What are you hopeful for in the next year?
Personally, I’m hoping for more rewarding work and a better employer.
For family, hoping mom’s dementia stabilizes enough that she doesn’t end up in the psycho ward.
For the rest of the world, here’s to Trump doing what he does best and fuck everything up for himself and his buddies including Putin, Orban and the rest of the Right Wing moron crowd.
Open thread!
im hoping all of yous have a good year
for myself i dont need to hope…..just need to do
time to break the rona cycle of working and sleeping and being a very comfortable hermit
im snug as a bug under my little rock….but shits gone far enough
my new years resolution is making a year with more stuff in it than my last two have had
From your lips to God’s ears. We are fundamentally extremely sociable creatures, even the Faithful Hound is always up for visitors who he can harass, but in the last four years there haven’t been many occasions when someone has dropped by who hasn’t been paid by us or the insurance company. We have to put a stop to this. I have to get back into the habit of knowing how to feed a dozen adults with two hours’ notice.
i mean….im never going to be you level social
but right!
time to be done with this shit
Yeah I don’t think I have the social batteries to be anything close to Cousin Matthew’s level!
But I also don’t need to be such a petty vindictive misanthrope.
Well.
I have no desire to be less petty or vindictive.
Are you accusing me of being a petty and vindictive misanthrope? Because of course I have become one. I am my mother’s son. She died more than 20 years ago and every outing filled her with disgust and disdain at how degraded her world had become. (The whole concept of the Internet filled her with an existential horror.) But she was like me. When my father got sick she was about 50 and we, her children, had to teach her how to write out checks and apply for credit cards and give her driving lessons. She caught on soon enough, though. Sort of. When she died her car, which she had had for about a decade, had about 1,000 miles on it. My oldest brother took it and threw the bluebook value into the estate.
This story was supposed to go somewhere but I can’t remember where. My yearning for the distant past, I guess. Anyway, happy 2024 from your D/S misanthrope. Please be merciful and forgiving in the new year, and I will promise to try to do better. That is my New Year’s resolution.
Oh no, I was referring to myself as a petty, vindictive misanthrope and that I didn’t want to stop being petty or vindictive. LOL
That’s the spirit!
I’m on what feels like day 18 of feeding my family in law and I am so over it. Today I cooked kui teav (Cambodian noodle soup, FYCE in the works) and my MIL’s only comment was “Well, this looks… interesting.” Words she would never use to describe white European or American cuisine. They are “well traveled” but continue to be totally unaware of the racist lense through which they interpret other cultures. My husband, bless his heart, complimented the meal multiple times and so did the kids. I’m not overly vexed with my MIL, just tired.
For science, I’m making that Asian fusion spaghetti a la puttanesca next… we’ll see if it elicits a similar comment or if it flies under their radar because it’s a familiar italian dish.
It is funny that you would say that because years ago for either Thanksgiving or Christmas I wet over to my sister’s, and she had a huge mob over, and I said, “I will make potatoes, but not mashed potatoes. A friend of mine taught me how to do this.” So what you do is you slice potatoes and layer them in muffin tins, alternating with cream and Parmesan cheese, and throwing in a few chives. They’re delicious. This was on some kind of TV food challenge.
So I served them, and my sister’s MIL said, “This is interesting,” very disdainfully, but choked a little down. But she’s the one I’ve written about before. I loved her. Her sons loved her but their wives not so much. She had absolutely no filter. That’s what I liked about her.
Here’s a sample conversation, and imagine hearing this on Christmas day. I’m in the kitchen being her sous chef and she said, “It’s really too bad about X [one of her long-suffering daughters-in-law.]” “What’s wrong with X?” “She lost the baby. It’s because she’s so thin. Reach up and hand me that box of sugar, will you?”
OMG! But this was like an everyday conversation for her. She once said to me, “What is it like to share a bed with a colored man? I have never done it, none of us have, but—” That was at a 4th of July cookout IN FRONT OF MAYBE 20 RELATIVES.
Bless her heart.
She sounds like someone I would avoid if I could. Low filter or casual sexism and racism is not my jam.
If you’re around people like this and they don’t really understand what they’re saying or how it would be perceived, and this woman must have been born in the 1930s, at the latest, you can kind of see the humor in it. I don’t take things like this personally.
