Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

It's really sad to me how emphatic the response of "yeah, don't come to the U.S. now" has been from my pals who are there.

It's frustrating that a lot of the family I won't be seeing at this funeral (not my parents, but all the rest of them, including my grandma if she was physically able to vote in November) voted for a situation where I couldn't come back to be there with them.

To be clear, there are many reasons this would be difficult. And I fully expect to just have to drag up and style it out at some point. But the fact that this alone is sufficient for everyone to be like "yeah no don't"... Feels bad!

I've always been haunted by my what my mom told me her horrible sister's husband's response was when Mom was outraged at the Supreme Court decision overturning of abortion rights: "What do you care, you don't need one."

Not only is that morally bankrupt thinking on the face of it, but sometimes the guy they claim they voted for because eggs are too expensive is also gonna make it dangerous for their """niece""" or whatever to be at important family occasions. They're not as unaffected as they think.

But they'll never know. I didn't want to explain to my parents and even if I tried they wouldn't understand and even if they did they wouldn't relay the message to the extended family and even if all that happened nobody would believe this or reflect on it or think or do anything differently in future so why bother trying. I'm not their very important life lesson.

Grief has become a thing that lives with us. i've noticed the last few years that the more i name my social grief and let myself feel it, the less reactive and squabbly i am, and the more compassion and energy i have to care for others

this is the essence of Grief Therapy in Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT), along with sharing your stories w/those you share values with.

grief requires tending, a form of labor, but the advantage of social/political grief is that we have many hands to make light work -- there are millions of us on this planet to help hold it. even when we feel so alone in the absurdity of loss, we can breathe and remember how many wanted the same world as we do, and we can feel how that world is very much alive in our hearts and collective imagination

It took a matter of days for the Tim Walz "wholesome" memes to move on from "Tim Walz carries an extra ice scraper 'for situations like this' "-type stuff to start evolving.

Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Things got out of hand quickly.

There were a few I really don't like. (I saw about a dozen versions of the same photo of him idly petting a cat, captioned with "when you're famous they just let you do it" as if alluding to sexual violence against women like that, even if to say how far you are positioning yourself from it, is funny...it came off as smug and still misogynistic to me.) There were unsubtle digs at Trump and Vance.

There was the day of the trolls (just the one, as far as I can tell; I'm in awe of the admins and moderators of this open Facebook group!) where, when I called the trolls white men, I got told off by a white woman for being "negative" in a group that "is supposed to stay positive"; this is where I learned that "mentioning race and sex [sic] is never positive"!).

The trolling was really pathetic too. Apparently Tim Walz had a DUI once in the 90s! All they could do was throw out slurs that got deleted before I could report them and laugh-react at our comments -- which made me realize that, when when we were already laughing ourselves at posts like "Tim Walz thinks there's mustard in poteto salad," mockery can be difficult to do.

Last week I had to say that Tim Walz wouldn't let nostalgia for Garrison Keillor's radio show overcome the sexual harassment that led to the abrupt end of that show. I guess either a mod or (more likely) the person who left the gushing comment praising Garrison Keillor that I replied to has apparently deleted that comment, which deletes the whole thread so my comments disappeared too. I was very careful in my wording. I said people matter more than nostalgia and that Minnesota is the state that made Al Franken a senator and then stopped him being a senator and I was proud of that even though I voted for him.

( Today I'm trying to tell the Tim Walz meme group that ableism isn't actually wholesome. )

However. It's pretty fun to get to say stuff like "They're raising a neurodivergent son in a particular context, and the more the rest of us understand about that context the better neighbors we can be to all neurodiverse folks." I don't normally get to talk like this any more!

D says that weaponizing my Minnesota Nice in the cause of social justice is very me. Which may be the nicest thing I've been told in a while!

I ended up in tears at bedtime on Sunday. Something that hasn't happened in a while.

D came to bed soon after, offering cuddles and concern. He asked me what was wrong, I choked out "a lot of things." "Pick one," he said.

