One of the lead ballet dancers in Ukraine was killed in action near Donetsk today. Here he is in Don Quixote several years ago:

This is the kind of people we are losing.

Not nearly as funny but for many years my mother told people that my job is to write mystery novels in Spanish.

On Russian TV yesterday one propagandist said in a trembling voice, “At the beginning of the war we were told that the only danger our troops faced if they took Odessa was that the residents would hug them too tight out of joy. But now… it looks like… that might not be true? Ukrainians don’t seem to want to hug us?”

It took six months of war for one person in Russia to figure this out. These people are deeply hopeless.

We are experiencing a huge spam attack here on the blog. It’s the biggest one I remember in the past 10 years. Somebody is aggressively trying to publish pornographic content here. Obviously, they will fail but how boring.

Things that we come across exist to further our personal growth in the areas where we need it. Take, for example, my translation work. The kind of translation orders I get almost never seek to engage my creativity and deep knowledge of languages. I already have these qualities in abundance, and there’s no personal growth in doing what you are already great at and feeling good about it.

Instead, I get translation work that targets my weakest spots: attention to detail, meticulousness, and orderliness. I’m creative chaos personified but this work doesn’t reward anybody who is not in love with order and tiny little details.

There is a reason why I ended up doing this kind of work at this stage of my life. I might not know yet what it is but it has to do with becoming more careful and organized.