#To be fair global warming n whatnot

[jaythelay]

"I wanna go outside!"

Absolute avalanche of bugs everywhere, every chair is covered in bugs, webs or leaves. The concrete has ants everywhere. The yard covered in dogshit. Front yard then.

Oh I hate people. Oh no I can be seen. Oh god no. The Wasps are here. Neighbor dog never stops barking even if I stand perfectly still. Neighbor's burning plastic and tire every good day too.

It's too hot, too windy, or too cold.

The BEST outside time, is during a thunderstorm. Ya got rain, people fuck off, bugs fuck off, the damn wasps fuck off. The temp is just right and being drenched in rainwater invigorating.

[merriemelodie]

1, 16, 17, 28 and 50. :33

End of Year Meme

THANK YOU MY LOVE ALWAYS COMIN IN CLUTCH

[EDIT: This one gets REALLY LONG AND ANGRILY ANECDOTAL, so I put it under a Read More. I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE]

Let’s hit it!!!

1.) First things first, did you have a good year?

…Right now, it feels like a pretty resounding “NO,” but that’s just my most recent history clouding the first half of the year or so. The first half was actually pretty great, personally speaking, and it’s laid the foundation for all of the good things that were (and are) to come. So, I guess, if I’m being completely fair, it was a solid “meh,” with both good and bad parts to it.

16.) What food did you try for the first time?

Wow, what a good question! I’m not always the most adventurous when it comes to food, so I’ll have to think about this one. Hm…

Well, I finally tried sweet potato casserole (which my aunt makes, without fail, for every major winter holiday), and HI I THINK I LOVE HER. So, uh, yeah! We’ll go with that!

17.) Did you make any big permanent changes this year?

Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is “I worsened my vocal damage, and done so to the degree that I may not be able to sing well ever again,” SO THERE’S THAT. I’d really like to find something positive, though. I guess it’s hard, because very little (in my perspective, anyway) truly proves itself to be permanent. I made some changes here and there (good and bad), but I don’t know how long they’ll last. I guess this might be a question I’ll be able to fully answer later on down the road.

28.) Did anyone/thing make you so mad it stayed with you for days?

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOH BOY. YES.  YES. VERY RECENTLY, ACTUALLY. BUCKLE IN, KIDS.

So, my family and I decided to spend Christmas at Walt Disney World this year; and, because we can’t let anything pass by without making it just a little bit weird, we decided to invite my mom’s ex-husband to come along, too. (He went with us on our last WDW trip, as well. I had #MixedFeelings about it then, and I had #MixedFeelings about it this time, too.) Here’s the dealy-deal with this guy: he was a MASSIVE DICK when he was married to my mom (to the point where she still has unresolved issues with him, but decides to invite him on a Disney vacation??? LOL SURE OKAY). Like, refused to communicate, conducted a quasi-affair, flat-out told her he didn’t love her, LOTS OF FUN STUFF. So, they divorced a few years back, and that was that. How we came back into each other’s lives a while later is another story, but living on his own for the past few years and whatnot truly did seem to bring about a change of heart in him—one that I welcomed, if only to stop the constant barrage of vitriol that I had to hear about him at home. 

The last WDW trip we took with him didn’t turn out that bad, if only a little uncomfortable for me (because he’s that guy that laughs at people for expressing genuine excitement over something, as opposed to doing so ~ironically~ or just flat-out snarking through everything. I can do both, but I don’t want to if I don’t have to. It just put me in a really weird spot, TBH. THAT’S BESIDES THE POINT THO). So, they went ahead and invited him on this trip, and I was like, “Well, it worked out last trip, and nobody wanted to kill each other, so I guess I can roll with this one.”

Well, as 2017 was wont to do, NOPE.

Here’s the other dealy-deal with this guy. He is a Republican™. Not a republican, a Republican™. We’re talking about a baby-boomer, boot-strap-puller-upper, global-warming-conspiracy-theorist, “PUT-GOD-BACK-IN-OUR-SCHOOLS”-er, wouldn’t-watch-Finding-Dory-because-there-was-a-lesbian-couple-in-it Republican™. The guy likely jerks off to Fox News, and spends the afterglow scrolling through Breitbart. I knew it (because the dude used to drive me places while BLARING Rush Limbaugh and loudly agreeing with everything, and even a14-year-old me with no interest in politics knew BS when I heard it). I had just hoped that, after some time spent apart (and with a heart that had, apparently, been softened in that time), he might choose to apply some of that new-found openmindedness towards other things.

N O P E

So, we’re going to Walt Disney World, right? There’s a show there at the Magic Kingdom called Hall of Presidents, right smack-dab in the middle of Liberty Square. Now, I don’t know if you know this, since there was absolutely no coverage about it at all (😒), but the show had been under refurbishment for a year or so to install A Certain Orange Person, now that That Certain Orange Person, thanks in part to the unaccredited Electoral College, gets to sit in the Oval Office—but now, it’s finally (and very recently) reopened.

Clearly, I don’t have to tell you what my feelings are about the whole thing (because, if you have a pulse, you can read, and you’ve been on my blog for more than 5 minutes, then you likely already know). You know without a doubt whose name was filled in on my ballot last November—or, at the very least, whose wasn’t.

I’m sure you also probably already know, then, exactly whose name was on the ballot of my mom’s ex-husband.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(I’m suffering.)

