Hi Darling Ones,

How are you? I have not been well, hence the extended silence. The triple-whammy of Trump’s victory + my recovery plateau + the dying of the light (erm, time change) has left me. . .

sad?
grouchy?
angry?
nihilistic?
empty?

I can’t finish that sentence and thus I haven’t written in more than a fortnight.

Where do I even being to deal with everything? How do you come to terms with being disabled and even nice than that, how do you get comfortable using that term to refer to yourself? I don’t feel as if I’m “disabled enough” to claim it, which is probably more ableism in action.

How do I hold the uncertainty of what it will mean to be disabled in Trump’s America? Half the country voted to elect a man who very famously, and publicly made fun of people who have arm tremors similar to mind.

What about being poor and disabled in a country run by a president in the pocket of billionaires? I’ve only managed to make $5000 so far this year and my savings are rapidly dwindling. I’m still hoping to get on the dole, but social security has moved its decision timing from December to February. Then what?

And then when my brain can’t handle any of that, I think of bigger picture things outside of me. What will happen to my Jewish sister and her vocally-pro-Palestinian community of educators? What will happen to women and trans folks?

People like to label these fears hysteria (of course), but these are the same people who said Row would never be overturned.

Darling ones, I’ve got the mean reds and I could use some cheering up. What do you do to get on more stable emotional ground?

I’ve mostly been hiding from everything by making tiny toys while watching cartoons. So far that has changed nothing. Now I’m trying to write about it because sometimes that helps.

Lost,
Jodisa

The post Seeing if Writing About it Helps appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hey Darling Ones,

How goes it? I’ve been quiet lately. I’m sorry. Some of you get a little worried when I go dark for more than a week. Would you believe in the way olden days people would get freaked out if I went dark for a day or two? This was before social media or what we know as social media. This was when we used to update our blogs like Twitter. It was fun.

Speaking of the way olden days, a week or so ago I quit reading Swipe Up for More three pages in. Why? This was a nonfiction book about influencers and the author called her subject an “OG Mommy blogger” because in 2022 the woman had been blogging for an entire decade.

I can’t remember noping out of a book so fast in my life.

Are you kidding me? We love to credit Mommy Bloggers with making blogging a thing in like 2004, but trust me people were blogging well before that. I started in 2000 and I’m not even an OG.

Bleh.

This cranky anecdote fits perfectly with my mood of late and explains why I’ve been so quiet.

I’m unpleasant to be around lately. At least to myself I am. And I got nothing much to say that isn’t a frustrated yawp followed by a deep growl.

My tremor continues to be super tremory. My balance is such crap that I have to use a wheelchair to get the pool for physical therapy, which I dislike. And the world is general misery. Bridges collapsing in Baltimore. Turnip’s continued ascendancy. Genocide in Gaza. Fucking dire, shit.

Also, the stroke and its physical repercussions have entered my dream life and that’s bummer. Up until a week ago my dreams, for the most part, had me in my pre-stroke body. I walked okay and drove in my dreams. It was glorious. A few times I’d dream I was kinda pissed nobody was as amazed as I thought they should be that I was walking like normal. But now in my dreams, I can’t walk very well at all and have to use the walker. Frankly, it’s rude of my subconscious to do me dirty this way.

Ugh.

What sucks is despite everything I have plenty I to be happy about. I mean, Top Chef has returned and it’s set in Wisconsin.

A friend of mine who will remain anonymous paid my mortgage for April.

YES! MY ENTIRE MORTGAGE.

Do you have any idea what kind of relief that is for someone who has only made $1300 so far in 2024? Huge.

And yet, I’m still sitting around in crankypants for no damn good reason other than maybe seasonal transitions are rough.

My goal come April is to write more because I always feel better after I write, even if it’s just pointless bellyaching. I’ll try to make it more than that, but no guarantees.

Love & kisses,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

I have been out of sorts lately in ways unrelated from all death and accompanying grief. There’s just been this low-level air of dissatisfaction and crankiness lurking about the place.

My fart noises at positive affirmations on Insta were extra farty. My sisters asked me an innocent question about Christmas plans and I burst into tears while texting them. There were probably other things that I can’t remember now.

I chalked it up to some weird quirk of grief, but I was wrong. It seems all my crankiness may have been work-related. I have a tendency not to write a lot about work for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to:

• Work talk is boring.
• In order to not upset people it’s usually really vague. For real, I’ve read posts I wrote about work in like 2004 and I have no idea what I was going on about. Whatever it was I was really upset about it.
• It can make for some awkward situations like that one time I went on a twitter rant about people who ask me to work for free and it turned out they wanted to pay me but were really terrible at communicating. I did not get that gig.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago I launched a new site for a client and there was one annoying technical issue I could not resolve. This was basically the web equivalent of when you were a kid and you’d say, “Mom, it hurts when I do this.” And your mom (or at least my mom) would say, “Don’t do that.”

The client and I both refused to not do that.

I do not deal well when things are broken (Looking at you, ice maker). I want them fixed right now. Like right this second. This is obsessive tendency is even worse when I’m the one who is supposed to do the fixing.

So today, after literal weeks of going back and forth with not-very-helpful tech support people I won the lottery. Finally, I found the one who understood my problem and explained the solution in a way that made sense. I only had to say, “I don’t know what that means” once during our conversation. It took roughly 3 minutes to fix a problem that has been plaguing me since December 1st.

