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Not much to update you on today. I mean, it's Election Day, midterms 2018, but we won't get the final word on the degree to which we've taken a quick ride down the slide to fascism for until sometime later this week, probably.
Shobhit's going to be glued to the news all day. He's a deep pessimist, plus a political news junkie, which means he'll just be devouring all this with even more of an expectation of bad news than I have. What a fun day we have ahead!
The upside, I guess, is that Biden is still the president. The reach of administrative tentacles into federal policy is far wider than most people realize, or as many people discovered when President Fuckwit was elected in 2016. Looking through my Facebook Memories feed this morning was a bit of a trip, because Election Day in 2016 was also November 8—a day I started by posting a photo of a broken glass ceiling, with the full expectation that Hillary Clinton was going to be elected, only to end that day utterly crushed and disillusioned with this country.
Then, there was a post on November 8 in 2020, after a harrowing election in which it took days to confirm President Fuckwit was indeed defeated (and I literally went to bed on Election Night that year fully expecting a second Fuckwit term). Election Day was November 3 that year, which meant November 8 was fully five days later, barely after the results were final (President Fuckwit's refusal to accept them notwithstanding). Re-reading my
post from today's date in 2020 feels almost naively hopeful now. I still have far more admiration and respect for Joe Biden than I did before that election, but the idea that people even right now are regarding a "shift in the balance of power" as just part of the natural course of things—midterms tend to change the majorities in Congress—is mind boggling to me. The number of people dismissing the number of candidates as well as people in office, all of them Republicans, openly stating they will only accept the election results if they win, is truly insane. As is the dismissal of what a shift toward Republican majorities will mean for the 2024 presidential election, when President Fuckwit has a very real chance of getting right back into the White House again. And if that happens? All bets are off. I really believe that. That man is petty and vengeful, let alone litigious, and his return to the presidency would be wildly destabilizing for both our democracy and our country.
So, today still feels a lot like kicking the can down the road, regardless of where the balance of power in Congress shifts. The importance of state governorships and state Secretaries of State cannot be overstated either, because these are the people who certify election results. I'm reading 2024 far more than I am dreading the results of today's elections.
And now I've written a lot more about all that than I intended to. Shobhit and I had our ballots filled out and in the mail two weekends ago. Washington State has a voting system Republicans hate: vote by mail, statewide. And this time we're voting on whether to shift to ranked choice voting, which both Shobhit and I voted for, as it helps weed out extremists (on either side, incidentally). With some notable contextual exceptions, I am very proud of my state. But, if we wind up with a Republican Congress
and a Republican president in 2024 (Ron DeSantis would be truly horrible, arguably worse than anyone in history if we'd never had Fuckwit, but the one thing going for him is he's not an idiot with no clue how government works—still very dangerous, but in different ways; I wouldn't worry about him launching nukes on a whim), even the idea of abortion being legal in my state would be threatened. Conservatives have a clear plan to ban abortion at the federal level, no matter how many times clueless idiots try to say the Supreme Court decision "only" have the decision back to the states. Side note: matters of human rights and bodily autonomy should never be left for the states to decide.
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Anyway! Let's move on from all of that shit for now. Shobhit had a doctor's appointment yesterday afternoon, a day he had off of work, which I totally forgot. I came home and found him gone, only taking the spare set of keys which meant he did not take the car, and I truly wondered if he'd found an online hookup. And I'd have been fine with that; I'd just want to know. And then he came home and started talking about our new doctor, who is legit hot but otherwise Shobhit doesn't like him as much as Dr. Brandon. And then I was just like . . . oh, right. That was where he was.
The highlight of our evening last night, really, was watching the penultimate episode of
Interview with the Vampire, recorded from the AMC channel. Shobhit and I binged it over the weekend and now we're caught up; they actually air on AMC every Sunday at 10:05, though each episode is available on the AMC+ streamer a week earlier—I pay for enough streamers already, so fuck that. Waiting a week won't hurt us. Even 10:05 is too late for me, so we watched last night. Shobhit even asked if we could wait until Wednesday because he wanted to watch his news programs and he'll be glued to news all evening tonight, but I didn't want to wait that long. So, after his Braeburn Condos virtual board meeting was done, we watched.
Aside from that, though, I spent a lot of time last night at my computer, working on a budget template for our trip to Australia next year, more sophisticated (by my own usual standards, anyway) than I've ever done for these things. It's got separate sections for each leg of the trip: Brisbane; Gold Coast (which will just be a day trip while in Brisbane); first three-night stint in Sydney; Kangaroo Island; Adelaide; second three-night stint in Sydney. I've got expected or planned expenses for each place, with formulas all over the place, for totals in both AUD and USD, and even columns accounting for potential international transaction fees on our credit cards. I've got totals for each specific place; for each Australian state (as in, combining Brisbane and Gold Coast, or the two Sydney legs together, or Kangaroo Island and Adelaide together), plus totals overall for the entire two-week trip. With probably (hopefully) wildly inflated budget line items for food, right now it's looking very much like the whole trip will, in the end, have cost us (mostly me) a good ten thousand dollars.
I'm really glad to have created this budget, though. It gives me a sense of expectation and keeps either of us (mostly Shobhit) from freaking out about the amount spent once it's actually done. And this is with our departure still more than three months away. As ever, though, for me anyway, making the plans and looking up things to do before we even get there is half the fun. This is all a delightful endeavor for me, even this early on.
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[posted 12:30 pm]
