Funny time

It’s a funny thing about time, the way our perception of it is formed and shaped by what we’re doing, what’s happening around us, and the biggest of all those things. When the month clicked over to February, I was going to talk about how awful January had been, but I was wrong: January was mostly a good month—it was just the final ten days or so that were awful.

The first three weeks of January had the New Year holiday , summer time here in New Zealand, and ended with my birthday, and Barack Obama was still President of the United States. It was a good time.

All that ended on January 20 US time when the Orange Menace became the titular president, and the next ten days were filled with a whirlwind of true awfulness. Many of my friends on Facebook—people I know in real life—expressed sadness, anger, fear, and related emotions as they came to terms of how truly awful Don’s regime would be.

I was the same—some of the time. Unlike many of my real-life friends, though, I didn’t “unfriend” anyone on Facebook over politics. I did, however, block several strangers for being dicks and engaging in dickish behaviour in comments; mostly they were people on the Right, but with a good number on the Left—maybe 3:1 or perhaps 4:1. I didn’t keep count.

That was part of my strategy for dealing with the situation and to insulate myself from dickishness. We’re not talking about people I merely disagreed with—there are still plenty of them (Right and Left), and we still interact because no one acts like a dick. But when someone decides to be an obnoxious jerk and go out of their way to insult others, they’re gone burgers.

The other thing I did was avoid blogging. Sure, I had a couple good days last month, but there were also times I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. So, I didn’t. I think there will be many times in the months ahead in which I’ll just totally ignore US politics rather than have to deal with the negativity and mean-spiritedness that comes from Don’s regime and its supporters.

It’s also not impossible that I might still spin-off US politics into a separate blog. Every time I’ve considered it, I’ve ultimately rejected the idea, but this time I’m not so sure that it’s a bad idea.

There are so many other things I want to talk about, things I’m up to or other things that I just think are interesting—and there always a LOT of things I find interesting! We also have the New Zealand election coming up later this year, so I’ll have much calmer and more sane politics to talk about.

So, January wasn’t really a bad month, only the final 10 days were. But, those ten days were truly awful. It certainly is a funny thing about our perception time. In this case, the negative assessment was understandable.