Category Archives: Love

Hi! I don’t know shit about anti-malarials! Or viruses!

Soapbox

In which I’m on about the anti-vax movement again because really can’t figure out how it attracts so many otherwise normal human beings. Like, most of the people I loved during my Fairfield/TM days.

No SHIT, right? Right?

Antivaxxers and alternative medicine quacks are attracted to simple solutions. Reinforces their worldview, which is that they’re personally capable of expertise without earning any qualifications beyond google university.

They don’t like complexity (unless it’s the pseudo-scientific nonsense they make up themselves), and they don’t like nuance or method. They like bad guys and easy solutions, they like victimhood and keeping their (almost overwhelmingly white, middle-class) privilege at all costs.

So we’ve got wholly unqualified keyboard warriors promoting a medicine they know fuck-all about for use in a disease they also know nothing about, because… they read some dumb shit in their online echo-chambers.

Which are supplement stores, by the way. That’s where they get it. Mercola, Natural News, whale.to, Oz, Chopra, Oprah, Goop: they’re all stores. It’s like getting your worldview and ideology from Safeway and then deliberately exposing your children to potentially fatal diseases because of something you read on a pop tart box.

Then there’s this: “President Donald Trump on Sunday once again touted the potential life-saving benefits of treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine, a powerful anti-malaria drug, despite a dearth of medical professionals or clinical evidence supporting his claims. It just so happens that one of the largest manufacturers of the drug, Novartis, previously paid Trump’s now-incarcerated former personal attorney Michael Cohen more than $1 million for healthcare policy insight following Trump’s election in 2016.”

They’re literally supporting what they claim to hate, the whole “evil big pharma” thing. Mostly because they can’t discern between Citizens United fallout and, you know, the whole of scientific method.

What a time to be alive.

A washer & a dryer

Family

In which THEY’RE finally actually HEEEEERRE!

A gift from my aunt! Brand new appliances, professionally installed! Whoo!

Now I get to do thirty loads of laundry, because everything we own is dirty.

Update: Two loads of clothes are clean, and I’ve washed the bath towels and our sheets. So far, so good!

This house is so great!

Family, Life, Love & Marriage, Moving

In which I’ve moved to Oregon, a state I haven’t lived in since the early 90’s!

We found a house in Milton (or is it Freewater?) and have moved into it. It’s an eight-block walk from the cheese shop for me, and I’m grateful that it cuts his commute in half.

Big old tree in the yard! Brick flower boxes along the whole front (in which I will probably plant food — tomatoes and herbs)! Tons of parking (there’s more around the far side you can’t see in this picture), in case we have, I don’t know, a small concert?

Our neighbor to the north is a creek and an apple orchard.

Our street is adorable:

Six houses on a dead end! No through traffic! Cute and quiet, and we’ll never see another fender bender! So far, the loudest sounds we’ve heard are dogs (this town is rife with canine Americans; there are at least a dozen who woof at me on my walk to and from work) and the engines of our neighbors’ vehicles.

Guys, THIS HOUSE IS SO GREAT. It’s so great. It’s positively lovely and I guarantee you I don’t deserve it. It has every amenity we could want, from two bedrooms to a garage to a second bathroom. There’s a dishwasher, tons of cupboards, a coat closet and a linen closet, and a built-in curio cabinet!

(The owner told me she’d kept Precious Moments in it, back in the day, and isn’t clear now why she ever did, but there it is: a place for my teapots and other random ephemera.)

Look at the light in this, the main bathroom! I love it! (And the fan actually works. It’s like a hotel bathroom, with a high shower head and plenty of room and shelves for products.)

The second bathroom is full-sized, and has a window and a shower with a sitting bench in it. I don’t know that we’ll ever use it much ourselves, but it’ll be handy if we have guest.

There’s also an enormous back yard surrounded by a privacy fence.

There’s no exit from the house to the back yard (you have to go outside and through a fence gate to enter it), and when I look at it all I think is “YARD WORK,” but my aunt let us take an abandoned lawn mower from the shed in the yard of a house she owns and my better half seems to be fine with the idea of keeping it up, so I intend to mostly ignore the entire space since there’s so much front yard and porch and concrete apron to enjoy. We’ve already discussed getting a BBQ, which I expect we’d never bother dragging into the back yard unless we were having a large gathering.

