so i'm in alabama.

spouse got back and then got scheduled for a week of training for his real job, and since uncle sam is paying for hotel room, and i've never been to alabama, i tagged along and here we are. huntsville. there are many things here, but the most important thing is SPACE CAMP. as a kid i totally gobbled up the propaganda in ranger rick and space camp sounded amazing. who didn't want to go to space camp?! well, it's here. we went to the rocket museum yesterday (same location as space camp) and it looks every bit as amazing as my preteen astronaut fever dreams. we passed a space camp class and some kid in the back was napping and the other was texting on his phone. you FOOLS! you're at space camp! i would have sacrificed extremities to go to space camp! turns out space camp is currently $1500 for 6 days. steep. i guess it's one of those things where a kid who is truly motivated wouldn't see the money as an obstacle and will figure out how to fund it, but i dunno, it just feels like rich kids get to play on easy mode even in the sciences. i'm jelly for sure.

the gift shop was disappointing tho. like, how do you fuck up a nasa/rocket/space themed gift shop? i dunno who they have running it but they SUCK. you think they would nerd it up! so much potential! but no, all you get is "nasa, the pen" and "nasa, the playing cards" and "nasa, the shopping bag". i had to buy an astronaut magnet to turn into a christmas ornament for our collection. no snow globes at all. come on. we managed to find kid's shirts for the friend who is checking in on our kitties, plus curiosity rover socks for her, but that was after circling the gift shop 3 times and finally stumbling on the hidden location of the one design in the right sizes. just awful. they better be good at rockets because they are lousy at capitalism.

the important things to note here are: 1) they serve tasty icee cocktails at the planetarium and 2) they play excessively cheerful music while you're outside looking at the various military murder death machines and oversized explosive devices that people died to develop and 3) the food court sucks and 4) the gift shop sucks and 5) i scraped my hand up trying to switch to a full roll of toilet paper in the restroom, so i recommend picking a stall with plenty of paper already on the roll before you sit down and commit yourself, because the toilet paper dispensers are made by vampires. i'm not even sure exactly what happened, but now i have a deep scrape potentially full of fecal matter and i've discovered liquid bandage burns like fire ants.

we had a very good time - if nothing else, we are excellent museum going company and we find each other very entertaining. it's almost impossible to go to a museum with spouse and not have fun. after so much time apart, it's a nice reminder of how much we enjoy each other's company.

we wandered off to get food (the food court stops serving at 3pm because they hate money i guess) and found a mall and in the mall is a merch shop for the local minor league baseball team, the trash pandas. now they know how to merch! they got a cute mascot (a raccoon in a trash can rocket) and they slap him on EVERYTHING. spouse isn't into sportsball but so many of his coworkers are, so we got him a trash panda shirt so he can wear that and "blend". "yes, look, i too support a sportsball team." then we got some other stuff just because the trash panda is very very cute and nerdy. seriously, the rocket museum needs to go take notes because the trash pandas are light years ahead at capitalism.

that's pretty much our only full tourist day here. now i am chilling in the hotel while spouse is off at training.

i was regretting committing to the trip because frankly, i've had my fill of airport travel for a good while and wasn't excited about the flight(s). plus who wants to leave alaska for alabama. it's silly hot and muggy here, but it's also weirdly comforting, having just come from the land of crab. but the rocket museum was a good time (i have terrible rocket based sex puns for weeks now) and it's just a lot of fun travelling with spouse. we're driving around to local shops and we keep hitting "one way" or "no u-turn" intersections that require us to make squirrelly navigation decisions to get turned around in the direction we want to go without breaking traffic laws. we hit another of these intersections leaving the grocery store and spouse was grousing about it so i yell "no u-turns in rocket city! rockets only go straight!" and just as we get ourselves turned around and pass the same intersection, we watch a lifted pickup ignore the "one way" sign, drive over/through the orange reflective perma-cones put there to make people follow the rules, and just basically give middle fingers to everything. "i don't think he even has a license plate," spouse says in confused law enforcement awe, as i'm cackling hysterically but trying not to be too obvious lest this guy see us laughing at him and decide to stomp our little rental car into the dirt.

there's a similar spot in anchorage where lots of people want to make an illegal turn for convenience. the difference is, in alaska the barriers are metal and nobody's driving through them without totaling their vehicle.

so Huntsville is a weird mix of nerd and redneck.

