Ok But I Personally Do Like Owls

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This month 4 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:

What is the WORST present you’ve received?

It was submitted by: https://thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog

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I read an article a couple months ago that has stuck with me for awhile. It was unrelated to gifts actually and instead about weird or shocking deathbed confessions. 

One woman, near death, was surrounded by family who took the time, finally, to ask her what was the deal with owls. She had a house full of owls. Little figures and wall hangings and bigger sculptures and salt shakers and pillows... She had literally hundreds. Her answer? She didn't really like owls all that much to be honest. She'd bought one thing with an owl on it one time at a secondhand shop because she found it cute and every time she got a gift thereafter, it was an owl. For decades of her life she was surrounded by things she didn't really like all that much because she wanted the people who gave them to her to not feel bad, so she kept it to herself and displayed them over and over and over for all of her adult life. Finally on her dying breath she was free to tell the truth. She wasn't going to be there to face the hurt and bewilderment they'd feel for having not ever really bothered to get to know what she was actually into... The problem is sort of two fold here because maybe it would have been better to tell people the truth but I think the way we socialize women to be grateful for every speck of love they can grab onto, maybe she gets more of a pass than people who could have asked her at any time what she might like for a present. She was grateful for any gift. And I can understand that sentiment. We've also been taught to be grateful to be thought of at all.

I thought about writing a gothic horror about a woman being buried alive under her Nightmare Before Christmas knick knacks. I thought about writing about the few really bad gifts I've gotten like a ring from an ex as an apology for being a piece of shit, a last ditch effort at saving a relationship that he couldn't have saved without finally growing up some. Or the time my stepmom grabbed a $5 set of plastic earrings for kindergartners and gave it to me from my dad for Christmas when I was 16, for example. But I wanted to say it plainly instead of a metaphor in a story or talking about one gift because the problem is bigger than that. I see it all the time. We see one thing about a person and make it their whole personality instead of getting to know the real them. People are complex. I mean yes I do enjoy watching the Nightmare Before Christmas because Henry Selick is a fucking genius, an artist, absolutely crushingly underrated, but I also like everything else he's done. I like movies that aren't about animated skeletons or Halloween as shocking as it may be. I have a couple of very simple elephant tattoos BUT I ALSO LIKE OTHER ANIMALS which 3 cabinets of trinkets later would also shock some folks. I used to be able to have alcohol occasionally but really haven't been able to since getting sick with chronic fatigue syndrome. I've been sick for going on 7 years now and people still tag me in wine memes. I've openly talked about not being able to drink and not just once or twice...

The thing of it all... it IS nice to be thought of in any capacity but it also really fucking sucks to realize no one bothered to think of the real me only some version that they've created in their own minds so far from who I really am that it couldn't pass for my evil twin from the mirror realm. It's not like I hide what I like or who I am. A million times a month I probably share something I'd love to get myself if I had the extra money. I talk about things that are important to me. I live as authentically online as I do around people I see everyday. My family has easy access when they want to know what I'm into. It's all there online like some weird vision board for most to see. I'll answer anytime someone asks actually. Sit with me longer than 5 minutes and I will inevitably say something incredibly gay. It's all hanging out. 

I recently stopped writing a person I'd spent 4 years trying to help. Yes, a person in prison. I helped him work through some deeply wrong ideas he held about women including a specific ex girlfriend and his own mother. I got them to connect with one another about those thoughts he had and work through them together. I got him to appreciate fiction for the first time in his life. He even wrote a story! Just for fun. I had a visible impact on his life because I listened when he told me things and listened in between and we really did the work to pick it all apart. We aren't writing because he overstepped some serious boundaries but leading up to that point he sent me some things for Christmas last year that gave me a bit of a head scratch. A lot of guys at his prison crochet and sell what they make to other guys to send to family, friends, and girlfriends or whoever and he sent me an Olaf from frozen and a minion. I haven't even seen frozen. Ever. Not once. Never mentioned either movie. And like i have said a million times already yes it's nice to be thought of but it wasn't like he chose these things because he knew I'd like them. He just sent them to say he sent something and it showed all that time we'd been friends and through all the hard conversations we had and the work we did, he hadn't ever really got to know me. It wasn't really a surprise when my boundaries were violated. The version of me living in his head would fall head over heels because of a Disney plush, right? Obviously. And so then she'd totally be receptive to advances she'd spent years clearly spelling out she wouldn't cross. Great plan, right? Only I'm not that person, and the rejection made him angry, so now he's out a friend as well.

The point I want to make is to tell people. Tell them who you are loudly and lovingly. Tell them you don't want another owl. It's fine. No one should die surrounded by hundreds of trinkets they never loved that took endless amounts of work to keep clean. But more importantly, ask what the people you love are into, listen to them. Find out about the things they love no matter how silly you find it. No matter how at odds it is with the version of them you already created. Life is too short to do anything else.

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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 https://www.BakingInATornado.com

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver https://thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/

One Thing

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 7 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:

What is one thing you could start doing today to improve the quality of your life?

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

Probably not what anyone would think of as appropriate for 4th of July week but it's honest. 

