, political, personal way - as a way to be in the world and create the spaces around us by simply walking. Similarly, many machines in the gym are made to imitate movements habitual for other types of lives - fishers’ rowing, farmworkers or construction workers lifting, and so on.\nAs Solnit points out:\nThe everyday acts of the farm had been reprised as empty gestures, for there was no water to pump, no buckets to lift. I am not nostalgic for peasant or farmworker life, but I cannot avoid being struck by how odd it is that we reprise those gestures for other reasons.\nThere is a perceived “neutral knowledge” here: it is good to exercise in the gym and walk on the treadmill in a life where many of us no longer need to exert physical effort; this is healthy and could theoretically maintain us “in shape.”\nThe ideology behind gyms can simply be viewed as an idea against leading a sedentary life. It’s hard to argue that there’s anything wrong there. However, the same idea also ends up masking the ideological message of “There is no relationship between our muscles and our world! We can cultivate one completely separately from the other.”\nIt is not difficult to imagine people going to the gym five times a week, while in their day to day life choosing to drive even walkable distances and not using the strength and endurance they train for in any actions outside the confined limits of a gym.\nAll that said, I am still “guilty” of going to the gym and surely not because I experience a concrete need in my daily life to do bench presses with heavy weights. While my actions also affirm this world view of separation between body and world, I often at least try to look for some relatedness between the muscles I am trying to work on and my everyday life - for instance, I am particularly motivated to work on muscle groups that help you pull yourself upward, which helps me climb harder routes. Yet, let’s be real - I am far from exercising for any real need or for, like back in the good ol’ days, I would need to be strong and perform hard physical labor!\nThat said, Rebecca Solnit slid in the important distinction of not being reminiscent of a past in which conditions required hard labor (“ I am not nostalgic for peasant or farmworker life”). I am happy she did so because otherwise such nostalgia would have played into an ideological reconstructing of the past. And in a way, I am most guilty of falling into that particular trap: reminiscing about a past Madeleine for a time when people lived “in harmony” with nature (literally never happened!), naturally moving and not having unhealthy fitness beauty standards (also not exactly true, we always had beauty standards that were convenient for some and less so for others) and so on.\nIn the end, Žižek’s exploration of denial and ideology exposes the subtle ways in which we participate in shaping and reshaping our reality, often without realizing it. Whether through love, memory, or daily routines, we are constantly revising our past, our present, and our beliefs about the future. The illusion of standing outside ideology - whether through ironic detachment or imagined objectivity - is itself a form of denial, a refusal to confront how deeply ingrained these systems are in our lives.From the treadmill at the gym to the seemingly small, personal acts of nostalgia or regret, I realize that much of what we take for granted is not as neutral or separate from ideology as we may think. Perhaps, then, the challenge lies not in trying to escape ideology, but in recognizing and understanding its hold over us - acknowledging the loops we live in, and deciding which ones we want to break.\nTo my dear followers, I hope you enjoyed and stay tuned for Part 3 of Reading Žižek where we turn our gaze to yet another surprising ideological apparatus - animated films!\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2024/12/10/part-2-of-reading-zizek-when-i-die-nothing-of-our-love-would-have-ever-existed/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIsn’t it funny realizing the consequences of seemingly insignificant day to day choices? We often consume the narrative à la \u003cem\u003eHow I Met Your Mother\u003c/em\u003e where every tiny event, new encounter, romantic disappointment leads the protagonist Ted Mosby one step closer to the moment he meets the future mother of his children (which would be impossible without every random occurrence beforehand). Well, I feel that I had my own little HIMYM loop closed the other day when \u003cem\u003e[drum rolls]\u003c/em\u003e I finally got on Reddit! And what was the tiny seemingly insignificant step leading to it? None other than me picking up Žižek’s \u003cem\u003eLiving in The End Times\u003c/em\u003e at a moment where I had all of my books packed in boxes.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Part 2 of Reading Žižek: When I Die Nothing of Our Love Would Have Ever Existed "},{"content":"I vividly remember how, during my second year of Bachelor’s in Zoom class, one of my favorite professors mentioned Elena Ferrante as one of the most important contemporary authors to follow in our lifetime. Since a friend and I always took this class together seated on my old uncomfortable couch in front of one laptop, I lurked and saw in his notes he put something along the lines of “read ferate??”