Sunday Coffee – Thanksgiving

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Thistle

It’s Thanksgiving week, and to be honest, it couldn’t be worse timing. The country is in a massive wave of covid, with nearly 200,000 new cases a day, making July’s spike look like peanuts. This has been going poorly for weeks, and San Antonio has been faring relatively well…until now. Two days ago, our case numbers suddenly skyrocketed, and we all got emergency warnings on our phones about levels that hadn’t been seen since mid-July.

Now, we weren’t planning on having a huge traditional Thanksgiving celebration anyway. I have a very large extended family, and most years, we have an early Thanksgiving gathering with my mom’s side of the family the weekend before. It would have been yesterday, but it didn’t happen of course. And then on the day-of, we would normally go to my aunt and uncle’s house for a celebration with my dad’s side of the family. Again, that’s not going to happen, not in the current environment and definitely not now that our area is starting to spike.

But we were planning a few small things. We were going to make traditional foods just for us. My sister was thinking of coming to town and even isolated herself completely for a few weeks beforehand to be extra safe. We were going to hang out on our back deck, outside, far enough apart to again be extra safe. My mom and stepdad might have come over as well, though those plans weren’t finalized. At some point, we might have gotten together outdoors with my dad and stepmom and half-sister, maybe for a walk on the trails. It’s looking like all of that might be canceled, though. Our meagre attempts to be with family at this time of year, as safely as possible, just gone.

I know this is the way it has to be. I know. I’m going to spend some time mourning anyway. I have no idea when I’m going to see my family again, and my oldest son isn’t even coming home from college for the holiday. (He’s decided to stay up in Kansas over the long winter break, with a short week down here at Christmas.) Those are sad things. Covid has made a lot of sad things this year.

But I’m also going to take some time to be thankful this week for the things we have. None of us have been sick. (Fingers crossed it stays that way!) My kids have options for virtual schooling. Jason has a job that can be done from home, so we haven’t had to worry about income issues or him potentially getting exposed at work. I have a social support network that I can lean on when I’m sad.

I do hope that soon, we can be together again. Christmas is coming and I know it won’t be the same this year, which is going to be doubly hard as it already wasn’t the same last year due to other family circumstances. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve seen some of the people in my family now, and for a group that’s as tightly connected as ours, this has been rough. We’re all still hanging in there, though. And I’m going to try my best to appreciate that this Thanksgiving week.

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 7 Comments

The Zig Zag Girl, by Elly Griffiths (audio)

Posted on November 20, 2020 by Thistle

From GoodReads: Brighton, 1950. When the body of a girl is found, cut into three, Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is reminded of a magic trick, the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old friend of Edgar’s. They served together in the war as part of a shadowy unit called the Magic Men. Max is still on the circuit, touring seaside towns in the company of ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls. Changing times mean that variety is not what it once was, yet Max is reluctant to leave this world to help Edgar investigate. But when the dead girl turns out to be known to him, Max changes his mind. Another death, another magic trick: Edgar and Max become convinced that the answer to the murders lies in their army days. When Edgar receives a letter warning of another ‘trick’, the Wolf Trap, he knows that they are all in danger…

Likely this review will be shorter than that description. 1) I only realized recently that Elly Griffiths had another mystery series out, with five books published. 2) The first three of those books are available to me for free from the Audible Plus catalog, yay! 3) While I didn’t find this book as engaging as Griffith’s Ruth Galloway series, it was a fun read, and I’ll likely read the rest of the series. 4) The theatre/magic bits made the story quite interesting and were what I enjoyed most. 5) I kept getting tripped up by the characters’ “back in the war” comments because it felt like the war was 20+ years behind them rather than the rather close 5-ish years. 6) The culprit was fairly easily spotted early on, though I admit that I had another candidate I thought more likely. 7) James Langton narrates, and I quite liked his performance.

Posted in 2020, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Wellness Wednesday – Grounding, Hunger, Change

Posted on November 18, 2020 by Thistle

In mid-October, when my extended family was in a crisis in four different ways, my anxiety went through the roof and I began a combination of not-eating mixed with drinking 5-6 tumblers of iced coffee per day. This was bad for me. It clearly showed angry results with my first month of real weight gain in 2020.

