Cloud9Shopper

I watched “And It’s Surely to Their Credit” tonight, and I find it both sad and eye opening that we don’t have good enough health insurance in this country (and didn’t even in 2000) that Josh is being saddled with having to pay $50,000 of medical bills or have his credit tanked. I guess even back then federal employees weren’t immune from being one medical crisis away from financial ruin. (Note that even if I had seen this at the time of the original airing I was 15 in 2000 so wouldn’t have understood this.) Hated the way Ainsley was treated in this episode too until the last scene. On a lighter note, I would love to be a “deputy deputy chief of staff” a la Donna. As long as I don’t have to placate people with White House keychains. 😂 The bad joke about the horseshoe is very much my style. Mostly I just think the fancy made up title sounds nice enough LOL. Finally, if I can toot my own horn a little bit, I wrote my first West Wing fanfic tonight if that’s your thing. It’s C.J.-centric and is a what-if/canon divergence of the Season 2 premiere where she’s more seriously hurt than we see onscreen. It was just something that stuck out to me that I wanted to experiment with, and here’s my end result: And All I’ve Got is Your Hand

I’m on my millionth rewatch (or so it seems lol) and have about seven episodes left in the series, and I just realized I don’t really care for the episode when Dorothy and Stan get taken to court for being slumlords in the apartment Angelo was staying in. There are still a lot of great episodes in the last season and this one just seemed out of place and unnecessary. It could’ve been done a season or two earlier or cut altogether.

One from The Golden Girls (an overall funny show for the majority of its run, which is rare these days) is when Blanche sings at The Rusty Anchor. I’ve seen the series all the way through multiple times and still lose my mind laughing as soon as she lies back on the piano and kicks her shoes off, and it just gets more hilarious the rest of the way through the song.

I just signed back on to Facebook after getting home from Easter Mass. It was my first time on after a month and a half since Lent started and I will say it was a valuable experience. Just from an initial scroll through, I have not really missed much but I did realize I get a lot of useless notifications so I’ll have to fix my settings so I get less of them. One friend of mine got engaged…but she also had given up Facebook for Lent so I didn’t miss anything with her announcement since she didn’t post it until today. Other than that, though, even looking through my fandom groups, it’s the same old, same old discussions and posts. So I don’t think I need to go through all 40 days of activity from the last month. Going forward, I’m not going to apologize for opinions I have (as long as they’re not discriminatory or hateful to someone, as I know I went too far with some things I said in heated fandom discussions), but I will do my best to state them more civilly and back away if someone is getting mean or nasty with me. I also need to exist more in the real world and am trying to set more no-phone limits for myself, although this part is a bit harder, since I still tend to retreat into my phone at times when I don’t really know the people I’m interacting with (like at a family gathering that has a lot of people I really have no close relationship with). And I could definitely use my evenings after work better instead of scrolling my phone and worrying about writing fanfic, even if it’s being more absorbed in a TV show (another time I just should put the phone away if it’s something I’ve never seen before) or reading a book. I’d probably do this again, and it’s making me think about what social media platforms I really do want and need.

I was watching a Season 3 episode on WE today, the one where dispatch is held hostage, and it makes me miss the old show and not this new version that wants to be SVU (which also is very long past its prime) or something else it just isn’t. (I’ve never seen The Rookie so can’t comment on that.) I think when I rewatch I‘ll stop at the episode before Maddie gets kidnapped.

New one, and not related to my previous post a couple of days ago. People who treat even minor mistakes as deadly serious. I made the mistake of posting in one of my fanfic communities that I used ChatGPT as a Google-like tool to ask it some questions for a story I’m working on. Someone got upset and said “please be very careful” as if I had posted that I was committing tax fraud or planning to kill someone and it just made me feel like…it’s not that deep? Especially given the amount of mediocre to bad fanfic that’s published and isn’t always true to reality. A lot of authors don’t even bother doing any research and some readers and writers say explicitly they don’t care about researching or reality in fic. I also wasn’t planning to use AI to write the story for me (I test ran it just as an experiment/out of boredom and hated the suggestions anyway). For the record, I was asking ChatGPT if it’s OK to have Character A, who works with Character B and is a doctor, read Character A’s chart under HIPPA and ChatGPT gave me some answers about informed/implicit consent and said technically it’s not OK unless one of these things is true. I wasn’t planning to apply that info to real life and try to get unauthorized access to a friend’s medical records or looking to plagiarize for a school paper. It’s just a fictional story, and even professional TV writers come up with unrealistic and ridiculous storylines that people eat up for other reasons. I don’t think my fanfic is going to spawn real world outrage and legal consequences if Character B gives Character A’s consent to read her chart as long as I elude to something like B signing a written consent form or what have you. Honestly, the whole thing with having to be so careful all the time (I get these lectures at work even when I make a small mistake, and my work isn’t the type of job where people’s lives are on the line or essential to keep the world turning) and making every misstep or pique of curiosity seem like a huge deal gets stressful.

I missed the episode live last night because it was Holy Thursday but I saw Peter/Bobby trending on Google and decided to check out the results. Once I did, I didn’t feel like watching today. Bobby and Athena were my first favorite couple of the show and it feels like too much is missing now. (I predict they are going to move Maddie’s cry faces and constant trauma front and center, which is a pet peeve of mine on shows even though I don’t mind Maddie overall. I still bet she will get some kind of childbirth emergency with this baby.) Plus…I don’t want to deal with Gerrard again. The actor plays him convincingly and I get that he’s a great villain, but…enough already? Same with Athena who already lost her fiancé and went through a divorce. I really hope this is all a hallucination or a fake out but I’m not holding out hope. Even then, the whole thing would still feel too cheap. I haven’t liked the direction of 8b so far to begin with and this doesn’t help.