\nI, of course, immediately used the opportunity to mock his ignorance and in turn signal my perceived superior erudition and good taste… In addition, the professor who praised Elena Ferrante was one of the people who at that time could, only by acknowledging a thought of mine as not completely foolish, give me a giant self-esteem boost. That said, you can imagine my feeling of validation as I was telling myself “Yes, yes!!! There is something about her, I knew it!”\nI have a very special relationship with the books of Elena Ferrante I have read so far, which are the four books of the Neapolitan Quartet ( My Brilliant Friend being the first and most famous of them) and after this week - The Lying Life of Adults. While I have to admit, the Neapolitan quartet remains my favorite book series ever, her latest work I also found incredibly meaningful and intriguing. It had been a few months since I last binge-read a Ferrante novel and so last Sunday I was genuinely happy to dive back into the complex Neapolitan webs of female relationships.\nComing of Age and Meeting Your Crush Set in the 1990s, at the beginning of the story, the main character Giovanna is a 12-year-old avid reader and only daughter of two upper middle class teachers in Naples. They often invite their family friends over for dinner and discuss Marxism, world affairs, philosophy and so forth. Meanwhile, the kids - Giovanna and the family friends\u0026rsquo; two daughters, Angela and Ida, who are her best friends, absorb the way their parents speak, think, and act before returning to play. One day, in a conversation meant for grownups, Giovanna overhears her father disappointedly alluding to her resemblance to his sister Vittoria. Now, Aunt Vittoria who has stayed in the lower socio-economic class his side of the family comes from, is associated only with the malice, pettiness, lack of reason and even danger attributed to the lower class world of Naples..\nUpon hearing this comparison, Giovanna concludes that her father called her plain ugly as this is what Aunt Vittoria and her world represent - innate and unescapable ugliness that she all of a sudden felt doomed to. Giovanna decides she needs to meet her Zia Vittoria . Throughout the book, Ferrante follows the young girl’s journey from age 12 to 16, which is fundamentally marked by her becoming part of this new Neapol - the poor and religious Neapol of Vittoria and her community. Giovanna quickly finds herself knee-deep in disorienting new mores, ideas and behaviors strikingly different from the ones she had thus far seen from her slightly pretentious secular parents’ education.\nEventually, at 15 years of age, after a dynamic coming-of-age path filled with adult lies, erratic emotions, her parents’ divorce and a tumultuous love-hate relationship with her aunt, Giovanna is taken to church by Vittoria to listen to Roberto. This young man is a theological scholar (or #hotpriest) who comes from the same poor neighborhood but is now an important academic in Milan. Then and there Giovanna immediately falls in love with him.\nFerrante is incredible in chronicling seemingly small life events or even simple conversations that deeply change the character’s life path. From the moment Giovanna meets Roberto, her trajectory and the fundamentals of her world shift.\nHere is where, amongst many other virtues, I find the author doing something very interesting. Giovanna experiences love very intensely. As somebody who is also very, very emotional, I find an impressive soulfulness in a character who is able to feel so strongly. But this immense emotionality comes with the obsessive idealization of her object of desire. She and everybody around her finds Roberto innately extraordinary, intelligent and profound beyond comparison. Vittoria loves him, Giovanna’s father regards him as a the bright future of Italian academia, their mutual friend Tonino praises him:\nRoberto was destined to a brilliant university career. Roberto had recently published an essay in a prestigious international journal. Roberto was good, he was modest, he had an energy that animated even the most disheartened people. Roberto inspired the best feelings. I listened without interrupting, I would have let that very slow accumulation of details go into eternity.\nReminiscent of the Neapolitan Quartet’s Nino Sarratore, Roberto seems to effortlessly have this infatuating effect on people of all ages and genders. And similarly to how Elena spent every waking hour reading books and newspapers in order to be able to match Nino’s intellectual might and perspicacity, Giovanna takes on reading Christian texts and philosophy in order to impress Roberto:\nFrom that point on my heart raced. The fear that I might seem ignorant and unintelligent to Roberto kept me from sleeping and brought me with a step of calling my father to ask him questions about life, death, God, Christianity, Communism, so that I could use his answers, which were always crammed with knowledge, in a possible conversation.