Voting to-do list.

Alright, kids.  We have a critical election on Tuesday.  Here are two things we can do:

1. Vote.
2. Have The Talk with your parents.

The second item applies however you think your parents will be voting.  If you are on the same page, great.  Encourage them and thank them.  But if you disagree, talk to them.  I know it sucks and is way easier not to.  Your siblings may get angry with you and wish you’d keep your mouth shut (may I recommend a time other than dinner?).  But it’s important.  You may not change their minds or sway their vote, but they need to hear your voice.  Tell them you are worried.  Give them reasons why.  Show them evidence.  Don’t resort to name-calling.  Tell them you love them instead.  Donald Trump has split up enough families.  

Maybe they are also troubled by the current climate, but they think we are too far down the path of corruption to make any difference.  They’ve thrown in the towel.  Tell them how strange it is to hear them say such things, when you’ve been so accustomed to them telling you to never give up.  Ask them where we would be if that had been the attitude of their parents in the 1940s.  Tell them you will not give up without a fight, because that is how they raised you and how their parents raised them.  

Tell them what you see of your generation.  I see optimism, inventiveness, and determination.  We have big ideas and big hearts.  We crave the freedom and opportunity that is our inheritance from this great nation—the nation you will hand over to us, even if we have to claw it from your cold, dead fingers.  We will make it new again.  Because you taught us to participate.  We weren’t out there buying those participation trophies for ourselves.  You gave them to us.  You enrolled us in softball and dance and scouts and summer camp.  You taught us to participate because you knew its value.  We learned participation is not just valuable—it is essential.  Healthy society cannot function without it.  Democracy cannot function without it.  

Happy voting, friends.  

Only 2 years ago?  What a wild ride.

A message from Sean.

The Blob breaks its regrettably long hiatus with this special message from Sean Hannity.

Stand down, you idiot fucks.  Stand down.

Such moments in history do not often befall us mere men.  The Keurig has wronged us.  The Keurig has burned us.  Your valiance against the Keurig will not soon be forgotten. 

But we cannot continue in such bitterness. Brother against brother, father against son, husband against wife, husband against husband (lol jk, that would be gay and we don’t do that on this show), son against brother against father against nephew, men against single serving coffee machines.  Enough!  What more can the world take?

Again, I say, stand down.

We cannot hallow these grounds.  Frankly, they don’t deserve it.  I call on you to make peace with the Keurig, not because it is easy…but because it is hard.  Also because Volvo pulled its ads and I’m a little afraid to see what you’ll all do next. (Oh who am I kidding—GO SMASH SOME VOLVOS INTO HILLARY CLINTON’S FACE)  (lol jk again, my lawyers are advising me not to encourage this behavior.)

There will be other hills of beans to die on.  This is not our hill. 

You have fought the good fight.  You will finish the race, maybe even all the races.  You have kept the faith.  Know that our God fully espouses our righteous rage.  Is that not the best part of waking up?  But we must return to merely winking at violence, rather than actively stirring the pot.

Press on.

All's quiet on the western front.

Reporting live (for the time being) from the West Coast, apparently within striking distance of North Korean missiles.  Isn’t this fun?  Ben and Jerry’s 2 pints for $6, yes please.  If I’m gonna get burnt to a crisp or have my taste buds radiated off, I’m having Half-Baked TONIGHT.  BALLS TO THE WALL, Y’ALL.  THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE ELECT A MAN WHO ONLY UNDERSTANDS REALITY TV AND LOVES TO SAY “YOU’RE FIRED”.  REINCE PRIEBUS?  YOU’RE FIRED.  NUCLEAR MISSILES?  YOU’RE FIRED.  ISN’T THIS GREAT.  I’ll eat my communist ice cream and await my destiny.  At THE VERY LEAST we can be thankful we don’t have a lady president with email troubles.  Having a competent woman in power would obviously be MUCH WORSE than nuclear holocaust.  BenghaziemailsradicalIslamicterrorism, am I right?

Because this is a normal thing to do, I considered my last will and testament while walking home today.  Fortunately for all of us, I have Marie-Kondo-ed most of my shit in the last few months (thank you for your service), so nobody will have to dig through this stuff and feel bad about throwing it away:

It was important work.

But here go the crucial items:

If Minnie survives the nuclear blast, I entrust her to Trish.  Hugging Minnie for the last 26 years has contoured her perfectly to my body.  Trish and I have the same body.  Therefore, Trish gets Minnie and her wonderful hugs.  You’re welcome.  Treat her well.

