Discourse

With the Kavanaugh / Ford hearings taking up all of the oxygen today, even places like Facebook are lit up with related activity. Most of my friends think about things in the same way that I do, but there are some who don’t… and it’s weird to interact with those folks when they’re all fired up about their opinion of the matter in front of the court. One friend even made a post proclaiming her support of one “side” and then said she wasn’t going to be on FB for a while, to get away from it all. Great idea. Post your opinion, even though you’re tired of the discussion, and then expect people to not reply.

People, even grown ass people of my age, seem to have forgotten how to discuss a topic, or even debate a topic, without getting their rage on and feeling personally insulted, requiring them to spew anger back into the conversation as if someone stepped on their cat. Normally these are reasonable folks, but now “they feel” or “can tell” that this person or that person is lying. Or this person or that person is faking it when they cry. And that’s fine… you can go with your feeling about something… but it doesn’t do me much good to try and point out things that are based in fact, because their feelings trump (no pun intended) any facts that they don’t agree with.

Since when is it a thing that your political beliefs define you? Not define… but since when do they make up who you are, so much so that when your beliefs are challenged that you feel like you are being challenged? It’s so weird… I just wanna discuss it, find out why people think the way they do, see if they’ll acknowledge why I do… heh… nope… that kind of discussion doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

And I don’t push it, since it’s not something at the center of my soul that I’ve got to force everyone around me to believe in as well… so I just kinda back away and watch them smile and feel comfortable again as they settle back in to their echo chamber of comments. Nothing is better than a thread full of people who do absolutely nothing to challenge your beliefs. 😏

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Silent But Scandalous

This is kind of related to the post below. I just figured I would come back in here and report on an incident that happened to me when I was in junior high. Granted, that means that we were all kids, but still… let me continue…

While on a school-sponsored camping trip at a local nature place, all of us students were split up into 4 or 5 people in each tiny little cabin. Boys with boys, and of course girls with girls… and on one of the nights there, the other kids in the cabin decided to play a joke on me. 😳 It felt like a joke then, and it still feels like a joke now – but putting it in the hypothetical context of the current climate when it comes to reporting “sketchy” things… it makes me wonder how parents and authority figures would react to it now, if it had happened recently and I reported it right away. 🙂🤔

I have a feeling that it would have happened to the first kid that fell asleep in the cabin anyway, but I just happened to be that person. 😏 The way that I was told that it happened, was that one of the kids had been really gassy all day – so they decided that someone was gonna get farted on that night. 😅🤢 So when I sacked out, they silently prepared for the joke – which ended up with one of the kids pulling his pants down, putting his ass right by my face, and releasing the poison. 😝 Now, obviously I’d have preferred to not be the kid that got gassed… but it was what it was, and after a short moment of being butthurt upon learning about it – eventually I was laughing right along with them.

Now, take that story and transplant it to 2017. How would teachers react? How would parents react? Especially considering the… *gasp*… exposed ass right next to my nose. 😯 I can’t remember for sure, but there may have even been a picture taken. Can you imagine it though? I’d probably be stuck in counseling, the offending kid probably would have been arrested and branded as a sex offender for the rest of his life, the school likely would have never done field trips again, and certainly not to that campground – which may have been forced into closure after being branded the place where a kid was sexually assaulted.

I guess I don’t really know what point I’m trying to make. 🤓 I suppose it’s more about giving some personal background so that others might be better able to understand why I react to certain things in certain ways… ways that are possibly not the same as most other people would react. So yeah, when I see Franken’s goofy photo next to the sleeping woman… it’s harder for me to think of it as a big deal, since I’ve had an ass in my face while I slept, possibly with photographic evidence, and it really didn’t feel like a big deal to me. 🤷🏻‍♂️

 

Mixed Emotions

While Genesee was here we were of course talking about all sorts of memories, and we even watched some old home videos that I’ve got uploaded to YouTube in an “unlisted” area. As we watched some of the Atlantic City videos we got to talking about the story behind how I found and got her a key from The Continental motel for Christmas last year, which just so happened to be a key to a room that we actually stayed in – with video proof, as I walked up to and recorded the number on the door (like the nerd that I am) with the camcorder. 😏 It really was amazing…

That then immediately made me remember how I made an awesome, lengthy blog post about it… but then due to certain people reading my blog and giving me shit about the choices I was making in my life – I ended up deleting the entire blog without archiving it. 😔 So unless I find some internet archiving site that managed to capture it, that post (and all the others from that short era) is gone forever. And if you know me, you know that’s not like me at all – just impulsively wiping out a significant chunk of my own history. 😠

That’s what happens though when you’ve got someone who’s words meant everything to you, suddenly and repeatedly getting really fucking shitty about things. 😒 Rather than leaving my words up here to be picked apart and used against me, I just instinctively made them go away – theorizing that without a detailed view into my life, there’d be less for anyone to be shitty about. 🙇🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️ Meh… I still deal with internal mental fallout from that (and other things) every single day. 🤦🏻‍♂️ In fact, it’s usually the first thing on my mind when I wake up and the last thing I think about before falling asleep. Good times.

But anyway… speaking of memories… another fun thing to come from going through the old photos was discovering a stack that focused on school parties, birthdays, and holidays with friends when I was little. And thanks to Facebook, I’m still linked to a lot of the friends that were also in those photos – so it was a good time when I scanned and posted a bunch of them. 🙂 My god… the outfits and haircuts are so embarrassing, but everyone was excited to see them and laugh.

That’s one thing that I’m glad of, and one thing that a lot of friends are jealous about… how Mom and Dad documented and saved so, so much stuff from when I was little. 😊 Tons of photos, stacks of old school papers, favorite books, favorite stuffed animals, baby books filled out with all sorts of details about me… it’s just an amazing amount of stuff from my birth onward that I’ve got here – stuff that a lot of people’s parents never bothered doing/saving. I’m lucky to have it all.