To combat this, and in my first step toward cutting all coffee by the end of November (or at least down to one cup per day), I stopped buying and making iced coffee several weeks ago. If I wanted coffee after this point, I either had to make hot coffee, or go down to Dunkin’ for iced. This would keep me from binging on the stuff. Many days, I’ve gone down to Dunkin’ for an afternoon coffee. It’s not an ideal solution, but with one exception, I’ve only had two cups of coffee daily since Nov 1st.

On November 2nd, on my way home from a chiropractor visit, I strongly considered taking the exit that would take me to Dunkin’ even though it was 4pm and I usually don’t drink coffee that late. Plus, I’d already had my two allotted drinks for the day. I felt extremely anxious, and ever since transferring my anxiety-drink from wine to iced coffee over a year ago, anxiety immediately makes me crave the latter. I didn’t know WHY I felt anxious, though, and since I had a few minutes before reaching that particular exit on the highway, I sat with the emotion for a bit. Then I realized: I didn’t feel anxious. I felt hungry. The hunger was giving me anxiety.

I’ve talked recently about how I began using coffee as an appetite suppressant back in 2014, and how it completely messed up my metabolic system, causing massive weight gain. To this day, if I drink too much coffee, or drink it at the wrong time of day – ie, to stave off eating when I get hungry – I tend toward hypoglycemia attacks and weight gain. This is the reason I’m cutting it back and eventually out completely. Clearly, coffee isn’t good for my system. But it’s also not terribly good for my mental health, either. Which leads me to two things: grounding, and hunger.

There is very little in common between wine and iced coffee, and yet, I was able to successfully transfer from one to the other to combat anxiety. It was an intuitive process and not one that I worked to do on purpose. When I look back on it, I know exactly what made the switch successful: the straw. Sounds silly, but neurologically, it’s not. Sucking through a straw activates particular parts of your nervous system, and the thicker the substance (so the harder you have to work), the more this activates. (We used to have Ambrose drink yogurt from through a straw for occupational therapy when he was two years old and had sensory processing disorder.) When you have anxiety, your nervous system is in overdrive, and by giving it stimuli, you can help to calm the system. It’s no different from putting ice on your skin or doing tapping rhythms for grounding. Drinking water through a straw didn’t help me, because there’s just about no resistance to water, but there was just enough with iced coffee thickened with half-and-half to provide a mild grounding experience. This, in addition to the stimulation of the drink itself, was the key to the wine-to-coffee anxiety switch.

Then you add in the hunger component. After using coffee as an appetite suppressant for years, and becoming more and more disordered in my relationship with food, hunger has become an anxiety trigger. It didn’t used to be. I wrote multiple posts back when I was losing weight the first time about the importance of hunger cues. An excerpt from one of these posts said:

Too often, hunger becomes the enemy of those of us trying to lose weight. We wish we simply didn’t have to deal with hunger, because if we didn’t get hungry, we wouldn’t want to eat so much, right? But hunger is NOT the enemy. Hunger – REAL hunger – is a signal from our bodies that we need fuel. Hunger keeps us alive. Hunger tells us that we aren’t starving (or in starvation mode). Hunger is an amazing, wonderful thing, and an incredibly USEFUL tool on our weight loss journeys, if only we learn how to recognize it.

But back in 2014, my anxiety, hunger cues, trauma, intuitive eating, disordered eating, and coffee consumption got all folded in together, and I stopped being able to recognize what my body was trying to tell me. And now, apparently, getting hungry outside of planned mealtimes is an immediate nosedive into anxiety. Coffee was both my go-to for unwanted hunger and for anxiety, so it’s a double whammy to overcome in order to quit the habit(s).

