a very balkan february
Feb. 28th, 2025 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isunshowerso in book news i read girl at war by sara novic recently. novic wrote true biz which i enjoyed so much last summer that i've straight up started learning sign language. i'm taking this online course and i've got nobody to sign to so i don't have any ideas about how well i can actually communicate but i'm having fun. that's beside the point. anyway, girl at war is just as good, albeit for different reasons. it doesn't touch much on disability, instead focusing on the main character's experiences during and after the balkan civil wars. she grows up in zagreb, croatia, and for the first 25% or so of the book we've got this plucky middle-grade character--i mean it READS like a middle grade book for a minute. and then she watches her parents get executed by serbian nationalists and all of a sudden she's 20 years old and living in new york, having been adopted by a family in a metro area i'm actually very familiar with so it was funny to read about her on public transit and stuff. through a series of events she goes back to croatia, reconnects with her childhood best friend, and revisits her activities as a child soldier in the months immediately following her parents' deaths. it speaks, i think, to how you think your life could never be upended and then in a split second it IS. something worth pondering at this point in american politics, haha, hahahahaha, haha, i'm doing great everything's fine why are you asking.
my boss sent my team an email today being like here are several volunteer opportunities in the area and if you get arrested at a protest your job is safe just find a way to let us know you aren't coming in for your shift. it's very possible i'll be leaving this job soon and i had this moment of being like, shit. this new job would NEVER send us something like this and i'll really miss that and have to take a moment to sit with my values around employment. i haven't actually been offered the job yet. anyway.
the other reason this post is titled "a very balkan february" is because national finals, i guess. serbia and croatia are happening this weekend. serbia's was today actually and the results are very funny because the televote winner got like 50% of the televote or something stupid and it lost because the juries totally tanked it so there's probably going to be some drama. on top of the drama about the national public broadcaster's biased coverage of the corruption protests taking place in novi sad that had a good third of the competing artists wearing protest pins/including messaging in their performances. so yknow. meanwhile in croatia we thought they were gonna have good songs this year maybe and they, uh. don't. so we'll see on sunday what happens with that.
my boss sent my team an email today being like here are several volunteer opportunities in the area and if you get arrested at a protest your job is safe just find a way to let us know you aren't coming in for your shift. it's very possible i'll be leaving this job soon and i had this moment of being like, shit. this new job would NEVER send us something like this and i'll really miss that and have to take a moment to sit with my values around employment. i haven't actually been offered the job yet. anyway.
the other reason this post is titled "a very balkan february" is because national finals, i guess. serbia and croatia are happening this weekend. serbia's was today actually and the results are very funny because the televote winner got like 50% of the televote or something stupid and it lost because the juries totally tanked it so there's probably going to be some drama. on top of the drama about the national public broadcaster's biased coverage of the corruption protests taking place in novi sad that had a good third of the competing artists wearing protest pins/including messaging in their performances. so yknow. meanwhile in croatia we thought they were gonna have good songs this year maybe and they, uh. don't. so we'll see on sunday what happens with that.
