Suziecreamcheese Sings the Blues

Last night I was perusing Amazon because I had ordered A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (thanks, Kristi) and “based on my reading preferences” a book called American Dirt was suggested for me.

https://www.amazon.com/American-Dirt-Novel-Jeanine-Cummins-ebook/dp/B07QQLCZY1/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=american+dirt&qid=1629566998&sr=8-1

I’ve seen this book recommended in reading groups so I decided to check the reviews. It’s been described as “this generation’s Grapes of Wrath.” I’ve never read that one either. How the hell I graduated college with a degree in English lit escapes me. I digress. I tend to read reviews before I buy books, and I start normally with the one stars. I always do this with anything that’s been hyped up – I want to see what real people think about it, although I know that not every review on Amazon is real.

Most of the reviews were good, saying that it wasn’t as good as the hype, but most were okay. I had decided from the reviews that it wasn’t really my type of book and would give it a pass, when I came upon a review that made me pause. I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The book is about Mexican immigrants, their struggles in crossing the border, why they came to America, and what happens once they’re here. It was written by a white woman.

This reviewer said, (I paraphrase) that she was loving the book, truly enjoying it and then discovered it was written by a white woman. She immediately put it down and got a book written by a “Chicanx” author.

What.

The

Actual

Fuck?

You gave up an enjoyable experience simply because of the color of the author’s skin? How the fuck does one wrap one’s brain into such a twist that they can justify this?

I am living in the Twilight Zone, more and more every day. It’s rare that I know the lineage of an author. It’s sometimes a guess as to the author’s name if it’s a book I’m just reading for light entertainment – and if you ask me a year later who wrote a specific book, I’d probably have to look it up. (In my defense, I read a lot – close to 100 books a year)

I read for enjoyment. If I like a story, I read it. If not, I give up on it – that’s rare but it has happened, I just hate to not finish a book. I’ve never chosen a book based on the author’s sex, religion, or ancestry.

To say that someone can’t write about any culture other than their own is a form of censorship, in my view. If that’s the rule, I can only ever tell a story about an old white woman with a Golden Retriever, but I can’t mention anything that dog might be thinking because I’m not a dog, nor can I talk about the experiences of the lady down the road because she’s 17 years older than me, or the dear sweet child you all know as Peachy, or about my husband because he’s a guy and I’m not, no matter how you identify gender these days.

How limiting! How utterly stupid! Not only limiting to the author, but limiting to the reader – if you can only choose authors based on your prejudices – and this is as much racism as saying I’d never read a book by a black author – how will you ever learn anything?

I’m watching the “news” in disbelief. The Taliban is again in control in Afghanistan. The Talilban hates women. All the gains the women have made over the past years will be destroyed in one fell swoop. Women will be forced into burkas, raped, beaten, killed by men and nothing will be done about it, they have no recourse, they are owned by the men.

I am sick. I am also livid. I sincerely hope that all the people who are so in favor of the actions of the current occupant of the White House are watching this.

I don’t know how he can look in the mirror.

Where are all the women’s rights groups? Why am I not hearing them screaming about this?

What about the children? The little girls who thought they had a chance for a real life, will they ever trust the word of the United States again? Will anyone?

Meanwhile, the Vice President is tweeting about broadband access. Will someone wake me up when sanity returns?

Every single person who voted for this man has blood on their hands. But hey, you don’t have to read mean tweets!

No, Maverick doesn’t have it. Geesh, people, settle down.

Maverick goes to daycare. It’s the best thing that has ever happened with him, he comes home still with energy but it wears off after about an hour and he settles. He’s a very demanding, and very needy, kid, so when he’s home all day, and I’m home all day, he thinks that means that I’m at his beck and call all day.

He is very spoiled. Yes, my fault entirely, shutty. He will bark at me until I give him what he wants – this has been changing, I’m starting to leave the room and shut the door behind me when he does this.

He also has no concept of settle down. If someone is awake and moving, so is he. Every minute is a party to most Golden Retrievers. Maverick is ready to play any time you move.

So he goes to daycare, and he gets to play all day and I get a break, and life is good for both of us. It’s not that I don’t want to spend time with him, but I am basically an introvert who can only take so much interaction with people – and yeah, I’m good at it, but – I need to decompress, be by myself, not have to react. So after a few hours of constant Maverick attention, I need some peace.

He went a week ago for his normal shots. I mentioned to Dr. Dave that he was going to daycare, at which point Dr. Dave asked if he’d had his kennel cough vaccine. It seems that Bordatella, the technical name for kennel cough, is highly contagious. He’d never had the vaccine. (I’m assuming this is NOT the Delta variant of Bordatella, or he’d have to get the experimental jab and I’d be saying no)

However, like experimental jab, when a dog is given this vaccine, he (or she, shutty) sheds it for two weeks. Hence, he can’t be around other dogs for this period of time because they could catch it from him, even though he doesn’t have the actual virus. (Does this all sound strangely familiar?)

Maverick is home for two weeks. We’re on day 10 of what will actually be a 16 day quarantine. Next year, when he has to get this vaccine again, I’m booking a vacation.

