Lurker's Corner

Me: (pro-vax rant)
Me: (paid for own shingles shot before insurance would cover it rant rant rant GO VAXX)
Troll: yr mom dint vax you agin chickenpox because she loved you! (drool derp buh wut?)
Me: (kinda steely eyed) By the time the chicken pox vaccine was in release, my chicken pox was five or six years in the past.

Why yes I still struggle with hiding my contempt for the anti-vaxx (vax? Is there a grammar here?) crowd; what wss your first clue?

First reaction: (doubleshots on the rigid digit to all the Millennials who think they invented creative analog organization)

Second reaction: have these kids never met Franklin Covey? (The guys who monetized the hell out of creative analog organization)

Third reaction: (realizes that, for the price of a blank book and some elbow grease, can out-flexible Franklin Covey six ways from Sunday & recalls that everything Millennials say or do must be analyzed through the lens of they have no money.)

So now I'm setting up a bullet journal for 2017. Pinterest ate my life today with ideas of things to track.

I'm turning 29 today...on Mars, anyway.

Some site like BuzzFeed or LifeHacker runs a list of trends "you're too old to wear."

You've never been young enough for more than half of them.

Scrolling through tumblr is, like bird, kitten, puppy dog!, feminist screed, kitty cat, moose, social justice warrioring, feminist screed...

Pause. (blink) These girls are discussing issues of consent and at least part of the audience isn't just waiting for them to finish venting, accept reality and shut up. I mean, there are jackasses rolling their eyes, but no one except trolls acting as if it isn't a serious discussion to be had.

If you don't know what I'm talking about? Good.

Someone found their mother's X-Files fanfiction.

Bury me deep.

I BLAME THEMARYSUE.COM for the $62 I just spent getting caught up on the first three weeks of Marvel's current iteration of Secret Wars, because I am well old enough to remember the original Secret Wars. That they happened 1984-85 means I was out of college and earning a paycheck as a full adult, which was geeky above and Beyonder for the Greed is Good crowd.

Now I'm 53 and hooked on comics again. To be fair to themarysue.com, I'd say Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr., have some culpability there, as well as everybody else.

Also, I have a pull bin again.

...in more ways than one.

Most of the people I follow are very young or Millenials with the occasional Gen-Xer and even rarer fellow Baby Boomer. It seems that the younger and more creative the individual, the less likely they are to fit any of the gender or sexual orientation definitions available when I was a wee lass.

When I was a kid (whacks geezer cane on the porch) you had your boys, your girls, your normal people who dug the opposite sex, those highly suspect boys who dug boys and Renee Richards.

We were gobsmacked by Renee Richards and (at the time) waffled between judging him/her/it a horrible attention whore and/or her a brave pioneer.

Me? I was (and am, see girly stuff tag) a not very girly girl with minimal interest in boys because boys were stupid and no interest in girls because ...no interest in girls. For years, I didn't even realize that could be a thing. By the time I did, I was already finding about a dozen more interesting things to do than pursue sex with other people at any given time.

Now, I'm sniffing around a brand new sexuality (asexual or gray sexual?) and trying to figure out the difference between genderqueer and genderfluid (no link because Wikipedia feeds directly back to genderqueer on that one and all the other sites are BLOCKED ZOMG SEX from my work LAN) and whether either of them applies to me because I revolt utterly against the picture of womanhood imprinted on me as a kid, am not sure the current picture really fits either and would rather be dragged backward over carpet tacks and dipped in rubbing alcohol than be a man.

Thanks, tumblr. I was just twiddling my thumbs, wondering what to think about in middle age before you came along.

NO, REALLY I WASN'T KTHNXBAI. 

So, I was poking around the retirement benefits page and wound up visiting my money at fidelity.com, as you do.

Fidelity has this perky new toolset to help users figure out whether they're ready to retire.

Fidelity: Try using our 8x rule of thumb!
Me: 8x what now?
(voice of MOM) : That means 8x whatever you think you need, o spendthrift
Fidelity: No, silly! It just means you need to have 8x your final year's salary saved in order to afford retirement in addition to (11ty billion other money things.)
Me: (gets out calculator) This year's salary x8 = a quarter of a million dollars short.

I'm trying not to use this as an excuse to get drunk and play the lotto a lot.

Or, y'know, Merry Everything and Happy always.

Me? I'm spending $$ at the amazon.com one day sale for the purposes of loading up any new devices one might have unwrapped this morning. The haul so far:

The Winter Sea
Susanna Kearsley
The Rose Garden
Susanna Kearsley
The Shadowy Horses
Susanna Kearsley
Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch)
Ann Leckie
2312
Kim Stanley Robinson

That's just the books. Here's the link to all of the digital content on sale today.

It's heavy on the romance because I already had most of the f/sf. I really hope I like Susanna Kearsley; the descriptions were good and it's that one-day-only thing that put me over the top. Because I am old: (1) I'm still appreciating all the clothes I got for Christmas at Thanksgiving from my mother; and (2) I am considering the ABBA and Neil Diamond greatest hits mp3 albums from the same amazon.com sale.

I'm going to count the nine quart Le Creuset Dutch French oven as my main Christmas gift to myself. It was 40% off! And the right size for boiling more than one head of cabbage for African Cabbage Stew! Plus for making large, freezable quantities of things, which is what I plan to be doing after I finish my diet Coke! And did I mention 40% off? Yeah, still trying to convince myself it wasn't foolish conspicuous consumption.

And how are y'all holidays going?