I Miss

I miss the days where I can live my life without worrying if my gender, sexual orientation, or/and skin color would make me a prime target for the modern-day Gestapo (even if I was born in the States). 

I miss having a proper, competent government at the federal level, where their social media posts were not written by 4Chan exiles. 

I miss having a competent Supreme Court that didn’t bow down to oligarchs. (Just three judges siding with democracy ain’t enough!) 

I miss the days when politics were boring and not “BREAKING NEWS” every damn day.

I miss knowing a time when the US was not associated with concentration camps.

I miss the days when Nazi/fascism shit was a vile thing to do, and you’d only catch glimpses of it being parodied on shows like South Park

I miss satire being satire and not an actual New York Times headline. 

I miss mainstream media being factual, objective, unbiased, boring, and informative. I think it was before Faux News arrived. 

I also miss news channels not being 24-7. I’m old enough to remember CNN not being all news all the time, and when they aired other programs, like Style With Elsa Klensch. 

I miss seeing people feeling genuine shame when they fucked up. 

I miss the Biden days. And the Obama days. And the Clinton days. And, dare I say it, the W. Bush days. As much as I still loathe W. Bush, things were quite bad then, but not as catastrophically bad as it is now. The person that throws shoes at Putin’s puppet will be considered an international hero. 

I miss the days when the US was one of the places people sought refuge in after fleeing from the violence in their native land. Now, the States is becoming one of those violent countries!

I miss escapism. I’ll get back to that soon. 

I miss destressing at the beach. Crowds, work, and other things are keeping me away from them at the moment. 

*pops a Werthers* 

I miss the days when young girls bought their makeup/skincare at the drugstores and not at Sephora because TikTok told them to go get their makeup/skincare at Sephora. I think I should be glad I grew up with Seventeen magazine (which hyped brands like Cover Girl and Neutrogena to us teens in the 90s) instead of social media. I also grew up in a town where we didn’t have a Sephora or Ulta, and that makeup at Macy’s (which we had) was “for old ladies”. 

I miss life before social media. Blogging here is my tie to the pre-SM days, since blogging existed before SM blew up. Also, I tend to write a lot, and you can only fit so many characters in a SM post. 

I miss pop culture before 2008. I don’t think pop culture really died in 2009, but it started getting mid when the 2010s arrived. I blame that fake AF family. 

I miss it when “celebrity” meant an entertainer or public figure who got famous through talent & hard work and sustained it all over the years, and not some who-dat who has a bunch of social media followers and blew up after one of their TikToks went viral. “Famous influencer”? “TikTok celebrity”?? I don’t know them and get off my lawn. 

I miss craftsmanship in fashion. Some of the outfits I see on fashion runways these days would make Yves Saint Laurent spin in his grave. 

I miss riot grrl rock, new jack swing R&B, and socially conscious messages in mainstream music. 

I miss being a cat mom. Even if I wasn’t thinking about fleeing the country, the rules in my apartment only permit service animals. *pouts* 

I kinda miss hash browns. There’s no low-carb equivalent for it! 

I will not miss the times I’m currently stuck in. I aim to be a survivor of these times, however. 

Staying Sane In Uncertainty

It’s my Saturday and also MLK Day today. Something else happened and I have no idea what became of it. I’ve chosen to stay home and stay off Bluesky (my lone social media outlet now), opting to do some cooking, yoga, reading, listening to KCSM Jazz 91, and lots of lazing around. I only turned on the TV to reconfigure my internet, and if I’m gonna watch some TV, it will be for sports or a movie on the TCM Channel. Eventually, I’ll find out what became of that other event, but I’m choosing not to get worked up about it for now. Anything to maintain what’s left I have of my sanity. And staying sane is what I gotta do in this supposed new era of, as I call it, unprecedented fuckery.

This is not the first time I’ve had to do so. When I realized the household I was growing up in was a toxic, abusive hellhole, I chose to distance myself from it, working more and staying out more. The sanity I reclaimed when I left the people I once called “family” and went no-contact with them was freeing. I was glad to have like-minded friends to vent to when W Bush got reelected in November 2004, and before he went off the leftist deep end, Michael Moore and his documentaries that decade spoke the truth. Social media had yet to exist, and (IIRC) mainstream media except Faux News wasn’t kissing the ring of the then-powers that be. There was also The Daily Show at its prime, giving me laughs to mask the pain in seeing my generation fight and die in a useless war. (You’ll never see us elder millennials sane-wash W Bush; we still haaaaate his warmongering ass!) And I don’t know how I managed to maintain in November 2016/January 2017 (probably the weed), but I did and I’m still here with my sanity that’s about to get tested yet again. *sighs*

Edited to add more to this entry!