The Struggle Is Real (Green)!

Some friends and I decided to hang out Sunday, so naturally I had to buy some festive apparel. I know, you’re thinking… Paula, don’t you already have St. Patrick’s Day themed stuff from prior years? Well, not really! I have a hat, I guess, but that’s about it. I wore my greenish shirt on Friday to work, and it’s not that festive besides. I have a lime green sweater, but March 17th isn’t really about lime green, now is it? I used to have shamrock socks, but they got all holey. 😢

So, Friday night I went onto the Target app, like you do, to commence shopping. There wasn’t anything I liked much in my local store, so I moseyed on over to Huntington Beach. Eh, a couple shirts were okay, and there were some cute socks and earrings. Then I had a brainstorm to try the men’s department. Well! The guys had adorable shirts! Beautiful green ones with the Lucky Charms logo (we just got plain white), and OMG a kitty shirt, black and white, with a widdle green hat!!! Obviously, I had to get the kitty shirt. Why wouldn’t they make it for women/juniors? Who even can figure out the logic to these things? 🙄

I ordered the shirt, socks, and earrings, paid for all that, and planned to pick them up the next morning. I was very happy… for about 5 minutes until I received an email saying those items were no longer available in Huntington Beach. Or Costa Mesa. WHAT? I began searching the whole area on the handy-dandy app. They said I could buy all the same things in Irvine on Barranca. FINE. I was very happy again… for like 5 minutes. Then they said I could only have the shirt. No earrings, no socks. Wtfff? What about the Target in Irvine Spectrum? NO. Westminster Mall. NO NO NO! You can’t have any festive socks or earrings. Get over it. 😡

Ooh, I was so mad. This wasn’t the end of it though. I stayed up late, all energized by my fury. First thing Saturday morning I went right over to the Barranca Target and got my shirt ~ there was a minor drama however because they couldn’t find it at Guest Services and I was about to have a heart attack, but then they did, so I was okay. I went to Peet’s after that for coffee and a PB cookie (yummo). The reason Target was out of green things is because they took them away to make room for Easter things. I stopped at CVS, which sometimes has fun socks, but they too were all Easterized before St. Patrick’s Day. Kohl’s had one little sad display of green dishtowels. ANNOY! 🔥

But then… then I went to Party City. And guess what? They had tons of St. Patrick’s Day stuff still on the shelves Because… because PEOPLE WANT TO BUY IT! And unlike Target, CVS, and Kohl’s, Party City likes to make money from people who want to buy things! What a unique and interesting concept! Stores keeping things in stock that people want to buy. Huh. Who would have thought? Capitalism at its finest, folks, right here in Huntington Beach. Or over there rather. Up there? Idk. Directions confuse me. WHATEVER! I bought green things, which is the point. Yayyy!!! 🍀💖🍀

One-Liner Wednesday [rants in my pants]

I’m disgusted by the news from yesterday. And this time it doesn’t have anything to do with our horrible POTUS or one of his sycophants. I’m talking about the college admission scandal. Sure, people will roll their eyes and say it’s nothing new that the uber wealthy will pave the way for their children (we all try to help our children the best we can), but to me there’s a big diff in alumni daddy making a donation so his not so bright son can get a spot with less than stellar creds and these desperate celebs paying criminals to cheat for them. Paying a shill to take their kid’s SAT, or a proctor to change the answers, bribing a coach to say their kid is on a team when she’s not, sending in photoshopped fake pics of their kid playing a sport, on and on.

But to me the most awful thing is that these spoiled brat celeb kids don’t even give a crap about the value of these prestigious schools. They aren’t there to get a degree in order to make connections and start a career. Nope. Not at all. They already have connections and careers, thanks to their parents and their good looks. They have contracts as models and influencers. All they need the college for is to be able to add it as a hashtag.

It’s utterly nauseating. I hope the colleges throw every celeb kid out and give those spots to people who actually want to be there and have legit credentials.

~*~

One-Liner Wednesday

A Bash

Big bashes aren’t my thing. I’m not bashing bashes ~ in fact, decades back, I had fun at big, loud parties. But as my migraines have become more easily triggered, it’s just not that much fun for me to be in huge crowds. I prefer smaller groups where you can have a meaningful conversation or play a game.

Sometimes people act like this preference is a personality flaw, a thing I should feel abashed about, but why should I get over it? It’s simply a preference. I don’t ask them to quit liking huge, noisy venues; I simply decline the invitation to attend.

I’ve noticed this comes up a lot, that things about me are deemed inferior traits. Maybe that happens to everyone, not just me. I understand it’s how they get you to click on articles and then be subjected to ads. Just this morning (yesterday now, since I’m going to schedule this for Saturday), I read an essay saying that people with the Myers-Briggs type that end in “J” have the most trouble dating. I’m an INFJ.