So. It’s time to do a little work, and transfer across my current anxiety drink from iced coffee to something else. (It doesn’t even have to be a drink, though likely that would be the easiest transfer.) I don’t know what I can use, yet. I can’t stand tea of any kind, I don’t want highly sugared drinks, and I can’t seem to find any iced milk drinks that aren’t of the coffee/tea variety (milk drinks would be best in terms of straw-tension). But this is the goal, in addition to re-learning to recognize true hunger cues again as I cut away the drink that intentionally buries them.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , | 6 Comments

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by VE Schwab

Posted on November 16, 2020 by Thistle

Three hundred years ago, Addie made a deal with a devil: her freedom to live life as she chooses in exchange for her soul when she’s ready to die. She didn’t realize the catch – loosening her ties for total freedom means that she can leave no mark. No one remembers her. No one knows her name. And then one day, someone does.

Let me start by saying that this book is worth every bit of the hype. I put it off, worried that I’d be the one person who wouldn’t like it. Nope. I savored every page over the ten days that I languidly read it, and I wish I’d spread out the last hundred pages or so for longer as I read them way too fast. There was so much good here. The writing was exquisite and immersive. The characterization was awesome, with people who were flawed and not always good but also lovable. The ending was perfect, in a really tricky situation. This will definitely end up being in my top books of the year.

There were a few things that struck me. First, while the books are very different, I saw a lot of parallels between Addie and The Night Circus. There is a certain dreamlike quality to both books, weaving in and out of time and history. There’s even a scene where Addie and Henry walk through an interactive art exhibit** that reminded me of the tent-mazes in the Circus. It’s not just that, though. On a personal level, both books were ones that reminded me of the joy involved in writing and creation. I read both while taking a break from writing, and both made me want to start again. They’re inspiring and beautiful and spoke directly to my core.

Second. There’s a particular scene where Henry takes Addie to the whisper gallery in Grand Central Station (for those who don’t know: you can whisper at the wall in one corner and have it sound perfectly audible on the other side of the room). He’s taking her to a spot she’s never known or experienced, something new in her 300+ years. It annoyed me at first, because how could she have missed this? I mean, this is a famous thing. It is literally mentioned on Wikipedia and on the Grand Central website as a thing to see there. My sister took me there on my first ever trip to NYC. So in all the many years Addie has been exploring the city, how did she not know? But then I had a realization: If someone had wanted to take her to this whisper gallery, they would forget her before they reached the other side of the room and began to talk via the audio arch. Yeah, it’s not particularly realistic that she wouldn’t have heard of this place, but it’s almost certain she never could have experienced it. So even though the scene stretched believability, I appreciated it all the same.

Last, because I don’t want to drone on too long about this book: the ending was incredible. The relationship between Addie and the “darkness” (the devil she made her deal with) is complex and interesting. I really worried about the different directions it might go. Without going into anything spoilery, the resolution between them was just as complex and interesting as the rest of their history. I cheered for Addie’s ingenuity, and while I mourned some of what was lost, I loved the perspective of time from the viewpoint of someone who has navigated three centuries of experience. It was just perfect.

I can see myself reading this book many times. Definitely need to check out an audio version to see if that will be equally brilliant. I love love love when I can add books like this one to my collection, and I’m so happy that I didn’t let the hype deter me!

**In the week since I finished this book, I discovered that there’s an interactive art installation here in SA that is very similar to the one in this book. I definitely need to go there when this whole covid thing is under control!

Posted in 2020, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – Theories: Rhythm of War

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Thistle

Note: This post will contain spoilers for earlier volumes of the Stormlight Archive (including Dawnshard), as well as spoilers for the pre-released chapters from Rhythm of War. Do not continue if you don’t want to read spoilers!

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Quarantine Diaries – Weeks 33-35

Posted on November 13, 2020 by Thistle

Today is Friday the 13th, eight months to the date from the Friday the 13th in March when we got our first case of Covid in San Antonio. The country is undergoing a third spike, higher than previous spikes. Unemployment benefits – which are already a joke as most people get red-taped out of them and those who don’t get almost nothing (we, for instance, would get less than a third of Jason’s salary if he lost his job) – haven’t been extended by the current administration, so they’ve expired (maximum of 26 weeks). San Antonio has been named one of the top five cities in the country for covid financial distress. People are out of work and unable to go back to work safely because our state and country are doing absolutely nothing to help or get this under control!! Texas became the first state to reach a million covid cases just a few days ago, and the US is now experiencing well over 100k new cases and 1,000 deaths per day. And with people protesting masks by wearing them under their noses even more since the election results, I’m kinda terrified of what we can expect to see before we have a vaccine available.