So I talked about work. It sucks on a micro (can't do my job because of blockage within the organization) and macro (literally in the news) level at the same time, which is really difficult to deal with. One or the other, you can kinda let tht one go for a bit and focus on the other one. Both at once... and with no end in sight... It's a lot.

I was unenthused about a day off, but he offered to have a day off with me. Which at the time just meant I was being held accountable for actually doing it, heh. But by Tuesday morning, when I couldn't get out of bed and the concept of getting dressed felt unfathomable, it helped a lot to be able to tell myself you'll get a day off this week.

D had told me any of Wednesday, Thursday or Friday would be good for him. I checked my calendar on Monday at work and that evening told him that the one that'd work for me is Thursday.

Tuesday at work, I realized that I'd meant to tell him Wednesday.

As someone said, this is proof enough that I need a break.

He very kindly swapped his day off and I tried to do so as well (it's a little more complicated for me because I can't un-book time off; I can book it myself but only my manager or HR can deny it!). And so we had today off already!

We slept all morning, I turned off my alarm which isn't unusual but I didn't hear any of D's either which is unprecedented. We slept until around 11. It felt great.

Before I even got out of bed, I had some good news which is that I'm finally not listed as a director for a company I don't have anything to do with. It has taken forever but they did accept it with my explanation: "I don't have utilities in my name; other people live here as well. And Erik is the name I am known by but not the name on legal paperwork so I am unsure how to prove it. I'm also unsure why I should be having to prove this when no such proof was needed for someone else to enter me into legal and financial responsibilities without my knowledge or consent."

Also before I got out of bed, I was already learning charming new things about Tim Walz from comments on a friend's Facebook post:

When he was teaching high school he started the first GSA at the school. In 1999. And later said it had to be him. It had to be the straight, married, former soldier, and football coach. He knew it had to be him. There just keep being more things I like about him.

and

I've gotten to know his type of Minnesota democrat through my husband's family and.... yeah, they're a good lot. I'm so excited for people to get to know this kind of politician! & he reminds me, in a few ways, of my deceased father in law, who I wish were here to see this!!

and

I saw someone say, "Tim Walz is the dad we lost to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News." 💔😭

(This has lots more hearts and sobbing-emojis and " I just.... Whew... Full body reaction." / "... I didn't know I was holding that pocket of grief. Thank you." / "Ow. Yeah. I haven't felt actual dad vibes I wanted in a damn-too-long." / "BIG BIG OOF". Left me being grateful that my dad always has been and still is not having any of that Rush Limbaugh/Fox News nonsense.)

While I was waiting to get dressed (gotta let the planned manitizer dry) and putting away a basketful of laundry I'd done yesterday, D had taken the dog for a walk already, and made me coffee! It was waiting for me by the time I got downstairs. As the usual first-one-up, I love being looked after in the mornings particularly; I love the quiet hours to myself but I also love it when someone else makes me coffee/tea.

Gary got his favorite thing, which was a day of all his humans in the same room. More or less. When D and I went out this afternoon to get some topsoil and compost from B&M, rather than getting V to come downstairs to keep the dog company in his current unwillingness/inability to use the stairs himself, I brought Gary up. Something we normally only do at night, so it was a little confusing for him but it meant V could continue painting and drawing where all their stuff is and didn't just have to dogsit. Apparently he was really good, and it was sweet to see him waiting at the top of the stairs (where he can see the front door), looking out for us when we came home.

He got most of the way down the stairs on his own once he realized that D and I had brought back sandwiches for all the humans to have for lunch. That dog is an utter fiend for sandwiches, he absolutely loves them. It's baffling. But we complimented his dedication to doing the stairs by himself.

Taking him upstairs worked just as well later in the day when D and I wanted to lie down; he napped happily in my room and eventually went to go complain to V that his other humans were being boring and not doing anything important like paying attention to the dog.

D suggested I could choose some takeout tonight for my day off. I pointed out it was his day off too, but he said it was because of me and treats for me were good. (I am typing this on a cheap keyboard with LED lights in a rainbow under the keys, something I've coveted and also my work-supplied keyboard is starting to die, and also this was only £10 so he got it for me.) So we had burgers and stuff from a new-to-us place since the one we like seems to have closed or changed ownership. The food was okay but not as good as the old place. I was envious of D's milkshake though; I hadn't thought to look at those on the menu and he got my favorite kind (chocolate mint); I had a taste and was wistful.