The article didn’t give us tips on how to deal with being a J. Nope. It said we should work on being not-J. The main trait of the J aspect is a dislike of uncertainty. We are list people. We want plans, and we like things to be settled. What’s wrong with that? Why can’t we focus on meeting someone else who enjoys an orderly life? No! Says the article. Change into a la-la type who is fine with maybes and disorder.

Annoying. The article has disturbed me all day. I can’t even concentrate on this awful Jennifer Aniston romcom I was looking forward to.

Yes, yes, I’m all off-topic now, but no one is actually reading this, so like whatever! My consciousness is streaming, which is the important thing.

Opposites Attract: Challenges 4 & 5

These two challenges are perfect for International Women’s Day! 🌏

So many things have been forbidden to women over the centuries, depending upon the society. Certain professions were not deemed permissible for “the fairer sex.” Only in the last hundred years have women demanded and received the right to vote and manage their own money, here in the USA! It some cultures, it’s not allowable for women to drive or choose their own spouses. 😡

On social media, wherever a woman may be physically located, it’s likely that in cyberspace she has experienced misogynistic bullying and trolling, if not worse. But she is still expected to be pleasant and have a smiling selfie as well as an emotionally generous and forgiving “tone,” lest she be accused of not being feminine. The horror! 😱

Speaking of looks, in the dating arena (yes, we are back to that, pffft), a woman is expected to be fashionable. Men are always jabbering on about women’s looks, even when they say stupid things like they prefer “Mary Ann to Ginger,” as if Mary Ann’s pigtails and non-makeup makeup look didn’t take just as long to style as Ginger’s glam. But supposedly it’s okay for men to obsess about looks because they’re “visual” and can’t help it, but if a woman cares about comfort and security due to her DNA, then she’s a gold-digger, right guys? 🙄

Whatever! I’m just happy to be done with all that, and now I can schlump around in uncool corduroy pants, cozy unstylish sweaters, and all manner of comfy dowdy shoes that aren’t sexy in the least.😜

Celery [SOCS]

Celery contained magical anti-calories, people thought. If you chomped on these stalks, the energy you expended chewing and digesting them would exceed the number of calories in the celery itself. So, all you had to do is eat celery all day and soon you would be celebrating your new trim and fit figure!

But of course if you kept eating pizza and nachos and milkshakes and candy bars with your stalks, the celery diet didn’t work, and you did not end up looking like your favorite celebrity, unless that celeb was President Taft. 😳

Many crazy diets have come and gone since I read about the magic of celery as a teen. Some girls in my high school went on the 3-3-3 diet: 3 bananas, 3 hot dogs, 3 carrots every day. Very phallic. Why doesn’t my phone know phallic? I must not be writing about enough dicks; I blame my DEXIT.

People have jumped on this keto thing, but we all did the Atkins’ fad way back when. It’s nothing new. We’d order bacon double cheeseburgers and throw away the buns, hon. Sure, you’d lose weight because meat is satisfying and pasta is not, ounce for ounce. Sorry, vegetarians. Also, how much cheese can you eat without barfing? 🤮That is rhetorical.

Then came the 1980s when people decided fat was bad and carbs were good. They threw away their butter and chowed down on bagels the size of dinner plates. Why are we getting so fat, they moaned over their vats of spaghetti.

In the 1990s, I watched other moms load up their kids with constant snacks and juices. I tried not to do that; I had my own ideas about nutrition. But kids grow up and have to make their own choices eventually. I did not like to be Dictator Mom, about food or any other thing, except education, and that philosophy worked out well imo.

One of the things now is to shun prepared foods. Oh, that’s the new boogeyman! 🙄 It’s not that we’ve all been stuffing our faces with way too much food for way too long… it’s that we’re not tra-la-la-ing for hours through farmers’ markets every Saturday for fresh produce, and then spending the rest of the weekend cooking from scratch. The heck with writing books or having hobbies! We’re fat because we haven’t been slaving over a hot stove.

Bullshit. I call BS on all ideas of overweight except one: too many calories nommed up. I don’t care if they come from salad or salami or pasta or papayas. Too many in over time leads to fat layers on our bodies. There’s no magic cure except to eat fewer calories over time.

Personally, I love packaged and prepared foods. For single people who don’t want to buy wastefully in bulk, and who don’t want to spend their free time cooking, they are fabulous. But so is celery ~ and it comes in a package too.

Crab 🦀

Writers/authors/poets/ or whatever you are identifying yourself as when you want to sell a book to me…

STOP TELLING ME A BOOK IS FREE WHEN IT ISN’T!