Week 33 – October 23 to 29
65,423 cases, 1,250 deaths, 201 cases for the 7-day rolling average (major increase), 6.9% positivity rate (up 1.1%). That plateau we were on? It’s now a steady increase. Not a spike yet, not this week, but it feels like it could become one easily. Why? Well, a big chunk is all the kids returning to school. Another big chunk is cooler weather and people thus hanging out (with people outside their household) indoors instead of outside. There’s also a lot of pandemic fatigue – people just tired of being strict with the rules. Not to mention, if the rest of the state/country has increasing numbers and people have to travel for work, there’s gonna be cross-contamination. So hospital numbers are on the rise, testing numbers and positive results are on the rise, and Bexar County has moved up from low to moderate risk this week.

Things hit hard at home this week. My aunt, who runs a preschool with my mom in a small town west of San Antonio, tested positive for Covid. By the time she got tested and had a positive result, she’d had a week of symptoms exposing my uncle, mother, stepdad, and elderly grandparents (not to mention however-many pre-symptomatic days!). Her case was mild, thank goodness, and she’s recovering already, but the preschool is shut down for several weeks and we just have to wait to see if anyone else caught it. My mom was tested on the 28th and has yet to get her results, but has no symptoms at this point.

(Dec 2014: left to right – my uncle, aunt, grandpa, grandma, mom, and stepdad – everyone here had potential exposure, plus a few others)

Unfortunately, this is the side of my family where a lot of folks aren’t wearing masks, limiting shopping trips, etc. And my grandparents are extremely vulnerable being in their 80s/90s with multiple underlying conditions. It’s been a very stressful week. Doesn’t help that another six kids from the local high school came down with covid – we got a new notice almost every single day about at least one kid – and Laurence was scheduled to take his PSAT there on the 29th. He decided that he flat-out wasn’t going to take it – he doesn’t need it for college and he didn’t want the covid risk. Jason and I tried to convince him to go, but he put his foot down. And honestly, I don’t blame him. I just hope this doesn’t take away future opportunities for him.

Week 34 – October 30 to November 5
66,909 cases, 1,268 deaths, 212 7-day rolling average, 7.7% positivity rate (up 0.8%). We’ve now shown a steady increase in daily case trend for the last few weeks, contrary to the two-week decline trend that we look for. Unfortunately, lots of other parts of the state are overloaded. El Paso is beyond capacity so hospital patients are being sent all over TX, including over 40 here so far (and we’re 10 hours away from El Paso!). One news station estimates that we saw a bit over 8k cases in October total (about 12% of our numbers), but of course that’ll likely change with backlogs etc, which is why I don’t even bother to try to tabulate that stuff now! And at of the end of the week, the county judge was exposed to covid through another county employee, so we’ll have to see what happens there.

My mom’s covid test came back negative thank goodness! Several other family members (who I didn’t even know had been exposed) also came back negative, but I have yet to hear about my grandparents and don’t even know if they’ll go in for tests. There’s so much pandemic fatigue going on. My chiropractor office, which used to do well in terms of safety, is getting more and more lax to the point where I’m getting afraid to go (photo shows my chiropractor and how he always wears his mask now). People are hoarding toilet paper again (this time in anticipation of post-election riots). The library has officially moved to Stage 3 as of the 4th, and Fitness in the Park has returned with limited classes – all this despite the current increases we’ve had. My family is starting to talk about Christmas and what we might be able to swing or not swing safely. It’s all rather depressing. It would be easier if we didn’t have another spike…

Week 35 – November 6 to 12
69,014 cases, 1,287 deaths, 283 (!!!) 7-day rolling average, 8.4% positivity rate (up 0.7%). We’ve seen some major jumps in numbers here this week, including multiple days with over 300 and 400 new cases for the first time in months. The positivity rate has been climbing for the last month, and our hospital numbers are up quite a bit too (though some of that is a continued influx of patients from El Paso). Texas is back up to over 10k cases a day, a level on par with the peak in July, and it looks to continue rising. Other than a few spiked days that reflected case backlogs in SA and Houston, we’ve had the highest daily increases in our state ever this week. Nov 11th was nearly as high as the spike day from SA’s backlogged cases! Sigh.

