Snow evaporating from a fence on a sunny day

Full moon in the suburbs.

I contain multitudes (Walt Whitman and Amsterdam Light Festival)

Amsterdam wild life (including the funky tree)

(Faceless) nobility buried under Lund Church about a thousand years ago:

They met years after almost loving each other to destruction, two people who each survived by turning into stone, and they spent a polite afternoon being “glad” the other one is doing well and saying they will stay in touch, petrified forever

Took a Pilates class that ended with an unexpected guided meditation, and then she finished with “touch the ground you’re lying on. Seal the experience. Because it happened”, and I liked that word sealing because I wanted so hard for all of it to be true

The coldest Christmas in the last 15 years

… and they’ve been doing that for thousands of years until about five minute ago, when it turned out that apparently humans are no longer required:

www.theguardian.com/music/2025/d...?

How are you not in awe of the fact that humans have been consciously creating music for over 60 THOUSAND years

How cool is it to hang old brass instruments above the bar, each with its own untold history. De Rijp

Selective memory and rewriting history are the biggest pitfalls of every relationship

Yesterday someone complimented me that I was “very Dutch”, and I objected because how many times was I accused (by old friends) of “turning Dutch” when I moved away, as if integrating (in order to survive) is the worst betrayal of one’s True Identity

Someone said in a podcast “Nietzsche was so wonderfully inconsistent”, and I can’t stop trying (and failing) to come up with an example of a wonderful inconsistency, and also wondering what it says about me if I could never in the millions of evers think of any inconsistency as wonderful

Wildlife coming out in the middle of the night

Holiday season is upon us: aerial view over greedy consumerism (Utrecht’s biggest shopping mall)

After a second first date which turned into a confession about how he hates himself, went for a walk with a friend who confided about her psychotic, self-harming teenage son. I’m hurting for people around me, yet can’t want for this day to be over.

Looking up through the glass ceiling (of a tram stop, after a frosty night)

How self-absorbed do you have to be, to give a recording of your voice as a birthday gift?

Suno-generated song instead of an office Christmas speech - what’s the point of a rhymed ode when all I want for Christmas is more free time?

Those unpretentious buildings that quietly stand there for hundreds of years

Amsterdam morning

Walked into a room where an aging Icelandic woman was sitting in what looked like a wheelchair. Felt awkward to reach out to shake her hand which, folded under a blanket, seemed as if she was maybe paralyzed. For the rest of the afternoon, wondered if it was a mistake

Mother’s itch: The offspring is obviously perfect, but the rest of the world occasionally disagrees. Big plans for the future silently collapsing in the background. He might not be as talented as I thought, I whisper while the wave of worry overwhelms me

When a colleague calls you a “humble queen” and you don’t recognize yourself in either of these two words

When someone sends you directions to come to a meeting and they say “right next to the castle” and you think you misunderstood but you didn’t

And just like that, I read online that the (second) biggest love of my life is moving to another country. So much for bumping into him on the street ever again.

The entire time I thought my native language holds my voice… turns out it was English all along. Who knew

An itch that cannot be scratched: when you talk to someone who systematically doesn’t (want to) understand