My pearl earrings will go to Molly and my diamond earrings to Rose.

Give all my money to Kelsey Gleason.  Girl, have a killer wedding.  Or, elope and use my money for a down payment.

Will, you may keep my TV, wine, and coffee table.

In the event that my death is murder by an illegal immigrant, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT ALLOW MY DEATH TO BECOME AN OBSCENE TOOL OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. I’m pretty sure having my name repeated over and over by Paul Ryan and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity will not allow me a good rest in peace.  I do not want any Claire’s Law unless it has something to do with forcing all grocery stores to function additionally as full service liquor stores EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN DAY. 

If I die in a freak accident or of some crazy disease, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT TURN MY FACEBOOK PAGE INTO A BIZARRO MEMORIAL WHERE YOU ALL WRITE NOTES TO ME.  GUESS WHAT.  I’LL BE DEAD.  I WON’T BE ABLE TO READ.  IF I HAVE SOME MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE AFTERLIFE, I WON’T HAVE TO LOG INTO FACEBOOK TO SEE HOW YOU’RE FEELING.  Instead, please direct your lovely thoughts and memories in notes to my parents.

As for the rest of my stuff, have at it, y’all.  Go crazy for that Ikea.  First dibs to sisters, cousins, and friends.  Now, I have some ice cream to attend to.  Please remember me as a lover of truth, humor, and peanut butter cups.   If I am granted more time on this fragile planet, I will be more attentive to this blog.  Godspeed.

Meditations.

Will has gotten very into meditation.  My experience with meditation almost exclusively involves snoozing during guided meditations in my high school theology class (“You’re walking along a beautiful beach.  You see a stranger in the distance.  Oh!  It’s Jesus!”)  Mrs. Choa (our teacher) would begin the meditations with deep breathing exercises.  These proved counterproductive for me, because I quickly discovered that slowly inhaling and exhaling made it much easier for me to burst out laughing.  Instead I had to bite my lip and concentrate on not peeing in my pants laughing, which was very stressful and defeated the purpose of a calming meditation.  Sleep was my best option, and thankfully, (then as now) never difficult for me to accomplish.

Will’s knack for meditating may be rubbing off on me, however, because I recently found myself meditating on a particular image.

Enter meditation sequence.

There was once a time of universal consensus, when men, women, and children of all backgrounds and persuasions could join hands and agree: surely this image is photoshopped. 

Buffoons.

Before this image was just a twinkle in Vladimir Putin’s eye, we believed, as children believe, in the resilience of our democracy.  When we heard the words “Kid President”, we did not picture an orange 70-year-old having a tantrum.  We thought of this charming fellow:

When we heard the words “Donald Trump”, we thought “you’re fired”, not “yuge pussy-grabbing tiny hands”.  

Can we go back to that time?

No!  You are terrible at meditating.  BREATHE IN DEEPLY.  Nostalgia is not the way forward.  The time to be awesome is now. Go pack for your ski trip.

Meditation—still not my strong suit.  I should probably go back to running into Jesus at the beach.  Or just take a nap.

Drastic times.

Listen, I really am trying not to interpret everything as signs of looming World War III/American implosion via class warfare/anarchy/eventual nuclear holocaust.  But suddenly preppers seem a lot less crazy.  (Don’t worry, I’m not building a bunker but our storage room may serve, so that is where we keep our bottled water and canned tuna.)

I’m not the only one freaking out:

Catchy new tagline.

I’m just very disturbed at how faithfully Orange Julius is following the authoritarian playbook.  The scapegoating of particular religious, ethnic, and non-heterosexual people, for instance, was an old standby for another thin-skinned dude who liked to yell and had bad hair.  (Ok, you caught me.  I’m not above a Hitler-Trump comparison.)  NEWS ALERT: Muslims aren’t killing us by the thousands (guns are), Mexicans aren’t stealing our jobs (automation is), and transsexuals aren’t grabbing your daughter’s pussy in the women’s room (she should watch out for our President though).  Picking on minority groups and the vulnerable may make some (miserable) people feel better, but it does not solve problems.  It actually creates them.  Stop me if I sound crazy.  Oh right, you can’t.

Here’s a problem created by the dogwhistling and hateful rhetoric that spewed from the Trump campaign, and now spews from the White House:

 

In case your preferred news source didn't cover this, vandals desecrated 100 graves at a historic Jewish cemetery in St. Louis this week.

