Blog

  • Too Long

    I have been away far too long from this. The new job happened, and then we all got into the swing of things when it comes to living in California. It has been a learning curve.

    The worst part is that I have completely let myself fall into old and bad habits. There is no working out, and I have noticed that, though NYC was a grind, car culture has made me lazy. I drive everywhere, and I don’t move. At least NYC meant that I had to walk everywhere, and that meant on most days I got my 10,000 steps in.

    It’s as if two different and competing ideas are in my head right now.

    First, there is the part of me that feels like with all these changes, I have lost my stability, and everything feels like it’s on the edge of spinning out of control. (This is not actually true, but it is the feeling that I have, since my life of the past 12 years has changed. And as I co-worker said to me, people don’t deal with change well at all.) I don’t know what my new stability is, or how to create it, so in the end, it feels like nothing is really getting accomplished.

    The other side is that I keep trying to force my new CA life to behave like my NYC life. The best example I can give is that in NYC, once I got home, I never went back out. Such as, I tried to schedule my life around the idea of being out (Leave for work, then rehearsal, then drinks with friends, then dinner, then home and done,) for as long as possible, and when I got home at the end of the day, my day was over. Here, not unlike when I was in TX, I can come and go from event to home, to event to home, but in my head, it’s like once I get home, I can’t leave again… Which is silly, but that was the way I lived for 12 years.

    Anyway, the point here is that I have trying to get out of old habits, make new and healthier ones, and find a way to live a new way, with new possibilities. It’s not as easy as I thought it would be.

  • New Job

    Well, I went and got myself a job which starts on Monday. It has been a challenging, and at some points, difficult three months of job hunting, but the work paid off and I will be gainfully employed.

    I did wonder if the change to my employment status played a part on the latest jobs report.

    But with the new job came a reality, which was that we are staying in California.

    I know that living in California was the plan all along, but everything still felt up in the air until I found a job. Now that I have one, we can let out a sign of relief and also start planning for a future here.

    And the planning was the part I had been holding off on. I didn’t know where I was going to be working, if we needed to get another car, or if we had to move, again, so that our commutes were reasonable.

    Now, its decided.

    Now we have to start thinking about schools and all of those other things. Local elections and festivals, and relaxing weekends in the mountains.

    But for me…

    The thing I get to start planning is a study/art studio. Oh, that creative thing that I couldn’t have in New York, as our apartment was too small. Bookshelves to put my books on, and a desk to create at.

    A little thing, but something that I have been wanting to do for 20 years.

  • Another Billionaire Problem Solver?

    I have nothing personal against Howard Schultz. As far as I know, and I will give him the benefit of the doubt, is that he is a good husband and father and friend to all.

    But he is a businessman billionaire. And going into 2020, that is a huge albatross around his neck. Is he going to try and convince me that a billionaire businessman isn’t qualified to be president, so we should elect another billionaire businessman?

    That’s going to be a tough sell.

    He isn’t making his case any easier by going after Medicare for all. (The only point I will give him is that no one is addressing how to pay for it, and he is right to point that out.) But it is completely a false equivalency to compare national health care to the boarder wall.

    There is national healthcare in the world, it does work. And if he is really worried about the insurance industry going out of business, then he should look at Germany’s system of national and private healthcare.

    The boarder wall plays on some people’s hate and racism. That doesn’t work.

    But here is where he has already fumbled the ball; he is trying to defend health insurance companies over patients, because effectively, that is what he is saying. He isn’t even politically savvy enough to at least say that putting insurance companies out of business would unemployed so many people, and that isn’t fair. (That’s a good old solid Republican line…) If he is trying to run as a centrist, and trying to get middle America to vote for him, then he needs to understand that this part of the electorate is living paycheck to paycheck (government shut down just hammered that home) and their experiences with insurance companies is adversarial. People have an emotional response to insurance companies, and his first steps out of the gate shows that he doesn’t understand that.

    Don’t show up to the emotion fight with logic, because you will lose every time. You fight emotion with emotion, and logic with logic, and the best politicians know when each is called for in the argument.

  • Here We Go Again…

    Not that I claim I know more than everyone else, but I was not surprised that Trump gave in a stopped the government shut down just hours after Roger Stone was arrested. I pointed out that this is Trump’s behavior back on my January 10th post.

    The day started off with really, and I mean really, bad news for Trump; another person was arrested who took part in his campaign. There was no way the President could let the news cycle for this weekend be dominated with stories of the walls closing in on Trump, and what does Mueller have next up his sleeve? No, Trump had only one card to play today to stop the press from going nuts, and that was to end the shutdown. “Hey look, America! Another bright shiny object to obsess over for the next 24 hours, while you forget about all that really awful stuff!”

    And it will work. All the news about the Roger Stone arrest will just become background noise as the press and people start their stories about getting their checks back, and paying bills, and the wall fight that will be protracted for three weeks. And what does this mean for the State of the Union Address? Ahhh… Roger Stone who?

    Trump is a really awful president, (Only Trump could make James Buchanan look good) but he knows how to make the media do his bidding even when they don’t want to. It really is too bad, and we just can’t shake free from it.

  • All Over the Place Today

    I have been working on this post for the past three hours. It’s not that I can’t think if what to say, or am blocked on being able to write…

    It’s more like I am being pulled in 100 different directions on ideas, and I can’t seem to focus down on one of them.

    I was going to write about Weezer’s new album…

    But then I thought I need to write about the shutdown…

    But then I was also thinking about that The Rentals did put out one good album…

    But what are my thoughts about those MAGA high school kids…

    But then I started thinking about how we might move out of our apartment which would mean two moves in less than a year, and I don’t know if want to deal with changing everything again…

    And that reminds me of how much most people hate change and that creates stress and miscommunications…

    And…

    See? This is how it has been today. And I have other things that I need to work on…

    I have a story to edit, then I wanted to do a writing/sketching session of new ideas, and also I wanted to draw some new landscapes…

    I will try again at this tomorrow…