FFS, people. I’m willing to download most pieces of writing from fellow bloggers in my community here, spend a bit of time on them, and give them some luv (stars). I’m even willing to spend a few bucks on those bloggers’ works who have been supportive of me, either by purchasing my work (lol, as if) or just by being nice, but I can’t stand deception. If I wanted to be lied to, I’d return to dating. 🔥

If your book is “free” on Kindle Unlimited, that’s not “free.” That means people who are paying to be in the Kindle Unlimited program get to download it. That’s like saying Amazon Prime movies are free for those of us who pay to be Amazon Prime members. My parking space is free cuz I pay to rent my apartment. 🙄

I’m not in Kindle Unlimited, so KU books are not free for me, and every time I click on a “free” promo, just to find out a book is not free, it pisses me off. Why not just say that your book is whatever price and also on KU? Why is that so hard? And no, I’m not then inclined to spend $2.99 on your book after I’ve been deceived even if I might have bought it if you’d been truthful in the first place.

All of my books are on KU, but I’d never say one was free unless I was actually running a promo making it free to everyone.

End crab.

Questions

After some posts, I occasionally see a sentence: “[Linked title of post] first appeared on [linked title of blog].”

Why? Is this supposed to prevent people from stealing posts? Lol, good luck with that.

Also, in several cases, I see that the second link isn’t working and it’s a blank. I guess people have goofed it up.

In a further development to this, there are blogs that don’t bother with the text of the post at all! There is simply some variation of the quoted sentence. I assume the blogger expects me to click the link and visit the post outside my app reader, where I will be subjected to a barrage of ads on my browser. Ads don’t appear on my app. Sorry about that (not).

I guess this post was more crabbing than questioning, wasn’t it? That’s rhetorical.

Happy Friday! 😀

FPQ13: Size Matters

Fandango sez…

“This week’s provocative question asks an age old question that has stumped philosophers across the ages. Interpret this question any way you want.

“Do you believe that size matters? Please explain your response.”

Of course size matters! Please click away from this post if reading something not politically correct will bother you. In fact, I’m kinda done being PC from here on out altogether. YHBW.

Size matters in all kinds of ways. Let’s take people (Americans, specifically): they’re getting much too large aka fat. I’m not talking about what is pleasing to me aesthetically because that’s irrelevant ~ I’m talking health. Our lifespan is declining and health problems are increasing, in part, because people are obese (and so are their beloved pets). Morbidly obese. Size matters.

Going along with this is portion size and total daily caloric input. If you haven’t noticed, it’s been increasing. Bagels are enormous. Cookies are huge. Burgers are double doubles. Drinks are supersized, extra large, or grande. Children don’t go an hour without a snack of some kind. We are not cows! We don’t need to “graze.” We now have a fourth meal if we stay up late. Just cuz we apparently need an extra thousand calories of energy to sit on our butts and play games.

Manufacturers have been adjusting their size charts for decades to keep pace with our flabby selves because they know we will get depressed to see we need a larger size and then not want to spend money.

Forex, I’m still a 4, but the 4 is not a 4. Ooh, what dark magic is this?! I’ll tell you. Over the years, they’ve been slowly increasing the size of the female form that can fit into a 4. I used to be a skinny 4; now I’m (what I consider) a slim to medium 4. Like most women, I’ve gained some weight, though not a lot, in the past 40 years. Yet… still a 4!

Marilyn Monroe was a size 12. People like to crow about this, as if she was some sort of example of a “thick” woman with extra curves. She wasn’t. She was a perfectly proportioned woman with a 36-24-36 body and would wear a size 2 or 4 now. A size 12 today is vastly different from the one MM wore. Size matters!

There are lots of other examples of size making a difference. How about housing? Do you want a studio apartment or a 3000 square foot house? I’d say size matters as far as paychecks, savings accounts, 401K plans, raises, bonuses, taxes, etc. What about pets? Do you want a vicious 10 pound kitty or a sweet 50 pound golden retriever? Size again!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re waiting for me to talk about the other thing. Especially if you’re a man, since that’s all you ever care about. Fine, I’ll talk about your stupid vehicles. I fucking hate giant SUVs. There I said it. Buy normal cars.

The Friday Four

A Guy Called Bloke Production…

1] What are your strengths and of your strengths – how have they helped you throughout your life?

– I show up and do the thing. It’s amazing how often this is what it takes, day after boring day, to do okay, as opposed to the magic pill so many seem to seek. I’m the plodding tortoise, never the sexy bunny. But I am all right while others have burnt out; a minuscule number have had stellar success.

2] What are your weaknesses and how have they or have they hindered your successes in anyway and what have you done to overcome them to rue your day?

– I’m easily hurt/angered. I deal with that by socializing less and less and never dating at all now. I suppose I could go for years of counseling to try to overcome this and be heartless like others but nah. Books and kitty will do just fine.

