I am broken-hearted at the terrible news that my alma mater, @hampshirecollege.bsky.social, after 56 yrs, is closing. Its death is a victory for conformism, for corporatism, for higher education's dull love of hierarchy & status. It's a grievous defeat for imagination & experimentation.
M watching The Nutcracker:
"Why aren't those rats flanking the tin soldiers with their melee weapons?"
"Never drag a casualty by their feet!"
"Oh, see, the RATS have a stretcher! The rats are a professional army with standards--not some bootass Arkansas militia."
In my many months absence I have bought and started fixing up a house, started grad school, been getting crushed at work, and watching all of Ken Jennings's original Jeopardy run.
Also I don't know why Trump has to workshop mean nicknames for MTG so hard when my MIL has been calling her "Marjorie 3-names" with a devastating sneer for years.
Might have to come back to bsky to have a repository for thoughts like, "Twitter in the 40s would be like IF YOU'RE IN LINE TO DESECRATE MUSSOLINI'S CORPSE STAY IN LINE."
Beloved f/sf author Diane Duane could really do with help for funeral expenses right now. See details below for how we can help:
Hi I'm still alive. I was super sick for a few weeks and then we went from, "maybe we should buy instead of rent?" to cleared to close in three weeks to the day, and now we're moving. I see everything has continued to be the expected level of terrible despite my absence from Online.
Having a really wild Friday night of mid-90s Law & Order eps on Hulu, NyQuil, and going to bed at 6 pm.
The irony is that this administration's policies are going to inadvertently push American consumers into drastically more environmentally sustainable consumption habits.
The true lesson of the past few weeks has been how hard it is to build good things, and how easy it is to destroy them.
I've been sick in bed with the worst bronchitis for almost a week, but it was nice to have something more pressing than the downfall of America to attend to.
Will add that my husband texted the group chat to let them know I got home okay but my phone was out of commission and they spent the day speculating that I literally Hulk crushed it in a rage at the Signal leak story--that was a pretty good hypothesis; my takes are too spicy for primetime.
My phone battery exploded on Monday and I just got it repaired, but after two full day hiatus from being extremely online I'm gonna see what I can do to limit my screen time more significantly.
This is for service members not for spouses.
Oh fuck yeah past me left future me which is now current me a bunch of lime Topo Chicos in the fridge for when I got off the plane.
Apologies to the rental car return guy I accidentally called baby and to the good people of Boston I clearly endangered by driving while tired enough to call the rental car return guy baby.
Me: What a great vacation! I love seeing my friends and being in a real city--
My body: HELLO THIS IS YOUR BODY WITH A SCORE UPDATE. I HAVE BEEN KEEPING IT.
Me: Body, no. Please?
My body: AS OF TODAY THE SCORE IS FATIGUE, HEADACHE, MALAISE, LACK OF FOCUS, AND BONUS COLD SORE.
Me: Thanks, I guess.
Have developed a temporary mutual enmity with the old fuck in front of me on this plane who put, I shit you not, an empty duffle he "didn't want to crush" and a TENNIS RACKET in the overhead bin preventing my bag from fitting. Flight attendant mediated, which prevented me from catching a charge.
"'The Postal Service is the only entity that delivers to every address in the country, no matter how remote. If we privatize it, those rural customers will be left behind,' warns Tony McKinnon, president of the NC Council of the APWU."
I miss the subtlety of comic-book villains
"In conclusion, China is a land of contrasts. Thank you."
6 mo post-retirement it's still by default my last resort to take emotional distress or practical daily problems to my husband without exhausting every other solution (a source of huge frustration for him!) because this is an extremely hard behavioral pattern to break--reflexive self sufficiency.
For people whose friends and family may be far away, or lacking the cultural context to understand specific military stressors, this hesitance to put emotional burdens on their spouse can mean they have no outlets at all. Making close friends is a process and moving every few years makes it hard.
Another thing that makes this a uniquely difficult to manage situation for mil spouses is that your partner is often quite literally your only support, yet mil spouses are acutely aware that additional stress on someone going into dangerous situations could potentially be a catastrophic distraction.
The military, last I checked, does not publish statistics on spouse mental health, stress related injuries, or suicides. There is a deeply embedded culture of not complaining--someone always has it worse and more blatantly traumatic. This mass internalization of immense stress can be very damaging.
This experiential saturation tends to pile up--sometimes into a formal C-PTSD diagnosis, and sometimes just in a way that makes you weird at parties. At a point, so many things have happened that it feels impossible to process anything else that's happening and you end up on autopilot.
One of M's best senior officers he ever worked with described this as "experiential saturation." So many things happen so quickly to military families, some of them the kind of trauma that would derail anyone else's life and is considered a normal occurrence, you can't possibly process them all.
all these systems need massive reform. but one of the most dumbfounding things about Trump’s buzzsaw approach is how to makes so many of us small-c conservative—trying to preserve the systems we have because of the unconscionable costs of losing them outright—when we’d like to imagine better worlds
Likewise, don't compromise other people's work when you don't have to--that means being smart about data, devices, networks, contacts, etc. and what you risk for all of the people connected to you when you take risks involving a police state. Do what you've gotta do, but be smart is all I'm saying.