Although we incorporate the “Chinese Banquet” dining option into our wedding ceremonies, ours is primarily Buddhist-influenced and retains the traditional flavour of the local inhabitants. Basically there are monks chanting and blessing, a thronged procession to the bride’s place of residence (usually with a banana tree), and like Songkran you get people wet…
— Salisa to Henry, February 21st, 2026
I’m not a botanist but.. did I see some banana trees near the Kreml? That’s just about the only plant I can identify I’m afraid.
And bamboo of course! After all (la)bubu is a panda ❤️
Be safe today Pootookie! Nice smile for the cameras! […] Bubu watching! (if the whole thing is not too long)
— Salisa to Путуки, May 9th, 2026
That’s what labubu is? Labubu to ledudu?
— Salisa to Путуки, June 3rd, 2026
Solve a real world problem for us, darling. Don’t make me fire you or rage-quit myself because of your murky requirements and non-communication. You’re (le)dudu to my (la)bubu. You’re behind everything and have consistently shown the care, the patience, and the love whereas Anton gets resentful at having to remember a girl’s birthday or something. It’s not even a real competition.
Salisa to World? Shoo! He’s got a tiny pecker! This one right here! Don’t tell anyone! […] Stop him and his tiny pecker! His schlong not be long! His Johnny be tiny! His schlong not be long! His Johnny be tiny! His knob is a nub! His prick a matchstick! I mean, don’t you all see his hands? Barely bigger than mine. Just as delicate with a pinky sticking out while sucking on straws! He’s got T-Rex hands y’all T-Rex hands! T-Rex hands! Tiny Johnson! Tiny Johnson! Stop him and his tiny pecker! His schlong not be long! His Johnny be tiny! Hit him! Hit his tiny pecker! Rid him of his rod of domination! Without a rod he cannot rape! Target the rod to save a bunny! Save bunny from his tiny Johnny! Repeat after me: Save a bunny from his tiny Johnny! Show no mercy to the Johnny! Jab it! Slice it! Lob it! Chop it right off! Eye for an eye! He raped me! His weenie is mine! His teenie weenie is marked for knife LOL His silly family marked for life! His teenie weenie marked for knife! He’s going to hurt pookie for real now! Save pookie! Pookie’s scared pootookie help! Kill him! Kill him! Kill the tweenie weenie! He’s only a tweenie weenie! Pookie not scared of a tween weenie! Smite the hermaphrodite! Smite the male dyke! He’s a dyke in disguise y’all! Dyke in disguise! His beard’s fake! He’s a real snake! His penis is half the size of Tanguy’s wrist! Tanguy, show ’em all your wrist! Tanguy’s got a big hand, man! Should have totally hit that! Pootookie you sent him, didn’t you? As pookie’s treat! You’re real sweet! Show them your wrist! Show them your wrist!
— Salisa to Anton, April 7th, 2026
Fire the missiles! Off he shuffles the mortal coils I’ve gotten so off point! Point is to stop a world war! Bad for business! Bad for everyone! Everyone benefits from his death! Kill the ****** to save the world! Save the bunny, save the world! Anyone a fan of 2000s TV? He’s a Sylar to my Claire! Kill Sylar! Save the world! Bunny no cheerleader! But she will dress as one for pootookie! After he offs the ****** that is! To save the bunny you will have to kill the villain! Kill him! Then bunny turns into a cheerleader! Kill him! Then bunny does a cheerleader photoshoot for everyone! Maxim style! Playboy style! Playboy bunny! In a cheerleading uniform! How fitting! But if pootookie gets to him first then cheerleader only session for pootookie! But if everyone else gets to him first then playboy cheerleader bunny for everyone! Getting sidetracked again. Point is to cheerlead everyone into offing the ******* ****** and ***** ***** and *********** *****! He’s faggoting! Stop him!
— Salisa to Anton, April 6th, 2026
Time to go off gently into the night my Georges! Can’t handle a Lenny! Maybe they’re all Lennys! That would make Westies my Georges! Kill Lennys, my Georges! Kill a bunch of Lennys! Smear them! Smash them! Smite them!
