This Year's Jack-o-Lantern

Designed by the kid, carved by Dr. Skull

Tomorrow They Cut on Me

...which sounds really dramatic.

Tomorrow morning at five a.m. I check in for the surgery to fix (let's hope) my hiatal hernia, which is causing my GERD, which is causing my ulcer.

I Need Xanax

Sweet Jesus, this election is on my last nerve.

I'm mainlining Nate Silver, which only helps a little.

Dr. Skull, the kid, and I went down to the courthouse and voted early. Now we just gnaw our nails and wait.

Juxtaposition

So oddly enough -- odd, because I don't usually get enough space in my day to watch this much media -- I watched two documentaries yesterday, back to back.

First I watched 13th, the documentary by Ava DuVernay about the loophole in the 13th Amendment that made it possible to continue slavery by another name, by turning black Americans, and specifically black males, into a criminal underclass.

It's very well done and worth watching, though I'd also recommend reading Slavery by Another Name, which adds a lot of the deep background this documentary presents in summary.

I knew most of the information in 13th, but not all of it -- I didn't know the information toward the end, for example, about ALEC and its connections to the prison industry. And I'd heard some bits of the information about what's happening with immigrants and private prisons, but I learned more here.

Well worth watching.

Then -- right after watching this film, which made me angry and depressed and furious about how fucked up our country was -- I watched the PBS documentary Hamilton's America.

Well!

I don't know if you saw it. (You can stream it for a limited time through the link above.) But it's lovely, and Lin-Manuel Miranda is just lovely in it. This documentary made me feel so hopeful and happy about this country. Brilliant, talented people working hard and well, creating something amazing, and having amazing success: that's the America we all love.

Both of those are the real country, hard as that is to wrap our heads around sometimes.

So, This Happened (TW: medical procedure)

I may have mentioned my ulcer.

I've got this ulcer, caused by my hiatal hernia, caused by having a baby -- well, by being pregnant.

Raising a Genderqueer Kid in Arkansas

I didn’t intend to give my kid – a brilliant Jewish atheist with anxiety and depression issues – a childhood in a small hyper-conservative city in Arkansas, where most of the people she went to school with would be Evangelical Christians, not to mention Far-Right (read: Trump-flavored) Conservatives.

Rosh Hashanah 2016

Yesterday was Rosh Hashanah, the last the kid will spend at home as a child -- she goes off to college next year.

As we've done every year since she turned four, when we moved to this town, we went down to the Arkansas River to throw bread in the water and our sins with them.

"I'm sorry I yelled at the dog!"

"I'm sorry I fight with people on the internet!"

"I'm sorry I use gendered insults!"

"I'm sorry I don't pay more attention to Mom!"

Then we came back here and had a fine meal of stewed chicken with garlic, grilled asparagus, challah, and honey cake.

"Have some more honey cake," Dr. Skull said. "You have to have more honey cake, so you'll have a sweet new year. Here," he said, giving a bit of honey cake to Heywood. "You have a sweet new year too, you little freak."

Have a sweet new year, all y'all!