Every week under this administration feels like a month. Was the orange taint's speech really just this week? I didn't watch it, but I was very disappointed to hear that his insane blathering about transgender mice wasn't interrupted by a military coup, or more accurately, a military counter-coup. I do think that's where this is going to end after he refuses to follow the court orders against him and orders the military to attack our allies. I really hope the bulk of the military is more loyal to the constitution than to this self-proclaimed king. I bet it helps that he's shitting on veterans every chance he gets.

I also predict that we'll see proof that Musk rigged the election, and that's why the elected president, despite being an unparalleled narcissist, lets him act as the real president. An organization called Election Truth Alliance has identified anomalies in the vote tabulations and is raising money to sue for audits. I believe it's onto something because of what I just said and also because every Republicunt accusation is a confession and also because the orange taint, Musk, and Musk's little human shield have all made multiple very sketchy statements pointing in that direction and also because, as I said right after the election, it made no goddamn sense for the orange taint to win the popular vote and every swing state for the first time after his brain turned into cottage cheese and he couldn't keep people at his rallies. If the election was stolen, that's actually great news because it means he has less support than I thought and this country is less rotten to the core than I thought. And most of us actual people didn't deserve it, but on a macro level, the country sure did. It's 100% karma for decades of installing and propping up right-wing dictatorships in other countries. The US deserves to lose a lot of its global power and influence. It's just unfortunate that China will swoop in to fill the gap.

I've been in three protests since the protest I wrote about a week ago - one for democracy, one for science, one for women's rights. I've become a satirical film character. Right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley showed up again to the former, this time with four or five of his little douchebro friends in tow. The cops escorted them out after one of them disrupted the proceedings with a sign that said "Save Our Big Booty Latinas." (I had to quote the sign directly in case you're still under the delusion that these are decent people with a valid alternative point of view.) I'm grateful that when Salt Lake cops aren't shooting autistic teenagers for running away, ordering their dogs to attack compliant and motionless suspects, or hazing rookies by mutilating deceased homeless people, they sometimes do their job. In addition to protecting our constitutional rights because they're supposed to, some of them may actually be on our side because the orange taint pardoned a bunch of people who assaulted cops and Utah's Republicunt legislature just made it illegal for cops (and firefighters and teachers) to collectively bargain. Nick Shirley wasn't at the next two protests. Maybe the cops scared him, or maybe he has enough awareness in his tiny mind to realize that mocking science and women's rights is a bad look. I'm guessing the cops scared him.

My landlord has been banging and drilling and stuff next to my bedroom all week without warning me he was going to do that. Yesterday morning he had a plumber over and shut off the water without warning me he was going to do that. I just wanted to get that off my chest. I went to a hip-hop show with my little nieces before the protest, though, so that was fun. Oh yeah, and daylight savings time started today, so I anticipate that the next week will suck. Daylight savings time should be shot, run over with a truck, and shot a few more times. I got in trouble for writing that on Facebook once because Facebook is stupid.

​The other day I saw my brother-in-law on Instagram gloating about the richest man in the world illegally cutting off funds for millions of people in poverty. That was the moment I realized I officially hate most of my family. The cherry on top, of course, is that today he went to church and pretended to worship Jesus. I'm glad my church doesn't make sociopaths feel comfortable. This realization hurt like hell, but I got high and got over it by the next day. It's not like I had real relationships with most of my family in the first place. I currently feel closer to the great-grandmother I saw for a couple of hours every other year before she died in 2010 than I ever have to my parents. And it's not like I'm the first person who's experienced this. The civil war tore lots of families apart. I know my dad would have supported the confederacy because he's obsessed with states' rights and doesn't let marginalized people's suffering bother him.

On a more positive note, this past week I got to participate in two protests against everything most of my family stands for. Thanks to my self-determined work schedule and proximity to the Capitol, I can go to protests whenever I want. Here I am on Wednesday with my "White Dudes for Harris" cap. I had to get more use out of it somehow.

There was some unfortunate division after the protest had officially ended and most people had left. A transgender person got up and complained about all the American flags they'd seen, and they said they thought the only reason to bring American flags to a protest was to burn them, and they said we shouldn't be proud to be Americans, and they said the US has committed genocide against transgender people, and they chanted "FUCK AMERICA!" Two girls with American flags were still there, standing in the back, and they looked at each other awkwardly and soon left. I regret not talking to them to assuage any embarrassment they may have felt, and I hope they haven't been alienated from activism for good. I won't say the speaker was wrong to feel the way they did about the US. I understand. My faith in its fundamental goodness died on November 5. But my feeling is that this country exists, it will probably continue to exist for the foreseeable future in one form or another, and it will either get better or worse. Chanting "FUCK AMERICA!" won't make it better but will alienate people who would otherwise love to help make it better. Countries suck, all right? That's just how they are.