Darling Ones, I’m fucking giddy and jelly-boned with relief. I had no idea this problem was bothering me so much. After all, I didn’t really think about it constantly, which is what I usually do about broken things. So I assumed I was putting it away, setting up good work/life boundaries, and all that happy horseshit.

But the body knows, doesn’t it? My shoulders are relaxed for the first time in ages. I bet I sleep like a goddamn champ tonight.

After so many losses, it feels good to have this teeny, tiny win.

Jodi

P.S. I’m not a huge Flaming Lips person, but I really love the song Buggin’, which I’ve been singing in my head since I started writing this post.

The post This is What Was Bugging Me, Apparently appeared first on I Will Dare.

So, Darling Ones,

I had a tiny rage meltdown today.

When I checked the mail this afternoon there was the usual printed spam, the electric bill, a package containing 300 teeny, tiny phallic-looking stitch markers, and a letter/offer/advertisement addressed to my mom.

An advertisement from a monument company addressed to my mom but sent to my house.

I went from having a so-so day to incandescent rage in about thirteen seconds.

I’m still pretty salty about how expensive newspaper obituaries are. For the Minneapolis Star-Tribune obituaries are $12.80 a line. Each line is something like 30-35 characters. Adding a photo is anywhere from $89 to $230. My dad’s tiny obituary was $320. We kept it pretty short and didn’t include a picture because he hated having his picture taken and would 100% haunt my ass if I included one.

So not only does the newspaper rob you blind in the middle of the worst time of your life, they promptly sell your information to other morbid money grubbers. The newspaper obit is the only way that company would have been able to put my mom’s name with my address.

I AM FURIOUS. I need everyone to be as furious about this stupid, inconsequential thing as I am.

I’m lucky I have this to be mad about otherwise I’d be super bummed about the 300 eensy, teensy phallic-shaped safety pins.

Stitch markers are one of the things I forgot to mention when I was listing all the things I need. The project I’m working on needs a lot of stitch markers. I bought a bunch if plastic, non-phallic ones when I first started the project. But I need more. So I bought the phallic-looking ones because they looked bigger. I did not read the fine print. My dad just died, I cannot be responsible for details.

When I opened the package today I was disappointed to see I got the stitch markers for ants apparently. I recognize that my hands are larger than the average woman’s, but so am I! For my size (6’5″) my hands and feet are kinda petite. I dated men shorter than I am who wore bigger shoes than I do (men’s size 12).

In other grief updates, yesterday sucked ass. I couldn’t manage to do anything but lay on the couch and read Dan Chaon novels (I finished Sleep Walking and immediately started Ill Will). When BFK texted me to ask how I was doing I sobbed.

Today, aside from the fury, has been better. I got to hyper-focus on making charts for a client brochure while listening to music. It was nice and distracting. This same client also dropped off 5.5 pounds of chocolate at my house. I’m not even exaggerating.

So if you need teeny phallic safety pins or some chocolate, I can hook you up.

Saltily yours,
Jodi

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Buckle up, Darling Ones,

Or maybe ducking is in order? I’m in the midst of weathering a perfect storm of responsible humaning and I’m very cranky about.

I usually try to the spread out the bullshit tasks that come with being an adult grown up who wants to function on some level. For instance, I never empty the dishwasher the same day I must fold laundry. Because I excel at procrastination and I’m not above squalor this rarely happens, where I have to do two tasks on the same day.

So I don’t know what the fuck happened with today. I blame Wendell. That furry fucker woke me up at 5:16 a.m. because he was relentlessly and noisily pawing at my dresser. I’d yell at him to knock it off and he’d stop for only as long as it took to walk to the other side of the dresser and paw at it again.

The ding-dong dropped one of his pipe cleaner friends behind the dresser and could not rescue it. His arms are too short. After listening to him raise a ruckus for forty-five minutes I finally got out of bed, moved the dresser, and used a hanger to get the pipe cleaner for him.

Want to know what he did after that? He sniffed at it, jumped on the bed, and promptly went to sleep.

When I saw one of my biggest flaws is being a sucker for a cutieface, this is one example of that. See also, my last relationship and 903 other dumb things I’ve done.

My mojo is all discombobulated now, which is the only way I can explain why I had to do all the adult garbage today, including literally taking out the garbage.

Here’s a short list of tasks I did today:

1. Put laundry in the dryer.
2. Fold & put away the laundry that had been chilling in the dryer for two weeks.
3. Empty the dishwasher.
4. Get groceries.
5. Put away the groceries.
6. Drag the garbage bins into the garage.
7. Pay the electric bill.
8. Postpone jury duty.
9. Work.

How do people do all those tasks all the time on the same day? Sometimes many days in a row? Is this why nobody reads books anymore because they’re too busy doing the fucking laundry or the dishes? No wonder people are tired and cranky all the time.

Here’s a short list of funtivities I did today:

At some point I’m going to have to figure out what to have for dinner, but that may be one task too many. I might just eat cherries and Hawaiian Punch popsicles (the smartest thing I’ve purchased all summer). I might take a wee nap to see if I can’t adjust this attitude. I might light the entire world on fire.

Crankily yours,
Jodi

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