Two things I’ve had since the day I was born: bad knees and dreams/nightmares that are far too real.

My nightmares have gotten less severe since I’ve gotten older. Used to be I’d have at least two soul-rattling nightmares a week, now it’s closer to twice a year. When I was a child they were even more frequent, and they were creepy enough that by age four, when I ran into my parents’ bedroom at night, mom quit telling me that talking about them would make them seem not so scary.

She couldn’t let me tell her about my nightmares anymore because they would either giver her nightmares, or chill her so much that she couldn’t get back to sleep.

In the morning she’d encouraged me to write about them instead, telling me that Stephen King did the same thing, and now he’s a rich and famous writer! I so feared what would happen to my family if I unleashed my nightmares on them that I refused to write about them. I did, however, take the advice to write away my anxiety, and that’s how, at age five, writing became part of my identity.

And bad knees? Well, who doesn’t have those? Mine are hereditary, passed on through my maternal family, generation after generation. Mine creak and crack and sound like they belong to an 80 year old, but are otherwise in pretty damn good shape compared to where the generation before me was at this age.

So, what do the two have in common? More on this in a minute but first! A word from our sponsors:

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Back in 1997, my grandma and I took a trip to Vegas for our birthdays- my 18th and her 61st. The dates were a mere three days apart and it was always a bond we had. The April girls, the diamond girls. 

For this reason, my grandma told me from a very young age that when she passed, all of her diamond jewelry would go to me, but until then she bought me diamond something on every important birthday. On my 18th birthday, I woke up in Vegas with a wrapped present that was clearly a ring.

It was a very pretty ring, gold with a medium-sized “diamond” on top, two smaller diamonds to the side. Yeah, I knew the larger diamond wasn’t real (“but it’s a real cubic zirconium” as my grandma sometimes said), but the authenticity of the ring didn’t matter. It was beautiful, and I had long ago lost the ring she bought me for my 13th birthday.

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I turned 38 this year, so the ring has been on my finger for twenty years now. My oldest niece was born in April, so I get to carry on the tradition with her: she knows it’s hers when I die, as is my grandma’s wedding ring (that I also wear along with my own).

(Besides the birthday ring on my right ring finger and the wedding rings on my left ring finger, the only other ring I wear is a stainless steel scarab, which is also from grandma because she said it brought it luck [it hasn’t], and when my youngest niece gets jealous that the oldest one gets my diamond rings, I remind her that she gets the bug ring, because she bugs she so much about it. Ba-dum-bump. Dad humor from the aunt.)

At some point last month I took a nap and woke up to something sharp digging into my skin. It was the ring, sans “diamond.”

OMG. What happened?

I was shaken up about it, obviously, but Mrs. BB calmed me down with promises that we’d take it to a jeweler and get a new diamond cut and reset it in it (I was told by a jeweler that I need to get the damn thing reset when I was shopping for the wedding rings, but I figured I’d get to it eventually…..)

I scoured every corner of every single room I had been in, and even a few that I hadn’t. No sign of it anywhere. I couldn’t wear the ring without it snagged on things, so I’ve felt completely naked and uncomfortable for over a month now.

And then yesterday my vacuum got clogged so I started taking it apart to unclog it, and BAM! The diamond fell out with a clump of dog hair. I picked it up and started crying, but in my excitement dropped the damn thing again and lost it. I prayed that Mrs. BB would be home late for work when I realized I had every lamp and light in the house on while I crawled around the floor with a flashlight, combing through every strand of carpet. Yes, honey, I’m carpet-surfing. No, it’s not for meth.

After about twenty minutes, SUCCESS! I popped the diamond back in the ring and am home again.

I still feel naked because I only wear the ring if I’m not doing anything besides sit on the couch, and I don’t do that often enough to wear it for any significant amount of time. But I, uh, probably need to get it reset before it goes back on my finger and stays there day in and day out.

Yesterday was a wonderful day, is what I’m saying.

So without further ado, on to Tops!

Top Comments:

white blitz nominated this awesome comment about optimism by GoodNewsRoundup in GNR’s diary.

From your humble host:

This comment from sfbob in Tevye’s diary about organ donation was a welcome bit of wonderful news.

Top Mojo:

1)  It happens. My husband is the grandson of a poor … by catwho +170

2)  I’d almost forgotten what a President is suppose … by Chitown Kev +158

3)  How frustrating it must be for him to keep havin … by GrowingMindsInSC +141

4)  I adore you. Thanks for the work you do and for  … by LaPinturaBella +128

4)  Fight to get them more, better, and cheaper educ … by progressive2016 +128

6)  Private schools “succeed” because they are exclu … by WestCoastFranky +129

7)  Bernie Sanders and his staff deserve a lot of cr … by First Amendment +127

8)  “Starting”? If Corker can find one Trump intervi … by Mother Mags +124

9)  Oh, well, the motherfucker won’t be missed. by Chitown Kev +115

10) Eats shoots and leaves. … by dbcoe +113

11) Scaramucci, Scaramucci will you do a press brief … by Mark Sumner +112

12) So not only did Republican senators find out McC … by HeartCooksBrain +109

13) The 24-7 AntiObama cult finds itself adrift in t … by McGovern78 +106

14) It’s not just a generational shift. I grew up in … by Geonomist +96

15) The bigots came out in force. Fox and GOP have b … by Maltie +93

16) It was nice to hear him speak again. And be able … by bluva06 +89

17) Private schools can also exclude students for an … by Pale Jenova +84

18) I can’t wait until Scaramucci’s skeletons start  … by David54 +82

19) What’s Melissa McCarthy gonna do for work? by radv005 +81

20) After 30 years he's where he never wanted to be, … by Shippo1776 +80

21) [image] by cblodg +78

22) You know it’s bad sign when your press secretary … by jwinIL14 +77

22) Those small minds have been carefully brainwashe … by slouching +77

22) Poor, poor Mitch McTurtle. … by karmsy +77

25) Any institution that stands in their way of powe … by dcg2 +76

25) [image] by freewayblogger +76

27) Emperor Devin Nunes has no fucking clothes on. … by sunbro +75

28) Yup. by IndieGuy +74

29) You say: … by anjaspapa +73

29) Five bucks worth of crap in a thousand dollar su … by Snud +73

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I’ve written about my BFF before here, but definitely not at the length that she deserves.

We’ve been friends since grade school and are more like sisters than friends. But even “sisters” isn’t a good description. We met, we melted into each other, and we’ve been psychically connected since 1990.

When I was twelve and my parents divorced, she was there.

When I was thirteen and lived in poverty and none of our friends wanted to be seen near our apartment complex, she was there.

When I was fourteen and we didn’t have enough money to keep our phone connected, she’d make up random times to call a payphone near our house. I’d be boarding the school bus and she’d yell at me “7:23 PM!”

I’d walk down to the phone booth and, sure enough, right at 7:23PM the phone would ring.

She was there at 15, when there was nowhere except her house to be safe.

She was there at 16 when my mom decided we were moving to Boise. She cried, but thought I’d have a better life there and supported me.

At 17, she almost killed the guy who had me trapped in an abusive relationship. Visiting her was the worst thing he ever did, and she walked like a rooster around me, ready to peck the dude’s eyeballs out at the slightest provocation.

At 18, she rearranged her entire day and missed some finals so that she could be there for me when my grandpa got a very bad diagnosis, and at 19, she sat next me while I wailed on her family room floor about losing my grandpa.

At 20, when I had a nearly successful suicide attempt, she quit speaking to everyone who treated it as a juicy bit of gossip, and she has not spoken to them since.

At 21, 22, 23, all the way up to where we are now, she has been there, a fucking rock that I can’t live without.

And here we are, at 38, where she tells me that she found a lump in her breast so she made an appointment with her OB-GYN, and they felt the lump and immediately sent her to get an ultrasound and they immediately sent her to get a biopsy and oh, by the way, your blood cell count doesn’t look good.

So she texts me and asks if I have a minute, and I say of course!

And she tells me all of this and I can’t breathe.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, but I know that if the shoe was on the other foot, she would.

In the early aughts, a friend of mine worked for the local alternative paper and got press passes to a Tom Petty concert. He had been one of those shows that I thought, eh, I’d really like to see him but I can’t afford the tickets, so when my friend brought tickets to my house for me and my then-girlfriend, I was pretty stoked. I’d actually get to see Tom Petty live!

I didn’t have any real expectations for the show. I was used to smaller indie bands, where the music is much better and more passionate live than on an album. Tom Petty just seemed like the kind of dude where what you see is what you get, and at the show that night he was basically what I expected. Not a rock star (even though he was) just a guy up on stage playing songs for a crowd. Totally unpretentious, personable, professional, and clearly enjoying himself. The ultimate rock star was the anti-rock star.

There were two really memorable moments for me that night. The first was that he played a song that had not yet been recorded, but he told us would probably be on his upcoming album. He said it was written about a friend who was in NYC on 9/11. I remember listening to it and thinking it was beautiful, and being kind of awed that I got to hear a Tom Petty song before the masses did.

The second one is what happened when he played You Don’t Know How it Feels.

More on this in a moment, but first, a word from our Heartbreakers sponsors:

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D’oh! It’s been one of those days!

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Next month it will be ten years since I joined this site. It hasn't always been easy-going: there have been ups and downs, long hiatuses, serious fights, and long-held grudges, among other things. 

But one thing that’s always struck me is how many friends I’ve made here. Most of them are almost strictly online, but a lot of them have become real life friendships as well.

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Do you ever find yourself saying the same thing frequently throughout the day? A word or phrase that you can’t seem to quit using?

In my house, that word is “goddamnit” but it’s almost always either before or after the name of one of our dogs. We joke that Annie’s last name is “Goddamnit” because we use it so often. “Annie Goddamnit!” But her first name is Happy, because she’s the happiest dog that ever dogged, so her full name is Happy Annie Goddamnit.

Annie’s transgressions are minor. She’s indecisive and she always wants permission for everything. That’s okay, but for example if I’m laying on the couch and she wants to lay with me, she tap dances around the couch or starts to get up and then backs away, then starts and backs away. I won’t even notice because it’s so routine, but once I notice I tell her it’s okay.

Then she starts to get up on the couch, checks with me, gets further up the couch, checks with me…“Annie, Goddamnit, just get on the couch.” And then she gets on the couch.

She pulls the same stunt with nearly everything. Indecisive and in need of permission (which she doesn’t actually need- we gave up on keeping the dogs off the couch a long time ago), and then waiting for us to as soon as we get exasperated, she feels confident that all is right with the world.

More on this in a moment, but first a word from our sponsors, goddamnit!

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I don’t have a lot to say about this, except for what the title says.

Uma Thurman was recently asked if she had anything to say about the recent revelations that Hollywood is pretty much a cesspool of sexual assault/harrassment/worse. She replied with  contained anger, using her words carefully and with measure.

But most people can recognize a woman about to explode, and Uma seems as though she will soon in a magnificent way. She is right that when we say things while angry, we don’t always express ourselves in the best way.

Which makes me look forward to the day when she’s just angry enough to address the issue, because she clearly has something important to say.

And she followed up on Thanksgiving with this:

H A P P Y  T H A N K S G I V I N G

I am grateful today, to be alive, for all those I love, and for all those who have the courage to stand up for others.
I said I was angry recently, and I have a few reasons, #metoo, in case you couldn’t tell by the look on my face.
I feel it’s important to take your time, be fair, be exact, so... Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators - I’m glad it’s going slowly - you don’t deserve a bullet) -stay tuned

I, for one, look forward to when she speaks. I’ve seen anger like that before and I can’t wait for her to say what she’s thinking.

Now, on to tops!

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“I used the word ‘anger’ but I was more worried about crying, to tell you the truth. I was not a groundbreaker on a story I knew to be true. So what you really saw was a person buying time.”

-Uma Thurman

Back in November, Uma Thurman was asked about the many breaking stories about sexual harassment. She was clearly upset, but said she would not speak until she was able to “be fair, be exact.”

Well, she’s finally told her story, and it’s as ugly as expected.

There are a few different angles to this story and it’s hard to condense into a single post, but of course, it involves Harvey Weinstien.

Thurman says she was able to overlook many warning signs as she first got to know Weinstein because “he used to spend hours talking to me about material and complimenting my mind and validating me.” It wasn’t until a meeting in Paris when her blinders started to come off.

They were arguing about a script when the bathrobe came out.

“I didn’t feel threatened,” she recalls. “I thought he was being super idiosyncratic, like this was your kooky, eccentric uncle.”

He told her to follow him down a hall — there were always, she says, “vestibules within corridors within chambers”— so they could keep talking. “Then I followed him through a door and it was a steam room. And I was standing there in my full black leather outfit — boots, pants, jacket. And it was so hot and I said, ‘This is ridiculous, what are you doing?’ And he was getting very flustered and mad and he jumped up and ran out.”

Not long after, he physically attacked her at a hotel in London:

“It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things. But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”

The next day, he sent her a bouquet of flowers with a note that read “you have great instincts.”

Let’s pause here to collectively shudder.

Thurman confronted Weinstein about the incident, threatening to expose him and ruin his career. But she left the meeting rattled and feeling angrier, considering him her enemy from that point forward.

When it was time to begin work on Kill Bill, Director Quentin Tarantino noticed that Thurman seemed “skitttish” around Weinstein. Thurman reminded him of what Weinstein had done to her, but she says he seemed to dismiss. Later, however, Weinstein approached Thurman and gave her a “half-assed apology.”

And here’s where the story takes a strange turn.

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

Thurman objected to this, asking for her stunt double to do the driving instead. Tarantino got angry and insisted she did the driving herself, saying he couldn’t get the shot he needed with a double. He told her it was a straight road and the car was safe.

She had been told by another crew member that car was not, in fact, safe, but bowed to the pressure that Tarantino put on her.

In reality, the road was sandy and not straight, and the drivers seat was not properly bolted down. Thurman lost control of the car and wrecked, suffering injuries that still affect her to this day.

Shortly after the crash, Thurman wanted to see the car and the footage of the wreck, but Miramax said they would release it to her only if she signed a document releasing them of any consequences, which she refused to sign. It was only recently, with Weinstein’s history of abuse being reported that Thurman was able to put more pressure on Tarantino to release the footage.

(The NYT story includes the footage from the crash, which shows the road is sandy and not straight, and the drivers seat does indeed appear to have not been properly secured.)

