Not So Thankful

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 13 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My subject is: What is something you AREN'T thankful for? 

It was submitted by: http://www.notthatsarahmichelle.blogspot.com.

 

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I was super glad I didn't have to talk about what I am thankful for. Seriously. I just knew with it being November, it would probably come up in my prompts. It's been a tough few months around my household, and while I do try to focus on the good things, I really didn't want to get all fake and make it seem like I have my shit together. I don't. Not by a long shot. Everyone else will be doing their 30 Days of Thanks like it's a competition to see who has the greatest life and I will be over here eyerolling so hard I look like I need an exorcism. And maybe I do. That might explain a lot. 

So here in all its glory is a list of things I am not thankful for this year.

· Working in retail hell

· People who shit in the sink at our store and leave it

· That woman who watched her child throw up in our floor at work and just left it laying there.

· Men who think it’s appropriate to loudly comment on my tits while I’m making minimum wage to smile at them.

· Men who feel they need to tell me to smile more

· People who feel it’s their duty to treat anyone in a service position like absolute dog shit just because we have to take it with a smile.

· The fact that 2016 decided it was THE year that everyone would die.

· Bill collectors

· Minimum wage being absolutely disastrously low

· This clusterfuck of an election

· People who still don’t get what cultural appropriation is

· People who think that being politically correct is a sign of weakness instead of realizing it is about respect

· The phrase “all lives matter”

· Locker room talk and its acceptance

· Cases like Brock Turner where the future of a rapist is more important than making sure he never rapes again

· Boxes with like 50,000 cans of Vienna sausages in them

· Sky shelves

· White people wearing corn rows and getting featured in magazines

· Lil Wayne

· Ignorant Halloween costumes

· Cranberry sauce in a can

· Underwire poking out of my bra while I’m at work because that’s just the perfect fucking time to deal with even more bullshit, eh?

· Walmart registers that refuse to scan printable coupons

· Coupons (it’s a love-hate relationship)

· Having not quite straight but not quite curly hair

· Hot dogs

· That one kind of person who feels it’s absolutely necessary to tell me I will regret my tattoos

· Answering the questions: “are those real?” and “did they hurt?” about my tattoos multiple times a day

· Seeing on average 120 people in 4 ½ hours on a cashiering shift

· Remakes, shitty ones anyway. Michael Bay ruined my childhood.

· Ashy elbows

· 100% humidity

· THE SUN

· Not having multiple Halloweens per year

· Lost. Not being lost but the series Lost that took so much of my fucking time just to end that way.

· Cliffhangers. My heart can’t take it. My anxiety can’t take it.

· Oh. Yeah. Anxiety period.

· My child being a hurricane.

· Climate change deniers.

· Fox News

· Being lactose intolerant. I just want a fucking bowl of frosted flakes that tastes like it’s supposed to. Is that so much to ask?

· Adventure Time and Regular Show coming to an end

· Pokemon Go costing money. FUCKERS!

· Survey apps. They never do a damn big of good.

· Generic Cheez Its. No. Just no.

· Sports. Whatever, man.

· Patronizingly pink tools

· The Walking Dead. I AM SO DONE.

· Makeup not being made for pale people. Im tired of looking like Donald Trump. Orange is not a natural color, yall.

· Hairballs.

· Being self conscious

· Pretending not to be self conscious

· Body con dresses

· Being financially unable to be more conscientious about what I buy… coffee, chocolate, clothes, food, whole department stores… they all take further advantage of marginalized populations

· Politicians

And finally because who has the time to read my entire list… crazy relatives.

So yeah… I have a list just as long of things I am absolutely thankful for, but as I said, it’s nice to be honest and vent about all the things we avoid bitching about during the holiday season. That’s life. Balance. There are as many pros as cons, and sometimes one outweighs the other. It’s absolutely good and necessary to find the good in life even if it’s only small things, the little things, but I also think it’s vital to be open, honest, and (when possible) humorous about the things that you don’t care for, the cons, the negatives, the things giving your trouble in your life at the time. Burying them to act like life is perfect on social media isn’t going to help anybody. Keep it real. And have a good Thanksgiving.

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Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

Baking In A Tornado http://www.bakinginatornado.com/2016/11/secret-subject-swap-serial-wanderer.html

Not That Sarah Michelle http://notthatsarahmichelle.blogspot.com

The Bergham Chronicles http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com

Spatulas on Parade http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com

Confessions of a part time working mom http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2016/11/november-secret-subject-swap-meltdown.html

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver http://www.thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog.html

The Lieber Family Blog http://thelieberfamily.com

Dinosaur Superhero Mommy http://dinoheromommy.com/

A Little Piece of Peace http://little-piece-of-peace.blogspot.com

Never Ever Give Up Hope http://batteredhope.blogspot.com

Evil Joy Speaks http://www.eviljoyspeaks.com

Not So Happy Reunion

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 15 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My “Secret Subject” is:

High school reunion. You are not only expected to attend but to get on stage and talk to your former classmates about real life after school. Share your speech with us!