Oh yeah, and this picture went kind of viral. In case anyone is wondering, it's chalk, and it got washed off. As soon as it was discovered, the event organizer chewed us all out and said that vandalism is unacceptable and makes us look bad. It made for a badass picture, though. And the Venn diagram of people who will be outraged by this and people who think the January 6 rioters did nothing wrong is almost a perfect circle.

As I left the Capitol, I passed by like five counterprotestors, two of whom were filming us. I'm sure the footage of me and others flipping them off is now on Twitter with the caption "sO mUcH fOr ThE tOlErAnT lEfT." I don't care. They're owning themselves by showing the size of the anti-Trump movement in one of the reddest states in the US. I also knew as I marched that there was a non-zero chance of a MAGAt plowing his truck into us. That didn't happen, but at one point I saw someone drive really close and heard a thunk and a "That's what you get." I thought the driver had run over someone's foot, but apparently what actually happened is that someone punched his mirror off.

My old college friend Cece was there too. I hadn't seen her in... ten years? I don't remember.

Many of us returned to the Capitol afterward. I got a picture of my second-favorite sign. My first, which I regrettably didn't get, was "Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS."

So yeah, that was pretty great. Solidarity is how we'll survive the foreseeable future. (I want to say "the next four years," but that may be too optimistic.) We won't obey in advance. We won't be silenced. Nothing short of death will stop me from proesting again on March 1. Also, to get there and back, I rode the city train for the first time, and that was fun. I feel blessed to be able to ride a train.

On an unrelated note, this piece of shit came at me on Facebook the other day with "Democrats don't even know what a woman is" etc. etc. I contacted his fianceé and his employer. This is North Carolina, so probably neither of them care, but fingers crossed.

I've never felt less happy about the New Year. My country is almost certainly about to enter its darkest hour since the Civil War for no reason except that a majority of its voting citizens have no principles and are easier to brainwash than first graders. At this point, I sincerely believe the best-case scenario would be a bird flu pandemic disrupting President Musk's government and naturally selecting a big chunk of stupid out of the population. I'd rather not have a pandemic every five years, but oh well, at least I already have a remote job this time.

On the plus side, I beat the odds by living long enough to experience my country's death by suicide in the first place.

I published my new book on the last day of last year. I don't know how long I'll keep up publishing a book every year, but two is two more than I had two years ago. I could say a lot about this book, but there's no point because it's all in the introduction that you can read in the free sample.

A week ago, the LDS Church had its Relief Society (women's auxiliary) anniversary broadcast. The announcement was cringe. The women's meeting being led by a man is old news, but this time I also noticed that none of the female leaders have names. Sarcasm aside, I guarantee that most Mormons don't know what they are.

I can't believe that the church's PR department or correlation or whomever is still so tonedeaf that it didn't bother to suggest this token of basic respect that could be extended without having to change any of the sexist teachings or policies. I said something less inflammatory to that effect in a nuanced Mormon Facebook group, where dozens of women agreed with me while a man accused me of "white-knighting" and silencing any hypothetical women who may have disagreed with me. And women kept telling him he was wrong, but he just would not shut the hell up. He suggested that I should have let "someone with skin in the game," a woman, post about it instead. I want to go on public record stating that I do have skin in the game because women are people and I'm also a people. If you need something more specific, though, I have nieces being raised in this church, and I don't want them to settle for as little as their mother does. (I'm talking only about church stuff. That wasn't a jab at my brother-in-law.)

That was nothing to the controversy that would follow, though, because of course the sexist teachings and policies are still the real problem. The church received one of the biggest social media backlashes I've ever seen after it posted a quote from J. Annette Dennis, one of the female leaders whose name wasn't on the announcement.

First off, she conveniently says "that I know of" so you can't accuse her of being disingenuous if she just doesn't know much about other religions. Even without that caveat, her assertion is unfalsifiable because of circular logic. I'm pretty confident that Mormon priesthood power and authority are imaginary, but to believers, they're the only valid power and authority, so they automatically trump whatever other religions let women do. But even from that perspective, they're largely meaningless in this context. Women objectively don't need priesthood power or authority to do ministering assignments or anything else that they do in the LDS Church outside of the temple. When men perform priesthood ordinances, the belief is that those ordinances aren't valid in God's eyes without the priesthood, and that's reasonable enough on its own. But women don't perform ordinances outside of the temple. They only do things that they and any woman or man in any religion could do without the "priesthood." The women in my little Unitarian Universalist congregation do everything that the men do without any "priesthood." The LDS Church gives its women nothing and tells them that the nothing is something and the something is the most special thing ever.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise, then, that this claim that Mormon women have priesthood power and authority is only a decade old. It was a total retcon by Dallin Oaks in response to the Ordain Women movement. "We are not accustomed to speaking of women having the authority of the priesthood in their Church callings," he said in the April 2014 General Conference, "but what other authority can it be?" Hmm, I wonder why they weren't accustomed to speaking of it. Maybe because he just made it up to pacify feminists and dissuade them from demanding actual equality for a few more years. I wonder if he exchanged any tense words behind the scenes with Boyd Packer after his doctrinal innovation almost humorously contradicted what the latter taught in General Conference a few months before I was born:

This week has been a bleeping roller coaster. First, the highlights.