The pressure to do the driving herself wasn’t the only act of dehumanization by Tarantino; he also spat on her for one scene and choked her in another, even though other actors were who were in the scenes with her were scripted to do so. Also, the NYT adds this paragraph parenthetically:

(Tarantino aficionados spy an echo of Thurman’s crash in his 2007 movie, “Death Proof,” produced by Weinstein and starring Thurman’s stunt double, Zoë Bell. Young women, including a blond Rose McGowan, die in myriad ways, including by slamming into a windshield.)

The thing that always strikes me about stories like this is how blatant the behavior is, and how nonchalantly it’s often handled by other men. Whether Tarantino turned on Thurman in order to continue working with Weinstein or not, the fact is that he knew what Weinstein had done and yet continued to work with him.

This happened industry-wide, and it’s not just Hollywood where this is a problem, it’s virtually every industry.

Weinstein’s rep did respond to the story and actually acknowledged and apologized for more than he has in the past, while still denying quite a bit of it. But the response also included several pictures of Thurman and Weinstein together at events after the reported incidents.

I think we’ve seen those pictures in nearly every high profile case, the obvious suggestion being that if the woman still acknowledges the man in any way she must obviously be lying. Her smile proves that she’s not uncomfortable, therefore a liar.

Will this defense of Weinstein, who has essentially zero defenders at this point, finally make people reconsider that as a defense in general? I’d really like to hope so, but can’t bring myself to believe it quite yet.

For most of my life, I’ve had a problem with sticking my foot in my mouth. I’ve gotten better about this over the years, as I seem to get more and more introverted every year, but it still happens too often for my comfort.

I’m happy to report that I still haven’t topped the absolute worst instance of this, which happened about 25 years ago when I was a teenager. My mom and stepdad had gone out of town for the weekend and I had the house to myself so, naturally, I threw a party. It wasn’t a big bash, more of a small gathering of about ten friends. We had beer and pot, but no one was really wasted. It was pretty mellow.

I knew everyone there pretty well. There were three girls besides me, and they were all my closest friends, and there were four or five guys, and they were all pretty close to our group except for one guy. He was casual friends with the guys, but none of us girls had ever met him. I’ll call him Mark, but I honestly don’t remember his name.

More on this in a moment, but first a word from our always well-spoken sponsors:

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This will be fairly short since I am posting from my phone, but The New Yorker is reporting on several women coming forward against Eric Schneiderman, all claiming physical abuse. 

Now Schneiderman is facing a reckoning of his own. As his prominence as a voice against sexual misconduct has risen, so, too, has the distress of four women with whom he has had romantic relationships or encounters. They accuse Schneiderman of having subjected them to nonconsensual physical violence. All have been reluctant to speak out, fearing reprisal. But two of the women, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, have talked to The New Yorker on the record, because they feel that doing so could protect other women. They allege that he repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent. Manning Barish and Selvaratnam categorize the abuse he inflicted on them as “assault.” 

The accounts are consistent and seem credible, with corroboration. 

Ugh. I can't manage any commentary. I'm so sick of this shit. 

I'll update as I'm able to. 

__________

A few more snippets of the report:

About four weeks after they became physically involved, she says, Schneiderman grew violent. One night, they were in the bedroom of his Upper West Side apartment, still clothed but getting ready for bed, and lightly baiting each other. As she recalls it, he called her “a whore,” and she talked back. They had both been drinking, and her recollection of their conversation is blurry, but what happened next remains vivid. Schneiderman, she says, backed her up to the edge of his bed. “All of a sudden, he just slapped me, open-handed and with great force, across the face, landing the blow directly onto my ear,” Manning Barish says. “It was horrendous. It just came out of nowhere. My ear was ringing. I lost my balance and fell backward onto the bed. I sprang up, but at this point there was very little room between the bed and him. I got up to try to shove him back, or take a swing, and he pushed me back down. He then used his body weight to hold me down, and he began to choke me. The choking was very hard. It was really bad. I kicked. In every fibre, I felt I was being beaten by a man.”

[She] and Schneiderman began making out, but he said things that repelled her. He told the woman, a divorced mother, that professional women with big jobs and children had so many decisions to make that, when it came to sex, they secretly wanted men to take charge. She recalls him saying, “Yeah, you act a certain way and look a certain way, but I know that at heart you are a dirty little slut. You want to be my whore.” He became more sexually aggressive, but she was repulsed by his talk, and pulled away from him. She says that “suddenly—at least, in my mind’s eye—he drew back, and there was a moment where I was, like, ‘What’s happening?’” Then, she recalls, “He slapped me across the face hard, twice,” adding, “I was stunned.”

Schneiderman hit her so hard, she says, that the blow left a red handprint. “What the fuck did you just do?” she screamed, and started to sob. “I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. “For a split second, I was scared.” She notes that, in all her years of dating, she has never been in a situation like the one with Schneiderman. “He just really smacked me,” she says.

There's a lot more at the link, you should read the whole thing. 

_________

Wow, that was fast, apparently he's already resigned. 

_______

For those of you worried/wondering about who will take his place, please see this comment by Vecellio. 

For those of you worried about the implications for the trump investigation, SDNY is Federal, not state. 

So, due to an injury, using a laptop has been unwieldy/uncomfortable for the last month. Because of this, I haven't been able to write as much as I'd like to and am limited to mobile internet use. 

It's been frustrating because my creative juices have been flowing lately and I have a LOT to write about. Recently I was able to spend an hour or so a day on the laptop and started taking notes on all the drafts I have in my brain. 

I'm sure you can see where this is going. More on this in a moment but first! A word from our perfectly functioning sponsors:

Good evening and welcome to Top Comments!

I had a funny story to tell for tonight but…. Ooops! The time got away from me.

My best friend and her daughters visited over the weekend, and shortly after they left my nephew showed up to spend some time here for a few days.

We’ve been sitting on the patio catching up and I realized I was waaayyyyyy behind schedule to get anything substantial written so here it is: my Mea Culpa.

Ooops!

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Top Comments:

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15) I agree and the reason is, of course, Russia. Ni … by Rosalie907 +96

16) Trump also has more Twitter followers than Linco … by progressive2016 +92

16) She did NOT lose. She was flat our robbed. We al … by Onomastic +92

18) I agree that this is a great topic, and a very g … by lemay50 +91

19) If anybody wants to know, here’s today’s Tromp t … by northleft +86

20) It’s always about money with Tromp. … by northleft +83

20) News Corpse, exactly. The thing is IMHO he actua … by txdoubledd +83

20) Pence and the Russian Orthodox Church: The axis  … by kurious +83

20) The time for Sulzberger to wake up was back in 2 … by anastasia p +83

20) Thank you, Justice Ginsburg. You just made me fe … by LaPinturaBella +83

25) I have an idea. Since he’s so terrified by “ille … by filkertom +82

26) Trump is the enemy of the Constitution, a docume … by Baileywick +81

27) It’s a sick, abusive relationship that the media … by FishOutofWater +80

27) My husband and I were in the audience that night … by davidkc +80

27) Oh my. … by northleft +80

30) Oh, I’ll never forget him or McConnell refusing  … by Onomastic +77

Picture Quilt:

I wish this was a metaphorical title, but no….

Tonight I will be under siege by angry hornets, and I am resolved to kill every last one of them.

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I feel like my tenure at this fine group that we call Top Comments could be described in one word: procrastination.

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I was fortunate enough to change before my first election, but I could have easily become a trump supporter. I was raised in a conservative household in a conservative town, so it made sense that when I was young, I was quite conservative. I would have been furious if you had called me racist but looking back on myself I cringe because I was. A stereotypical white person who ranted against welfare even though my family was a recipient of it because I was convinced that “lazy” people took advantage of it and, if not for them, we’d be able to get more to help us get on our feet.

I am horrified by this, but when I was 17 Donald Trump was once again running his yap about running for president and I thought that was an awesome idea. What this country needed. No more politicians! There is no coherent reason for this, just a vague sense that everything sucked and no one in Washington cared. That was 1996, and I’m horrified to admit this as well but later that year I was rooting for Bob Dole because fuck Bill Clinton. Why? No reason. I mean, it’s Bill Clinton. Everyone hates him!

I did have some moderating influences in my life in the form of my maternal grandparents who were very active Democrats (my grandpa boycotted radio stations that played Rush Limbaugh; my grandma thought Limbaugh should be charged with treason). They were working class folks, grandpa worked at the plant, grandma was a nurse, they were both proud union members. Neither had a high school degree but both were intelligent and thoughtful. They made a good life for themselves on those union wages. Bought a house on some land to raise their kids in the country, took vacations often, didn’t have a lot of debt and lived quite comfortably.

Irony of ironies, I figured that’s why they were Democrats. They could afford to be. Of course, the reality is that they couldn’t have afforded NOT to be.

This is not to say that I viewed myself as a republican, either. My dad was a staunch republican and I thought he was a selfish asshole, therefore all republicans are selfish assholes. At least on this point, I haven’t changed my mind all that much with the passage of time (though I do have a softer view on my dad now that I’m an adult).

The 17 year old me would have rejected this analysis out of hand, but the only reason I believed what I believed, incoherent as it was, was because of the culture I grew up in.  It was full of “of course I’m not racist but….” remarks, war is patriotic, peace is for sissies, welfare is for the “lazy” people who are also somehow stealing our jobs. A consensus had been reached, and this was just the way it was. It was obvious, and everyone knows it.

Here’s the part where it might get frustrating for my audience: if you were hoping for some insight into how a person like that can drastically change, there is none here. It’s too specific to apply almost anywhere else except for one universally understood motive: I was selfish.

At 17 I wasn’t very religious, but I was fire and fucking brimstone about abortion... until a pregnancy scare right around my 18th birthday. Then overnight I was thinking “y’know maybe it’s not murder so much as a reasonable choice to make in certain circumstances.”

So I budged quite a bit on that issue and started to listen to what other people had to say about it rather than dismiss their arguments out of hand. I realized that maybe things aren’t as black and white as I wanted to believe.

But also around the same time as my pregnancy scare, I was struggling with an even larger issue: that I absolutely adored the man who got me pregnant but I was not and never would be in love with him.

It would be a couple more years before I came out of the closet, but in the interim I heard a LOT of republicans making horrific comments about the gay community and that was enough to make me decide I would never, ever vote for one of them. They had lost me forever.

This still didn’t mean I was a Democrat, I simply saw them as the lesser of two evils and I still wasn’t registered to vote. I didn’t plan on ever doing that as I just didn’t see the point. Then this happened:

I was, very fittingly, 19 years old when I read that book [Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony] and, put very simply, it radicalized me. The person who turned the first page of that book was a shifty, directionless, disaffected, and hopeless young lady. The person who clung to very last word of the very last page was a focused, passionate, dedicated woman.

Reading about the women’s suffrage movement influenced me more than anything else had at that point. There was no way in hell that I could justify not voting after realizing how hard my foremothers fought to give me that right.

So I made my journey from likely trump voter to Yellow Dog Democrat, but the scary thing is that had I not had a pregnancy scare, or had I gotten pregnant and wanted to be a mother, AND if I wasn’t gay, I don’t think I would have made that journey. I don’t think I would have gotten there without both of those things being true.

Because despite my suspicion that everything was rigged and the whole system sucked, I was comfortable. You couldn’t have told me that at seventeen or eighteen, but the reality is that I was. It was always easy for me to get a job. It was always easy for me to get promoted. Of course I never thought I made as much as I should have, but everyone thinks that (and that IS usually true).

And as much as I cringe to admit this, I know that trump would have spoken to me. I know that I would have rejected the idea that my bigotry was a motivator, but that would have been true. The seventeen year old me was threatened by the idea that whites could become a minority. Of course I couldn’t articulate why at the time but it’s obvious to me now. And before my pregnancy scare, I was less concerned about “baby killing” and more concerned with how irresponsible women were. Sluts should have consequences for being sluts.

The underlying theme being so clear now: I was the only person who ever suffered for MY mistakes but no one else did. I saw myself as a victim and trump would have spoken to that.

Of course, it’s always possible that I could have changed between now and then in some other way, but if I had followed a traditional path there would have been no reason for me to. Because, again, despite feeling like a victim of something I couldn’t name I would have been comfortable. Even after my supposed awakening I rejected feminism for years, and during all of my twenties and up until several years ago I would have completely rejected the idea that I had any privilege whatsoever.

I’ve always realized that had I been born straight I probably would have never been a voter or, if I had become a voter, I would have voted for republicans. But after 2016 I realized that it would have been worse than that.

One night in late 2016 I was wrapping up an evening shift at work and listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast. It had been rumored that trump was going to soften his immigration stances and he was expected to make a speech about it that night. Of course, no such softening happened. trump railed harder and more explicitly than he ever had before, and he’d already been openly hateful and racist.

Maddow played a fairly long clip from that rally on her show that night and it filled me with absolute dread. First, because it was terrifying that this sort of rhetoric was in any way acceptable for a major party candidate. But what chilled me even more- what made me cry on the walk home- was the way the crowd went absolutely crazy for it. I knew at that moment that trump was going to win. Because the people cheering cared a lot more about cruelty towards brown people than other people cared about making sure that could never happen here.

And I shuddered at the thought that I could have been one of those people. Not just conservative, not just reliably republican, but outright racist and proud of it, yet offended when someone calls me racist. Easy to be swayed by a demagogue, easy to manipulate, easy to make any excuse in the book for supporting someone so obviously reprehensible, unstable, and unintelligent. The sad fact is, it would have been easy; much easier than the journey I took away from that.

 I’m not going to end this with advice on how to handle trump supporters because I don’t have any, but I will take a slight detour here to wrap things up. 

Midway through September I had nearly forgotten about my revelation earlier that month, that trump was going to win. I told myself- and I truly believed- that Americans would not accept the idea of a trump presidency. Right up until the night of November 8th, 2016, I believed we would reject trump and his demagoguery and even up until midnight of that night I could not believe what was happening.

And for many months after he took office and implemented one cruel policy after another I would tell myself “this isn’t America.”

Earlier this year I had a lightbulb moment that should have come a lot sooner: this actually IS America, just the one I’ve never had to see because even today, despite being gay and being a woman, I am comfortable. Just as I never had to really accept my own racism until my mid-thirties, I never had to accept the racism so prevalent in so many others. I didn’t want to believe that it was true of us as society, so I didn’t.

And sometime a couple of weeks ago when the NYT published yet another story trying to explain trump voters to the rest of us, I thought yep, this is America. The explanation is staring you right in the face but you don’t want to accept that, so you’ll continue to search for a reason that’s more comfortable for all of us.

Paulette Jordan wasn’t supposed to win the Democratic primary for governor of Idaho. I have nothing negative to say about her opponent, AJ Balukoff- he has a reputation for being a genuinely nice guy and I would have gladly voted for him in November had he won the primary.