It was submitted by: http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch

Just so you know, this probably wasn't the kind of prompt that goes well for somebody like me. Consider this your fair warning. 

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Growing up in rural South Georgia as a bit of a weirdo, a social outcast, didn’t necessarily give me good experiences in high school.

Allison from John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club was my teenage spirit animal. In a way, she still is.

I had hippie parents growing up that had been more into records and drugs (the latter part was true for my dad not my mom) than Jesus and football. We didn’t spend Sundays dressing up to go to social hour at church only to dress down and worship the pigskin afterwards. It was a bit of anomaly here in the Bible belt where high school football teams get police escorts and the principal of our high school openly talked about Jesus at every pep rally.

I can’t say that I didn’t have friends. I did. The lot of us had very little in common and looked, at least on the outside, like the Misfit Toys from that old Rudolph Christmas special. Our common bond was the fact that we didn’t fit in anywhere else. We weren’t nerds though many of us were intelligent. We weren’t jocks though some of us could play sports. We definitely weren’t princesses though some of us had a little queen in us. And, there was a little bit of a criminal in a few of us. Weirdos. That’s what we were and in a lot of ways that’s what I still am.

In school that mattered more than it does now. I made a conscious effort to make sure everyone knew I didn’t want to fit in. I rebelled. I wore black lipstick and laughed when someone asked me if I was a witch. Rumor had it that I sacrificed goats at lunch. I was a vegetarian at the time, and I let the rumor get to me. The times that I was called dyke bothered me. The note that was stuffed into my locker featuring crudely drawn dicks and magazine cut-out letters that told me to take my fag friends to San Francisco where they belonged bothered me. Every time my friends, who did happen to be gay, were mocked and threatened, it bothered me. The whole thing was a massive trial in just how much a person can be tested, I think. I was coming out of an abusive home and recovering from a rape that took my virginity, and none of the people, you all, that pointed and laughed and spread gossip on a daily basis bothered to get to know that. The more you pointed, the more outlandish I got like it was a competition to see who would break first.

There is some part of me that would like to think I won, but the truth of it is that it just stopped mattering. I started going to college full time when I was a high school senior and never really looked back.

I had friends that would have probably walked by my side in school if I had shown up in an alien mask and an Elvis jumpsuit, and I still have some of those friends today. Outside of learning and increasing my knowledge, the only thing that matters are those friendships I made, the connections I still have, and the fact that I know in my time there I took up for people around me I loved whenever they were as heavily picked on as I was. That’s what I learned about life after school—that the things that happened there really were inconsequential. I was already going to be the strong free spirit I am today, and no amount of hillbilly finger-pointing was going to change that.

The thing of it is, a lot of us still live in this same town, a lot of us see each other on a regular basis running errands and picking up groceries, and I smile and wave and accept the friend requests on Facebook because life is a lot more complicated than bullying and high school dances and football games, and sometimes we have to play the part even when we don’t want to. But, I don’t have to stay here and party down at this reunion with people that never gave a shit to know me when we were kids, and I’m not going to. Who wants to celebrate with a bunch of assholes that I never should have let bother me in the first place, assholes that, once high school was over, really didn’t make an impact on my life whatsoever?

Now you guys can all go fuck yourselves because life after high school doesn’t involve giving a shit about what you all are doing.

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That's the way she goes. 

Alright, be sure to check out the other contributions to the Swap below. Enjoy!

http://www.BakingInATornado.com Baking In A Tornado

http://themomisodes.com The Momisodes

http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/ Spatulas on Parade

http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com/ Sparkly Poetic Weirdo

http://www.southernbellecharm.com Southern Belle Charm

http://thelieberfamily.com The Lieber Family Blog

http://batteredhope.blogspot.com Never Ever Give Up Hope

http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch Confessions of a part time working mom

http://www.someoneelsesgenius.com Someone Else’s Genius

http://www.clutteredgenius.com Cluttered Genius

http://www.smalltalkmama.com Small Talk Mama

http://www.renasworld.com/ Rena’s World

http://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com Climaxed

http://dinoheromommy.com/ Dinosaur Superhero Mommy

http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com/ The Bergham’s Life Chronicles