It’s Saturday. Slept on a mattrass on the ground next to Bruno’s bed. From all currently available options by far the best one.

We got up at 6 am. Bruno was unstoppable and dragged my mattrass to my study where he then proceeded to watch YouTube kids. Something I lie to myself about and say it’s not the worst, cause he watches everything in English. While he is doing that I am basically his waiter and valet. I get him dressed and bring water and snacks. At least he says please.

I read quite a bit of pages of an excellent German translation of a World War 2 book. Maintenance for my German. Focus training. As you can see I have to see some Return On Investment in every activity I do. This is why I can’t read a book on World War 2 in Dutch. What would I really be learning? Nothing, unless it was a very niche book, only existed in Dutch and had such a unique, valid, perspective it would still teach me something. You can guess that no such book exists.

Here my dormant narcissism kicks in and while reading I do get flashes of other people:

sleeping in, waking up hours later than me, grabbing their phones, scrolling Instagram, and thereby already nuking their own potential for focus or deep learning for the rest of the day. Sometimes wittingly, almost always unwittingly.

We eat pancakes. I down 50 gram of proteins. We talk about yesterday. We went to some playroom and he and his friend Simon played with a girl there who was very excited to have found two boys willing to hang out with her. Her father had the hardest time getting her to go home. By my own estimate the father stayed certainly one hour longer than he had intended.

Other highlights of a week lived in obscurity, with no social media, in a world where the social space, the liminal space I have seen it named this week, has DIED. Meaning that you can move about all you want today, you will not connect with other human beings. If you don’t have a working strategy on apps to get in touch with people or don’t do something where you have to pay a person for a service or they pay you for a service or you are not forced into people’s lives on account of them being your fellow salary hunters, colleagues, you will not make meaningful connections.

Yesterday at 7 am I went to have my eyebrows plucked. The first time ever in Slovakia. In Belgium I used to get that done about every three weeks. Why cause things aren’t so awkward as they are in Slovakia. People around here are tense, I am tense, and we make each other tense. 

Life does surprise at times. Instead of a Slovak lady I get assigned a Ukrainian lady. Iryna from Odessa. By her accent I immediately knew her mother tongue was Russian, not Slovak, so I switched to Russian. Which visibly relaxed her. She was not even impressed that a Belgian in Slovakia speaks both Slovak and Russian. Which come to think of it, I appreciated.  Knowing languages is more like a fun, ice thawing, gimmick than anything that brings any real leverage in this world. Am sure Donald Trump speaks only English and knows fewer words than I do, as he hasn’t read a book cover to cover in decades, I can safely assume. But he has leverage that can run circles 24/7 around Greenland and my leverage allows me to feed one child and have some tiny financial margin left.

Since I do one thing well, namely asking people questions with genuine interest, and without taking what they tell me as an opportunity to lecture them or judge them (I conveniently do that later in writing after I have processed what they tell me) she gets absorbed by her own words and treats my eyebrows longer than intended. For which she apologizes. As if getting better, longer service would be a nuisance.

She tells me she is happy in Slovakia and that she likes Slovaks, because essentially things aren’t complicated here and nobody bothers you. The frozenness I hate and detest so much is a major plus for her.

Yes, if you can be happy in your bubble in Slovakia then Slovakia is perfect, because every Slovak you meet is in a bubble of a handful of people and very wary of keeping that bubble intact and not disturbing any other bubbles.

She talks about the war and finds it insane that so many people are being sacrificed for the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Nothing was gained and a lot lost. She tells me that in Odessa you often have only a few hours of electricity, heating and running water a day. Before it was a thriving tourist hot spot with a strong seaside vibe. She also says that real alcoholism is a Russian thing, that the way Russians do booze is far more toxic than what Ukrainians do.

Note that in my personal experience Ukrainians do not see beer as an alcoholic drink.

I’ve heard Ukrainians say: ‘Am not drinking alcohol today, only beer.’

To my slight shock Iryna doesn’t proceed to pluck my eyebrows, but instead dyes them. She’s so fast I can’t stop her. She’s ready to also dye my beard, but there I can halt her.

This is why it took unnecessarily long.

The good news: you can’t see that my eyebrows were dyed.

She also emphasizes that she doesn’t want to feminize my eyebrows. (And what if I wanted to look androgyn like Mick Jagger in his prime? Would she do it? I don’t ask.)

Again, my baked in obsession with ROI is present and after parting ways with the genuinely friendly Iryna (very unlike the stiffly, reluctantly, performed faux friendliness of Slovaks) I notice myself concluding:

I essentially paid a very fair price for a one hour Russian conversation class with plucked eyebrows as bonus.

I’ll be booking this lady, my new Russian teacher who plucks my eyebrows in class, again.

This is not a joke.

Other little things:

I refreshed my knowledge of Richard Schwartz and the idea that we are made up of parts who have unfortunate strategies to keep us safe. Firefighters, managers, inner critics, protectors, attackers, exiled parts or wounded children… I shared this with several students/clients this week and 2 were VERY interested, the rest only mildly so. The very interested ones were both women. For some reason women are much more eager to learn about the workings of their psyche than men are.

I think it’s because:

– women sense something can be improved INSIDE THEM and want to hear how

– men prefer hearing that something is wrong with the OUTSIDE world and are very afraid to find out something is not optimal inside them

I tried a little harder than in previous months to make my classes fun and to actually teach my students something enriching, not just some language skills. How much language fluency can an overwhelmed 2026 human even acquire? By giving them something nurturing there is a better chance some of the target language will stick.

So this is me at my unhappiest and most unmet.

I feed my mind, I give there where it pays.

It cushions the structural loneliness, the total erasure of eros, the lack of non-fragmented minds to engage with outside of my service role.

There are no orgies to report on, no emotional depth, no aliveness lasting longer than mere seconds, no conversations where I felt seen as a full human being.

Just life among wannabe gym rats, holiday seekers and little, mostly failing, finance projects on two legs (modern humans) with being a father as that one lighthouse in the darkness, and feeding my intellectual curiosity as soothing candy. Yes, candy. Intellect can comfort. It does not give leverage without a product that sells.

And now back to my 800 page book on World War 2 in German. One giant ice cream for my mind. So as not to beat my own head in (I literally tried that a year ago or so, but I have a thick skull and it sets a bad example for Bruno).