But while Paulette Jordan was getting recognized nationally, on the ground it seemed like she was a long shot. Every prominent Idaho Democrat had endorsed Balukoff; he had better funding, better name recognition, more advertising, and more experience running a campaign. That last part concerned me more than anything: just days before the primary, the deputy campaign manager and the field and political director resigned from the Jordan campaign. One of them cited disagreements with the direction of the campaign, the other offered no specifics.

I was excited to vote for her but I didn’t expect her to win. When she did, Idaho politics changed just ever so slightly.

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First, I want to openly acknowledge that while I know the basics, I am woefully ignorant about the finer points of antisemitism. In fact, I had never even heard the epithet “s/he Jewed me” until I was in my twenties.

(Fun fact: this is also when I learned that playing clueless about a racist stereotype is one of the most effective ways of stopping people from saying stupid shit. I wasn’t playing at that moment, I was generally stumped. “Oh, this guy haggled with you over the price of a used car and that makes him….Jewish? I don’t get it.” But I’ve since used this tactic in other conversations when racist tropes are used. “I don’t get it, please explain it to me….” usually makes the other person realize they can’t without, you know, sounding racist.)

Anyway, I asked this question elsewhere but have not received a response and it’s something I’m genuinely curious about.

The question is this: Jewish people are Jewish whether they’re religious or not, so it seems uncomfortable for me to refer to that as someone’s religion. Meaning, there’s a difference between being ethnically Jewish and religiously Jewish, correct? For example, Sarah Silverman is proudly Jewish but also proudly atheist, so being Jewish isn’t her religion.

I know I’m probably not articulating this well, and antisemitism definitely doesn’t discriminate between ethnicity and religion. But I feel like it’s not accurate to say “Sarah Silverman gets death threats because of her religion,” because she doesn’t have a religion. “Sarah Silverman gets death threats because she’s Jewish” seems accurate.

I am sure I am coming across as clueless because I AM.

I want to make clear that I am not saying that any antisemitism is ok if it’s based on religion rather than ethnicity or vice versa. I don’t accept antisemitism in any way and this isn’t a question to argue degrees of antisemitism. All of it is wrong. I’m just uncomfortable with calling it someone’s religion when it clearly isn’t. Is that wrong?

I’m working on another heavier and meatier diet diary at the moment, but I’m having a hard time focusing because of my current diet.

For those of you not familiar with the elimination diet, it’s not another fad diet. The concept is basically that your body reacts to certain foods in ways that you might not realize. You can be allergic to or intolerant to a food and not experience the severe effects of that like someone with a severe allergy might. It’s not a weight loss diet, it’s a “how is my food effecting me” diet.

I haven’t even been doing this for a week yet, but I’ve already noticed an enormous increase of energy. My skin has become clearer, my sleep patterns more consistent.

For the record, on paper my diet has always been pretty healthy. I love fruits and vegetables and am not a huge fan of meat. It’s always been joke that I eat like a rabbit and I don’t take offense at that. But I also love a cheeseburger and fries on occasion.

Anyway, my question is, have any of you done this, and what got you through? Most of it seems to be Jedi Mind tricks. I have never liked eating any more than I liked breathing. Of course I want to do both because it’s necessary to life, but if I could go without either I’d be fine with that. I really enjoy cooking, but I also don’t really want to eat the stuff that I cook.

At the same time, I am on a daily basis craving food that one week ago I only craved once a month.

So I don’t have a specific question, just want feedback from others who’ve done the same diet. Did you crave the things that were the worst for you? Did you have a hard time adjusting?

Twenty years ago, if you’d have told me that it’s possible to miss someone decades after they left, I probably would have been a narcissistic fuck and told you that you only missed a person because you’re stuck in the past.

Actually I probably wouldn’t have done that, I just like to be hard on myself. I’m not the type of person that would spit on someone who is in pain, but for some fucking reason I like to think that I was maybe sorta kinda the person who could do that. Not now, but back then, in all of my anger.

But I never was that person. And every time I’ve tried to be it has weighed on me like a ton of bricks because more than anything else, I hate to see people in pain.

So if twenty years ago you would have told me that my grandma was going to die soon and in twenty years I would still weep at the sight of her on video, I would have told you to fuck off but I would have felt bad about it afterwards.

I don’t know why this is my introduction. I’ll probably regret it later.

 
My grandma died twenty years ago. It completely wrecked me when she died, but over the course of time I learned how to channel her influence on me in a good way.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

As my favorite aunt (now also deceased) said, of all the fucked up, morbid, and depressed grandchildren she had, it had to be you who found her dead?

I’m just digressing more and more, aren’t I? Maybe I don’t know how to tell this story.

Maybe I should just say what I want to say.

This is amazing if more polls show the same:

Remember, this is only one poll — we’ll need to see other surveys to be sure we know how the debates affected voters — but Harris’s second-night performance doubled her support; she went from just under 8 percent before Night 1 to almost 17 percent percent now. Much of that support came from voters who previously said they were backing Warren or Joe Biden. Speaking of Biden: He lost a bunch of voters — mostly to Harris, but also to Warren, Buttigieg and others.

Each candidate ranks as follows, with pre-debate numbers first, post-first debate, post-second debate:

Biden: 41.5 / 35.4 / 31.5 (-10)

Warren: 12.6 / 18 /  14.4 (+1.8)

Sanders: 14.4 / 16.4 / 17.3 (+2.9)

Buttigieg: 6.7 / 4.4 / 4.8 (-1.9)

Harris: 7.9 / 6.3 / 16.6 (+8.7)

So, again, it’s only one poll, but if this is accurate, Harris doubled her support after the debate while Biden lost 10 points. Warren gained from her performance but it fell slightly after voters watched the second debate. Buttigieg ended up losing points, which is not what I would have expected.

Now, let’s look at favorables:

Biden and Sanders didn’t move the needle much, which is expected considering they are the most well-known with not a lot of room to make an impression on anyone.

Warren’s numbers are remarkable because she’s the only candidate who saw her unfavorable number drop. Her favorables also went up 8 points.

O’Rourke arguably fared the worst in favorable/unfavorable ratings. He gained two points in the favorable rating but also picked up almost 7 points in unfavorable. That’s an almost five point drop- not the direction any candidate wants to go.

Harris and Buttigieg both gained about ten points in favorability, which is great, but Buttigieg’s unfavorables also increased by four. Still a net 6 points, but his numbers overall suggest he might have plateaued.

The good news for everyone is that with the exception of Beto and Biden (I’m not including the fringe candidates), everyone saw an overall increase in favorability. The net numbers are as follows:

Warren: +9

Booker: +8

Klobuchar: +4.5

Castro: +16

Sanders: +2

Harris: +9

Buttigieg: +5.5

Gillibrand: +2.5

Biden: -4

O’Rourke: -4.5

Castro had an enormous bump in favorability, but only gained one point in voting preference. All credit to him, but he’s an ideal VP pick rather than a presidential one. If he’s able to hold his favorables throughout the race I do think he’d be a great compliment to any candidate we nominate.

We have a long way to go and a lot of things can and will happen between now and the end of the year, but as things have stood for a while now, we have a five person race, not a 20+ person race. That doesn’t mean that no one likes the rest of the field, just that in a field this large most candidates will necessarily fall to the wayside.

Again, this is only one poll so I don’t want to get too carried away with it, but it is great data to chew on while we wait for more post-debate polls to drop.

_{Hat tip to joedemocrat for bringing this to my attention, and fcvaguy had an earlier diary about the same poll.}

As most of you are probably aware, a group of anti-gay bigots recently held a so-called "straight pride" rally in Boston. This stunt could not be more transparent: it wasn’t about “pride,” it was about demeaning LGBT people and their allies. It was a gleefully hateful concept, meant to draw bigots out in force to send a hateful message to a group of people who already have reason to fear for their safety.

While many people spoke out about the event and counter-protesters outnumbered the bigots, there was still a lot of commentary that simply made jokes about the bigots. Mockery may sometimes be an effective form of shutting someone down, but it’s not at all effective in the face of hate.

But there was something even more troubling to me about this. I’ve been speaking out about this tendency for a while, but I decided today to write more in-depth about this because I think it’s important.

There is no other type of bigotry that we make jokes like this about. We don’t think the KKK is a laughing matter. No one found humor in the Charlottesville tragedy. We are horrified by how immigrants (and even brown-skinned citizens) are being treated, rounded up, or detained. Most of us are holding our breath as anti-abortionwwoman legislation makes it way out of backwards statehouses and slogs towards the Supreme Court. None of this is a laughing matter. We've all been  anxious and scared for a while now.

Yet when it comes to anti-gay bigotry, there’s a tendency to crack jokes that perpetuate homophobia and/or misogyny. I have been guilty of this myself in the past, but one day earlier this year I started noticing that almost all the comments in a diary about a homophobic person somehow managed to insinuate the homophobe was a closeted/latent gay. This is probably the most common reaction to homophobia.

This didn’t come out of the blue. It is true that we have many examples of outspoken homophobes later being caught in a gay sex scandal or worse. And research does exist that shows one source of homophobia could be latent or repressed homosexuality.

But it doesn’t account for all of it, and that’s where we get into dangerous territory when that’s our initial and/or only reaction to anti-gay bigots.

First, it feels a lot like blaming the victim, but consider what message it sends to people who are questioning their sexuality or afraid to come out of the closet. We already get so many messages that gay is wrong or shameful, and then on top of it, the people we’re most afraid are so rotten it proves they must be gay.

None of us here would use the term “gay” to describe something bad. “Dude, jazz music is so gay,” would be hidden immediately. But “wow, look how pathetic that organizer is, he’s obviously gay*” is recommended.

But more importantly, it downplays the very real bigotry that lives inside most of these people and we have to reckon with that just as we have to reckon with racism, sexism, xenophobia, and everything else. We can’t treat homophobia as nothing more than a sad denial of one’s true self, because that describes the very people that are most targeted by homophobia, not the perpetrators of the same.

Anti-gay bigots are, at their core, dangerous. The same way that a racist is dangerous, the same way that a sexist is dangerous, the same way that people who chant “build the wall” are dangerous, so are anti-gay bigots. They are denying us housing. They are making our employment precarious. They are KILLING us.

If you haven’t yet read sfbob’s diary about the slippery slope of anti-gay bigots, please do so now.

The people we make fun of for refusing to bake a cake for a same sex couple are the very same people who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Their hate is not benign. It never has been. While a small subset of them might be acting out of a fear of their own sexuality, every single one of them is also acting out of malice and hate.

We understand that racism and sexism is taught and learned, and that it is also systemic and usually implicit. We have to start recognizing homophobia in the same way, because the people who are teaching racism and sexism are also teaching homophobia, and people are still learning it.

Understand that this is most often the case. Instead of viewing a homophobe through the lens of “oh, he’s probaby gay,” view them instead as who they present themselves to be. Odds are they probably are simply hateful and repugnant human beings who hate everyone that doesn’t look exactly like them.

*^{This isn’t a direct quote. I have decided against quoting or linking to any specific comments because my intent here is not to shame anyone or tell them they’re wrong, rather I’d just like a little more awareness before we toss out these jokes.}

This morning as I sat down to breakfast I got a text from my cousin: our grandma is on her deathbed and doesn’t have much time. Suddenly my veggie benedict felt obscene; I still haven’t finished breakfast.

My initial reaction was that I’d be right there to say goodbye, but the more time I had to think about it the less I wanted to go. I’d walk through the door into a house that used to feel like a nest but that I would no longer recognize, then I’d walk down a hall into my grandma’s bedroom where she wouldn’t be cheerfully folding and ironing my grandpa’s clothes, but breathing her last breaths.

I decided I’d rather hold on to my childhood memories in a vivid way and not diminish them by undoing all that I remember, because I don’t remember much.

I’ll go back home for the funeral. I’m not going to go home for this.

I’ve spent the rest of the day trying to untangle this knot that’s taken up residence in the depths of my torso. My wife keeps asking how I’m doing and I keep saying, honestly, for once, “I don’t know.”

I’m sad, yes, but I also feel defeated. Yes I want to cry, but I also feel that thirteen-year old me climbing up those knots in my chest, searching for an escape and wanting nothing more than to run. To choke me as she exits my throat, sees the daylight, declares her freedom and runs, but doesn’t know what she’s running away from or running towards and, besides, her lungs are my lungs and it’s exhausting to even think of allowing her to run so far. 

So for now she’s leaning against my heart and demanding answers and I wan’t to tell her that she has to quit leaning like that into my chest but I also don’t have the heart to tell her that in 27 years from now she’ll still be in the dark.

So I let her persist.

Scare quotes around threat not because it’s a direct quote, but because I think very few people are actually worried that she won’t be on stage.

“I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate on October 15th. I will announce my decision within the next few days,” Gabbard said in a video posted on social media Thursday.

Gabbard cited meeting voters in Iowa and New Hampshire who have “expressed to me how frustrated you are that the DNC and corporate media are essentially trying to usurp your role as voters in choosing who our Democratic nominee will be.”

Gabbard claims the DNC and corporate media are trying to replace the roles of voters in early voting states like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, and replace them with polling and “other arbitrary methods which are not transparent or democratic.”

“They're holding so-called debates, which really are not debates at all, but rather commercialized reality television meant to entertain, rather than to inform or enlighten.”

Link

The argument that the DNC is rigging the process by setting standards for who can appear on stage isn’t particularly new or creative, but it’s… an argument. There are 282 official candidates for the Democratic nomination. I’m not sure how much better served she’d be to have all of them onstage with her.

Her announcement (with transcript below):

Transcript:

I want to thank you all very much for your support. I need to share something with you. It is very important.

There are so many of you who I've met in Iowa and New Hampshire who have expressed to me how frustrated you are that the DNC and corporate media are essentially trying to usurp your role as voters in choosing who our Democratic nominee will be.

I share your concerns, and I'm sure that all our supporters throughout the country do as well.

The 2016 Democratic Primary election was rigged by the DNC and their partners in the corporate media against Bernie Sanders.

In this 2020 election, the DNC and corporate media are rigging the election again, but this time against the American people in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.

They are attempting to replace the roles of voters in the early states, using polling and other arbitrary methods which are not transparent or democratic, and holding so-called debates which are not debates at all but rather commercialized reality television meant to entertain, not inform or enlighten.

In short, the DNC and corporate media are trying to hijack the entire election process.

In order to bring attention to this serious threat to our democracy, and ensure your voice is heard, I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate on October 15th. I will announce my decision within the next few days. With my deepest aloha, thank you all again for your support.

