I'm only preachin' the truth here.

 

I'm still here. Really.

Yes. I’ve been silent for months. Well, in the blogiverse mostly. I’m rarely silent unless I’m sleeping. What have I been doing? Well… I’ve been writing books. I finished one and sent it off for editing. I’ve been working on a collaborative project with author Shéa MacLeod, which is in rewrites stage right now, and I am about two thirds through another novel. I’ve been pouring my creativity into my books. I have been given the unique gift of time; the first time since my little baby was born four years ago (Yes, he turned 4 last Thursday, I can hardly believe it). He has started preschool in earnest, which allows me nine hours a week to sit down at the local café (which is really like the town’s living room, it’s awesome), and to write freely. It’s been a while!

Playing with Friends Annie & baby Maxine

 So I am taking advantage of it. I have my crafty projects (and project-a-palooza) on hold for now. I have a desire to create pretty things with my hands, but I need to finish this novel and get these projects done before the end of the year so I have new releases for Comic-con in February. If you want to know more about these things, or more about the world of my writing, which is done separately from everything else under the nom-de-plume Miranda Mayer, please feel free to like my page on Facebook, or sign up for my newsletter from my website. I don’t email very often, only when I’m about to release something.

His first tournament.

School starts

 Other big news is I have stepped away from the group I founded, the Oregon Regency Society. I did it for a variety of reasons, but what it came down to was that there were constant issues with drama, unkind gossip being flung by people who were supposedly my friends, returned to me by people everyone respects and who were then called liars by said gossips. There was also a problem common to groups like these, and that is people with input but no actual action. There was the old problem of people who take on too much, and then cannot take responsibility for not following through, and who spew blame instead. Bottom line, it just wasn’t fun anymore. I’d been through this kind of thing once before, and I just didn’t have it in me to weather the drama to try and fix what had been poisoned. So I have cast it off the shore into the hands of others, and wish the best for it. As long as the people who have maligned and vilified me continue to be involved, I will not. I might try to play with friends again someday, and I already miss so many people, but for now, I need to just focus my energy on things that are fulfilling to me. Like my child, my creative outlets and well… me. My mental health needs to be important too.

Chilling behind my table at the Rose
City Comic Con. He's pretty deft
with the iPad.

 So I’m here, prepping for the holidays. My son’s paternal grandfather has been struggling with stage 4 cancer. My son has Bronchitis, and so does my husband, and as grandpa’s immune system is compromised by Chemotherapy, we cannot go to their home for Thanksgiving. It’s kind of sad, because my mother-in-law has been really having a rough time dealing with all of this, and to top it off, she has painful arthritis in her hip. I was going to go and help her cook the meal so she wouldn’t be miserable the whole day. But we can’t put Grandpa John in danger. So I will be cooking a small thanksgiving meal for the three of us here at home.

School time.

Waiting to go to class.

 Alex had his fourth birthday party on Saturday. He had a wonderful time, and Stephie made him the most beautiful Paw Patrol cake in history. He was so fixated on the cake, it was hilarious. It’s amazing to think that the child we never expected is now four years old. It’s crazy. It’s too fast! I wish there was a rewind button so I could go through it all again. Even the colic and the teething.

So the holidays approach. I imagine you all have plans for them. I’m excited about Christmas. More than ever since we had Alex, and this year, it’s the first year where he has as much anticipation as a child should have, and I’m excited to put the tree up with him, and to decorate the house. I intend to do it after Thanksgiving, come what may. The earlier the better. Considering how awful this year has been, we need some damned goodwill in this country. Even if there are battles to be fought still.

Class is over!

Feeding the gulls in Astoria.

 Oh! I found a kitten. So we now have another cat. She’s fecking cute. I might be a little allergic to her, but how do you tell your kid, sorry, no cat. So I’ll just manage with it. She’s a brat. So I appreciate that about her. Anyhoo, I will try to be better about snarking, crafting and journaling as I go. I won’t have any new costume posts for a while, I’m afraid. I don’t really have any desire to participate in events right now, so I don’t have any reason to sew new Regency things. But the lark may come where I will want to make a hat or whatever. So who knows? Maybe I’ll arrange a non-related event just so I can play with the people I want to play with. Time will tell.

