Thursday, July 21, 2016

baby it's all right now

I don't even know where to start - my temper is inflamed, but I should recount things in the order in which they occurred so that I don't miss the good things that happened. I woke up this morning and was feeling #inittowinit, which was a good thing because I had some promotional activities to take care of this morning. That involved hosting a facebook chat with a historical romance group - and since I'm an overachiever (but also a procrastinator), I wrote up some historical fun facts to share with them (longer than they needed to be, written right before I had to post them rather than in a leisurely manner several days ago).

So I wrote up a bunch of stuff, and then I threw on some clothes and drove to Berkeley and holed up at Philz to do the main part of the chat. The reason I drove all the way to Berkeley for Philz is because I had lunch plans after, and I wouldn't have made lunch if I'd been online from 11am to 11:45am at home. So I got my coffee and settled in and got lots done (some other work-type tasks were accomplished while I was monitoring the facebook stuff), and that all felt really good.

But I stopped being productive around 12:15 and met up with John and Jess for lunch at Saul's, our usual go-to place. John's mom is in town, so she watched Ian while John and Jess came out for lunch, which meant Jess could eat without having a human attached to her (although I offered to sit closer to her if that would be helpful). It was great to see them, of course, but the unfortunate thing was that John recently fractured something in his ankle, so he was wearing a boot and not moving very quickly, which is all too bad. But Saul's was still great despite that, I think.

Then I went back to their place and briefly stared at their sleeping child and briefly talked to John's mom. I left a little after two to try to beat traffic, and while I wasn't perfectly successful in that attempt, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. When I got home, I was going to do all the things, but I was feeling really run down and tired, and so I ordered groceries rather than going to buy them, and I did only one load of laundry (the stuff that needs to be hung up to dry), and I messed around online and did nothing and eventually ordered a pizza because I also didn't feel like cooking.

That was the beginning of the end for me. It turns out that I accidentally ordered a regular gluten thin crust rather than a gluten-free crust, and I didn't put two and two together until I was a couple of slices in, which means I totally poisoned myself. And it really feels like I did poison myself - while I've had trace amounts here and there, this is the most gluten I've had at one time in months, and it feels like my skin is on fire and everything itches and I kind of want to die.

Or maybe that's how I feel about tonight's RNC performance - I don't know. I think it's the gluten. But I watched Ivanka and Trump (and Jon Voigt's intro, which must have made Angelina suuuuuper happy), and at the risk of upsetting every since blog reader I still have on both sides of the spectrum by expressing my full opinion.....I was pretty furious. Furious that this was the best the Republicans could put up this year (although I would still rather see Trump be the president than support Cruz the Zodiac Killer). Furious to see a candidate for the presidency care so little about the actual role of the presidency that he doesn't seem to understand or care what responsibilities lie within the executive branch and which are firmly part of the states' mandate (and the last I checked, states' rights was part of the Republican platform). Furious that he seems totally happy to suggest that he should take some version of authoritarian power, contrary to everything that I thought the party once stood for in terms of individual freedom and state sovereignty - and the natural extension of everything that Obama has been (mostly rightly) criticized for in terms of his vast expansion of executive power. How can a party that hates Obama for his executive overreaches even consider electing someone who seems to think he can write whatever executive order he wants? And that doesn't even get into all the problematic things he says and believes about refugees, immigration, the fact that David Duke immediately said on twitter that it was an awesome speech, etc., etc., etc.

The few things that sounded like actual policy recommendations would be more at home in the Democratic platform - Ivanka's promise for equal pay for equal work, better maternity/family leave, (both of which I'm for, fyi), etc., as well as Trump's total abandonment of any principles of free trade (plus a general lack of understanding of how treaties work and what it would mean to abandon ours). It's also astounding to me that any real evangelical would get behind him, given that he's made no attempt to follow Christian values in much of his own life (and even said that he probably doesn't deserve their support). And saying that he was only going to give facts and then saying that we're the highest taxed country in the world (false) and that crime is going up and America is more dangerous than he's ever seen it (debatable, but crime is still remarkably lower than twenty years ago, particularly in places like NYC), and a bunch of other cherry-picked half-truths, was just icing on a cake that really pissed me off - because some of his base will always be convinced that any attempt to dispute his 'facts' is just spin from a biased media. And Trump is nothing if not brilliant at controlling the media narrative.

But I think what bothered me the most was how very negative and dark and fear-mongering it all was. It was basically an overly-long riff on how dangerous things are and how awful America is, with a lot of empty promises about how Trump is the only person who can possibly save us. But it's all spin and cherry-picking of facts (which, by the way, we will also see at the Democratic convention next week - another thing that appalls me in general is how I can see Fox News and the New York Times, for example, both talk about the same issue with two totally different sets of facts and opinions and viewpoints, and both of them can sound logical and right, and they're both just catering to their base to get clicks/views/money, and it's nearly impossible to tease out what's 'true' anymore). And for all that I haven't been impressed by Obama as a policy-maker in a lot of ways, you can't deny that it's a lot more inspiring to hear a speech about America's future in a positive light, rather than spending an hour listening to someone scream into a mic about how everything is on fire and we need to close our borders and build walls and destroy alliances and burn everything down to save it.

sssanyway. What I'm hoping is that this is the final death rattle of this incarnation of the conservative side of the aisle, and that the next few years will lead to some sort of rebirth - because I don't think it can go on like this.

So after that, I sat in the dark and stewed for awhile, and debated whether I should get into politics or blogging or the media in an effort to actually fix things - or whether I should write novels with optimistic endings and provide hope in another way - or whether I should stockpile food and aluminum foil hats and wait for the end of the world. I also snapchatted for quite awhile with my cousin (you may know him as Drewbaby), which is the first time I've ever used snapchat for more than three seconds - so if the apocalypse comes and they purge anyone over thirty-five, I may have enough skills to pretend that I'm younger.

And now, I'm going to take my gluten-poisoned self to bed and hope that I sleep dreamlessly tonight - I have a lot to do tomorrow that doesn't involve politics or allergic reactions or anger or anything else that I felt tonight, and I want to make it all happen. Goodnight!

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