'Tis the Season to be fat and happy

Merry Christmas!

I know I tend to get a little negative here, and vent a lot about things, and I also know that Thanksgiving was last month and to do a blog about things that I am thankful for is a little late, but you know what? I'm much more thankful for things at Christmas than I am at Thanksgiving.

Things I am thankful for, 2013:

1. My family.
1.5. My dogs
2. My friends.
3. Love eternal.
4. Wibbly- wobbly, timey-wimey.
5. Music.
6. Life.

Let's break it down a little.

1. My family. I don't just mean my immediate family, like my husband and siblings and parents. I mean my cousins, and aunts and uncles. I mean my in-laws. I mean family members I don't even think about until I get out my Christmas card list and see them on it (admittedly, there are a couple, and no I am not naming names.) I haven't really been close to my extended family because I've always lived three thousand miles away from most of them, but I really am thankful for them. Family is important, and even though they are the people who are most likely to drive you crazy, they are also the people you are most likely to have things in common with, the people who are closer to you genetically than a stranger on the street, and the people who just might message you on Facebook when you're having a shit day to let you know that even though you're not close, you're family, and if you need to talk they're there to listen.

1.5 My dogs. I put them here in the middle because to me they are family, but I know not everyone gets that. Besides, they're more than family, too. They're protectors, they're children, they're best friends. My dogs are always following me around the house like an entourage. If I'm upset and crying they are all of them trying to lick my face and make me happy. They love me unconditionally and I feel the same way about them.

Besides, they're adorable!

 

2. My friends. I would be lost without my friends. I have friends all over the world, friends I email daily, and friends I visit with whenever I get to be in their neck of the woods. I have good friends that are more like family from Seattle all the way to England. I have friends I've known since I was in elementary school, friends who grew up in the same neighborhood, and friends I've not even met in "real life." All of them are important to me. There's a line that has always stuck with me in the song "Thankful Heart" from The Muppet Christmas Carol- "And if you need to know the measure of a man, you simply count his friends." I have a lot of friends. I may not have a lot of them close by, but I have a lot of friends, people who I have seen come together in a common purpose to do amazing things for one another, people who have gone out of their way to pick me up at the airport or change their schedules so they could see me, people who have taken me into their homes and let me stay for the weekend- you know. Friends.

 

3. Love eternal. For some of you this makes perfect sense, others need an explanation, and the only one you're going to get is this: It's a Blockhead thing.

 

Sometimes being called a Blockhead is a compliment.

 

 

4. Wibbly- wobbly, timey-wimey.

 

Technical.

 

So, for those of you who don't watch Doctor Who, you should. Not because it's excellent Sci-Fi about a Time Lord who travels through space and time with mostly Earthling companions saving the universe over and over again with a bit of whimsy and a lot of intelligence (even though it's all of those things) but because there is nothing that gives you as much hope as the thought that a brilliant and amazing alien sees so much potential and good in mankind that he continues to save us from decimation again and again. If The Doctor thinks we're worth saving, then maybe we should think the same.

 

The Doctor.

 

 

5. Music. I pretty much can't live without it. I haven't listened to a lot of it today and I can tell you I've been a lot quicker to snap over things than I would if I'd had music playing in the background. I love all kinds of music- you already know I love New Kids on the Block and Maroon 5, but I'm also a fan of Puccini, The Beatles, Bing Crosby, the Monkees, Brad Paisley, The Carpenters, musicals, Aerosmith and Eddie Daniels (he's a jazz clarinet player.) My tastes are varied (much like my taste in movies) and while I tend to spend most of my time listening to pop music, there are days when I need to listen to country, or I need to put on classical and just mellow out. And my all time favorite song?