\nA Beautiful Obsession? While in The Lying Life of Adults, the female protagonist’s sudden driving force for applying herself in studies, books and questions about world affairs comes primarily from the want to impress a man, I feel that it still captures a very genuine part of the human condition. After all, who hasn’t felt the tantalizing and exhilarating drive to discuss ideas with their crush? Who hasn’t entered a playful back and forth during which everything said by the person you admire is registered and classified as intelligent and impressive, and your only hope is to, through intensive preparation and reading, get close enough in order to keep being a worthy participant in that exchange?\nNobody, only me?\nSure, if women are represented as only striving to become smart in the eyes of their superior intellectual males, that would be wrong. However, Ferrante shows these tendencies in female relationships as well. For instance, Giovanna’s friend Angela admits to often adjusting her taste and opinions according to whatever thoughts Giovanna expresses and Giovanna herself notices how Vittoria’s friend waits for her approval when tipping the toe in any take. Not to mention the dynamic between Elena and Lila in the Quartet, which often consisted of both of them studying, reading and philosophically engaging with the world only to try and match the other’s innate intellect, while always having something that escapes one of them, which they recognize the other possesses.\nThat is why, although I admit the slight unease when female heroines do things to impress men, when reading about Giovanna, Elena or Lila’s studious moments, I too get a surge of inspiration to read and discuss:\nThe Gospels, the father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the tangle of faith and the absence of faith, the radical nature of Christ, the horrors of inequality, violence, always carried out against the weakest, the savage, the boundless world of the capitalist system, the advent of robots, the urgent need for Communism?\nOh, la la! Only if I had a hot academic crush (or hot priest) who magically recognizes my extraordinary innate perspicacity and encourages me to read more about all these concepts!\nEach of those encounters improved me, Roberto\u0026rsquo;s words immediately set off a need for reading and information. The days became a race to arrive at a future meeting more prepared with complex questions on the tip of my tongue. I began to look through the book my father had left me home to find some that might be helpful for understanding. [\u0026hellip;] But understanding what, or whom? Through his perspective was broad Roberto was constantly moving beyond it, he blended together minor examples, stories, quotations, theories, and I tried to keep up, alternating between the certainty that I\u0026rsquo;d sounded like a girl who talks pretending to know and the hope that I\u0026rsquo;d soon have another chance to prove I was better than that.\nParagraphs like this one describing Ferrante’s female protagonists wanting to match the intellect of their counterparts (romantic or platonic) remind me of how I have felt with certain people in my life - some of my professors and friends who inspire me to reflect in new ways and read, read, read. And I often feel conflicted, am I genuinely driven by knowledge or am I driven by a desire to appear smart?\nWhat has been special to me in that particular aspect of Ferrante’s fiction is that it made me see how beautiful this conflicting academic drive could be… She romanticizes the radical vivacity that some people have the power to bring out in you (again, be it crushes or friends you admire intellectually). After all, we all, at one point or another but especially in our youth, put certain people on a pedestal. Is it so wrong to have a crush whom you consider incredibly smart and inspiring and that awakens in you strong emotions? Strong emotions that lead to you wanting to get closer to their inner world and pick on their ideas? Moreover, what I find particularly endearing is the authenticity and acknowledgement of the characters that yes, they do indeed want to use their readings to impress, to bring up in conversations or to rise in status through education and so forth.\nThat said, this aspect of Ferrante’s writing is just one example of what evokes in me genuine feelings and I strongly recommend reading her if you haven’t! If you don’t trust me, remember my Sciences Po professor praised her too. She is incredible in creating complex characters with inextricably entwined lives, women who are strong, emotional and true, as well as worlds that blur the lines of all possible opposites - truth and lies, family and enemies, friends and rivals, lower and upper social classes - everything can always change, go back to its original, or even take another form. Furthermore, The Lying Life of Adults as well as the Neapolitan novels always move through a specific female gaze, which doesn’t give the vibe of “Oh, look at me, Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway, who sits down and writes and is just smart!” It rather shows a new type of female intellectual strength, which is not foreign to self-doubt or softness.\nNow all of that said, somebody find me a hot priest figure to discuss the Holy Spirit and the inevitable fall of capitalism with!\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2024/11/27/the-lying-life-of-adults-my-reflections-on-intellectual-crushes/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI vividly remember how, during my second year of Bachelor’s in Zoom class, one of my favorite professors mentioned Elena Ferrante as one of the most important contemporary authors to follow in our lifetime. Since a friend and I always took this class together seated on my old uncomfortable couch in front of one laptop, I lurked and saw in his notes he put something along the lines of \u003cem\u003e“read ferate??”