Conscious Streaming [socs]

Co-ed is a term you don’t hear very often these days. It always seemed insulting to me, a code to treat someone dismissively. Why not call college females “students” same as we do males? Nope, it was part of our constant obsession with labels. We still have that compulsion. Different ones now, but even so, we can’t quit consigning people to boxes. Not all are bad, of course, but I prefer mine to be filled with cookies not people. Should there be a comma after cookies? I generally err on the side of fewer is better so as not to drive my readers into a punctuation coma. But if you’re a comma cop, I can concur with the concept of including one there. Whew! I could have used a second cup of coffee today, though that’s a moot point now since this will post tomorrow while I’m cocooned in my cozy bed. Hopefully my lovely readers across the pond and on the East Coast will have checked in before I see it again. Note that I generally don’t comma off starter adverbs either unless I want the reader to take a dramatic pause. It may not seem as though there’s a method to my cornucopia of madness, but I assure you nothing is coincidental.

~*~

© 2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

FPQ35: Standards

Fandango provocatively asks…

“Do you believe public figures (e.g., politicians, celebrities, athletes, authors) — or anyone, actually — should be judged by today’s standards for their words or actions from decades earlier? Why or why not?”

Yes, I do. The thing is real standards ~ well, mine anyway, and those are what we’re talking about here, amirite? ~ have not shifted with the tides. Fandango gives a few examples.

One example is the recently unearthed Reagan monkey comment. That absolutely should be judged by “today’s” standards. But in my view, not calling an entire ethnic group monkeys was always the standard, whether in the 1970’s or now. Maybe I had a weird upbringing, but my parents never used ethnic slurs and neither do I.

Now, I happen not to be a Reagan fan in general, so it doesn’t bother me to say eh that was bad. I don’t need to twist and squirm to defend my “hero,” since imo he isn’t one. There are a lot worse things he did than this! But if you are a Reagan fan, so what? No reason why you can’t admit your dude was flawed. Everyone is.

Another example Fandango gives is Biden on the Anita Hill hearings. I absolutely judge Biden for being a weak doofus back then who didn’t stand up for what was right and now we’ve been stuck with the godawful Thomas on the bench ever since. It’s not a matter of “today’s” standards ~ doing the right thing is evergreen.

However. That’s politics. We need to judge these people on their words and actions so we can make decisions about their future behavior and how it might impact our lives and our finances, the environment, etc. There are other milieus, such as film, music, literature, art, and everything else. Do I care what some musician said about blacks or women or whatever the fuck? Eh probably not so much. I just can’t get so worked up about entertainment types. They’re always saying stupid things. It’s not that I don’t care at all. I may get outraged for a minute.

That’s not to say if an entertainer makes a career out of being deliberately disgusting and offensive I’ll enjoy that. No. I’m not down with the Joan Rivers nasty school of humor. Sorry to use such an old example, but I saw her live once and she was so mean and gross; I don’t know of anyone currently comparable. I don’t seek it out.

If an artist I like makes a stray offensive comment… whatever. It’s pretty arbitrary though, I admit. I will get more tuned in to some things, like racism and antisemitism than rando sexist jokes/lyrics (such as the song in Fandango’s example). Sexism from a politician is important though; it clues me into actions they may or may not take that will actually affect people.

Bottom line: I do hold supposedly educated leaders and wannabes to higher standards. Not today’s standards. Just standards.

~*~

© 2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Fuck

Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

It’s just a word. But I understand if you don’t like it. There are words I hate too, but they’re ethnic slurs, not curse words. I don’t even mind derogatory names for women, if they’re said in the spirit of fun and flirting. Who decides that? Well, me. Duh!

But back to the F-bomb. You know who else doesn’t like fuck? Those fucking thieves at tygpress. It’s the one word you can search for there that gives you blank results. Damn and shit are apparently okay with them, but fuck is a no-go. So random.

I discovered this by chance when I realized that my post cursing them out wasn’t on their site with the rest of the writing they are stealing from me continuously (along with all y’all). So, I began searching for various words, etc.

