based on a true story

The Wall Street Journal's Take on Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts - if you want ammunition for the fiscal conservatives in your life who still cling to the hope that Republican economics will fix the budget, you can share this with them to help them see: no, Republicans are lieing to you. These cuts aren't paying for themselves. This really is straight up: "Fuck you, I got mine. We do not live in a society. Every person for themselves."

The government has two weeks to pass a budget or shut down. The budget resolution that the House passed aims for $2 trillion in program cuts and solidifying $4 trillion in tax reductions. It's interesting that they're not even trying to sell the tax reductions as "these are going to pay for themselves by unleashing economic growth" because that WSJ article proves that's a lie. This is all there to make the rich richer.

A reddit thread about Gay Valimont a Democrat running to take Matt Gaetz's old seat in Florida. There are two special elections happening in Florida, this one and the FL-6, which was vacated when Trump named its congressperson, Mike Waltz, as National Security Advisor. So, flip those and hello Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. They're going to be tough because they're very solidly red districts, but if it comes at the heels of a government shutdown or a dissolution of Medicaid, then anything is possible.

National Park Service Rangers talking about being fired -- this has been a very sad thing on Instagram, and each night I feel like I need to be a witness. It is easy for many of us to get caught up in the rat race of chasing the next big paycheck, the next step on the corporate ladder, the next title that lands us in a job that is bullshit and meaningless and just there to make another billionaire wealthy. We dream of quitting and finding something with meaning and purpose. And yet. We stay in the job. We connect to the meaningless meeting, because it ensures our comfort. Some people did not choose that path. They chose something hard and demanding with a shitty paycheck because it was meaningful; and they are being punished for it. I think it is worth witnessing that tragedy.

Republican Town Halls facing backlash -- if the terminations of federal employees are a tragedy then seeing the backlash that Republican congresspeople are facing in their town halls, and seeing them retreat into cowardice by cancelling their meetings with constituents brings some hope. Pressure works. Resistance is stiffening. But also the stakes are rising. I wrote an email to Mayor Wu's office because I thought it was important to give her some form of support as she's been summoned to testify to Congress next week about Boston's position as a sanctuary city; and I expect it to be another gladiatorial spectacle like today's meeting with Zelensky.

This is our world now. Every interaction with government will be stunting to create meme-able, shareable moments for TV, Youtube, TikTok, and X/Bluesky. They'll edit and splice to show how they owned the libs. We'll do our own editing, splicing, and distorting to show our courage.

I hate it.

But this is the game. This is the meme war that we are all in.

Two years before I was born, Ferdinand Marcos had proclaimed martial law across the Philippines. He imprisoned most of his political rivals, though relented on letting one of his nemeses, Ninoy Aquino, go into exile in the US for a medical emergency. I was almost 9 when Aquino defied the exile agreement to return to the US to campaign against Marcos in the 1983 elections and then was shot in the face as he arrived in Manila.

My parents had long discussed the idea of moving to America. My father went to school here and loved the country's optimism and respect for the rule of law. The plan had always been to maybe move when my sister and I were in high school or college age; but the Aquino assassination amped up a wave of instability that made them decide to head out now. Riots were breaking out in the streets. Elections had been postponed.

The move had been framed to us as temporary. The visas that we used were temporary. We left as our academic year ended and it was going to be like a couple of years abroad in America. Let's just wait things out and maybe come back when things have settled down. I don't think they were just saying that to pacify us. I think that they earnestly believed it being temporary.

So we left and settled in San Francisco.

And, for various reasons both personal and geopolitical, it turned out that there was no going back.

Some of their friends from the Philippines would visit. Family would visit occasionally but the Pacific is big and flights are long. We were left to adapt to a new culture that we aspired to join but was not our own. Then, when our temporary immigration visas would eventually expire, we moved to Canada.

Those wandering years between California and Vancouver were the loneliest years of both of my parents' lives.

I don't want to speak for either of my parents, who are not on this platform, but I think it's fair to say that they lost a lot by leaving, and much of what they lost -- community, family, opportunity -- they never really replaced. Immigration is not a thing most of us can pause and unpause or a test that can we just undo. It has consequences that can be profound.

But if you ask them if they regret it, they will look at us, their children and they see the way that we grew up independent of the learned helplessness and decadence that they saw of others in the Philippines, and the lives that we were able to build for ourselves here. They will see the way we have thrived when we may have been stifled in our old lives, and they won't say if they regret any of their own losses, but they will say that we made it worth it.

