(no subject)
It's been a time.
I have been having a lot of difficulty just moving through life in the most basic ways since the election. I made a post to Facebook about that, and announced I was going on a social media hiatus because I am going full-on ostrich about politics for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure that was the best choice; I've been so depressed, in a way I never have been before -- I have experienced biochemical bipolar depression for perhaps the majority of my life, but I've never had situationally-triggered depression like this before, not that I can remember -- and I know there are others in the same boat with me, and many of those people are people I primarily or entirely connect with on social media. But I just can't deal with the storm right now, so I've tentatively decided to stay off Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr. LJ is much less political and much more personal than those three sites, so I'm going to try to hang around here. We'll see how it goes.
(This, by the way, is one of the main reasons I put off the kindness project I was talking about: I knew I wouldn't have the reserves to be trying to be kind and nice to Trump supporters in the immediate aftermath of a Trump victory, should it occur. Right now I'm adjusting a little bit to living in a world where people share my grief and horror, but I am entirely unprepared to try to connect with people who are smug and self-righteous and high on their victory over POC and queer people and disabled people and all the rest of us who stand in the way of America's return to an imaginary historical greatness. I do not have what that takes. We'll see where I am in December; I may have to reformulate the project. Tbh I really thought I would be trying to pour gentle balm on the souls of people who thought Hillary was going to plunge the country into a nightmare hellscape of mutilated babies and, I don't know, private email servers. I was afraid we'd lose, but I really thought we'd win. I don't know what to do with this.)
Last night λ and I decided it was a night for ice cream sundaes but also a night for not leaving the house, so we ordered sundae supplies from Instacart, a grocery-delivery service new to our area. We ordered Breyers cookies and cream ice cream, or we thought we did, but when it arrived it turned out to be Breyers "frozen dairy dessert," a fact Breyers has tried very hard to conceal by means of packaging that looks identical to their old ice cream packaging except it says FROZEN DAIRY DESSERT in tiny letters at the bottom of the carton. It turns out it doesn't meet the legal standards for "ice cream," having replaced a lot of the actual cream with a variety of polysyllabic lab-produced ingredients like HFCS and carrageenan and, further, having whipped way more air into the product than is typically done with ice cream. The PR guy for Breyers staunchly declares that "people" have been asking for a product that is smoother than ice cream, and Breyers is only catering to the demands of the public. He does not explain why, if this is the case, they have tried to hide the fact that the product inside their traditional ice cream cartons is not actually ice cream, but instead a "frozen treat" happily devoid of all those pesky lumps that have persecuted ice cream consumers for so long. Anyway, we didn’t notice the little FROZEN DAIRY DESSERT label at the time and probably wouldn't have understood its import if we had, so we settled down to our non-ice-cream sundaes. And they were awful. Really awful. It was clear to us early on that whatever we were eating, it wasn't ice cream, and we didn't finish the sundaes, but the hot fudge and sprinkles and so on sort of camouflaged the awfulness of it for a little while and we ate a decent amount. And a half hour later, *man*, were we feeling it. I don't know what the hell it was in that pretend ice cream with the Orwellian label that wreaked that much havoc on my stomach but it was definitely doubleplus ungood. Uuuuuugh. Least said is soonest mended about the effects of that shit, but -- steer clear of "frozen dairy desserts." Really.
A part of me, even as I was writhing around clutching my stomach or doing other things still less appealing to relate in a LiveJournal post, was drawing a Trump metaphor. That all the people who voted for him thought they were getting ice cream, a happy ice cream sundae with a perky cherry perched on top, and instead they are getting something that is going to set their gastrointestinal tracts on fire and leave them crouched over their toilets convulsing with explosive liquid napalm shits. My faith in this Trump-as-frozen-dairy-dessert concept though was mitigated by the fact that on the night of the election, after it was clear which way things were going, Maggie* jumped onto my vanity table** and, in batting at a dangling necklace on a jewelry tree, managed to knock over the jewelry tree, which knocked over another jewelry tree, which knocked over a stack of books; necklaces and bracelets and earrings and books cascaded everywhere, making a noise like Tiffany's just blew up, and Maggie streaked out of the room amid a rain of jewelry, terrified. The noise was really appalling and my brain immediately went SEE, THAT'S YOU, TRUMP SUPPORTERS, THAT'S WHAT YOU JUST DID, YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN BUT ACTUALLY YOU JUST KNOCKED EVERYTHING OVER INTO CHAOS AND SOON YOU'RE GONNA BE RUNNING SCARED, but I am perfectly aware that that's not true at all. Trump supporters are not running scared and they're not going to be for a while; they overturned America, took a country that has been struggling slowly and fitfully toward justice for 240 years and knocked it into the sewer, and even though they're right there in the slime with us they haven't even noticed that's where they are. Maggie had the sense to run when everything came crashing down, but they don't. I guess they like the mess.
Anyway, enough of that. Metaphors aside, don't buy frozen dairy dessert. It's very bad. So check the label. We Americans are facing four years of Trump presidency no matter what we do, but at least we can still have real ice cream.
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*For those not on Facebook, Maggie is our new cat. We got her a few weeks ago, not long after Ariadne died. I definitely don’t feel like going into that now.
**In reality this is just a desk that I keep my jewelry and makeup on and which we have been swearing we are going to paint white and set up with a mirror for years now.
