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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Anyone who ate hot lunch had to eat everything on their tray, and we weren’t allowed to pass on any part of the meal because children in other countries were starving or something. Lunch ladies checked our trays before we were allowed to leave the cafeteria.

    On the days when sauerkraut was served, we’d take turns being the sauerkraut smuggler, cramming that dank crap from about a dozen 8 year old kids’ trays into an empty milk carton, so we could toss it all without the lunch lady catching it. One day when I was the kraut smuggler, lunch nazi grabbed my carton and marched me back to the table. She said I had to eat every strand of the milky garbage we’d all stowed before I could leave.

    I tried, but kept gagging and retching. I sat huddled with the collective slop at the table, crying for about 3 hours before my teacher found me and released me from lunch jail.


  • The summer I was 11, all the bored neighborhood kids decided to play a game of chicken with our bikes. We raced down a narrow ramp that ended at a huge concrete wall, to see who could speed the farthest without braking.

    When it was my turn, I hopped on my hot pink Stingray with the banana seat and pedaled for all I was worth. I accidentally hit the wall at full speed, the rear tire flew up behind me and I was smashed flat against the wall like a bug. When the rear tire came back down and I could breathe again, I looked up to all the horrified faces and grunted “I won”, then got back on my bike and casually pedaled away until nobody could see me crying and bleeding all the way home.


  • That’s just it! POTUS isn’t a dictator. It’s astonishing to see headlines ignore the fact that the powers of the office of the president are limited. No president has the authority to force Congress to pass any kind of foreign aid legislation or to impose peace on the Middle East.

    The horrors occurring in Gaza, Ukraine, and throughout the world elicit deep emotions in us, but they’re beyond the control of one elected official, which is what keeps us from living in true tyranny.

    It’s disturbing to see so many smart people lean toward a candidate who seeks chaos and destruction simply because they feel outrage at atrocities that can’t be solved by a POTUS, but could definitely be exacerbated by one.


  • Considering the facts that everything in politics is stupidly transactional, and that:

    1. The POTUS doesn’t control foreign aid and must rely on congress to agree

    2. The deeply religious House Speaker Johnson, who controls which aid proposals will come to the floor, is fervently in support of Israel

    Is it possible that President Biden is throwing a bone to the hard right, in the form of support to Israel, in order to get desperately needed aid to Ukraine ASAP?

    I mean, we ALL understand that a US President doesn’t have the unilateral power of a king, and there’s a shit ton of finessing behind what we can see.


  • I was talking to this old man from South Dakota last week. He stated “we’re being invaded because our president won’t do anything.”

    When I explained that a President can’t run around making laws - Congress is supposed to make the laws, but they haven’t, he snapped “Well, he should MAKE them!”

    Isn’t it frightening that adults believe a POTUS is directly and personally responsible for state and local decisions? Like he has the authority to break any law and force all elected officials in the USA to bow to his tyrannical will? And that when he doesn’t do this, everything is his fault, so he shouldn’t be re-elected?

    Isn’t that terrifyingly absurd to you?





  • I grew up with a lot of snow, skiing, etc in the PNW. As an adult I moved to Palm Springs, where my daughter was born. She and my friends had never seen snow, so one day I thought it’d be great to show everyone. We took the tram up to the top of Mt San Jacinto, where there was about a foot of fresh snow.

    I loved watching them marvel at how oddly cold and bright the ground was. They tried and failed to copy me making snowballs, like it was some alien magic trick. I ran ahead and made a sliding jump down a small slope, then stopped and turned around, waiting for them to follow. They did, one at a time, and every one of them slipped and dramatically wiped out trying to navigate the slope. Gods, they just kept. coming. down.

    I was horrified that I’d accidentally set them up to go careening everywhere, but the sight was too hilarious and I could only double over and belly laugh as they all crashed about like lemmings on ice!




  • I learned about lucid dreaming from an old book I found when I was 18, and I began practicing. Because flying has been my passion since I was 5, I focused on that.

    At first, I would run and take long leaps, like I was in low gravity. After a few weeks, one leap would keep me about 6 feet above the ground until I wanted to drop back down. I’d remain vertical with my arms relaxed at my sides, and just lean a bit for direction. About a year after I began flying every night, I could lay down and then close my eyes while making one push off the ground with my right foot and I’d be immediately at tree line. I loved flying through my neighborhood and the city, hovering over streets, visiting the houses of my friends, sometimes popping in to see them.

    My dreams were in real time, so it was late at night and they were almost always asleep. It felt like an out of body experience.

    I’d learned from the book how to make recurring dream threats your friend, and I befriended the wolves that had terrified my dream life at least once a week for over ten years. It was an incredibly empowering experience.

    After a few years, I was in a lost time in life, and my dream flying reflected how out of control I was. By then, every time I laid my head on my pillow, my right foot reflexively tapped and I was off. But now, I was shooting straight up faster than a rocket and zipping beyond the moon in just a few seconds. I started panicking that I’d “lose my earth tether” and never be able to find my way back. I believed that I needed to return to my body in order to wake up. So now going to sleep was a threat in my mind. It took weeks to de-condition myself to stop flying.

    In retrospect, I should have taken control, but my day life had really gone off the deep end and I think this is how it manifested. I haven’t practiced lucid dreaming or flying since I was 28, but I miss that exhilaration of zooming at tree line in a place I loved.