As it turns out, bad people are empowered to do bad things when we do not actively embrace tolerance and respect, when we elect people who do not actively embrace tolerance and respect.

One of the most moving places I have ever been is the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.  For over 300 years, it was the only place the city’s Jewish people were allowed to bury their dead.  The graves are stacked layers upon layers, making “ground level” something like thirty feet above the current street. Up to 100,000 people may be buried there.  Seeing these graves all crammed together sparked a major understanding in my brain when I visited with my family a few years ago.  The Nazis didn’t cook up anti-Semitism in the 1930s—it was hundreds and hundreds of years in the making.  Passive cruelty and episodic violence were the norms.  Europe was so primed with anti-Semitism that it required just one particularly evil man to twist prejudice into holocaust.

Photos can't really capture this place. 

I’m not saying Donald Trump is plotting to murder all the groups he recklessly scapegoats.  But I am saying he is too cozy with authoritarian methods of exploiting fear and prejudice.  People like David Duke, Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and cowardly grave vandals should not feel encouraged by the President of the United States.  But they do.

I’m still hopeful our nation's history has primed us to love and defend freedom.  But I fear this slippery slope we’re on.  I love you, America, but I don’t like you a whole lot right now.  We need to open our eyes to reality.  Democracy dies in darkness.

My fellow Austrians.

Good evening.  You may have noticed the Blob’s small hiatus from its regularly scheduled cutting commentary.  My apologies.  We’re living in a reality show conducted by King Man-Child and Mr. Bannon-Goebbels and it is exhausting.  I’m so exhausted that upon waking up to a rare San Francisco peal of thunder recently, I assumed we were getting nuked by North Korea and was surprisingly okay with it. 

But this is the tactic of our Orange Overlord, right?  Inundate us with bullshit from all angles so we are stuck spinning in excrement, all while he dances around tearing down democratic norms?  Our free press, our independent judiciary—nothing is safe from his vindictive incompetence.

I can hear some of you thinking, “Oh Claire, you’re being dramatic.  Can’t we go back to the fun, non-political times of the Blob?”  NO WE CANNOT.  I attempted to write a light-hearted post last week but it turned into a real tearjerker about how I feel like CAPTAIN VON TRAPP SINGING EDELWEISS TO HIS DEAD AUSTRIA.  I need you, Julie Andrews.  And right now, I’m sparing you the very poignant lessons we could learn from the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague (but don’t worry, I’m saving it for later).  It seems that all my blob brain is wired for right now is finding parallels between our current state of affairs and the rise of the Third Reich.  THANKS, OBAMA.

And now, we breathe.  During the hiatus from substantive blobbing, I had the great fortune of attending two meet-ups of strong lady friends (Feminist Fight Club last Tuesday and Babes Brunch yesterday).  We discussed current events, brainstormed ways to get involved, and ate delicious food.  I recognize my tendency to sit at home and fret, so it was good to meet up with smart, kind women and plan for action.  I highly recommend it.  It’s healthy to get out of social media world.

Womankind, arise!

That’s all I got for today, y'all.  Good night.  God bless.  Call your senators.  Tip your waitresses.

Though we adore men individually,
we agree that as a group they're rather stupid.

Reason for the season.

Happy December, blobs.  If we can thank Donald Trump for anything, it might be that his victory has Fox News and lackeys in such an orgasmic tizzy that they might completely forget to freak out about the War on Christmas.  Praise sweet baby Jesus.  The reason for the season.

For my Advent sacrifice, I’m going to give up our president-elect. I find it difficult to prepare a joyful heart for the coming of baby Jesus while I’m dreading the coming of President Trump (which is doing nothing to sooth my sneaking suspicion he is the actual antichrist).  (Relax, I’m being dramatic.)  (Or am I…)  Anyways, my plan is to ignore him.  You all are welcome to join me.  We deserve a break.  After today, the Blob will neither mention his name nor display his image for the rest of 2016.  Instead, you can look forward to my very civilized reviews of the year’s podcasts, books, and shows.  Cheers.

We’ll leave Donald in the care of a trustworthy adult.  Thanks for taking one for the team, Mitt.  Let him wine and dine you, but if he proposes furniture shopping...cover your you-know-what and run.

...the Satan thing though.

Bob Ross is on Netflix.

