May peace be with you

To the person who stole my iPod 20 years ago, may peace be with you.

To everyone who uses an inverted “M” as a “W”, may peace be with you.

To my mom, who came home from a workshop when I was 10, telling me she met a trans person, that she pities her, that she’s so glad I’m not like that, and that it would break her heart if I ever became like that — may peace be with you.

To my husband, who simply cannot see the point of separating dark from light laundry, may peace be with you.

To whoever made Webpack, may peace be with you.

To whoever made the ES6 spec, may peace be with you.

To the math teacher who told me to come back in three years when I was 11 after I asked him about a trigonometry problem for a game I was making, may peace be with you.

To the same math teacher who made me so scared of him that I had to throw up before each math test, may peace be with you.

To my brother, who stole and broke my Barbie doll — including the Barbie Foam Bath spray — when he was four, may peace be with you.

To whoever invented boys-only boarding schools: may you have the most annoying itch in your grave that you just can’t reach. Then may peace be with you.

To whoever popularized jQuery, may peace be with you.

To my four-year-old son, who seemingly cannot lie next to me without accidentally pulling some of my hair out — every single night — may peace be with you, little gremlin.

To the entire concept of mandatory military service in Austria: may you become obsolete and disappear forever. Then may peace be with you.

To the caravan leader who wouldn’t let me down from the camel without paying him “a bonus” in the middle of the Egyptian desert, may peace be with you, you shark.

To the barkeep who violently threw me out of that bar in Cairo because I had long hair and “looked gay”: may thy knife chip and shatter in an unfortunate moment. Then may peace be with you.

To the donkey (and its owner) on the train between Luxor and Aswan that snatched my food out of my hand and blew donkey spittle all over me, may peace be with you.

To whoever gave me Rotavirus and made me nearly die (I bet it was the donkey), may peace be with you.

To the old nurse at the American Hospital in Cairo, who stuck the needle into me three times before hitting a vein: may peace and better eyesight be with you.

To my ex, who was an opera singer, may peace be with you.

To the perv who stole my bikini shorts and ran away with them at the beach in Croatia — what is wrong with you? May peace be with you too, goddamnit.

To whoever was responsible for the Internet Explorer 6 event handler memory leak bug, may peace be with you.

To the European Commission that decided mandatory cookie popups are better than a set of defaults decided via browser settings, may peace be with you, you bureaucrats.

To whoever decided that “SS” should be used as the default uppercase replacement for the lowercase “ß” (sz-ligature) in the German language, may peace be with you.

To all the people who made fun of me in school for having shaved legs: go fuck yourself. Then may peace be with you.

To my old boss from a different life who gave us fake, unreachable deadlines so that we worked our asses off, only to tell us “Surprise, we still have two more weeks left!” when we “didn’t make it”, may peace be with you.

To the old fart politician who straight-faced asked me in a city council meeting about biking lanes if I “have my period” because “I’m so agitated”, may peace be with you too, asshole.

To the people who are fighting over whether Live Programming and Live Coding are different (they are the same), may peace be with you.

To the Electrical Engineering professor who spent an hour discussing the dynamics of the biggest blunt he ever rolled with the entire class, may peace be with you. (I bet it already is.)

To whoever thinks their blog is a memex, or a garden, or a thinking machine, or a zettelkasten, or a mind-machine interface, or a … may peace be with you, too ;P

To my endo, who is lovely and amazing but probably the most disorganized person I know, may peace and a sense of time be with you.

To my stepdaughter, who seemingly can drink her water only from espresso cups nowadays, which she must then immediately leave in a random room of the house: may peace be with you.

To fuming me, stuck on a stalled train right now, may peace be with me.

And to you and your prejudices, your biases, your unreasonable fears, your uncomfortable insecurities, and all your internalized bullshit, your little lies, and your big ones: may peace be with you, too.

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