Murder, and Other American Ideals

On March 20th of this year, I was commenting about the fact that 3,060 people had been murdered by guns in America so far this year.  As of today, seven months later, 12,110 people have been killed by guns in America this year.  This does NOT include suicides.

What in the earthly fuck is going on?

If guns protected people, America would not be the gun-murder capital of the world.  I get the Second Amendment.  I am not totally opposed to owning a gun.  But we, as a country,  have to acknowledge that citizens owning guns will NOT stop government tyranny.

Let me channel Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale:  Everything is getting weird in society (just look at today's news) and then all of a sudden (in the novel) the entire government is murdered, in a coordinated effort.  The president, vice president, the chain of succession, and the congress.  Chaos ensues.

Sidenote:  Just last week, some crazy motherfucker sent dozens of bombs to the media and politicians.  What if they were active explosives?  What if they were active AND sent to current members of the government??  What if they also targeted media outlets, so no one knew anything about what was going on?

Margaret Atwood might have been writing a dystopian novel, but she isn't far off of 2018 reality.  It could happen.  What would you do if, all of a sudden, you couldn't protest, because if you did, a military force came out and gunned everyone down?  No warning.  No rights.  Just straight murder.  Would you go back out and protest?  Or would you shut the fuck up and stay inside?

What if they cut off access to your back account and you had no money?  What if they refused to let you exit the country to find sanctity in another country?  What if biblical rule became the law of the land?

Here's the thing, Americans:  you might think your weapons will save you, but the government will outman and outgun you, even if the "government" is not the one democratically elected.

Shit happens.   Everyone needs to vote.  Do it now, if you haven't already.  And do it like your life and your future depends on it, because it does.

The Second Sex (not Simone deBeauvoir Style)

I am a woman, a girl.  And with that comes many social responsibilities.  I have to tend to the house.  I have to tend to the children.  I have to make all the appointments.  I am (somehow, inexplicably) the one who decides who's getting laid.  And when.  I have to figure out all the financial, educational, personal, and maintenance issues of the household.  Even when my husband and I lived together, I was all of the roles in the household. 

This is bullshit. 

Fuck gender politics.  I just want to be an individual.  I should not be defined by the antiquated bullshit which accompanies being a girl.  And men shouldn't have to subscribe to roles which were defined far before they were born. 

Do I want to be taken care of?  Sometimes, yes.  It would be great to have someone, sometimes, who offers to help me or to fix things or to assist with the manual labor of the household (inside and out).  But I cannot find this person.  So I accept being alone.  I accept that in terms of having a partner, I will never have that element of life. 

To be honest, I don't even know why I'm writing this, except that sometimes it helps to shout the feeling-words into the internet void in order to purge them.  I am pissed at all the significant people in my life, because none of them care enough to help maintain our living space or to incorporate other people's needs into their own, selfish, narrow version of life.

I wish people didn't treat me this way because I'm female.  I wish I could say that people treat me like a maid or a doormat or a means-to-an-end in a non-gender-related way.  To be be fair, sometimes they do.  Sometimes people just suck, in general.  But being a target based on other people's impression of women (meaning I am intrinsically maternal all the time and should compromise everything for everyone), is bullshit.

Done.

Parent-Teacher Conferences

Quick summary:  Parent-Teacher conferences (at my school, at least) are two days in a row, four hours apiece, after I work for 8 hours teaching. 

So ... 13 hours, two days in a row, rolling into school in the dark and then out of school, in the dark.

Then the students are off Friday (because they're obviously so tired from going to school), but teachers have to attend a staff day Friday to learn about how to be teachers. 

Hmmm....  (I think if we didn't know how before, it's a little late at this point.)

To add insult to injury, Senior Skip Day is Thursday.  So the kids whose parents won't call them out of school have to suffer through "lessons" which will need to be partially repeated, because most of their peers are sleeping in or hanging out with their friends. 

Cool.

I learn, every day, how much the education system in 2018 is completely broken. 

On each teacher's table is a sign which says, "Please limit your conference to 5 minutes".  That won't happen.  Parents will get pissed at having to wait.  Students will get berated in front of me for doing poorly in class.  I will get berated by parents for not coddling lazy students.  Administrators will roam around, surveying the room for discrepancies.  Nothing, ultimately, will be accomplished.  My ass will be totally asleep by 8:30.

Again, the year is 2018.  Social media is omnipresent in the lives of students, parents, and teachers.  We DO NOT need to block off 8 hours of time for parents to find out about their children's progress in school.  If a problem exists, I am at work 5 days a week, 8 hours at a time, and I read my email every single day, even out of school hours.  Students, parents, and teachers can communicate every day, almost all the time, without this antiquated nonsense.

Stop.

Thoughts About Thoughts

Sometimes, I sit somewhere (currently, outside on my back porch), and think ... what is happening?

I'm watching my cat (he's currently showing off by walking on a completely broken-ass porch rail and looking at me to see if I'll do something about it).  I think to myself, "Hey, Humphrey, you're a dumbass.  That fence you're on is not supporting you AT ALL, and you're going to fall".  And he looks back at me with his cat face and says, "what are you gonna do about it?"  My answer?  I'm going to do nothing.  I'm going to watch you fall, and hopefully you won't be so stupid in the future. #mexicanborderwall

Having a cat is oddly similar to having a child.  He's cute.  I love him.  He often makes bad choices.  Whatever.  Hopefully he doesn't die from falling on something sharp or being eaten by a wild animal.

And then, sometimes, I'm watching the students in my classroom, and I think, "Hey, kids, being able to read is probably important in life.  And (more importantly) CARING about ANYTHING sometimes is marginally important in life.  So good luck when you graduate, because no one will be there to call you in sick or make excuses for you or "pass" you through your job with a 59.5%."  (You'll just be fired.)