This will be short. 

Like many of you, I'm eagerly awaiting the SCOTUS decision about DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals). I haven't delved into the legal oral arguments yet, but I have been somewhat following it online as time allows.

But I've noticed a trend among DACA recipients and their allies to put forth examples of really remarkable people who could/would probably be deported upon repeal of DACA.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why that's necessary and how it helps appeal to people who aren't already aligned with us. 

My beef isn't with that- it's a pretty age old method of gaining enough empathy from the larger public and it often works. 

That said... You know? Some DACA recipients sit on their asses and play video games all day and that's ok, too. Some of them were C students who never went to college, never served in the military, and have lame ass jobs that don't pay well. 

They're like the rest of us- unremarkable, average people. 

And that's ok. 

I know a lot of immigrants, legal and not, and their kids are all Americans, legal or not. They're kind of assholes because they're young, they have their earbuds attached to their heads all the time and they roll their eyes at pretty much everyone who's old enough to legally drink.

What I'm saying is that they're not wonderful people because they're teenagers and teenagers are just inherently awful people. 

And that's exactly why it's so cruel to send them to a country they don't know or remember. The little shits are as American as apple pie and they'll grow up and become fully functioning, empathetic, and responsible adults. 

But, yeah, for now they're assholes. But they're OUR assholes. 

They don't have to all be future or current Nobel Prize winners or Medal of Honor recipients. They can just be loud, stinky, hormonal, sarcastic, emotional, and irrational people because that is what you and I were when we were young and our parents may have threatened to send us away when we were that age but for Dog's sake we'd never accept the government doing the same. 

So I understand the respectability politics of it, but I'm just gonna call bullshit and say that a lot of the people we're protecting are just mediocre. 

And the thing about mediocre people like me and you and them is that, just like remarkable people, being home is always the most important thing. 

And I will be beside myself if the little assholes I know don't get to keep their home. 

Look, I am not a fan of Senator Sanders and I do think he should concede sooner rather than later. I’m really not interested in debating the pros and cons of that; as far as I’m concerned the presidential primary is over and we can all move on.

But  THE WORST argument for Sanders conceding is that he is endangering public health. It’s not even an argument- it’s a fallacious attack that undermines some of the most important elections that still have to take place.

We all felt a huge sense of victory when Dan Lipinski was defeated in his primary, didn’t we? That happened because there were other elections besides the presidential primary on the ballot. Had Sanders conceded on March 4th, that election STILL would have had to take place.

In my own state, we only cast a vote for the presidential primary on the 10th (some localities had other issues on the ballot). In May, we have to go to the polls again to vote for the candidate to take on Jim Risch, and every other office down ballot from there.

Even the earliest states have yet to weigh in on down ballot races. These elections simply haven’t happened yet. That’s right- Iowa and New Hampshire still have upcoming elections, and they’re important.

IF YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE ELECTIONS, YOU NEED TO LOOK CLOSER TO HOME.

You should all be doing this, anyway, because the presidency is such a small part of the electoral politics that impact your life. But the bottom line is that your governor is responsible for how elections are handled. Put pressure on them to come up with a mitigation plan- they need one regardless of what Senator Sanders does.

So make any argument, pro or con, on whether Sanders should concede or not. I think opinions are baked in on that and won’t change. But for the love of Dog, if you’re making the argument that his staying in is threatening public health you’re just telling me that you don’t care about all the other elections that matter just as much.

They’re in our districts, the people running are our neighbors, they live in our states, they will make a huge difference in your life.

And your governor needs to hear from you that you expect a safe election. Screaming at Sanders doesn’t accomplish anything- he does not control state elections and state elections will continue even if he’s abducted by aliens and takes up residence on Mars tomorrow.

Thank you for letting me rant, and please invest in your local races today.

One thing that hasn’t changed since the first coronavirus cases were confirmed in Idaho is that Blaine County has consistently been home to about half of all cases. I predicted this a couple months ago, but it didn’t take a lot of intuition or intelligence to make that prediction.

Blaine County is large in size but small in population. It is made up of several small towns, the largest being the county seat of Hailey, population roughly 8,000. I live about ten miles north of Hailey in Ketchum, population of roughly 3,000. The whole county has a population of about 22,000; in most places it would be considered rural, and there are definitely places where that still applies.

But we’re a more urban environment than even some of the population centers in Idaho thanks to being home to Sun Valley, a world class ski resort. On any given weekend during the peak seasons of summer and winter, Ketchum and Sun Valley can have as many as 40,000 people in hotels, restaurants, shops, buses, ski lifts, etc.

I love living here for a million reasons. One, it is a small town, so wherever I go I run into someone I know. I don’t have a ton of friends but I have a million acquaintances, and some days when I’m out on a walk or grocery shopping, that short “hey! how’s it going!” really lifts my spirits. We do favors for each other here on a regular basis. Short a few bucks for lunch? Don’t worry, it’s on the house. Credit card declining at the store? No worries, come back tomorrow with the cash.

The working class here takes good care of each other.

But we don’t have to sacrifice culture or other urban amenities to have that small town familiarity. In the Spring and Fall, when we go into slack and have the town to ourselves without the tourists, we still have public transportation, concerts, nightlife, locally owned restaurants, theaters, etc. And if we’re sick of civilization- which you have to be on some level at all times anyway if you live in Idaho- it’s a short drive to the wilderness.

(We recently sold our truck, and we had all of our camping equipment stored in it. So we transferred it to the back seat of our car and when I told people “that’s our summer house back there” they knew exactly what I meant.)

This is where I live.

And where I live is being absolutely killed by this virus.

I’m writing this mostly for posterity, but it might give those of you in places that haven’t been hit hard an idea of what might be coming.

We just had an earthquake, and last I checked the news still hadn't reported on it.

Trying to get details now, but through secondhand info the epicenter was north of me at 6.8; but people from North of Boise all the way up to salmon felt it, which covers a large geographic area.

Will update with more info as it comes in.

Update: my apartment isn't safe for earthquakes so I'm trying to get myself and my dogs to a safe space before I can update but if you can leave your snarky little comments about Idaho at the door I'd appreciate that a lot.

Update X 2: sorry everyone, I'm simply exhausted and had to check in with all my family. There are news reports available now but honestly I don't have the energy to update as needed. So far there are no injuries or major damages reported so we're all safe.

I think I'm gonna pour myself a stiff drink and call it a night early.

Final update: it was a 6.5 magnitude. I apologise for not updating with better info but there are a lot of updates in the comments so please read those.

My title pretty much says it all. The last few days, everything and anything makes me cry and it doesn’t matter what it is. Tears of joy? Had them. Tears of sadness? Check. Tears of disbelief? Strolled down these cheeks. I’ve even started crying without knowing why. Just standing outside, looking upon the world, tears streaming down my face.

I mean, my small dog started cleaning my medium-sized dog’s eyes and ears, which she does a couple times a day, and all the sudden I needed a tissue. Then I saw a picture of Michelle Obama and it was full waterworks.

Okay, that last part isn’t entirely unusual but whatever…..

I remember back to the 2017 eclipse. I don’t know what I expected, but I know it wasn’t much. I was kind of flabbergasted that so many people were traveling so far to get to the totality zone (which I live in). At the time I thought it was kind of ridiculous.

But then the day came and I was transported out of a world of stoicism and into a world of wonder. As the air got cooler and the sky got darker, the atmosphere changed and I felt it in my body. When it felt like dusk at mid-morning, I felt like a little girl on the night of Christmas Eve again. That overwhelming feeling of “what’s going to happen? What will it be like?” made me feel small again.

(And now I’m crying as I remember that day.)

When totality happened it blew my mind in a way I’ll never quite be able to explain. I felt dizzy and weightless, insignificant but more alive than I’ve ever been. Afterwards, as the sun suddenly peeked back around the moon, I realized how cold I was, and how I always seem to have words to describe something but I had absolutely nothing to describe what I’d just witnessed.

Everyone that I was with was in as much awe as I was but they were speaking, adrenaline pumping, commenting on what they’d just seen.

I wanted to say something, too, but I couldn’t find the words. And I felt like anything I said would somehow, at best, minimize what I’d just witnessed and, at worst, be disrespectful of it.

So while we were back to the dusk-like feeling, I quietly walked back to my apartment, sat down on my couch, and sobbed.

Up until that point I had never in my life cried tears of awe, but I will always remember the feeling of having no other response.

And I guess that this last month has been a really long repeat/replay of that feeling. Being witness to something so utterly surreal and powerful and being unable to summon the words to describe it. Knowing that this is one for the history books and, when I need them the most, my words fail to document how incredibly powerful it is to walk on empty sidewalks. To drive on empty streets. To see only the top half of a familiar face and struggle to remember what their smile looks like.

To not see my family. To get a wild hair and decide to go out of town for the night and have dinner and drinks, but have absolutely nowhere to go. To cancel what I want to do for my birthday. To not go play a game of pool just because it sounds nice to drink a beer in a dim room and do something.

To sit on my patio and hear no traffic, see very few people. To hear the helicopter above and start crying again because we all know what that helicopter means.

To hear that my coworker is sick, and we don’t know anything else besides that.

When every door handle could be a death sentence to the most vulnerable. When I could be the conduit through which that door handle exacts its vengeance.

It is a lot like watching two heavenly bodies move across each others path and completely change the world we lived in for a minute. The way we see things, the way we process information, the way we simply stand in our yards or on our sidewalks.

Sometimes things like that happen.

And six months ago I would have told you that I’d document every day of something so big that it upended the way we live our very lives.

But it turns out it’s so big I can’t wrap my words around it, so instead I just cry a whole lot and hope that someday I’ll be able to write about how I feel.

That someday this will all make sense.

But for today, and tomorrow, and next week, I think I’ll just let myself cry.

On this day in 1936, my grandmother was born. She was an amazing woman, as I’ve written before, and probably the most singular force in my life for the first two decades of it. She had a really rough upbringing that I don’t want to dwell on now, but that very tragic upbringing made her the best grandma in the world. She always spoiled the hell out of me and told me “that’s what grandma’s are for- to give their grandkids everything they never had.”

I’ll never forget the way she dug into her ice cream as she said something like this. In many ways, she relived her childhood- the childhood she always wanted- through her grandchildren. Me especially. I know no one is ever supposed to say this out loud but I and my baby brother were her favorites. She loved all of her grandkids deeply but baby bro and I, we were the apex. The best. The favorites.

It’s really hard for me to type these words, but after my grandma died I resented my mother. I didn’t feel like my mom appreciated what I had lost, and I knew my mom was almost always irritated by grandma, and it really pissed me off that she didn’t even seem to realize what happened.

That my grandma was gone. The woman I ran to when no one else wanted was no longer there. That the woman who offered wisdom through cryptic weirdness (“no one takes a frump seriously”) was no longer there.

I thought that somehow my mom’s resentments toward her mother somehow overrode her grief.

Of course, that was not true.

I was a stupid 19 year old who thought she knew everything but I would never, and could never, understand the depth of my mom’s grief.

One night between the night my grandma died and before her funeral, my mom and I were alone at my grandma’s house. Even though there were three beds in the house, we pulled out the hide-a-bed and laid together in there. We were both exhausted. We both cried. I had been the one who found my grandma and I felt incredibly guilty for not finding her sooner, when I could have saved her. I apologized to my mom for that and she hugged me. “Honey, I promise, grandma would have never wanted this to happen to you.”

And then we started laughing.

We flipped through old photo albums and my mom told me stories about the faces she remembered. But then we came upon a photo- you know, those old-timey photos where everyone is straight-faced, of our unknown ancestors. “It’s so weird how they never smiled back in photos back then, isn’t it?” I said.

“Well, it wouldn’t be so weird if they didn’t look like they had a pickle up their ass” my mom answered.

We both busted up into uncontrollable laughter. All the angst, sadness, regret, anger, grief, came out in a ball of hysteria. We flipped through the pages of the photo album and would pick out a person from a photo and shriek “PICKLE!” and then collapse into laughter again.

Once we had exhausted ourselves from laughter, my mom asked me to grab my notebook. “I want to speak,” she said “and I want you to just write down what I say.”

I did as she asked, until I realized she was crafting the eulogy for my grandma. “Mom, no,” I said. “Just two weeks ago grandma said no child should ever have to eulogize their parent. You can’t do this!”

“Annie,” she said, staring up at the ceiling, “please just keep writing.”

I did as I was told.

My mom laid there with her hands behind her head, staring upwards but not focused on anything, and I wrote every word she said. Sitting next to her at that moment I should have recognized the depth of her grief. I should have known how much she was hurting, how her whole life had been upended.

But instead I thought about my grandma. And I had the audacity to be angry on her behalf that my mom was expressly dismissing her belief that a child shouldn’t eulogize a parent.

(This belief of my grandma’s was a newfound one, as I watched her plan the funeral of her own mother and she insisted one of her mother’s children should give the eulogy, as long as they weren’t going to be full of shit.)

Anyway, we wrote the eulogy, and then laid in bed and talked about this and that. Still trying to make each other laugh, but also still crying a bit here and there.

Then there was a knock at the door right when we’d cracked each other up over “PICKLE!” again.

It was the coroner, and he was obviously taken aback by the sight of my mom and I having giggle fits while he explained to us the logistics of what was happening to my grandma’s body. I tried so hard to keep a straight face while he spoke; my mom pulled the covers over her head and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying under the blankets. But the coroner said “…and then we’ll take the body to cremate it” and my mom pulled the covers down enough to look up at me and whisper “pickle!” and I laughed and laughed and thanked the coroner for his time.

He backed slowly out of the house and we never saw him again.

I don’t know if this has been posted here yet, but my wife just showed it to me and I set my deep cynicism aside for a moment and felt hopeful for a minute. It’s called The Great Realisation, and I just feel in love with its optimism.

(Transcript posted below for those with slow connections.)

Voice of little boy: Tell me the one about the virus again, then I’ll go to bed.

Man on screen: But my boy, you’re growing weary, sleepy thoughts about your head

Voice of little boy: Please, that one’s my favorite, I promise just once more.

Man on screen: Okay. Snuggle down my boy, though I know you know full well

The story starts before then, in a world I once would dwell.

It was a world of waste and wonder, of poverty and plenty

Back before we understood why hindsight’s 2020.

You see, the people came up with companies to trade across all lands

But they swelled and got much bigger than we ever could have planned.

We’d always had our wants, but now it got so quick,

You could have anything you dreamed of, in a day, and with a click.

