It’s Memorial Day in the US, one of the few holidays I’ve got with my current employer. I’m taking a day off writing, for the most part, as well so I can get an actually restful weekend of sleep and (hopefully) recovery in me before returning to the grind. I don’t typically have much respect for today, given how much it’s being used for pointless pagentry, political points, and trying to stir patriotism in a country with a bit too much pride in itself. I can’t much take a holiday seriously when all of the communication I see about it is either advertisements for appliance sales or attempts to create a sense of pride in my country will it tries to ruin the lives of the marginalized people who live here. So, to that end, ignore the fascist spinning up of nationalist pride in preparation for Trump’s Birthday Parade and do something else like call your reps about putting a stop to that or about how they plan to actually stand up the the fascists instead of demuring every time there’s an opportunity for the kind of endless opposition we need from every level of our government if we’re to survive as a country with any semblance of what we like to call “democracy” intact. Eat a hot dog or grill out or whatever it is you feel you need to do, but don’t let the holiday blind you to the continue rise of fascism rather rapidly consuming our country.
US Politics
The Economy And Society At Large Are Failing Artists
Recently, an… associate? Community member? Friend of a friend? Recently, someone I know vaguely in that way you know people who are in your community but with whom you’ve never had much of a direct interaction published a graphic novel (or second of three collections of a comic they’re publishing on the internet, depending on how you want to define things) and got not only zero support from her publisher but a string of such unhelpful responses that it would be easy to suggest that she was actively hindered. I’m not going to name the person, the publisher, or even the comic because I don’t want to drag any mud into her business, but it was absolutely infuriating to hear about what a shitty time she’d had in the publication of this latest book given that the one freaking thing a publisher actually does, aside from making the editing and printing aparatuses available to creators, is help to sell the book! All they’ve done so far is make sure copies show up at businesses and that’s the bare minimum for a business! You’d think that a company that was going through the actually significant hassle of receiving, editing, proofing, and printing an entire graphic novel would also spend some time and money marketing it so they can, you know, make some money of the damn thing! But no. This released with no fanfare, the creator was absolutely stonewalled when she tried to get the ball rolling, and she’s been left to do any amount of marketing by herself via social media. It’s absolutely infuriating.
Continue readingLooking For Reassurance As The World Threatens To Crumble Around Us
Despite being a part of the economy of the United States of America, both as a person producing value/wealth for others like a good capitalist cog and as someone whose retirement is largely dependent on it’s health due to the broken way that retirement is set up in the US, I feel a sense of satisfaction every time the stock market loses value. I understand this is the perversity within me making itself known–it is my one source of schadenfreude even though it is far from harmless–to a life mostly spent setting it aside in order to do what I know to be right (for example, I did actually vote in the latest election in Wisconsin despite wanting nothing more than to not vote at all because I was being harassed and hangued at all hours of the day, by phone and mail, about note just voting but how just ANYONE could look up whether or not I voted in any particular election by those messages that always feel more threatening than motivational). I understand that and do not set it aside because, for all the harm it does, it has a greater impact on those so wealthy that their “worth” is tied up in the bullshit confluence of imagined value known as the stock market. It is the only time I get to look at the world and know that while the actual impact on my life is greater than it will ever be on a billionaire’s, at least my changes are measured in four or five digits while a billionaire’s changes are measured in at least double that many digits. Cold comfort, to be sure, given that I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be able to actually retire in the modern sense of the word, but it’s the only comfort I’ve got as my country and economy shake a rattle at a scale beyond my ability to influence.
Continue readingA Poor Excuse For A Wisconsin Winter
Today, while I was stuck inside working and writing blog posts during all of my breaks, the snow melted. It hit the mid-50s and would have been an excellent day for a walk if a few inches of snow hadn’t melted and turned the entire world into a swampy morass of goop, mud, and salty grit. You see, until just a couple weeks ago (two, as of this being posted), we hadn’t gotten much snow. There’d been several incredibly light dustings and maybe an inch or two total of accumulation over a couple snow events, but none of it stuck around long and it was never enough to really blanket the environment. Two weeks ago, we had a couple snowstorm events over a few days and accumulated a proper amount of snow, enough for it to ACTUALLY feel like a proper Wisconsin Winter. Now, today, it’s all melting and will likely completely vanish over the next few days as the temperatures rise above freezing and stay there. Sure, it’ll drop down eventually and we’ll get that Wisconsin Classic, the good old Wintery Mix of snow, rain, and sleet that turns the world to slush, but this is probably going to be it for actual snow accumulation barring some strange late-March temperature drops. A week and a half of snow. Maybe three or four weeks of decently cold temperatures, most of it without much snow. And then a bunch of days in the fifties, tons in the fourties, and who know how many High Temperature Records. What a terrible excuse for a winter.
