3 New Youtube Videos are up! Also, thoughts on the banality of evil and joy!
Did you know I have a youtube channel?
Happy Fathers Day to the dads out there! I hope you are enjoying this gorgeous weekend.
It’s a perfect sunny 80 degrees here in Washington, DC. Hot beautiful days in our nation’s capitol bring back memories of growing up in St Paul, MN where you had to wait for the “afternoon warmup” for the real hot weather to begin which, if we were lucky, lasted for the two months of July and August. Now I wake up on a weekend day in June and head up to the roof with a book and my headphones at 10:30 am, and it’s already hot enough to enjoy a dip in the pool.
I used to joke that I felt indefinitely detained in the cold Gitmo that is Minnesota. And it took a long time to get out — I was 37 when I finally moved away from St Paul to Washington, DC. I packed up the ’93 Cadillac Deville with everything I owned (everything left after several trips to St Vincent de Paul to donate old furniture and many stops along Grand and Summit Avenues’ little free libraries where I dropped off books I could probably live without — we’ll see), bribed the best sister you could ever ask for in a cousin to make the trip with me, and off we went. June 24, 2022 will mark 5 years in DC! Every single day, I wake up knowing I made it out alive — I escaped (there may be a somewhat longer story here, lol). And I am so thankful.
I started creating youtube videos in 2013 and they were sometimes interviews, sometimes just my thoughts about a political issue, and then something happened. My one single blogpost (of course I was also a blogger) entitled “Memoirs of a Sigma Female” got thousands and thousands of views. I realized that there was a huge demand for sigma male and sigma female content. I created some more and my video “the Elusive Sigma Male” was viewed thousands of times and my website tribal roles was born.
My three most recent videos are embedded below for your viewing pleasure, the first of which I am so happy to say, exalts the merits of that most fantastic of gases, laughing gas. Two days ago I had my first experience with nitrous oxide, a.k.a. laughing gas, for a tooth extraction. I went in with 30 teeth and went out with 29!
You guys, nitrous oxide is amazing. It lasted a loooooong time. It may even have still been influencing my thought processes when I filmed this video a few hours later!
In the next video, I’m on a walk in Navy Yard — I love capturing a moment in time which is what happened here.
Someday that building will have been renovated so I’m glad I captured footage of it in its present state before it becomes completely transformed.
And finally, here’s Lilly my sweet rescue dog. This is my first foray into “youtube shorts” and it was quick and easy.
I’m not religious but I’m very spiritual: I prayed for a dog for years, from 2008 to about 2017, to have enough income to afford pet rent in addition to the upfront cost of purchasing a dog. I am so thankful that in September of 2018, I was able to get Lilly, this little dog who has become such a constant companion, especially since the pandemic began.
Later this week I will be publishing the “one year later” update on when I was fired from my job at Arlington County Treasurer’s Office (where I was a debt collector of local county level tax — yes, I know, please God, kill me) for even questioning the vaccine/mask mandate details as we made the transition from work-from-home to back in the office. If you are interested in hearing about the original situation, at the time, you can watch the video and blogpost detailing the sequence of events (click on the highlighted text to read/watch) I created back in June of 2021. One new detail I will share coming up is how the Treasurer’s Deputy repeatedly, hourly, approached a reluctant employee (someone I worked with who told me that this is what happened) who hadn’t scheduled their vaccination appointment, saying, “when are you going? when is your appointment? why haven’t you scheduled it yet?” When the employee said they hadn’t decided if they were going to get vaccinated yet, the deputy said, “what do you MEAN??? you need to make sure you get it scheduled.” After a week of this hourly browbeating, the employee scheduled her Covid-19 vaccination appointment.
Life seems to me to be surreally horrifying at times, but mostly both the banality of joy and the banality of evil are relatively familiar (and sometimes an actual relative). Sometimes the joy is as banal as a little dog curled up next to you while you stream episodes of your favorite show and enjoy the amazing taste and texture of your favorite dragon sushi rolls and smooth sake for dinner. But sometimes it’s the joy and not the horror that is surreal. Like the remarkably — bizarrely so — pleasurable experience of breathing in laughing gas. Whatever life is, I’m glad I get to be a speaking character and that my voice is heard by you and others.
I sincerely thank you for reading! And hope your day and weekend are going great!
Postscript: it turns out that frequent use of laughing gas does have some very unpleasant side effects. So there goes my brilliant idea for holiday themed nitrous oxide pop-up bars!! Or how about nitrous oxide speed dating!?? The possibilities were endless! Hey, speaking of endless, instead of bottomless mimosa brunch, how about endless nitrous oxide brunch! I guess the police would probably show up and be like, “this is il-EAGLE!” Fine, fine. Party poopers!