Tag: life

• Things Are Getting Pretty Grim Around Here

  This is a personal update, and has a major trigger warning: a lot of heavy shit, massive complaining, and hard knocks situations. But, it’s time to stop being stoic, and start being honest. Maybe that’ll come up with some solutions – flushing them out here, in a blog; because right now I’m out of them.

  I’ve mentioned a few times that we recently moved. It feels like a lifetime ago, but the reality is that it’s only been about two and half months since we got the keys to the place. I guess, when you’re miserable, time slogs along at a snail’s pace. I’ve tried to gaslight myself, as have others: chalk it up to depression, chalk it up to turning 40 this year, chalk it up to the fact that I did not get into a doctoral program I worked three years to get into at the same time as we moved. I tried rationalizing it as something millions of other Californians are going through.

  While all of these may be a little piece of the truth pie sitting at our table beginning to rot, the reality of the situation is that we – my family unit – is in a pretty bad place, and it’s only getting worse.

  (And when I say “sitting at our table,” this is of course a mischaracterization of our home… there isn’t even room for a table in our home that we can all fit at anymore.)

  We Were In The Worst Position To Move

  When we received our notice that our landlord had decided to terminate our lease, we were probably in the worst position imaginable to move. I wrote a letter to them, begging to let us stay just a couple of extra months until the end of the school year – the beginning of summer. I outlined the reasons with total honesty.

  The first was that our now-18 year old daughter was scheduled to have excision surgery for endometriosis with a specialist in San Francisco in the spring, something we had been waiting over a year to get the a-okay on. Requiring us to move at that same time would make both the logistical and financial aspects of that a complete impossibility, after seeing a considerable loss of our income through the first year of the pandemic.

  The second was that our kids and their friends were in years foundational to a kid’s childhood, especially our 8th grader. To rip them out of their communities in that time would, in our view, be absolutely devastating to their mental health.

  The third was that the housing market for rentals was going to be difficult to navigate. We had cared for the home as if it were out own for over five years, and paid our rent in full and and on time without question. Even when we had a 30% reduction in pay for the bulk of 2020. It seemed fair to ask for a couple extra months to find a place so our kids could stay in their community. This isn’t like we are a military family, where moves are expected and this was our choice. It was sudden, it was unexpected, and we were given very little warning.

  In that letter, we also made a number of offers. We offered to pay considerably more in rent to allow us to stay until June. We offered, if they were planning to sell the home, to make it readily available for work, and showings.

  Their response was callous and cruel: to reject our request, with absolutely no reason why. A lot of friends and family surmised that this was because they had planned to quickly get the house on the market for sale. In reality – we learned from several friends we left behind that lived on the same street – it was so one of the landlord’s family members could take the home.

  You all can imagine the result: my daughter’s endometriosis surgery has now been indefinitely postponed. The kids missed out on much of the year’s things with friends, even though I have tried as hard as I could to drive them back for all of them. We were forced to take whatever was available, even though it was far away and a significant increase in our monthly cost of living, our rent alone now constituting 46% of our monthly income, with a host of other additional costs of living where we now live.

  And as it turned out, this was only just the beginning.

  I Had a Premonition

  Originally I thought that the worst of the stress was going to be finding a place, and moving to it. Moving is the absolute worst, and we were doing it under forced circumstances.

  Now I’m not saying that I’m psychic or that I actually believe I had a premonition. But I do often have hunches that turn out right, typically my anxiety piques for a reason, and more than anything I listen to my dreams, because they’re telling me what I already know and don’t want to believe or admit.

  About a week after we moved to our new place – a whopping 45 minutes in the best of circumstances from our old home and our entire lives – I had a bizarre dream about moving, and woke up thinking and the move was just the beginning, the worst is yet to come. In an instant, the reality that I had not been focusing on (just trying to get myself, my husband, my three kids, and my 79 year old dad moved, and the house looking as nice as I could make it) came crashing down on me, and it was true.

  The move was just the beginning, the worst was yet to come.

  For the Kids

  So I’ve mentioned the situation with our 18 year old, but more than that this has put her entire life’s plans into peril. At the time that we were notified of our move, she was being scouted by several colleges to play tennis. But the thought of being that far away from home, and making that kind of a commitment, was too much for her if she had not yet had her surgery.

  The problem now? Several-fold.

  First, and foremost, the surgery requires a significant amount of financial commitment – travel, hotel, the costs of the surgery, and so on. We also will have to go back on a waiting list, which at the moment is over a year long. That, probably, is a blessing in disguise because – as I said – we were totally unprepared financially to move; now financially unprepared for anything medical, dental, or otherwise, to be honest. To be frank: with the exponentially higher cost of living here, and the amount of money it took for us above and beyond our savings to move here, I find it hard to imagine how we will even recover financially from this move, let alone be able to save up for more things years down the road anyway (something I try not to think about too much just yet, because right now it’s about surviving each day). But for now, we’ll stick with… four year college is on hold.

  Nevertheless, she has considered two paths until we figure out the surgery: community college, with playing tennis there; and/or coaching for tennis. But still, we come up against more walls, as the community college with the tennis team closest to us is an hour and a half one way, in good traffic; giving lessons would also have to be done around 45 minutes away, as the only courts near us are already reserved by other coaches.

  People have suggested we just get her a car – a fair proposition, if we are comfortable with increasing our cost of living even further beyond the bounds of what we can afford; except when beginning to explore this, our HOA notified us that we had already reached the maximum number of cars allowed in the community, and any additional vehicles on the premises beyond 48 hours will be towed (see what I mean when I say they hate renters?). And remember that condition she has that requires surgery? She takes medicine for part of each month that makes driving a bit dicey anyway. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, we need to bank on that she’ll need a ride.

  So she is in something of a holding pattern, trying to figure out what to do while feeling entirely helpless to even make that decision. And the clock is ticking – you can’t wait forever to begin the rest of your life, or even your next year. There’s really no winning for her at this time, in this situation, and that we have done this to her at this point of her life is absolutely devastating to me, something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for.

  Our middle child, the 14 year old, seems to be relatively okay. Because of the move, she decided that she was definitely going to public high school back home. And while this seems like a positive thing: she’ll be with her friends, her community she’s spent her entire life with, the school is good, and relatively safe compared to other area schools; for myself I’m trying to wrap my head around how exactly I can manage to commute her older sister to school or work or whatever, plus her to school and high school sports…

  … and also raise my 5 year old. He will homeschool for primary grades, as his sisters did; but that doesn’t mean he should be forced to just be carted around to chauffeur other people all the time. And then, of course, since he’s reaching the age of starting to get into activities himself… where exactly am I to put him in those? Back home, where we hope to eventually return to and where his sisters have lives? Or here, where we really don’t know anyone and it’s not exactly… safe? And the schedules for everything, should I just expect the schools and the coaches and the activity directors and the other families to work around us and our ridiculous situation? How, doing this all – for the most part – alone, am I to do that?

  We’ve explored several options. My husband looked at a few office spaces to use as hubs back home, but none were within our budget, and moreover, most had restrictions about times and who could be there (no little kiddos, which seemed odd). Someone suggested using a family members house as a to-and-from hub. Well first, what family? We have a lot of family, but we may as well live on Mars to them. When we said we were moving, we got little, to no, offers of help. It’s been years since many of them came to a birthday party, a graduation event, invited us to either, or even said “Hello” to us when we’ve seen them at the tennis courts and said “Hi” (and don’t get me started on seeing family members pay little kids we know on Venmo for tennis lessons, when they know our daughter is trying to get her own coaching business going… hurtful does not even describe that one) – again this is one of those topics we can save for another day, and another post. Even so, we are still trying to be COVID conscious, and so I just would love to know how… that would even work when most everyone else has moved on? Because of my dad, we still have to be careful…

  Whatever the case may be, it all comes with a price tag – either a physical one, or an emotional one; and frankly, the piggy bank on both is empty.

  But Wait, There’s More

  But it isn’t just the logistics of my children and their future that make this situation untenable to all of us.