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The one thing I could do to improve my quality of life immediately is to move out of the United States.

I’m not exaggerating.

I have a chronic illness and no access to adequate or affordable insurance. I don’t have access to doctors who take my issues seriously undermining them both because I am a woman and because I am chubby. Women in this country experience so many issues in the healthcare system even when they do have a thin figure, insurance, and enough money to pay their copays. We have a higher rate of being underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and with harassment from healthcare workers. All of it adds up to me not at all being able to get adequate care. I need a fair healthcare system, one that isn’t rife with misogyny. I need universal healthcare. I need doctors who are actually educated on my disorder and who take the issues I face seriously. I need doctors who are educated on the new research involving weight, how weight is often out of people’s control and not remotely tied to every single health issue a woman might face. I’ve gone to the doctor for colds, literally, and had them blamed on me needing to lose weight. How is that at all the kind of healthcare system that works for people?

The United States doesn’t even rank in the top 20 when it comes to women’s equality. Pay rates, healthcare, programs… we are seriously lacking in every regard when it comes to women having an even playing field with men while our government remains dominated by men and often by women who pander to the male demographic by denying the issues that social sciences prove to exist.

Capitalism relies on extreme poverty and homelessness to function. Economic theorists have found this to be a certainty. Without people to show how terrible it can be when you don’t “work hard” people refuse to take the lowest pay for the hardest work. That's the way capitalism works. We lack the social programs that prevent these issues that other countries have. It’s not even about socialism. We can look to the Scandinavian countries to see that if the United States is hellbent on having capitalism (which I don’t think works not as it is here and perhaps not at all), it can do so with a heavy foundation of social programs that put its most vulnerable populations on better footing. I’m disabled. I cannot work with the illness I have without risking being bedridden or worse for the rest of my life. I’m barely hanging on to not being completely homebound. I need a cane to get around my house because I insisted on working when I was initially sick and have gotten worse in the 3 years since this started. Being in this country is fucking terrifying. There are no safety nets for people like me. The amount of money I would have to pay and years I would have to wait to still be denied disability is outrageous, and our disability programs are constantly being threatened. People are cut off at random. And it’s never enough for people to actually get by. If I somehow found the money to make the kind of appointments and do the testing needed to prove I qualify for disability and keep it going for the years it takes (more than 3 on average) to finally get it approved, it would take years and years of disability to finally recoup the money I shelled out for specialists and testing and scans… And in my current situation, sure it would help but it surely wouldn’t alleviate my poverty. Not here. People literally die waiting on their disability. My dad did when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Being queer in this country is equally as terrifying right now. Sure, you’ll roll your eyes and say that we can get married. What else do we want? How about protections against being fired for being gay? Those don’t exist in many states and federal protections were rolled back under Trump. How about not being denied housing because we’re gay? Not being turned away from healthcare? Not being killed LEGALLY because of gay panic defense? Being able to adopt? Being able to shop without discrimination being disguised as “religious freedom?” Not being forced into conversion therapy by bigoted parents? Or kicked out of the house and put on the streets where the country doesn’t have any sort of programs to help out? The United States doesn’t even rank in the top 15 friendliest countries for the LGBTQIA+ population, and it’s no wonder. Violence continues with hate crimes against the community especially trans women of color. Murders, attacks, fear… what kind of life is that? We can’t even hold hands in public without fearing our safety much less live our lives out and happy. It’s absolutely a MOMENT when you see a gay couple living out and loud and not looking over their shoulder or minimizing their affection. It makes you feel so hopeful and so less alone, but it’s so fucking rare that it’s only ever really okay at pride and even then we encounter protestors who would like nothing more than to eradicate us from the world. We may have come a long way from where we were in the past several decades, but we already had so much more to go before this administration, and it’s not going to get any better any time soon.

At least 5% of America identifies openly as LGBTQIA+. As many as 1 in 5 have a disability with 1 in 10 actually having a severe disability. Half the fucking country almost is female. So while this may be a harsh critique of a country you love, for some of us, it’s a matter of the life, liberty, and happiness others already get without worry. If that’s you, great. But there is so much work left to do. We’ve been browbeaten with this idea that America is the greatest country in the world without fault and without complaint, but that’s hardly true. It may feel good to think in the moment when you’re a few drinks in, fireworks exploding in the background on Independence Day, but the rest of us are exhausted. The rest of us get nauseated when we see those displays of patriotism without criticism. We were founded on questioning what’s right and moral, but that stopped a long fucking time ago, and there are a lot of times I wish I could afford to be done with it all as it was made very clear to me that even though Guthrie sang about this country belonging to us all, there are far too many red-blooded Americans who want the population to look, act, and believe a certain way or we aren’t welcome here.

I’m tired of living where I’m not wanted and couldn’t get help if I was.