When you work from home, each day seems pretty much the same. And when you teach from home, the weekend is just the time you catch up on grading and student emails, so it’s not really all that different from any other day except the Bear is home all day and the TV is on all day (I don’t turn it on when he’s not home).

I have homework to do and I don’t want to. It’s the last two chapters of PowerPoint and then the class is done, and I was cooking along till I realized that this isn’t due till next week. I’ve been perusing the “news” and see that the Mayor of NYC has decided to make restaurant owners, gym owners and others into vaccine police. His statement that NYC has a lot of great stuff to offer but “you can’t play in our sandbox if you don’t get jabbed!” (my words, not his, exactly, but the same sentiment) made me laugh.

Dude, I’ve BEEN to NYC and trust me, it ain’t all that. Yeah, there’s some cool stuff to do there, but is there REALLY that much that you can’t do in any city? I want to visit the 9/11 memorial at some point but I’ve lived this long without doing that, I guess it won’t kill me if I don’t get there.

I’ve worked retail. The thought of confronting people and demanding to see their papers – nope, I didn’t get paid near enough for that. I once almost had my head torn off for asking a guy if he was a senior citizen – we gave a discount – geesh, I was supposed to know he was only 45? He looked like he had one foot in the grave, seriously! There isn’t enough incentive for anyone to ask people for their “papers.”

And if they should be brave enough to do so, how many (hopefully lots) will just turn around and leave? It hasn’t been hard enough for small businesses to survive lately, let’s make it even harder!

We’ve been hearing all along that it’s far more difficult for people of color and poor people to get this jab than it is for others. So let’s just make life more difficult for them too! Isn’t that racist? Isn’t that segregation at the highest level?

If we don’t stand up to this nonsense, I fear for our country.

Driving home from the park today, I turned on the radio. I usually don’t because I like to just drive and enjoy the scenery but Maverick is banned from daycare for two weeks – kennel cough vaccine – sheds for two weeks so he could infect other dogs – so we went to the big park today and walked a mile and a half. This is half my usual, but he decided at 1.4 miles that he was done, planted himself beneath a tree, and panted like he was about to keel over. (It was barely 70 degrees out, he got a drink of water and after a bit was able to meander to the car. Can we say “drama queen?” (He informs me he is not a queen, by the way)

To drown out the panting from the back seat – I did mention drama, right – I turned on the radio. The big news was the expiration of the ban on evictions. I sympathize with people who are struggling now. Shutting down the economy for all those months was brutal – so many people suffered. Most landlords, in my experience, are people who have bought a second home and rent it out in the hopes that someday, it will be paid off, and then will actually generate income, but in the meantime are using the rent payments to pay the mortgage and any other bills that go along with upkeep on that property. There seems to be a picture of landlords as all filthy rich tyrants who can go years without collecting rent and while I’m sure there are plenty of those, I’m sure there are plenty of just regular people trying to get by.

For the filthy rich, this ban was no problem. For the regular guy, it has been. The bills still needed to be paid, and for all the talk of mortgage payments being delayed, we never saw that here (we don’t own a second property, we’re paying on our home). Where were they supposed to get the money to pay those bills?

Now the people who haven’t paid rent in over a year are in danger of becoming homeless. The sympathetic part of me feels bad for them. But another part of me is asking – what did they do with the money they would have been using for rent for this past 18 months? What did they do with the extra money they got from the government (yes, almost all of us got the checks, not judging there)? Did they think they were never going to have to pay the rent again? They could have saved the normal rent payment and at least earned some interest on it. Or they could have invested it and earned even more.

Yet we’re meant to feel sorry for them. I’m having a hard time doing that. Maybe it’s because I know people who chose to not pay rent, even though they could well afford it, knowing that they couldn’t be kicked out, and spent the money on themselves. Maybe it’s because I know some of those smaller landlords who have been forced to sell out to huge companies who run multiple rentals. (And do you think those are going to let anyone off the hook for past rent?)

It’s a mess. And I can’t help but wonder if this is an example of socialism in action.

I read today that the border control people are no longer testing the illegals for Covid. Actually, I’ve heard this more than once recently. I’m also hearing that there’s a “surge” in this new Delta variant that somehow manages to bypass the vaccine that was supposed to keep everyone from getting sick – unless you’re trying to kill Grandma and refuse to get it, then you can just go die in a corner, you selfish piece of shit.

I’m also hearing rumors of another impending lock down – because the first one worked so well.

Seriously, I know a lot of people (raises hand) who barely survived the first one and most likely won’t survive a second one. This is more than financial hardship, this is mental torture. I am a social being, when cut off from friends, I go into a mental place that I don’t like to visit, let alone dwell in.

I’m wondering, how many people will refuse to comply if this should happen?

I also wonder why in the hell we’re discussing a lock down when our borders are so wide open, and the people coming over are not even being tested for this supposedly highly contagious variant of the virus that was supposed to kill all of us last year. How does this possibly make sense to anyone?

