This is precisely why my trust in white people is fractured

Among the vast majority of nerds that comprise of the vast majority of my social media circles, there was an individual that many of us knew/knew of identified as having been present in Charlottesville during the weekend of hell there.  This was confirmed by commentary made by them that stated as such, and that’s pretty much all that there needed to be known by the community before the witch hunt began and the shit started to fly.

Typically, my go-to move on social media is to unfollow people but not outright unfriend people, if I don’t like seeing what people post.  Whether they post too much for my liking, post opinions that I don’t want to see, flood my streams full of narcissism and/or selfies, or all of the above, among other reasons, I’ll usually unfollow first, but rarely unfriend.  I don’t want paranoid people eventually discovering that they’ve been unfriended and to have an uncomfortable conversation later down the line, and if it can be avoided, I’d rather avoid it.

But it’s not every day that you find out that someone you know personally, have allowed into your home, and allowed to pet and carry your dog, with smiles and seeming sincerity, marched in a rally and chanted discriminatory rhetoric with known white supremacists.

This is why my trust in white people has taken a critical hit, and why I can’t feel like I can ever let my guard down with them.  Even those that I’ve known for a while, apparently.

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What Charlottesville has done to me

It’s not often I want to go back to a major topical event, but admittedly, I’m having a hard time letting this one go.  It’s on the tongue of every news outlet, and even in the endlessly flowing stream of social media, it’s still a hot topic that is still the talk of the town.  But the emergence of blatant white supremacy, the supposed neo-Nazis, and just plain eruption of bigotry that took America by storm in of all places, Charlottesville, Virginia has been a pretty big story, with some everlasting repercussions and impressions, whether people other than myself want to admit to it or not.

Originally, I assumed it was mostly populated by the degenerate hill tribes of Virginia where the KKK is known to still be around, but it turns out that it was slightly more organized, and comprised of people from all around America.  Why Charlottesville was chosen as their point of conglomeration was a small question I had, but given the obvious answer that such a demonstration would never have been able to fly in Northern Virginia, where they’d have been eaten alive by the vast mixing bowl of the region, with the same sentiment being similar in the Commonwealth’s capital of Richmond. 

My friends and I have laughed about how this would only have ended in tragic-ironic gun violence if it happened in the next largest populace of the Virginia Beach-Tidewater region, which has very large black communities with many notorious gang issues, whom would probably love to band together to oppose a bunch of white supremacists, so it pretty much left Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia as the only logical place to gather and blather on about white-this and white-that and all their stupid shit that they somehow think is remotely acceptable in 2017.

I can’t get over the irony in that Charlottesville is the place where I learned Korean, a language not belonging to whitey, is also a place where large numbers of angry white bigots gathered to light tiki torches and chant about their supposed dying culture.  Obviously, it’s not so much a reflection of Charlottesville itself, as much as it is the unfortunate choice of gathering of a bunch of racists, but that’s how history works; Charlottesville is a site where hatred gathered, boiled over, and became national news.

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This is precisely why Northern Virginia wants to secede

I want to do nothing but make fun of the fact that they’re all carrying tiki torches, probably purchased for $3 a pop at their local Walmart or convenience store, and how they probably bitch about how fuel costs more than the hardware itself.  And how it’s hard to really take them seriously because they’re protecting themselves from mosquitos at the same time they’re marching like sheep, preaching bigoted messages of white purity and some other hateful rhetoric.

But it’s because of the bigoted messages of white purity and some other hateful rhetoric that I can’t just laugh at the tiki torches, and instead have to wince and acknowledge that somehow, this is 2017 and not 1917.

Here’s the thing – I am a native Virginian.  I was born in Virginia, and spent 21 years of my life in Virginia.  Seeing shit like large, organized white supremacy groups marching down the campus of the University of Virginia is something that I never thought I would really see in my lifetime, and really, really makes me glad that I don’t live in Virginia anymore.  It makes me ashamed of the state I was born in and grew up in, and I wish I could deny my Virginia origins.