I've been trying to write some prequel short stories to go with my recently published novel, Crusaders of the Chrono-Crystal. It's been very difficult because I write two sentences, they're garbage, and I have no motivation to continue. This is not a new problem, so I thought back to how I've managed to finish short stories in the past. I remembered that in most cases, I wrote them for college classes, and the pressure of the deadlines and having to share with my peers eventually overrode the writer's block. So I sought out a local writing group and attended my first meeting this week. It was a nice meeting, but the real fun happened when several of us went to dinner afterward. I say "us" as if I'm part of the group already. Well, I feel like I am. They were very welcoming. The leader of the group is this surprisingly boisterous, outgoing guy who tells funny stories and keeps looking around to make sure you're paying attention to his funny stories and feeling included. He said traditional publishing is dying, so I don't need to feel self-conscious about self-publishing, and he suggested that I publish each of my short stories individually before publishing them in an anthology, to boost myself in Amazon's algorithms and drive more people back to my novel. Genius. Except now I have to somehow get fourteen cover arts instead of one.

I got a publicist for my recently published novel, Crusaders of the Chrono-Crystal. He reached out to me on Facebook and offered me a huge discount on his standard rate. Of course I was suspicious, but I verified that he's a real person who's worked with authors who have far more sales and reviews than I could ever get on my own. I don't have whatever it takes to make the universe stop ignoring me. I had a strategy of posting on this blog every week, building a following, and then telling my following to follow my book when I published it, but after almost nine years of posting on this blog every week, that strategy is clearly a bust. Just recently, I thought maybe after some of my friends buy the book and tell other people about how great it is, it will spread organically without the need for a bunch of advertising, and I guess it's too soon to rule that out, but there's just too much competition in self-publishing for that to be feasible. I need someone who isn't invisible to make me not invisible. So even though I'm in literal poverty, I took the chance. In theory I'll make that money back with interest.

Now, the anti-highlight.
​
A school filed an incident report against me because I yelled at some students to leave me alone and threatened to call the police if they didn't stop harassing me in the bathroom. I misspoke. I didn't mean call the police at the station, I meant talk to the one officer who's already at that school every day because it's a shithole. Seriously, this school has hands-down the worst behavior problems of any I've been to, and I try to avoid going there, but I was just substituting for an art teacher, so I thought that would be fine, and it mostly was, except for this part. So someone from the staffing place called me to tell me that she would send me an email to go to an online calendar to make an appointment to talk to someone else about it. Literally the first opening on the calendar was eight days later. I called the person back to tell her that, and the number was no longer in service. I responded to her email to tell her that, and she ignored me. So for a minimum of eight days, I can't work, and this job that already wasn't paying me enough to survive will pay me nothing. And then maybe they'll just go ahead and decide to fire me anyway. I had an assignment scheduled for this entire week, filling in for a special education aide who's going on spring break from USU. Now that's canceled, and the school won't likely be able to replace me on such short notice, and it will assume that I'm to blame. I have an eight-day assignment scheduled beginning next week at the youth facility where only people who have done the special training can substitute, and maybe they'll reinstate me fast enough to do that if they don't fire me, but I'm not counting on it. They're clearly in no rush.

For the second time in a month, I became suicidal and only held on for the sake of the people who love me. I see no purpose for and no end to my suffering anymore. I hate this job and I hate having no rights. I doubled my efforts and lowered my standards in the job search. I'd rather use my Master's degree to stock shelves at Costco than be bullied by students, stabbed in the back by two-faced administrators, and kicked around like a lump of dog shit by apathetic bosses who wouldn't likely appreciate it if someone stopped them from earning money and ignored them for over a week, but of course nobody would do that to them because they, unlike me, have rights. I'm stable now. I'm doing the work to change my life into something that I don't hate. But because the world is fundamentally unfair, there's no guarantee that I'll succeed in doing that. Ever. Hence my depression and lack of will to live. There is one tantalizing prospect that I should hear about within the immediate future, but I don't want to jinx it by talking about it.

Also, Daylight Savings Time started today, and I hate that so much that I got in trouble for threatening violence against it.