The night started out pretty well. I had my Craft Center shift that night. I brought Chinese food. I had found some “I Voted” sticker/button things on slate.com, I printed them out, and we had a button making party. They had some cute slogans like “This Nasty Woman Voted” that seemed so charming at the time, 24 hours ago. We hung out. We laughed. We thought, “oh, we just gotta make it through the voting from the racist states first, then she’ll win.”

You know how that ended.

I am getting a lot of shit lately about how “negative” I am. Hell, I got reported on the other day at work for being “negative” because I said I wasn’t allowed to borrow someone else’s computer, something I had straight up been forbidden to do previously when I’d been having computer issues on a regular basis. However, I stupidly actually believed Hillary would win. I looked forward to actually seeing a female president being elected in my lifetime. I looked forward to the nightmare of 2016 finally ending. Because regardless of how much some people hate her, how the fuck can you vote for a straight up racist who’s happy to rape people and can’t wait to push the nuclear button?

Even my mom, who is a diehard Republican because (a) it’s traitorous to her parents to vote otherwise and (b) she works in a money field and thus is surrounde. d by rich white dudes pontificating all day, didn’t want to vote for Trump. The whole election she kept saying she couldn’t stand to vote for either one and that they were just the same. I was all, REALLY? But in the last few days, between my aunt and me telling her that voting for anyone but Hillary was a vote for Trump, she actually sucked it up and voted for her at the dead last minute. “Even though it didn’t do any good,” she said. I told her I was proud that she had. (But seriously, the Republican party is full of racists and sexists and she’s neither. I really, really wish she’d quit them. However...at this point it’s probably safer for her to still be one. I give up.)

Apparently our country is full of racists and sexists and bigots and they’re outnumbering the rest of us. After eight years of liberalness and a black president, it’s time for us to be punished with backlash, and backlash so hard it’s officially a mandate. There is no hope. The crazy guy may nuke anybody over a tweet. All of our rights and health care? Buh-bye. Safety for anyone who’s not a white man? Buh-bye. God only knows what he’s going to do--at this point he can straight up just start shooting people of color in the head on the White House lawn and get away with it because the entire majority of the government is Republicans. Bad behavior WON and was rewarded.

This is the darkest timeline.

Well, it’s a good thing I already booked a second shrink appointment this week on my day off! Though I feel very sorry for my shrink having to deal with her entire clientele while feeling like shit herself.

And then there’s my NaNoWriMo novel. I’ve gotten obsessed with reading about presidents in the last year and I’m doing a nonfiction novel doing writeups about the presidents I’ve gotten through so far. It’s going really well. I wrote ahead for the first week, skipped a few days because I knew I’d miss them over the weekend (plus my mom’s wireless no longer works at her house, so no Internet GRRRRRR), and kept plugging away while at the CC. Even when the bad results started to come in, I kept plugging away. But you can probably figure out that I’m not feeling so much into this project any more, or continuing to read about presidents when this fucking turd is eventually going to come up in line. And I thought Dubya was bad. However, it’s way too late to change projects in midstream now.

I went to bed at midnight. I woke up again right at 3 a.m. for no goddamned reason. Crying. I gave up and watched some CW TV shows to catch up on. Jane the Virgin and Supergirl went well, but I really shouldn’t have tried to drag myself through a Supernatural episode titled “American Nightmare” that featured crazy religious bigots. NOT HELPING.

I went to work. I’m amazed that nobody called in sick today. I think we should all get some kind of life bonus points for that. I am fortunate that I live in a little liberal enclave and we don’t have a whole lot of Trump supporters here and everybody was mopey/wearing black/barely dressed/hiding in our offices in a “safe space.” I have been having issues with certain people of late (see above complaints about how I am negative), but I straight up said today that we need to not attack each other and support each other and it seemed to go over well, and that’s what we did. Huzzah. Nobody was up to faking cheerful today, and I’d like to hope that nobody will report on anyone tomorrow for that.

I am fortunate that Country Music Lady no longer works here because I think we all would have found her insufferable today. We did have one Trump supporter in the office, and she did tactfully not brag or say anything about the election. However, she was rather chipper in general and, I’m told, getting on other people’s nerves. This is somebody I like, but she is a Country Girl and god knows every country girl I ever met in my life is a Republican by default. (I come from Country Suburbia myself. I shudder to think about what it’s like in my hometown and I do not want to talk to my mom tonight about anything but especially not How Everyone At The Office Feels.) It makes me wince to think that she voted for someone like this, it makes me want to say, “How could you do this? Do you know how many PoC work in this office that you are close to? How could you do that to them?” because bigotry is where I straight up fucking draw the line when it comes to voting. Especially when she’s not a bigot and has never been one in my experience. I didn’t say anything. However, when she walked into my office for a chat about how her grandson now has a Mr. Potato Head like mine and wanted to show us a video of the kid playing with it...I think we should all be glad that my other officemate managed to hold her shit together. The office has been making her crazy the last few weeks like whoa and I am actually pretty impressed she held it together today, I would have figured she’d call in sick.

I am so glad I wasn’t on public service today. I bet there was crazy going on, but fortunately I didn’t hear about anything super nuts--just the usual complaints. I was happily left alone for several hours before the usual level of crazy complaints started coming in, I managed to hold my temper when I got annoyed at a certain programmer who blames everything on me (the program she works on has developed a lovely quirk of DELETING things I put in even though they are stll in the feeder program I work on and that is NOT MY FAULT), I got some things fixed, I tested a new program and it worked well and I came up with some suggestions. Mostly it wasn’t a bad day at work.

I feel sorry for all the folks at the Comedy Spot having to be funny in shows this week. The Wednesday night teams...oy. I am going to be staying home and drinking for a few days. And then I need to start thinking about reconfiguring my life to account for a second Great Depression, having to suck it up and get an IUD even though they squick me out in case birth control is taken away forever, shrinking my life down in case I never have money again, probably never dating again (though that was a giant duh) and giving up on the idea of ever getting another job, because I need to hold on to this one for dear life so I can still have health insurance, no matter how bad it gets. (And lately, it’s stll pretty bad. The nitpicking culture that was making me crazy is still going on.) And also giving up on the hopes we had that they might actually hire people again, of course.

I daydream of secession because the only way to handle this divide--when half the country would happily see anyone who isn’t a white male dead--is to get the fuck out, and I don’t qualify to emigrate. At this point the West Coast is so different from everyone else, we just need to get away. Thank God I live in California where not everything sucks, but still. Too bad Trump would just nuke us if we tried, though.

I don’t want to be here any more.

I thought this nightmare year would end, but the nightmare is only just beginning, and for all we know he can declare himself Fuhrer for life and this will never end.

I’m sorry I’m not feelng the “call to action” impulse right now, but I’m already tired as is.

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