Yes, I’ve started playing my Animal Crossing game again. I learned you can get bubble tea! But you can only get it during the fireworks show they hold every Sunday during the month of August from buying raffle tickets. I spent so many bells, but I got every flavor! Anyway… I’d had a shitty weekend, had a horrible fight with someone close to me, and was feeling really down. When I went to play my game, this is what I was greeted with, my in game bestie, Punchy, asking if I wanted to watch the fireworks with him. Now… this isn’t how the game works. They say shit like this all the time, but they don’t mean it. It’s just a nice gesture for them to say it. But I still plopped my video game ass on the bench and began clapping (you can do that) in the hopes Punchy might join me, but I wasn’t optimistic. Imagine my surprise that he not only sat down and started clapping with me, but he sat there for a good ten minutes! Just me and my little bestie watching fireworks together… It’s almost as if they know when you need cheering up. Is Nintendo watching and listening?! Hahahah… But seriously, it’s a little creepy that they always seem to know what you need and when. Was Punchy just making good on his request? Or did he know I desperately needed cheering up? I don’t know. All I know is that it was the first time I’d smiled all weekend. Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that can make all the difference in the world. And this was one of those things. Punchy is my little love… I wish they made a way to hug them in this game.

So I’ve decided to retire my 9 year old dinosaur and get a MacBook Air. And the first thing I decided I wanted to write on it was a blog for you, dear readers! I mean, if you’re still sticking around after some of the shit I’ve written, you deserve a nicely written blog on a new laptop, right? I probably wouldn’t have bought a new one, but mine was reaching the point of receiving no more updates (that’s bad) due to its age. That’s bad… And Best Buy happened to have this bad boy on sale. They did not, however, have the color I wanted and the closest store that has the starlight was quite a haul from me. My choices were gray and black. Eew… I hate the gray (the color of my old one) so I was shown the black. It was pretty nice, so I went with the black. It’s growing on me. And I’m liking the lightweight, sleek design. It also has a kick ass speaker my other one didn’t have which is amazing for my music! I’m even going so far as to buy a case for this one because it’s so thin, I’m kind of afraid of it breaking…. I found a beautiful one with mandalas on it that’s perfect! I’m still getting used to the huge track pad and typing on it, though…

So today’s topic of randomness… Last night, I watched What’s Eating Gilbert Grape… For those of you who have never seen the movie, it’s about a young man named. Gilbert (obviously) who is the man of the house since his father died and is pretty much put in charge of everything since his father hung himself. He’s the breadwinner that supports his two sisters, his retarded brother and his obese, housebound mother all while having some odd love affair with an older, married woman and having to keep a very watchful eye on his retarded brother, Arnie, who is forever getting in trouble because he doesn’t know any better. And if poor Gilbert fucks up, he’s forever being told he has to “do better”. That’s a tremendous amount of stress being put on someone so young. He’s not treated fairly at all and has no future living in this dilapidated house he can’t keep repairing in this bumble fuck town that has no hope for anyone living in it. It’s a fucking toilet…

But that’s not what I want to talk about… It’s the woman who played the mom, Darlene Cates. Look at her! She’s easily 400 pounds at least! And this is a huge (no pun intended) part of the story. Though they may not all admit it, in some ways (with the exception of Arnie), they[re all feeling the shame and embarrassment their mother brings upon them simply by being fat, Gilbert actually lifts neighborhood kids to look In the window to see the fat woman (which is really fucked up) and is constantly bad mouthing her behind her back. It wasn’t until she climbed the stairs to her room and died os a massive heart attack that Gilbert realizes hoe much he loved her and wont let her become a joke by letting her get taken out of the house by crane because of her size. He decided they all had to move out the furniture they wanted tp keep and decided to torch the entire house, essentially cremating her in this enormous blaze. Amazingly, no one got busted for arson… I’m assuming it’s because the house would have been leveled anyway.

That movie was made back in 1993… Back then, if you had someone in your family that was super morbidly obese, it was an embarrassment. Today, in 2023, there are a lot of super morbidly obese people in the world. Hell, how many times have you been in the grocery store and you see elderly people who can barely move walking around the store because there are no motorized carts. Why? Because they’re all taken by fat people who can walk but choose not to because it’s difficult lugging around all that blubber. We’ve become a society of whiny little bitches who say all sizes are beautiful and we shouldn’t fat shame anyone. So now, instead of people like the mom in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape being an embarrassment to themselves and their families, it’s almost as if the way society started seeing fat people gave everyone a free pass to eat what they wanted to, gain as much weight as they wanted to, because they would still be accepted by society and be considered as worthy and beautiful.

Does this look beautiful to you?! It doesn’t even look human anymore! But that’s just my opinion… Fat is one thing. Being super morbidly obese is quite another. And it’s so unhealthy… With this amount of weight, you’re subject to high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and a whole plethora of other health complications. Put down the box of mallow mars and eat a god damned salad!

But in the past 30 years, society has decided that being this fat is perfectly acceptable… Instead of gawking and staring at super morbidly obese people like they did in the movie, we now see this as a type of norm. And no body shaming…. That’s a huge no-no…. Someone will get offended by that! Listen, if I offended anyone… Well, truthfully I’m not sorry. This is just my opinion that you can take or leave. You don’t need to love it or even like it. But if you want me to respect your views, you had better be respecting mine. It’s that simple. Still… When did the US go from being ashamed of super morbidly obese people to being comfortable with this being the norm? We live in a fucked up society…

By the way (more randomness)… For anyone who saw my work in progress last time, I finally finished my drawing!

I said it before and I’ll say it again… I fucking hate working in graphite. I’m not very good at it because I don’t practice it enough (hence the reason I’m doing it so much) and it’s a messy, tricky pain in the ass. However, I will say some of the people on my Facebook group are simply amazed at one thing… I think when they draw graphite drawings, they tend to create drawings with photo references. That’s a bit easier, especially if they’re black and white photos or you can convert them to such. But I don’t do that… These aren’t real people, I don’t use photos… these are just people I make up. So there are no references, no way for me to figure out where light is hitting, blah blah… I think they’re just impressed I can create people…

In other news… Yours truly has been doing rather well with her guitar lessons!

My instructor recently gave me “Hotel California”, “Dust In The Wind” and this week he gave me Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song”! I got the first two in the same week as I had an hour long session as I’d had to miss one… Anyway, I’m doing rather well with “Hotel California”. I played it all the way through the other day while I was singing along and it wasn’t too bad! I’m also getting fairly good at David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”! He may actually make a guitarist out of me yet!

Let’s hope I can speed it up a bit… That’s my biggest issue… I can play all the chords, I just can’t do it very fast yet. I know, All things in due time, right? But I do think I need to either practice relentlessly or I need a miracle to feel confident enough to play faster than I do. Cross your fingers!