I lost track of time this week. I didn’t know when it was Monday or Wednesday, Jan. 30 or Feb. 1. I’ve lost my cues this week that tell me. Being medically retired and not having a Monday through Friday life, it can happen.
I usually have appointments scheduled for Wednesdays and get reminders from the providers on my smart phone, but I’ve no appointments this week to remind me Wednesday was coming up. My roommate usually works weekends and has specific week days off, but on one of her days off left early enough in the day, for whatever reason, that it could’ve been for work, and that threw my count off.
In the longer term sense, I’ve stopped following current events as closely in the last months, especially the last month, as I have in the past. I don’t note the difference between weekend cable news programing and weekday programing that gives me cues. I don’t watch Sunday morning news shows. I read newspapers as feeds and through apps online, so I don’t physically get thinner newspapers on Saturdays and thicker newspapers on Sundays.
This past month, I’ve been trying to avoid the tendency to have all things be Trump. I don’t want to live in a progressive echo chamber where a nightmarish dystopic vision of my future as an LGBT community member begins eating away at my soul for four years, starting now.
It’s hard though. I use social media; I’m on Twitter and Facebook. My Facebook feed alone is filled with a myriad of people posing about some lesser and greater outrages of President Trump and the Trump Administration.
How many days was President Trump and the mainstream media focused on how big the crowd was at his inauguration, and whether three million voters voted illegally? I don’t know; it seemed like a lot.
Then there was the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and all the affiliated marches, including San Diego, across the nation. Were they just a one off event that bent a lot of grass, or was it the starting of the movement? Sort of a progressive version of how the Tea Party movement started?
And, of course, the Women’s Marches were probably the only event where you couldn’t get young trans women to excitedly wear cat ears. It seems “pussy hats” were a play on vagina-centric women’s politicking, and my Facebook and Twitter feeds had a number of trans women pointing out how this kind of politicking excludes a large number of them.
Then there was the immigration order. It’s generous to say the details were poorly thought out because of inadequate vetting of the order, and execution of the order was poor because it caught all of the implementing agencies off-guard; the agencies weren’t forewarned the order was coming.
And, that doesn’t even go to whether the order embodied American values, or whether the order was constitutional. It didn’t go to how the order lumped five year old refugees and interpreters who helped the U.S. Army in Iraq with “potential terrorists.” The protests at the airports across the nation were large.
And then there’s President Trump trying to take credit for being pro-LGBT for doing nothing with regards to an Obama Administration era LGBT antidiscrimination order regarding federal contractors; the Trump Administration is leaving it in place. However at the same time, President Trump announced a very anti-LGBT choice for the Supreme Court in 10th Circuit Appeals Court Judge Neil Gorsuch.
I’ve been burying my head by working on a detailed playlist matrix for my iPod. I listen to a lot of 1940s swing era music, and I want to listen to a wide swath of big band, blues and jazz from that era, to include vocal and instrumental pieces. I want close harmony groups, other groups, duets, black, white, Hispanic, male and female representation; a detailed matrix. It’s taking me hours to develop this matrix.
I lost track of time trying to pay attention to life outside of my music. I’ve been trying not to pay attention to the Trump news, but the Trump news is finding me anyways.
Dystopia, here I come.