We noticed families had stopped talking; that’s not to say they never spoke

But the meaning must have melted, and the work life balance broke.

And the children’s eyes grew squarer and every toddler had a phone,

The filtered out the imperfections but amidst the noise, the felt alone.

And every day the skies grew thicker, until you couldn’t see the stars,

So we flew in planes to find them, while down below we filled our cars.

We’d drive around all day in circles, we’d forgotten how to run.

We swapped the ground for tarmac, shrunk the parks ‘til there were none.

We filled the sea with plastic because our waste was never capped.

Until each day when you went fishing, you’d pull them out already wrapped.

And while we drank and smoked and gambled, our leaders taught us why

It’s best to not upset the lobbies, more convenient to die.

But then, in 2020, a new virus came our way.

The governments reacted and told us all to hide away.

But while we all were hidden, amidst the fear, and all the while,

The people dusted off their instincts. They remembered how to smile.

They started clapping to say thank you, and calling up their mums.

And while the car keys gathered dust they would look forward to their runs.

And with the skies less full of voyagers, the earth began to breathe

The beaches bore new wildlife that scuttled off into the seas.

Some people started dancing, some were singing, some were baking.

We’d grown so used to bad news, but some good news was in the making.

And so when we found the cure and were allowed to go outside

We all preferred the world we found to the one we’d left behind.

Old habits became extinct and they made way for the new,

And every single act of kindness was now given its due.

Voice of little boy: But why did it take a virus to bring the people back together?

Man on screen: Well, sometimes, you’ve got to get sick, my boy, before you start feeling better.

Now lie down and dream of tomorrow, and all the things that we can do

And, who knows, if you dream hard enough maybe some of them will come true.

We now call it The Great Realisation and yes, since then there have been many.

But that’s the story of how it started it, and why hindsight’s 2020.

Yes, it’s far more optimistic than I’m usually willing to be, but no one really knows when or how we’ll come out of this and, at least for today, I want to believe that this is the path we’d take.

^{(Apologies for any errors in the transcript- that’s not my strong suit.)}

Hi everyone,

This doesn't matter. I think I just need to exhale deeply and I guess I'll do it publicly.

I haven't been well for quite some time. My depression and anxiety have really sent me into a whirlwind. I want to say I don't have control of my emotions, but the truth is that for the longest time I've had none at all.

There is a deep empty feeling, almost like a heartbreak…. Like, when you see your ex with someone else and you desperately want to be that person next to her/him… but instead of an ex and a heartbreak, it's watching other people just being alive and feeling a deep sorrow of knowing I'll never be one of those people who just lives.

I'll always be one of those people who aches every single day for reasons I'll never really understand.

If it was a heartbreak it would be easy. But instead it's more a lack of heart. Like, I don't know why I'm here. It hurts and it sucks and I have no way out, so I'm just forced to live and breathe and not even want something better; no, I'd never indulge myself with the thought of something better. But if it could just be less worse, less exhausting, less dark, that would be bleak but bearable.

I knew things were bad when I started crying because I missed my mom. Daily, almost every hour, I just needed a hug from her, but because of Covid19 I wasn't able to visit her. But then in mid-May, my wife decided that getting me help was important enough to take some risks, so she invited my mom and brother to visit us.

I wish I could say it helped (and in the long run, it did), but in the moment it made me feel so, so much worse.

I wanted more from my mom than what she could give. I asked a million questions and she answered them honestly, but I was frustrated because none of the answers explained why I am how I am.

“Well, if it wasn't dad, and it wasn't you, maybe my grandparents weren't as perfect as I remember them.”

“Your grandparents were great,” she sighed. “Honey, you just have a disease. There isn't an answer for that.”

“Okay,” I cried, “then why can't you all just let me go? You know I have this disease but you demand I stay alive and I am tired and I want to go. I'm done. Why won't anyone let me go?”

Mom took a deep breath, “because,” she said, “you wouldn't let anyone else go, either. We depend on each other to stay.”

I could do nothing but sob at the truth of the matter. I'm not the only one in my family with this disease, but sometimes I am the only one who thinks I'm unfairly and particularly burdened by it. Or maybe not. Fog of war and all that.

I don't want to share the details of what happened after that. Suffice it to say, things got immediately worse. When my mom left to go back home I hugged her tight, pretty sure it was the last time I would ever do so. It bothered me how frail she seemed. She's my mom, she's always been a rock, but now when i hug her it feels like she'll break.

We said our goodbyes, then I went back to bed, pulled the covers over my head, and sobbed some more.

I apologise in advance for this short post.

But on weekend mornings I work at the local C store in my little community. The post office is just a few blocks away, and most of the postal workers stop in to get coffee and snacks and such before work.

This morning they were all especially exhausted and dreading the day. They, like all other postal workers, have been dealing with an enormous backlog of work. Plus, they're getting non-stop calls about ballots and such, even though all they can say is “call your representatives.”

Honestly, I don't even know if the protests are a national thing or local. I've been on a news diet. But the postal workers I talked to were understandably worried about the protest.

They're worried about the counter protesters showing up and making it violent. They're worried about the protests blocking the trucks that bring the mail. They're worried about violence and mayhem on top of all the extra work they're doing.

Every single one said they appreciate the sentiment, but they wish the protests were happening in front of statehouses. They don't have the power to fix this, and though they agree with the sentiment, it feels to them that THEY are the targets of the protests since it's in front of their workplace.

So this is all anecdotal, of course, and represents a town with a small post office, with less than 3,000 Po boxes. But to a person, every postal worker I spoke with this morning appreciated the sentiment but wanted the protest to be where they belong.

Just food for thought. I've called all my reps. Have you?

Never in my life did I think I’d have to go to a food bank- and I have had some serious stretches of poverty. I moved out on my own at 16 and it took  some work to make ends meet. By eighteen I had a pretty tight budget. By twenty I was somewhat secure. At twenty-five I had it all worked out. I still budgeted like crazy but I ate the best food.

That was my thing- I just wanted a nice dinner at the end of the day. And I had secured that for myself.

It felt good.

So it was really weird and felt catastrophic when I had to go to the local food bank a few weeks ago, and every week since. If not for them, I’d be starving right now.

Usually every Thursday we pull in to the parking lot of our local STEM school and shed a few tears about how many other cars are in front of us. We live in the wealthiest part of our state but all of these people are going hungry? But yesterday, on account of the holiday, they moved the collection center two towns away, and also closed early, so we didn’t get our food for the week.

The volunteers are incredibly kind and non-judgemental. They treat us like customers rather than charity cases. But no amount of kindness makes us feel better about being charity cases.

We’re doing better than most- part of my wife’s salary is free rent and utilities. We don’t have a lot of bills.

But we’re drowning.

I don’t know how people who have to pay rent and utilities are doing it.

I want to quit going to the food bank so that people who really need it, get it.

But I also don’t know how to feed us without it.

At 41 years old, I’m going to a food bank for the first time in my life.

And I am really trying to justify that while also telling myself that other people need it more than I do, and feeling guilty for getting free food when so many other are struggling.

And this is 2020. Just an absolute shit year that wrecked us all.

But never in my life did I think I’d have to get in line at a food bank, nor panic when we got there too late.

I don't have a lot to add to this, but:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="und" dir="ltr"><a href="https://t.co/kwti60bZLw">pic.twitter.com/kwti60bZLw</a></p>&mdash; Elliot Page (@TheElliotPage) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheElliotPage/status/1333820783655837701?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 1, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I'll transcribe the announcement shortly.

I hate to post a tweet as a whole diary, but I want to congratulate Elliot for taking this step; coming out is never easy.

Elliot Page had a pretty large fan base of cis lesbians (myself included). I suspect this was something that made the public announcement more difficult and brave. But it is my deepest hope that Elliot lives a deep, fulfilling, and full life. This is the first step in that journey.

I’m usually not one for year end “Best of” lists- I will often browse the selections of my favorite critics but that’s about the extent of my engagement with them. But this year I, like many others around the world, consumed a ridiculous amount of entertainment and I leaned away from my usual fare and more towards genres that I normally wouldn’t invest a lot of time or attention.

The most notable thing I noticed was that music was nowhere on my list. It was shocking to me when I realized I didn’t listen to a lot of music this year, and certainly nothing new. But whether I’m writing or listening to music it has never been a form of escape for me, it’s more of a way to bring into focus my thoughts and feelings. This was a year where I needed blurry and dull edges around everything; when things came into focus they felt too painful or scary. So I didn’t listen to a lot of music and what I did listen to was older and familiar enough to simply be background music, that didn’t make me feel anything.

So without further ado, here are my favorites of 2020. Please share yours in the comments!

I apologise for the all caps but y'all, THIS IS SERIOUS!

Whether you love or hate microbreweries and craft beer, this is an injustice that we cannot let stand. I say this only partly in jest.

Back when lockdowns started to happen, a lot of local breweries across the country got to work creating hand sanitizer. Remember back in March and April when it was impossible to find any? Brewers stepped up and instead of making locally sourced craft beers they just made the alcohol to in turn make hand sanitizer.

Some of them sold the sanitizer at cost; others, like Warfield, pictured above, simply made it then handed it out for free to essential businesses, like the one I work for.

Well, it turns out the FDA is going to punish them for that.

When the onset of the pandemic led to a massive increase in demand for hand sanitizer this spring, many distilleries stepped up to alleviate the sudden shortage. The main ingredient in sanitizer is ethanol, which they are in the business of making, albeit typically in more fun and tasty formats. More than 800 distilleries pivoted from spirits to sanitizer, offering it for sale or in many cases donating it to their communities free of charge. Their prompt action helped ensure supplies of sanitizer when it was otherwise unobtainable.  (Even then, the FDA needlessly complicated things, imposing additional requirements on top of guidelines published by the World Health Organization for emergency production. The FDA's mandate that all alcohol used in sanitizer first be denatured—rendering it undrinkable—created a bottleneck that raised costs for distillers and slowed production.)  Producing sanitizer is viewed as a point of pride in the distilling business, a way that they were able to help their communities in a fearful time of crisis.   Now, however, that good deed is being punished with unanticipated fees by the FDA. "I compare it to surprise medical billing," says Becky Harris, president of the American Craft Spirits Association (ACSA) and of Catoctin Creek Distilling in Purcellville, Virginia.

This article states that the fine is as high as $14,000! For an industry that is mostly made up of local, small business owners who've already lost a lot this year, this is an unforgivable ask which will likely force many of them to shut down.

2020 has been a year of living in a sci-fi hellscape. I've learned to live without and give up a lot of small pleasures in life. But goddammit this is just a bridge too far.

Besides spending time with my family, the one thing I can't wait to do after the pandemic is over is to settle into a nice patio seat on a warm summer day and drink locally made beer while waiting for a hamburger.

There's nothing like coming back from a long hike or bike ride and getting that cold microbrew.

But all is not lost. Here's how we can help:

Here is a list of ways to contact the FDA.

Hereis the docket number for reference when you contact them:

FDA-2020-D-1106

We’ve all been through a lot this year and I know so many of us spent a lot of energy to GOTV, and in a lot cases are still working for the chance to dispose of Mcconnell as “leader.”

But on this last day of this awful year, maybe we can make one more final push. We've sacrificed so much already. This is just too much. 

#SaveOurBeer!

We recently lost a long-term, well regarded member of this community. This happens periodically for a number of reasons, but the community is often anguished by the departure.

I don't have any answers or particular insight into why or how this happens, whether it's an admin decision, community moderation, or choice on the part of the member, I figure everyone has their reasons and I respect that it's not always an easy choice.

What I do have is some insight into why I personally sometimes step away. Once, a long time ago, I wrote a TTFN (tata for now) and I don't remember the details very well now. I know that I started deleting my diaries (something I regret to this day) and dismissed the comments asking me to stay.

I don't know (because I'm too lazy to check) if I deleted that diary, or changed it, or what. But I did leave the community for several months. I didn't even check in to see if I was banned or to see if there was anything worth reading here. I just left completely.

It was a very heavy time in my life but getting offline was revitalizing. I took my vacation time from work and went on a beautifully fun and carefree road trip with my wife. I sat outside eating pistachios and reading a book. I barbecued, I took my dogs for a walk in a new place every day.

In short, I just lived my life, unplugged.

It wasn't necessarily this place specifically that I needed to break away from, it was just outrage and angst in general that I needed to distance myself from. I also unsubscribed from all my political podcasts and only listened to comedy based podcasts.

Since that year (I can't remember if it was ‘13 or ‘14) I've taken several other long term breaks. In the last few years I've disappeared mostly during winter because the winter where I live is incredibly long and it takes a LOT to keep myself from falling into severe depression.

I know a lot of people feel the need to announce their exit like I did back then but the truth is most people won't notice your absence right away. What's most likely is that by the time people notice you haven't been around you're ready to come back.

That's not to say that our relationships here and our contributions aren't valued, it's just that there's a lot of people here and, just like any other rocking party, you can slip away without anyone noticing for a while.

So that's what I do. I know that when something here is aggravating me or changing my mood I have to walk away and recalibrate. I love so many of you, but very little that happens here is worth my energy in the real world. If it's more taxing than fun I simply log off. Sometimes for a day, sometimes for half a year. In the summer because I'm busy hiking and biking and camping, in the winter because I'm trying to keep the sanity I gained over the summer.

I guess my advice (which is worth what you paid for it) is twofold:

A) when someone you care about leaves, let them go and don't take it personally. We all know what happens when a member posts a GBCW. They may have weighed the consequences and decided it was worth it. They may have just had a really bad day and lashes out. In the case of the former, they probably have an even better reason to step away. No one should take what happens here so seriously that it seeps into their real world life.

B) If you feel like you're on the brink of saying fuck it all, log off for a week before penning your GBCW. If the interpersonal aspects of this site are still bothering you then absolutely, throw some flames on your way out. But if you find that you're just fine without us, just stay away until you miss us. Absence make the heart grow fonder and all of that.

And finally, this has been a very rough time all of us, and the cherry on top of the shit sundae was a pandemic that isolated a lot of us. Nevermind all the craziness that happened AFTER the election.

It's not unreasonable to feel angry and exhausted. You should feel angry and exhausted; it's been an exhausting and outrageous five years.

But we all have to steel ourselves because the next few years are going to be hard. We will likely return to sane and compassionate policy but the disease that brought us to the breaking point is still prevalent. We'll be fighting QNuts for years.

So make sure you take time for yourself. That's evergreen advice, but especially important for those of us who genuinely care about our future.

There’s currently a diary on the trending list about a gay man who suffered from gender dysphoria for many years. I am completely empathetic to his story because we share a lot in common as far as our understanding of ourselves goes, but I need to make a few crucial points.

