Posts Tagged ‘life’

In which I try my hand at DeviantArt.

The tablet that we’ve had since Bub was a baby decided to die a peaceful death from old age, so I went on ahead and replaced that — it doesn’t surprise me that it died since it was that old, but hooking it up to all of the computers that we have in this house and not getting it to function in any capacity nailed the whole “it died” thing for me, because for the life of me I couldn’t get any of them to recognize it when plugged in via USB and we live in a plug and play world. I wound up getting the same exact make and model as our old tablet, which was almost wonderfully ironic… I guess that’s one less thing that I have to learn how to navigate, although I haven’t actually used a tablet in awhile, so it’s going to take a bit of time for me to get used to drawing on a tablet again. But I do want to learn how to do it again while the kids are in bed, and I suppose that is the best time for me to practice on it. That said, I went on ahead and made a DeviantArt account that my intentions are to post art and photography on, the former of which I’ll work on while they’re sleeping each night. I haven’t exactly heard bad things about DeviantArt, so I was like, well… why not? Heh.

Meanwhile, Bub and I have been playing through some of the old games that they have on the repository (what do you call that) that having a Nintendo Switch online subscription gives you free access to. We found out the hard way that you can only have one “suspend state” save file, although luckily we didn’t have any really far out, advanced save files at the end of a game. It’s good that we know this now though. Right now we’re prioritizing working on Kirby’s Adventure, then we may play Super Mario Bros. 3 and go on from there.

I mean, honestly, this does not surprise me.

Regarding this school district and opening up what was supposed to be the first three weeks of virtual learning for everyone (since a judge mandated that no face-to-face learning could take place until, at the very least, after Labor Day due to the continued spread of COVID-19), I found out that in spite of the district having interested parents and guardians fill out multiple forms attesting to the need of a device or Internet hotspot… they did not order enough of either of these things, schools ran out at varying times on the first day on days that they had designated to give out schedules, supplies, and technology, and this effectively left students who were in need of technology in the lurch because they had no way to get online or do their work, especially if they were going to remain virtual students after Labor Day. So apparently the school had to inform parents and guardians that they would be extending a “grace period”, not holding students’ absences against them if they could not log online due to this, and not penalizing students’ grades for not being able to complete assignments due to this. Personally, it just blows my mind that this district had all summer to plan for this and this was exactly what happened. But I graduated from this district myself, so…

They had the whole summer to make this a clean, seamless transition, and they completely botched this.

Meanwhile, in my spare time I’ve begun to acclimate to our new PC controller, which I have in hand. Either this is less forgiving than I thought it would be, or Kickle Cubicle is less forgiving than I thought it would be. Knowing me, it’s probably a little bit of both. But this game is definitely not known for being an easy game.

Facebook never ceases to depress me now, does it?

So far, I have managed to get banned from Facebook twice for thirty days each time.

Ironically, both bans have come about as a result of disagreeing with conservative men.

The first ban came about because I would not bow down to an extremely religious “abortion abolitionist”, as he likes to call himself, whose stance on pro-life borders on the violent to the point that his local Planned Parenthood, to the best of my knowledge, is actively litigating against him because his manner of “protest” has made it so that clients are afraid to access their clinic and staff do not feel comfortable or safe entering the clinic, exiting the clinic, or performing their jobs… which is exactly what he wants, because then he feels that he is “turning people away” and “saving the pre-born” (and yes, that is exactly what he calls them). He thinks that screaming outside of “abortuaries”, which is another pet word of his, is all the activism that he has to do, rather than advocate for benefits and services to help pregnant women keep and raise their children. This has been brought up to him many times, and he literally ignores it whenever it is mentioned.

The second ban came about because I told someone who literally espoused Nazi ideology that I wanted him to take a 23andMe test and “see if he would come up 100% European”. I might have used the choice terminology that runs rampant in those circles — Aryan white supremacy, and a bit of swearing as I said this. Ironically, I was accused by Facebook of bullying and harassing him, but him literally stating that he didn’t care that Jews died, wanted Jews to die, would wear a face mask with a swastika on it if asked to cover his face during this pandemic and felt that Jews were “greedy bankers and lenders”… didn’t go against any of Facebook’s rules, and multiple people reported him for this. But all of the people that he reported caught varying bans on posting when he gamed the system. As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, it seems that conservative white men — and this one also openly admitted to being Christian — are so easily able to game Facebook that it isn’t even funny at this point. They can say whatever they want without repercussion.

Anyone who dares speak out against them is silenced, especially if they are female. That’s just a sad fact.

One other thing that I don’t think people get.

I’d like to say that I’ve done a fairly good job setting out doing what I want to do, which is beginning to forget about the person that gave birth to me, raised me, and spent as long of a period in my life as she did. But when people ask me about forgiving her for what she did to my child (which I have written about in here for anyone who might be curious, and do not intend on rehashing since it has already been mentioned), or whether or not I have forgiven her yet for what she did to my child… a lot of people don’t ever seem to put themselves in Bub’s shoes, which was a point that I tried to make in my last post when I stated that I didn’t know if I could forgive her even if she had apologized to me for whatever reason before she had passed away. At the end of the day, it wasn’t really about me, although I could have — and did have — my own opinions on the matter, and ultimately came to the realization that even if she had apologized for what she did, I personally could not forgive her because I would never know under what circumstances she had apologized and would never really know if I could trust that apology. But as I think I’ve made clear, Bub is free to feel about her whatever he pleases. If he’s forgiven her, that is just fine with me. And it’s just fine with me if he hasn’t yet, or if he never does. Because all of this took place to, or with, him. All of this involved him.

Imagine being close to someone your entire life, loving and trusting this person, and then having this person’s behavior out of the blue push you away. Even if it had a distinct pathology, that still does not make it right, because she had periods of lucidity where she knew better and should have taken some kind of responsibility for her actions, and no one else wanted to help her take responsibility for them — if anything, they wanted to make every single excuse under the sun as to why she was “doing what she was doing”.

I don’t think Bub has forgiven her as much as he has more or less forgotten about her, and in time I aspire to completely forget about her as well. But I’m not going to give her the luxury of retaining good memories about her until that point comes, and we are at that point now. I no longer retain any good memories about her at all, and I am fine with that. In the interim, I don’t mind people knowing how she was before she died, though. I can give her the luxury of taking “a good death” away from her in the same sense that she took away from me the ability to make good memories of and spend peaceful time with her in the six months that led up to her own death. While I’m forgetting her, she should be remembered exactly as she chose to go out.

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