\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Lying Life of Adults: My Reflections On Intellectual Crushes"},{"content":"What do we choose to live in denial of? One Sunday evening, I picked up a book from the common shelves at my now former apartment in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It was my last night at the place I called home for over a year, so I was a bit anxious before going to bed. Having all of mybooks packed and already sent to Grenoble, I almost jokingly picked up Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times, which was left in the living room by the previous tenant, a Marxist urbanism graduate who now lives in Barcelona.\nUsually, when I start a new book it is either with the hardcore stoic attitude of I shall finish it no matter what or with the idea of dipping my toe with no pressure of actually reading more than a few pages. It was undoubtedly the latter with Living in the End Times but I quickly found myself drawn in - nodding to myself and underlining (with very thin pencil lines, don’t be mad at me).\nAs I am writing this, it is Sunday evening following the abovementioned events and… I have made my way through what may sound like the highly unimpressive volume of 81 pages, or the first section titled “ Denial: The Liberal Utopia”. However, these were dense and meaningful pages that unless I discuss or summarize in writing will end in the big pile of “Things I Read About and Now Sound Familiar But I Can’t Tell You Exactly What They Are.”\nWe have all heard in passing the famous scheme of the five stages of grief or dealing with a traumatic event: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In Living in the End Times, Žižek looks at each stage as a way in which “our social consciousness attempts to deal with the forthcoming apocalypse.” And for him the four reasons (or riders, as he calls them) for the “the global capitalist system approaching an apocalyptic zero point” are: Ecology (approaching environmental crises), Economy (the worldwide financial collapse), Biology (the rise of biogenetics and its transformation of human identity), and Society (widening social gaps leading to protests and rebellions.)\nBut what does it mean to be in denial? Looking at the four points, immediately I feel highly ignorant about 2 and 3, and mildly less ignorant about 1 and 4 but only in a tiny fraction of the Earth. That being so, what is the difference between lack of knowledge and denial?\nIn denial, we are also knee deep in ideology. It is true especially if we think we are not, or on the other hand, if we do believe ourselves militant in our conscious ideological beliefs - we would still be swimming in yet another different pool of ideology.\nIf there is an ideological experience at its purest, at its zero-level, then it occurs the moment we adopt an attitude of ironic distance, laughing at the follies in which we are ready to believe - it is at this moment of liberating laughter, when we look down at the absurdity of our faith, that we become pure subjects of ideology, that ideology exerts its strongest hold over us.\nYou may think “But I am ironic all the time!”, which is my case at least, so yeah - truth hurts. But the idea of ideology having its strongest grip over us precisely at times we are having our little ironic comedy routine is rooted in the feeling or performance of liberation. Let’s say, we are all so aware of the hyper consumerist culture or the hustle culture, compelling us to always buy, buy, buy and do it now, quickly, get up at 4am in order to fit everything we would like to do in our schedules. We may know it’s silly, we may know it’s a capitalist trap. Yet, the mere fact that we have elevated ourselves at the “high horse” of theoretically knowing better to the extent of being able to formulate witty jokes or memes, liberates us from further responsibility. Maybe we feel that we have already done the work, we are not like the other girls and ironically, this is when we get even more imprisoned in ideology. This mental performance of liberation puts us in a place of illusory outside of ideology, the denial of our participation in it or of its reality even.\nThe collective denial, the way I see it, as opposed to ignorance should be seen not on its own but as inextricably linked to the ideological apparatuses at play, which create the structural conditions for its hegemony. This reminds me of a Bulgarian podcast episode I listened to some months ago and still do not shut up about - “Скорост” (Speed) by Vox Nihili (Ratio). One of the two hosts, Lyubo, begins the discussion by sharing that an acquaintance of his recently died in a car accident, which is why he wanted to have an episode about road safety. Yet, all throughout he himself remains very skeptical if such discourse would be even “productive” enough and if he shouldn’t on the contrary use his time and energy for some sort of political organizing, raise awareness through an event etc. On the other hand, the second podcast host, Stoyan, wants to talk about speed instead,and the way it has penetrated every aspect of our lives:\nTalking allows for the space to lower the speed of action and engaging in discussions is actually part of the process that is critically placed in relation to speed, the movement that is against \u0026ldquo;Just Do It\u0026rdquo;. These are the messages that we see all the time in ads and slogans in various forms. What that means essentially is \u0026ldquo;Step on the gas!