If there are any flaws, they are these: there are very few grounded outlets, the stove is electric (I’ve already burnt three dishes), and the glorious kitchen sink window looks into the garage rather than at the orchard.

The garage has a window, thankfully, but still, I’m sure the view was much better before the garage was built.

We don’t have any furniture except for the desk he bought for his computer, but the family is going to give us some chairs and a dresser!

The bedrooms have lovely wood floors, and built-in heating.

The LR has a heat exchanger in the wall and two windows. The place came with curtains, lace in the kitchen and living room and neutral panels in both bedrooms. So much storage. So well laid-out.

It’s so nice to be reunited with our stuff after nearly four months; I’m particularly happy to have my dishes and pots and pans, and the rest of my wardrobe. We’re 75% unpacked and very comfortable.

Yay amazing new house!

It’s all so fucking TWEE, though, the shit people believe

Soapbox

In which blah blah Facebook blah.

Somebody from Fairfield posted this on Facebook:

And I wrote this in response, but didn’t post it. Because why bother.

Counterpoint: There is no good reason to shame people who need pharmaceutical antidepressants. Those meds save lives.

Humans suffering from mental health disorders do not need to hear that their meds are bad and what they REALLY need is… a drum circle? Seriously? It’s like telling someone with cancer that all they need is a good attitude. It’s judgemental, unloving, and ignorant.

People with serious illnesses need drugs to survive. Diseases like depression and cancer are NOT the sufferer’s fault, and these diseases can’t be treated with positivity alone. That’s why we invented drugs in the first place!

Are drugs side-effect free? No. Are they perfect? Also no. But do they save human lives? Yes, they absolutely do.

Sorry for the soapboxing, but I know a lot of humans on psych meds who don’t need to be shamed about it.

You’re not a skeptic, for fuck’s sake, you’re anti-vaxx

Health, Soapbox

In which I know they can’t be persuaded until they’re ready so I’m not bothering to post this on Facebook, where I wrote it in response to someone’s anti-vaxx post, but I didn’t want to delete it.

The risks of being exposed to diseases are known, and they are horrible.

The risks of vaccination are vanishingly low, verging on non-existent outside of allergies or contamination (generally associated with lack of refrigeration).

We have decade upon decade upon decade of proof that vaccines are both safe and effective. Vaccines truly are one of the best things humanity has ever invented! They’re amazing and wonderful and gorgeous! Vaccines have saved millions of humans from disease, disability, and death! Unlike so much of the shitshow that is modern life, VACCINES ARE ACTUALLY WORTH CELEBRATING.

We know that vaccines do not cause autism. We know they do not cause “immune disorders” (this term is vague and medically meaningless). We do know they prevent disease and that they save lives.

To be a vaccine “skeptic” — without actually being an epidemiologist or biologist or in some way genuinely qualified to meaningfully contribute to the science — is to be anti-vaccine.

And to be anti-vaccine is to actively contribute to disease and death. Full stop. You don’t get your shots, you don’t get your kids their shots, you encourage others not to get their shots, and then we get ants. No, sorry, not ants: we get FUCKING MEASLES. A disfiguring, miserable disease that can not only kill you, but depresses your immune system for years, making you susceptible to diseases you’d otherwise fight off.

Your decision to cling to ignorance because it feeds your ego to “know something” the unwashed masses do not is the opposite of wisdom, the opposite of loving compassion, and the height of hubris.

“My intention is to allow others to make their own choices” is a pat set of anti-vaccine weasel words. What you’re really saying is this: “I mistakenly (and probably in good faith, for what it’s worth) believe outright lies, and I cling to them. And, even though my beliefs are demonstrably wrong, I expect my privilege to be respected in spite of my ignorance, the whole of the scientific process, and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence.”

People on chemo are catching measles because of the anti-vaccine movement. Babies are literally dying. Not very many yet, true, but this suffering IS PREVENTABLE.

The idea that letting a few people die in order to retain the privilege of flaunting one’s google university degree is AWFUL, and it absolutely breaks my heart to witness so many otherwise intelligent and loving people using their free time to be so-called vaccine-skeptics.

It’s a hobby that is LITERALLY killing human beings.

And yes, it’s a hobby. None of you are doctors or scientists or qualified in any way to do anything more than read shit online. And yet you “know” better than a over century of scientists and doctors and the self-correcting whole of scientific process?

