And now it is June

I wish I had some Wite-Out.

Housemate gets a lot of charity spam in her physical mailbox. One item she got late last year was a free calendar from the National Audobon Society. She already had a calendar for 2025, so she offered me that one; I was pretty broke, so my usual preference of buying a wall calendar was not going to happen, so I accepted it. Plus, birds. What nature nut doesn’t like having birds on their wall?

Maybe the silly ones. Other than them, though.

Well, Audobon has clearly jumped the fucking shark when it comes to the gender-identity issue. I already changed the thirty-first of March to International TERF Day, and now I see I’m going to want to edit the June first entry. Because they couldn’t just label it Pride Month, no. They had to label June as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month.”

I mean, I would leave the last two words. What the actual fuck.

I want to rant some more about that choice of words, but I just don’t have the spoons.

Because we are all tired of that topic, let me answer the question of “Why do you even want a wall calendar, Dana? Google Calendar is a thing.” That is a very good question. Have you ever stopped to consider that in order to even look at Google Calendar, you’ve got to go through several intermediate steps?

Step one: Pick up your phone or turn on your computer (or just bring up the screen; how many of you ever turn off your desktop or laptop? I don’t much)

Step two: Open your Google folder if on your phone; open a browser if on a computer

Step three: Open the Google Calendar app if on your phone; visit the Google Calendar website if on a computer

(FYI I am aware that a smartphone is also a computer. Yes, it is. Try not to miss my actual point though)

And if you’re lucky, you don’t need any additional steps to actually look at the overall month. But often, you do because it’ll be set on a day view or a week view instead.

Now, how many steps do you need to look at a paper calendar on the wall? Step one: Stop looking at your fucking phone and turn your head and look at the wall. Bam. Done.

It is also super easy to write an appointment on that thing. I still input appointments into Google Calendar, mind you, but the only reason I do that is it will spit out reminders on my phone and I’ll get alerts for them. But if I don’t need to be alerted, I usually don’t bother. It is enough to be able to glance up and see it written on the paper calendar.

Plus, a paper calendar is an elegant solution to the damn-near-universal I Like Too Much Art And Don’t Have Enough Blank Walls problem. Which is why I normally buy them instead of just scrounging for a free one. For a lot of years, I was into the We’Moon calendar but these days I don’t trust that all their “female artists” are actually female artists, so I don’t know if I will do that again. The most recent feminist calendar I purchased was Birdy Rose’s, but she blocked me on Facebook and I still don’t know why (I suspect for my pro-choice stance; I hear she’s staunchly anti-abortion), so we won’t be doing that again. Might be I’ll just design my own. Pardon me while I laugh hysterically at myself.

Oh, shit. I was right. I just looked at We’Moon’s about page and they’re platforming fucking men now and pretending that they’re women. Okay, I really am done. FUCK YOU.

I gotta say that it doesn’t surprise me though. We’Moon is Neopagan-adjacent, and one reason the Neopagan community were sitting ducks for gender identity is that they’ve always believed womanhood is a feeling in a person’s head. The movement has always pushed stereotypes over reality, right on down to what it sees as the essential nature of Goddess and God. Before I saw people in the community arguing that people with penises were literal women, I saw a gay man arguing that he should be able to be selected May Queen because he had enough “feminine energy” for the job. To make matters even dumber, many prominent Neopagans have long argued that embodied spirituality is an important counterbalance to Abrahamic body vs. soul duality. Okay, I agree with that, BUT: how the fuck are you “embodied” when you reduce an aspect of embodiment to a thought in a fucking man’s head? You’re not. You’re in fucking la-la land. You’re a loony fucking space-case. This was one of many reasons I ultimately distanced myself from the community. If you can even call it that, and I fucking wouldn’t. They sniped at one another constantly.

But anyway.

And now for some randomness.