Does everyone already know about this?  Such a soothing show.  I’d like to invite the hackers to replace Fox News with The Joy of Painting.  It would do the world so much good.  Bob Ross beats Sean Hannity and Bill O’F-ingReilly any day of the week.  I happen to have a small Russian readership—maybe you guys can make it happen.  (I know Donald Trump has you all very busy and this wouldn’t be in your national interest, but there have to be some of you who want to screw over Putin, right?)  Or we could just organize a national Joy of Painting watch party so everyone can calm the f down for 30 minutes (or 3 hours, as I did on Friday). 

I’ve been MIA from the blob as I was busy with final preparations for my office’s 50^th anniversary party on Thursday.  It was a YUUUUGE success.  Yuge.  Believe me, it was the best party San Francisco, maybe the world, has ever seen.  Yuge. 

I had a bit to drink at the party, which led me to have some wild dreams on Thursday night (my boss having a Velcro beard, etc).  In one dream, I had a meeting with Chris Christie and made him cry.  I gave a quite moving “I’m not mad, just disappointed” speech regarding his support of Trump.  He got very choked up. 

So this brings us back to me nursing my hangover on Friday with the help of The Joy of Painting.  I am now recovered and back to the blob.  Stay tuned for my election wrap-up coverage. 

From all of us here, I’d like to wish you happy voting, and God bless, my friend.

Debate diagrams, part one.

Do kids diagram sentences* these days?  I've always enjoyed the activity.  For my own amusement (and perhaps for yours), I decided to diagram a few of Donald Trump's "sentences"** from the first debate.  His peculiar rhetorical structure forced me to get a little creative at times, so I cannot claim 100% accuracy in my diagramming.  But as far as I can tell, Mr. Trump has never been concerned with 100% accuracy, so I'm not too worried.

That's the kind of thinking our country needs.

One of the more bizarre sentiments uttered in a presidential debate.

Palm Beach, tough community.

We need to abandon coherent sentences.  It is the kind of thinking our country needs.  

RAGE RAGE RAGE RAGE MY STRONGEST ASSET IS MY TEMPERAMENT RAGE RAGE 

*Great resource for those of you who want to revisit 6th grade English.

**Straight from the transcript provided by the New York Times, which surely is misrepresenting Mr. Trump at Hillary Clinton's behest.  

A history lesson.

My love for history began when I was a kid.  I remember one Christmas I got a book containing stories, letters, and images of real people during World War II.  I was spellbound.  Here were ordinary people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary times.  The victory gardeners, the Navajo code talkers, the concentration camp inmates, the D-Day soldiers.  Perversely, I was actually jealous of these people—they got to live history.  All I could do was read about it.  In the naïve, grammar-school mind of an upper-middle class white girl, history was over.  The world, or at least my world, was stable and prosperous.  Nothing exciting or dangerous would ever happen again.  The struggles of earlier generations had born the fruit that was my blissful childhood in the ‘90s.

Of course, I was so wrong.   I had thought of history as stories with neat beginnings, middles, and ends.  It was a convenient way to take it all in.  But history does not happen that way.  We can’t know how historians will classify the present moment.  Is this moment—the departure of the UK from the EU, the rise of Donald Trump—the beginning of a new, fearful era in the experiment of liberal democracies?  Is it a strange, momentary aberration in the trend toward global economic cooperation?  Or is it (pause for melodrama) the end of the world as we know it??? 

When I read history now, I consciously try to erase my bias of hindsight.  I had realized I was taking events in history for granted. Of course the Allies won World War II.  Of course the D-Day invasion worked.  Of course Neville Chamberlain should have known never to shake Hitler’s hand.   But when I suspend my knowledge of how the story ends, the plot becomes more treacherous.  Certain characters, like Chamberlain, engender more sympathy.  His country had not long before emerged from the worst war it had ever known.  He did not know something more terrible could be on the horizon.  Other characters, like Eisenhower and his D-Day soldiers, earn even more admiration and awe.  The D-Day invasion had absolutely no guarantee of success.  Eliminating the advantage of hindsight allows us to understand that the moments we study in history are defined by their uncertainty. 

More now than at any other time in my life, I am hyper-aware of the uncertainty of the future.  For the first time, I look to the future with great unease.  The only other moment rivaling this is 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, but the difference between now and then is my faith in the stability of government.  I don’t know if we can overcome the dysfunction in Washington.  I am afraid of a Trump presidency.  I don’t know if our system and national wellbeing can weather his ignorance and narcissism.  That scares me more than terrorism.

I finally feel like I’m living history, but I wish I could tell fourth-grade Claire that it’s not as cool as we thought.