  Because of how few housing units were available, and the competition in the rental market that we were just unable to compete with at the time, we had to take the first place that came available that would approve us and that we could make work, even under dire straights.

  Putting it bluntly: this home is way too small. It has the same number of rooms as our old home, but they are infinitely smaller than the other house, which makes things incredibly difficult; and some are open concept or an area of courtyard with no roof, so cannot be actually used as bedrooms or office/study rooms.

  My dad’s room is on the second floor and has no closet. That’s right: it has no closet, making me think it was an office that the landlords decided to market as a room. He’s getting older, though (he’s 79 and his mobility is starting to strain), so if he’s having a bad arthritis day, I see him literally dragging himself up the stairs, I’m assuming due to knee and hip pain. Also upstairs is where my husband has set up our bed, all of our storage (forgot to mention there is no attic in this home); and his work space. The walkway between the wall and all of that is so tight that you have to walk sideways at some points just to get an Easter decoration out of the closet, shoved between his jackets and t-shirts.

  My son has completely sacrificed a bedroom, and now sleeps downstairs in the largest bedroom with my two teenage daughters. His toys are stored in the garage. Because the room is the largest room in the house (so the natural room to put three people), but only a little larger than the other two rooms upstairs, we had to get rid of his bed. So he sleeps in one bed, and my two teenage daughters sleep in the other. In there, they have their own bathroom, which is good – kids bathroom downstairs, adults bathroom upstairs; except that the lights malfunction, and the landlord refuses to do anything about it, so they have to shower and get ready for the day and in the evening, with the lights off. The flickering is just that bad.

  You all may be remembering that my husband works at nights. Yes, the thing they never tell you about the film industry is that hours are shit. His job in post production marketing is from just before 6 pm every evening, until whenever he’s done working in the morning. He doesn’t like to be bothered by our 5 year old during the day, when he sleeps though; so he locks the door to the room. This, coupled with the fact that all of our stuff had to be stored in that bedroom closet (old DVD cases, papers, holidays decorations), being the only storage to speak of in the entire house besides the area by the laundry in the garage, I have to keep my clothes in bins in the kids’ closet downstairs, and use a rolling garment rack that sort of just roams around the house, to store my clothes. And to sleep?

  

  That’s right, I sleep on the couch. For the first year of the pandemic, I slept on the floor in my kids room along with my son. That was better than this, and more comfortable; but not possible, as you can see the floor through out the house is tile. As the pandemic wore on after that first year, we were able to really adapt our house for the long haul, as it became evident that the government wasn’t going to do anything to return actual pre-pandemic normalcy. But now? Now there is just no option but the couch for me. Every night. And because our house is so small, I can hear my husband working all night, I can hear my dad going to the bathroom at 4 in the morning, and when the kids get up… well then I’m up too. No locking bedroom doors and getting a solid 8, or even 4, hours for this lady.

  We no longer have a laundry room, those hook ups being in the garage. I know that’s fairly common, though it does make it difficult to do laundry for six people when you live in a desert that gets really hot and dry during the day, and where you can regularly look over while sorting your whites from colors to see whatever the fuck this is:

  

  Even the dogs lose in this situation: whereas at our old home they had a nice, grassy yard they could play in; now they have some concrete and a dirt hill in the back. It doesn’t matter that we have that back area, though: the first couple weeks we were here, our duplex neighbor complained to the landlord that our son was giggling in the back yard and playing with the dogs. So, frankly, we don’t go back there much.

  And That’s The Rub

  For the short term until we could find a new home, this seemed do-able. But as the days wore into weeks, it became less and less likely that getting out within months was a possibility. And so, hopelessness and depression has become pervasive to our household unit.

  I haven’t even gotten into the crime in this community, which is something to write a series of blog posts about. We’ve had white collar crime, squatters, drunken people passed out outside the neighborhood gates, a throuple living next door in their mid-60s (not exactly crime, but also not something I want to have to explain to my 5 year old), someone try to break into our home, and, as mentioned before, our crazy duplex neighbor has it out for us something bad. Beyond the complaints about the mere existence of my son and dogs in her general vicinity, just today, we saw her taking photos of our garage when it was open, and later saw in her garage she has a pinboard with photographs of us and our house pinned up on it. This all, in just over two months.

  But again, what even can we do? Can we get out of the lease here? Sure. In fact, we’ve consulted with a lawyer, and it should be easy and cheap to do so. But then what? Having spent our savings, plus recognizing the rental market everywhere right now, it’s hard to see an easy solution. We are not competitive, and have no way to pony up another security deposit, after our old landlord illegally stole ours for nefarious repairs that had nothing to do with our tenancy. There’s no way we can, or are even willing, to purchase a home at this time – it is way beyond our means, and more responsibility than any of us can fathom after everything that’s happened these last few months. Then again, it’s hard to make any decisions when my kids have medical needs I don’t know how to meet, they have educational and social needs that are becoming more difficult by the day; and everyone is literally on top of each other, while I basically do not sleep anymore.

  It’s ultimately a dire situation, and hopeless to boot. And while I don’t have answers, and don’t expect any from you, what I do know is that we can all demand more housing and for our elected representatives to solve this crisis the entire country, and especially California, is experiencing right now. That’s about all I have left to hang on at this point.

  May 7, 2022

  dark satire, hard knocks, hard times, kids, kids mom life, life, Mom Life, moving, parenting, raising kids, social commentary

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• Please Stop Making Roe About You

  Unless you live under a rock, you know that Roe and Casey are about to be overturned.

  If you do live under a rock, my apologies. Last night, a leak from within the walls of the Supreme Court was published in a Politico article, which included the opinion of the Supreme Court, which has effectively taken an internal vote to overturn both Roe and Casey. This will throw abortion and other healthcare rights back to the states, which will have an avalanche of consequences, including the return of back-alley abortions, and an elimination of privacy for everyone. It also, effectively, makes travel even through a state with outlawed abortion a non-option for millions of young women, as even travel through will be subject to criminal proceedings should a woman later terminate a pregnancy that was merely conceived in the state, in passing. Here is a link to that article; if you need to go read it, we’ll be here waiting when you’re done: LINK.

  There is little less in this world quite as grotesque as the actions and words of many within hours of the publication of that article. I am sure more will come.

  If I were to include an incomplete list, it would include:

  1. Men, like Congressional Representative Eric Swalwell, making this into being about him:

  

  2. Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and the DNC/Joe Biden fundraising off the issue:

  

  

  3. People who have been promising to protect women for decades, only to repeatedly fall short of doing so

  

  And the big one:

  4. Men who believe they have a right to pontificate on how women are allowed to respond, react, feel, and vote/not vote on this issue

  And that is, fundamentally, what I am seeing of the most. Men, and a few women as well, taking to Twitter and Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram – everywhere really – to pontificate and bluster about how this is the fault of young people who didn’t vote in 2016, or this is the fault of people, especially women, that are critical of Biden and the Democrats now.

  The problem with that is that it fails to acknowledge history, and the gift that Democrats have been given over and over again over the last 50 years, only to take that gift for granted, much in the way women are often used and abused and then thrown to the side when no longer needed in every day life.

  Even if we just consider the last couple of administrations, since the Supreme Court evidenced itself to be a political body in Bush v Gore, you have to accept that:

  -In 2009, Obama had a super majority in the Senate for 5 months. Prior to this, he had campaigned on codifying Roe into law, and yet as soon as elected, his agenda shifted and this no longer became a priority. With that super majority, nothing was done.

  -In 2014, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked to retire, and she was either too selfish or senile to oblige. People claim that she wanted to wait until a woman was president, but this foolish viewpoint is a grim statement more (in my view) of why the Supreme Court should not be a lifetime appointment; that an age limit should be enforced.

