Brandon

  • New realizations in thankfulness

    Thanksgiving is such an interesting holiday. Pilgrims marked their successful harvest with parties and gunfire in celebration and Native Americans thought they needed help and thus started this holiday we now call Thanksgiving. It has diverged into being a day of being thankful for what we have, and reminiscing on the things that make you happy. 

    For a lot of people it’s also just an anxiety filled day of exhaustion, but who really cares about those people. 

    I’ve recently gotten a puppy, marking the first time that I’ve been responsible for a living creature other than myself, and in many ways that event has made me thankful for more things than I’ve realized. While I’m also thankful for the “normal” things (ie, health, money, food, family,) I want to focus more on the things I haven’t realized before. 

    The most obvious and easy thing to say is that I’m thankful for the knowledge that I have. In the first week or two of having a puppy there are so many scenarios that come up that, unless you’re a well-rounded, educated individual, you won’t be able to do without asking for help. That education has come from my parents, of course, but also from schooling and general inquiries on the internet over the years. There are so many things that have come up this week that I’ve never had to have knowledge of before, be it installing a light, insulating and heating a garage crate, or DIYing some things to solve specific problems I’ve had. 

    I’m thankful for being a caring and loving individual, I don’t know how this happened, but somehow through my upbringing and early adulthood I’ve learned that negativity is a poison that just fuels more negativity. That stance has translated so well in having a pup, there is not a single mean bone in this dog’s body right now. Now does my caring nature also mean that he isn’t properly crate trained yet because I feel bad for leaving him in there? “You can’t handle the truth!” 

    I’m thankful for my little pup. This year has had some hard hits so far, between ADHD, school, anxiety, and this election season, having something so pure in my life is a much needed reprieve. I remember regarding to my girlfriend a few weeks ago while I was on a Nursery floor that babies are born with nothing in them but hope and instincts. They are the ultimate blank slate, and with parenting your job is to gently guide them towards the type of person you wish them to be. With puppies I feel like that is just as true, to a greater extent even. This little pup looks to me for everything, food, potty time, play time, nap time, sleepy time, behaviors, etc. As exhausting as it is having to teach him everything, having that responsibility is rubbing off on me and making me a better person I feel. 

    Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and I hope you find something new to be thankful for soon. 

  • Democracy dies in (optional) darkness

    Over the past week, due to a post from MSNBC, I’ve been drawn back to the days of the end of the 2020 election when all that I could hear from Republicans was about the “Twitter Files” that were going to expose Twitter for allegedly prioritizing Liberal posts, costing them the election. The Republican caucus went on a tirade, as if Democracy itself was at stake with the threat of a Biden presidency (ha.) We’ve just gotten off the heels of an election where X (formerly Twitter) was verifiably targeting right wing posts toward young men and other likely voters, and we haven’t heard anything about it. Republicans have shown their own hypocrisy with allowing targeting of political propaganda from the richest man in the world, who will likely be one of the most important people in the Trump II Era. Have we, as a society, accepted that our companies should be able to influence our political views at the whim of their (infuriatingly hypocritical, fake news spreading, and habitually lying) leaders. Every politician from the right seems to preach free speech when their idea of one of the founding ideals of our nation is censorship in the name of extra votes. It’s pathetic.

  • Owning the narrative

    In the light of today’s political climate and the increase in speech regulation on social media sites, along with pending threats, I have decided that there is no reason for me to give my thoughts to those companies. X is owned by Elon Musk who actively steered his base from Democratic to Republican and managed to seemingly become the most important figure in the Trump II era. The entire tech industry has seemingly started the appeasement arc for this new administration and I don’t think we should support that.

    Therefore, I have chosen to own my own narrative. I am not sticking to a script or censoring my ideas, I’m not posting things for people to like them. I’m here to be me, nothing more nothing less.