Continue readingBuying In Bulk In These Uncertain Times
Eggs are expensive. They’re hardly a good barometer for the economy as a whole, especially now when they’re expensive largely due to scarcity resulting from bird flu running rampant, but it’s difficult not to look at a seven dollar carton of eggs and think about all the little ways that grocery buying has gotten kinda fucked up over the last couple years. These days, unless I’m not buying much or really skimping, it is rare that I make it out of the store without spending about one hundred dollars. I could probably get that down with cheaper products and really hunting bargains, but doing that doesn’t save me all that much money and, as someone who has done that more than a few times in the last half a decade thanks to COVID-19, I’m already buying the cheapest stuff I can without sacrificing flavor or quality. What’s worse is that I’m not even buying stuff in the quantities I was before. I used to buy the economy size of most of my staples since I’d definitely go through that stuff before it went bad. Certain spices, condiments, various shelf-stable food in boxes, rice, etc. All stuff I’d buy in the biggest container I could. Now, though, my grocery bill has gone up noticeably and I can’t even buy the volume per item I used to. I literally can’t find some items in the sizes I used to. If I could, I’d still buy them in that size, increased cost be damned, but a lot of brands in the grocery stores I go to have just stopped selling those larger sizes.
Continue readingFixing One Problem So I Can Work On The Rest
After a few sessions without much in the way of stuff to work on, my physical therapist and I decided to change our appointment schedule to every-other-week (starting with a three-week skip due to scheduling issues). Since I stopped taking that medication that was making me physically miserable, I’ve had fewer and fewer problems that I’ve needed to work on with my physical therapist. At this point, as I’m coming up on two months off the medication, I’m still dealing with some lingering stuff, but most of what I’ve got going on is due to the physical demands of my job and the somewhat uneven muscle usage those demands result in. Other than stretches and starting up my exercise routine in earnest again, there’s not much to do for now. Thus the every-other-week appointments. We’ll let some time pass, see if getting back into my exercise routine helps fix my lingering problems, and then hopefully either end our appointments or set me up with a better workout and stretching routine and THEN end our appointments. Either way, I suspect I’m less than half a dozen appointments from being done. Which is great, let me tell you. I still remember just how awful last fall was, even if a lot of those days blur together in my memory, and no matter how tired or sore I feel nowadays, I can take comfort in knowing that it will pass in a couple days if I stretch and get enough sleep. And destress a bit. I’m still struggling with that part, but I always have so I doubt I’m going to fix it any time soon.
Continue readingMental Health In My Doom Spiraling Era
My experience of depression has pretty much been a lifelong series of ebbing and flowing cycles. I used to compare it to floating in the ocean, with days where everything is calm and still, others where gentle waves rock you, and the occasional day of furious storms that threaten to bury you deeper beneath the surface than you could ever hope to return from. These days, or maybe these years, really, it is a much less tumultuous affair. Part of that is being more emotionally even-keeled as I’ve worked through a lot of my trauma and removed a bunch of the unhealthy relationships that added turmoil to my life. Another significant part of this more mild experience has been that I’ve learned how to handle my own internal spikes and troughs better, thanks to years of therapy and introspective work. The rest is probably settling a lot of outstanding issues that were actively causing me deep and constant pain. That said, it’s not like my depression is gone. It’s just different. I tend toward valleys and hills rather than waves and cratering depths. Little rises and falls along the way as I cross much larger rises and falls measured in a scale closer to geography than individual steps. The bad days are still bad and the good days often feel few and far between, but I have to admit that feeling less caught up in it, moment to moment, is a huge improvement.
Continue readingBlogging Through The Horrors
I kind of expected shit to go sideways as soon as Trump took office. I’ve been readying myself for it for a while, after all, so I had a pretty good idea of what his government would do, how’d they do it, and how that would go. I didn’t expect it to be as grand and sweeping a shitstorm as it is, but we’re still within (the admittedly far end of) my projections. What has surprised me, though, which maybe it shouldn’t have given how the election went and how the party behaves over all, is how the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And not only are they not doing anything, but they’re actually supporting some of the confirmations of Trump’s horrible, unqualified, and incredibly disastrous government. They’re not trying to reformat themselves into an opposition party. They’re not even trying to PRETEND to be acting against him! What they’re actually trying to pretend, with a few exceptions, is that this is a normal governmental transition. Which is whack! It’s fucked up, even! This shit isn’t normal and the fact that they literally made a goddamn vote deal so they wouldn’t have to work on the weekends is abhorrent, ESPECIALLY after the first aerial crash that came as a likely result of Trump attempting to gut the FAA. This isn’t normal! They should try to do fucking anything at all! Literally anything! People’d be lining up to support them if they did! No one likes this and even the people who like this are going to stop liking it as soon as more air traffic accidents start happening, disease via food contamination runs rampant, and the next plague breaks out! The first two are a foregone conclusion [I wrote this on the morning of the 31st, before the second collision, so I feel kinda bad but also very justified in writing this, even as SOME Democrats have begun to do something that still falls short of what feels like the minimum I’d expect from an opposition party] but the last thing seems increasingly likely as bird flu and fucking tuberculosis start to pick up and the systems that might have warned us they were coming are being dismantled by a mixture of pettiness destructiveness and incompetence!
Continue readingIs It Still Resilience If I’m Just Willing To Accept Being Miserable?
Content warnings for discussions of mental health and therapy, including suicidal ideation as a side-effect of obsessive-compulsive disorder and non-specific misery.
Continue readingAn Exchange Of Beliefs To Reflect This Upcoming Political Era
Content warning for discussion of childhood abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma.
Continue reading