— Salisa to Anton, April 22th, 2026
Did I get like twelve of you killed in Donetsk last week? Flew right into the FSB headquarters 9-11 style? A bit of an escalation, wasn’t it? Boom! A plume of smoke and debris everywhere! For some reason don’t feel bad about that. They wouldn’t bomb the girl school like I asked them to, huh?
I think that was my fault at the end of the day. Bad pick. Had I made a good pick I would have been yachting in a bikini in Sochi by now.
— Salisa to Anton, April 27th, 2026
I’m so big and tough. Can’t even put in the most minimal efforts to make it work with a girl of his dreams to take the heat off his friends and his country. Send this fucking coward to the frontline Pootookie I cannot deal with fucking baby […] Your country will bear the brunt of it but it is what it is. You are what you are. Your heart is weak. You possess no courage. Your brain is pulp. You possess no intelligence. All you do is tweet, tweet, tweet. What a fucking embarrassment to your entire outfit. Anyone wants to fuck me to save your nation? Jesus Christ that’s it You blew it congrats I have no patience for you anymore I’ll summit the Everest for the man I love. But I won’t deal with this fucking twit even if everything’s at stake.
— Salisa to Anton, May 9th, 2026
I can’t not talk to him. I really wouldn’t be able to live with the consequences and grow to hate you. […]
You ping me but not message me, why exactly? I’m beginning to seriously doubt your intention. It’s just a scheme to galvanise and antagonise the West. Nothing more and nothing less. I’m not the insincere one. You are.
At least Anton is real and I can deal with him. But maybe both of you are in cahoots. Both of you pulling the wool over every one’s eyes. How can we ever be sure?
— Salisa to Путуки, May 16th, 2026
On nights when the sky holds no stars, I keep walking on. True love remains my lodestar through these lost and wandering nights.
In moments when dreams ready themselves to be my companion in death, I still hold onto a destination. As long as a faint light lingers at the edge of the sky, I will go on until the last light dies.
I think historically though Russian ladies got less hate for being empowered. Wasn’t Tchaikovsky married to a female physicist? [correction: it was Shostakovich] The revolutionary upheaval of 1917 that led to the collapse of the Tsarist monarchy was started by women who worked in textile factories in Petrograd. And it was on International Women’s day! Now that would be something we all should celebrate.
Did you know that they were the first in the world to legalise abortion? 1920. And literally no feminist suffrage because women’s rights were the bread and butter of the communist philosophy and writings. The Bolshevik government led by Lenin bestowed legal and social rights and equality on his female compatriots decades ahead of the West (voting, marriage, reproduction, economic participation). It seems no gender slant in living out individual “liberty and freedom” in communism vs democracy.
— Salisa to Henry, April 15th, 2026
[In Iran] Men are expected to show their emotions—take Mossadegh’s tantrums. If they don’t, Iranians suspect they are lacking a vital human trait and are not dependable. Iranian men read poetry; they are sensitive and have well-developed intuition and in many cases are not expected to be too logical. They are often seen embracing and holding hands. Women, on the other hand, are considered to be coldly practical. They exhibit many of the characteristics we associate with men in the United States. A very perceptive Foreign Service officer who had spent a number of years in Iran once observed, “If you will think of the emotional and intellectual sex roles as reversed from ours, you will do much better out here.”
— The Silent Language, Edward T. Hall
Let us summarize how the love act contributes to the deepening of consciousness. First, there is the tenderness which comes out of an awareness of the other’s needs and desires and the nuances of his feelings. The experience of tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of isolated selves but a union. In this love act, the lover often cannot tell whether a particular sensation of delight is felt by him or his loved one – and it doesn’t make any difference. A sharing takes place which is a new Gestalt, a new field of magnetic force, a new being.
— Love & Will, Rollo May
In the West, brainy Tanguy would be dating artsy Betty or someone with an equally respectable talent. That’s what makes a relationship, you know. Should I write you a guide to Western romance for dummies?