A lot of us are scared, and I see a lot of folks talking about escape plans. I spent half of my life immigrating somewhere, and maybe part of it is sunk cost fallacy, but I spend more time thinking about how to fight rather than run. I still feel like I just got here and I want to make it worth the 20 years of waiting in line. But I don't judge friends who need to go to protect themselves.

My parents were not the sort of people that Marcos would go after. We had a lot of privileges that kept us safe, and we mostly chose to go as another exercise of privilege. It's a different equation if you're being actively targeted by Trump. Mostly I'm sharing this story, if it's helpful for any of you in your calculations.

The cost to you for leaving will be very real and the difficulty of adapting to a new life will be very hard. But if it eventually leads to a better life for you, and especially for your kids, then I get why you need to do it.

Earlier this week, we got clearance from H's oncologist for me to take a week of family leave so that I can focus on caring for her after her surgery. To be honest, it wasn't something that we were thinking about, but after talking to my mom and LittleSister about my mom's own recovery from her lumpectomy, it made some sense to take leave, and I'm glad that we have laws like FMLA to allow us to take these kinds of leave.

I was planning to spend this weekend doing some prep for H's recovery period. Stock up some groceries and frozen chili or make a big pot of congee so that we can feed ourselves without a lot of mental effort. However, I also woke up on Tuesday with what felt like a sprained ankle that turned out to be a new gout flare. In the past, I was offered but turned down taking a medication like allopurinol to prevent gout. The doctor said that possible side effects could include kidney and liver damage, and it just seemed unwise to take something that can degrade my kidneys just so I can eat more red meat and drink more booze. I just think of gout as this little warning bell that tells me when I've been overdoing it, which I still value, but, boy, the timing sucks.

(for what it's worth, I had seen some significant reduction in my gout by just cutting out sugar-y foods. I made it through an entire holiday season that included a roast goose, oysters, lobsters, steaks, and several bottles of wine without any trouble, so I guess that made me complacent enough to think that spending a week eating our way through a 7 lb. roast leg of lamb while having cocktails every other day would be fine. Readers, it was not fine.)

So now H is recovering from her second biopsy, while I'm hobbling around the house like a cripple, and we both just negotiate chores. She asks me to lift heavy things, and I might sit down after making breakfast while she brings everything to the table. It's a picture of domestic decrepitude.

The flare is subsiding, which is good, because I'm starting to get annoyed with this walking boot that the doctor prescribed for this latest flare; and I'm hoping that I'll be mobile again by the time of her surgery. But, boy, I look forward to a week when we're both healthy, because it certainly feels like we can't take those for granted anymore.

I have colleagues who, in our Slack instance, rather than typing out replies or messages, like recording voice memos and sending them to me; and every time I get one, a small piece of me goes "ugh". I hate how voice has to be listened to and can't be skimmed. There's transcripts, yes, but the machine translation is frustratingly confusing. I have it set to 1.5x playback but it still feels slow. But people like it and so I accept it and this is one of my reverse ageism DEI projects.

Over the course of this afternoon, I have been having this running conversation with a colleague over voice memos. For the past three hours, we've left each other a dozen 3 minute long voice memos. This should have been a meeting!

But, also, our schedules are kind of crazy, and it's hard to find time to book a meeting, but easier to record a three minute reply in between meetings, so this is what we do. And when I let that sink in, it doesn't seem so bad. So maybe I am not that much of An Old.

"so ... you know words."

"I know some words."

"I've been meaning to ask: why is 'poach' the cooking technique the same words as --"

"-- as 'poach' the illicit hunting thing? I don't know. I said I know some words, but not all of them."

"ok, I will ask the internets ... ohhhh, so to 'poach' some game illicitly is from the French and is originally a German word for "to poke" but the simmering thing is also from the French 'poche' or a pocket. Like you nestle an egg yolk in a pocket of barely set white. But it gets collapsed into 'poach' because--"

"-- the Norman conquest! The same reason why --"

" -- the same reason why we use French for all of our food words!"

"well not all of our food words. Just the fancy ones of nobility. So cow meat becomes beef because 'boeuf' or pigs become 'pork'."

"and fancy people get their deer hunted illicitly and do fussy things with eggs."

This is, like, every Saturday evening for us. Because WE ARE NERDS.

18 years ago, I setup a Livejournal.
My livejournal can serve in the military.
My livejournal can purchase and use tobacco products.
My livejournal can consent to sex.

