nite chat: 4:28

ok
monday is officially my least favorite day
it just keeps fucking me over
my unemployment looked like it had a statement
i got very excited
but it said the amount paid was 0
and sure enough 0 was the amount extra in my bank account
so
i need to call and check what's going on
i think they decided not to pay me until the severance weeks
have run out
which seems legit, except
i was really hoping to get the g'v'm'nt money
and it doesn't look like i'm getting that
at least until the severance weeks is up
so then i need to know
is that what's going on
or did i do something wrong paperwork wise
and is it counting by number of weeks
or dollar amount
and
if dollar amount
is it including the $600
or just the $252

so it looks like i might not get the $600
maybe at all
and if they're opening back up
i assume they will change the number of jobs
i have to try to get in a week from 0
to some other number

i don't want to have to get some dangerous job
for no pay
but
i'm not sure how this is all going to play out


anyway
very stressed

when i signed up on facebook
pretty much right away there was this woman
who wanted to be my friend
i didn't know her
but she was a painter
and she seemed cool
i think she was in the same circle as my mom
or maybe she subsequently is, idk

but since then
she has gotten divorced
and become a real estate agent
and i was attempting to read my feed
which i don't really enjoy
and rarely do anymore
but
she was one of the first people on my feed
and she was posting a statistic
bar graph
about human trafficking
and she said
i am so proud of my president for his work
in catching human traffickers

and i thought to myself
is there any way this could be true
i've not been tracking that at all
could he have actually done something good
and i momentarily felt bad about myself
maybe i've been unfair

so
i was just trying to find the graphic
and the first thing that came up was this

now i didn't read the entire article
because it kept popping up subscribe to finish
paywall ads, however
i used to read foreign policy
not regularly, but sometimes
and i did not ever think it was
anything other than a reputable news source

i just looked it up
and they never endorced a candidate until 2016
so, i mean, they aren't looking for his good stuff, sure
but i don't believe they are fake news
sometimes i read things
and i think, well yeah, ok but is that really news
or is that really an editorial that's posing as hard news
and i know pretty much nothing from the right slanted news
can be trusted anymore
but
sometimes
even the sources i think are "my kind" of news
sometimes the questions they ask
are not the best questions
because what they want is the thing that will sell
and the orange one calls it fake
if it doesn't paint him pretty

but sometimes it isn't fake
it just isn't quite real either, if you know what i mean
news and infotainment are all mixed up
and it's all content

then
it gets even more crappy
because they "reporters" often just present
two things as though they equate
or
report craziness without actually calling it craziness
so
any news, for me, is possibly not real
although that's not the same as fake
do you follow me

but
i feel like
if foreign policy says his record is fake news
that i don't need to read the whole article
they may end up saying
yes he arrested this many more people
but this is how that somehow undermines
everything
and that did sort of seem to be the direction they were going
but i think of foreign policy in a similar vein as the economist

did i tell you
that way back
i may not have told you this
when i was first out of high school
before i started college
i know i told you i worked at the bookstop
which you may or may not even know what that is
but
i ran the news stand
i ordered and received and managed which magazines we carried
and all of that
i really liked it
and the returns were stripped cover returns mostly
so i could take the magazine home to read
so
i read foreign policy and mother jones and fifth estate
and off our backs and the nation and a bunch of other stuff

although fifth estate and off our backs and on our backs
and woman of power and shaman's drum i generally bought

off our backs was a feminist broadsheet newpaper
on our backs was a feminist erotica/porn-esque magazine
also deneuve (later curve) was one i read regularly
i used to read a lot of magazines
i love magazine
but i rarely read them anymore
i now read twitter and instagram

i would also take home paris review
sometimes
that was pricey and people bought it
so it wasn't usually left over
but
i never read much of it
maybe one thing per issue
i thought i should read it
and i wanted to want to read it
but
i guess i liked the news and politics better

fifth estate was an anarchist newspaper
that is where i first read about ronnie selling drugs
to get money for the contras
in like 84 or 85
and everybody i told was like
you are crazy
but it turned out to be true didn't it
oh, also earth first

so that is the stuff i was reading
when i was 17-18 before i started college
in fall of 1985

that was not what i intended to talk about

i am pretty sure i never told you that

i wonder how that jibes with
who you think i am