When I'm Not Vixen Strangely...

 

I don't know how much of an explanation this is, but it'll have to do. Maybe someone will find it useful. Maybe it'll make sense to you. Maybe it won't. I don't think it will hurt. 

 Being me sometimes hurts. Not in a big way--just in a "wake up feeling as good as I'm going to" kind of way. My knees started to sound like bubble wrap popping back when I was unloading pallets of copy paper over a quarter of a century ago. They hurt when it rains. So do my hands. So do my ankles. Not in a big way.

Usually. And different things would just rattle or seize up or feel weird sometimes, but it would pass. Or I'd be run down. 

This isn't going to be a post about an awful diagnosis. I really sort of checked out and never followed up because it wasn't bad. My problem was I was in my thirties and full of stress and could stand to lose some weight. Then it was I was in my forties and full of stress and could stand to lose some weight. And more recently, well, my birthdate is on my driver's license, and I buy my own pants, so no one could tell me a damn thing I didn't know. Maybe it was from having mono in my teens. Maybe it was just getting old. 

I just figured I would pace myself--and I self-medicated. 

Yeah. It's that kind of post.

What the Hell Are You Doing? 4: St. Patrick's Edition

On this St. Paddy's Day, a special message from noted Irishman Robert Francis O'Rourke. pic.twitter.com/JRjMEXhZRY

— GOP (@GOP) March 17, 2019

I see that the GOP account is reflecting a few things here--they would like to remind us that the hot, new thing on the campaign trail for 2020 had a DUI (George W. Bush, anyone? Matt Gaetz?)  They would also like to remind us that Beto O'Rourke's given name is "Robert Francis O'Rourke" and not actually "Beto". (Although this would be true of a person whose name was "Roberto" as well--it's a nickname like so many "Dick's", "Bill's" and "Jimmy's".  Politics is full of people with nicknames. I'm not sure what the problem is here--are they trying to do a "Pocahontas" thing as Trump did to Sen. Warren, where somehow, O'Rourke is pretending to be someone he isn't?)

But what this GOP post did was refer to Robert O'Rourke as a noted Irishman (he was born here in the US, making him as Irish as the Kennedys, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and me). And called up a stereotype of the Irish as being drunks. It isn't always untrue, that poverty, tragedy, loss and homebrew/pub life have intersected, but it was used against a whole class of immigrant in the US to deny jobs and to blame the Irish immigrants for the problems they had in assimilating. The drink was a signifier people could moralize about, instead of just looking at these Irish Catholics through a snobby Protestant lens, which was less sympathetic.

But even if alcoholism was an inheritance among Irish people--it is a disease that can be overcome and not a moral failing, however the wearing o'the green and beer-bonging Guinness have been identified with this Irish-American holiday. And alcoholism is a familial tragedy that touches many in terms of interdependency and co-dependency. It isn't a joke. It isn't a casual thing to throw around for politics' sake.

My own response to this was "Way to stereotype, dipshits." On today, of all days, to use Irish identity to slam a Democrat with outdated and vulgar stereotypes shows a lack of class and character and good sense. I am employing my prerogative to take this insult against O'Rourke personally myself, and will hold a grudge against the GOP until I die, and rise in the morning and go to bed at night cursing their very existence. In increasingly satirical and devastating ways, along the function of a  seanchaí. 

Which I was going to do anyway, as a matter of fact, but because of this, more so.