\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Do things quickly! Don\u0026rsquo;t overthink it, skip some stages and just do it!\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Ride fast or die.\u0026rdquo; You [Lyubo] thinking that talking can be useless is you facing the problem of speed. You are trying to hurry to the next stage. If we weren\u0026rsquo;t systematically trying to be so fast, we would have saved many lives.\nIsn’t that the perfect example of ideology? People tragically killing others (and at times themselves) because of Fast-and-Furious-esque shenanigans on the road is just another face of, let’s say, the cultural messages propelling one to rush through their day and deliver work as quickly as possible. The whole episode, it seems to me, was the most genuine back and forth between Stoyan pointing finger to ideology and essentially proclaiming “Any discussion that is not about ideology would be missing the point!” and Lyubo wanting to discuss something “more concrete”, hence missing the point.\nPerhaps, we are all in denial like Lyubo - when we see a YouTube ad prompting us to donate to help kids in Ukraine, its real ideological message is “Just Do It.” Just donate, help this one concrete kid and don’t politicize, don’t reflect on the complex webs and systems that allow it.\nAnd ironically, even as I sat down to write my blog post I quickly entered another state of krisis stemming precisely from the phenomenon of speed at which I wished to share. An anxiety of writing too slowly possessed me and I ruminated long over the impossibility to publish one text a week with my snail’s pace. Is it not funny that I was knee deep in ideology while writing about ideology? I believe it is, though not at the moment while I was in my krisis.\nAn important message here is that, while we can’t remove ourselves from all forms of ideological messages, performances and participation, we should truly strive to not miss the main point, often well hidden by ideology. If we look at my speed-related anxiety, one could choose to deem it a purely individual issue - like Lyubo, focusing on the concrete. Or, one could choose to regard the situation as the collective question of ideology it truly is. My worries that I am not producing enough content for a given amount of time is part of the problem of speed, which is part of the accelerating nature of capitalism. And while we still need individual band-aids (for instance, me doing breathing exercises or talking to a friend), we need to be looking towards real socio-cultural solutions and the starting point, as Stoyan put it, is “to at least start these conversations and counter culture where we realize speed is not only virtue.”\nI hope if you got till the end of this page, you found something meaningful in my first encounter with Žižek through Living in the End Times, but even if not - pretty please don’t beat yourself up for “losing time”! It is a trap of hegemonic ideology!\nAnd stay tuned for Part 2, where I continue to share my musings on ideological loops, recreating the past as well as the philosophy of modern gyms…\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/2024/11/04/part-1-of-reading-zizek-looking-down-at-ideology-from-your-high-horse/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhat do we choose to live in denial of? One Sunday evening, I picked up a book from the common shelves at my \u003cem\u003enow former\u003c/em\u003e apartment in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It was my last night at the place I called home for over a year, so I was a bit anxious before going to bed. Having all of mybooks packed and already sent to Grenoble, I almost jokingly picked up Slavoj Žižek’s \u003cem\u003eLiving in the End Times,\u003c/em\u003e which was left in the living room by the previous tenant, a Marxist urbanism graduate who now lives in Barcelona.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Part 1 of Reading Žižek: Looking Down at Ideology from Your High Horse"},{"content":"Born in Sofia (capital city of Bulgaria, or Bay Ganyo Land) in year 2000, I made my way to the French capital of Champagne in 2019, its actual capital - Paris, in 2022, and currently reside in Grenoble (known as the capital of the Alps). So, either even the smallest village can find the pretence to call itself capital of something or as they say, we attract what we fear most and my contempt for capital-ism manifests in weird ways\u0026hellip;\nFrom a young age I often found myself in the in-between of things. I changed schools so I felt in between old friends and new friends, went to a mathematics high school but was amongst the few people who cared more about humanities, did a Political Science degree but took all Philosophy electives\u0026hellip; and now, I work at a tech company while still trying to nourish my social science cravings by writing a personal blog! What a c(k)risis, I guess?