This isn’t a post about a topic because it’s topical, it’s a post because there is a part of me that has some relation to the situation in the fact that this shit is happening not that far from where I grew up.

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The most NOVA story ever

Short story shorter: woman in smarmy Mercedes-Benz somehow manages to not just crash, but wedge her car stuck onto the bumper of a smarmier $300,000 Ferrari

Watching the corresponding video to this tragic story, all I could think about was the issues that fictional Eagletonians dealt with in fictional Parks and Recreation; shit like not enough lobster at the soiree, or the mineral water content in the urinals being not up to par.

But this is pretty much the most Northern Virginia story ever to happen.  A WASP pretending like they’re rich and white privileged, somehow managing to not just hit, but basically run over and get stuck on top of an extremely overpriced and expensive status symbol with wheels; owned by another WASP.  Not to mention the Benz had a vanity plate reading “DER BNZ” because nothing is WASPier than needing to let everyone know that your car is definitely of a German manufacturer.

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QQing over wrestling

I’m sad because I’m missing Wrestlemania this year.

I’m not sad because I’m missing Wrestlemania this year, because the card looks putrid, NXT Takeover will inevitably be the better show, but Wrestlemania’s card looks putrid this year.  Nobody wants to see Roman Reigns win the world title, nobody wants to see Kevin Owens be in a match that includes the Miz and Zack Ryder, and the best match of the night very well is going to be the Divas title match between Charlotte, Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks.  No disrespect to the hardest working women in ages, but the rest of the card is definitely not worth sinking five hours of time into.

am sad because I’m missing Wrestlemania this year, because it’s pretty much the first time in over a decade in which I’m not going to be watching it with some of my closest and longest tenured friends, whom we’ve had something of a tradition of doing for the better part of almost the last two decades.  Prior to this year, the only two blips in the radar have been the times in which I actually attended Wrestlemania, which were cool in their own right, but paled in comparison to evenings of catching up, shooting the shit, stuffing our faces silly, and commentating on all the bad matches of the night.

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A stroll through Springfield Town Center, circa 2015

Three years after I wrote the eulogy for Springfield Mall, like the phoenix, rising from the ashes of the dead, arrived the new Springfield Mall, rechristened as Springfield Town Center.

In spite of all the criticism and sarcasm I’ve often stated when it came to the topic of Springfield Mall, it’s always because of the fact that Springfield Mall has always held a strange place in my heart. Call it nostalgia, call it reluctance to accept change, or a sentimentality of something that was a frequent setting of my childhood and teenage years, but it legitimately made me feel melancholy when I saw this place getting (partially) torn down, and effectively closed down back in 2012.

But now it’s back. And in my recent trip back up to NOVA, Huzzard took me back to our old stomping grounds, so that I could get a look at what’s become of our old stomping ground. Believe you me, I was quite excited at the idea of getting to walk around again. And much like I did in 2011, when Springfield Mall was in shambles, and barely hanging on to operational life, we took a stroll through the new place, so that I could see what all the metaphorical fuss was all about.

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While trying to be the prodigal son

Long story short: my parents’ separation isn’t going that smoothly.  Big surprise there.  My sister and I have been doing everything we can from afar, but there will always be limitations to what we can do for them, without actually being them, or at least, being physically present with them while we try and do things for them.

Naturally, the whole ordeal is often exasperating, and leaves the both of us on the phone with ourselves, venting to one another about just how they could possibly drive us even more up the wall than they already are.  Ultimately, the conversations steer back to the fact that they’re our parents, and we’ll do whatever it is we can to make sure that they’re okay, because that’s what supposed good children do once they’re adults, they help their parents.

To those paying attention, know that recently my bank account took a fairly substantial hit, on account of some decisions that my parents made, without necessarily doing enough (read: any) checks and balances to what repercussions may come about with spontaneously changing bank accounts.  Although the incident from a few days ago wasn’t the first time that this had occurred, it was undoubtedly the worst, seeing as how it completely zeroed out that particular bank account and rendered my daily purchases and ability to pay bills compromised until repaired.

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