Other times, I'm watching the news ...

The best of times and the worst of times.

DJ Idiot just called himself a "nationalist", a term which has terrible connotations, but which he and his Kool-Aid drinking followers embrace.  Yesterday, DJ Eazy E (sorry, that's an insult to the actual rapper who died of AIDS) said that we need to let Saudi Arabia have some time to come up with a reason they cut a journalist to pieces with a bone saw, because America needs to make some money on international trading of murder-y weapons.  And a few days ago, he called someone he paid upwards of $100 thousand dollars to shut up about their affair "horseface".

I don't get it.  Has rationality gone out the fucking door?  Are we now a nation of idiot-lovers?  Do we have any credibility left with other nations??

Oh wait, I forgot that he said that the caravan of immigrants headed this way was littered with "MS-13 and Middle Eastern".  While he might not be wrong, PEOPLE SHOULDN'T SAY THINGS WITH NO FACTUAL EVIDENCE!!  He's the president for god's sake; have some composure, and stop fear-mongering.  Have some respect for the people you represent.

Shut up.  Please.

"STOP", said No One.

As a human being, I say STOP.  This shit going on in the world is an embarrassment.  Seriously.

Kanye West was at the White House the other day.  Let me just repeat:  Kanye West was at the White House the other day.

An aside:  Here is a list of things which Kanye West has said out of his face-hole in the past:

• “Every time I say something that is extremely truthful, out loud…it literally breaks the internet. So what are we getting all the rest of the time?"  
• “One of my biggest Achilles heels has been my ego. And if I, Kanye West, can remove my ego, I think there’s hope for everyone.”
• "I hate when I'm on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me. Like, oh great, now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.”
• “I am so credible and so influential and so relevant that I will change things.”
• “If I don’t win, the awards show loses credibility.”
• “I don’t even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.”
• "I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it."
• “Just imagine if I woke up one day and I was wack. What would I do then?"

What the fuck, Kanye?  But I get it.  You're a rap guy.  You are living some kind of dream.  You're married to a super-rich girl who made a sex tape in which some shitty "rapper" came on your wife's back and now her and her sisters and her mom and whomever talk about eating at restaurants or film their vacations at places most ordinary people could never, EVER afford, or some shit.  That's cool.  Who are we to judge?

So ...

What was the next step in Kanye's ascent to the top?  The fucking White House.  Donald Trump let Kanye West come to the White House and spew a bunch of hot nonsense.  KANYE rolled into the room, and DONALD TRUMP was star-struck.  Really?!  How does a marginally insane rapper roll into the White House and awe the President of United States??  Probably because they are both reality TV stars, which is objectively the WORST kind of tv star:  Suck-up, star-fuckers.  

Think about this:  our president is "friends" with a reality TV star /rapper.  And the PRESIDENT is in awe of this vapid motherfucker.  (by the way, that last word is one that Kanye used in front of our president).

Quote from Kanye IN THE WHITE HOUSE:  Trump “might not have expected to have a crazy motherfucker like Kanye West supporting him.”

Okay, then. I guess America has ... changed courses ... (?) . White America now values entertainment over actual reality? Is that a thing? (Probably). Also, I dare anyone to share this Trump/Kanye exchange with the old, white men, and tragically delusional older, white women, who voted for Trump, (who most likely didn't watch this recent, embarrassing exchange in the White House), and ask them if they still agree that DJ Trump should be in charge of ANYTHING - like a light switch for example - let alone the entire United States of America. Ask ALL of them. ALL 50 states (plus Puerto Rico, where he threw some paper towels at victims of a natural disaster).

(Also, apparently, Jim Brown doesn't matter, because he was just there in the background.)

(And then Kid - Fucking - Rock took the mic from the president later in the day ...)

Let's MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN by taking this ridiculous, embarrassing motto off the table and actually making America better. Fuck "great": we're not even in field-goal range of "great". Let's just make America semi-viable again. This grandstanding shit happening in the White House is a fucking joke. On America. America is (sadly) relegated to an Onion hashtag now, because what's going on in this country is a kind-of funny anti-joke.

Communication Breakdown

I have this notion that no one really says what they mean anymore.  Or, they say exactly what pops into their heads, without regard to anyone else's ideology.  

This whole Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearing has me thinking about growing up.  Going to parties.  Being around drunk boys (and girls).  Very few people on the party circuit in high school and college were thinking about lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.  We were just having fun.  

Here's the deal:  sometimes "fun" gets out of hand.  Sometimes a girl drinks too much and ends up in a room full of stupid, drunken boys.  It happens.  Sometimes the girl has to maneuver her way out.  Sometimes she has to fight her way out.  And usually, the boys in the room are people she knows, vaguely or personally.  She doesn't want to freak out right away, because she doesn't believe that these people she has met before would ever hurt her.  And then comes the moment when she realizes that they (or he) want something far beyond the excuse for going to the second room ("listening to music", "playing the guitar", "checking out a cool space", whatever).  Sometimes people can be too trusting or naive or stupid or drunk to make good decisions in any given moment.

But ... if someone who compromised me and caused me psychological harm - even if it was 30 years ago - was about ready to be given a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, I would speak up.  I understand why this woman didn't tell the authorities. It's embarrassing on every level, and she didn't want other people to know.  But if what she says is true, and if what the others say is true, that this man was a belligerent, drunken idiot throughout high school and college, grabbing girls inappropriately and laughing about it like total dick, then he doesn't belong in a position where he is one of nine people determining & interpreting the law at the highest level.