How I was banned from Tinder forever without a right to an appellation.
Mind that russian propaganda is literally everywhere and this is very wrong.
On May 23 russians bombed the biggest print house in Europe, which was located in Ukraine. 7 people were killed and over 20 were severely wounded. A lot of my books were printed on Factor-Druk, and the majority of the books I love, too. As I was writing about this on Facebook and Instagram, I received the warning that a lot of people had already been blocked for writing about what I had mentioned in my post, so I better consider well if I wanted to post it. If the person responsible for this kind of “community safety” at Meta was somewhere nearby at that moment, I would slap them. It’s very wrong that not only has our country been terrorized by russia for years, but also we are forbidden to speak about it in order not to upset the “safe community”. I posted the thing anyway.
...I met my daughter’s father on Tinder. I was just out of a quite toxic relationship and wanted to date no one ever at all. After half of a year at Iowa Writer’s Workshop and pretty tense work on a new book in Kyiv, I went for 2 weeks to Zanzibar, where I realized I’d better find someone to share the cost of hiring the car or the boat to go see places. I used Tinder with the relevant disclaimer: looking for no romance but for friendly company, and met brother and sister from the neighboring hotel, who were happy to share not only the boat and a car, but dinners in the nearby beach restaurants. I forgot there was a Tinder at all, and went back to Kyiv. However, my profile remained active.
A couple of weeks later I was visiting my mother and she asked me what “tender” was. I explained her tender was a kind of competition when companies are invited to bid on a project. Stock buybacks, takeovers, you know. She asked if I was sure and told me the 10-grade pupil girls (it’s 16-17 year-old in the Ukrainian education system) were doing tender on their phones.
I explained to her the concept of Tinder and as I remembered I had an active profile I decided to show her what it was. We had fun, we even saw the husband of my friend and one of my long-ago exes. We did not like them, but then there was a guy