No, you don’t know better. You’re not in on some secret. What you know is what you’ve read, and what you’ve read is garbage written by snake oil salesmen who want you to buy their cleanses and herbs and books and unregulated, useless supplements. Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine not because he knew too much, but because he was an unethical bastard trying to sell an alternate vaccine he would have made money from. All the rest of the anti-vaxx brigade are shady at best, from Oz to Chopra to Mike Adams to Scudamore, and they’re all selling you something.

Supplements are a multi-billion dollar industry, as are “alternative” health books and retreats and seminars. The ridiculous irony of the anti-vaxx movement is that it makes more than actual vaccines do, but screams “Shill!” whenever presented with facts.

The anti-vaxx movement is like Trump: everything it accuses others of is something it is doing itself.

Alone

Admissions, Love & Marriage

In which this is really weird.

He’s gone for two weeks, and I have the place to myself. Off managing the integration of a satellite office for work. I can do whatever I want! Including nothing! I don’t even have to make dinner if I don’t want to! I can do absolutely NOTHING AT ALL if I like!

Except the dishes are dirty, there’s still a load of laundry left, the floor could really use sweeping, and the throw rugs haven’t been washed in most of a year. There are also a couple bags of recycle to take out, and the stovetop needs a scrubbing because it’s greasy and gathering dust and looks gross. I should clean all my random shit off the table and do a general tidy. Nothing’s been dusted in months, either.

In other words, there’s a list of chores to do like there always is, this is just another Monday like any other, but now I’m also feeling sad and lonely. He won’t be home at six. He won’t be around at all. It’s just me and the apartment.

There’s still snow on the ground, barely a quarter of the lawns are showing green, and there are no flowers. The trees are barely starting to bud.

I’m not on the schedule at work until Friday. (There’s a new checker in training on the liquor side, so I’m guessing that M. and T. are getting extra hours in the cheese shop to keep their F/T schedules? I dunno. All I know is that I have four days off in a row, which is pretty fucking great, really.)

Except I’m home alone, and there’s nowhere to go, nobody to see. I could go out for a $6 coffee, but I have espresso and dairy here, and I really should finish the whole milk before it has a chance to go off. I could take myself out for dinner on Lyndale or Eat Street later, but I have a couple slices of pizza to eat, plus Indian food from the other night, plus stuff for nachos, plus unused produce that’s almost a week old that needs to be thrown into the Instant Pot before it turns to sludge. (Wow. Not to mention some lentil soup in the fridge, and two or three soups in the freezer.) In short, I have a fuckton of food to eat. No need to go out and spend money.

I could walk over to the art supply store, but nobody needs stationery less than I do.

Could go to the bike shop, but have I really decided to buy a bike this year? I love the old Schwinn, but I didn’t ride it at all last year. I should just sell it on Craigslist. And my work commute is two blocks, and I’d have to find somewhere to park a bike while I’m working. It’s a liquor store on Lake street in front of a bus stop; I bet bikes get vandalized and stolen from there all the time. Better to just walk. Don’t need a bike for my work commute.

I don’t need a bike at all, technically. I mean, I want one. Rides to the lake or the global market are really lovely… during the three weeks each “spring” and “fall” when I’m willing to ride a bike around here.

There just aren’t enough days per year in that sweet spot between 45 and 75 degrees. I don’t mind a little rain, but fuck biking in mud and snow, and absolutely fuck biking in 80+ heat and humidity.

Today would actually be a good day for a ride! It’s 51F and heavily overcast, and while there is snow on the ground all the pavement’s clear, and the Greenway looked free of snow and ice when I walked over it yesterday. Buuuuuut my bike’s got two flats, is too tall for comfort, and where would I go? The park around the lakes is grey and ugly as fuck because THERE IS NO SPRING IN THIS GODFORSAKEN PART OF THE COUNTRY, and I don’t really ride for its own sake–I greatly prefer it as a method of getting somewhere.

(I’m actually surprised it’s in the 50’s out there; all the pedestrians on 28th are wearing parkas and hats, so I thought it was colder.)

Could go to a movie, but I have a fiber internet connection and streaming everything so putting on pants seems like a lot of effort.

Everyone I know is at work so there’s no one to chat with online. Notre-Dame de Paris en proie aux flammes, and my president is a tit.

