The Fluffbucket Diaries

“The boss has made it clear, he likes to see his people fight, and he wants the news to be good,” said one adviser to a senior health official involved in the coronavirus response. “This is the world he’s made.”

I have desperately, and seriously, been trying to give up schadenfreude for Lent. But given the news of late, I am failing miserably.

Aw. I miss The Onion’s “Diamond Joe” Biden. But I get why Diamond Joe had to die.

Welp, I suspected this month’s Pokemon GO event in St. Louis would be postponed. Now it’s official. Haven’t decided whether F and I will refund our tix. Might still go to St. Louis for the heck of it, as it’s during her spring break.

“Every corner, you’re going to see a White Sox hat. Black and white, man — it’s the most neutral hat in the game. You can wear it with anything.”

Tim Anderson is one of a ton of reasons I’m so excited about this season as a White Sox fan.

David Leonhardt in The New York Times: “By designing campaign strategies for the America they want, rather than the one that exists, progressives have done a favor to their political opponents. They have refused to make tactical retreats, which is why they keep losing.”

As is his wont, a former colleague of mine likes to create Facebook posts noting birthdays of people in the media. For some inexplicable reason, he posts mine every year. I appreciate it, but I’m not a “media figure,” but somebody who worked in the business for almost 3 decades. Most of us news industry veterans are not famous, and don’t aspire to be.

Anyway, he posted a link to this site, which is fine by me, but chances are it’s not compelling enough to create a following. And it’s not built to have a following, except for friends who might want to know what I’m thinking about or what I’m doing.

I know about my former colleague’s posting because for the first time in a while, I actually put something on Facebook today. Nothing exciting, just the photo of my kid’s delightful birthday card. I used to get scores of birthday wishes – a lot of them, if not most, seemingly rote and gratuitous – when I was active on Facebook, and it fed a weird neediness that bothered me after a few years. Even though I effectively dumped the site from my routine a few years ago, that neediness for birthday attention hasn’t completely gone away; in a way, it’s helped ruin birthdays for me. Last year’s particularly depressing natal day led me to decide to use that day for retreats, and then I forgot about that decision for this year. Maybe next year, God willing.

Fortunately, except for some mild health issues and crankiness related to other matters this morning, today hasn’t been that bad. And I got to thinking that, all in all, I have not missed Facebook, and that having this modest little site as a “sandbox” (to use a college friend’s term for Facebook) is infinitely healthier for me and more fun for a number of reasons:

• This place has no metrics. Websites, including blogs, typically have ways to gauge readership. Micro.blog, the platform I use here, does not. Attention is not quantified here, so I’m not checking every 5 minutes to see if someone has “liked” a post or provided some witty comment or remark about how brilliant I am. Birthdays aside, I’m grateful to simply have a place – a “sandbox” – to play in.

• No faceless, corporate social media behemoth is monetizing my content. Hell, I’m not even monetizing my content. That takes the fun out of creating “content.”

• No comments. I don’t care about replies. I don’t care about opinions of my site. Perhaps more accurately, I don’t want to care about your approval or disapproval. And I am not obligated to provide you a platform for replies, opinions, approval – or especially mansplaining (even from some female friends), which has been a pet peeve of mine long before the word “mansplaining” became a thing. (Users of Micro.blog, which is infinitely more civilized than most social media platforms, are welcome to comment if they like when entries from this site are posted there, but I don’t always engage there, either.)

• I’m not exposed to others' political rage and anxiety. Sure, one can mute or unfollow people on social media who won’t shut the hell up about politics. But many of the friends I love the most are the biggest culprits when it comes to such noisemaking.

• I’m not exposed to others' annoying social media habits. This includes sharing of memes, lists of “my 100 favorite movies/albums/books/etc. of the past 24 hours,” lengthy hot takes on the news of the day, and personal oversharing.

Granted, I have been guilty of many of those annoying social media habits, and I have learned from my mistakes with them. On my site, I write longer posts occasionally but relegate myself to sharing links and photos and short remarks. Still, I try not to get overly personal; for instance, I no longer share full-face photos of my child (except on Instagram, where I have a private account, and even there I ask for her permission first), and if I’m going through a rough patch, I will turn privately first to my close friends and my God. That is what, in part, they are there for.

With all due respect to those who have found solace and support on Facebook or other platforms, I’ve learned that for me, life and family are too precious to squander in their entirety on the Internet. This site is plenty of space for me.

“If you are struggling with health anxiety in the midst of all the coverage of coronavirus, there are some steps you can take.”

Birthday loukoumades, maple bacon edition. Would have been tastier if there was bacon in the batter, but still pretty good.

Best birthday card ever, Pokemon Edition. Or heck, just ever.

“…in our defense, the supposed ‘discoverers’ offered us a really great deal on Obama’s golden sarcophagus.”

The mailing in front arrived two days after Bloomberg left the race.

I may need to create some sort of artwork with the other Bloomberg mailings I’ve received in the past few weeks. (I think I got two or three others besides these, but I had the good sense to recycle those.)

I’m not a massive Frank Zappa fan, and I only listened to this album for the first time earlier this week, but this L.A. Times article about the making of his seminal work “Hot Rats” is a fascinating read.

On the Catholic blog: St. Ephraim, Schmemann, and Lent. Shout-out to my Orthodox friends as Great Lent is under way for them.

Elizabeth Warren on ending her 2020 presidential campaign: “If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’ If you say, ‘No, there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’”

This just in, on why the Dems are still not the party of Ocasio-Cortez: “…political influence outside of Washington does not always translate into legislative victories, as progressives are promising.”

Quote of the day, coronavirus edition: “You can’t bring criminal charges for being a bonehead.”

Hey, White Sox fans: Time to get jacked up with a rally cry for the ages. Thanks, Dallas Keuchel’s mom. ⚾️⚾️⚾️

Want a break from politics and the coronavirus? Here’s coverage of a llama in a tux crashing a wedding. And yes, that is a yarmulke on the llama. You’re welcome.

Happy to see Dorothy Day continue to draw attention with a new biography. Interestingly, reviewer Karen Armstrong notes: “I began to wonder if Day’s religious conservatism might also, perhaps unconsciously, have been politically subversive.” You think?

After reading about how people are stupidly avoiding Chinese restaurants because of a fear of coronavirus, I’m picking up lo mein and combo fried rice for dinner on the way home.

I check out news in Canada because I consider it a reasonably sane country. But then once in a while, it goes all Florida on me.

So, I guess this means I need to receive the Eucharist in the hand for the time being?

I kinda get why more schools are ditching the A-to-F grade scale in favor of standards-based grading. But we’re still trying to get used to it at our kid’s school.

No, this is not an endorsement. But in case you’re wondering why Bernie Sanders has gained traction in this campaign season, this might be one reason why: a spike in the number of kids under 6 without health insurance.