\nI decided to start this blog for a few reasons. First, I believe writing to be a great way to formulate and develop one\u0026rsquo;s thoughts. Second, I have discovered that blogging, in an effort to be clear, compels me to read with intensity extracts that otherwise I might even skim. And finally, it is not only as a self-centered practice that I think of this endeavour - in fact, there aren\u0026rsquo;t many things that I love more than sharing interesting ideas with my friends, exchanging books recommendations and have new dialogues and perspectives open on my horizon.\nThat said, I also recognize some inherent flaws in the practice of blogging, the best formulation of which I have found so far is by Jonathan Crary:\nThe phenomenon of blogging is one example - among many- of the triumph of a one-way model of auto-chattering in which the possibility of ever having to wait and listen to someone else has been eliminated. Blogging, no matter what its intentions, is thus one of the many announcements of the end of politics.\nWhile I would be beyond happy if people used the comments section, it is fair to say that, as a practice in and of itself blogging is, much like journaling, a narcissistic affair. Yet, I always believe that if we approach things with sincerity, curiosity, a low level of pretentiousness, and a high level of enthusiasm, then we could certainly arrive at a meaningful outcome!\nCome what may, In a Time of Krisis is created to be a space where I genuinely share readings I consider intriguing, my thoughts (even when I don\u0026rsquo;t have the confidence they are particularly intriguing), and hope for readers to find bits and pieces, which encourage them to further read, reflect and participate in discourses!\nBisous,\nKrisi\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/about/","summary":"about","title":"About"},{"content":"Effective Date: March 17, 2026\nLast Updated: March 17, 2026\nThis Privacy Policy explains how inatimeofkrisis.com collects, uses, discloses, and protects personal information.\nThe Services are operated by Royal Palace Media LLC.\n1. 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Contact Royal Palace Media LLC\n30 N Gould St N\nSheridan, WY 82801\nUnited States\nGeneral contact: support@inatimeofkrisis.com\nPrivacy requests: privacy@inatimeofkrisis.com\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/privacy-policy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEffective Date:\u003c/strong\u003e March 17, 2026\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eLast Updated:\u003c/strong\u003e March 17, 2026\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis Privacy Policy explains how \u003cstrong\u003einatimeofkrisis.com\u003c/strong\u003e collects, uses, discloses, and protects personal information.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Services are operated by \u003cstrong\u003eRoyal Palace Media LLC\u003c/strong\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"1-scope\"\u003e1. Scope\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis Privacy Policy applies to personal information collected through \u003cstrong\u003einatimeofkrisis.com\u003c/strong\u003e, including email signup forms, contact forms, and related email communications.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"2-what-we-collect\"\u003e2. What We Collect\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe are committed to data minimization.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor ordinary newsletter or email signup use, we collect only the information reasonably necessary to provide the requested service, which is typically:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Privacy Policy"},{"content":"Effective Date: March 17, 2026\nLast Updated: March 17, 2026\nThese Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of inatimeofkrisis.com and any related pages, forms, email signup flows, newsletters, and content made available through the site (collectively, the “Services”).\nThe Services are operated by Royal Palace Media LLC (“Royal Palace Media,” “we,” “us,” or “our”).\nBy accessing or using the Services, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Services.\n1. 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Contact Royal Palace Media LLC\n30 N Gould St N\nSheridan, WY 82801\nUnited States\nEmail: support@inatimeofkrisis.com\nPrivacy requests: privacy@inatimeofkrisis.com\n","permalink":"https://inatimeofkrisis.com/terms-of-service/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEffective Date:\u003c/strong\u003e March 17, 2026\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eLast Updated:\u003c/strong\u003e March 17, 2026\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of \u003cstrong\u003einatimeofkrisis.com\u003c/strong\u003e and any related pages, forms, email signup flows, newsletters, and content made available through the site (collectively, the “Services”).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Services are operated by \u003cstrong\u003eRoyal Palace Media LLC\u003c/strong\u003e (“Royal Palace Media,” “we,” “us,” or “our”).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy accessing or using the Services, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Services.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Terms of Service"}]