“Who would buy the graphic novel memoir of a 30yo dude?” Well, it begins with him being born in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1994 and ends with him dating me, so follow me if you want to sign up for the preorder

I just recorded an interview with Written on the Edge podcast, which was very fun and a good distraction from my grief. Soon Milenko will come over and eat soup and then we will go to Sarajevo and life will go on, as it insists on doing.

My only coping skills are drugs and writing. I should have taken Milenko up on his offer to come over and sit with him while he works, because I sat down to work on my WIP and realized I wrote my dogs into it, and I just can’t right now. Will I even be able to finish this book? My poor dog.

Nancy Janet, you were a very good dog. I’m glad I got to spend the last three years with you. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there with you when you passed. I hadn’t abandoned you. I wanted you to come here with me.

Sure, the world is falling apart and people are the same disaster they’ve been forever. The arc of justice looks straight along the vast expense of time. But I have someone to make chicken soup for, and we’re looking at apartments in Sarajevo.

In the next installment of BiH Will Make Me Fat AF, I present burek, seasoned meat in phyllo-like pastry. You can get a foot long one for like 2,5 KM, which is just over a dollar

It turns out that your body can be perfectly healthy sleeping in batches instead of one long stretch. I’m human chaos rn

Making the mistake of watching Lepa Sela Lepo Gore

On October 14, Colbert & Kimmel will be vaporized before the new golden statue of Charlie Kirk in front of the US Supreme Court Building. I got a contract to sell catsup dogs from a truck for the event, I'm very excited.

At the really “expensive” little market two doors down, got this for 34,43 KM which is about 20 bucks at current exchange rates. You couldn’t get just the coffee for that in the US

My whole life I’ve been clung tightly to my schedule as a way of feeling like i had some control over my life, i guess. I’ve been so anxious all the fucking time, about everything. My blood pressure was dangerously high. Suddenly, when my life is complete chaos, everything is different: I’m calm.

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” It costs a lot less to house people.

This gets a paragraph, if that, in high school US history.

Milenko and I are having these convos about when I get my extended visa, but it has the vibe of the dialogue at the end of Mice and Men. “Tell me about the apartment in Sarajevo, George. The one with the loft where we can play music and ain’t bother no one.” Good shit does happen sometimes. It can.

What if we kissed and dropped liquid in the WWII genocide memorial monument

Definitely not hanging out in my fucking charming Banja Luka apartment with my sexy eccentric artist boyfriend or starting a psychedelic revolution in Bosnia and/or Herzegovina

I have Milenko to blame for the fact I now know there’s a guy who covered Origin of Symmetry on the ukulele

I don’t believe they think they’re sacrificing the economy. They’re rounding up workers for slave camps. Those workers will still be “working”.

Vague for a reason: a guy was working for a company through a temp agency, they wanted to hire him FT. They checked his papers and he wasn’t in the system, though the temp agency was strict and had cleared him. They talked to DHS, who said they’d revoked all work permits from Venezuela, Haiti

What do these dudes think they’re fighting? Do they think anti-fascism protests are just a cute networking opportunity? How does it not register that having lists of dissidents existing might be a bad idea?

Vague for a reason: a guy was working for a company through a temp agency, they wanted to hire him FT. They checked his papers and he wasn’t in the system, though the temp agency was strict and had cleared him. They talked to DHS, who said they’d revoked all work permits from Venezuela, Haiti

I’ll just go ahead and play the part of the timeline cleanse for a while. This is ćevape, and i fucking love it. I love the person sitting behind the plate, also, but he’s a weenis about not letting me take his picture

I can tell you it is not significantly less terrifying to read about this shit from Bosnia and Herzegovina, even though this specific shit was what finally got me to pull the trigger on leaving

Can we hear from some hicky-givers, please? Please reskeet, because i need answers. If you give or have ever given hickies, quick question: why

I really need to learn this language because I need to understand all the good-natured dry Slavic quips that older dudes throw at me whenever I’m out in the world. I understood one so far, when I was jogging and got to the top of the hill and a guy said “svaka čast!” (Congratulations!) but

I want everyone to know that a 500 ml bottle of Coke costs about $0.90 in Bosnia. Also, aqua fresh toothpaste tastes like rosemary.

Thank you everyone for your support. It seems like Nancy Janet is ok for now.

Sure, sex is great, but have you ever tried that moment when you realize you’re utterly in love, and for whatever fucking reason it seems like they are, too

Milenko calls me his weird little American gnome (because I once called myself that). He pronounces gnome “guh-nome” & I don’t correct him. Some day, when he’s talking to some other American woman & says guh-nome, she’ll laugh, & he’ll remember me & know I was laughing every time.

I love Europe because you can just casually drink coffee in some thousand year old dungeon which has now been made quite charming and aesthetic

Arf

This town is surprisingly easy to find my way around I don’t understand. Usually I’m fucking helpless

Kastel, Banja Luka, Bosna i Hercegovina

[violence, DV] you know, if this guy I’m transcribing about had beaten and choked anyone else as hard as he could, saying “I’m going to fucking kill you,” he would be in jail on attempted murder. But it was his wife, in front of their kids, so he’s out on bail on a misdemeanor DV.

Can people please offer me kind words today? I’m not ok

Please witness the wonders of Bosnian parking

I guess here comes my first test of character. One of my dogs back home is very sick and very well might not make it, which means i whisked off and abandoned her when she needed me the most.

There are autistic extroverts i think at the same rate as in the allistic population. The reason people think autistic folks are all introverted is, being a social disability, we pretty uniformly have serious trauma from being rejected and abused around our social behavior. Some of us give up.

Someone tell me why i need a goddamn VPN just to do my job. Washington state court websites just won’t allow me to access them because I’m in BiH

Having been both on the other end of cops’ interview tactics and on the outside looking in while transcribing interrogations, this is SO CORRECT. And yet, please know that these tactics WORK when you’re in that situation. People aren’t stupid for falling for them. Human psychology is very strange.

I’d forgotten how nice it was to have someone to cook and eat meals with. Someone to bake brownies for And 30yo dudes can eat some food, let me tell you Also, ajvar on fries is much better than ketchup

This was not a fucking suicide. www.lipstickalley.com/threads/blac...

This stuff is amazing. Like clotted cream with a slight cheese flavor (I’m guessing from the name you could also get it aged with more cheese flavor) But i mispronounced kajmak once in front od Milenko and so now every so often he’ll just look at me and say “kamđak” and smirk

If I did not have Milenko to help me navigate I would be utterly lost completing any complex task. Some people here speak English of course but not tons. A lot of the ones who do learned on Duolingo which is the only endorsement for Duolingo I’ve witnessed because they speak very well.

volim Banju Luku

I’m really fucking struggling with myself and over the most fucking petty, shallow shit. Why does trauma have to ruin all the best things for me. Why can’t I just be fucking happy? Haven’t I earned that right at this point? Not that one has to earn the right, but still

It’s really interesting* to watch the narrative pivot slightly from accusing neurodivergent people of every deadly shooting to trying to implicate trans people in them. Same rhetoric, same bald untruthfulness in the claims. They’re of course also saying transness is a “mental illness”

Maybe now is not the time to post two people just being happy, but there’s at least the consolation that we both fucking hate having our pic taken. I just wanted at least one with him before he comes to his senses

Bosnian and Herzegovinan party

So the UN has voted overwhelmingly to recognize palestine