The CDC is no longer monitoring cases of Covid diagnosed in people who’ve been vaccinated. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html And yet we’re being told that the majority of cases that are being diagnosed are people who are not vaccinated. How the hell do they know that? If I feed Maverick a cookie, and my husband turns around and gives him 6, but neither of us tells the other one, how do we know how many cookies he’s had? He sure as heck isn’t gonna tell us!

I feel like I’m living in an alternate universe, where common sense has gone out the window and people spew so many contradictory statements in a few minutes that my head spins and they don’t even blink.

I’m praying every day that those who are blindly accepting the current state of affairs will wake up before it’s too late.

Yesterday I went to buy some twill tape to finish up an outfit for the most perfect baby ever born. I was going to buy twill tape, nothing more. I was NOT going to buy fabric.

So I bought fabric.

I cut out two tops and two pairs of shorts yesterday afternoon because, well, I bought fabric.

My plan for today was to spend some time studying – I’m taking a computer information systems course and the current topic is Access, which I firmly believe was invented by Satan. Tonight was dinner and diamonds with the dog ladies, always a fun time and much needed for my mental health, and it was my turn to make dessert. I planned a Boston Cream Pie because who doesn’t like Boston Cream Pie, other than Satan?

I took Maverick to daycare, did my usual morning routine, decided not to walk today because it was bloody hot and my feet were screaming at me half the night, so I made some phone calls. One of those was to the vet about getting Bravecto for Maverick. The not so nice receptionist informed me that they had to see Maverick since he hadn’t been there in 3 years. Ummm, I have receipts from about 2 months ago so if you haven’t seen him in 3 years, I think I need some money back! That got resoved and I made the cake and then my lunch. I usually eat in front of the laptop, check mail and answer student emails and scroll through Fakebook and just relax a bit.

The plan was to eat lunch, let the cake cool, study awhile, make the filling for the cake, let that cool, and sew for an hour or so before putting the cake together.

The universe laughs at plans.

While eating my lunch, and listening to Toby Keith’s new song, my laptop suddenly went black. I said some bad words and tried to restart the computer. The jump drives were blinking so something was working but that screen just stared at me in total blackness.

I teach online. I need a computer. After trying to buy one from Best Buy and encountering a total cluster f**k, I called Staples. Tech guy tried to fix the old laptop with no success, so home I came with a new one.

I hate setting up a new computer.

Several hours and a lot of swearing later, I have things pretty much the way I want them. Having dinner with good friends helped improve my mood, having Bear come to my rescue when I was melting down over everything going wrong helped even more.

Today I’m playing catch up with all the school work I didn’t do yesterday. I don’t ever want to hear a student complain about how much homework I assign, the class I’m taking has three times as much homework as I ever handed out. But I’ll get it done and do some sewing today too.

Because it takes more than a blank screen to keep me down for long.

For the next several weeks, the Bear starts work at 6:00 a.m. He gets up at 4:00 to give himself time to get functional before heading out.

My alarm (clock) is set for 8:00. My alarm (dog) tends to go off at about 7:30.

We are not morning people. For most of our marriage, Bear has either worked second or third shift, and I tend to take only afternoon or evening classes, although I’ve had the rare morning class (that usually doesn’t go well). However, we’ve adjusted to this early rising thing and although things are iffy until that second cup of coffee, we haven’t yet committed mayhem upon anyone or anything. (It was a close call this morning when Maverick was barking at a guy who said, “will he bite?” and I replied with, “I don’t know.” To that he responded, “well then I won’t approach.” I refrained from saying, “DUH!!!!!!” ) (In my defense, I’d had NO coffee!) (I did give him the look, though)

I’ve never quite understood people who are judgy about what time other people get out of bed. When the Bear worked second shift ( that’s 3-11 for you normal people), we would go to bed around 2:30 (that’s A. M.) and get up around 11. We ate dinner at around 1:00 a.m.

My sister, who personifies judgy (she should have been named Karen), would often make snide comments about how late we slept. And the thought of eating dinner so late made her just about pass out. (I would say she got the vapors, but I can’t quite see her fluttering about with smelling salts and a handkerchief) (I’ve been known to get the vapors at times, but that usually preceeds me falling over in a dead faint and scaring the bejinkies out of everyone in sight.) (That’s kind of fun, actually.) (I digress)

She’s now retired and has been for years. When I was in NY, I was told (often) that she gets up at 5:30. I refrained from saying, “what the f**k for?” Seriously, is it even light yet? And what is open? It’s not like you can go to the library or go shopping or go to the dentist or the doctor or really anywhere except all night diners and emergency rooms at that hour! (Are all night diners open or is the Kung Flu still got them closed down?) (I’m going to Hell for Kung Flu, I just know it)

When (if) I ever retire, I plan to sleep till noon every day, take a nap around 5, and then go to bed around midnight. I suppose at some point, I will have slept enough, so then I plan to just get up, get a coffee, and go back to bed with a book.

I have always been a failure in her eyes. My lack of enthusiasm for early morning hours is only one more of the many things wrong with me. (The list is long and grows longer with each passing year. I’ve given up keeping track.)

I’m not sure why people who get up early look upon the night owls as lesser folk. I just know it’s tiresome.