Sometimes you have to tell it to yourself straight, and these random thoughts crossed my mind today:

I will never figure out how to use the f*#%ing telescope we got Jesse for her birthday six months ago. At least, not if I keep relying on the hopelessly terrible instructions that came with it. 

I have no idea what to get the kids for Christmas. They’re so worn out by all the shit of this consumer age that they’re refusing to write Santa a letter demanding anything. Nick says, “let him decide.” I say, “why do you think Santa is a man?”

I am seriously middle-aged. There’s just no amount of fitness or weight loss that’ll make me pass for a young-ish hottie ever again. It’s “pretty old hottie” at best, from here on out. But I think I still need to fight for that, because I think rating women based on their youthfulness and physical beauty may be part of the first omnibus moral legislative plan proposed by the P-elect-OTUS. 

I think Jesse has figured out Santa is a fiction created by her parents lying to her on and on, one lie after another, for her entire life. I think if I tell her now that Santa Claus is “real” (I would qualify the meaning of that word in my mind like Bill Clinton qualified the meaning of “is”), she will react to me exactly the same way Trump is reacting to evidence that Russia played our elections like a cheap violin (“I don’t believe it”), and this will cause a cascading disaster of cognitive dissonance and self-loathing that will render me useless. 

Jesse’s mental health issues aren’t caused by Lyme disease, gluten, or vaccines. Or by my lies about Santa. But all these things probably don’t help. 

Donald Trump will be our next president for four or eight years. Noooo, there won’t be a re-vote, my optimistic friends. Noooo, the electoral college won’t flip, my delusional friends. And noooooo, the Republican congress won’t impeach him, my living-a-waking-dream friends. 

All of Trump’s cabinet picks will be approved by the Senate. We are fantasizing if we think petitions and letters and phone calls will make a difference. Three million votes didn’t make a difference. Why would three million phone calls?

A single political party that does not have the support of a majority of Americans nationwide now holds literally all majority power at the federal level, and is gerrymandering its way into the same sort of thing at the state level. Its presidential candidate won the election but lost the vote by almost 3 million voters. Still, this party is claiming a mandate to pursue positions on significant human rights and other policy issues that are not supported by a majority of Americans, and it clearly has no intention of pursuing any sort of conciliation. 

But people keep telling me I live in a representative democracy. 

I don’t believe it.