New BFFs.

My girls started laying. Two were killed by raccoons. Hubby
shored up the enclosure, and my friend Molly gave me a couple
hens to replace my lost ones.

Halloween spookiness.

The kitten (Peppercorn), has claimed Simon as her
personal bed.

My little lion trick-or-treating homes for the first time.

Bratty McKatten

Everything Paw Patrol for his party

Kitty McAssface Von Kattenstein.

Taekwondo

The lovely cake by Just a Dash cakes (aka auntie Steph)

I’m off to forage for Thanksgiving ingredients and such, in spite of my sinus infection. See you on the flip side folks! I’ve missed this.

The Bitter Pig-faced Lolita (was *that* offensive?)

I’ve had it with Tone Bullies. Well, one Tone Bully in particular—who I thought had been blocked but whose inexplicable return came with the inevitable negative encounter.  You see, Facebook is rife with these people. The embittered, mean-spirited, hyper sensitive narcissists, who view every post and every comment as something invariably about them; as something about their issues. This one in is a particularly volatile example. I know her through the ORS. She made a brief appearance in the group. It wasn’t brief enough. Armed with an arsenal of bad seamstressing, personal issues and dietary and medical problems, every event she attended became something about her stomach, her health or her personal offense. She left one of our retreats early because she felt ‘unwelcome’. Stop the world! Nobody likes me! (Probably because you’re a whining asshole—FYI)

My first encounter with her is also documented in this blog somewhere. Unknown to me, a friend of mine posted a humourous meme or movie or something that laughingly mocked vegans. This person, (who I will dub henceforth as ‘Balding Pink Haired PigFace McEverythingsAboutMe’ or BPHPFMcEAM), being dietarily ‘sensitive’ (but also being as overweight as me if not more—obviously not *so* sensitive that she can’t eat like a Roman in a vomitorium), posted a bully missive that made my friend feel compelled to remove the post. She made a comment about having to do so, and that raised my hackles.

I.  Hate. Bullies.  HATE THEM. So I replied to the comment telling my friend that she should have not removed her post, that it was her wall, and that it isn’t up to someone else to tell her what should and should not be there. If that person is offended, that’s their fucking problem.

Now let me interject something here… A few weeks ago, someone posted a meme that was basically a statement about white men being more respectable than black men, simply by the way they dress; the meme showed black guys with droopy pants and flat-billed caps, next to a photo of a couple of white bros in suits and ties. Now that meme was stupid and flat out racist. There was no ambiguity, no lack of clarity; it was racist. And I told that person that it was. I also told them that there was no shortage of white guys running around with droopy pants and douchey flat-billed caps.  However there’s a stark difference between a full-on racial commentary and a meme making fun of vegans.  Vegans are not a culture of people being marginalized by society. They’re vegans.

So there’s a fine line here. The issue here is that this post by my dear friend was not about BPHPFMcEAM. But to her it was, you see, because SHE had dietary issues, and that would be offensive to people with dietary issues and blahdefuckingblah. I got into a fray with her, in which she did what apparently must be habit for her, she made some comment and then blocked me so that I could neither see it or respond to it further. No big deal, good riddance, yes, it’s cowardly to shout something before slamming the door, but I am used to the ‘attack then retreat’ tactic, my narcissistic mom did it all the time.

Life was quieter without evidence of BPHPFMcEAM’s existence for quite some time. But I noticed her name and the image of her pig-face popping up again on another friend’s profile under comments. I ignored her. But invariably, because she doesn’t like me, she found a reason to start her Tone Bullying again. This time, she hijacked this other friend’s post about the hyper-masculinizationß(not sure if actual word) of mens’ products.  It was a fake ad for ‘manpons’. It was funny. Funny as shit. Here it is:

Yes. It’s funny, and it’s totally true, the ads would TOTALLY be like that.  Anyhow, I made the comment beneath that, seeing as most men are total babies when it comes to pain in comparison to women, if they had a period, they’d more likely spend it curled up into the fetal position whining for a week.  And sound the horns, the TONE POLICE came a-ridin’ in on a Special My Little Pony Lolita Unicorn.

