I'm stepping away from Facebook for a while. Might be a day, might be a week, might be a few hours...but between the politics and the latest murders and the politics around them...I just can't handle it any more. FB is normally my escape. I think I'll stick to here and pinterest when I need an escape.

I'm stepping away from Facebook for a while.

I'm glad we leave for vacation tomorrow, which will take me away from the internet to some degree. (Yes, I use FB while we're on vacation, but at least my days will be so full with the important work of reading on the beach and/or wrestling sharks that I may just post a picture or two and then disappear again.) Because I am SO with you.

I'm really beginning to think seriously about just never calling the cops now. I don't want someone to get shot because I'm bothered by property crime...

I'm kinda there with you based on the preferential racism I see in our neighborhood watch emails. Don't want to get someone shot for knocking on doors or heaven forbid just walking down the street (because yes I get emails warning me that young men WHO LIVE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD have been stressing out their neighbors when they walk home from school!). I'd need to see a violent crime before I'd call the cops.

I'm glad we leave for vacation tomorrow, which will take me away from the internet to some degree.

Yeah. I'm going to be in the mountains at Family Camp during the RNC, and I think I'll be a much more decent human being after five days off line. Although if there's a coup at the RNC, I may be bummed about missing it.

I'd need to see a violent crime before I'd call the cops.

I'm getting there. Even the drug dealers in my neighborhood seem fairly benign: one of them has been bringing my garbage bins in for me every week for two years. And for a while he was sweeping my driveway, too.

Congrats on the coin, Consuela! That's cool.

Dana, that's great, and also frustrating. Good luck!

I'm really beginning to think seriously about just never calling the cops now. I don't want someone to get shot because I'm bothered by property crime...

I feel like this too. I live next to a big apartment complex and there are sometimes folks who have a loose definition of property boundaries wandering across my yard. I don't care about people cutting across the corner, but when guys start arguing loudly at night and dropping beer bottles and cigarette butts on my property, I'm... uncomfortable about that. And what am I supposed to do? I'm afraid to confront them because belligerent drunk men scare me, but I don't want to call the cops because they're drunk brown men, and I don't want anyone to get shot just for being a drunk asshole.

Unfortunately that is precisely the training they receive. There's a "psychologist" going around teaching them to do exactly that [link]

WTFF

How do we begin to fix this?

We could stop doing the above for one thing, good grief. I mean wtf. We have to pry the bad cops out while keeping the good cops, and replace the entire heirarchy of power that's created and maintains this horrific culture of violence and racism. And how? I have no idea. But we start by collectively agreeing that it has to be done, and so far we haven't even got THAT far. It's horrible.

I told her my mother would beg to differ, and told her to please check for typos in her address line.

I've been getting email for another person with my name for fourteen years. I dutifully send each one back letting the sender know they have the wrong address. Mostly I get no reply, sometimes I get a thanks, every now and then someone insists they do indeed have the right address. I never know what to say to that. Like, what, I'm pretending to not be "your" Elizabeth? I've finally found out what her correct email is, and I'm nobly resisting the impulse to email her and ask why she's friends with these idiots.

OMG, just saw this HRC ad: [link]

It's absolutely killer. I've been waiting for the Clinton campaign to start bringing out this stuff. It looks like this guy got paid maybe 20% of what he was owed.

For a couple years there was a guy (and his kid) living across the street from me who was pretty obviously dealing some kind of illicit goods. But he was polite and quiet and kept his lawn mowed. After he moved out, a family moved in who never mowed or cleared the junk out of their yard and had loud parties late into the night. My next door neighbors and I were like, can we have the drug dealer back?

Smart drug dealers know not to call bad attention to themselves. Al Capone made sure the kids in his neighborhood got milk to drink.

Man, I'm depressed. Let's mock the guy who wrote this ridiculous profile of Margot Robbie:

She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes.

Indeed. I am purple, but only with the help of certain makeup.

[link]

I've only called the police once, and I was a little hesitant about it, but I didn't know what else to do. It was at my old apartment, and I was coming home around midnight, and there was a woman just about passed out next to my house. I tried talking to her, but she was way too drunk to be coherent, and it was something like -6 degrees. The police and an ambulance came, and I don't know what happened after that. I checked the local papers for the police blotter, but they didn't mention it.