• Awake there dreaming by Budinca (TMA, JonMartin)

╰┈• "It's funny, but in a way it was easier before.

Easier than this — scrubbing dishes and glasses and that one pot Daisy or some previous owner had left in the shed completely encrusted in who-knew-what, doing laundry and fighting with the clothesline outside, talking over meals every day, actually following radio shows, since that was all they had.

Easier when Jon had barely been there, either distant or missing or simply out of reach. Easier when Martin had felt like he himself hadn’t been there enough to matter.

It was just easier to deal with feelings on your own. Martin could casually muse over them as he made tea, then coffee. He could get bored waiting for some government website to load, and ponder them a bit longer. Almost like thinking back on a mystery novel he hadn't yet reached the end of. Not puzzling, not as such, but a puzzle anyhow. Where the pieces kept changing shape — just a little, never enough to become unrecognisable — and yet still fit in the general picture.

Martin had held several iterations of his own feelings in his head for the better part of three years.

Martin was in love. Martin had a crush. Martin had a weird complex that made him want to make everyone like him, even just a little bit. Martin had tricked himself into believing he liked someone. Martin liked the idea of being in love, and had chosen the least likely person to care about it.

All could be true. All could be false."

╰┈• "Oftentimes he wished he could switch his brain just right, so that all his thoughts and emotions came solely in response to what he was offered. Fondness born out of what someone did for him, unlike out of what they might someday do. Crushes that bloomed into something more from reciprocation, not from hours spent alone, daydreaming.

But unlike his poetic tendencies, Martin was slow to catch affection, and fast to lose it. If he didn’t make an effort, he lost interest quickly enough, no matter how much he liked being in love.”

Spirits Podcast Ep. 374: From listerner Emma, they/them, a response to requests from Episode 339, about traditions in our families about names

╰┈• "So I'm from a very traditional Ashkenazi family, and that there's only ever one person with a given name born into the family. Everything gets cycled through every 100-ish years. My English name is after a friend of my mother's, who passed before I was born. My Hebrew name was my great grandmother's, same with my brother and my cousins. Everyone comes from, 'Oh, you are named after so and so. They would have loved you,' type situation.

That brings us to two of my grandmother's favorite Yiddish curses. The first one is, May a child be named for him. And May his name be forgotten.

The second one ties most closely to the concept of memory and grief in Ashkenazi tradition, where the most common way of sharing condolences is to say, 'May their memory be a blessing,' because for as long as somebody is remembered, they are never truly gone. In my family, at least, this is part of the rationale behind recycling names. It allows the stories of our ancestors to be tied into our upbringing to continue into who we then become."