— Salisa to Anton, May 7th, 2026
The Toast of the Muses, Brigitte Szenczi
Salisa to Anton, May 7th, 2026:
You do know that in both countries you’ve been living in strong traditional gender roles often dictate that men aren’t allowed to display emotions, right? I’d say your home country especially. Men be tough, women be submissive. Or at least women don’t appreciate weaklings who show emotions or vulnerabilities. Thus ideals of masculinity undermine and dehumanise men. Marriage reduced to something akin to an economic arrangement and has a weak emotional foundation (emotions aren’t shared or appreciated). Well, the West hasn’t been like that for like decades. Men can cry like babies nobody faults them for being so. Didn’t you see Mark Carney crying at the public memorial of that school shooting by a trans kid last year? Anybody made a big fuss about that? If anything, people praised him. He has children after all. Would be quite psychopathic if he didn’t. And aside from the resurgence of certain far-right movements (anyone surprised Erika Kirk turned out to be quite psychopathic? They certainly didn’t marry each other because they liked or respected each other that’s for sure), The West for the most part has certainly been deconstructing gender ideals or has now completely deconstructed them. None of my Western partners so anal about appearing “sensitive” or full of feelings, even a few generations before me. How do you think love develops?
So I don’t understand why every time I read your writing there is a consistent undercurrent in the subtext promoting the “new-fangled” fad of men giving into their emotions and women embracing them. It would be very new and subversive like half a century ago probably. You’re writing for the wrong audience, or rather in the wrong language. I’d say that despite the Japanese still having strong gender expectations in the social and economic realms men can still have whimsies and write poesies. Culturally Japanese men aren’t so anal about it and are privately and quietly individualistic. They are as weird and wacky as they come. So you shouldn’t be crafting your messages in Japanese either. As far as I know there are sub-tropes in Japanese anime about strong silent women and sensitive romantic men. My Thai ex filled me in on this ages ago but I forget about them now. So despite sexualising and trivialising women in a lot of cases the Japanese certainly have no illusions about women… Or men for that matter. I’d fault them for being in their heads too much.
It’s just a bit insulting when you write with the presumption that your audience shares your worldview, that’s all. It’s so outdated these days. I’d say that the West started embracing the emotional complexity and sensitivity of men since the days of Shakespeare (if he in fact turns out to be a man and not a woman). Don’t you know his love sonnets? Read British poetry in the last two hundred years. Some of the greatest love verses written by male poets. Anybody made a big fuss about that? This is why it helps to be well-rounded. Coleridge, Shelley, Keats a sensitive bunch with deep, expansive interiority. Sturm and Drang in Germany or Prussia at the time? Anyone made fun of Goethe for writing Werther in his prime? Or Werther for being such a “simp” in that story? Seriously, stop being such an ignoramus pretending that your culture speaks for the whole world. One great thing you can do since you are trilingual is to popularise the lyrical literature so famous in Europe in your native tongue. They say that Shakespeare “invented” psychological language that made it possible for us to explore the complex mental landscape of human emotions and struggles and morality for the first time. Harold Bloom I think. The Brits would know what I’m talking about. When you read great European and American writers and poets, you can tell there is such a big inner expanse and interiority to them. In your case, your native culture constrains you.
That, or stop caring what your culture tells you. I give my own culture a big middle finger since I was 15. Why are you acting like a wimp and let benighted men entrain your thinking? If I have to describe you in one word, I’d say “conformist”. You are very conforming after all despite using the word “normie” at times. You care too much what other people think. Fundamentally we are too different. I’m a radicalist (in some ways) and obviously so is Pootookie.
I was in one of the largest bookshops in Moscow a month ago and one curious thing I got was an aisle full of translated detective stories. Seriously? Of all the great English literature, you guys just dig Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, huh? Do you know that Shakespeare became very popular in Germany and a cornerstone of their literature as early as the 18th century?
And on the French side we all know their greatest export Rimbaud and Verlaine were lovers. Anybody made a big fuss about that? I read Musset’s Confession of a Child of the Century a year ago and it was an absolute masterpiece. I recommend you read it. I mentioned it in my journal that it’s a parallel to our story. I’d like to hear what you think.