First, I also have thought on occasion that my life would have been tragic had I been prescribed puberty blockers. But it’s important to note that the only time I’ve had that thought is when an anti-trans person brings it up, and paradoxically if I think about it further, my life would have been a lot better had my parents even considered such a thing. That would have meant that they recognized this thing that had caused me so much distress and unhappiness.

When I was a little girl, I assumed that when I went through puberty it would turn me into a boy. That was the only thing that made sense to me. All my friends were boys, I was a rough and tumble kid, I loved sports and guitars and girls. Oh, did I like girls. Not as friends, but as something different, though I didn’t quite understand the difference.

When I went through puberty I felt like this had to be a mistake, even though I was old enough to know better. My inner feelings did not make sense to me. I had crushes that I recognized as crushes on girls my age and older, but that couldn’t be permanent, could it? It had to be an odd side effect of puberty because puberty was supposed to clear things up for me.

At the time I did have gay and lesbian friends, but every lesbian I knew was a butch one. I love butch lesbians but I’m not one and I didn’t want to be, so I didn’t think I could be a lesbian. I just didn’t see myself in them. But I also didn’t see myself in my straight friends. I was completely lost and confused.

Finally (TMI, I know, but relevant), I share with the diarist the experience of it all making sense the first time I masturbated. I had a long term, very good looking boyfriend at the time and I was considering having sex with him, which would be my first time. I got curious about what it would be like, so I started experimenting. It took a while before it started to feel good (girls really need a positive sex education earlier in life) and as soon as it did I tried to think of my boyfriend but all I could see was the girl in my class who always flirted with me.

I couldn’t make it stop. Her smile, the way she looked at me when I took off my coat, the way she’d approach me but suddenly become shy and look down instead of at my face. She was the cutest punk girl I had ever met, and all I wanted to see was my hands in her purple hair that night alone in my room.

It took me a couple more years to completely accept this truth about myself, and a bit more time to tell the truth to everyone else. It was a very painful, scary, confusing journey. But the one thing that became clear to me is that I did actually love my body. I loved being a woman. I had never thought that was possible before.

I empathize with the other diarist on a very intimate level. But I must say, this is exactly why I think he’s wrong.

[Deep Exhale]

I was maybe ten years old the first time I heard my father beat the shit out of my mother.

I don’t believe in the supernatural but that house was haunted and when we moved into it we were all doomed. There wasn’t an escape hatch. There was nothing but the absolute cold- no matter how we tried to heat the house it was freezing cold.

My sister and I had rooms in the basement, but we often pulled our mattresses upstairs and made a bed between our younger brothers’ beds. We would play stupid games, win stupid prizes, and the first one to fall asleep woke up with a Sharpie mustache and goatee.

But one night we heard what we had always suspected was true: dad was beating the shit out of mom in the room next to us. We sobbed, hearing the wreckage. I can’t really explain the terror.

This particular night, the oldest of my younger brothers went to spend the night at one of our uncle’s houses. My dad, a railroad worker, was called out to drive a train to another state so wouldn’t be there that night. My youngest brother, at all of 5 years old, slept with my mother that night.

My sister and I were attempting to sleep in our brothers’ beds. My sister fell asleep pretty quickly, but I couldn’t sleep because my uncle, my mom’s oldest brother, had moved into our place “temporarily” and took over my room which I was fucking furious about.

And then dad came home.

At the last minute the railroad had to change routes so my dad didn’t have to drive a train. This gave him the opportunity to go to his favorite dive bar and drink a bottle or two of whiskey before coming home.

My sister and I crawled into the same bed together and tried to hold each other tight enough that it wouldn’t be real.

But the violence didn’t stop. We heard it all, the slaps, the punches, the throwing. And we knew our baby brother was in there witnessing it all first hand.

At the time, my uncle was sleeping in my room. Fresh out of scams in Vegas he moved to Idaho to recoup and find another grift. He was always the creepy uncle. He never did anything inappropriate, but he was also never entirely appropriate. I don’t know how to explain it. I was his favorite niece and he forced me to sit in his lap while he kissed my forehead and called me his “favorite little tomboy.”

Anyway, that night, the first time we heard my dad beat the shit out of our mom, I lost it. My sister held me down to get me to NOT run into our parents’ room and bite my dad’s ankles, or whatever I was planning.

She wanted me to just lay down and cry with her and I thought that was fucking bullshit, so I wrangled myself out of her body lock and I ran downstairs to my bedroom which my uncle had taken over. I grabbed his wrist and started tugging and crying “Uncle Joe, wake up! WAKE UP! Please, please help….:

He finally woke up and asked what was wrong and I held onto his wrist and pulled him out of the room so he was standing right beneath my parents’ room so he could hear what was happening.

He stood there for a minute, then pulled me in to a big bear hug. “Honey,” he said as I sobbed on his chest, “married couples do this. It’s ok, your mom will be okay tomorrow.”

Then he let go of me and went back to bed, and I always wondered if my mom’s screams, his baby sister’s screams, ever haunted him.

But I know they didn’t because he fell right back to sleep and I went back upstairs feeling completely defeated. I KNEW what was happening was wrong and that a better man would stop it.

Depending on one's yardstick, I am either a baby Gen Xer or an elderly millennial. This means that I was born at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution and so my working life has been up and down and sideways, but never steady. I understand I am not even a cog in the wheel of capitalism, I am just the flat product that the cogs make possible.

I'm 42 now, and I've had a wild ride. In my worst years I made barely over $10k a year, in my best I cleared $90k. Most of it has been somewhere in between, and I suppose I'm lucky that my median over 20 years is 45k.  That SHOULD be minimum wage but, y'know, the way it works is if you make more than average you're doing well.

Anyway.

Not to digress too far but I've hit a few really rough patches where I had to go to the food bank AND ask for charity on the internet. I'm not proud of that, but I refuse to be ashamed, either.

But all of a sudden, it's a worker's market. Anyone can get a job anywhere they want and that's not republican talking points, it's the actual truth.

Employers are raising wages and adding benefits to lure people to work.

(I'd love to take a deep dive on why this is, and I probably will later, but for now let's focus on the here and now.)

I recently got a great job with a wage that's above average and a lot of perks. I still work hard and ethically but it's So. Much. Easier than the public service sector job I was doing before. 

I don't have people yelling at me because I don't have the very specific Tootsie Roll bar that they want.

No one approaches me with an attitude about how much a six pack costs.

I don't have to deal with any of you grumpy tourists who didn't know what you were walking into before you got here!

I do customer service over the phone- the people I'm talking to would never imagine that they're talking to a lady who is wearing a vintage (IDC, I'm calling it vintage) LGBT for Obama T-shirt and blasting Rage Against the Machine in the warehouse.

I love my job, and I love what I do. I thank FSM for leading me to a job where I don't have to work with public.

But… 

BUT (and here's where YOU come in), I am exhausted. I am so tired. At my warehouse there's enough work for three people to do, but it's just me.

I wake up, I go to work, I come home, I pass out from exhaustion, then I wake up and do it again.

I don't mind. In fact, I enjoy it. It's making me happy, giving me discipline, having a goal every day is an important thing for me.

And at the end of the day, I just want someone to be nice to me.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but hear me out.

Everyone you encounter in your day to day life (unless they're retired or otherwise out of the workforce) is trying to make things work with a lack of help.

This means that you need not only be kind to the clerk that's ringing up/bagging your groceries (and BOO if you don't simply do that out of habit), but also keep in mind the people in front of and behind you.

They're exhausted. They're showing up to work every day knowing they can at best stay ON TOP of things but the idea of GETTING AHEAD of them is out of the question.

Worker bees work. That's what we do.

A lot of us have quit working with the public because you all- I'm sorry, I'm just going to say it- y'all are insufferable assholes.

We no longer have to deal with the sort of abuse that people love throwing at service sector employees.

So be exceedingly nice and generous wherever you go, because the people who bring your plates to you can go elsewhere.

We already are. So be kind, be happy, be generous. You might not even know how much a kind word in the middle of a long day can be.

When my grandmother died, my aunt and I somehow became responsible for cleaning out her house. This wasn't an easy task due to her tendency to hoard stupid shit and the fact that she kept items she found through her genealogy research and mementos of all her kids and grandkids.

It was worth it, though, to see what she chose to keep.

One day I came across two items that I never connected until recently.

The first was a ration book of my great-grandmother's. My grandpa would have been a young teen at the time it was issued during WWII. Half of the coupons were gone but the other half remained. I know that millions of Americans have much more intimate connections to that war, but I was born almost four decades after it. (Context: the end of the war was to me what 9/11 will be to children born in 2036.)

The second thing was a stack of newspaper clippings. It had all the things you'd expect- marriage and birth announcements of her children and grandchildren, a clip of my baby brother who was featured for his artistic rendering of the weather (a first grade project). Me making the front page due to happenstance when my junior high school band played at half time for ISU's homecoming game.

And then a letter to the editor that my grandma had written. I had no idea that she had such strong feelings about the topic but it didn't surprise me. That woman never had a soft opinion on anything.

She wrote that it should be illegal to burn the American flag, and again, this was not a soft opinion. It was harsh, bombastic, and unapologetic.

It was rare, if not unprecedented, that I disagreed with her opinion but on this I very much did. Flag-burning has never bothered me and, in fact, I think it's often a necessary statement. Stronger than turning it upside down.

It's not that I dislike the flag- I actually respect it a great deal. Like almost every other American, I was raised/taught/brainwashed to respect all it stood for. I recognized ages ago that it doesn't stand for waswhat we are, but what we could be. I like that promise. It's my overall goal in life to make us a More Perfect Union, knowing that I'll never see it in my life but I nevertheless have the tools at my disposal to try.

And so I have always shunned the “patriot" label because of the people who associate themselves with it. It makes me angry when I see a guy wearing a pair of flag shorts. Flag bikini's for women, are you fucking kidding me? Flags on tshirts, worn as bandanas, flip flops, socks, ties, jackets, dresses.

NO. You don't do that with the US flag! You're supposed to respect it. Take it down at sunset and raise it again in the morning, unless you have a shining light above it. There are rules about this piece of cloth and for whatever reason- maybe it's a flaw- I firmly believe we should follow those rules if we claim to pledge allegiance to it.

Then on my commute home the other day I put these two things together- the rations book and the letter to the editor.

I've always felt an internal distrust about so-called patriots. The guys wearing the grease and sweat-stained hat with the flag on it. The girls with the flag and bald eagle on their oversized shirt that they use as a nightgown. The football team from Boston…. They all make me recoil.

Because patriotism isn't about the flag. Patriotism is that book of ration coupons that my great-grandma didn't use just because she could. Patriotism was the coupons she never cashed in.

Patriotism was my Grandpa signing up for the Army Air Force (that was a thing) as soon as he turned 18. It was his younger brother lying about his age to get the same role and becoming a fucking *paratrooper*.

It was my grandma's first born son going off to a war he didn't want to fight in, and having it consume him.

It was my younger uncles who served in supposed peace time but still came home with PTSD.

It was me, when I was aimless and shifty and my mom tried to convince me to join the service and I told her I couldn't. I was able but not willing to fight or die for whatever people were fighting and dying for. A year later 9/11 happened and my mom sobbed about what could have been if I'd followed her advice.

It was me in 2000, at 21, casting my first ballot for Al Gore, and every year thereafter faithfully going to the polls for the greater good (I've missed three elections in my life- 2007 when my sister went into pre-term labor and I rushed to the hospital instead of the voting booth after work; 2011 and I can't remember why now, but I remember lamenting that I couldn't make it; and 2015, when I had just moved to where I am now and didn't know enough or have enough time to research the candidates in my new town.)

I know a lot of people who wear flag paraphernalia and it deeply offends me that they disrespect the flag like that. I know it's only symbolic, and that's what pisses me off the most.

Most of you will recognize me as a typical jaded Gen Xer. And I did and do disagree with my beloved grandma about flag burning. But I have endless sympathy for my great-grandma and her judicious use of the ration book.

Both of these things hit home especially hard because I never thought I'd be able to show true patriotism in my lifetime.

I never thought I'd be asked to sacrifice for my fellow Americans.

But that happened.

And I don't enjoy wearing a mask. I hate giving up my favorite pastimes . I still really want to go drink mimosas and play several games of pool or darts with my wife in a dive bar.

I want to go to the library and spend hours browsing each section without breathing into my own face. I miss spending the entire day, carefree, browsing the aisles.

But this is what I do instead: browse Library books online and place holds on them to pick up outside.

Go without a pool cue in my hand. Play a game of cards instead.

Be mindful when I'm planning my weekend. If I need to go to the hardware store, call ahead and make sure they have what I need so I don't waste any time.

Order takeout. Sunday brunch can't happen in our favorite restaurant, so we order takeout if we have Sunday off together.

I want a big ass Sunday dinner. I want to spend the day in the kitchen with my sister and mom and gossip all day long then serve a delicious feast to my nieces and nephews. Then I want to scold them for not eating enough and being ungrateful.

I want to take my youngest niece shopping, which is an absolute nightmare. I want to have petty squabbles about cost/worth of a product and be disappointed that she chose looks over function.

I miss SO MANY little things. Like dinner with family, shopping with kids, lazy drunken days with my wife.

THESE are all the ration tickets I didn't use.

Because I love every single individual that makes up my whole family.

I miss my friends.

I miss meeting strangers who become friends.

I miss spending the whole day in the library, running my fingers along so many spines of books I'll never read, but pulling a couple from the shelf that I will.

I miss my life.

I've given all of these things, all these sacred treasures, to my country, my fellow citizens. I've given and given and given, because that's what this time calls for.

But I'll be damned if I'm not ready to toss a flag in gasoline at this point.

I love this country enough to sacrifice for it. That so many flag-waving dickheads won't do the simplest thing makes me despair.

I am a patriot. I am trying to save us.

Take your fuckin' star-spangled socks off and join me.

Your flag paraphernalia tells me a lot, but if you have a mask on your face I know enough to recognize you as a true patriot.

And right now, what we need the most is true patriotism.

While having my morning coffee and browsing the internet this morning, I came across a discussion about how parents can instill in their children a healthy relationship with food. I’m not a parent but have been far more active as an aunt than most. (In practical terms I had 50/50 custody of my three oldest nephews, and the nephews and nieces who came after them also spent far more time with me than their own parents.)