I don’t want to fucking do laundry.

E. tells me that when her husband travels for work she gets drunk and has a cry the first night he’s gone; I thought that was weird until last night when I got home from work and S. was in Illinois for the rest of the month and I felt heavy-duty sadness and separation; I guess I’ve never been with anybody before I liked to have around more than I liked privacy and space. I was always relieved, before, when whoever I was living with fucked off for a few days or a couple weeks. I didn’t expect to feel so fucking sad.

I mean, S. leaves every closet, cupboard, and drawer he uses ajar, snores sometimes, and often sleeps in the very center of the damn bed, but that’s really the worst of him. (Well, that and his habit of saying he’s “going to order us food” and then having to read multiple menus and “think about it” for three hours first, until I’m starving and end up eating cheese straight out of the fridge.) It’s not unfair to say he’s a bit boring in some ways, but it’s also true that every time I walked into the other room last night and saw that it was empty and dark, I felt absolutely hollow. No hugs or smooches. No “I love you”s. I mean, we chatted online, but he’s not here.

We were apart a few nights last year when I went to DC to see Amma, but other than that we’ve never been apart more than the length of a workday since I got here, five years ago tomorrow. You get used to a person, don’t you.

Oh, and part of what made yesterday and today so melancholy is likely The Curse. This cycle was 44 days long, and I had nearly a week of PMS symptoms (irritability, bloating, cramps) before I finally started bleeding, so there’s a whole hormonal component affecting my emotional wisdom. (If you can help it, don’t start your period the day before your favorite person leaves town for half a month; it’ll make you weepy.)

So, what will I do? Likely fuck-all. I’ve made the bed and a latte. I’m online, at my desk. I’ll probably surf Twitter and stream shit I’m barely interested in watching until I get hungry enough to go nuke something; then it’ll be dark and because I slept badly last night and stayed in bed until mid-afternoon I won’t be able to go to bed early, so I’ll just keep sitting here feeling weird and alone and not even getting anything checked off my to-do list.

Odds are I’ll go get a cocktail or two, wearing a knit hat because my hair’s dirty and I won’t bother to wash it, then come home and fall asleep listening to 15-year-old music on my iPod next to a basket of dirty laundry.

To my ex-husband’s girlfriend, on why I didn’t reply

Admissions, Soapbox, Whining

(NOTE: I found this post in my drafts folder, it’s actually a couple of years old; apparently never published it. In it, I say I don’t care what she thinks, but then I wrote all these words, so I guess I did! Sometimes I’m full of shit, yo.)

In which my ex’s girlfriend posted a picture on Instagram of the deck on my old house, finally FINISHED, after all these years! It looks fantastic!

Dear my ex-husband’s girlfriend,

Thank you for your inexplicably bitchy comment on social media. You appear to misunderstand “snark.”

Having had no meaningful interaction with you (beyond clicking the occasional Like button, or sending you Christmas cards) for the past ten years, your apparent rage — coming, as it did, out of absolutely nowhere — rather upset me and hurt my feelings, as you and I were good friends the last time I saw you.

I’m guessing that you’re mad because I used a picture you took, in one of my many stupid blog posts about my stupid feels about my stupid marriage? This picture-stealing happened, according to my archives, seven years ago. (It took half an hour of paging through old posts to even find the post you were probably talking about.)

Apparently you tried to communicate your anger at the time by unfollowing me on social media, I think? I’m sorry to say that I didn’t even notice that you were “done” with me, because, seriously, who pays that much attention to their ex-husband’s girlfriend’s sporadically-maintained Instagram account?

Technically, I did not “steal” your image. You’d posted your images publicly, on Facebook, on the internet, where anybody on earth could see, use, download, or link to them. I’m sorry it made you mad that I used one, but I didn’t even think about it, really. I mean, nobody even reads my blog but Stanley and my parents anyway. Plus, it was a picture of my house.
Continue reading To my ex-husband’s girlfriend, on why I didn’t reply →

Guns

Soapbox

In which I do an op-ed.

There’s a Twitter feed, called Well Regulated Militia (find it at @Well_Regulated_), that posts about nothing but the gun-related incidents and accidents that befall our, well, “militia.” Here’s a common example of its content:

“A member of our well regulated militia sleeps with a loaded gun under his pillow. His 2 year old son crawls into bed with him, finds the gun, and shoots himself. He dies at the hospital.”

