Happy Halloween everyone! I hope you’re having a good day wherever you are, whenever you’re reading this. There are fun times to be had in the spooky season if you look in the right place. Unfortunately, for those living in the wrong place such happiness is harder to find. As I type this from the comfort of this room more children die in Gaza. Earlier today Israel hit a refugee camp with an airstrike because they thought some big shot commander was there. Is his death worth all the others killed in the blast? I don’t think so, and it’s not completely clear if they even got him. Similar atrocities happen elsewhere in places we pay less attention to. By sheer luck of birth I get to watch from the sidelines instead of being directly involved in the vast violence humanity is capable of. Is it even okay to be happy under these circumstances? I guess it kind of has to be. If it is not okay to be happy when so much in the world is not, then when can we?

We shouldn’t look away from what’s happening. Doing so helps enable its continuation. But we don’t need to add even more suffering to the pool. We don’t need to make their unhappiness our own. The pain we experience watching will never match the pain of actually being there. So if you find something positive in your life, I don’t think it’s wrong to embrace it.

Such are my idle ruminations. This is not the post I planned to end this month with. Far from it. But since that one needs more time in the oven this is what you’ll get for now. I’m not going to rush a post just to meet some deadline I made up. It’s my fault, but I’m not going to make you readers suffer a worse post because of it. I assure you I haven’t forgotten this blog in the slightest. There’s a lot of stuff stuck in the drafts at the moment. Some of it will stay there. But I like to think the ones that make it out will be of good quality. A lot of it will be niche, but to be fair that’s pretty much my whole blog any way. So I hope you look forward to it. For the record, there’s more than just posts on the horizon from me. But there’s also posts.