  -In 2019, as highlighted above, Biden campaigned on codifying Roe, much like Obama did. And while he has not been gifted a super majority, his weak leadership has only made the problem worse. When asked to expand the court, he created a commission to study it. After spending our tax dollars to research the issue, the group created a 300+ page document that simply provided a history of the Supreme Court, and issued no recommendation. Since then, the issue has been dropped, mentioned now only in passing when things get bad. Moreover, in fall of 2021, the House passed a bill that would codify Roe into law, and the Senate has remained in gridlock on the issue. Most notable though is that a handful of senators did not even show up to vote on the issue, Biden made no public moves to lead with an iron fist on the issue, and to this day he continues to take zero position in favor of nuking the filibuster – even for a carve out on this singular issue, which they have done before, on military spending.

  And these last 24 hours, the people in power have again shown us who they are. Pelosi and Schumer issued perhaps the weakest joint statement they have ever issued; Biden did much of the same today. It was more “let’s wait and see what happens,” as if time is not of the essence in this issue, as if the clock is not about to strike midnight. Fundraising, because women’s rights are a big money maker; and moving on to their agenda for the day of passing more money for Ukraine.

  In the end, the military and the economy is really what this is all about anyway. If women continue to stop having babies, the economy cannot grow. Right?

  But all of that is neither here nor there, in the final analysis. The damage to this point is done, and now it is only a matter of time before women in this country are subjugated in ways we never even believed could happen. Interestingly, over the decades, abortion statistics have remained static, through illegal and legal times. The only difference, fundamentally, has been whether or not they are safe.

  Then again, were we the ones foolish and senile on this issue? The people in power in this country – the elite oligarchy of Democrats and Republicans, and a handful of progressives who still have more cash on hand than the rest of us – have systematically shown women what they think of us for a long time. There is no universal childcare. No equal pay, truly so. No paid family leave. Women’s healthcare has been on the downslide for decades, with abortion being the final nail in the coffin.

  And it’s more than that. It’s the rise in toxic masculinity that is pervasive to daily life. It’s people saying they don’t want to wear a mask to protect others because it makes them feel “weak,” and “feminine” to care about others, have compassion and express feelings like kindness. It’s feeling threatened when a strong or intelligent woman enters the chat. It’s being a woman and calling the cable company, only to have them ask if they can speak to your husband. It is exhausting to be a woman in America today, this decision by the Supreme Court is more of the same.

  It’s a country of men mansplaining to women how they are allowed to feel and react, and – again – how to vote or not vote in reaction to their fundamental right to choose being taken away.

  Please stop making Roe about you. Please stop posting your hot takes, turning it into your own issues, using it as a fundraising tool, and telling women their frustration with their supposed-allies is invalid. Even if you are an older women, consider that this only symbolically affects you. For young women – women under 50 all over this country – the stakes are much more dire; for you it’s posters and cries to resist, for them it’s life, death, and back alley abortions.

  Consider this: when you tell a young woman who is now faced with the consequences of the world created for them, a woman who has to plan travel around not even going through states that outlaw abortion (unless they want to later on face possible criminal proceedings)… when you tell them that they cannot vote how they want, feel how they want, or react how they deem appropriate, because the Democrats said so and the two party system is just what we have:

  You are doing the same thing that the Supreme Court did by voting to overturn Roe and Casey.

  You are taking away a young woman’s autonomy. You are deciding for her what she is allowed to think, feel, and do.

  Please stop making Roe about you.

  

  May 3, 2022

  abortion, biden, casey, congress, dark satire, Democrats, elections, joe biden, life, lifestyle, mom, political, politics, Republicans, roe, roevwade, social commentary, Supreme Court, women, women health, women rights

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• Personal Responsibility Is Not Public Health

  What kind of a shit show is going on over there at the White House, anyway? The new approach of people taking individualistic, personal responsibility, for whether or not they get COVID, and how they fair with it, is some wild ass horse shit I never saw coming.

  Wild ass horse shit.

  I feel like the Biden Administration, including his COVID Task Force, covered a piece of lumber with rusty nails and beat me over the face with it. Or they’re imploding. Or they’re just giving up and don’t give a fuck anymore.

  Personal responsibility is not public health.

  It’s quite literally antithetical to the word “public,” to the concept of public health. The scope of public health is, of course, to protect the community and the public, not cowtow to airline CEOs and Blue MAGAts that stopped caring the minute they were protected and found out it was just the Blacks and Browns, and the poors, mostly being affected.

  A few problems with their Spring 2022 approach:

  “We Have Solid Leadership”

  No. We don’t.

  We have people that tell us to live with COVID, while giving us no means to do so, or to spell out the risks of it so everyone understands.

  We have people who lead by gaslighting; who say that COVID can be managed safely, while showing the world how they do it without disclosing the vast privileges they have above and beyond what average Americans have access to.

  This is not leadership, and more and more we’re now hearing stories about people getting very sick, because they simply didn’t know any better but to listen to the President of the United States, whose primary focus is to keep you spending money and working more.

  Perhaps the most disingenuous aspect of COVID in the US right now is in the vaccinations. Beyond the lie that we would have an Omicron vaccine by now, or that we could tweak the vaccines quickly, is the scandal of letting data sit for other vaccines while people die. Novavax has been on the FDA’s desk since January, Covaxin pediatric vaccine was denied with no reason; parents are being forced to wait for Moderna so Pfizer has an equal shot at getting product in arms. Did you all know that in the UK they have 6 vaccines? In Canada they have 8. Why do we deserve only a couple, and why are we not getting some honesty with the American people that for the vast majority, they’re as good as not vaccinated at this point?

  Oh I know. Because corporations and the economic outlook.

  Less than 50% of Americans are boosted. 30% of Americans boosted over 6 months ago. The vaccines don’t last forever, Karen… in fact, they don’t even last a year, which means that many people have zero protection; and Omicron BA 1 conferred no protection.

  Did you get that? None.

  

  We don’t have leaders warning people, telling people that now the question isn’t have you gotten COVID, but how many times have you had it? We have no one out in front being frank about the risks of getting long COVID, or a more serious case, with each successive infection.

  If you all read nothing else I have to say, read this: the President of the United States does not give a fuck about you. They tell you you can take off your mask without knowing your personal health status. They tell you it’s safe because they want you spending money, and because some political consultant with his head up his ass thought it would help with the Midterms. They tell you “we have the tools” without funding those tools so that you can have them too.

  And now they make jokes about it, as they did Saturday night. 1 million Americans are dead, millions more disabled; but the White House Correspondence Dinner was a good time to crack jokes at the expense of those victims, at an event held amidst unprecedented springtime community transmission nationally.

  “We Have the Tools”

  No. We don’t.

  They do, and I guess for them that’s all that matters. But in many communities, Paxlovid and other treatments, including the preventative monoclonal Evushield, are still just… not widely available.

  (And also, the United States is urgently studying whether or not Paxlovid and Mulnipovir have a widely observed infection rebound effect, which is fucking great if you want the drugs to be worthless by the fall/winter surge.)

  There is no vaccine for the variants currently circulating, either.

  No improved ventilation, pretty much anywhere.

  But it isn’t even just that. In many areas, testing and vaccinations are gone for the uninsured. The free at home tests have run out, so have the masks you can pick up in the pharmacy. Congress has failed to pass funding for COVID, which we all saw coming when they gutted it from their omnibus budget (more than 50% of which was for military spending) earlier in the year. They always say “we’ll do it later, as a separate bill.” But as with their social spending bill that was burned to the ground by a single Democratic senator from West Virginia: it’s all smoke and bluster up the bum.

  We also don’t have a CDC with integrity, an FDA free of special interest, and a White House COVID Task Force with an actual strategy.

  “We Know What To Do”

  No. We don’t.

  At the same time the White House was hosting a poorly ventilated, mask-less, super-spreader this weekend, Amazon was making the announcement that they would no longer be offering 5 days of sick pay to employees who test positive for COVID 19. As a replacement, they offer 5 excused, unpaid days.

  Personal responsibility as a response to a public health crisis.

  Companies have already been doing this, but Amazon’s official change in practice will be the opening of the dam for the rest of the water to break. COVID protections in the workplace are over.

  If an employee tests positive, they don’t know what to do. Go to work? Or stay home? If they stay home, how will they pay the bills?

  They don’t know.

