Watching the Brewers game last night was a good test of my baseball-watching abilities. Spouse was asleep, but I was able to follow almost (but not quite) everything going on.

Having the sound off helped a lot. Commentary can be very distracting.

Spouse stayed awake long enough to teach me how to read that little info bar with the balls & strikes & all that shit. That was all I needed.

I passed the exam! I have now completed the prerequisite to watching the World Series! 🤣

Perhaps I should feel a little sorry for my sister though, who relocated from Iowa to South Carolina.

Those Southern states often have a much stricter concept of who is allowed to belong vs. somewhere like Wisconsin where (in my experience) people seem significantly more willing to accept that if you want to claim it as your home & take pride in it, then it's your home.

Goddammit. I watched a sports game last night & felt emotionally invested in the outcome.

This can't be right.

It did help that Spouse had the sound off. I don't have any interest in listening to sports commentary.

Actually it was kind of funny, because he was exhausted & kept falling asleep, but *I* watched the entire game.

The Brewers are in the playoffs with a very good chance of beating the Dodgers (4 more games to go, I think), & I'm experiencing something very weird in my marriage.

It's happened more than once now that I have said "maybe tonight's a good night for sex" & Spouse has turned me down because the Brewers are playing.

I'm not mad. He's just never turned me down for *baseball* before.

Oh no! What if they make it to the World Series?

Jesus Christ. The midterms are going to be a true horror show.

These people are not playing the Democracy Game anymore.

It's hard to fuck with the actual votes. It's hard to convincingly, at large scale, fake the *actual* votes in these elections.

There are, however, lots of possible ways to disqualify votes. They could just declare that certain ballots don't count & certain votes are fake & refuse to count them. George W pulled that off. This Supreme Court would be happy to agree to that.

New thing I'm trying:

Letting people misunderstand me.

No, really. If I say something that is incomprehensible to them or they misinterpret, if I don't need them to understand me & it isn't important to anything, I just let them misunderstand.

Not when I'm trying to have genuine communication with a friend about something of weight or importance, but if it's a remark I made that someone didn't understand, that's fine. I don't have to put in extraordinary effort to make myself comprehensible.

God. I hate having to use my personal device as an authenticator for work.

I'm getting issues logging on to the company network that I'm pretty sure are related to my phone system being "out of date", but I don't fucking WANT Android 17 on my fucking phone. It's filled with AI garbage.

As things click into place, I'm starting to suspect one of the reasons why my brother thinks his life is so hard & that it's still falling apart 6 years after his wife left is that he STILL hasn't fully realized that if he doesn't have a woman doing all the domestic shit for him, then HE has to do it.

Like...it seems like he's confused by how hard adult life is. He thinks there is supposed to be an easier version.

When I got divorced I didn't lose my maid/babysitter. I WAS the maid.

Honestly, if you hear a marginalized person talking about their experiences, you do NOT need to explain that we all have it bad, actually.

"All lives matter" is kind of the Ur-example of this, but it comes in all flavors.

We're all living in the dystopia, ok? We're not really doing great collectively. We all know this. It's ok for marginalized people to talk about things without thinking about *you* experience. Really, it is.

Thanks all for listening to my family rants. 🫡

I process best through the written word, & I have also been told by several people at this point that I am the only person they have ever seen writing from personal experience about the effects of inter-sibling conflict.

So I share this shit because I dunno, I guess we're all figuring out how to deal with people. A lot of us have difficult experiences with family that take a lot of processing.

If you're considering becoming a parent, please be aware that parenting is exhausting & difficult.

I'm not telling you not to have kids.

It's just that when you make the choice to have a child, you are making the choice to make your life harder. You may find it very fulfilling, & you may love your child very much, but you will have to WORK SO HARD. Just know that going in.

Make an informed choice.

Although as I think about it some more, when I see the ways he seems to be drifting away, I wonder if he does want his family to "give up" on him so that he can feel a little less guilt about giving up on his daughter.

I dunno...

I could be wrong, but maybe if he could "prove" that people always give up when the going gets tough, that would buy him an excuse.

Not a good one, mind you. He's been in "crisis" for 15 years, & we've been there for him.