In a Time of Krisis

This Girl Which is Not One

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:25:00 +0100

Spinning and Other Existential Mistakes

Last Friday night, a terrifying existential insight struck me – and it happened during an already terrifying activity: spinning class.

Across 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.

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus once thought – and that is the question of whether life is worth living.

If Everything Is a Sign, Nothing Is : Of Toothbrushes and Men

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 17:18:41 +0100

In A Lover’s Discourse, my boy Roland Barthes describes the miserable trap of interpreting signs:

But 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 […] 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?

All Shit Stays in 2025

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:49:43 +0100

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.

On Writing: My Airplane Musings

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 17:44:40 +0100

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.

All Fours by Miranda July: A Person with an Experimental Soul Should be Living a Life that Allows For It

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:05:00 +0100

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!

The 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.

A Contemporary Lover's Discourse

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:00:00 +0100

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’s Discourse:

Herein 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?

Or to paraphrase it the way Sex and the City protagonist Carrie Bradshaw would have said it: I couldn’t help but wonder… Why am I utterly and ridiculously obsessed with Mr. Big?

Romantasy? Yes, and I Blame Black Salt Queen

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 18:17:01 +0100

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.

⚠️

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!

Sometimes People Just Suck: On Behind the Bastards

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:20:18 +0000

“Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I’m trying to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life, every week.”

It is on this optimistic, high-vibe note that my favorite host, Robert Evans, welcomes listeners. And don’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.

Why Was I Obsessed With the Bulgarian Bachelor?

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 19:34:12 +0000

As I am starting to write, I have no answer in mind.

The 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.

My Thoughts On Nature Part 1: Are Parks Weird?

Fri, 09 May 2025 18:40:41 +0000

“The fact that human beings create such things as gardens is strange […]” 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)

“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.

Doing Less, Worrying More

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:45:08 +0000

You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything writes Greg McKeown in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.

Sure, 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.

Just 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!

Part 3 of Reading Žižek: What if Po Died in Kung Fu Panda and Lacan Was Right About Everything?

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 14:38:31 +0000

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!

Slowly 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…

Ruptures, Apricots, and Geometry: How Three Books Defined My Year

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 18:18:21 +0000

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.

Part 2 of Reading Žižek: When I Die Nothing of Our Love Would Have Ever Existed

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:01:09 +0000

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.

The Lying Life of Adults: My Reflections On Intellectual Crushes

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 20:32:23 +0000

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??”

Part 1 of Reading Žižek: Looking Down at Ideology from Your High Horse

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 12:53:56 +0000

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.

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