  If a coworker tests positive, and you have an immune-compromising condition or comorbidity, are you protected? Don’t know. Should you wear a mask? Not sure. Should you get tested? Where?

  No substantive public policy was ever made to address ventilation in the workplace, nor guarantee sick pay to protect others. We have the tools? We know what to do? We have leadership on this? The fuck we do.

  But it isn’t just that. An important tool for people to assess their personal risk – given their own health conditions and vaccination status – is to know conditions on the ground in their own communities. But by and large, states and counties have cut further and further back on reporting. In California, we now only get numbers twice a week; in my county, it’s only on Mondays. Moreover, the CDC completely redefined their levels of transmission, and COVID ACT NOW has eliminated the rate of transmission on any portion of their website (while claiming it’s still available).

  Information is another kind of tool, and it’s being intentionally restricted. Why? I have my suspicions, and I’ll meet you at Applebees to discuss it. (See what I did there?)

  We can talk later until we are blue in the faces about why this is happening, and the real crisis of morals America – nay, the world – finds itself in. For now, we need to focus on the fix. What is the solution at this point? For myself, I’m not sure. I’m doing everything I can to keep my own family safe, but finding it increasingly more difficult to do so when I don’t even know what is lingering on the other side of our front door.

  The Biden Administration has made themselves abundantly clear, and beyond just being about economic interests, I believe it’s about election prospects this year as well. But letting the pandemic reach it’s most fucked up point yet, with more people than ever saying that at least with Trump we had funding (I would be one of them), it’s hard to see how the Democrats can expect to do anything but lose this year. Bigly.

  The consequences of this of course will be disastrous, but what do we do? Sit and lie, gaslight even ourselves and say everything is fine? Or do the opposite: advocate louder and harder for a reverse course, even if it means Blue MAGA cancels us as radical and “anti-vax” (an absurd accusation unto its own that has grown among elite, neoliberal Democratic circles in recent weeks).

  But I am still an optimist on this, probably to a fault. It’s never too late to fix this. To admit mistakes, take responsibility, and kick COVID in the balls.

  There’s that word again though. Responsibility. The government is making damn sure to demand it from us, while making it impossible for anyone to really and truly do so in a way that is ethical and fair.

  And, at the same time, they are running away from any of it themselves.

  You can’t point the finger forever though. At some point, you’re left with no one to point at but yourself. I just hope we change course before that’s all that’s left.

  May 2, 2022

  biden, campaigning, cover 19, covid, dark satire, Democrats, economy, elections, get vaccinated, health, life, lifestyle, mask up, masks, omicron, pandemic, pandemic management, politics, public, public health, satire, social commentary, white house, White House correspondence dinner

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• What If COVID Is The Beginning of the End?

  Of course my big disclaimer here is that I am not a doctor and have no science degree. But, I do believe heartily in climate change, and I would wager a guess that the pandemic caused by SARS-COV2 and all of its variants are actually the beginning of massive and catastrophic climate change.

  We know that the ability for SARS-COV2 to jump so easily from bats to humans, and to continue to adapt and mutate into variants, was accelerated by climate change. This is a fact.

  But what if COVID was actually the climate crisis… kicking off?

  The signs are everywhere. From the inability to get the pandemic under control, the constant mutations that are now spitting out at such a speed of rapidity, every day a huge new list is spewed out by the World Health Organization; to the other emerging co-infections that are wreaking havoc around the world (such as the hepatitis that is mysteriously causing liver failure in kids all over the world, many of whom had confirmed cases of recent COVID and adenovirus). COVID is now the most transmissible virus in recorded history, and it became as such in just under two year’s time. Ebola is also an epidemic again, with the second death confirmed today; animals are seeing their own viral outbreaks, including hemorrhagic rabbit disease, and bird flu has been spreading through out North America for a while now.

  As if this weren’t enough, today China announced its first confirmed case of H3N8 influenza in a human. This sort of just flew under the radar of the news cycle, but anyone that knows anything about avian influenza knows that this is bad news. There are several types that, if they become more transmissible between humans, will obliterate half the human race. This is not hyperbolic either; at least one avian flu cropping up monthly now has a greater-than 50% mortality rate.

  It seems like disease is spreading more far and widely than ever before, and it’s mutating and adapting to be able to jump from animal to human to animal again with increased speed as well. I’ve seen enough documentaries to know that this was to be expected as a piece of the climate changing – our ecosystem is changing, and in many ways falling apart.

  But again… what if this isn’t just arbitrary and minor change, but rather the beginning of the catastrophe?

  Last week, right before Earth Day, several scientists got a little blurb at the bottom of the news screen for chaining themselves outside their office building to raise attention to the pending doom the world faces if drastic measures are not taken. The United Nations then issued a statement saying we have 36 weeks to reduce carbon emissions from every major carbon emitter in the world; and this doesn’t even take into account the real thing not being discussed: methane from commercial farming. (Why is no one talking about this?) Then, on Earth Day, a Buddhist and climate activist lit himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court over the catastrophe descending upon us all.

  And then, everyone just went about their weekends.

  But what if these warnings are too late? Obviously they’ve mostly fallen on deaf ears, and the media cannot be bothered to report on them, or even when they do to do so with the urgency of the message contained. Don’t Look Up wasn’t supposed to be a How To manual, but it sure as hell seems that it is being treated as one. And what if we really are too late? Certainly, I’ve seen some scientists on Twitter suggest that at this point, it’s about survival. I know you’ve all seen some of those takes too. When we look at the way our government is handling COVID at this stage (well, all along)… maybe that’s true.

  Maybe they even already know.

  It’s a grim thought, but when you look at the somewhat-state of nature, post-apocalyptic world we live in today, it’s hard not to see this as the actual turning point. The point from which we realize there is no return. Through the last two years of this pandemic, the world has also seen bizarre weather phenomenon – hurricanes of untold strength, tornadoes where tornadoes typically don’t … land… I’m not suggesting a Biblical apocalypse (though I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if one day we see people shooting up into the sky, should God and the Rapture actually be what’s real).

  I’m saying that what I see COVID as now is the beginning of the climate crisis that scientists have been warning us about for years. And just as the COVID variants changed in ways and on a timeline that defied the science as we knew it, the climate crisis and how it will play out has as well.

  And it makes sense to me – a non-scientist. In the climate catastrophe, everything we knew about the empirical world changes. The true hubris of modern science leads us to believe we know exactly how and when it will all happen, but the truth is: we don’t. COVID reminds us of that. …that science really doesn’t know until after the fact. After it has data it can test with. Like the way economists don’t know a recession has occurred until after we’ve been in it for several months, couldn’t scientists not know the climate catastrophe has begun until after it’s had a while to observe and gather the data?

  This certainly makes sense to me.

  People always say “yeah, if we handled COVID this poorly, just think how we’ll handle climate change!” Except COVID is climate change. COVID has been made worse by the organic processes that result of a changing climate; just as the human behaviors that caused the changing climate have fed into the trajectory of the pandemic. But I think it’s time to delineate between climate change, and climate catastrophe. Between the slide to the end, and the end.

  What if COVID isn’t the slide to the end? What if COVID is the beginning of the end?

  April 26, 2022

  bats, breaking news, climate climate change, climate scientist, cover 19, covid, dark satire, global warming, illness, influenza, life, life on earth, news, pandemic, random post, random thoughts, sars, science, scientists, social commentary, world, world events

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• The Newsletter: Issue #10

  

  So much is going on in the world, and in my world: it’s a little bit of a whirl wind. I’ve been trying to post more in general, keep up on my social media following; and to keep up on this newsletter too. So let’s get to it.

  Around the World

  Somehow I got sucked into the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial. I’m never into these types of things – like ever – but then I see it streaming live on my For You page on Tik Tok, and I’m hooked.

  One thing I think that I’ve noticed above all the details, the commentary, the cutting off the middle finger thing – all of it; is how authentic Johnny Depp is. Between his clarity on specific details of conversations, his bizarre hair dos, facial hair, and attire/accessories, to his remarkable pride in having quit using opioids, Depp – in all his weirdness and classically Depp deadpans – is unapologetically himself. Does that make sense? Regardless of the trial, or how it all turns out, that is what I take away from this.

