Hola Darling Ones,

Well, we made it to 2026 and it’s been a real kick in the crotch, hasn’t it?

On January first I started using this neck & chest firming cream before bed each night because I’m well past my prime.

I have/had a ridiculous amount of creams, potions, and unguents from good ol’2020 when I had more money than sense. I’ve been making my way through them over the past year or so. Most of them are crap because I look exactly the same no matter what I smear on my face.

The package on the cream claims, “97% had firmer skin in just two weeks.” That’s why I started using it on the first, because I’d be able to remember two weeks from the first.

But then monsters decided to up their cruelty and now my state is occupied my hostile forces and so last night as I was spreading the goo on my neck, I said into the mirror, “this is crap. My skin isn’t firmer!”

When I climbed into bed I realized we were only ten days into 2026. Yowza that cream’s got four more days to give me the neck of a 20-year-old.

As for 2026? I don’t know. . . it’s hard out there for a human.

Since I use humor as a defense mechanism and to hide from my feelings, I joked the other day about how I missed the pre-Rodney King 90s when white people like me could live in ignorant bliss about the murderous police and the violence they inflict on people because they feel like it.

The joke did not make me feel better, but I tried.

Can a person even feel better right now? Since the murder of Renee Nicole Good I’ve been quiet. I don’t have any words to help or heal, and no desire to add to the echo chamber that gets more performative with each atrocity. Between the woke scolds* and the creative-types patting themselves on the back for continuing to art as an act of resistance I’m a little more misanthropic than usual.

One of my goals this year is to write more (this has been my goal every year of my entire life), and that gets tougher as the US falls further into fascism. I do not want to write about politics and current events. There are smarter people that are better at that. I want to write about frivolity. I want to compare and contrast the use of sleep in the lyrics of Jason Isbell’s “Foxes in Snow” and Amanda Shires’ “Nobody’s Girl.”

However, that feels not just frivolous but unserious and disrespectful at this moment in time. I’m a generic Allen Ginsburg, “America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?”

Not even close to figuring it out,
Jodi

 
*I just learned the term “woke scold” from one of Wolfdogg’s daughters. She kept calling him a woke scold and it was hilarious because as a 50somoething white guy there about 583 million worse things he could be than a woke scold. Also, he’s right. Spotify is evil.

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Uff Da, Darling Ones,

Today has been a rough one. Yesterday was a rough one too, and I am deep down in the feeling sorry for myself dumps.

I had eye day yesterday and it did not go well. It started out great two old ladies in the waiting room complimented me on my Still Kickin shirt and Dr. D said my hair was cute.

What can I say? I’m vain.

I was actually kind of excited for the treatment, because I was getting the super-duper new high dose eye juice. If this stuff works I might be able to go 4 months between eye days.

Things have not gone well since the injection. For the first time in a year I’m dealing with awful side effects.

I sent all day yesterday with my left eye closed and crying, I became alarmed at one point and called the retina clinic to find out if my eye was about to fall out.

Turns out this happens sometimes if all the betadine doesn’t get rinsed out. Yowza.

While I can open my eye today the site hasn’t recovered yet and everything is blurry. It also feels like I have an eyelash in my eye.

All the things I’ve experienced are considered normal side effects and being giant baby I am, I’m all “I can’t live like this!”

It’s been hard. My already compromised vision is worse than ever. My left eye was my “good” one. The vision in that eye wasn’t distorted, like it is in my right eye. Now I got super blurry on the left and distorted on the right.

And my balance? SO MUCH MORE GARBAGE. My body is a house of cards. If one tiny thing goes askew everything collapses — balance, tremor, mood, all of it.

So yeah, today has been a blurry, wobbly, shaky pile of crap. AND IT’S MY BIRTHDAY WEEK!

The injustice is incalculable.

I’ve been singing Westerberg’s “Good Day” to myself all day, trying to remind myself that at least I’m alive.

That’s a good thing, right?

Jodi

The post Not a Good Day appeared first on I Will Dare.

Dear Darling Ones,

My first thought this morning upon opening my eyes was of my dad. He died in September 2022. His death was not a surprise. He had warned us off and on for the year leading to his death that he was ready and tired of fighting.

He had not been in good health since 2015? He was diabetic with congenital heart failure, he had surgery to remove lung cancer in 2016 and ended up having a stroke while in the hospital. He did pretty well for the next couple of years, but the COVID isolation of 2020 really did him.

When he announced at a random family dinner in 2021 that he was tired, it was understandable.

Today when I woke up my right side simultaneously heavy and tremory, my Floppy Scoop uncooperative, and my legs feeling like they weren’t attached to my body correctly, I could relate.

