Tag: anti-Semitism

Guitar Town

Monday and back to the office with me this morning. Huzzah? I have an Admin Day and my supervisor is out of the office until tomorrow. It’s also 32 degrees (!!!) this morning. My desk feels cold, and there’s definitely a chill here surrounded by windows. The apartment feels nice and toasty; we turned the heat on last evening as the temperature dropped. It kind of feels like Christmas now, you know? Warm weather at this time of year always seems wrong in some way. I did very little yesterday, and won’t apologize for simply falling into a spiral of not feeling like getting anything done for most of the day. I wasn’t tired; I just was kind of in a low-energy recharge state for most of the day. I did write some notes for the book, and started getting to the place where I feel like I finally have the narrator’s voice, and that was what was holding me back from getting started. I am hoping today to get some good background work done on it after work tonight, depending on how cold it’s going to feel on the way home and once I get here. I do have some chores to do tonight, too–which I should have done yesterday but alas, did not. No guilt, though, which is kind of a lovely feeling, and undoubtedly a result of the anxiety medication.

I do find myself thinking sometimes so this is what it feels like to be normal before realizing and remembering that there really isn’t a normal; everyone thinks they are normal because we only truly know our own experience, and our minds instinctively think that everyone is the same as us. I knew I wasn’t like everyone else very young, which was very unpleasant, and was absolutely terrified people would figure out I was different and it took years for me to reach a point where I didn’t much care about being different anymore and actually embraced it. I am also very literal and completely oblivious sometimes, which really bothers me…but being oblivious, I am not really aware of just how oblivious I am. I am oblivious about being oblivious, which is kind of weird.

But I did watch a lot of documentaries yesterday on Youtube; Paul’s not been feeling terribly well so he spent most of the weekend sleeping and resting, so I was pretty much on my own yesterday during the day. I watched one on the Hapsburgs (always fascinating to me), one on the Romanovs, and several other historical ones–a lot of legends and lore of the South and the Appalachians; and other tales of hauntings and murders. I was, of course, horrified about the latest round of mass shootings, and more than a little surprised that one wasn’t actually in the US but rather in Australia. Since the targets at Bondi Beach were Jewish-Australians celebrating Hanukkah, I can’t help but feel that anti-Semitism was at the root of this horror. All mass shootings are horrors, but these ones driven by bigotry and prejudice really bother me. There’s no justification for killing other than self-defense, and even then I am not certain how one lives with that sort of thing. The end result of bigotry and prejudice is inevitably violence; which is why hatred and hate speech is such an abomination.

Targeting people celebrating a religious holiday is especially egregious and evil, no matter what my views on religion are.

Sigh. But it’s Monday, and a new week and it’s back to the office with me in a bit. Christmas is next week, and once again, I failed to do Christmas cards and probably am just going to give up on that for the year. I do need to wrap a couple of presents, and I need to ship one to Dad, but does it really matter if it gets there before Christmas? Probably not.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back in the morning tomorrow.

All I can think is that he’s getting cold standing by the window in his underwear like this...although it could be a prompt for a Christmas crime story.

Goodnight Tonight

Wednesday pay-the-bills day has rolled around again (huzzah?). But we’re also halfway through the week and I am not exhausted yet, so that’s a plus? I slept very well last night, and the bed felt very comfortable this morning when Sparky and my alarm started trying to get me out from under my heavy blankets. Yesterday was a fairly good day. I finished the short story and sent it in, and now tonight hopefully I will be able to get back into writing the book again. St. Patrick’s Day is also this weekend, so I’ll be trapped at home because of the Irish Channel parade–traffic will be horrible, so I need to check the time and what day and the route and all that and plan my weekend around it.

There’s nothing more New Orleanian than planning around a parade, is there? Ah, the Crescent City life, right?

Paul got home late again last night, so after I worked on my story and did a few chores, I settled into my easy chair with Sparky for some bonding and to watch the news…which becomes more and more dystopian and insane every goddamned day. Now the government is illegally detaining and disappearing legal residents under the guise of “preventing anti-Semitism.” This is terrifying. This is one of the biggest violations of the First Amendment I’ve seen. If we have to listen to bigotry and prejudice and hatred all under the umbrella of ‘free speech,’ then everyone has to suck it up and hear speech they don’t like. It isn’t “free speech for me, but never for thee.” Everyone in this country, whether they are here legally or not, is entitled to the protections of our Constitution–which include due process. It always amazes me that people miss that part. (It’s the same kind of elitist “us v. them” that Christianity teaches them.)

And now we have someone using the highest office in the land to make car commercials in front of the White House. Talk about cheapening the dignity of the office! But the office was cheapened when he returned to it, wasn’t it? I will give him credit, as he’s accomplished several things no one thought possible in uniting Canada and Europe against us. What a lovely way to repay our allies, right? We’re going back to that horrible period between the world wars, where our economy crashes and the United States are isolated from the rest of the world….and how did that turn out for the world? SPOILER: Not well.

Sigh. I suppose we should be glad it wasn’t a McDonalds or KFC commercial.

I am so tired of living in this, the dumbest timeline of all. It’s been really amazing seeing how fragile our systems and institutions are, and how much people love to cosplay “patriotism” without understanding even the barest minimum of how to be a good citizen in this country. I’m tired of people complaining about paying their taxes but also bitching about how shitty the government is. Why are we so uneducated? Because the Right has always hated free public education and has been doing their damnedest to undermine and underfund it since its inception. The reason why societies always fail under conservatives/libertarians. Libertarians are all about the theory, but subscribing to a theory that is a fallacy will always end up with terrible outcomes. The fact that so many people don’t know how fucking tariffs work (and neither do the current administration) is a stinging indictment of public education–not to mention no longer requiring either a civics or government course. (My US Government course has proven so valuable to me over the years…like 2000, when I was one of the few people aware of what the Electoral College was and its role in elections.) But…an educated populace who knows how the government works and is capable of critical thinking would never vote conservative, so here we are. No Christian should ever vote conservative and show their face in church the following Sunday, but…

Sigh. A lot of people in our society love to cosplay at things they don’t understand.

I still haven’t started reading my next book, and I may try to dive into Moonraker tonight after I get home from my errands (Sparky needs treats!). We shall see.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later!

Yeah, Tom Cruise was most definitely NOT the embodiment of Reacher