In better news, the county judge had two negative covid tests so it looks like his exposure last week didn’t lead to contracting covid. On the other hand, our mayor was apparently exposed this week and is currently in self-quarantine awaiting a second negative test (first came back negative). With things getting worse, the Rock ‘N Roll Marathon people finally saw the light and decided to cancel this year’s event despite saying just a few weeks ago that they’d still be hosting it traditionally. We saw another three students at the local high school come down with covid – at least that has slowed a bit now! – and sadly, we got notice that one student passed away. We don’t know if that was covid-related as they keep that info private, but it’s always sad when a classmate dies. It wasn’t someone my kids knew (the high school has over 3,000 students enrolled), but either way, grief is tough and even more surreal in a situation like the current one.

Moving forward
Well it would help if Prump stopped acting like a toddler and let the transition process begin. If he were anyone else, he could help bridge the divide here. But then again, if he were that kind of person, he could have pulled both sides in together over covid – and hey, he likely would have won the election had he done that. In any case, I think we’re in for a rough few months of lawsuits and protests (both in-person, and safety-related), and that’s going to lead to worsening covid numbers. The current ones are staggering, and they’re predicting now that soon it could be 200k+ daily cases in the US.

At home, we’re going to keep quarantining as much as possible. I’m being more careful about how many hikes I attend/lead, and likely our little individual support bubbles will get smaller/stricter as the numbers grow here. It’s really frustrating, right in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas! But I’d rather have my family and friends alive for future holidays than with me this year. At least our deck is almost finished and we can have a few people over for outdoor, distanced celebrations! Ironically, the Texas weather that we despise so much is actually going to make the next few months easier. Temps in the 60s and 70s over winter makes for great outdoor gatherings! Certainly easier than the 100+ temps from over the summer!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Dawnshard, by Brandon Sanderson

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Thistle

This novella is #3.5 in the Stormlight Archive, taking place between Oathbringer and the upcoming Rhythm of War. In it, Rysn guides her ship toward the treacherous island of Akinah, with help from several Radiants, and a traitor on board. This is the sort of book that is absolutely dependent on reading the others in the series to know what’s going on. It’s a book that bridges gaps and fills in holes in readers’ knowledge of the Cosmere.

Did I love it? Oh yes. Absolutely. I knew that the book would be about 75% Rysn’s POV and the rest mostly The Lopen’s POV, and while Rsyn hasn’t always been my favorite character, I was interested in watching her continue to grow as a person. The Lopen, of course, is just awesome, and I knew he had a good arc to navigate as well. Plus, the prologue clued me in to the fate of someone I’ve wondered about since early in the second book, which is awesome!

The region felt so empty. Quiet as a home with no cousins. –The Lopen

Um…Not really much else to say here. I’m not going to go into realmatic theory and I don’t know if any of my current readers have ever even been interested in the Stormlight Archive, despite my obvious enthusiasm. So I’ll just keep this short: Brandon Sanderson does it again!

Revisited via audio in August 2022: The audio production of this book released two years after my original read, and it was lovely to revisit this book read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. It’s funny how a book that you’ve only read once can feel like a comfort read due to it being part of a larger series that you love. The audio just enhanced the story that I already loved, and my only quibble was the change in how the narrators pronounced Aimia, but that’s just a tiny thing. Loved this audiobook wholeheartedly!

Posted in 2020, 2022, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

At the Top of a Mountain

Posted on November 9, 2020 by Thistle

Do you remember where you were on 9/11? Where you were when President Obama made history as the first Black president of our country? How about now – will you remember where you were when Kamala Harris became our first female, Black, Asian-American vice president?

I will remember.