It has been such a lovely day.

I know most people would prefer a long weekend but I actually love the way this worked out; two 2-day "workweeks" per week feels so much more manageable. A single day off can't fix any of my problems at work, but it has meant that I feel much more okay about going back to work tomorrow.

I still don't trust Labour of course, but it's so nice to see the new Transport Secretary say that the Department for Transport's motto now is “move fast and fix things”.

Which is nice to hear because after years of neglect, absolutely everything about transport and the public realm needs to be fixed in this country.

Like most things about the U.S. Republican party, this article about the intensity with which the congressional party are approaching the upcoming baseball gameagainst their Democrat counterparts is as weirdly fascinating as it is depressing.

After a litany of Republican failures this Congress (can't impeach Biden, can't antagonize his son effectively, can't correctly count their votes about the impeachment of the Secretary of Homeland Security, their committees are just blocking bills from reaching the House floor...) the article says:

As if stealing advice from the 12-step program, Republicans are now only seeking to control the things they can control. And Democrats are fully aware that means the GOP is gunning for them at Nationals Park on Wednesday.

The Republican practice sessions have been intense and very early in the mornings. The Democrats are much more laid-back about theirs.

The Republicans taking part also seem much more intense. Their coach, Rep. Roger Williams, says:

“It’s a big rivalry. Everybody says [the game is] bipartisan; it’s not really bipartisan. And with all the stuff that’s happening, this is another way to get after each other.”

"It's not really bipartisan" is the Republicans' approach to governing as well as the baseball game. Another quote from him seems equally revealing of wider patterns:

“I tell people, go back to your high school days, when you played your biggest rivalry in football. All you thought about was that, right? At school, you didn’t do your homework, you didn’t study. You’re ready to get out there.”

Republicans certainly haven't been "doing their homework," and do seem to have gone to schools like mine, where sports were the priority and excuses would always be made for the athletes who most successfully propagated their toxic masculinity.

Meanwhile, on the other side:

“They’re definitely a lot better at baseball than they are at governing,” says Rep. Jared Huffman, a former player who’s now the Democrats’ first-base coach. (Huffman said he gave up playing because the early morning practices were too much.)

Anyway, even if you don't care about baseball or U.S. politics, here's a couple of sentences that made me laugh and I hope you like them too.

In the past, opposition researchers have been dispatched to the game to get footage of certain candidates wearing baseball pants. (It’s almost impossible for anyone over the age of 40 to look good in baseball pants; it’s actually impossible to look good in baseball pants if you’ve authored a bill that has become a law.)

I'm so annoyed that a Department for Transport report that would be directly hugely immediately relevant to my day job is being buried because it says the opposite of what Rishi Sunak wanted it to say when he commissioned it: that "low traffic neighborhoods" are popular and effective.

Garth Brooks welcomes trans people, tells a-holes to get out of his bar.

My brother and my best friend were obsessed with Garth Brooks when we were in middle school, so I'd still quite happily never hear one of his songs again. But that's not the point: the point is no one, transphobe or not, gets to claim that the wave of legislative transphobia in the U.S. right now has the support of every famous person or every country-music type or every red state -- to take this kind of stand in Nashville means a lot when Tennessee has been passing some of the most sweeping transphobia (or trying to).

Croatia was my favorite last night and the more I learn about the act and their performance the more there is to like.

Even if you don't care about Eurovision, it's a great way to get a broader audience for stuff like this.

Eurovision fans outside the post-Yugoslav region have been getting to know a band who were using their art to mock and shock repressive social forces even before Croatia became independent from Yugoslavia in 1991....

By the time Let 3 appeared on Dora, in other words, Croatian viewers had a frame of reference going back more than thirty years for making sense of their uniforms, inflatable missiles and salutes (and for wondering what was going to be under those uniforms when they inevitably came off). While their lyrics describe militarism and machismo, the band’s profile as musicians and their subcultural positioning has already resolved what would otherwise be the ambiguity of where they stand.

