The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks. I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance. We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood. Coronavirus: the week explained - sign up for our email newsletter Read more As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that. First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do. You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days. You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it. You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy. You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom… Advertisement You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest. Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes. You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again. You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training. You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all. You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules. You will count all the things you do not need. The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises. Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant. Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month? You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair. You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.#Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce. Many children will be conceived. Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy. Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die. You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU. You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps. You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.#italyItaly

During lockdown, anxiety about our health and the economy was on the rise – and the easing of restrictions has brought new worries. Experts describe how to navigate this periodOn one of the worst days of the lockdown, Kat says, she ended up “in the corner of the room sobbing. My workload was through the roof and I couldn’t do anything with the children because I couldn’t take a minute away from it. And they were upset because they were missing their school friends and not wanting to sit and do maths. It all got a bit too much.”She works in customer services and had been doing her full-time job from home, as well as trying to home-school her two children, while her husband, a gardener, kept working (she also has a chronic pain condition, made worse by stress). There were several times, she says, when she would turn off her phone and go into the kitchen for a cry. Continue reading...#life_and_style#coronavirus_outbreak #mental_health#work-life_balance#world_news

3 weeks left. 🇫🇷❤️

What am I supposed to write in a NIGHT LIFE category, if it’s the last week before finals and all I’m dreaming about is SLEEP AT NIGHT 🤣

1/5 finals done

"So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me, because I, too, am fluent in silence"#Love #couple #couplegoals #photography #Duanemichals #art #blackandwhite Tbilisi

ACBA was pretty cool🧐 didn’t expect this

On that story, the little prince, fell in love instantly with a rose in his asteroid. The little prince care so much to the rose. The rose with its thorns seems defenseless and susceptible- and yet, she shows off her thorns and puts on a superior attitude. But the rose’s vanity and demands cause the heartbreak of the little prince. And thus, he decided to leave its asteroid and the rose. “She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her… I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her…” Just before the prince leaves, the rose said to it’s prince : “Of course I love you,” the flower said to him. “It is my fault that you have not known it all the while. That is of no importance. But you — you have been just as foolish as I. Try to be happy…” On his voyage to the earth, he come across a huge rose garden, and he realised that his roses were not the only one in the universe. “There might be millions of roses in the whole world, but you’re my only one, unique rose.” On the movie adaptation, the rose is the reason why the prince come back to its asteroid even though it’s too late that the rose has dead. “. . . One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. . . . It’s the time that you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important. . . . You become responsible for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose. . . .” The story was telling a beautiful story of love. As the rose, we may take the love that’s being given as granted, and thus, we forgot to ’taking care’ of the love itself. And as a little prince, we may need to go around the world to realise that our rose is the only one because ‘anything essential is invisible to the eyes…’ Even though the rose is being portrayed in the story as a vain, foolish, frail, and naïve creature, the little prince loves that rose. Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.#littleprince #rose #fox #art #love Tbilisi

10 Sex and the City quotes that prove Samantha Jones is the goddess of common sense No smoking in bars. What's next, no fucking in bars?” “I’m done with great love. I’m back to great lovers.” “I'm not going to find my orgasm in this town.” “I'm officially out of men to fuck. I have to get married or move.” “I don't believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party. I just believe in parties.” “I don't really believe in marriage; now Botox on the other hand, that works every time.” “That’s because gay men understand what’s important; clothes, compliments and cocks.” “The sense of power is such a turn on - maybe you’re on your knees, but you got him by the balls.” "We did it with him on top, me on top, me on my side, on his back, on his side, on his face. Have you ever done that? ... It is fabulous!” “The good ones screw you, the bad ones screw you, and the rest don't know how to screw you.”#samanthajones #sexandthecity #fashion Tbilisi

1. Be sure to remove your makeup the night before: When I go to bed with my makeup on my skin looks dryer in the morning. My favorite cleanser is a jelly cleanser by Drunk Elephant. 2. Work out: Even if it’s short and sweet. The flush and redness that comes with working out brings a natural blush to the face. 3. Exfoliate: I always do it before work. It’s important to remove dead skin and bring blood to the surface. I love the Summer Friday’s Exfoliating Mask but I also make my own sugar scrub with olive oil and use it all over my body, face and mouth. 4. Brush your lips: I use my toothbrush to really bring the blood to the surface and make your lips look fuller and a little pinker. 5. Lip Balm: I use an Aquaphorm one. Lip balm is so important to rocking the no makeup look. 6. Antioxidant Serums: Serums are crucial – I love any sort of antioxidant by my favorite is a vitamin C serum by Ceutical, it helps to even my skin tone and make my skin glow. I mix it with an oil, such as rosehip. Another serum I love is Plankton Elixir by Biotherm, it’s regenerating and super moisturizing. 7. Moisturize: Again, crucial. I use Lifeplankton Sensitive Emulsion as its really hydrating. I always take this on the plane. 8. Find a retinol that works for you: I use a prescription one, but you can buy them over the counter too. I feel like this really shrinks my pores and helps with anti-aging. 9. Curl your eyelashes: It opens up your eyes and makes you look more awake, even if you’re not wearing mascara. 10. Brush up your eyebrows: We want our brows looking as full as possible. I sometimes put hairspray on the end of the brush to fix mine. #makeup #fashion #makeuphacks #makeupcare Tbilisi#მოდა