i enjoyed the planetarium show and i was wondering why i hadn't bothered to go out and look at the stars in alaska yet this summer, and then i realized, silly, it hasn't been dark enough for stars yet. there isn't such thing as "dark and warm" in alaska. real night is coming back but we're talking midnight to 4am at the moment. by the time the stars are out at 9pm, it will be cold again.

my neighbor brenda has been inviting me over to pick the raspberries in her backyard. she has a smallish patch but the berry yield is unreal. i have gone over 4 times and come back with at least a quart of berries each time. there is one raspberry cane in our backyard on cat poop hill that did yield a surprising amount of fruit, and two young canes with no fruit, so looks like i'll easily be able to cultivate my own patch. (i didn't get any strawberries from our plants - either the squirrels got them first or the rain made them go moldy, so poo.) mary says she planted canby raspberries in the neighborhood - they jumped the fence and that's what brenda has and i believe i have, too. they are nearly thornless, do well in cold climates and the berries are large and plentiful. brenda is going to give me some of her young plants that she wants to weed out to keep her patch from spreading too much. so i've made raspberry crisp and cheesecake raspberry bars and put some in the freezer. those raspberries are goddamn delicious. mary also has a red currant bush growing right by the chain link fence and she let me harvest some, so i have currants drying and currants frozen - for whatever reason currants make me think of hoidays so i will make something for thanksgiving/christmas. supposedly currant jelly is easy to make.

the fireweed is blown and winter is coming. by the time we get back, the leaves will probably be starting to change and we will have to scramble to get firewood and clean up the yard. while i'm on vacay i want to figure out my fall planting to set ourselves up for spring.

brenda seems really nice and i like her quite a bit. mary also seems awesome - she was giving me her tips on making frozen ice globes for decorations. it's a shame mary is moving away because we'd probably get up to all kinds of trouble. we've also met wayne who has the house on the corner with his family. apparently megan bought the flipper house and they aren't flipping it, they just had to clean it up first to live in. i'll probably still call it the flipper house. the slappers are still the slappers but apparently the two inflatable pool parties were the worst of their partying. they still have like 5 cars, and one seems to like parking in front of our place constantly which i am not crazy about, but at least they haven't blocked our driveway since i put my foot down. they're going to have to figure out something else when i park our car in that spot to give the driveway to spouse's work car. i've pinned the grampa as the source of trouble. he is a bad egg. i'm unclear if he lives there but he at least visits a lot for meals. at first i thought he was speaking a different language, but after listening to him yell for a while, i understand he is just speaking english with a heavy slur, like a lifelong alcoholic, or possibly someone missing a lot of teeth, or both. you know how people with a drinking problem are too loud, too reactionary, too impatient? yup. dude has fried himself with something. he is bad news. i overheard an argument where the matriarch (his daughter) was throwing away some expired food and he freaked out because he thought it was wasteful. she explained that she buys all the food and it's her money, he threw a fit and started screaming and cursing. the daughter was upset and crying - i think he was violent toward her. it was horrible. over some expired food, he ruined the whole family's evening. he threw his fit, got in his truck and stormed off.

now and then i second guess myself about how i've kept my dad out of my life. i know i seem very cold. maybe he wasn't so bad, he meant well, etc etc. nope, it's the exact same brand of controlling bullshit. it's the daughter as his ego boosting vehicle, not respecting her as her own person capable of making her own decisions. everything must prop up the father figure because he's too fragile to handle any hint of "you don't know best". he's a parasitic tyrant, ruling via temper tantrum. no, i don't want that in my life. that poor woman sobbing in her own kitchen, begging her dad to stop. that will not be me. i made sure.

so i have some compassion for the matriarch. she's still a slapper, but i know where she gets it from.

--

so trump got raided. spouse's mom is flipping out, because naturally she can't let herself believe that the raid happened because trump did bad criminal things worthy of a raid. nope, there has to be ulterior motives and plots within plots. "god is using trump as his vessel" oh my god.

i didn't get around to visiting his parents on my own when spouse was gone. i thought i would, but honestly after the roe v wade thing i just didn't feel like engaging with them solo. it didn't sound like a good time to me. maybe that makes me a weenie.