I still can't find a profile picture that I like. Sometimes I look around at what people do on the Internet, and I wonder how I never learned to do that. "Picking profile pictures that I like" may be one of them. But then again, I get people asking me to teach them how to have vulnerable conversations with their subordinates, because they never learned that. So maybe I shouldn't feel bad about going through 18 years on the Internet without seeing a profile pic that makes me think, "yes, that one. That is me."

I stopped writing here when I wound up spending more time on Facebook and now Facebook is a hard place for me to be, so I'm writing here again and finally moved to Dreamwidth to get out of the rotting corpse that was LJ.

Unsure yet about what I'll write here, but I have thoughts.

The thoughts always have to go somewhere.

Hi, everyone.

We're posting our collected wedding album to Flickr

Jesus, what a month.

When people ask us how we met, we take turns telling parts of the story, because it's so fun. There's a version of this that I'd post that is twice as long and perhaps I will someday, but this is the version that I used earlier this week when telling it to a hundred strangers at Oberon for another Moth Storyslam. Earlier in that evening, a woman told a story of an entirely epic, almost cinematic, first date, and I knew that she would win. I told Hyson that I never go into these events expecting to win, I'd just like to be entertained and know that I can hold my own against an array of great storytellers. With all that said, getting 2nd place was pretty nice.

I'll start this story 12 years ago, though it actually goes further back. I was in the South, on a road trip visiting friends, and on a humid summer evening, I had stopped in Alabama to visit my friend, Hyson. I stood there on the threshold to her townhouse and I rang the doorbell. I had to admit that I was nervous. I had not seen her in five years and there's always the part that wonders how someone's changed over time, and whether or not your memories of a person are closer to who they were than who you wanted them to be.

But there's another factor that I should share with you, and it was that Hyson and I dated briefly 8 years prior when we were both in university. I was 20, she was 19. It was, as you can imagine, terrible in that special way that relationships between young adults can be. For my part, I didn't know who I was or what I wanted. I just knew that I didn't want the person that I was being then. I was a wannabe writer who had lacked the confidence or, I believed, the talent to make a career of it; so I had chosen to study business instead. I was a sellout, a coward who didn't possess the conviction to go after what he had truly wanted.

( Read more... )

So, every year sometime around the holidays, usually a little after the New Year, my friends and I have been having this music mix swap party. Come to the party, bring a mix tape or CD, throw it into a communal pile, and at some point in the evening we'll draw randomly and you may go home with someone's electroswing highlight reel or someone will luck into your curated selection of Japanese babymetal.

We've been doing this about 15 times now, and the mixes that we've accumulated over time have been this audio record of trends and tastes through the oughts and 2010's. This is the year when a bunch of us discovered Sigur Ros. This is the year of electroclash. This is the year when someone got into Lady Gaga.



This is my mix. The title is 'band chasing' and the theme was bands that I've seen in concert between 2012 and 2014. There's a cheat in that one of the bands I haven't seen yet, but I certainly aim to in the new year. There's old shoegazer-y post rock, new Midwest hip-hop, singer/songwriter, and hipsters paying homage to the glamor of the 80s. I didn't see these concerts with most of you, but I hope that sharing the videos will give you a glimpse of what it was like.m

We ended our cruise near this village called Olympos. The town itself is a bit of a backpacker/dirtbag nexus, close enough to the big city of Antalya that you can get here in an afternoon if you need to, but inconvenient and remote enough that you don't come here unless you want to do a whole lot of nothing. There's a beach, and there are some ruins, and rock routes to climb if you'd like, but it's a lot of pensions and courtyards with young travelers putting in a lot of work on their tan. It is, in other words, the perfect place to transition from four days of dedicated idleness on a boat.

We spent a night in Olympos before ayun left in the morning, heading back to Fethiye and Rhodes, hugging us one more time to make sure it lasted. couplingchaos, mishak and I went down to the beach to do a bit of swimming and perhaps climb one more sea route. The obvious option was this twenty foot high outcropping poking above the sea. There were already a couple of folks diving from the cliff. And as we swum out and had our turn with climbing and launching ourselves from the rock, this young Texan swam up to us and asked us if we can hold his GoPro while he gave the jump a try. Because, of course, anything worth doing is worth documenting.

We hung out on that beach for a bit of the morning, waving down a street food vendor carrying a tray of steamed mussels stuffed with rice as a bit of breakfast, but eventually we chose to leave Olympos early to get on our way to Antalya so that we can sort out our next destinations: mishak and couplingchaos heading to Seljuk and Ephesus, and I to Cappadocia. It was on the overnight bus to Goreme (the main hub town in Cappadocia) that I sat down and noticed that my seat neighbor looked familiar.

( two travelers, one long bus ride )