Yes. I told my mom today how I was feeling (she’s also Catholic, so where there are some things in life we disagree with, the church and the way some people conduct themselves isn’t one of those issues) and finally realized I need a break. I told her I was still going to sing this weekend since Holy Week is so significant and I’m not backing out this late but after that I’m done for a while. The choir I used to be in is so much more laid back and doesn’t have any of these shenanigans going on; I just wasn’t going there as much once I moved 20 minutes away. If I ever move back closer to that church then they will become my home church again.

I don’t know. I’m thinking of complaining to the director (or telling her directly she will never speak to me again the way she raised her voice at choir last night), but my church is unfortunately very clique driven and I doubt the director will care, especially because he didn’t stop her from carrying on last night. She’s one of the “favorites” so to speak, and gets a pass because her grandparents are very active in the church and she has “life trauma” and was largely raised by her grandmother. Which is fine but I hate the “trauma” and “mental health issues” excuses people use to be rude to everyone around them and then that behavior is enabled because everyone knows how poor Becky has had such a hard life. There are, I’m sure, people with life trauma who can join a choir and treat others with respect while they’re there rather than yelling like hyenas. She’s also one of the partying ringleaders so she made a bunch of Jell-O shots for the bus that’s visiting different churches for Holy Thursday. Because I’m sure people who are in those churches for private prayer are going to be thrilled (/sarcasm) if people from our church come in talking loudly since they’ve been drinking on the bus. It’s another reason she gets a pass. People are so excited to do shots and get their drink on when they should remember that Holy Thursday isn’t exactly a partying day in the church. (Plus, there is a bar and a brewery right down the road if they need to drink that bad. I don’t know why that’s allowed either but again, you can’t speak up in that church.)

I sang in a Lutheran church choir when growing up and people wore jeans under their robes all the time. Robes aren’t as common in Catholic choirs (not sure why; maybe it is because most of the time they’re in the choir loft and not singing in front), though the choir at our diocesan cathedral wears them. Most Catholic churches I’ve been to the choir is just wearing church-appropriate clothes. But for some reason my group loves the matchy matchy stuff. Which leads me into wondering why so many adults still love matching clothes! It’s like the “getting ready” outfits at weddings when people buy matching pajamas or robes for their wedding party to get ready in when most of them are never worn again after that day. That’s one thing I‘m skipping if I ever get married.

People who need to be in charge all the time. Even when they have no business leading. I just got home from choir and there was a woman who was out of control and raised her voice twice during practice at us (she is around 35-36 years old; not that that’s relevant but just for context that this isn’t some old Catholic lady), one time to yell that we need to not breathe on a certain point in a song and then again at the end of practice that we need to wear gold or white on Holy Thursday and then she added “and if you don’t have something figure it out!” And the director never stepped in and told her to quit yelling or put her back in her place. She is not the choir director, the assistant choir director, the conductor or anyone of leadership in the church. She’s just been going to that church since childhood. That’s about it. I’m sorry but I don’t go to church choir practice to get screamed at. I wouldn’t like it if the director yelled either. Not to mention there is zero need to be that hostile and insist that adults need to wear matching colors for Mass. As we sit upstairs in a choir loft and really no one turns to look at us, who is going to care if we wear white, gold, green, whatever? I wore a purple sweater last Holy Thursday when I was still at another church and singing in the choir. Guess who cared? Absolutely nobody. That’s who. If you ask me, someone should’ve told this woman to shut up and reminded her she’s not the director and put her back in her place and he’s the one who should be reminding us when to breathe.

Josh giving the press briefing in Season 1 of The West Wing (in Celestial Navigation) and thinking he can control the press corps no problem but then he goes to the podium and bombs it, all while CJ is watching in horror back in her office. Not to mention the “I had a woot canal” running gag. Topped off with Jed finding out he has a secret plan to fight inflation. Josh really lacks people skills sometimes but I find it hilarious anyway.

I’m starting to get bored with 9-1-1. I’m not yet bored enough that I won’t come back for Season 9 but the second half is Season 8 feels tired. Oh look Maddie got kidnapped again! And now Chim will almost die for the fourth time! Eddie’s still not back yet so nothing much is happening there either. I’m not even saying I want characters to die and I get that they’re first responders and this is a risk of the job but the drama isn’t that compelling anymore. Also it feels like the Buck/Eddie speculation is starting to swallow the fandom and is becoming annoying. I’m not even against them being together and see the potential but a lot of fans are acting like it’s the only storyline and are becoming the annoying shippers who think they’re entitled to see these two get together. Shipping tends to ruin everything.

I just watched the Season 2 premiere two-parter “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” and I’m not OK haha. That was a couple of hours of TV that makes me sit and look at the closing credits for a minute in awe. I really just loved so many things about it, from the way Donna crumbles when she finds out Josh was shot and the care Abbey and Mrs. Landingham gave her, to Abbey telling the anesthesiologist he will be the 15th person in the world to know about Jed’s MS, CJ powering on when you can tell she wants to collapse in exhaustion…even all the flashbacks, which I didn’t like at first, I came to appreciate. I’m really looking forward to the rest of Season 2, especially with Janel Moloney in the main cast now and Mandy (who was one of the most forgettable people on TV ever) being gone. That said, this was also one of those heavier drama episodes that made me want to put on a sitcom after finishing so I could unwind. So I stayed on Max but changed to Mike and Molly.

How many more Chim near death experiences do we need? This has to be third or fourth one. I feel like the writers are running out of ideas.