That is relevant because when I had the kids I fed them whatever they wanted every morning, no matter what it was. They didn’t get enough food otherwise. The only rule was it had to be something I could make with what we had in the house. There were some debates on occasion, but at a certain point I’d start making pancakes before they even woke up. That was their favorite, expected thing. As soon as they got out of bed they’d have a cup of hot chocolate and pancakes ready for them at the table. It was just how they liked things to go on the mornings at Annie’s house.

For lunch we’d have a more balanced meal- sandwiches and fruit or roasted veggies with pita and hummus.

For dinner they always wanted pizza or fast food or frozen meals just because that was what they were used to but I would rarely go along with that.

If they wanted pizza or burgers and fries or hot pockets or whatever, we’d make that at home. That’s when I learned to make dinner interactive. I got tired of the kids hovering in the kitchen asking when the food would be ready so I started assigning all of them tasks to help make it. It was a lot of fun! (Stressful for me, to be honest, but worth it and fun watching the kids learn to take pride in what was served for dinner.)

I want to emphasize that I know this was a privilege I had. I could not have done it as a full-time parent. At the time I was financially comfortable- my then-partner and I made good wages and had low housing and cost of living expenses- and we were DINKs, so we had plenty of disposable income. I loved that time of my life most of all because I never, ever had to go cheap when it came to food and that was the most amazing thing I had achieved in my life as far as I was concerned.

So this discussion I was reading about parents teaching healthy relationships with food sent me on a long journey through my mind and memories, including the above.

One person posited that parents shouldn’t simply say “eat it or else” and instead explain why that’s what they have to eat that night, to be honest: if it’s because that’s all you can afford, tell the child(ren) that’s all they can afford. If the parent is just tired, tell the child(ren) that they’re tired.

Another person said the parent doesn’t have to do that- part of life is accepting what people give you when it comes to your needs and if it’s not enough, learn to live with it while you figure out how to get what you want for yourself.

Other people jumped in to say opinion A caused an unhealthy relationship with food and yet other people said the same about opinion B.

And my mind and memories got to humming…..

I wish I could do this story more justice- do a deep dive into what really happened and why- and some day I will. But this morning I’m just going to write about it how I remember it, which will of course leave it open to an incorrect timeline or other misremembered facts.

But I actually think that this anecdote about John Denver is even more powerful through the lens of a child and for the purposes of this post, I want to write from that perspective.

Unfortunately, I kind of have to be unkind to Tipper Gore. I honestly know nothing about her outside of this topic and the fact that she was Al’s wife. The first presidential election I was eligible to vote in was 2000 and I didn’t follow politics in depth back then the way I did in subsequent years. To this day  she could be standing in front of me and I would have no idea. I’m sure she’s a lovely person and would have been an excellent First Lady.

But the only thing I really know her for is her work with the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC).

Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist: Self explanatory but, to expand, a radical feminist who excludes trans women from their mission or vision.

Kind of a passive definition, isn’t it? For example, my feminism is in many ways tied to my physical being so I’ve always included trans men who were assigned female at birth (AFAB); therefore, I have an inclusive scope of feminism. Easy Peasy! I’m an intersectional feminist, period, the end.

Except, it’s not actually that easy.

I’m very easy to prey upon and sway when it comes to those who were assigned male at birth (AMAB).

I struggled for a long time with my identity. I can’t say exactly when it happened, but eventually in my early twenties I simply embraced the Me that I know. I was tired from making a statement with my appearance and I just wanted to be comfortable in my own skin.

I had earlier wrapped myself in the most butch persona possible. Short, spiky, multi-colored hair, wearing cut-off camo fatigues, combat boots, and a tank top. Or combat boots with jeans and a t-shirt and a wallet with a chain, even though carrying that wallet in my back pocket really hurt my back when I drove.

This was a defensive act on my part- I never felt comfortable in that identity. Coming out had exhausted me, though, and I was tired of people doubting that I was really a lesbian. Dressing as the stereotype gave me a thicker shell. Strangers knew at a glance that I was gay, and friends and family got pushed even harder out of their “it’s just a phase” stance.

(I even shaved my head at one point, save a row of bangs that I dyed bright pink. My sister, who was the first person I came out to and had been supportive up to that point, saw me and asked “what’s next? Why don’t you just go tattoo ‘DYKE’ on your forehead?”)

Anyway, after a couple years of this I got tired. I was just an actor, spending a ridiculous amount of energy on my appearance even though that was never anything I enjoyed doing. So I quit dyeing my hair and let it grow out and I started dressing how I always had, which was comfortably and without regard for the opinions of others.

There is a lot more I want to write about how the world viewed me and how I viewed myself in each stage of my self-acceptance and it’s actually quite pertinent to the topic, but I’m not here to write a treatise today.

The point is that my personal experiences with identity necessarily inform my views, even when those views are wrong. But because it’s personal, it’s easy for bad actors to sway me into a thought or belief I wouldn’t have really given a moment’s thought to otherwise. That’s disturbing! It straight pisses me off. It’s easy for me to immediately spot someone who’s racist or sexist and refuse to give them any of my time. It’s also easy for me to spot the same with anti-trans** people, but I haven’t yet achieved that ‘no time for you’ credo with them.

Indeed, the worst part is I’m willing to hear them out.

_{This is going to be a lot harder to write than my last post (“Confessions of a TERF”), and that last post was really hard to write. BUt….}

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Critical Race Theory has become the new boogie man of the right and it scares me how effective that has been. I’ve been saying for years that the most effective way to wake up white people is education. As it is, we’re given less than Cliff notes on the topic- in fact, I truly believe that if the Civil War hadn’t happened we wouldn’t have been taught about slavery at all.

My public education taught me that yes, racism is bad, but we fought a war to end it. Then it bubbled up again in the fifties, but a black pastor from the South made a speech and it ended again. It was never a constant, never built into the fabric of our society. Racism was a bad thing that bad people did way back when, but good people stopped it and it has been stopped since.

I was just a child. Hadn’t even reached five feet in height yet, and I had no reason to doubt the adults in my life when they told me racism was a thing that only happened in the past before a better generation fixed it.

That one of my best friends was a black girl proved this.

To be fair, I was, at the time, colorblind like people preached we should be. I didn’t see Ella as a black person, she was just my friend. I never thought anything about us being friends until adults pointed out it was “good” that I befriended her, or “compassionate” for including her.

On some level I understood what the adults were saying but it really made no sense to me otherwise. Ella was just another friend. I didn’t spend time with her for egalitarian purposes, I spent time with her because we were a lot alike and I felt comfortable being myself around her.

I wasn’t picked on or bullied back then but I wasn’t popular, either. I was this sort of in-between, and Ella was right there with me. We loved to read, but we’d take our noses out of our books if there was a game of kickball happening. We loved Math, but not enough to defend it to our other friends when they complained about assignments. We loved going to the library together, but when our other friends saw us in there amongst the pile of books we amassed they made fun of us and we didn’t even care.

Thirty years later I still don’t understand the pride so many Americans take in being barely literate. But Ella and I, we loved words. We loved stories.

We were excited about the upcoming field trip our class was going to take to the airport. We got to see a lot of cool stuff so I shouldn’t roll my eyes about it, but it was a very small airport with maybe five to ten arrivals or departures per day. The entire airport was smaller than our school, and we started getting bored and restless as we were shown and led through yet another conference room.

I don’t remember what we were being led to at the time, but we were all following a woman to an upstairs area. A boy from class looked back at me over his shoulder, laughed, and asked why I was hanging with a N*****.

I had never heard that word spoken out loud before and I immediately got angry and lunged toward the kid. Ella and our friend T grabbed me and held me back, but I promised Doug I was going to kill him when the final school bell rang.

My threat didn’t stop the boys from picking on Ella and I had never seen anything so cruel in my life.

They kept picking at her and I kept fighting back and Ella kept grabbing my elbow and telling me to let it go, it was OK. BUT IT WASN’T O FUCKING K. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing as the boys in our class taunted and tormented her. I couldn’t believe the adults there heard most of it but kept threatening me and never told the boys to STFU.

When we got back to school and into our class, our teacher called me to follow her into the hall. She was furious. Demanded to know why I was so disruptive through the entire field trip. So I told her.

I told the truth and nothing but the truth. She furrowed her brow and looked deep into my eyes. “This really happened? I need you to name names if this is true.”

So I fucking named them.

Named every fucking name.

Brandon.

Jesse.

Chad.

Doug- especially Doug. He was the one who used the N word.

Mark.

Dan- he was the one who said something I won’t repeat.

Cory.

And Derek.

I always thought Derek was my friend and a good guy. He didn’t say anything, but he stood there with them as they taunted Ella. And when I wanted a fist fight to settle the score he just walked away.

The teacher thanked me and said I did the right thing but I was still in trouble, then she opened the door to the classroom to let me back in and yelled the names I’d just named. I thought justice was coming.

I’ll spare you the drama, but at the end  of the day I was the only one who faced consequences.

At some point, I remember it being the next day but I could be wrong, my mom barged through the school doors and ripped the principal a new one. It was so embarrassing- it was a small school building but that didn’t justify her voice ringing through the halls for all the school to hear.

To ten-year-old me, this wasn’t a case of racism. It couldn’t be because that didn’t even exist anymore except among really awful people. They were picking on her because her hair was weird and her clothes were old. They were picking on her because she didn’t know who or what or where her mom was. They were just picking on her to be mean, like the time the same boys cornered another girl- a white one- and spit loogies on her for what was probably two minutes but seemed like an eternity.

Ella, T, and I all stood back watching it happen, glancing back and forth to each other expecting someone to say something, but if WE did, we would be the ones with loogies in our hair, so we just watched it happen, stoic and silent.

It was by accident/happenstance that my last two posts (Confessions of a TERF andConfessions of a Racist) had an obvious theme. Neither were written because they were necessarily timely or relevant to larger discussions we’ve been having here, nor did I anticipate they would be as well-received as they had been.

In the comment section of the former post, I joked that I had some internalized misogyny, but it would take me years to unpack that. And it’s true, I do carry some baggage with me about women and I, like millions of other women, find myself judging them so much harder than I do men.

What’s the opposite of “the soft bigotry of low expectations?” That’s what I (and I believe most women) carry with me every day. I don’t think it’s benign per se, but I’m also not going to dig deep into why women like myself fight that battle because I don’t think it’s that important.

I hope that one day it will be but I don’t think we have that luxury now, if we ever did at all.

Before I continue though, I need a standing ovation for Cecily Strong and her skit on SNL’s Weekend Update. If you haven’t seen it yet, you must correct that oversight. This post is written in dedication to and appreciation for her.

The absurdity (and it’s beyond absurd) of the skit is what makes it so absolutely and paradoxically poignant. Here is a smart, talented, successful woman talking about her own abortion and literally acting like a clown in order to make it seem harmless- which it was ALREADY.

But she had to make it more palatable to the audience. An audience, I should add, that is likely already mostly on her side of the issue. 

Strong later said that the skit was indeed biographical, and she hadn’t even told her own mother about her abortion. She wanted to tell her story but she wasn’t sure how to do it and, at one point, even asked people if she was crazy to think she could pull off this skit.

(That’s another thing about women- whether it’s abortion or rape or domestic violence, we often carry it alone, quite often further enabling the stigma because we think there’s something wrong with us if we can’t  carry that particular weight with quiet dignity.)

And that is the most frustrating part about abortion as “an issue;” as Strong points out, it’s not an uncommon procedure or experience for many, many women. And as I always say, if you think you don’t know any women who’ve had an abortion, you do. You just don’t know any women who’ve felt safe telling you about it. 

You know what else I say that about? Sexual violence. I guarantee, statistics be damned, that nearly every woman you know has experienced being treated as an object at best, violently raped at worst.

If we’re murdered it’s almost always a man who slithered his way through the “justice” system for years, despite our bruises or wounds. And sometimes women help those men. The reasons for that are as sad as they are varied, but they all mostly boil down to not wanting to be in more danger. Indeed, the most dangerous place a woman can live in this world is in the weeks after leaving an abusive partner.

I hope and want to believe that this is slowly changing but until it’s eradicated, women are trained from a young age how to adapt to this violently misogynistic society rather than young men being trained how to not be sexually or otherwise violent towards women.

*******************

When my oldest niece was born I was blown away. Beyond in love with her and determined to keep her safe for her entire life, and that overwhelming love was when I realized something was tragically even more wrong than what I’d previous realized.

After five nephews, I finally got a niece and I literally danced as I walked for weeks afterward.

But I was also overwhelmed with the thought that she would one day grow up in this world and we hadn’t taught our boys anything. I carried- and still carry with me to this day- the anxiety of loving this girl so much and being unable to ever truly protect her.

When she was a couple of weeks old, I remembered a line I had heard in a movie or TV show or maybe just popular culture in general.

“When you have a son, you spend your whole life worrying about that one boy. When you have a daughter, you spend your whole life worrying about every other boy in the world.”

And that shouldn’t be our truth. That shouldn’t be what we feel when we look at our daughters and it shouldn’t be what we expect of our sons. We shouldn’t be resigned to the idea that she is vulnerable as a girl in a world designed by men. We can no longer accept that our boys will just be boys, and part of being a boy is damaging women.

As far as my eldest niece goes, my mom and I (her primary custodians) didn’t really teach her anything at a young age other than “always be comfortable with your feelings.” (I know I’m prejudiced, but my niece was and is an insanely adorable creature. I want to belabor this point so hard that I will probably have to delete several paragraphs about how fucking cute she is/was when I edit this. [Ed note— I deleted seven paragraphs])

Anyway, whenever we went to the store or the park or any other public place, people- mostly elderly ones- would see her and light up and approach her asking for a hug or whatever. My funny, adorable little niece would most often turn her head up and over so as to show she didn’t want that person in her space. Otherwise known as sticking one’s nose in the air.

Every once in a while she’d smile back and give a hug to the person then sing a song for them. (FWIW, her voice has never been as beautiful as she is so we taught her the shortest version of all of her favorite songs. For our own well-being. There is no amount of adoration within me that will justify that rusty can sliding across a chalkboard her singing voice.)

What was remarkable is that when she was a toddler, 90% of the women who approached her got at least a smile and a song, and less than 1% of men got the same.

Yet 100% of the women who got the “you don’t exist to me” head turn accepted and respected that, saying something along the lines of “good girl, she knows not to talk to strangers!”

To be fair, about half of the men behaved the same.

But we never really talk about the other half, do we?

The other half of men that she shunned became visibly angry. “You’ve taught that child no manners!” or “when I was a kid we respected our elders!” or “she’s going to have to get used to strangers, you know!” or, my favorite “WHY DON’T YOU TEACH THAT GIRL TO SMILE?!?!?!” Like she’s a fucking dog pissing on the carpet and this dude is flabbergasted that I haven’t potty trained it.