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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 https://www.bakinginatornado.com/2019/07/sobriquetless-secret-subject-swap.html

Wandering Web Designer https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog

Spatulas on Parade  https://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/2019/07/be-our-guest-be-our-guest-or-not-sss.html

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

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2019/07/secret-subject-swap-dream-car.html

Our Prime Years https://ourprimeyears.blogspot.com

Cultural Misogyny

Rejection has been a theme over the past week for good reason. Elliot Rodgers felt the need to gun down 6

people before turning the gun on himself because he was so often rejected by the opposite sex that he found it to be unfair and needed to punish those he thought were responsible for his unhappiness. He was rejected so often he became miserable, full of hate, and violent and decided the only way to right these wrongs was to take lives—to make people pay.

That’s tragic. It truly is. But, when it all comes down to it, rejection is not the real reason Rodgers committed the atrocious acts he did.

We’ve all been rejected at one time or another and many of us handle it well or somewhat well. But to dismiss this case as one where a mentally ill man couldn’t handle rejection completely ignores the underlying cultural issues at work that have been creating an antagonistic environment for women throughout history that continues, obviously, to plague us today. So, at face value, it may seem like this is a story about a lone mad man who couldn’t stand rejection and ultimately and tragically reacted with violence, but once you take a closer look at things, you being to see the sense of entitlement at work—an attitude that women can tell you is all too common in so many men with whom we have contact.

Rodgers said he wanted to kill women for never finding him attractive enough to fuck him and for ruining his

time at college. He wanted them to sleep with him but the fact that these women slept with other people made them sluts. It’s the double-edged sword issue that women have been facing for ages. If we’re sexually active, we’re sluts, but if we won’t sleep with someone, we’re prudes. It’s this cultural idea that we’re not in full ownership of our own bodies. Being in control of ourselves, doing what we want with who we want is such a foreign fucking concept that instead of being “allowed” to do what we want without commentary and with the same respect given to men in the same situations, we have people constantly policing our bodies and telling us what we should be doing with them.

To add to that, we’re expected to dole out sex to men who want to sex us without giving any thought to whether or not we’re attracted to the men in question.

No seriously. Think about it. Think about every fucking time you’ve heard the “friendzone” or heard a guy complaining that “nice” guys finish last…

In every single instance, if you really think about it, you have a man complaining that a female friend of his whom he attempted to hook up with through falsified niceties and friendship strategies had no interest in fucking or dating him. In essence, he cannot handle the fact that this person only thought of him as a friend (oh the fucking horror of actually being a friend to a woman) and was not sexually attracted to him. It is not a simple case of lack of attraction, it is now the fault of all women everywhere because we only want to fuck assholes who act like jerks and lie to us to try to get in our panties because we’re bitches.

But, wait…if this guy was putting on a bullshit act to be our friend just to try to get in our panties isn’t he the

asshole who lied to us? And we didn’t sleep with *him* so.... Kinda blows that theory right out of the water. It’s not seen that way though. All across media platforms the guy gets the girl. The hero gets his babe. The hook up always happens. In books. In television. In movies. Women are objects to be pursued not persons to be respected and certainly not people with whom to be platonic friends. Ultimately, we will come around, right, guys? We’ll jump on that dick before the end of the movie if you just push and push and push until we see the error of our ways. No means negotiate. “Let’s be friends” is a death sentence, and when it happens, it’s a reason to be angered and prove your manhood through namecalling and threats or through actual violence.

Or if you’re like my stalker, just keep on texting and tracking a girl down for going on 12 years even though she consistently ignores you. She’s bound to come around at some point.

Rejection sucks. It never feels great. There’s always a sting to it. But, the difference in feeling rejected and what Elliot Rodgers’ and many, many other men feel and believe is the idea that they’re somehow owed a woman’s affections--that the world owes it to them to bestow upon them the woman they want no matter how that particular woman feels about them. Rejection then turns into injustice and that attitude becomes wholly dangerous as we saw this past week and have seen numerous times before unfortunately.

The strong urge I have to add a not all men disclaimer in this piece to avoid the same bullshit I’ve experienced while talking about this on Facebook just goes to show how bad it’s gotten, too. We’re living in this world where women are consistently objectified and seen as conquests, where men feel justified in lashing out when a woman is not interested in being their plaything, and where seemingly decent guys feel the need to put their defenses up and scream and shout “not me” every time a woman attempts to share her experiences.

It has to stop. Women need to be heard so we can finally start addressing the misogynistic culture that

shapes people like Elliot Rodgers into murderers. We shouldn’t have to sleep with a man out of fear of being slaughtered or raped for saying no. We shouldn’t have to be afraid to go on a date or be approached by a man in a fucking parking lot. We shouldn’t have men trying to shut us up when we want to share what we’ve gone through and what other women go through. I was told before I wrote this that men don’t have it easy and that blaming certain actions on culture doesn’t address that. But, no one has an easy life. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to be a series of challenges and obstacles that help you grow. The problem right now is that we live in a culture where on top of the experiences we all have in life that challenge us to be stronger, women of all races and ages and sexual orientations face these unique-to-us situations that make life harder and scarier than it has to be and, at every turn, bringing about awareness on this issue gets shut down.

And that’s fine. I’ll just get louder.

Who’s with me?

This has been part of Sunday Confessions with More Than Cheese and Beer. The prompt was rejection. Check out hers and the rest of the contributors' posts! It's always fun to see how each person takes and interprets their posts.