Sorry this is more a rant than anything else.

I spent my teens to thirties feeling so damn lonely, depressed, and horny. Now that I'm in forties, I just feel exhausted all the time. Ya it's work related. Usually I get to school around 6am, and I might finish around 6pm. My job is meaningful, but I feels like I'm sprinting everywhere. When there's no one around, I often loudly groan in frustration, it's really awkward when kids or other teachers see it.

I'd like to read more, see friends more, and do more activism, but often I need to just calm myself down so I can actually get some meaningful rest. Usually I need to consume pointless media in order to feel rested and often need to watch something to sleep. I'm tempted to start smoking weed in order to get myself to that point of relaxation sooner. I probably should exercise more: I stopped when everyone stopped masking in the gym. I have the ability to exercise at home, I just need to motivation.

Every time I get a holiday, the same thing happens: it takes a few days to recover from work, but after 4 or so days I start to feel normal. I can start to do the things I wish I was doing more. I enjoy books again and have more meaningful time with my partner.

I did a good faith search for the 90 000 number for Cuba, and I can only see US government sources and Cuba dissident groups. Cuba's own reports put this at half the number, which puts them well below Amerika.

From here.

Oh shit, I better open a window as the rain has stopped. Also I better grab that book from the bedroom.

NO I'M NOT GOING TO MAKE MORE THAN ONE TRIP

Oh my partner is standing up. Please baby can you grab that thing that's 4 metres away as getting up from the sofa must be avoided at all costs.

I'm tired of you all holding back Palestine.

Stolen from here

My comment: sorry if this is racist, but this has definitely been my experience when meeting Israelis when traveling through Asia. This goes especially for Israelis just off of their conscription tour. They're especially shitty and mean to the locals. To be fair, I've met the random cool Israeli that hates their country and ran away from conscription, but they tend to be the exception.

My first encounter with Israelis was when I was backpacking through South America in my twenties, and I remember being shocked by how consistently awful they all were. I guess after their mandatory military service they tend to go traveling for a bit, and whenever I'd run into them they were reliably some of the nastiest people I'd ever encountered.

They weren't ever nasty to me, though. I am a white westerner, and I never had a problem with them. They were nasty to the impoverished brown-skinned people who were hosting us. They were obnoxious and bullying toward local guides, they'd leave the place in a mess, and they were always trying to screw over the locals for a better deal or extra meals or favors. One time they tricked a hostel into putting up a sign in Hebrew for other Israeli backpackers which said ugly things about our hosts (they told the hostel owner it was a great review), which I only know because they were laughing hysterically about it and told me. They consistently treated the people who were looking after us like they were much lesser than us. Their pushiness and entitlement were just unbelievable.

It was a very educational experience for me. I knew the Palestinians were being treated unfairly because my father had told me so, but I also had a great love of Jews and Jewish culture. I had visited Auschwitz and Dachau and Anne Frank's house in my travels, and I remember having some romantic ideas about kibbutzim. This was my first time directly encountering the reality that there is something unhealthy about Israeli society. Not Jews or Jewish culture, but Jewish Israelis.

Now I see evidence of this on my news feed every day, in the IDF soldiers prancing around in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women, in the AI translations of Hebrew tweets, in the polls which show widespread Israeli approval for the atrocities in Gaza, in Israeli TikTok videos mocking the suffering of the Palestinians, in the Israelis showing up in my comments justifying the worst things in the world in the most depraved ways imaginable.

My encounters with Israelis in South America were an early taste of ugly things to come. Everything I glimpsed then I've been seeing online over the past year. I keep thinking about those obnoxious pricks I met all those years ago, and about how they didn't know at the time that they were giving me very useful information for me to make use of in the future.

When Israel supporters tell you to shut up about Gaza until you've been to Israel and met Israelis, just ignore them. Don't go to Israel; you're a westerner, they'll be nice to you. Go to one of the tourist spots in the global south that Israelis like to visit, one with lots of brown-skinned people who've been colonized by the west, and watch how they treat people there. That will show you what Israelis are really like.