  Of course the other big obvious going on in the world is that COVID is going masks off-balls out, and yet the government is scaling back its efforts and funding in ways we probably never saw coming, no matter how bad things have been. (Just remember: it can always get worse, right?)

  With variants upon variants cropping up that are just, to many of us, terrifying, it’s hard to really know what to believe. And yet, the doctors of Twitter and the mainstream media seem to have also flown the coop. Some, like Leana Wen from CNN, have gone batshit crazy, blocking major figures in public health, and even Marked by Covid (the largest national advocacy and lobby group for survivors and families of victims from COVID 19) from viewing and reacting to her comments on social media, all the while accusing the world of bullying and harassing her for having unpopularly eugenic views; while others, like Jeremy Faust, have decided it’s time to monetize.

  I find the latter to be, frankly, stunning. This guy started writing a newsletter less than a year ago, and has fewer email subscribers than little old me, and yet he’s still thinking it’s a good time to grift. For $5 more a month than your favorite 99 cent game app on your iPhone, or regular emails from WaPo, you can get, as Faust describes it: “…after I publish, I realize that there are more considerations worth sharing for people who want to go deeper…”

  Whenever I criticize this, people say “running a website isn’t free, Heather.” Sure, yeah, I definitely know that. As evidenced by the website I run, here. But if you are doing something for the sake of public health, monetizing a website that can be thrown together, maintained, used to host your email server, and give you a unique domain, for around $100 a year or less, when you’re a doctor that also makes high dollar media appearances… well, I don’t know… monetizing your very important medical information and advice seems sort of grossly capitalistic.

  But America is a capitalism, and our healthcare is for those with the means only, right?

  One more thing that is absolutely bananas to me going on in the world, of course, is this:

  

  Around My World

  It’s a bit of a shit show in my personal life. We really are not adjusting to the new house well at all. My kids and their entire communities are around 30-45 minutes away from home (depending on the day and traffic). This isn’t a situation where we are like the military, where moves and changes are expected and a part of life. We will continue to get our kids back to our old city to be with friends and their sports and social stuff, it’s just … really really stressful to juggle it all (and the cost of gas doing so).

  Of course you guys all got my email yesterday about Hello Kitty Toaster coming back for a pop in.

  Meanwhile, at our new house, I’ve recently discovered that across from our house is a home that I am 90% sure is occupied by squatters.

  The people that own the home live in Texas for the bulk of the year. They just keep this home to use casually when they visit their adult children in town. Now we’ll save the fact that people that own multiple homes only for one to sit empty most of the year, while the rest of us scramble for any slum we can find to pay 46% of our monthly take home pay to live in, are making me more upset by the day, because these types of practices (their right, or not) have irreparably harmed my family, I still feel something of an obligation to … at the very least investigate.

  I’m finding myself become more and more like Tom Hanks in The ‘Burbs, by the day. I’ve camped out on the living room couch for about two weeks now, waking up in the middle of the night, taking photos of the lights on, searching around the gated and upper-middle income community in which we live for any signs of something amiss… I even considered buying binoculars.

  I’ll keep you guys posted.

  You Can’t Unsee This

  Presented without comment:

  

  STFU Fridays

  Again, with the masks.

  I know, I know, but hear me out: even if you don’t give a shit about masks, you only care about yourself and what you feel in terms of protection, and you are just done with this whole pandemic…

  … you could still keep your fucking mouth shut to those that still mask.

  Monday the mask mandate for travel and public transportation was lifted by some dumb-dumb judge with no public health experience or expertise whatsoever, and the world cheered. (I wrote about it HERE.)

  Within a day, accounts of people being shamed and bullied for still wearing masks cropped up.

  The highest profile person I saw post about it was Trump’s Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, who has – oddly enough – become the voice of reason these last several months. You really know things are bad if any of Trump’s folks are the voice of reason, but we can save that conversation for another day. Adams went to board a flight, and a Delta pilot made some snarky comment about how he should take off his mask and breathe the fresh air. Adams posted about it on Twitter, and the anti-maskers went WILD on him.

  Really? Just shut the fuck up. The fact that these people got what they wanted, but did not stop it there, indicates – at least to me – that it was never really about freedom or their personal choice. It was about an ideology and what the masks represent: weakness, fear, and probably a little bit of racism towards cultures in which face coverings are the norm.

  Gross.

  So to them, I say: shut the fuck up. Just shut your fucking mouth, and cough all over people all you want. You won! At least for now. We’ll all still be there to empathize with you when COVID bites you in the ass, because the data doesn’t lie on the promise that sooner or later, it will.

  One more thing…

  If you haven’t signed up yet, please subscribe for this bitch to be sent directly to your inbox:

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  Happy Weekend!

  April 21, 2022

  Amber Heard, breaking news, California, CDC, celebrities, celebrities they're like us, comedy, commentary, content, content creator, covid, COVID 19, crime, criticism, dark satire, ethics, Facebook, housing, humor, Jeremy Faust, Jerome Adams, Johnny Depp, kids, Leana Wen, life, life with kids, lifestyle, masks, masks off, mom life with three, moving, news, NEWSLETTER, omicron, pandemic, pandemic 19, parenting, politicians, politics, random post, random thoughts, renting, satire, social commentary, social media, squatting, STFU Fridays, suburbs, the burbs, tik tok, Tom Hanks, travel, trends, trump, Twitter, twitter docs

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• Guess Who’s Back Again, Back Again

  No, no, friends. It’s not Eminem this time.

  It’s Hello Kitty Toaster.

  

  Those of you that have been around for a while (and I mean a while) know that I used to refer to my sister in law as Hello Kitty Toaster. The point was simple: she is pointless, a mere novelty in a world that has very little use for her. She is somewhat irrelevant, few people even know she exists. She is vacuous. An eye sore.

  But I digress…

  Well a lot has happened since I blogged about her last, most importantly that she no longer lives anywhere near us (so she’s not usually even a flicker of a thought in my head); and, she and my brother in law are on the outs. The divorce kind.

  They have a kid now, our niece. She’s 7 (so that gives you an idea how long it’s been since I posted about her). You would think that having a child would have made Hello Kitty Toaster grow up a little since the days of outright arguing with me publicly on Facebook over whether or not vegetables are good for you (her position was that they are, in fact, not)… but no.

  I think if it’s possible for people to grow less mature as they age, she is living proof of it.

  So flash forward to now, in the divorce she ended up taking a number of things from their home (not sure she was supposed to do that), and one of them was a television that had originally been at my in law’s house. At some point in time (we are talking close to a decade ago), we had logged in to our Amazon Prime account for our children to watch some tv show or movie on there – a common occurrence back in the days before the pandemic, when people could just get together and hangout without having to worry about killing each other with their breath. I’m pretty sure that in the time between then, and now, we have changed our Amazon Prime password a countless number of times, and yet somehow – it turns out – she was able to log in to our account through that TV.

  How did we find out? Buckle up, this is a doozy.

  About a month and a half ago, after not hearing or even thinking about her for years, my husband received a text message from her that said “Can you and your wife please log out of my Prime, thank you.” This turned into a little bit of a back and forth, where she accused us of using her Amazon Prime account – a little odd, not only because we have our own account, but also because we hadn’t talked to her in nearly a decade at that point.

  Finally, my husband grew frustrated and, at the same time, realized she was trying to actually use our account on one of his parents televisions that she took, and just said “you’re probably on one of the televisions you stole from my brother, you need to use your own account and stop involving us in your issues.”

  Right before he blocked her number, she fired off the doozy, and had the audacity to even demand we give her the Pin to reactivate our account on the stolen television:

  “Ha, thank you, all I want is the pin to let my daughter watch the Sound of Music. Last time I checked when you’re married it isn’t stealing, maybe you need to hop on to my Prime because you have a deadbeat wife and two jobs excuse you. Next time you talk to me with ‘authority’ make sure you aren’t making a fool of yourself, so the Pin please.”