spouse's mom is trying to get his attention now and convince him of these conspiracies she has invested herself in. she desperately wants him/us to believe the same things she & his dad believe. spouse is not engaging because to reject her theories is the same as rejecting her personally and implying she's not as smart as she thinks she is. she's pretty invested in her identity as a self educated scholar. she'll point at her hoard of books and fluff up her self given credentials and think they give her some kind of smart person license (it's awesome to be an alaskan but living in the middle of nowhere with no normal job def does not make you a superior choice to lecture about govt or politics in any way, shape or form). so she feels strongly about the veracity of her pet conspiracy theories. there's no good-faith engaging with that.

like, does she think that the wackier the theories she believes, the stronger and greater her faith is, and the better christian she is? is the irrationality a feature, not a bug? "hey MIL, do you think the crazier, stupider things you can make yourself believe, the closer you are to god and the more jesus loves you?" i would love to ask her this. but spouse would not appreciate me kicking that hornet nest.

parents, amirite? what's with the need to dominate your kid through violence and/or theology? what's with the power games and emotional blackmail? why the desperate need to force your kid to conform to your authority? it's not about the expired food or the crackpot theories. it's needing to be the authority. it's the substitution of genuine love for the mindless validation craved by an insecure ego.

what is real love? real love is trusting someone to make the right choices for themselves, even if they don't make sense to others at the time, even if they are almost certainly mistakes. real love is allowing free will, like god gave humanity. real love is also allowing the consequences for poor choices to play out. real love doesn't change if someone makes a mistake. real love doesn't say, "i told you so" or "i know better than you". real love is resilient, big picture, acceptance. not fucking power games and lockstep conformity.

what with all the conspiracies and irrational thinking these days, sometimes i find myself questioning my own woo-woo beliefs and reminding myself that i am not immune to propaganda and potentially zealotry. i'm no paragon of hard logic. i think the line is: do i personally feel attacked or insulted if someone believes differently? do i feel a deep need to share my beliefs and convert others to think exactly the same? am i trying to control the choices of others through my beliefs? i feel like as long as i confidently answer "no", i'm probably okay. i don't think a little woo-woo is harmful. it's just a story we like to tell ourselves about the workings of the inner world we make for ourselves. it adds color and dimension to existence. people should be able to choose their own flavors (or no flavors). but too much is brainworms.

oh, spouse shook the hornet nest and got into it with his mom and sisters, about trump and also about the gay and trans hate/fear that the gop has been feeding (because they've bought that garbage too). he is so much more patient and kind than i am. he asked them a lot of leading questions to get them to articulate why they hold certain beliefs, and then gently poked holes in their arguments and showed them the absurdities. THINK about what you are saying and what it leads to. he has got them in a fine tizzy.

he told them he felt like the "black sheep progressive" of the family. that ticked off his mom, who apparently sees herself as a progessive because she wore pants in the 70s or something. despite having chugged all the republican koolaid short of qanon, she is somehow a bastion of progressiveness. SURE. see, she has no fucking clue who she is. she just has a mental cardboard cutout of who she thinks she wants to be. spouse says she doesn't want to admit she got brainwashed.

but it brings an interesting point, how the red hats can deceive themselves into thinking they are the cool anti establishment rebels with the sekrit truth, fighting against the corrupt system. they're the freedom fighters, they're the badass heroes, they're the star wars rebels, they're the ones holding up the middle finger and doing what is right. it's an attractive image of themselves they value and invest in. maybe for the older ones it is about resurrecting their youthful self image, where they told their boss to shove it and smoked weed at concerts and broke laws. it's the cinematic mythology and romantic tropes they cling to. it's why they make all the crazy photoshops of trump as a muscular stud riding a tank and such. they want to see themselves like that, as heroes untouched by age, respected and admired. not wrinkly fat pampered old people who don't know how the world works anymore and are deeply uncool. it's a huge thing with gun culture, too, the idea that a gun makes you a real man,

makes you powerful. it's marketing. it's self image.

so she can be whatever she thinks she is. a firebrand progressive who is anti-choice and anti-vax and thinks gays are grooming kids and certain books should be banned and everybody should be christian. yup.

anyway. i think spouse should just spam the chat with dark brandon memes. i bet his mom would lose her mind.

oh, i ran across an interesting talk on the patriarchy and masculinity and the current trend towards fascism that made some good points. the patriarchy is awful for men, too. this idea of "the man box" and how male bullying culture starts young and results in basically nothing good for anybody except the 1% at the top. i think if we want to target this societal chain of abuse, being aware of "the man box" is a good starting point.

please ignore the dumb title and also when the hostess pitches a shake product in the middle. it's worth the time investment.

https://youtu.be/e8XhkuqAvnQ