hey, fuck off, viral nonspecific affirmation!!!

The thing is, faceless affirmations always say stuff like "You will make it through this!" and even if it makes sense in SELF-TALK to say "I will make it through this", this depends on the situation, and this affirmation is tossed out into the world with no address, destined to meet a bunch of people it's not true for, but it doesn't care. And we know it's not always true and that its creator knew this, because people don't always make it through this, which doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence in their judgment and expertise: it's become completely void of reassuring power (not completely meaningless, though, because it still has enough YIKES implications to offend me).

I mean, I've seen people saying "we'll make it through" the pandemic, which is true of humanity as a whole but ignores the fact that the ENTIRE PROBLEM is literally that we all know many people are not making it through the pandemic. There are potentially reassuring or at least calming things to be said, even about pandemics, that aren't offensively and blithely untrue, but that isn't one of them.

And if it's just a rebloggable post with no context, then yeah, it's addressing plenty of people whose worry is the pandemic (because duh) and all kinds of other situations that it can't be true of. I imagine someone might say "Oh but it's not for THOSE people, that's not who it's talking to," but... those are potentially the people who need comfort the most and they can still see it, it doesn't SAY it's not for them, and then they're getting a slap in the face instead of an affirmation from you? Classy.

yard improvement time

This morning there was a little set of stairs leading from the driveway in front of our garage to the level of the doors, but now it looks like this:



These stairs have been rotten for some time, so Wax bought a few pressure-treated two-by-fours the other day, but we forgot two of them at the sawmill and when we went to investigate the situation today, I grabbed one of the old ones and tugged on it and the whole stair basically just ripped off, because the stringer underneath was about the consistency of old oatmeal. Or less. I think it was already gone on one side. You can sort of find some random chunks of wood left there but that's it. We don't really know how to build stairs and also this happened right before sunset and we don't have the tools to make new stringers, so we're going to have to buy a bunch of that stuff and build a whole new set of stairs since this one is evidently rotten through. In theory building it on a pile of boulders was a reasonable idea to keep the wood off of the earth, but it left a big hollow to fill up with dead leaves and detritus.

Wax has another eight days of work now anyway, so it's gonna have to stay like this for a bit. We weren't really thinking we would have to move this little staircase to the top of the list when we first talked to our tenant about... living here, because we always used the driveway that lets you out nearer the doors, even when we were living on her side of the house. She doesn't like backing up though, and that's the only way to get out of there; she parks down around the back and walks all the way around because there's enough space to leave her car parallel to the street. (She could go through the garage and up the inside stairs though.) (Not PARK in it - it's got 2 cars' worth of space filled approximately 1/4 with her stuff, 3/4 with MIL's stuff - but walk through it.)