  So much to unpack here, but above all we’ll stick with the fact that Hello Kitty Toaster, my friends, is a fucking psycho.

  The conversation came to an end at that point. We went back to our lives, she I assume went back to hers. Stopped thinking about her anymore until today, when my kids and I decided to watch Bowling for Columbine on this, the 23rd anniversary of the Columbine school shooting in Littleton, CO.

  I logged on to our Prime account from my phone to rent the movie, and lo and behold I saw that my sister in law (well, ex-sister in law) has somehow still figured out how to create her own profile on our Amazon Prime account, hasn’t even code-named it something inconspicuous – just straight up used her name – and that she’s been continuing to use our account since that ridiculous text argument over a month ago.

  

  The. Audacity.

  This time I was able to get a hold of Amazon (both online, and on Twitter) and we were able to remove her device from our account, remove her profile, change the password – the whole shebang. Of course it likely falls short of falling under being defined as fraud in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but I will say I do plan to go through all of our purchases for the last several months, and cross them with our bank statements, to make sure everything matches up.

  There’s a lot more about this situation that piques in my mind as worthy of discussion, though. One is that this woman, Hello Kitty Toaster, has charge of our 7 year old niece for 50% of every week. What kind of an example is she raising this child into? Is she even mentally fit to have that kind of influence over a young child? Certainly this trailer park trash town hillbilly behavior doesn’t warrant an emergency custody order, but the sense of entitlement to other people’s things – people you have not even spoken to or been involved with for close to a decade – seems, to me (in my totally unqualified and unprofessional opinion) to speak to some larger mental health issues that could turn into a problem down the line for this innocent kid of theirs.

  “Guess who’s back again, back again” – for those of you unaware – is Eminem’s ode to himself; how rap/hip hop would be useless without him. Apropos of nothing, Hello Kitty Toaster seems to be one of those people that just squirms her way back in, commanding the room and demanding we all listen to her self-serving bullshit.

  Well I, for one, am done with it. Done with the abuse. Done with feeling like I have to give free rent in my head to people like her. Narcissism is a bad look on a novelty toaster, which is why I’m over it. She can text my husband and call me a deadbeat, she can try to steal all the passwords to all the streaming services we subscribe to (of which there are too many) until she’s blue in the face. I’m over it. She’s been out of our lives for close to a decade, and unlike Eminem, her return is not even occasionally welcome.

  With that being said, I’ll be sure to let you guys know if we find out she made purchases on our account, because then this shit’s going wild…

  April 20, 2022

  Amazon, Amazon prime, comedy, computer fraud and abuse act, custody, dark satire, divorce, family, hello kitty, hello kitty toaster, humor, in laws, life, lifestyle, prime, random post, random thoughts, satire, social commentary, theft

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• This Mask Shit Is Ableist AF

  Do I need to say more than that?

  Yesterday, some Trumpkin in a judge’s robe gave the death blow to the CDC’s mask mandate for public transit. This includes planes, trains, and publicly shared automobiles like Uber and Lyft. Within minutes, companies jumped on board and removed the requirements, Delta even announcing that in its omnipotent authority, COVID had officially transitioned to a seasonal, run of the mill cold bug.

  

  (Newsflash: the CEO of Delta Airlines has zero fucking qualifications to make that call… we are still very much in a pandemic; you don’t get to just declare that shit over because you feel like it one day. But I digress…)

  Naturally, the true ghouls of the United States celebrated en masse. Within an hour, I saw copious amounts of videos go viral on the Internet, of airline pilots announcing over the loudspeaker that people could oft their face coverings mid-flight; and celebratory chants went wild as flight attendants walked through the aisles of packed-in passengers, holding trash bags so that these oppressed people, woefully miserable with thin strips of covering over their gentile and delicate faces, could trash the vestiges of pure authoritarianism once and for all.

  You ghoulish cowards. You make me sick.

  Here’s the thing about the masks, which I guess more than two years into this y’all still don’t get: the mask is not to keep you safe, necessarily. It’s to protect the vulnerable around you. I thought everyone got this around the time Biden was elected but then what hit me like a brick were all the Democrats that also ripped their masks off and raw dogged the air like the GQPers that thought it was some sort of grand scheme to restrict their freedoms. And today, when asked if people should continue to wear masks on public transportation, Biden said “that’s up to them.”

  That’s up to them.

  You can still get and transmit COVID even if you are vaccinated or boosted. With the variants of sublineages, it is now the most transmissible virus in recorded human history. There are people that cannot be vaccinated too, like little kids and people with severely compromised immune systems may as well not be vaccinated even when they are. The shots plum don’t work on them.

  We all get it: you feel protected. I even feel protected, but the bottom line is that there are people that do not. That isn’t their fear; it is not their rationality hedging on thin ice. It’s their own situation, and it is just as valid and worthy of protection or care as everyone else’s.

  Imagine a kid that needs to get chemotherapy across town, and his parents are too poor to afford a car to get him there. The medical bills are too much. That kid deserves to have everyone on public transit masked. For him.

  Imagine a father of five who had a kidney transplant due to a rare disease as a child. He’s immunocompromised and still has to fly for work. He can’t just phone it in or work at home. That man and his family deserve everyone on that plane masked.

  Imagine a child with cancer traveling Amtrak for her Make a Wish, or across the country to get to Saint Jude’s for treatment. That kid deserves everyone on that train masked.

  Of course we all should not ignore the proximity of this to people booking their travel for summer vacations, as well as Midterm elections – where the Democrats and Biden in particular are polling so poorly, it’s a little shocking. At the same time, though, is it really? When you make very specific commitments and are elected on those, and then you fail to follow through on them – preferring to bait and switch with a different, arguably neoliberal and rigidly corporation-focused, agenda, this is the result.

  But to the masks…

  It’s such a simple thing to do for other people, and not being willing to do so speaks volumes about people – either they don’t care what people think, or they’re too stupid to understand what they’re doing to the fabric of their community. Community is not all about you, so this individualistic approach doesn’t fly. I know that when I, and others I have spoken to, see people unmasked indoors in high risk situations, it’s like a neon sign is blinking over the person’s head saying “I DO NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT ANYONE BUT MYSELF.”

  It’s narcissistic and albeit as fuck, all wrapped up in one.

  The worst comments I see on the Internet are the ones that justify the deaths of the vulnerable by saying “well they were almost dead anyway.” No. They weren’t. If it weren’t for COVID, they would still be here, and many more will die unnecessarily for that same reason. It’s fucked up, genocidal in fact, to talk like that about other people. I’ve heard it in person too: early in the pandemic, our neighbors were talking unmasked, and one quipped “shouldn’t we mask up.” The other – a doctor, at the local hospital – said “hey as I see it, the people that are going down with this ship were already headed there anyway.”

  A fucking doctor. What a nightmare this country has become.

  There has to be some middle ground between COVID Zero and COVID is King. But in this increasingly polarized country, is that even possible anymore?

  April 19, 2022

  ableism, ableist, be safe, community, covid, covid19, covid19. society, dark satire, holiday travel, humor, life, lifestyle, mask, mask mandate, mask up, omicron, pandemic, protection, public health, random post, random thoughts, satire, social commentary, society, travel, vulnerable

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• The Newsletter: Issue #9

  

  Welp folks, I’m 40. Fuck everything.

  I can say in all honesty that I never in a million years expected to live this long. I’m not sure why. I feel 100, and also 12. Who knows what’s next? It’s just a number, and to be honest this doesn’t really change anything at all or mean anything.

  Still…

  Around the World

  Not all of you live in California, or the United States, so I imagine this needs a bit of primer.

  In America, we like our United States Senators to be old. And I don’t just mean old… I mean these fucks could drop dead any day. It’s sad, because they should be enjoying their Golden Years watching TV and doing crafts, but these folks have a tendency to get into office and then hang onto it with the life force of Skeletor’s death grip.