They all became offended when my niece drew her own boundaries. They all seemed to believe that it was something wrong with her or me that she didn’t want their attention. They never considered that my niece didn’t want their attention.

We never had an explicit or open conversation about this, my mom and I were just naturally on the same page as far as my niece went. She owned her own body, her own face, her own energy. Sure, there were things like bathing and swimming and other things toddlers can’t do alone where we had to be at least supervising but often actively in charge of her, but other than that no one, not one person in the world, could force upon her body anything she didn’t want. As a toddler, that was an unwelcome hug, but we knew that as she got older it would escalate.

The thing was, raising my niece made navigating this world even more complicated and difficult for me. It was now a wickedly designed and plainly dangerous maze rather than the maze I had grown so accustomed to that it now seemed mundane, even when I hit a dead end.

Every single fear that I had for my niece was part of my own history, my own trauma. And so much of my own trauma was knowing the trauma of my mother, and her mother before her, and her mother before her. My niece was an adorable, brilliant, individual being of her own, yet also a composite of every woman before her.

She’s sitting in a dark basement room, the only physical contact being a smack across the face, and no way to remember last time she saw the sun. She’s the little girl dropped off at the steps of an orphanage, the girl also later inheriting the trait of the only physical contact being a smack across the face.

The girl pregnant at fifteen but never considering an abortion because she so wanted another human, one who would never know poverty and the desperation she felt. The same girl who later wrapped her infant child in a blanket and held him close to her chest as she stepped out on the ledge of her apartment window, suddenly aware that she couldn’t escape her fate and thus she had also doomed her first begotten son to the same, and that was a fate worse than death.

This is the girl who went to spend the night at her friend’s house and woke up to her friend’s father with his hand where it shouldn’t be. The girl who’s tiny body completely froze until he finished what he was doing before running home barefoot in the middle of the night. This is the girl that woke up one night in a cheap motel with her naked body pressed hard against the cold wall, barely able to comprehend what the man who had pinned her there was doing behind her.

This is the girl who is twelve years old and on the couch with a man three times her age shoving his tongue down her throat. This is the girl who was thirteen when she woke up to a man asleep on the couch, who suddenly grabbed her arm and pulled her down on top of him, pressing her pelvis into his and grinding and asking if she wouldn’t mind getting naked for him. This is the girl that knew enough to be scared when he asked if she couldn’t tell how hard he was or if she simply didn’t care. This is the girl who pried herself away and made a pot of coffee and felt invaded but otherwise normal because these are just the things that happen.

This is the girl who had a pregnancy scare at fourteen and, unable to collect the money needed for an abortion, instead got really drunk and had her best friends punch her as hard as they could in her stomach. This is the girl who had a nice boyfriend who said that however the pregnancy test turned out, it would be ok, and this is the girl who five minutes later crouched in a corner among shattered glass trying to explain how she could be so fucking stupid.

My niece, my beautiful niece, was all of those women in my eyes. All of those scenarios and more I had to protect her from. Her very innocence shattered me because I knew it was destined to be short-lived. I did the typical thing and said I was going to keep her in the attic until she was thirty. And even then, any man who wanted to see her would have to submit to a serious interrogation.

This is the strange experience of being a woman. We are individuals, radically diverse and unique, yet also all the same. The woman who thinks and feels and dreams and contributes to society and loves and is loved is the same woman who will nevertheless eventually find herself in the proverbial dark alley and lives each day with that inevitability. We somehow reconcile those two beings at some point in our lives- usually in the aftermath of said dark alley. We are sincere and genuine, but we’re also scared and always aware that we are prey so we hold a lot back. 

So I don’t really care what internalized misogyny I carry because it’s nothing compared to the specifically female trauma that this world created. It’s light as a feather compared to the generational trauma I drag around with me. It isn’t what led me to write a line in a song that said screamed “now not even my cunt is mine” and it isn’t the sigh and deep exhale my mother gave when she heard that, turned her head towards me, and said “you know I don’t like That Word but that was a really good song.”

It isn’t like the feeling I had on my eighteenth birthday when I was pregnant and trying to figure out how to get an abortion. It’s not the suffocating feeling of turning the corner at the drug store to find a man with his shorts pulled down and penis hanging out, staring at eight year old me as he started to pleasure himself.

It’s more the feeling of running fast away from the man and towards the customer service counter. My internalized misogyny is based on the fact that I find safety in women. That a part of me will always see them as caregivers first and foremost.

And I’m okay with that for now. As long as the world is as daunting as it is for women, I will embrace the stereotype of feminine = nurturing. It’s all I’ve ever really known. And it’s what I’ve become. My oldest niece is now approaching her 18th birthday and so recently I asked her if she needed birth control. She said yes. I told her if it ever fails, call me and we’ll take care of it and she said she already knew that.

If my niece also carries internalized misogyny I have never seen it, but that she sees me as a caregiver first and foremost I am okay with because my life wouldn’t be my own if she didn’t know I was always here, ready for a hug, no matter what.

*******************

Like Cecily Strong, I haven’t told my mom about, well, everything. Or anything.

She knows things have happened and she’s allowed me the space to tell her vaguely about some of them, but I don’t think I can ever tell her about most of it. I know she’ll blame herself and if I’m being totally honest, I DID blame her for most of it, too.

Because the very young, recently divorced single mother can make many mistakes, yes, but why is the worst thing a mother can do is bring men around her children?

And WHY am I so mad at my mother for what men did?

Women shouldn’t have to constantly view every single man as a potential predator. Seriously- how are we to function in this world if we have to always set aside how dangerous men are to us, while also pretending we are not at all threatened by men?

*******************

One day when I was about ten, my family had a big get together at the nearby reservoir, as we did several times every summer. There were about eight of us girls sitting under a big umbrella in wet swimsuits with towels wrapped around our shoulders. Both sides of my family were there. I took a deep breath and told my sister and my cousins that I was being molested and I didn’t know how to stop it. I had heard all the speeches in school about “tell somebody” and all that, but I still felt, and feel to this day, incredibly stupid for telling my story.

I finished my story anyway.

And then one by one, they started telling their own stories.

A group of young girls, ten to twelve, telling their stories of molestation. Only one cousin swore she’d never experienced anything like that but I knew she had because I was there when it happened. I remember the police coming to our house to take a statement from her, and I remember how my young body trembled when they said “we’ll probably never find him, unfortunately, unless he does something serious to another young lady.” I thought the police would recognize what happened WAS serious, but they didn't and so I knew I would always be in danger of seeing that man again. That is a really hard lesson to absorb at nine years old.

When I was older and first came across the perfectly accepted statistic that one in three women will be sexually violated in their lifetimes I couldn’t help but laugh.

I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t been.

This is the hardest part of being a woman. She tried to shield it from us but we, my sister and I, heard every detail of what happened to our mom, both as an adult and a child. We heard what happened to our grandma- and I haven’t yet and probably never will share what I learned about my other grandma.

In so many ways this is simply generational trauma, but it’s also because so little has changed. No, in theory, our bosses can’t slap our asses while we’re in the office. In theory men can no longer make  offhand, sexist comments. (BTW, if you’re one of those men who thinks “just the tip” is a good punchline in any situation, please STFU forever.)

So many men feel like they’re being shackled by the “#MeToo” movement, otherwise known as “we’re fucking tired of your shit,” and at the same time women are feeling shackled by, well, just look around at everything.

And yet we’re *still* required to make men feel comfortable in our presence as though we’re the ones who can inflict harm.

So there will be no “Confessions of a Misogynist” from me. Yes, I sometimes objectify women. Yes, I judge them harsher than I judge men. Yes, I hold them to a higher standard and yes, I do that because I think they are superior to men.

There.

I fucking said it.

But I didn’t write the rules, I’ve just lived by them.

And in part two we’re going to talk about how the rules are far worse for men than they are for women, but for now I just needed to be an angry feminist. 

_{I am only sharing here what I want to share. Please don't flood me with messages or comments asking questions or offering advice. Thank you in advance.}

Back in March of this year I almost died. I remained close to dying for several weeks, but I ended up pulling through. My wife was by my side through it all, but about a month after my long stay in the hospital she had to travel for work.

My sister and my niece came to help me out,  staggering their visits so that they could cover the entire week my wife was gone.

This would have been really good for me had I been healthy, but being in the position I was it was kind of everything. My sister and I had time to get to know each other again (long story I don’t want to elaborate on now) and I got to spend quality time with my niece, who turned me into a mere satellite in her galaxy the moment she was born.

It was good and necessary for my sister and I to reconnect. I still felt small in her presence, like the little sister I will always be, but I also had a chance to stand up for myself in a way that I never could when we were younger: the thing that scared her most, that broke her heart every day I could save her from.

But I chose not to because I love her, and I don’t want to lie to her.

 Anyway, I suppose I shouldn’t dwell on these small points so that I can just get on this with this message:

There really was no better time to be alive than the time I’ve been alive.

Yes, I watched the tumbling of our democracy. I saw the planes hit the towers, and I cried helplessly as I witnessed the so-called PATRIOT Act be enacted.

But I also married my wife.

I was here when the state stripped protections (dozens of times) for low income people to access healthcare, but I was also there when people stood up and fought against stripping what access they  did have.

I watched the Pride Fair turn from a counter cultural event that our lives literally depended on to a family friendly event that is just another summer festival families can enjoy together.

When I was sixteen my mom forced me to see a therapist and start taking pills. When my niece was sixteen she just went by herself to a therapist and had my mom sign a paper.

She had no shame.

There was no stigma.

When we’re together as family- five generations of us, we talk openly about anxiety and depression and failure and suicidal ideations, and I am so happy that the kids have a name for it. For all of it.

All that they’re feeling and experiencing and thinking- it has a name and so it can be stripped its power.

My life would have been a lot different if I had known how to name It.

My life probably wouldn’t be something I was ready to leave behind.

But, my friends, it is.

It’s time.

Obviously a lot is happening right now. You all have to fight like hell to reclaim the right of choice. You all have to go to the ballot box and pray to whatever deity or teacup in the sky you believe in that the pro-democracy folks win. Organize, fight, fight, fight, fucking win.

I won’t be there to cheer you on.

The fight of my life right now is hilariously (to me) simply to stay alive.

But I'm all out of fight.

I left giving nothing except the name of that which killed me, and having that name means the children I love so much won't spend a whole lifetime fighting that off.

At least I hope it will.

You all take good care of yourselves and the world we live in.

I hope you all find comfort and power in your final days.

👍

It surprised me when my voice caught in my throat. Just one second earlier my planned response seemed important; now I was silent, watching her cheerfully peel an orange. She was beaming with pride. In any other context her sunny demeanor would delight me.

“I just told her I thought she would always regret it,” she continued as she popped an orange slice in her mouth.

I wondered if that was true. It didn't seem true for the women I knew, but the women I knew didn't exactly wear their hearts on their sleeves.

And they probably didn't yet see me as a woman, anyway.

It was a beautiful spring day, the kind I needed after a long, gray winter, and I wasn't sure what that meant for me. I was certain I deserved a dark and dreary day but the earth overruled me.

If I was going to meditate on regret I was going to do it in the bright light of day.

I was seventeen, just weeks away from my 18th birthday. I needed that birthday to come quick because I hadn't had a period in over six weeks. My sex partner (I can't legitimately call him a boyfriend because he wasn't) was as anxiety ridden as I was. We didn't even have a real discussion about it. I told him I was late and we'd have to save funds to take care of it, and he said OK.

Being seventeen and raised in a conservative environment, I had until then been “pro-life.” But once it happened to me, I realized abortion wasn't evil. It was just practical.

My story is kind of anticlimactic. I had started a new job and during orientation I passed out. The next day, less than a week after my 18th birthday, I started bleeding and it was NOT a normal period. It was a miscarriage but I've never been happier to be in so much pain and bleed so much.

I just wanted to go home and sleep, but before I did that I stopped by my partner's house. I guess I looked pretty bad because as soon as I walked in the house he rushed over to me and said I should probably sit down. Instead,  I wrapped my arms around him and whispered “I'm bleeding.”

We both started sobbing happy tears.  He helped me down to his room and put me to bed, holding me tight. I stayed there in his bed for a couple days and he couldn't have been more helpful. He cleaned me, helped me walk, fed me, held me.

And this experience changed my life. I became fiercely pro-choice, and I also realized it was probably time for me to come out as a lesbian. WHY I made that particular decision at that time is a whole other story; maybe before I leave this earth I'll be able to tell that.

But it was only in the last few years that I told my mom about this; about how I felt certain she knew, as she ate that orange, that I was pregnant at the time and as far as I was concerned I had only one choice.

She really didn't know, and apologized for making me feel pressure. “I am against abortion,” she said. “But that's a personal choice I made for myself.  I've never thought I should make that choice for other women. But I guess the way I've always talked about it made it seem that way.”

“Well, just so you know, to this day if I somehow got pregnant, I'd abort the shit out of it with no regrets.”

My mom laughed uncomfortably. “I can't believe I raised you this way.”

I know a lot of women told their stories when the leaked Alito draft made the news. I read many, if not most of them, but I was critically ill at the time and barely able to send texts more complicated than “OK” or “LYT.” And with the Dobbs ruling, I didn't know whether to feel grateful that I was heading out of this world, or angry that I can't stay and fight.

I still don't know.

I know that I don't have the wherewithal to do anything more than vote this year and that drives me crazy. But I thought maybe the tsunami of very important and relevant abortion stories needed to start up again before the midterms.  Just as a reminder that this IS a critical issue. It's an economic issue. It's a health issue, it's an issue of equality.

And it's an issue that we've been trained to tiptoe around and treat with the utmost delicacy, but for millions of women it's not that delicate. It's not taboo. It's simply a choice that should be available. Whether that is a difficult decision or not depends a lot on the person, and as I listened to my mom speak of regret all those years ago, I STILL can't think of one woman for whom it was a regret or difficult.

We need to be able to say that out loud. And God damnit we have to fight like hell to protect it.

I can't fight anymore. But please, please, please, fight like hell for me and on my behalf. PLEASE. We need this.

I used to work at the Veterans Home and this was the worst day. Men missing limbs trying to run. Violence increased, meals went untouched.

Management increased workers so everyone had only a few people to work with instead of a dozen.

It wasn't unusual for staff to leave with bruises.

It was the worst day. For us, the workers, we'd clock out feeling like we just left a war zone.

But for the men in the building,  they had never left the war zone.

It was the worst day.