Well, I’ve Got The Extra Hour

Body’s tired and feeling a little beat up, but my brain isn’t ready to go to sleep I guess. It’s a little after 2am on Sunday morning… 🤔 Oh, wait a minute… 😅 no it’s not. 🤦🏻‍♂️ Just looked down at my phone to see the exact time – and hooray for “fall back” tonight, eh? Still being awake at 1am doesn’t feel nearly as bad as still being awake at 2am. 😏 Heh… it’s just that typical thing that happens after vacation. In this case the vacation came to me, but you know what I mean – you get the nice distraction from reality for a while, then when vacation is over and things have to go back to normal, it just takes a little while to adjust. 😟

It’s silly, but because I don’t generally do a heck of a lot with my time… I mean, when it comes to going out and doing things… so when Gen was here, even if I wasn’t necessarily part of all of the plans for the day, I still felt like I was “doing something” with my day. 🙂 It’s just been a while since I’ve had to coordinate a few of my days with anyone else, whether that coordinating involved me doing something or involved me avoiding it instead. 😅 Granted, my lack of “doing stuff” is usually because I’m either hurting or wanting to avoid hurting… but with the right company, I don’t mind it quite as much for a couple of days. But yeah, Sunday… Monday… 🤔 they’ll probably be a couple of “nothing” days so I can regenerate from the visit and get my thoughts back on track when it comes to the stuff I want or need to do. 🤷🏻‍♂️

On Friday she woke up early to do something with friends in Logan, but then once she got back here we went out and picked up Bri and Bryson to go in town for a bit. Stopped off at Walmart, and as we were all checking out (and this happens more than you’d think) the cashier lady mistook me for Bryson’s dad. 😁 I was standing behind the cart, entertaining him so he wouldn’t fuss until we left, but when I moved to the front of the line to pay for my stuff – he started crying… and cashier lady said “Aww, see he wants his daddy.” 😏 I just played along, joking that she was right and that Bryson wasn’t a mama’s boy. It actually caught me off guard this time though, ‘cuz I wasn’t shaved, and I’m pretty sure I was lookin’ my actual age… 😊 but it’s still amusing.

That evening Gen made plans to meet with Toni, Matt, and Anna for dinner, but I just didn’t have the oomph for it… and that was before I found out Wendi and her Matt were there as well. 😯 I kinda felt bad for dipping out, but I just didn’t have that couple hours of “social” in me that late. (I did appreciate her bringing a cheeseburger and fries home for me right before midnight though.) Despite needing to get up stupid early the next day, she wasn’t sleepy yet due to all the socializing so we squeezed in another episode of Doctor Who before she hit the sack. 🤓📺👱🏻‍♀️ That made four episodes since she got here – which should be enough to either hook her, or to know that it’s not her kinda thing. 😏 I always try to convert people.

Saturday morning… she was up and out shortly after the crack of dawn, on her way to some horseback riding near Moonville with a friend, and not only did I not wake up when she left – but I didn’t even fully wake up until noon. 😐 There’s a chatty cat that comes to visit (outside) and tries to play on my emotions as it’s getting colder around here, so I agreed with her suggestion of making a little “kitty house” out of a big ol’ Rubbermaid tub from the basement – so that was my mini-project for the afternoon. Time was starting to get tight though, so rather than fussing with the mailboxes or the bags of gravel, we decided to go out and visit Dad for a bit before it started to get dark. 🙂 OutsideKitty had vanished by then though, but that’s good… gives me a little more time to finish up the tub and find some suitable soft stuff to use as the base for when I put it out on the back porch for him. 😺🙄

Dad seemed like he felt better today. Like half the people I know though, he’s been fighting a shitty cough and “bleh” feeling, but it’s either starting to get better or our visit was just a nice distraction from thinking about it. 😁 Unfortunately we couldn’t stay there too long, ‘cuz I had to get Genesee up to Columbus (to Chad and Shannon’s place) and try to get back home before it was dark dark. 😳 Sounds like an “old person thing” but I just prefer to not drive at night with these “backup pair of a backup pair” glasses that I’m currently stuck with. 😕 I can cheat during the daytime with my Rx shades that are one prescription “more current” at least.

But yeah, as quickly as she arrived, she’s now up there and will be heading home in a few hours. 😟 (So glad that Chad can help with getting her to the airport at 4am today. Oy.) She was busy nearly the entire time she was in town, not including the house downtime for watching Doctor Who, looking at old pics/vids, etc… but I definitely envy the way she was able to tackle her self-imposed schedule. 😊 I suppose it’s easier when it’s stuff that a person actually wants to do… but she can wake up and be out the door, ready to go, in minutes – while I need an hour just to wake up enough to decide that I’m about ready to wake up. 😋 (Actually, it’s more about letting the morning meds kick in, so I can at least partially function like a human being…) But it was nice to see that even with the limited time here, she still managed to do most of the stuff that she planned.

Today’s Version

While I used up most of my oomph yesterday, goofy here sure is full of it today. 😼 For some reason she loves the smell of hair product. Turns her into a weirdo. If she’s hyper enough, she’ll even attack your head. 😅

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. 😏

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.