Like all ambiguous art which questions the allure of military power by placing its style and symbols up front, how well ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ can convey its messages depends on how far the audience realise how the band are inviting them to respond, and what they need to know about them to form that interpretation.

Pro-LGBTQ+ stances and anti-militarism go together in Let 3’s military drag because, according to the politics the band have expressed for more than thirty years, patriarchy, homophobia and male insecurity are root causes of militarism, nationalism and war.

Let 3’s mockery of drag dictators, however, starts at home – where they have been standing up to militaristic, nationalistic, and aggressively heterosexual ideals of masculine leadership in their own context for so long that ‘home’ used to be a different state.

Arriving in Liverpool, Let 3 and their tractor have touched down in a country where the forces that want to criminalise drag internationally are gaining ground, drag queen story hours in public libraries are being threatened by the far right, the equalities minister has met approvingly with the governor of the US state passing the widest suite of anti-trans laws, and the UN’s independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, has just been hearing from trans people across the country about how politicians and the media are whipping up fear against them during his own visit to the UK.

Let 3’s art may not be for everyone, but the freedom to make it for anyone is the same freedom that lets Eurovision itself be a place of safety for LGBTQ+ fans – and one of the first freedoms that the dictators lampooned in ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ have struck against.

This morning, rmc28 wrote a very good (and therefore very depressing) post about the UK's ending of all covid restrictions, support, and almost all testing.

One of the things she said was

I am not looking forward to being the weirdo in a mask who won't eat or drink indoors, when everyone else is busy pretending we're "back to normal" and ignoring the no-longer-monitored disease silently spreading everywhere people congregate. But I'd rather that than a heart attack in my forties, or fatigue for the rest of my life.

Obviously I quite agree with that conclusion, but the first sentence got me thinking...

I said in a reply, about that specifically

I have already been that weirdo (I don't know when I'll next be able to eat or drink indoors; beyond two near-unavoidable times, it hasn't happened since March 2020) and there sure aren't many of us in real life! Which is fine for me, I'm used to being noticeably weird (for being fat, queer, foreign, disabled, trans/at least sending off weird gender vibes, etc.), but a lot of people are going to be new at this.

I'm wondering what I can do to support that; like a guide for How to Be Okay with Being Weird in Public, or an online group...because while I'm being The Only One in the Shop Wearing a Mask, I know from my internet friends that there are actually a substantial amount of us. And an online group can't help that IRL weirdness, but it might be helpful to people to know there are actually a bunch of us out there, and we can support each other.

Someone I don't know replied to suggest a Discord or a Dreamwidth community and Discord isn't accessible to me (though I think this is a great idea if anyone else wants to start/run a group for this kind of thing there!) but I'd be happy to run a Dreamwidth community if there's interest in that kind of thing.

For all that there's been a cognitive load to assessing the kind of covid risk-budgets rmc28 talks about her family having, there's also a huge cognitive load to continuing to wear a mask/try to distance when the people around you aren’t. I'm going to have to miss my covid/disabled people meeting this month so I'm making notes on the papers ahead of a phone chat with the chair beforehand, and one of the notes I've written today is

Humans are such social creatures that many of us find it difficult to stand out and while some people don’t have a choice but to be visibly different, some of us who aren’t used to sticking out so much might benefit from some social support to carry on masking when society all around us is pushing this message that “the pandemic is over.”

I of course was thinking about disabled people in particular there but it's true of a lot of other people too, maybe even more so people who are used to thinking of themselves as "normal" and might be new to being a visible minority. It sure can be tiring! Even scary, or just offputting.

And it'd be nice to be able to vent and to cheer each other on. I hope it'd be possible to have a community like this without it descending into animosity to everyone unmasked or unvaccinated because there are people with medical reasons not to be and they will also benefit from as many people as possible continuing to wear masks and be careful. Our (justified!) ire is rightly directed at institutions, not individuals, especially marginalized ones.