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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Five or six. They’ve discovered it at the same time as my allergies. We were visiting West Germany and the friends’ place we were staying at had cats in every room. My parents saw I wasn’t feeling well so they put me in a smoke-free bedroom (eighties, eh) and when it just kept getting worse they finally decided to take me outside for some fresh air. They had tests performed on me not long after. Inhale/exhale curve + exercise, allergy pokeys and the works, to get the definite diagnosis.









  • Hungary had Russian all the way up to around 1993 as mandatory language classes in elementary grade 5-8 and high school grades 9-12. Starting about 1989 though a lot of schools got the option to replace it with either German or English. Due to the proximity of Austria and Germany, a lot of students opted for German back then. This trend continued until the ubiquity of the Internet, when English gradually overtook German.

    In Germany I had English starting grade five elementary during the late 80s.

    My kids are having English as their language classes in Quebec.


  • I’m a survivor of my beloved who has died twice:

    • Once when she had an asthma induced heart attack and her brain was without fresh oxygen for fifteen minutes. Her brain turned into complete mush, while retaining some minuscule bodily functions like breathing, defecation, pupilary reflex. “Persistent vegetative state” used to be the less apt description for it.
    • Second time after she has succumbed to pneumonia while in hospice. Her mother, the only next of kin with sway over her fate, a religious nut job, kept her alive for four years.

    Where I am trying to go with this is that false hope and selfishness is bad, and if I had the choice, nay SAY back then between keeping her alive or having lungs transplanted into her as an experiment that may establish the procedure to save someone’s life in the future, I’d have chosen the experiment every time.

    I did not have a say in ending her absolutely pointless continued existence though. And she warned me about her mother’s selfishness and narcissism many times before her person as I knew her ceased to exist.

    My point is that love is very much often a selfish act, as opposed to compassion, empathy or altruism. And people often make the wrong choices out of selfishness.