Like several of you, I’ve contacted GoDaddy and Digital Ocean with takedown notices and… nothing. GoDaddy says they don’t host the fucking thieves, so too bad, so sad. Digital Ocean doesn’t respond at all. It’s been an education in how little you can actually do when someone decides to be a blatant anonymous asshole online.

I tried a couple things in the meantime. One, I switched the name of my blog to Light Fucking Motifs to see if my posts would then vanish from the bad place, but nothing changed after the transition. So, I switched it back. Two, I tagged a post that was on the bad site with #fuck to see if it would disappear, and no. It stayed. This leads me to conclude that the actual word fuck needs to be in the content of the post for their bots to pick it up and reject it.

Obviously I’ve been spending way too much time brooding over this. Why? Idk. I guess journalists are resigned to the fact that everything they write will be reposted somewhere else, maybe with a link to the source, maybe not. Eventually you learn to shrug it off. It’s so frustrating when it first happens though! The thieves could link back to us, like a blogroll. What’s the big deal? Why are they being such dicks? No one is going to read/follow blogs from their site, since the format sucks. I guess they just want to turn into an enormous search engine or something and then sell ads by saying look at all these clicks.

And you know we’re helping them every time we go there. 🤮

So… am I going to put a little fuck in every post? Will my OCD compel me to go back and sneak a tiny fonted fuck at the end of my old published posts? That’s just absurd!

Sigh… 🙄

UPDATE: This post is now on the theft site. So idk what. It doesn’t come up in a specific search, but it does partially show under my site name with a snippet of the F-bombs intact. It is not clickable to a full post like the others.

UPDATE 2: They are now linking back to my blog twice by blog name and with Paula Light at the end of every post, just like a reblog, naming me as the source. Okay. I’m done.

All The Leaves Are Brown [SOCS]

Leaves 🍁 are lovely when they change color, and it used to be a fine tradition to press them in waxed paper between leaves of a book, when we found particularly pretty specimens. Now, I live in Southern California, where we don’t generally have a visible change of seasons, and I also do most of my reading electronically. But I’m not one to pine away for the past, for the most part. I’ve never been back East since I left in 1983, to witness the beautiful colors of the trees in autumn, though I wouldn’t mind going, someday.

My first thought was to write about people leaving, as in relationships, but I like to begin the SOCS with the prompt word, in its proper form, and I couldn’t come up with anything that made grammatical sense. For the regular daily prompts, I don’t always use them in their proper form, and now this inconsistency may bother me.

Or not!

I see I italicized pine because I thought I’d stuff this post with more tree words, but I forgot, and now it’s time to branch out to other endeavors and schedule this thing already. Yes, I am barking mad, thank you for asking! 🤪

In Other Words, compliment…

“They” say you’re supposed to ask for what you need,

But whenever I did, the excuse train came chugging down the track;

“They” say you’re supposed to model what you desire,

So I gave praise and said sweet nothings,

But I never heard a single compliment back.

~*~

Prompt from Patricia

One-Liner Wednesday: Tigers

I deleted identifying information from this blurb so as not to out the typo-ist. Fact is, we all typo, even the most OCD of us. But I couldn’t resist saving and sharing the humor, especially on a headache day. (It is not a migraine day, just a headache day.)

Tigers are magnificent, and should be valued and protected, but typos aside, I can see comparing a migraine to one. They prowl in the forests of my dreams, ready to pounce when I open my eyes. They claw and bite, making me want to return to the soothing darkness. But it’s too late. Once a tiger has found me, there’s no respite from his merciless attack until I calm him down with prescription medication.

~*~

One-Liner Wednesday

Why I Write…

The answer to this question varies with my mood. Some days I have a story to share that I think people will enjoy. Other times I simply need to express myself and words are my best tool for that. There are times I feel like being clever with language. Other days I have this ridiculous notion I’ve come up with something important to convey. Once I answered this question by talking about how writing fiction and poetry is the best way for me to organize my scattered thoughts and make some kind of sense of this messy world too.

I was thinking about all this a little while ago when I re-downloaded my drafts of Attractive Nuisance and Sweet Nothings from the cloud. The other day I’d told a friend I hadn’t been working on a novel lately, only flash fiction and poetry, because I can’t focus for more than a few minutes at a time. But ever since yesterday, when I impulsively replied to Jim’s post about a song, by jabbering on about an old pile of writing, I’ve been energized about working on this layered tale again.