 

Words and Music by Jeff Moss

 

6. Life. If you're not thankful for your life, even if it's full of senseless crap like there being no way to stop your hated Google+ account that you almost never use from being connected to YouTube even though YOU DO NOT LIKE THIS and WOULD OPT OUT IF GOOGLE WERE NOT STUPID AND ACTUALLY GAVE YOU A CHOICE (like I could get through a blog without a rant?), then frankly, you're missing the bigger picture. That we exist at all is incredible. Whether a higher being or dumb luck created life as we know it on this planet is irrelevant- we exist. And while the universe may not give a damn about that, we should. Yes, I have diabetes. Yes, I feel like ick right now because I need to lose a few pounds and my blood sugar is 207 and climbing. But I'm alive. I'm alive and so are you, to quote Bill Murray in Scrooged.  And holy crap that is amazing.





I AM the crazy lady

So, recently I started nosing in around my Google+ profile because more of my friends are using it.  I have to say I have the same issues with it that I do with Facebook- they take my information and make it available to anyone they want to without consideration of my feelings. Personally, I miss letter writing, because then you could stay in touch with people you were friends with and not have your entire conversation plastered all over a social media webpage that automatically shares all of your private information with search engines and complete strangers. I know there are ways to set your profiles to "private" but that shouldn't be something you can DO, it should be something that happens AUTO-FREAKING-MATICALLY, and only if you WANT to share things should you have to go in and make changes to the defaults that some jerk programmer in Silicon Valley thought would be acceptable to everyone.

I know this isn't necessarily about diabetes, but here's the thing: if I want to share this blog with people (which I do, even complete strangers, because I think it might be helpful to people) via Google+, I HAVE to link it to my personal account, which means people I don't freaking know now have access to "learning more about me than I may be willing to share." Because of this, you will learn almost nothing about me from my Google+ profile, even if you're my husband, because I have almost every single solitary thing that I can set to "Only Me" set to "Only Me." And that makes social media basically a giant steaming pile of waste of time.

 I spend more time changing the defaults than I do actually posting stuff.

What I share on this blog I share because I want to, not because the privacy deficient morons at Facebook changed the privacy settings yet again so that things we thought we were posting in private are now searchable by Yahoo. And yes, I know that this blog makes me sound like a ranting lunatic who wears aluminum foil hats to keep the government out of her head (I don't, mostly because they could get around that if they wanted to), but the fact of the matter is, people, that what you put on the Internet, even in private, is FOREVER. Those Tweets you deleted? Yeah, anyone who gets your tweets sent to their phone still has them. The Library of Congress has been collecting Tweets for years. Some server somewhere has a cached memory which your tweet still resides on, and is still searchable by any search engine.  Armageddon will happen, cities will be leveled, the human race will be destroyed, and you know what? Those Tweets you deleted will still be there, and the cockroaches will be reading them while they eat Twinkies under the radioactive sky.

Now back and more resilient than ever.

Where am I going with this? It's kind of a rant, and I think I lost the point... oh yeah.

So now my blog is connected to my Google+ account, because frankly Google dominates everything and eventually we'll be calling them our lords and masters anyway. Why do I use them, then, you ask? Because I'm the only one who misses letter writing, and I see the positives in what social media can offer us, if used responsibly. I will say that at least Google makes it fairly simple to opt out of sharing things you don't want to share, whereas Facebook is run by the NSA or something considering how little they care for user privacy.

Shit, did I just get political? I'll shut up now.

Long story short, if you go to tag me in a picture or add me to an event or say we work together/went to school together on any social media, do not be surprised if I UNtag myself, say I'm not going even though I am, and refuse every single request to acknowledge that I do what I do for a living where I do it or that I matriculated from any one institution. Also, don't trust that birthday app that tells you when my birthday is, because 1) I don't allow them access to my profile and 2) Facebook doesn't know when my birthday is. Yes, I am the crazy lady. But when you've been pricking your fingers for over thirty years, you have tasted insulin as your blood stream shoots it past your taste buds because you injected it in the oh-so-wrong place, and you have spent more hours than you can count worrying about your physical health like I have, you're entitled to the crazy. At least a little.

Or in the case of Freddie Mercury, as crazy as you want.