Saturday morning, the fifth morning of the election, dawned with no new news. Things were leaning blue, but I was still nervous that something might change. I was awake very early to get ready for an hour-forty-minute drive up to Lost Maples for a hike. Once there, I discovered that – as expected – I had no cell signal. I met up with the other seven ladies going on this hike, and we hit the trails. Lost Maples is known for its amazing color changes in November. You have to reserve one of the limited day passes a month in advance – you can’t do it any earlier than that and they run out FAST. And you never know exactly which week the trees will begin to turn. Happily, we arrived in the early turning. Maybe a quarter of the maples were red, orange, or gold, and that will ripple outwards over the next week or two, with new trees turning and turned trees losing their leaves. If you’re lucky enough to get to the park in this window, it’s a riot of color.

I haven’t been to Lost Maples since the fall of 1998, but I still recognized a lot of the trail. At one point, we diverged from the trails my family used to take, and took the challenging East Trail upwards. For 0.8 miles, we went up. And up. And up. About 400-450 feet of elevation in a very short distance! When we reached the top, we could look out over the valleys and peaks of the area. I say we were on top of a mountain, and that’s not quite true as these are technically still hill-sized – just very big hills! It felt like we’d reached the top of a mountain, though.

And as we stopped to check the map and decide which direction to go, one of the ladies realized that she had signal, now that we were at such a high altitude. She started to check her phone, and suddenly quieted us all. “Ladies,” she said, “Ten minutes ago, Kamala Harris made history.” We paused for only a beat, letting that sink in, and then began to cheer and whoop.

As we traveled over the top of the mountain and down a slippery, rocky slope back to the bottom, we heard other groups break into cheers as they got the news. Various groups on all sides of the mountain were cheering back and forth to each other, echoing across the valley. Amazingly, we didn’t hear a single set of boos or insults. Everyone we passed was celebrating. I’ve heard about towns where cars were driving by honking, or where crowds gathered in the streets to dance and shout, or where people rang bells all clanging together. My experience was of a mountainside exploding into joy as people got the news intermittently in an area with almost no cell signal. It was glorious.

I’m so glad I got to spend this day with these women. It’s very hard for me to do a lot of what I did Saturday – especially to drive by myself over roads I don’t know to an uncertain destination (no one knew where we’d meet up) – but every hard step was worth it. I know where I was when history was made. I was with my hiking family at the top of a mountain.

Posted in Personal, Wellness | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Sunday Coffee – Favorite Photos of October

Posted on November 8, 2020 by Thistle

I had a lot of fun playing with my camera in October. It’s just an iPhone camera, but the iPhone 11 (not pro) actually does a decent job with a lot of shots. Especially outdoors. I ended up having to cull my favorite photos down from almost twenty initial choices! Only after I finalized my top dozen did I realize that all but one photo was taken outdoors, and seven of the twelve were taken on group hikes!

Left to right: Atticus tries to eat the grass while outside on his new harness and leash (we’re working on it, since he desperately wants to be outside); the giant tree at a nearby park that’s invisible from the trail (this photo doesn’t even begin to capture the majesty and size of it!); miniature portraits painted on wooden walls along the Riverwalk

Top left: Jennine on top of a foggy mountain. Bottom left: Spot the froggie! Right: the medieval-style tower at the top of Comanche Lookout Park with the full/blue moon rising on Halloween

Left to right: Gavroche models; painted rock found at my local library; night shot of group hiking in the dark on Halloween (lit by flashlight, blurred through multi-second light uptake – it just looked so cool!)

Left to right: shadow walk as I wait for Laurence’s wisdom teeth surgery to finish; scenery along the Riverwalk; Jason extinguishes our fire (again with the multi-second blurring)

As always, these photos were taken by me with no filters on them. I think technically, the “portrait” mode on the iPhone might count as a filter? If so, then the photo of Gavroche has it on there. But if it’s just a lens-focusing, then no. In any case, I didn’t do any editing/filtering after taking the photos. Besides of course putting them into these collages! Heh.

