Io Sapsai 🌱

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Don’t get me wrong, Bucharest and Sofia are rather LGBT friendly as long as you know where you’re safe. (I’ve only visited both for a couple of days on a number of occasions). I can’t speak about other cities but the Orthodox Church is really strong in Romania. Bulgaria on the other hand has soccer extremists/fascists who are particularly dangerous and tend to mob on their targets so it’s hard to even find the culprits by the authorities… Not that they even bother unless it’s a murder.

    In fact I had a mob of Bulgarian hooligans in Bucharest of all places yelling “Look dude Rapunzel!” pointing at me (I present masculine but have rather long hair). I felt realy threatened and uncomfortable but I realised they didn’t know I spoke their language and I was in a crowded place so it all passed.


  • Bulgaria is an example. The LGBTQ+ community is discussed only during the annual pride parade. Sofia is rather liberal but the rest of the country is highly conservative. The people in power are likely in favour of marriage equality (or most don’t care that much so they just vote with the flow) but it’s a political suicide given the opinion of the most active voters. If you decided to run a country-wide poll, most people would be against gay marriage. The general attitude is “I don’t mind gay people as long as they’re not in my face”. Except many have stronger opinions than that. Especially men.

    Speaking of men, the Balkan macho culture created a fear of gay people (literal homophobia). On a regular basis I hear men speaking about being afraid of being raped by gay men in certain situations (think massage rooms, men’s locker rooms, bars).

    Football hooligan extremists are especially dangerous because they go on witch hunts for marginalized groups and would attack (and sometimes murder) anyone who looks gay, Turkish, ir has a darker skin colour just for sport. There are still partly unresolved murders of LGBT youth commited a decade ago.

    In fact I’m surprised about Greece, they must be the first ortbodox christian country to legalize same sex marriage and they’re very religious compared to us.




  • It was fun having to go to work yesterday morning. Nothing was cleared up, no way for cars to get to my house so I had to make a trek by foot. This morning was worse because some of the snow had melted during the day yesterday and it refroze. Everything is slippery now.

    One thing outside observers need to know is how incompetent the municipality services are. They knew in advance that this storm was coming. There were warnings all week. It came a day late here so they had extra time. The municipality website showed no information, just some cultural events and an article from two days ago that “the municipality is ready for the winter”. At this point we have a saying for poor organisation during winter time when everyone knows it’s coming in advance:

    “The winter surprised us again!”




  • I soak up trivia, and information about things like a sponge. I work with meds, and I can tell you at least one little piece of trivia about most of the thousands of pills that surround me. I can't let myself interact with an object, and not know what it is, or what it does. Every single songbird that I hear outside, I must know what it is. Every single flower on the ground? I need to know! We've spent an hour on a 10m stretch cataloguing, and identifying every single plant on there, just for fun.







  • Meds really helped me with anxiety (Thank you trazodone) but for personal reasons I’m in the process of going med free. I too feel like I don’t need them at the moment and I’m open to starting them again.

    What changed is my diet and what I do with my free time. Going vegan made me reduce the junk food I consume to a minimum and helped me lose a little bit of weight. I’m a firm believer that eating more whole foods and less processed ones can impact depression and anxiety in a good way. My blood work showed that after supplementation I was on the low end of vitamin D levels so I’ve been deficient all this time. That can also manifest as anxiety.

    For my free time I found a hobby that doesn’t involve screen time. Social media, news, phones are overstimulating for me. Video games also disrupt my sleep and make me overexcited. I do cross stitching, my SO, also an anxiety sufferer found that gardening helps them a lot.