Well, fast forward to CHRISTMAS ACTUAL DAY, and the trip’s almost over. Everyone’s getting on each other’s nerves a little bit more, and the pettiest parts of me are DELIGHTED by that (because that likely means I won’t need to continue to put my own discomfort about the guy on the back burner on any future vacations because HE AIN’T GON BE THERE). We’re sitting through CHRISTMAS ACTUAL DINNER; and, after delicately discussing how terrible the Certain Orange Person’s audio-animatronic seemed to look (something we all agreed upon, his “liberal Imagineer sabotage” conspiracy theory aside), I changed the subject and started joking about how I was going to stay in Orlando and submit my application for employment with the Walt Disney Company (which is also not that much a gag, tbh). Jokes about job interviews came up, and I said I’d find a nice pantsuit, and The Ex, inevitably, turns it into a Hillary Clinton joke, comparing me to her. I look him dead in the face, and say, “Welp, I’m choosing to take that as a compliment, since she has such a long, impressive resume.” 

(Like, there are things about Hillary that I very decidedly Do Not Like, but you can’t deny that she was more than qualified to hold the Office of the Presidency, given all the experience she’s had. That is a compliment to me.) 

The Ex looks at me, and goes, “Well, it wasn’t one.”

NICE AND FRIGID. WALKING IN A WINTER WONDERLAND, EVEN.

But I let it go, because this is my vacation, too, dammit, and as much as I’d LOVE to scream about politics (clearly. PLEASE VISIT MY BLOG SOMETIME), I wasn’t gonna crap on what was left of our time there—AND ON CHRISTMAS DAY, NO LESS. We finished the meal, he visited the restroom, I vented to the rest of my family about his political herd mentality and potential moral bankruptcy until he came back, and I promptly shut up once he was in earshot. That, I thought, would be that.

ALAS.

We’re in Liberty Square, we don’t have any place to be, and it’s one of the last times we’re going to be in the Magic Kingdom before we leave. What do we do that we hadn’t yet done?

What else? GO TO THE HALL OF PRESIDENTS.

GOD.

Okay, so, real quick, I’m gonna take this opportunity to give kudos to the Imagineers who worked on that refurb, because they upgraded the projectors/footage to 4K, AND IT WAS STUNNING. My ACTUAL BREATH was TAKEN AWAY. If they were pouring all their work into that, it’s understandable why they didn’t have that much manpower going towards not making 45 look like a dirty sweat sock. (But, again, the Petty Petty Salt Queen in me was also cackling at that, because BEAUTY IS AS BEAUTY DOES BINCH, so I let it ride.)

So, we’re in there, and we get through the really abridged (and surprisingly not too sanitized) montage on American history, which was moving and stuff. After that, we get to some iconic speech excerpts from Presidents past, one of which is Obama’s speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches. This is a speech whose significance cannot be denied, and whose relevance has never been greater. It is inspirational, moving, and certainly one that deserves its place in the history books.

I’ve gotten more liberal with my profanity over the last year or so (and you can probably guess why), but I still very much hesitate to drop the F-bomb. Let that tell you everything, then, about this next phrase—and about my mom’s ex-husband:

During this impassioned, poignant, important speech about race relations, and equity, and perseverance, and the indomitable spirit of humanity, and how justice will prevail, this motherfucker starts booing.

Excuse me?

Look, I get that it’s been a rough fuckin’ year, and that there’s more of a divide between people and their differences than there has been in a while—but most good people have enough decorum and basic human decency to NOT BOO DURING A SPEECH ABOUT THE PROMISE OF THE FUTURE, AND THE DREAMS OF A WORLD THAT PROMISES PEACE AND EQUALITY FOR ALL PEOPLE.

Like, holy fucking shit, guys. I had to sit next to him and watch him boo peace and harmony, just because it came from the mouth of a guy he didn’t like.

The messenger doesn’t change the message. That this asshole let it—and just did something like that without a second thought—horrifies and frightens me to a massive degree. I guess it’s also worse, because I know the guy, and I know he rarely, if ever, has strong opinions of his own. You ask him what he thought about something without having been exposed to a conversation about it first, and he him-haws and stutters so much, you wonder if synapses stopped firing in his brain. He takes his cues (and his beliefs) from others—like Fox News, and the people he surrounds himself with. He pulled that shit in the Hall of Presidents likely because he saw it pulled elsewhere, and went along with it because “that’s what I have to do, because that’s what a true republican does.” (This behavior was A Whole Thing in his marriage to my mother, trust.) 

All I kept thinking at the time was, if this is what he’s willing to do—and all without anybody standing in front of him and giving him actual directives—what else would he do without hesitation, just because he sees others doing it?

That’s a terrifying reality, and one that’s more common than I think we realize sometimes.

If he didn’t like Obama (or if he felt like he shouldn’t like Obama, rather) then he could’ve just stayed silent. It took more energy for him to cup his hands around his rude-ass mouth and FUCKING BOO WORDS ABOUT UNITY AND FREEDOM than to just keep his feelings to himself. It was all the proof I needed that he hadn’t changed at all; or, if he had, it was wholly for the worse. It was the human embodiment of what got Trump in office: racism, hatred, bigotry, incompetence, close-mindedness, and a toxic, xenophobic hive-mind mentality.

I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the trip. (I’m still shaking while writing this.)

50.) What do you wish for yourself?

To find happiness, and give myself permission to keep it.

Thank you, my darling! I hope your 2018 is everything you wished your 2017 could have been. You deserve nothing less than that.