So, today was my paternal grandmother’s birthday. Her name was Ethel June, and the June was because her birthday fell today. She would have been 102 this year. Good lord. Her second husband, my grandfather, was even older: born in 1909. And it’s weird how family birthdays can cluster. (My wasband, his mother, his grandmother, and our son all have March birthdays. My paternal half-brother, his mother, her mother, his son, and our paternal grandmother all have birthdays in May and June. My youngest maternal half-brother and my maternal grandparents all had birthdays in July. My other maternal half-brother, my daughter, my mother and father, and I all have birthdays ranging from October to January. And on and on.)

I came to a decision about my Facebook stuff. I have decided to adhere to Dunbar’s number when it comes to Facebook friends. That number is one hundred and fifty, which I am at right now. So when new people come in, I roll old people off (not LITERALLY old people, unless they are, but that’s not why). I don’t have a rigid set of criteria for who gets to stay, but if it’s someone I never hear from or if all they ever post is mindless crap, they’re on the short list to get the boot.

Stuart’s next on that list. I should have made him gone already but weirdly, I still like him on some level, and I haven’t figured that out but I’m pretty sure it’s along the lines of I have felt singularly unliked and unloved for four fucking years now and if I could just get this one person to change his mind about me, maybe I’d be worth something. I also like what I’ve seen of him as a person, flaws and all. None of that really fucking matters, because he’s been inflicting the silent treatment on me for months. No reason given; in fact, the couple times we addressed it, he gaslit me — oh no, I like and respect you, I’m just busy. Too busy to just have a normal conversation like two people who’ve actually fucking met in person and should be friends by now. I hear more from Neighbor than I do from him, and Neighbor actually is busy. Stu’s little game, in fact, reminds me too much of Matt which, honestly, is the kiss of death anymore. Really I only haven’t unfriended him up til now because the last time I did that, he got furious and blocked me AND there’s a risk, however small, that he might come to town sometime this year and then I’d possibly have to interact with someone who blocked me on Facebook for bruising his ego. Even if that doesn’t happen, when he figures out what I’ve done, he’s going to paint it as I wasn’t really his friend when actually, he’s been the one not acting like a friend. Multiple times. He’s been doing this monkey dance of Ha Ha, I’m Not Talking To You while simultaneously interacting with our mutuals right in front of my face. No amount of my expressing my feelings about it, nicely or not, is going to help. I already tried and it changed nothing. This does not bode well even if he did get the fuck over himself tomorrow and start interacting with me again; we have now established I can’t trust him. I don’t know who it is that I’m missing, but it isn’t him. It is some sort of act. I am tired of seeing it and so fairly soon, I won’t anymore. I am giving myself a structure within which it makes sense to drop him and won’t look quite so arbitrary. Because I still care too much what people think of me. I guess?

In other news, I am seriously white-knuckling it these days. One of the big draws for me coming here is now gone: the free-meat deal is done. It was a fantastic deal, and even quite ecological in nature, since we were gleaning castoffs. It certainly was a major factor in my more-than-fifty-pound weight loss since my diabetes diagnosis in March of last year, as well as my current excellent control of my disease. (I have NORMAL fasting sugar now. Not diabetes-normal. NORMAL normal.) It also meant I could earn some spending money (no, not selling the meat, but some chores related to the general logistics). That’s all gone now. Back to zero.

If I still had my car, I would worry a little less. I didn’t trust that car to make it all the way here from Louisiana; once we were here I didn’t think it would pass smog, and insurance is always expensive if you’re broke. Now at least, if it had held together, I could have earned money doing delivery and in the worst-case scenario, I could have lived in it again. I don’t like that, but I am willing to do it if I need to. Now I don’t even have that option.

I have one possible out at this point, and I might even have a job opportunity there, but it will require me to leave California. I don’t know if I can actually make that happen or if I even want to. But if it’s going to happen then it’s better if it happens sooner rather than later. The DGR conference is coming up in August and the housemate needs time to find another live-in dogsitter. And I need that $120 for next month’s half-utilities more than she does; if nothing else, I can use it for work clothes if I do find a “normal” job. If I’m not even here, that whole debate goes away.

Well, we’ll see. I have babbled on long enough for this post and I’ve got other things to do. ‘Later.

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EDIT: Fixed a couple rather important errors. Soz.