(photo credit: AP)

PS – I am very happy about the news that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election. I have a whole story about finding out (if you’ve seen facebook or instagram, you already know, but of course I have to put it here too!), but I was out most of yesterday and will be out again for a big chunk of today, so I don’t have time to write that up at the moment. This post was already pre-drafted so it will work for today! In any case, congrats to our new President-elect and our first-ever female, Black, Asian-American vice president! So many historical statements in the latter half of that sentence!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Wellness Wednesday – Uncertainty

Posted on November 4, 2020 by Thistle

Four years ago, I wrote about the heartbreak of the 2016 election. Somehow, I’d managed to garner some hope last time, even though a big part of me was already sure what the results would be. Maybe I’m too cynical, or maybe I’m too realist. I’ve always been one of those “um, the glass is half empty AND half full…” people. And even though I hoped in 2016, I knew what was going to happen. This election? I didn’t even bring hope into it.

Sure, I voted. And yeah, I’ve worn my F*ck Trump lipstick every day for the last week. I stayed up until 11pm watching the election coverage, just like last time. Then I slept poorly, woke up at 5:50 to check the results again, and eventually gave up trying to go back to sleep. Instead, I’m having a very indulgent breakfast of pumpkin muffins with butter or Nutella and a large mug of coffee. Nothing is decided yet, and it doesn’t look like it will be for days, but I can already feel things slipping back into Trumpland, and it’s depressing.

So maybe you’ll tell me to keep my hopes up, to stay positive, or point out that there are promising signs for Biden. But as I’ve said to several friends before, I won’t believe it unless it actually happens. I think we’re doomed for another four years.

And guys? This is not because I’m anti-Republican. Sure, I’m on the more liberal side of the fence in most things, but like I said in the post I linked out to, there are Republicans that I respect and even ones that I’ve voted for in rare elections. (Not presidential – but I vote during all the times I can, on all the local and national races.) I can also see that there is some good coming out of this election. In 2016, Clinton won the popular vote 65.8 million to 62.9 million. As of when I’m writing this (7:30am on the 4th), the current popular vote stands at 69.1 million (Biden) to 66.8 million (Trump). Without even all the ballots counted, 7.2 million more votes came in this year compared to 2016 – and more voter turnout is always a good thing!! I do wish that I could see Biden’s current 2.3-million lead as a good sign, especially with so much left to count being mail-in ballots (which trend more Democrat), but I can’t. Clinton won by 3mil, and still lost the election.

The Electoral College: the thing that makes it so our votes don’t count. The idea is that the EC and popular vote almost always go the same direction. But over the last twenty years, this is no longer true. Two of the five elections between 2000 and 2016 had the EC go opposite of popular vote. When it was down to something like 1000 votes in 2000, I could accept the fluke. When it came down to three million votes in 2016…that’s a dangerously-disenfranchising system. It’s not fair that a state can be split almost 50/50 and have all the points go to one candidate. This is true in red states, blue states, and swing states alike. If a candidate wins a state with 60% of the vote, he/she should get 60% of the electoral votes. To do otherwise strips the power away from the losing party’s voters. It means that 45% of Virginians this year have no voice in their vote for Trump, just as 45% of Texans (me included!) have no voice in their vote for Biden. It’s no wonder we have such low voter turnout under these conditions.

Of course, the electoral college has a long history of Bad Stuff, including its use to basically disqualify the “uneducated” from voting because “they wouldn’t be properly informed,” and the bolstering of votes given to slave-holding states as slaves could count toward the population (on a 3/5ths level) without being able to vote. There is literally no reason to keep up this antiquated and broken system. There’s a movement toward states agreeing to put all their electoral votes toward whichever candidate wins the popular vote, but until enough states agree, it won’t happen. In any case, it seems like it would just be a better choice to abolish the electoral college altogether. This CAN be done, and SHOULD be done, and everyone always forgets after the dust settles post-election. Sigh.

Anyway.

There’s not much more to say. I don’t know where we’ll be in a few days or a few weeks. I don’t see much changing for the next four years, and I feel much as I did in 2016, like hunkering down and staying very, very small. Only this year, there’s not so much fear as numb resignation, not so much heartbreak as “yeah I figured.” Even if Biden DOES end up winning, the appalling actions we’ve seen in our country these last few weeks just make me so tired and so sad. I miss logic and reason and kindness.

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 2 Comments