  This week, the San Francisco Chronicle published a piece in which several colleagues (as in Democratic Senators) and former aides to United States Senator Diane Feinstein attested to her cognitive decline over the last several months. Those of us in California for whom she is one of our two senators know that her husband recently died, so she may arguably be a bit distracted. Nonetheless the woman is in her 80s (88 to be exact), and as with many of them… aging fast.

  This calls into question not only her ability to serve in her office now – making major decisions on behalf of the American people, but until her term is over, still years from now. She has since issued a statement that she plans to – and claims she is capable of – continuing her tenancy in office; but the rest of us are left wondering… why? Why does a United States Senator choose to spend every last breath of their lives in office for a little over $100K a year and a good parking spot at the airport?

  Especially one like Feinstein, whose net worth now stands above $87 million.

  I – for one – am all in favor of term limits for holding public office. Nancy Pelosi is another, who is 82 years old and running for another two years. These people play games with the lives of over 340 million Americans – from choices about war, to how social spending is (or is not) to be had. And when it comes of an appropriate time to retire, to head to Florida to live out the lives of the Golden Girls (or some similar retired folks anecdote), they instead choose to hang on to office for as long as they can.

  I have my own thoughts, and a lot of others have theirs. On one hand, I do believe you have some politicians who have been doing it for so long that they just don’t know what they’d do in retirement. Or, they had an agenda when they first got elected, and because government moves so slow have yet to finish it.

  But I think the real crux of it, especially in cases like Feinstein and Pelosi, can be found in what they block while in office.

  Nancy Pelosi, as one example, has been opposed to bills that would limit what types of, if any, investments elected officials can make while in office. Unlike our Governor – Gavin Newsom, who placed all of his investments and businesses into a blind trust when he entered public office – many other elected officials go on to hold robust stock portfolios. And whether anyone will admit it or not, they cash in when they are privy to information that will affect the stock market before it happens.

  For people like Martha Stewart, or average schmucks like us, this is called insider trading, and comes with hefty prison sentences. But for people like Feinstein and Pelosi, or the same on the other side like those two Republicans from Georgia that lost in the January ’21 special election, it’s a blip in the news, and no one is ever held accountable.

  Election reform, again, would go a long way to correct this. But then that would require the elected officials to vote for the types of reforms that would stop them from doing all of this, so… I guess we shouldn’t hold our breath on that one.

  Around My World

  Things are getting pretty grim around my neighborhood. The new one, that is.

  We are at war with our duplex neighbor, who is psychotic and has come banging on our door in the middle of the night more than once. She complained to our landlord about alleged noise, and rather than come to our defense and talk to her about her crazy behavior, the landlord decided instead to take her side, warn us about noise (our 5 year old giggling…), and say they were going to do nothing about it.

  So we’ve also had several maintenance issues come up with, what appears to be, just years of neglect of the home. The circuit breaker is outdated, and so our lights all over the house intermittently flicker if more than one light or appliance is on at a time. When we told the landlord, they sent out an electrician and then tried to blame it on us. So we just deal with that and hope no one has a non-epileptic seizure. The duplex neighbor has also made damn sure that our kids don’t play out back by encouraging her elderly mother to chain smoke in the backyard. After one asthma attack by my little guy, that sealed off use of the backyard for us.

  The real kicker is in the pedophile down the street. I thought this guy was a little off, if you know what I mean. His wife pumps iron in the garage like a body builder, and he shuffles around smoking a pipe all day and all night. One night, my 14 year old daughter was just walking the dogs up and down the street, and he started following her. So this guy is a … creep…

  Last week, my husband was heading out on a run one day when all of a sudden he came running in screaming my name. Our house was completely lined with sheriffs and unmarked cars full of guys in suits. My driveway was blocked, and the neighbors all around pretty much acted like it was your average day around here. We saw a K9 unit go in and then come out with a black bag.

  No one left. No one was taken away. Just… the black bag…

  So we’re looking for a way out. Frankly, I’m not sure how much longer we’re going to be able to do it. At least it’s good for some stories?

  You Can’t Unsee This

  I’ve been thinking there’s some haunted presence in this entire neighborhood since we moved here two months ago. I even wondered if the flickering lights through out our duplex unit are actually just a ghost.

  Two nights ago, I fell asleep on the couch in the living room and around 4:45 in the morning woke up to what sounded like someone knocking on the back patio sliding glass door (which runs parallel to the couch I was sleeping on). I dismissed it and went to sleep again, too tired to go to bed; only to wake up in the morning to see that shortly after I had woken up, our front door camera (titled “Christine Watch” for our psycho neighbor) had pinged my phone with a “Human Detection.”

  Except, as you can see, there was no one there.

  

  STFU Fridays

  I think I’ve said this before, but for real this time: shut the fuck about “COVID is over.” It isn’t. Every time you dumbasses rejoice and rip off your masks and start having parties, and shit, COVID comes raging back.

  If you are paying attention, the cases in the United States – as in other places around the world – are beginning again to increase. As are hospitalizations, and the deaths will follow (in fact, in some places deaths are increasing more quickly than cases, indicating woefully inadequate and faulty testing). This is all happening probably because of a relaxing of protection; or more of that seasonal bullshit (although I don’t know any other specific virus that circulates seasonally as in all the time, unpredictably, in every season…). There was also recently a huge outbreak at a political event in DC, in which more than 11% of attendees contracted the virus. That is an alarmingly high number of people to be infected as a part of an outbreak, and to make matters worse the management of the venue refused to disclose how many employees got it to.

  There’s also a new variant, which has mainly gastrointestinal symptoms, so I’ve really enjoyed the dozens of posts in the Facebook moms groups about this “crazy stomach bug going around that also has a cough.” I mean come on, get tested and stay the fuck home.

  And while we’re at it, maybe stop with this “we have the tools” horse shit. Yes, vaccines and antivirals are available, but available is not equal to effective tools that everyone can avail themselves of. Vaccines have limits, too; we know this now. The efficacy of them wanes, even the second booster and even with protection from hospitalization. And antivirals… maybe if you’re a wealthy elite, you have access to them readily. But a lot of people have no access, or limited access; and hardly any insurance companies are planning to cover them (this includes ours, which has it marked as Non Formulary).

  The problem is that the more y’all don’t shut the fuck up with these trite and dismissive comments is you give our leaders no reason whatsoever to continue doing anything, ie funding, the effort. So stop. Even if things are looking better.

  To me it’s like: why tempt fate? Why call it over, say we’re good now, when you just do not know? No one knows, this is a pandemic! A once in a lifetime event! Maybe have some humility and accept you don’t know everything, err on the side of caution, and realize that people exist on this planet other than you.

  That, and shut the fuck up.

  

  April 14, 2022

  40, age limits, birthday, California, comedy, commentary, covid, covid19, Democrats, election reform, elections, feinstein, get vaxxed, humor, life, lifestyle, moving, neighborhood, NEWSLETTER, omicron, pandemic, politics, random post, random thoughts, Republicans, satire, social commentary, society, vaccines, variant, wear a mask

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• The Newsletter: Issue #8

  

  Well anyway, we are getting settled in our new home. I hesitate to call it a home, because when you do that you get attached and if I learned one thing at our old place it’s: do not get attached. Nevertheless, we are settling in at least for now. We aren’t sure how long we’re going to stay here, but we’re making it work in the meantime.

  World’s still gone crazy while my move was going on, so let’s get to it.

  Around the World

  Okay folks, so y’all decided to fuck around with loosening of COVID precautions, and now we are all going to find out.

  Cases in other places of the world – in particular Southeast Asia, Europe, England and Scotland, and Canada – with the new sub variant of Omicron BA 2 are exploding, but what is particularly alarming to me (beyond the US again thinking we’ll go by unscathed) is that hospitalizations in some of those countries are at their highest points of the last two years. This is not good. With symptoms more severe than Omi 1, absolutely no prior infection with Omi offering protection, an R0 estimated by some between 22 and 38… and no one – and I mean no one – giving a literal shit whatsoever about any of us… welp friends…

  What’s so chilling for me is that corporations and the political elite have completely ripped off the veil. Like really, they have shown all the cards in their hand. They do not give a fuck about any of us. At all. They have the tools, so now fuck all of us. Eat Lord Omi and die, right?

