Best posts made by Aria

Meet Tybalt, my Old English Sheepdog. Who is currently napping on his dog bed, right by my feet.

I don't know whose brilliant idea it was to make white the default color option for multipacks of women's underpants, but it was probably a dude. And that dude is a fucking moron.

After much back and forth with the shelter and with the humane law officers, and a great deal of deliberating about names, @insomniac7809 and I are delighted to announce the arrival of our first little girl. ('Cause seriously despite having rescued seven other cats and a dog over the years, somehow all our pets have been boys.)

Meet Jane Pawsten.

Kitty Glamour Shot:

Kitty Not-So-Glamour Shot:

And OMG, you guys. She doesn't just have majestic ear tufties. She has toe bean tufties. And they are amazing.

I have been horribly sick for days, and my dog has been at the foot of the bed watching me the entire time. At present, he's curled up there using a pile of blanket to prop his head up, but apparently the state of constant vigilance has exhausted the poor watchdog. His eyes have drifted closed and he's now dozing, but his ears and eyelids twitch every time I cough. He is SUCH A GOOD BOY.

@Auspice My father once told me when I was 15 years old or so that I shouldn't have cut my hair short because the boys in my school wouldn't like it.

Given how many threats he had made of the 'dating my daughter' type, I looked him right in the eye and asked, "Daddy, do you really think I should make choices based on what the boys at school want me to do?"

The look on his face -- and the ensuing silence -- was priceless and I have not forgotten it to this day.

I watched my baby cousin graduate from college today. Granted, it was via live webcast because Obvious Reasons (tm), but still....

This is the same cousin who lost her mother rather suddenly and horribly last summer, her mother who tried to be a mother to me when my own mom was, well.... yeah.

And this kid. This fucking kid.

Not only did she manage to finish out her senior year despite the chaos of the pandemic, despite the heartbreak of her mother's awful death....

She graduated magna cum laude. And was too modest to tell anyone before it was called by the dean.

Presented without comment, because I am still laughing way too fucking hard to come up with anything really clever.

@greenflashlight

I know everyone says they have the best dog in the world. And everyone is absolutely, absolutely right. But man, this guy.

I broke my foot in 2014 and given the layout of our house, was basically confined to the second floor bedrooms and bathroom for several weeks. For the entire time, he refused to leave my side except when he needed to go use the puppy facilities, and even then he'd fly back into the house and up to me as quickly as possible. He wouldn't even go downstairs for dinner because huMom was broken and needed protecting. It reached the point that @insomniac7809 had to start feeding him in our bedroom and bring his water fountain upstairs because otherwise he just wouldn't eat.

Tibs is the very best boy.

So I have wanted a pair of Doc Martens since I was in seventh grade, when my parents absolutely would not buy them for me.

And then as an adult, for whatever reason, I just.... never got around to buying them? Until a few months ago when I saw some on clearance on Nordstrom Rack. They came, they didn't fit, and they weren't available in larger sizes. I had to return them. Still no Doc Martens.

Until somehow, by some magic, these were restocked on the Doc Martens site. And I got a coupon for being a new subscriber. And they came in the mail today.

I OWN A PAIR OF DOC MARTENS AND THEY ARE SPARKLY AND I LOVE THEM.

My sweet Old English Sheepdog is about (by best guess) eleven years old. For a dog his size, that's about the equivalent of being an 80 year old man.

All summer long, his legs and hips have been getting worse.

We've been through just about every daily painkiller he can be on. At one point, between his natural struggle with his legs and the side-effects of the medication he'd been on, he couldn't take the stairs in our house without falling. Sometimes he couldn't even walk without losing his balance. We fortunately realized the worst of this was his medicine before making the decision that if he couldn't get around safely and was at constant risk of injuring himself, well....

After about three or four tries, we finally found a medicine that mostly works, and of course it's the most expensive option. (Love you, bud. Why do you do this to me?)

Still, it's been a challenge. Especially stairs. He's medically stable and in the words of our vet, otherwise "shockingly healthy for his age". I don't want weak legs to be the reason we end up losing him if there's something we can do it, so he'll be starting doggie physical therapy on Thursday as I mentioned above.

But even before getting him into PT, the place I called told me all about a special harness that, hilariously, basically turns your dog into a suitcase with the number of handles that it has on it. They recommended I try one for him and it just came today.

You guys.... he fought me every step of the way because he was so scared of falling and wasn't sure what this weird thing hoisting his butt was, but we did it. And when he got to the top of the stairs, my old man was so happy he literally bounced into the bedroom.

I am crying. I am crying because of a dog harness. I feel ridiculously stupid and so happy he's happy and so, so relieved.

I thought this was a super, super cool idea!

But if I'm being brutally honest....

I am also old enough to remember White Wolf's "Year of the Lotus" and decided that the white lady should probably slowly back away from the terrible racist stereotypes that people were likely to end up playing, accidentally or otherwise. Probably (mostly) accidentally, but still. Especially given the sharp increase in anti-Asian sentiment that a lot of Asian-Americans are dealing with in the last year.

Man, if you read the sagas of the Icelanders -- the actual sagas, not the game, I mean -- 'someone stole my goat' is pretty much cause for three hundred pages of "And then for the next fifteen years, these three families regularly decided to BURN THIS MOTHERFUCKER AND HIS ENTIRE LIFE TO THE GROUND."

Do not steal a man's goat, bro.

I just spent entirely too much money on a sweater that is almost the same color as a sweater I already have....

But in my defense, this sweater has a fox wearing a monocle and a bowler hat.

So for many years, I worked as an administrative/executive assistant at companies that tended to be very bottom-heavy with their titles, so my job was really more "Assistant + Choose Two: project manager/database manager/event coordinator/marketing specialist/writer".