I related so hard.

Between the unending financial anxiety and the continuous physical battles and the having ask for help all of the time, I’m tired. It doesn’t help that I had appointments Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I call it the gauntlet. Retina Doctor, Regular Doctor, and Physical Therapy. Uff da.

There’s still a lot of fight in me. This isn’t a cry for help or a warning. I don’t want my life to end. I don’t want to hurt myself or anyone else. I just want one thing to be easy once. Just one thing. One time.

Exhausted, but continuing,
Jodi

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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,

Carnations always make me think of that scene in “Sex in the City” when Berger breaks up with Carrie on a post-it note.

This is kind of a shame, because I really love carnations. They’re not my first (lilies), second (peonies), or third (daisies) favorite flower, but I still love them. They’re criminally underrated. The first flowers I ever got were carnations leftover from a Mother’s Day brunch promotion at Country Kitchen where my mom worked when I was a kid.

I have a tiny cup of carnations on the windowsill. They’re all that remain from some flowers BFK got me after that terrible, no good, very bad week.

Because my brain is a dick, instead of relishing in the childhood joy of carnations, it is fixating on romantic relationships, breaks up specifically. It might not totally be my brain’s fault. I’ve been pondering romantic relationships quite a bit recently.

I can’t seem to decide if I want a romantic relationship or if I just want to get laid on the regular.

My last relationship was stupid and messy. Part of the problem was being involved with a narcissistic liar and part of the problem was me thinking, ala Rob Gordon in High Fidelity, “my guts have shit for brains.” So when I got involved I decided I was going to do the exact opposite of all the things I usually do in relationships. I was gonna be bold about what I was looking for. I was going to be honest and ask for what I needed. And, here’s the part that was dumb, I wasn’t gonna run when I got tiniest urge to run.

After all, my guts had shit for brains. Darling Ones, I should have run. Instead, I put up with oceans of lies and mountains of bullshit because I decided that I was going to love unconditionally. I gave up so much of myself doing emotional work and support for someone who did not return the favor. I did this for someone who could not be roused to ask me how my day was or what I was reading or what I was thinking.

I live for people asking me what I’m reading or what I’m thinking or what I’m listening to. I told them that repeatedly and still I got nothing.

Like the prophet Jack White has said before, “You don’t know what love is, you just do what your told.”

I thought sacrificing yourself and being forgiving about all the things is what unconditional love was about. I also thought if I gave that I would get it in return. That is not true. Not everyone deserves my unconditional love, and unfortunately nobody is required to love me.

I make a lot of jokes about having an ice robot heart, and those are mostly jokes, but I’m not kidding when I say I don’t know how to do romantic love. I don’t know if I’m broken in some fundamental way or what. People keep saying, “you know when you know.” I’m pretty smart and I don’t think I’ve ever known.

Despite being with a lot of men I’ve only ever said “I love you” to one (1) man in a romantic kind of way. I did not mean it. I thought if I said it enough I would feel it, repetition would make it true. It did not, and I’m retroactively angry at myself for saying such a lie out loud with my own mouth. So dumb.

How do most of the people on Earth do this? Did I miss some very fundamental class in high school? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I’m not sad or angry about this so much as frustrated and exasperated. I keep thinking about all this and like I said, I’m not even sure I want a romantic relationship at this point. All I want is a man who will occasionally debate pop culture with me and then want to have sex after. I know this is asking a lot, because I’m really fucking smart and men get intimidated by smart women who are also very tall.

Auuugghh. Emotions and desires. The dumbest. Figuring out what you want. The dumbest of the dumbest.

Frustratedly yours,
Jodi

P.S. I stole the headline from the song “Good Arms vs Bad Arms” by Frightened Rabbit, because I am armed to the teeth and heavy-set. Much like the song I’m armed with the past, the will, and a brick (and by brick I mean my big mouth, it’s the same thing).

P.P.S.
My love of flowers is one of my more embarrassing predilections. It feels kinda cliche and out of character for me. Flowers are so fragile, feminine, and fleeting, which are not words I would ever use in describing anything about me. For years and years and years I would beg everyone I know to get me flowers for my birthday, which is the only gift-giving occasion a single woman has where flowers are appropriate.

This flower-getting campaign worked excellently for many years culminating in getting 30+ bouquets of flowers for my 30th birthday.

Over the years I have backed off. Fresh flowers feel a little frivolous and wasteful. When COVID first hit I pivoted and decided to fall in love with plants, thus the Sadness Garden was born. But I still love flowers and get excited whenever one of my plants produces one.

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