  Not this lady, if I can help it. I hope you all are taking adequate protections too.

  The other thing going on still, obviously, is the situation with Ukraine and Russia, but there are two things about that I would like to highlight:

  First is that the Democratic Party has failed to fund COVID, has failed to secure any social programs – including the continuation of the Child Tax Credit, failed to fulfill campaign promises (in particular that student loan forgiveness one), and has, for the most part, failed to adequately protect us from whatever COVID had to offer… but now they’re all contemptuous of us all for (rightfully) asking just what in the fuck they’re doing for us, while they send literally billions in aid over to Ukraine.

  This is and has always been my problem with the Democratic Party: they are elected to do very clear and specific things, and they instead do what they want (which also happens to not be those specific things). They were elected to deal with COVID, provide the working class a better quality of life, and address voting rights and systemic racism. Instead it’s economy, police budgets, and military spending that comprises more than 50% of the entire fiscal year budget.

  Think about that for a second. 56% of the budget is for military drones and soldiers to fly around in jet packs. The other day, whatever dumbass is running Biden’s Twitter account tweeted something about how his father always said that to know a man’s priorities, look at his budget. Fucking shooting people and playing big dick around the world as a military superpower appears to be this administration’s priority. The people? Fuck us.

  Now I suppose I need to preface this by saying that I totally and completely support helping Ukraine and, by extension, keeping America safe. Putin is a monster, and the war was totally unjustified (in my opinion all war is – for the most part – unjustified); and we are in a pretty scary moment of world history, what with fascism rising all over the world. Nevertheless, it is fair to ask why the American people are being asked to sacrifice, struggle, deal with rising prices brought on by sanctions, and watch billions and billions of our tax dollars being sent overseas, when we can’t even get any fucking healthcare. My daughter needs an MRI on her knees right now, and our share of cost on our insurance (that we pay $1300 a month in premiums for) is 7% of our monthly take home pay. So sure… do all your military spending and big dick drones and jet packs and shit… but can you throw us a fucking bone too? Anyone?

  To make matters on this worse: today, a study showed that the sanctions have actually not even done anything to harm the relationships between Russians and Putin. In fact, in his closest circle (the oligarchs)… it strengthened their ties to the country and that fascist fuck. So basically bread and pasta now costs half your paycheck, and you have to wonder how to drive to work tomorrow amidst soaring gas prices from gas and oil company CEOs taking advantage of the situation to make a profit… welp, for nothing.

  Well done Dems. Well done. Now, thanks to this incompetence and corruption, the entire world is staring down the barrel of Trump outpolling Biden in 2024 by 6 points. Well. Fucking. Done.

  Around My World

  Over the years, I have gotten so many requests from people for merch. You guys know what I’m talking about; if you’re reading this, you may even have been one of the people to ask. I’m not talking about merchandise that has something dumb, like my name or my photo; rather has all the dumb shit I say.

  So in a couple of weeks I’ll be launching a shop where you can get all of those things on t-shirts and masks and mugs and such. If you have requests, put them in. Here is my favorite one related to the pandemic (but point of clarification: they are not all related to the pandemic):

  

  Other than that, you guys know I turn forty this month. 15 days. I’m staring at it with bags under my eyes and creaks in my bones. Like literally, every year I get more creaky; today I was walking up the stairs and my knees sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies. TikTok says I look like a teenager, so I guess I have that going for me. Whatever the case may be: it’s coming, and it’s coming fast.

  My kids and now my mom keep asking what I want to do for my birthday. Thinking about it is exhausting; but also, all of their ideas kind of don’t sound very fun. Fundamentally, I’ve been a student in higher education for so long that I’ve not really taken any time to identify with my interests beyond that and being a mom for decades. Now that I’m no longer a student, and I’m just a mom, I still need time to figure out what I really am… in to? I just don’t see figuring all of that out in two week’s time.

  You Can’t Unsee This

  So we live in a duplex. The lady that is attached to ours is a crazy ass bitch; like not a good crazy bitch – like “you crazy bitch get over here and do shots with me.” Like this bitch is so crazy we bought an outdoor security system and named the camera for the front door after her: Christine Watch.

  On the other side of our front door, though, is another front door that we share the walkway with. This couple lives in Texas for most of the year, but uses the house when they come to visit their adult daughters. These people are the squarest fucking people I have ever met. The husband’s name is Bert, and I’m pretty sure this guy invented high wasted khaki pants for men. Not even joking.

  Bert and Betty’s house had water damage to it, and they’re doing all kinds of mold remediation and renovating as a result. So today the French doors were open and these guys were pulling up the flooring, and I look out my window to see into their courtyard (because the doors are open), and what do I see other than a life-size statue of a fucking samurai.

  

  So Bert in his high wasted khaki flood pants, and Betty with her weekly trips to Applebees with the girls, who live in Texas and only live here (here: a gated community in the town that invented the Karen) when visiting their adult daughters, have a life-sized samurai staring at them from their courtyard in the middle of their duplex. Don’t get me wrong, I think the samurai is really cool. But it doesn’t fit their quilts and mallard duck nicknacks aesthetic, if you know what I mean.

  This place gets stranger by the day.

  STFU Fridays

  Today’s STFU Friday is a little tangential; nevertheless, it’s something that’s been bothering me. People that refer to Trump as “tfg.”

  I’m sure many of you are among them. Maybe this is the final straw for you and I, and to that I bid you adieu.

  Honestly, though, what is the deal? Is it that you have some sort of PTSD when you hear his name? Is it that you don’t want to give him any more airtime? What is it?

  “TFG,” which – for those that didn’t know – is what many people colloquially refer to Trump as, ie “the former guy,” is such a bizarre trend. I get that it’s playing allegiance to Biden, who refers to him as “the former guy,” and so in that sense it’s a cute little Biden fan club thing, but FUCK THAT, you guys.

  First of all, I can see that it’s a part of not wanting to give that deranged Cheetoh in a toupee any more airtime, but y’all are failing whether you call him “Trump,” “tfg,” or “Almighty Orange One.” The point is that talking about him but changing what you refer to him as does not change the fact that you are still fucking talking about him, and honestly – really – it’s time to stop. I see all these Biden Stan accounts on Twitter that are fan-girling the President so hard, but at the same time they are bitching and griping about Trump like he’s still in fucking office. He’s not. He lost. I don’t care if he thinks he won; he lost. Focus on the people in power, holding them accountable, and making sure they don’t fuck up (which they are doing while y’all still bitch about Trump).

  This is why you are giving Trump exactly what he wants: no matter what you call him, you’re still talking about him. Just. STAHP.

  And anyway, it’s not like he’s some super villain with magic powers who grows more powerful the more you say his name. This isn’t Peter Pan where you have to say you believe in fairies for them to be real, and for Tinkerbell to survive. Literally Trump is real whether you say his name or call him The Goya Buttplug Salesman. The more y’all act like calling him tfg will change the very real and certain danger he poses to all of us, the more of a danger he becomes because you are missing the point, and being distracted with stupid, pedantic nonsense.

  There’s also this sort of collective trauma I’ve noticed, where we’re all just supposed to be so grateful that he’s not president anymore, that any time anyone points out a failure or flaw in Biden’s policy, or the Democrats at large, a whole slew of “Vote Blue No Matter Who” bros come out of the woodwork, and say dumb shit like “at least he’s not tfg.” Yeah, no shit Debra, we fucking voted for him to not be like Trump, so maybe it’s time to start calling people by their actual names and holding all of them fucking accountable for what they’ve done these last several years.

  I don’t know maybe try that.

  So to them, the Biden Stans, the hardcore Dems, the people that think saying his name will somehow give him more power… I have to say grow up, and shut the fuck up.

  March 31, 2022

  ba2, biden, comedy, covid, covid19, dark satire, Democrats, gop, humor, life, lifestyle, local politics, NEWSLETTER, omicron, pandemic, political, politics, public health, random thoughts, russia, satire, suburbs, tfg, ukraine

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