Did I ever tell you [OH NO!] that when one of my nephews was fairly young his lily-white public school had introduced some kind of MLK, Jr.-related unit or something. Stuff due in January. So Better Half and I were over at their house at some point during the Yuletide mayhem and he thought it would be a good idea to get insights from a Black man. But he mangled the language, and instead of saying “people of color,” which was a recent linguistic coinage, he said “colored people,” which is a term that had been around since the Civil War, at least. And then he realized what he had done, but BH and I just laughed.
This recent cultural drift toward constant outrage and grievance gets a little tiresome. People make mistakes. People indulge in sarcasm and hyperbole and irony. Having a woman several decades older than me basically ask, “What’s it like to fuck a Black guy?” is pretty amazing, if you think about it, how unartfully it was expressed.
You have the patience of a saint.
I’m hopeful that I can get my dad into an assisted living facility even though he definitely doesn’t want to go and it will take all the assets from his house. OH WELL. Worth it.
I’m hoping to see more movies in theaters. I just came back from The Boy and The Heron and it was great to just sit back and let it wash over me.
Manchu confirmed the new Godzilla is really good, so that’s another candidate.
I’m hoping that someone gets around to changing the battery in the smoke detector that’s going off in some apartment that’s close enough for me to keep hearing but far enough away not to be able to do anything about.
Actually, I do have a bit of Somewhat Momentously Big News that seems to be officially confirmed, and I’ve been waiting for the right moment and/or thread to announce it, so I guess for now I’ll just say that I’m hoping to be able to capitalize upon it. . . .
If it’s sextuplets, I call dibs on getting one named after me.
I WILL BE THE GODFATHER TO AS MANY OF THEM AS YOU WANT. I’ve already got three. Another godchild or six will be no particular additional burden. In fact, my godchildren are now all over 21 so there’s not even a risk that they would wind up with me in this house of horrors, the Casa Encantada.
Don’t leave us hanging! SHARING IS CARING
I’ll tell you what: Make your next post another “Bragging Rights” one (or whatever the name is for the one with the dog jumping over the bar and pointing its paw towards the viewer, as if to say YOU’RE AWESOME), and I’ll try to tell the whole story then.
The Pistons won their third game of the year. I’m optimistic they will win at least four next year.
Can’t have sextuplets without the sex – although that’s another issue altogether right there. . . .
Oh no! You seem like a fun, interesting guy. Women don’t find you fun and interesting? It’s too bad you’re not gay. Or maybe you are. A little bit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld so memorably put it. Anyway, we gay men seem to fuck like rabbits. This is all in the past for me, the screwing around. I’ve been exclusive with Better Half since I was 23, but we have a friend who’s a little dwarfish and is 71 or 72 and he just acquired a new boyfriend who’s in his 60s. Por ejemplo. It can be done!
Oh, I have no doubt that, were I to play for the team, I’d probably be snapped up fairly soon afterwards. But, alas, it’s just not my sport.
Anyway, I’ve been hashing over these particular issues enough over the years with Laura, my therapist, but the biggest obstacles for me at the moment are probably working (and living) from home alone in a field that makes me inclined to shut the hell up and keep to myself once the day is through, not having the kinds of interests that tend to foster extroversion or activities undertaken in group form and finding myself in an algorithmitically challenged demographic as far as dating apps are concerned. (There were also some negatively conditioning experiences and teen angst bullshit during my formative years, along with a few instances of bad luck and/or timing, but that’s really neither here nor there.)
Plus, although I’ve only ever heard occasional anecdotal murmurs of this, it seems like this town has long been fairly lackluster for hetero dating – and, as the red sea encroaches more and more on this little blue island, I suspect it’ll grow even more so. (And I would ask brightersider for her perspective on this as well, if she hadn’t literally and repeatedly affirmed a preference for her own hand back during the Groupthink days.) I can’t imagine that the gay version of events is much better here, either, what with the police cruiser making a turn into the bar that was closing up for the night and one of the husbands who owned it ending up arrested for being less than pleased about the incident.
Can confirm, dating here is horrible. I’d star your comment more than once if I could.
Personalities are based on being Cardinals fans and alcohol. Or whatever church you belong to.
Also lots of people who seem reasonably normal at first and then turn out to be republican nutjobs.
