One of my biggest problems with Trump is that he is old.

The president should probably be older than 30 or so, but no older than 45. Honestly, I’d rather have a 25-year-old president than a 74-year-old one. (Yes, I know the president must be 35 by the time inauguration rolls around.)

Why is this? Well, because an old man or woman doesn’t have to live with the effects of their actions. Trump is 74 now, for instance. He won’t be around or at least won’t have to live for long with the consequences of his most deleterious antics.

I know it’d never happen, but I’d support a law that said the president could be no older than 50 when taking office, with no minimum age (this doesn’t matter because Americans would never vote for anyone very young anyway).

Romanian is shockingly easy to read, for someone who can read French, Latin or Spanish.

It’s a Romance language (I mean, obviously — it’s right in the name) but I had this idea that it was some obscure offshoot with bizarre conventions so I never paid any attention to it.

But now I can read a newspaper (but not a novel) in Romanian with just a few days of practice.

Cool.

I’ve been poor and I’ve been (comparatively) rich, and if anyone believes the poor have easy lives, they experienced a kind of poverty that I’ve never seen, read about, or experienced.

Know how freeing it is to get to a point where you could quit your job and go live in France for a year or longer if you wanted to? To work somewhere because it’ll make your retirement more lavish, not to get your next meal or to keep your child from starving?

Being poor is a constant exercise in humiliation, calculating the incalculable, and the eradication of the self.

I remember my dad getting laid off from his job at Occidental Chemical in 1984 or so. That devastated us financially and the family emotionally. It probably led to my parents’ divorce indirectly. It meant the money for my future I’d saved which sat on my dresser in an old alcohol bottle disappeared without explanation. It meant nothing in the fridge. It meant my mom as in the cliché searching the couch cushions for enough change to put some gas in the car to get to her new waitressing job. And it meant young kids (my sister and me) worrying about what was going to happen to us.

That’s poverty. It’s not some life of leisure or indolence. It’s called “grinding” for a reason. And it’s horrible and abasing and no one should ever be subjected to it in such a rich country.

Let’s watch Grace do her stuff.

Fuckin’ hell, she wrote both of those songs herself. Now one of my favorite singers. Let’s hope she keeps on. Easy to get burned out in that industry.

Modern Goths really should learn to speak Gothic. I’d add a lot to their presentation.

Also, the Gothic alphabet is pretty…Goth.