This summer, I started a new job with a new title that - despite being at the same pay grade and relying heavily on the same skillset - gets way more recognition and respect. And today, an admin I'd been working with for several weeks screwed something up. Like, screwed something up BIG TIME and now has us scrambling to find space for a full-week series of events for people coming in from two other states.

She almost burst into tears when she had to tell me, not because of me freaking out at her, but because of how worried she was that I might and how relieved she was when my response was "Oof. Okay. Well, that's not great, but it happens sometimes. Don't worry! What can we do to fix it? How can I be flexible so we can find other options to make this work?"

And I know that feeling - that feeling of absolute panic that you get when you tell the people you support that something went wrong, even when that something was totally out of your control or even actually their fault. The sickening dread that builds up in your stomach when you know you're going to have to tell them, even if you already have a workable solution, because they're going to flip out and put this on you because honestly how hard can this be?! It broke my heart to have someone come to me with that look on their face, that tone in their voice, and immediately start apologizing profusely on the presumption that was just expected of them because of their job title versus mine.

Guys.

STOP BEING ASSHOLES TO YOUR ASSISTANTS.

Just stop.

They deserve better. Their job is way harder than you think it is and if you don't believe me, spend a week trying to do for yourself everything they do for you. I'll be surprised if you make it two days without having to call someone up in a sad voice and ask them if they can please tell you how the expense reporting requirements work and how you even get into that system.

STOP BEING ASSHOLES TO YOUR ASSISTANTS.

That is all.

This morning, our CEO announced an emergency $5 million donation to organizations fighting COVID-19, including to hyperlocal organizations like food pantries that operate in the same cities as each of our global sites. They also announced that our corporate giving program will go from donating a 50% match for any charitable donation that an employee makes to a 100% match.

This wasn't announced in a press release. That's not how my company rolls. This was announced in a private video to employees, as a follow-up to letting us know that they're paying out our usual June profit-sharing payment in April this year to help those of us whose families have been reduced to one income, in the hopes that those employees whose families are all able to work from home and maintain their usual income will give an even larger portion to non-profits than they usually do.

And that portion? Is already pretty high. We normally time our internal campaign to support local anti-hunger organizations to that annual bonus payout. The year I led just my department's campaign, which is less than 1% of our employee total, we raised something like six tons of food between us.

I....

Please excuse me while I get all weepy at my laptop.

So it's pow-wow season -- or at least it's supposed to be. They, like everything else, have been cancelled.

Except literally thousands of people who would normally attend them have flooded into a group online to share videos of themselves dancing -- dancing in full regalia in their living rooms, their basements, their yards, the local park, a parking lot, a trail they hiked, everywhere. It's beautiful and moving and I have been watching every day, often for several hours with the videos up in the background while I'm working.

Specials -- aka competitions -- are still being held and today was the "Tiny Tot Special", for children six and under.

Today was also, quite unexpectedly, a really hard day. But then I got to spend my evening after work methodically going through every one of those videos tagged for the kids' special, liking each one, and leaving comments like "Wow, Branson! That's some fancy footwork. Thank you for sharing your dancing with us!" for the kids who got the least upvotes and replies.

I'm really glad I just got to say a bunch of nice things to a bunch of little kids who are probably really scared and confused right now and have their moms and dads tell me how excited their kids got when they read them everything people were saying.

That's probably weird, but it made today a whole lot better.

Setting aside all arguments about what the Confederate flag does or does not represent (racism, guys, the answer here is totally racism).....

<deeeeeeeeeeeeep breath>

Bitch, you're from Pennsylvania. So are your parents, your parents' parents, and their parents. Pennsylvania is north of the Mason-Dixon line. Pennsylvania was a Union state. A critical Union state. Your Civil War "heritage" is the Confederacy occupied York, we got all kinds of worked up about them bringing their shit up here, and less than a month later kicked their asses right back down to Dixie.

Put that on your fucking Facebook page, Christina.

I swear to god when this is all over and I'm expected to wear a bra for 12+ hours a day again, there's gonna be a goddamn riot.

#WFHforever

@Sunny

So, one thing that I tell people over and over - and @Testament has heard this from me literally yesterday - is that it's really hard to be someone who is both pretty smart and mentally ill. When you're smart, you take pride in that great big brain of yours! You come to trust it and its ability to synthesize information, solve problems, think creatively, etc.

But here's the thing: Your brain is also full of lies.

It tells you stupid shit like, "Ohh, Aria! Silly girl. None of your 'friends' actually like you. They just put up with you and never say anything about what a wretched burden dealing with you is because they're just too polite. Don't believe anything nice they say to you! That's just social expectation. You're really just a pile of hot garbage."

So you get frustrated. You get frustrated with yourself because you have this otherwise pretty cool brain that just malfunctions in this one particular way and why, why why, can't you just make the stupid thing work like it's supposed to??

My honest to god recommendation is to start dissociating from your negative self-talk. Stop treating it like it's a part of you and start treating your anxiety/depression/OCD/PTSD/whatever like it's the shittiest roommate imaginable. You don't like them, in fact you hate this asshole, but they're on the lease that is your head and you can't just kick them out. It is a whole lot easier to talk back to your negative self-talk when you've made it into a little caricature in your imagination that is the sort of wretched person that starts off sentences with things like "I don't mean to sound racist, but....", who literally never pays you back for anything ever, and who dents your car but insists its fine 'because you have insurance, anyway, right?!', etc.

Treat your negative self-talk like it's the sort of person whose opinion you'd never give a shit about, anyway, but would instead mutter about behind their back/under your breath and it's a whole lot easier to ignore.

"Nobody actually wants to---"
"Did I fucking ask you? No. No, I didn't, so shut up."

Trust me (and my therapist) on this.