That’s too bad. I really wish I could help you out. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve got the inner yenta thing going on so I don’t like hearing about “singletons” who wish they were in relationships. People who choose to be single are fine. They’re among the happiest people I know.
Oh, well, you’ll be fine. There’s a lid for every pot, as the saying goes. It just takes time. Patience. Discretion, but in the sense of sizing up your potential love interest and taking them out to a video bar and dancing to a New Wave song, I think for us it was “I Love A Man In Uniform” and taking them back to your rent-stabilized walk-up…oh, wait, that was just me.
Oh, and plus also, as Sarah Palin used to say (and how is she still walking this earth?) this is too late for Brain Drain, but we just completed another episode of “Hawaii 5-0.” That series…
In this one, Buddy Ebsen (!) is the special guest star. I won’t give any spoilers away, but a group charters a flight from “the main” (the mainland) so we’re back at the Honolulu Airport and people are staying at the Ilikai on the beach at Waikiki, which apparently is the only place to stay. According to the series. The chartered flight is amazing, and we’ve seen the Ilikai many times before, including the nightclub which is the topic of an entire episode…Fabulous. So fabulous. Completely fabulous. Mid-century Modernism at its finest. The pool…don’t get me started.
But no. What’s remarkable about this episode, and I hadn’t really focused on this before, is office life circa 1970. There’s a secretary who’s about ready to go home and her boss asks her to stay late to do whatever. So she removes the vinyl cover of her Selectric typewriter. I was jolted into consciousness. I have done the same thing, albeit more than a decade later. And she’s vaguely Asian or Hawaiian and she has this really sexy beehive and a necklace that goes down below her waist and a mini-skirt.
Meanwhile, some of the action occurs over the weekend so Steve McGarrett and my imaginary once and future boyfriend, Danny “Danno” Williams, are wearing these really sexy Hawaiian shirts, being cas’ [casual: I don’t know to write this] and all. Things are coming in over the teletype. Steve needs the operator to put through calls to the main. APBs are sent out to all the newspapers and TV stations. The cars, which must have gotten about three miles to the gallon, have these walkie-talkie-like things but with those cords that used to get tangled up.
Aloha,
Cousin Mattie
The Waikiki Hillbillies?
Looking that up, it wasn’t too long after that Buddy Ebsen started his long run on Barnaby Jones, which was also in rerun syndication forever. I think it may still pop up on obscure channels that can’t afford Rockford Files.
Braddah Mattie, you would be a kama’aina in a heartbeat.  You would love Hawaii & it would love you. I’ll help u make it happen!  Hawaii calls!  Here is your path, listen carefully.
I did love Hawaii, but we were there as part of this…it doesn’t matter what, but BH was at this week-long work-related junket and I was given strict orders not to engage with anyone else. So I hung out at one of the infinity pools (the resort had several) and looked at the ocean and for fun visited the turtles in this little area they had set aside. It was fenced in, so you couldn’t engage, but you could see them and say hello to them. There was this king turtle, or tortoise maybe?, who was estimated to be 80 years old. He was enormous. Apparently he was a randy fellow and attracted a harem and fathered all the other turtles. Well done, you! Living your best life on the Big Island!
One day I got fed up, I went stir-crazy, and I said, “I’m calling a taxi and I’m going to Kona. I’m charging this to the suite. Join me if you want.” So we went. It was a little touristy but not as bad as I was expecting. Plus I got bags and bags of cut-price macadamia nuts, which I adore.
I loved it. I just wish I didn’t have to skulk around like some kind of…I don’t know what…because BH is so paranoid about being outed in a homophobic industry. I think his fears are overblown. At this point, where he is, he could appoint Faithful Hound to some position, like Caligula (this is probably made up) appointed his beloved horse to the Roman Senate.
It’s been quite a life. I wish for many more years for all of us.
I had some trials in 2023, but there was a lot more good than bad.
I don’t know what’s coming in 2024. I don’t have much in the way of expectations. My only hope is that my training kicks in if and when I need it in the coming year.
By training, I just mean the peace and stillness that I’ve tried to cultivate and the love that I’ve tried to share.
A safe place to live, a good dog, and a job that let’s me keep both please?
And Mom still here, and ok.
That’s what I really, really want.
*Ideally* less chaos than the clusterfuck that this year has been, but it all just boils down to a safe place, a good dog, and being able to afford both of them without stressing out.