Here’s another illustration of why deep focus is amazing. I had to create a document that my university will pay me $600 to make. I hate the idea of making it. I detest that kind of work. But I do want the $600. We are given 2,5 months to complete it because it’s a very complicated bastard with tons of fussy columns and moronic bureaucratic vocab. But I know that I’ll hate my life if I spend a lot of time bogged down in this document.

So I prepared. Dressed up to the nines. Did my hair. Did an elaborate makeup. These are the things that help me get in the zone and that won’t work for anybody else but I found that they really work for me. I know it’s very bizarre to sit in my office alone in this fancy getup but guess what? I did that document in one hour forty-two minutes. Sent it out and was told it’s perfect and all I need to do is sign the paperwork for my payment.

It works, my friends. It really works.

We are safe from this in the US because can you imagine the BLMist potential of this kind of thing?

Everybody else, though, good luck.

To corral the unbearable affects you first need to know what they are. Here’s what we do. Spend 15-20 minutes a day alone with your thoughts. Track down the moment when you start feeling uncomfortable, bored, anxious, guilty, etc. Then write down what happened right before the uncomfortable moment. What thoughts, images, words, voices, etc passed through your brain right before that moment.

As a result of the exercise repeated over the course of a few days, you’ll have a list of your unbearable affects. Then we’ll talk about the next step.

Yesterday at the Oscars the woke, anti-racist Hollywood crowd celebrated and lionized this guy:

https://twitter.com/Jam_0s/status/1635158783617007616?t=kFLMSvVj6jsEW9PO_F-mNA&s=19

Just in case anybody wondered how serious these people are about their anti-racism and how true it is that the Left supports Ukraine.

My sister made ají amarillo. Don’t mind sunflower shoots. I added them for a Ukrainian touch. But the ají tastes very real, unlike the cardboard-tasting stuff sold at “Peruvian” restaurants in St Louis. Extremely delicious.

This is the leadership of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The burly guy in the middle is the Commander-in-Chief, a four-star general. They are all kneeling as the body of an ensign killed in action is being taken to the funeral.

This is a normal situation in Ukraine. Nobody feels too important to honor the fallen heroes. In the meantime, Russia is throwing away hundreds of its ensigns, sergeants, captains, etc like so much rubbish.

It’s a completely different understanding of the value of the human life. And that leads to a different style of warfare. It also leads to a very different society that the two cultures are trying to build.

Most of us have had the experience of somebody significant to us dying. We feel deep pain over the death. For a while, we can’t think of anything else. We cry all the time. Our insides are twisting and moaning.

One can’t live like that indefinitely, though. We have to be there for our kids and loved ones, we must show up to work, we need to find a way to enjoy life. We have to gather up the pain and place it somewhere inside us where we can access it whenever we need but from which it can’t poison everything else in our lives. When we go to the cemetery or look at the photos of the dead loved one, we access the pain, submerge ourselves in it, but then lock it back up and proceed with our lives.

The pain of a loss cannot and should not be erased. It’s our pain, it’s part of us. Our identity isn’t what we look like and how we have sex. It’s made of our losses.

During the grieving process, we find a way to make losses part of our selves in a survivable way. Death of a loved one is just an example. Anything else you perceive as deeply painful works like that. You have to integrate it into yourself and build a space for it inside your mind. If for whatever reason that work wasn’t completed, the grief, the pain, the fear – or whatever else the terrible experience makes you feel – will start leaking out, poisoning the rest of your life.

People aren’t robots. We aren’t supposed to “get over” our losses. Pain is a natural and normal part of human life. That’s why I said before that everybody has these intolerable affects.

If they aren’t boundaried up well and are seeping into our consciousness, it becomes a pretty scary place. So we begin to escape from our own minds. The escape can be effectuated through mind-altering substances or through filling our minds with noise. Have you seen people who are always in their headphones? They are trying to drown out the unbearable affects that are running free through their minds.

The noise people use to drown out unbearable affects doesn’t have to be physical. A barrage of words or images accessed on social media works great to drown out the painful thoughts.

The problem is that trying to ignore or meficate the pain doesn’t make it go away. It only hurts more. Then you need larger doses of the alcohol, the pills, the music, the gaming, the kitty videos or whatever else you use to escape from your own thoughts. This will continue until either you corral the unbearable affects securely or they’ll eat your life.

A nurse is attending a badly wounded Ukrainian soldier near Bakhmut.

“He’s going to be fine!” she says, trying to encourage the soldier. “Look, he’s winking at me!”

“Nah,” mumbles the bleeding soldier and raises his hand to show his wedding band. “I’m not winking. I’m married.”

I’d definitely be more scared of a Ukrainian wife who suspects cheating than of the entire remaining Russian army, so it makes sense.

I was stunned to discover that there are still people who are passionately interested in January 6. They are like aliens from another planet. So much important stuff has happened since, yet they are fixated on that deeply boring non-event. It’s quite extraordinary.

I slept in, and when I finally got up and went downstairs, I found Klara and her 7-year-old cousin perusing a thick tome of Greek myths. This is not a kids’ version. It’s written in the kind of language that even I have to consult the dictionary sometimes. The kids could have turned the TV or a gadget at any time because nobody was supervising but they chose true culture.

They are still reading the book, by the way, and are planning to drag it to the mall where we are going. People keep saying that there’s no need to teach the classics in college because students aren’t interested but it’s not true. Even first-graders dig the myths of antiquity.