Whatevs.

As we’ve already discussed, it’s Christmas card season.

I do so enjoy getting other people’s less awesome (than our) Christmas photos and cards…I do NOT enjoy getting weird Christmas cards from my estranged mother.

I looked at the envelope and knew it was going to piss me right off. I thought about throwing it away without opening it, but it was heavier than a normal card, so I had to check for enclosures that my dad’s money bought. She sent me a weird Christmas card with that came with a built-in keepsake daughter bookmark (because I am 11 years old) with a $25 TGIFriday’s gift card in it. Also, there was some jibber-jabber about missing me or something. I threw the card away, because I’m a stone-cold bitch, but we went to Fridays yesterday.

Last year, my mother sent my dad over to my house with a Carruth cement groundhog and a gift card for Brian (all paid for by my Dad, obviously) pre-divorce. Um, OK. It is also worth noting that she gave my brother’s girlfriend Amanda a gift card to Bath and Body Works, and Amanda worked at Bath and Body Works at the time. I guess I was lucky I got that weird stone groundhog and not a gift certificate for radioactive iodine or something.

Since losing her marbles, my mother has apparently decided that just throwing weird unnecessary and unwanted money at us (gift cards and Carruths) is a terrific idea. Yeah, maybe, if she was making her own money or had a new sugar daddy who was funding this (ew, I just made myself throw up a little)…but that’s not how it is. She is getting something like $2K/month from my dad to sit on her ass, after her sad, hard life of never having to work and being able to buy whatever she wanted (cigarettes, romance novels, hair frosting kits). So anyway, it’s hard to get jazzed about super-stupid presents. I thought about trying to sell the gift card and give my dad the money, but that seemed pretty complicated.

Anyway, so here’s us:

Waiter: Hello! What brings you to Fridays?
Me: (looks around awkwardly) Oh, um, we have a gift card.

We had enough Fridays to use up the gift card and skidaddled out of there.

I hate when my mom tries to communicate with me. It’s only happened a couple of times since the Great Schism, but she really tries to play the victim and make me feel bad, and I hate it hate it hate. Every time, it upsets me, but not because I miss her or feel bad…in fact, my most intense feelings are 1) guilt that I *don’t* miss her, and 2) anger about her greed/laziness/grossness. Aside from my fretting about my dad coming home every day to an empty house (well not really for right now, he has a boarder) and wondering about his finances and if he’ll ever be able to retire, my life is actually easier without having to deal with my mom. She was such a pain in the ass the last 5 years or so (if not earlier – probably 2001 when she started watching Fox News 24-7), it’s kind of a relief to be states and states away from her and not communicating with her. Thanks for birthing me, letting me start rotting my insides with Tab and Diet Pepsi when I was 5, etc., etc., see you later.

Anyway. So here’s hoping that’s all that I’ll hear from her this season. I wouldn’t put it past her to come up for Christmas (with her sister?) and show up at my dad’s (he’ll call the sheriff, supposedly) or my house (I’ll close the door and cry? I don’t know).

Let’s see…So aside from that, I’m generally just having a really stupidly hard time right now. Like everyone else, that whole Sandy Hook Elementary School thing is weighing heavily on my mind. There’s so much I could bring up about that and never make a dent in it. I feel like everyone is trying to seem really sensitive and upset about the whole thing to prove that we’ve not all gotten so used to terrible mass shootings lately…plus I think some of the Mommies are competing in their sadness and outrage (and are also SOOO inconvenienced by the protective measures that THEY THEMSELVES ARE DEMANDING…) – plus some of them seem to be spending a good bit of time reminding the childless that we CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND.

I’m not a fan of guns (duh). I’ve generally found that people who ARE fans of guns are assholes about it.

Once, when I was 22, a friend of mine got a “job” travelling with the Barenaked Ladies tour working for the charities that set up tents/booths outside the show. Because of my love of BNL, she got me a one-night job doing that with her when they played at Pine Knob. I no longer can recall what the charity we were working for was called, but the basic idea had nothing to do with gun control…they wanted us to talk to people and advocate that they HAVE A CONVERSATION with their kid’s friends’ parents (and other adults who host or look after their children) about the presence of guns in the house…and if there are guns in the house, are they locked up? Kids accidentally shoot each other in the face playing with guns they find in their own homes or their friends’ houses or whatever ALL THE TIME. (I really have no idea how often, but you know what I mean.) Basically, it’s worth asking about and you can do whatever you want once you’re informed…but you would have thought we were prying their guns out of their hands and melting them down in front of them…and as you can imagine, we were two of the softest-spoken unassertive nerdy girls in the place at the time. We took some serious abuse. At a Barenaked Ladies concert. Trying to talk about keeping kids safe, with no mention of getting rid of guns or making them less available. Awesome.

So this past weekend, I did not engage any pro-gun people in debate, at least not on purpose…partly because, you know, what’s the point, and partly because there are so many other factors in what happened and I don’t even know what happened and I’m not going to read more about this and the teacher ladies trying to stop the gunman or trying to protect the kids or hugging the kids while they died, etc. I’m just not…and yet I can’t even escape those things because they are EVERYWHERE and MOSTLY INACCURATE reports that are sent out without any verifying or anything…

Anyway, so this business happened:

After I got called an idiot and a bimbo by some random on the internet (who’s not even that random, I guess, he’s a friend of a friend, so it’s not like I was an anonymous redditor or something), I sat and contemplated what my response should be for a while. Really, what stuck out was that the person attacking me appears (from his profile picture) to actually be a “middle-aged white dude with vigilante fantasies who has armed himself like it’s Red Dawn” (Here’s his profile picture a little blown up but still (I think) made unidentifiable):

Awesome. That’s pretty much all I can say about that.

I wasn’t insulted by this dude calling me a bimbo and an idiot. I was upset that this random dude thought that was appropriate. I’m not the most proper person in the world, by any means, but the way people act online (see any comments on any article, ever) is GROSS. I’m definitely an old, but Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, people don’t realize what there are OTHER PEOPLE out there. It reminds me of how they say that when people drive, they don’t usually think about the other drivers being PEOPLE…who maybe are having a bad day or whatever…they just see another CAR.

My outlook was not improved by reading about all the people who were tweeting terrible racist things (use your imagination) when NBC preempted Sunday Night football for the President’s remarks at a memorial service for the Sandy Hook victims.

ARE YOU FREAKING SERIOUS?

“Hey THE INTERNET, I think we can communicate on a higher level.” Also, I think we can all have common decency if we try REALLY HARD. Ugh.

I’m actively moping and gaining weight/not exercising and approximately 3 seconds away from crying at any point any day (this probably has a SAD component as well, bite me and my growing large ass, except for the part where said fatness makes me MORE miserable and it’s a feedback loop of awful). Also, as soon as all my people who live out of town who are coming to NW Ohio for the holiday have visited with me and gone home, I’m taking a vacation from Facebook for a while (and starting a Whole30/exercise plan to try and “snap out of it”).

I’m so in a funk and also exasperated.