I bought muscadine grapes last week. Delicious, like plums and grapes in one.

I’m middle aged, I’ve never smoked, at the most in my younger years I’d drink one glass of wine or cider or something like that a week. I don’t anymore, I have maybe 3 drinks a year tops now. It’s amazing to me how my parents’ generation is still alive because they smoked like fiends and drank buckets of rum and cokes on the weekends, and I’d say that they weren’t big drinkers compared to others.

Absolutely. Especially when they start emailing you every day.

It’s great for talking to my friends out of country instead of stupid WhatsApp, but I got some weird messages on there.

Just routine blood work for his thyroid. He’s 13! He’s still really spicy and happy.

I’ve never used any of those things. I can write my own email just fine.

Oh goodness that’s funny.

I’ve never had to do that other than actual government organizations. It must be American.

This is wonderful and I’m glad he’s doing so well.

Abortion is fine no matter what, but in particular for this case yes; Down’s syndrome isn’t the almond eyed happy somewhat simple child that Facebook memes make it out to be. They can have awful congenital heart disease, they have a much larger chance of getting leukemia, and they age seemingly twice as fast, a Down’s syndrome person in their forties is incredibly frail. They’re happy enough people and can often enjoy a good quality of life, there’s a guy who is a bartender in Buffalo at a Mexican restaurant who makes amazing drinks, for one, and there’s nothing wrong with having a child with Down’s if you want, but if you find out you are pregnant with a baby with Down’s you really should see medical genetics and have a fetal echo and maternal fetal medicine and ensure you make a decision that works for you. There are Down’s syndrome babies who never leave the hospital because of the comorbidities.

My user name is the title of a book by my favourite author, Jonathan Carroll. He’s highly underrated but also a cult favourite. I couldn’t pick between his books.

Another favourite book is an old humour novel by the writer Patrick Dennis, whose most well known book was Auntie Mame. However the best of his books IMO was The Joyous Season, it was written in the 1950s and so some of the language in his books is a bit antique (like using Negro as a descriptor), but honestly there’s not a funnier book in my opinion, I reread it last month, and I realized that I still routinely say lines from it in my daily life.

Finally a great book is The Speed Queen by Stewart O’Nan, it’s dark and a tough topic to read about but it’s so captivating. All of his books are really worth reading. Last Night At The Lobster, Snow Angels, Ocean State, Wish You Were Here, Songs For The Missing, Evensong, The Names Of The Dead, The Good Wife, The Odds, Emily Alone, are my particular favorites, all pretty gritty.

My friend lived there, I swiped this from him. He says the Rougarou festival is amazing and I would like to see that.

Omigod hahaha.

It was a clinical note so I had to choose, but I’m picky haha.

I just want to be correct, but it still seems like a white person who writes for the NY Times idea and not universal for all black people, and that seems… cringey.

I got myself into a tizzy last year as I was editing a document and it was on a person who uses they/them pronouns, and I wasn’t sure if I should use “themself” or “themselves” as themself isn’t a word, but plural also doesn’t sound right. Then I realized a person who uses they/them probably cared less about this than I do.

This was a decision that I think the NY Times made to start capitalizing, and I’ve never understood why, but editors of books and articles all use it now, I saw it in a Stephen King story recently.

Language does change, a book by the trans writer Jennifer Finney Boylan about her own transition published in 2001 used transgendered through the book simply because that’s what was used then, and now it’s proper to say transgender; Jenny’s book was released for an anniversary edition and she addressed that in the foreword, that she had left it as written but with some hesitation that people would be offended, which I think would be silly because it was never a slur, it simply was the language then, and before that trans people were called transsexual, and that also wasn’t a slur. So terminology can and does evolve, but it’s just so random in the case of capitalization and nobody has ever explained why.

I’m not American. I honestly just wondered because the first time I saw this used it was the NY Times saying they were doing it from now on.

I know, I am not very comfortable.

I was looking at weather reports that year for like, northern Quebec, to see if maybe I could move there for the summer and hopefully not get eaten by black flies.

However so far it’s been pretty temperate here this year.

I just only seem to think it came from some idea from the NY Times, and I don’t think anyone says White, so it just seems, off kilter I guess I’d say. Of course I will say whatever is proper, but it’s just, odd.