Do you sometimes feel a profound, almost painful reluctance to do something you really must do?

I experience this feeling regularly and I always give in to it. I have never once managed (or even really tried) to fight it. And every time it turns out that giving in to the reluctance was the right call.

Recently, there was a big deadline for a document that everybody was writing for their department. And I just… really didn’t feel like doing it. So I reread an old Ruth Rendell mystery and then made sensationally tasty tefteli. And get this, 16 hours before the deadline we were told that the data we’d been given were all wrong, and we needed to throw it all out and start anew with different data and a new deadline.

I still felt great reluctance and did other things. Worked on a translation, decorated my planner, listened to a few philosophical videos from Arestovich. Two days before the new deadline. . . yes, you guessed it. We were regretfully informed that the new data were also wrong and now we had to wait for the correct and supposedly final data. I’m now well-rested and don’t feel as much reluctance, so I’m not averse to doing the document eventually. I don’t want to imagine the feelings of the people who have now done this excruciating work twice for absolutely no gain. I’m planning to steer clear of them at work so they can’t share their resentment.

It’s been like this my whole life. If I felt like I really needed to miss class as a student, it always turned out that the class was cancelled or interrupted by a fire alarm or something like this. As somebody said, intuition is a shortened leap of cognition. If you really don’t want to do something, maybe it’s a sign that you are better off not doing it.

One more reminder of why we should resist “telemedicine” with all we’ve got. Parents decided to seek a telemedicine diagnosis for a small kid with a penile infection. Being complete idiots, they photographed the poor kid’s penis and triggered Google’s child porn filter. The article’s author is making this about bad, evil Google but there’s a much larger issue in play. “Telemedicine” is a scam. Diagnosing people sight unseen and prescribing God know what on the strength of pictures that could have come from absolutely anywhere is scandalously wrong.

It’s hard to feel bad for the parents who would accept such a bizarre way of diagnosing a small child but there are always fools who’ll agree to weird things and poison the well for all of us.

Every minute I’m waiting to hear if Russians managed to engineer some outlandish atrocity to mark Ukraine’s Independence Day. We are all huddled and waiting. I’m not going to work today. Don’t want to see anyone or answer any questions.

We will celebrate in the evening, once it’s past midnight in Ukraine.

Happy Ukrainian Independence Day!

Thank you, everybody who supports, who stands in solidarity, who prays, and who believes that good will always triumph over evil. Together, we’ll win.