3] What makes people believe absurd conspiracy theories or alternatively are all conspiracy theories absurd? Answer which sits best with you.

– A conspiracy requires a whole bunch of people motivated to keep a secret for a long time. For some of the conspiracies out there, we’re talking decades or even hundreds of years. Given human nature, that’s nuts ~ people talk and brag. Since almost all these “conspiracies” are easily found via a quick google, they aren’t even secrets! So, what’s the conspiracy then? Nothing. If any exist, we don’t know what they are, by definition.

Why? Well, I was actually curious about this because I dated a couple wackadoos who believed various idiocies. It’s a form of control freakish behavior ~ OCD. You try to make sense of a chaotic world by latching onto a theory in order to label and categorize things in little boxes so life doesn’t feel so messy.

In the same way that another OCD sufferer might need to ritually wash their hands 27 times before leaving the house or drive down certain streets to make sure there isn’t a dead body lying in the road, etc., the conspiracy buff hangs out on certain sites, gobbling up tidbits of info to reinforce whatever belief makes him feel that one tiny corner of the world is a little bit neater, whether it’s the gobblement hiding evidence of alien spaceships or Hillary, frail and near death, kidnapping kids out of pizza parlors.

4] How important are morals in a healthy society? What are the most important morals for citizens to have?

– Morality is subjective. We agree on certain fundamentals and then create a code of laws around them. It sounds simple, but it’s become complicated. When we allow some people to disobey laws, whether desperately poor folks illegally crossing the border or wealthy folks cheating on their taxes, the system becomes diminished for everyone. Why should I, Jane Doe, respect the law when all these other people don’t have to? Why shouldn’t I just steal a pair of earrings when no one is looking?

It’s easy to say that morality and the law are two different things, but that’s for the philosophy books. When we live in reality, we have to agree to abide by a code of conduct in order to be part of a civilized society. Society can’t function if everyone stands around going hmm what is the moral thing to do in this circumstance, let me pray, or consult my favorite philosophy website. Should I stab this annoying person or not? Isn’t it easier if we all agree upfront not to stab each other, and if anyone does stab just because someone won’t move up in line, no matter how annoying that is, they will get punished?

To quote Jim Carrey in Liar Liar: “Stop breaking the law, asshole!”

Apology please, with a cupcake 🧁 [rant! bothsidesy! ackkk]

Like many, I often judge hastily, when I should know better by now. I was noodling around on Twitter this past Saturday when everyone began freaking out about the MAGA hat kids vs the drummer guy. Since I dislike the President and MAGA apparel, my sympathies went immediately to the drummer.

After a while I learned that the drummer is a known activist, not that there’s anything wrong with that ~ he’s a peaceful activist, as far as I can tell ~ but someone who’s used to confrontation nonetheless. He seeks out attention for his causes, as do all marchers and activists.

The MAGA boys were in town for a pro-life rally. Is there anything more uplifting than to witness a bunch of rowdy privileged prep school boys telling grown women what their healthcare options should be? Here’s my thought about what to tell teen boys who are opposed to abortion: never have sex with a female. That way, no unwanted fetus creation can be directly attributed to you.

Next I learned that the people who actually sparked this entire kerfuffle belonged to a third group, Black Israelites. I had to google them to find out what their dealio is. They were apparently insulting the MAGA kids, who responded by going into their tribal Catholic school dance, as you do, and the Native American group, headed by the drummer, felt like getting in on this action.

So, my new view of this incident is a big eff them all. No one deserves an apology except for me. Why me? I shall explain. 😀

During this craziness, lunatics on the left decided that the MAGA hat boys were the most evil things on this earth and should be doxxed and destroyed because they were smirking. Omg smirking! Nothing was off-limits… people began sifting through every scrap of info they could find and leaping to conclusions about identities.

Naturally the school principal and all the teachers’ names were made public. They’re all white and certainly horrible racists ~ we must obviously assume. I mean, Kentucky, eh? If it seemed like a student’s name was found, good enough! Go ahead and blast it all over, hit the parents, siblings, any colleges that accepted said monster, workplaces, etc. Kids were smirking at a Vietnam vet, so fair game, amirite? You know the left luvs them some Vietnam vets.

Except for one teensy thing. The lunatics misidentified at least one person and made his life hell. This is where your apology to me comes in (you know who you are). If it wasn’t for the insane proliferation of anonymous online accounts all over Twitter and FB, it wouldn’t be so easy to dox and destroy people with an army of trolls. If everyone had to use their real name when acting like a self-righteous jerk online to “out” strangers for smirking in a video, and whatever else, things would be way different (better), imo.

I’ll take my apology cupcake in the form of lemon cake with coconut frosting, thanks!