I have been having a lot of difficulty just moving through life in the most basic ways since the election. I made a post to Facebook about that, and announced I was going on a social media hiatus because I am going full-on ostrich about politics for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure that was the best choice; I've been so depressed, in a way I never have been before -- I have experienced biochemical bipolar depression for perhaps the majority of my life, but I've never had situationally-triggered depression like this before, not that I can remember -- and I know there are others in the same boat with me, and many of those people are people I primarily or entirely connect with on social media. But I just can't deal with the storm right now, so I've tentatively decided to stay off Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr. LJ is much less political and much more personal than those three sites, so I'm going to try to hang around here. We'll see how it goes.
(This, by the way, is one of the main reasons I put off the kindness project I was talking about: I knew I wouldn't have the reserves to be trying to be kind and nice to Trump supporters in the immediate aftermath of a Trump victory, should it occur. Right now I'm adjusting a little bit to living in a world where people share my grief and horror, but I am entirely unprepared to try to connect with people who are smug and self-righteous and high on their victory over POC and queer people and disabled people and all the rest of us who stand in the way of America's return to an imaginary historical greatness. I do not have what that takes. We'll see where I am in December; I may have to reformulate the project. Tbh I really thought I would be trying to pour gentle balm on the souls of people who thought Hillary was going to plunge the country into a nightmare hellscape of mutilated babies and, I don't know, private email servers. I was afraid we'd lose, but I really thought we'd win. I don't know what to do with this.)
Last night λ and I decided it was a night for ice cream sundaes but also a night for not leaving the house, so we ordered sundae supplies from Instacart, a grocery-delivery service new to our area. We ordered Breyers cookies and cream ice cream, or we thought we did, but when it arrived it turned out to be Breyers "frozen dairy dessert," a fact Breyers has tried very hard to conceal by means of packaging that looks identical to their old ice cream packaging except it says FROZEN DAIRY DESSERT in tiny letters at the bottom of the carton. It turns out it doesn't meet the legal standards for "ice cream," having replaced a lot of the actual cream with a variety of polysyllabic lab-produced ingredients like HFCS and carrageenan and, further, having whipped way more air into the product than is typically done with ice cream. The PR guy for Breyers staunchly declares that "people" have been asking for a product that is smoother than ice cream, and Breyers is only catering to the demands of the public. He does not explain why, if this is the case, they have tried to hide the fact that the product inside their traditional ice cream cartons is not actually ice cream, but instead a "frozen treat" happily devoid of all those pesky lumps that have persecuted ice cream consumers for so long. Anyway, we didn’t notice the little FROZEN DAIRY DESSERT label at the time and probably wouldn't have understood its import if we had, so we settled down to our non-ice-cream sundaes. And they were awful. Really awful. It was clear to us early on that whatever we were eating, it wasn't ice cream, and we didn't finish the sundaes, but the hot fudge and sprinkles and so on sort of camouflaged the awfulness of it for a little while and we ate a decent amount. And a half hour later, *man*, were we feeling it. I don't know what the hell it was in that pretend ice cream with the Orwellian label that wreaked that much havoc on my stomach but it was definitely doubleplus ungood. Uuuuuugh. Least said is soonest mended about the effects of that shit, but -- steer clear of "frozen dairy desserts." Really.
A part of me, even as I was writhing around clutching my stomach or doing other things still less appealing to relate in a LiveJournal post, was drawing a Trump metaphor. That all the people who voted for him thought they were getting ice cream, a happy ice cream sundae with a perky cherry perched on top, and instead they are getting something that is going to set their gastrointestinal tracts on fire and leave them crouched over their toilets convulsing with explosive liquid napalm shits. My faith in this Trump-as-frozen-dairy-dessert concept though was mitigated by the fact that on the night of the election, after it was clear which way things were going, Maggie* jumped onto my vanity table** and, in batting at a dangling necklace on a jewelry tree, managed to knock over the jewelry tree, which knocked over another jewelry tree, which knocked over a stack of books; necklaces and bracelets and earrings and books cascaded everywhere, making a noise like Tiffany's just blew up, and Maggie streaked out of the room amid a rain of jewelry, terrified. The noise was really appalling and my brain immediately went SEE, THAT'S YOU, TRUMP SUPPORTERS, THAT'S WHAT YOU JUST DID, YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN BUT ACTUALLY YOU JUST KNOCKED EVERYTHING OVER INTO CHAOS AND SOON YOU'RE GONNA BE RUNNING SCARED, but I am perfectly aware that that's not true at all. Trump supporters are not running scared and they're not going to be for a while; they overturned America, took a country that has been struggling slowly and fitfully toward justice for 240 years and knocked it into the sewer, and even though they're right there in the slime with us they haven't even noticed that's where they are. Maggie had the sense to run when everything came crashing down, but they don't. I guess they like the mess.
Anyway, enough of that. Metaphors aside, don't buy frozen dairy dessert. It's very bad. So check the label. We Americans are facing four years of Trump presidency no matter what we do, but at least we can still have real ice cream.
__________________________________
*For those not on Facebook, Maggie is our new cat. We got her a few weeks ago, not long after Ariadne died. I definitely don’t feel like going into that now.
**In reality this is just a desk that I keep my jewelry and makeup on and which we have been swearing we are going to paint white and set up with a mirror for years now.