[…]
Ever read Seducer’s Diary by Kierkegaard? That’s an equally interesting interpretation of you as Musset’s Octave and Brigette. Either way I profess my lack of interests in you.
And to be totally fair now that the storm of the vertiginous cycle has passed.. I was indeed a bit “cute and silly” with my domestic acting out. I tore up in half a Russian travel guide I ordered off Shopee a few weeks ago (the introduction by the author was decorated with the quote: “the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures” and on one page right next to the photo of the Kremlin a Moscow map was featured and it was a close-up look around the Arbat Street and in the centre of it was a destination pin that says “ร้าน Alice in Wonderland” which might have gone defunct now since the book came out in late 2019, October to be exact) and threw it on the floor downstairs where Lola and Baby can be found lounging about while fuming out the words, “sweetie, your new chew toy!”. A replacement for the shoe box they fished out off the bottom of my bookshelf to sharpen their teeth for maintenance fun which they’d then proceeded to whittle down to almost nothing (a six-sided box to a small leftover piece of cardboard in no time!). So now they’re working on the book chewing it to bits. A hidden camera can monitor their handiwork real-time, isn’t that great? And one can’t say a bunny can’t properly digest leisure & travel books! And did I mention that Lola and Baby are both girl bunnies? A totally important bit of information.
Let me tell you about the dream I had yesterday. It was kinda funny and I was actually horrified about it. I guess now I know what it’s like to commit emotional infidelity in a relationship you can’t get away from or get further on with. I walked past a pond and there was this guy in the water […]. When he emerged I immediately recognised his face. He smiled at me. I knew his intentions immediately so I said maybe we should spend time together. When he stepped out of the water shirtless he turned out to be like 1 meter in height. He then went into his mansion by the pond and said he was going to get washed and changed so we could go for a walk and get something to eat. When he was inside his house he suddenly grew into his normal height. I thought “Alice in Wonderland surely”.
In the miniature sculpture called “Little Gambit”, Little in her white dress and white bulbous cap representing a white pawn – was holding a red flower in her hand facing, well, the Red King (notice that in the 2-panel chessboard paintings, “Pawn’s Gambit” depicts the white side of the board whereas “Surrender of Life” depicts the red side with Little on her knees towered over by a Red Knight).
— Salisa, Journal: July 29th, 2025
Alice and Cards by Vladimir Clavijo-Telepnev
The “playing card”, a thin piece of paper adorned with symbols, holds profound meaning across many dimensions. It is a toy, a game, a marker of class that reflects power and opportunity. In various cultures, cards are used in games of chance, becoming symbols of fate itself.
[…]
In the end, a card is not merely something dealt to us; it is something we fold, bend, and shape into new forms. Sometimes delicate, sometimes powerful, each form carries meaning. Not because it is perfect, but because it represents the choice we’ve made to play it our own way.
It’s not what you get, it’s how you play it.
— Missing Piece, July 2025, Exposition One and Two
Alice, Wake Up! Exhibition view. Moscow, 2025.
The earthquakes that happened at the end of March made my hair stand up on ends. I intuited almost as it was happening that it might have been artificially induced and mentioned in a work meeting that I suspected the epicenter originated much lower than the reported origin at the time. It would have made more sense if it came from the south or the west of Thailand.
— Salisa, Journal: May 9th, 2025
I remember being irrationally annoyed by Markus’s stupid responses to one of our work asides a few days after the earthquake […] I couldn’t tell why but I remember being so angry. I remember thinking at one point: “why can’t they be more like Anton and Andre.. these two random strangers I met on a no-where island in a no-where country in a no-where hostel by a complete chance encounter”. Actually this thought may have worsened my anxiety so much that I checked Sebastian’s feed the first time in months or a year or more .. and that’s when I came across Gwen Robinson’s obituary which then broke the case wide open.
— Salisa, Journal: June 10th, 2025
Anton: whats a pootookie
Salisa: Someone who probably sent a chatty old fella to accompany me on my flight back from Moscow. He was going to be on a connecting flight to Indonesia since he had business dealings there. Hope he’s doing alright. Heard there was a strong earthquake that very next day.
Salisa lohavittayavikant 
