25hourenergy

Ha, love that cartoon. Our poor ancestors. I’m Chinese-Taiwanese American and have often had to correct/reassure people here in the US that not all Chinese like weird exotic meat and believe in stupid superstitions using endangered animal parts etc. It’s not too different with how there are a few people here in the South who like armadillo meat, there are local old cookbooks with recipes for it, but most of us will not go near it and even recognize that they carry leprosy...

Huh that’s what it is! One Halloween a friend’s theater-actor boyfriend invited me to his production, which was a sort-of haunted house with little scenes in different areas that played out in different ways depending on how you interacted with the actors. It was cool and bewildering.

During the winter storms we lost power while I was alone with a toddler and pregnant, no other power sources and we lost potable water for a while too. Then we lost power for over 24 hours during lightning storms about a month ago while my newborn son needed at-home bililights for jaundice and I needed a power source for my breast pump so my boobs didn’t get infected, plus it turns out my toddler now had some trauma from when lights go off and is now a blanket hoarder.

Power went off briefly the night before last and I was about to start throwing shit and start screaming in the street. Fortunately it only lasted a few minutes that time but yeah, I think my family will have some lingering effects. We’re not going to have “normal” reactions to power outages anymore.

Just wanted to say thank you for this. I’m an Episcopalian moving around the South and sometimes I feel like I’m at the only tiny church in a sea of charismatic/fundamentalist Christians who isn’t obsessed with Revelations and condemning/victimizing themselves. Even some of the Episcopal churches seem stuck about 30 years behind in some of these places just due to the culture they’re embedded in. It really does feel like a predatory form of Christianity sometimes.

I asked this during my confirmation lessons and was told “it would make an interesting thesis”—could the commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" be interpreted as not fear mongering and preying on the weak in His name, doing things like the Westboro Baptist protests in His name, or waging religious wars in His name (when the real motive is things like land/politics/money like with much of the Crusades?) And why isn’t this major commandment discussed more, over things like efforts to reinterpret random Biblical details to support views for/against LGBTQ or abortion?

We’re military, this is our first winter here (in South Texas, where we did not expect a snow storm, and I’ve even gotten rid of a snow shovel a few moves back because it was too bulky to move with), and we’ll move again in another year. We move a lot. Movers don’t move generators, and we’re renting. Not everyone can feasibly have a generator.