The takeaway is that guns kill, even without human intent. All the time. Totally debunks the whole “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” bullshit.

Guns have one purpose: to propel a bullet at high speed into things, particularly flesh. Yes, you can kill with a car or a plane or a knife, but all of those things — cars, planes, knives — have other, primary, purposes. You can’t get to work or Europe in a gun, or make dinner with one.

Guns are dangerous tools, and it turns out they’re unsecured a shocking amount of the time.

While there are very good reasons to own guns, a great many gun owners obviously do not need, or know how to properly use or secure, their guns. (Because if you needed your gun, it wouldn’t just be lying around, now, would it.)

There’s also a really long thread by members of the armed forces (under @iAmTheWarax, if you want to find it), who are rigorously trained to handle guns, who still fuck up regularly because even highly trained humans are, well, fallible. Guns should just not be lying around, for fuck’s sake, because they’re dangerous.

You need to get a license to drive a car; you should also need to get one to purchase, own, and keep a gun.

I don’t want to ban guns, or remove them from all owners, not at all.

But I do want gun owners to assert that they need one (even if it’s just to shoot rabbits in the garden), that they’re mentally competent, and that they’re trained to handle and secure one.

Submit some forms (your shooting certifications, your completed safety class, your gun safe receipt), take a written test. Re-up every decade. Bureaucracy, used for its proper purpose. Will the occasional qualified applicant be denied gun ownership? Probably. Will the masses who shouldn’t be own guns be denied? Yes.

Will some bad guys have guns anyway? Yes, but they’ll be outliers, just like unlicensed drivers are outliers, just like unlicensed doctors are outliers, just like unlicensed anythings are outliers.

But IT WILL HELP. We need to regulate gun ownership in this nation.

Someone who can do anything…

Soapbox, Spiritual

In which there’s a repost, because I liked what I wrote.

My dad, no idiot, who has told me about his own experiences of the ineffable (while yet confusing “religion” with idiot American Christianity and considering himself an atheist), posted this on Facebook:

This was my reply:

Seriously, though, who believes in a God as a separate, remote, all-powerful entity in the ceiling, and not the whole of distributed consciousness? (We’re not the ancient Greeks, for fuck’s sake. We call it “weather” now, not “Zeus.”)

Children do, maybe, ideate such a “God” briefly, and also the pitifully indoctrinated, and the ignorant. Have pity on these, as you would on the idiots and the damaged, as you would on those who believe in ghosts or magic. They will either come to know better in their time, or are incapable of knowing better. Either way, let them be. (Unless they vote. Hah.)

Most atheist memes are raging against a “God” nobody worships, because truly that “God” is well known to be a caricature of a symbol of an icon of an idea of a koan, weakly and vaguely representing that inexpressible, ineffable state every conscious being knows intimately and yet seeks endlessly: love.

The truth is that the entity whose duty it is to feed those hungry and protect those kids and women from idiot ego’s bottomless and selfish hunger is that one who can perceive such suffering: You.

Me.

Us.

Every one of us.

We’re conscious, we’re consciousness; we’re consciousness embodied, distributed, and rarified, and WE’RE what’s capable of perceiving suffering and acting upon it.

We’re “God.” Us. We, alone (as far as we yet know) among all the elements of the manifest, immense, infinite physical universe, are the only ones who experience refined intelligence and consciousness. (Barring ET and cracking superluminal travel, of course, but I digress. So far, it’s just humans.)

In brief, bitching about suffering — and raging at some one-dimensional cartoon “god” nobody credible actually believes in — is really no more noble than ignoring suffering altogether. The problem is not with “God,” it is with that ridiculous definition of God as a thing apart from the world, an individual entity like our minds, separate and finite, capable of selfishness and laziness.

God is consciousness, or love. And infinite. This is plainly stated in most scriptures, but one has to, you know, actually put in the study time, in earnest, to learn it. Figuring out what “consciousness” means apart from our finite minds, knowing what the mystics know, takes time, introspection, and intense self-discipline.

I guarantee no earnest seeker thinks God is a white dude floating in the sky like a Marvel superhero.

TAT TVAM ASI: thou art That. (Or, as I learned it, lifted from a Beach Boys song: I am That, thou art That, all this is That.) Figuring out what that means is the only meaningful journey.