Thing is, I don’t think it’s coincidence that this happened at the end of a week when I’m feeling especially frustrated at other people’s behavior. I’ve never been good at seeing patterns in the actions of real characters unless they’re completely obvious. I’m much better with fiction. And, of course, writing my own gives me a feeling of control I get nowhere else ~ I create a new world, populate it with my creations, and make them do what I want.

Just noodling. Back to work! 😀

More Things I Hate

I see it’s up to me to break up the syrupy brunch of Mommy Day posts full of flowers and pancakes and goopity goo, mm yes please I would like another mimosa hold the OJ thanks…

What was I saying? Oh! Yes, things I hate. Let’s start with slide. No, I’m not talking about those things in the park next to the swings. I’m talking about the absolutely enraging expression “it was a slide into the DMs.” If you haven’t been living under a rock, you know that this is the stupid way young people describe encountering one another privately on a social media site for romantic/ sexual purposes.

In other words, he sent her a message.

For fuck’s sake. We already have normal words like message, text, and email. We don’t need this idiotic slide thing. It drives me bananas.

Next up is drop. This is a word we use in its appropriate sense all the time as in these examples:

1. He drops women after three dates.

2. Don’t drop the baby, Grandma!

3. I dropped the package off at FedEx.

In the past, we had a perfectly good word to describe the action of an artist releasing a new piece of work, whether a song, album, book, painting, etc. We used the word release, in fact! But now these irritating people are using the word drop just to annoy me.

“My single dropped at midnight.”

It sounds like code for a spy operative. “The dog didn’t bark?”

“No, he was poisoned by the double agent.”

“Funny, I thought you were the double agent.”

“Well, actually–”

😡😡😡

Even more things I hate coming soon!

Expository [SOCS]

“Experiences over things” is another one of those irritating expressions that people parrot mindlessly. I used to see it creep onto dating profiles before I exited that whole expanse of pants. 😛

What does it mean? Welp, let me explain. Instead of buying Mom a nice cupcake-scented candle or a cute kitty tee shirt for Mother’s Day, take her to Tahiti. Don’t get Dad a boring tie for Father’s Day either ~ think of the wasteful packaging! Consider doing something more fun like taking him ziplining over the Amazon. Dads love that! Put the expense on his credit card. 😂

People without a lot of money have always been creating experiences. Family dinners, picnics, BBQs, potlucks, game nights, a day at the beach/lake/park, etc. are all part of normal life for everyday folks. It’s only now that the rich have discovered they haven’t been spending enough time with people who matter that they’ve come up with this absurd phrase. 🙄

Also, for anyone who may be related to me: I still expect the candle and tee shirt.

Mother’s Day is May 12. 🌷

Weekly Prompts ~ Food Cravings

My tastes haven’t changed much since I was 14, not in food or anything else really. I guess that’s sad in some ways, if you’re the type of person who believes that life should be about growth and change. Or maybe I’m just true to who I am, a girl who’s partial to grilled cheese, word games, and men with British accents. 🇬🇧

(No, that doesn’t mean I want to play Guess the Blogger with scrambled letters and obscure clues to people I don’t follow! 🙄)

So, decades later, when I crave things, it’s still the same things. Cheesy noms like mac and cheese, pizza, nachos, quesadillas, etc.

Equally, I have yearnings for the sweet side of the buffet. Chocolate chip cookies, PB cookies, lemon bars, cupcakes, pumpkin or key lime pie with graham cracker crust…

I’m not a chocoholic though and don’t usually crave chocolate by itself, though I do love homemade chocolate chip cookies, which is why I put them first. If people ask me which kind of cake is my favorite, I’ll say coconut ~ my standard answer since I was a kid.

Around once or twice a year I crave a big juicy cheeseburger from 5 Guys or In-N-Out. I usually don’t have the patience for the In-N-Out line though. This is how you can tell I was born in New York: always in a hurry, even when there’s nowhere to go.

~*~

Weekly Prompts