You see, apparently because she has a trans partner or friend, this was suddenly about the Trans community and my comment was horrendously offensive to them. I was dismissing trans men who DO suffer from periods, you see.  I was erasing their pain by making fun of guys being weenies about being in pain or sick.

I asked her to not turn the content of the thread into something else.  But she continued on, dropping a litany of inane and boring buzzwords and yammering on about how this was INDEED about what she wanted it to be. When I responded the last time, saying that her response had nothing to do with anything other than the male gender born with male bits, and that trans men could not be included simply by the fact that they experienced the heartbreak of menstruation. And in true form, she posted a response I could not see because she immediately blocked me.    

The above video, and the commentary about men being weenies about pain became something about this unfortunate woman. I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to look at everything with her eyes. Seeing offense where there is none; digging for maliciousness where there never was any. But the part that chaps my ass the most is the active desire to hijack someone’s feed and turn it into something about themselves. Every shred of opportunity, people like this latch onto it and whine and flail until someone notices them.  Everyone deserves consideration and kindness, but going about like some embittered, angry fool, trying to force everyone’s narrative into something that doesn’t offend your overly sensitive viewpoint, well that’s just plain bullying.

There are lots of other things that prove that this person is just generally an angry, nasty person in general, and who projects a great deal of her shortcomings on people. She didn’t last long in the group because of it. She blamed all of us for it, naturally, rather than her own social deficiencies. I am kind to everyone. Always. But when they try to make me out to be something I’m not, that’s when my kindness goes away. That’s when I stop giving a shit about their overly sensitive nature. And when they start hijacking threads, and bullying people into removing posts because they want the attention drawn to themselves, then that’s when I just call them out for what they are.

And since I have been blocked in a cowardly manner from saying so…. I will call this person out for what she is. She is a loser. An attention whore. A mean spirited, tone bully. A sour, pig faced, cow with shoddy costumes that no amount of pink Lolita wigs and bows will cure. And no amount of spouting PCness will change that. You don’t get social-credit points for fighting the acceptance fight where there is no battle. You don’t get to be sanctimonious and self-righteous because you have dietary issues; contrived or real, or because you are married to a trans partner. These things don’t make you a better, more accepting person. The fact that you can’t view a conversation of any kind unless you see it through your defensive lens makes you a non-accepting person. The fact that you can’t let people have a good laugh, or an opinion that is benign and NOT ABOUT YOU IN ANY WAY, without making it so, means you’re a bully. A nasty, ugly bully.  And you think that by defending the cause du jour (where no defense is required) will absolve you of that, well that’s deluded and pathetic.

Reflect on yourself, you sad human being. Don’t let a cause define you and make you bitter. I will not calculate my words, restrict my sense of humour, edit my postings, to keep from offending you. I know I’m a good person. I KNOW I am. I am not without flaws, which I often own, and some I deny… but I am not overtly mean, racist, intolerant, bigoted or cruel. I’m snarky, yes. I own that. I’m blunt, and forthright. And I will call people out on their shit. But I don’t like to be called out for shit when there is none. I won’t tolerate that.

You are not the decider of my character based on your own twisted standards—turning benign words into bad ones because it suits you. You can see me any way you want to see me, but don’t you dare tell me how I should speak, try to censor or control my speech or correct me. Unless I am overtly condemning trans people, or saying that all vegans should be put into death camps, you have nothing to say. If you don’t like me, keep your stupid words to yourself. But don’t paint me into the person you want me to be because you’re a nasty, insecure, obnoxious, self-righteous, sanctimonious bitch. And if you want me to be offensive to you, here it is, you pig faced ugly cow. Now you can go cry what a terrible person I am. Asshole.

God I can't stand that idiot. She didn't even deserve the politness she got when she was around.

End of ranting session. TYVM