The Robot Elf on the Shelf

Today my kid came home from our babysitter's house begging for an "Elf to sit on our shelf."

My sphincter puckered up when she said it. 

via GIPHY
 

I'd just been gloating to the Mr. last night about how lucky we were to have dodged that particular bullet early on, since roughly 3/4 of my parent friends who have started the Elf thing in previous years had taken to my Facebook feed over the last couple of weeks to bemoan the existence of their elves and the added holiday pressure that moving them around caused them.  

I had also recently read this  article, which points out that the Elves are conditioning our kids to live under constant surveillance... which I'd honestly never considered before, but now that I have read it there is simply no way to click the "ignore" button on the concept in my mind.  Of course, this mass-surveillance concept is not logic that makes sense to a 6-year-old.  And I didn't want to just tell her the Elves were fake, since that would both kill the fun for her friends, and lead to more questions about whether or not Santa was real.  

I didn't want the entire Christmas "gig" to be up.  

via GIPHY

So this is roughly the conversation that transpired at bedtime tonight when she brought it up again:

Kiddo:  Mom, why can't we get an Elf for our Shelf?

Me: Well, honey, the grown ups in a house have to sign a paper saying that it's ok for the Elf to come in and watch us all the time.  And mommy and daddy don't want to do that.

K:  Why not?
M:  Because we think it's kinda creepy.  Santa can already see us all to know if we're good, right?  

K:  Yes, with his magic eyeballs.  But the elf isn't creepy! He's cute he just... smiles a lot and stares at you!  *Does impression of elf face*  

M:  Well, I think that's creepy.  Besides, why would Santa need an Elf to live with us?
K:  I dunno, just to, like, help him and make it easy for Santa and things like that.  

M:  I don't think Santa really needs their help though...

K:  Yes, he does!  Elves work to make the toys and stuff, mom!  Gosh, we just watched that movie, remember?
(She had me there: We've watched Elf twice this year already.)
M:  Yeah, I know he needs them to help with toys.  But why would he need extra elves around the world like that?  And, *lowers voice to a whisper* have you ever noticed how all the elves on the shelves look exactly the same? 
K:  Yeah....

M:  Well, why do you think that is?
K:  *thinks for a while* Maybe they're actually robots?
M:  Oh yeah?  Robots?  Like robots pretending to be elves?
K:  Yes.  Like, the real elves make the pretend elves at Santa's toy shop and then make them robots and give the to people to try to make it easier for Santa to use his magic on people who don't have the shelf elves.  

M:  I bet that's exactly right!
K:  But maybe the parents just move the elves?
M:  Uh, maybe.  But if they were robots, couldn't they move if someone controlled them?
K:  YES!  So maybe someone is controlling them!
M:  See?  NOW do you think it's kind of creepy?
K:  Yeah, I think you're right.  That is SUPER creepy.  

M:  Yeah.  So if other people have elves, that's their decision.  But we don't want a creepy robot elf here, do we?
K:  No way!


And that, my friends, is how my daughter reasoned her way out an Elf on our shelf.  

OK, so I Can't Scapegoat Mental Illness. NOW WHAT?

It was brought to my attention today that my previous post about the need for mental healthcare in our country was based on bad assumptions on my part: Apparently mass shooters are more likely to be adolescent or young adult males who are poor, have easy access to guns, and are abusing alcohol or drugs than they are to be mentally ill. This baffles me, honestly, since I cannot imagine a sane, rational person committing such horrible acts of violence... but then again, most people aren't rational a lot of the time.

Since I am a grown-up who can admit when I'm wrong, that's what I'm doing here.  

But now I'm also left with this uncomfortable chasm of uncertainty and sadness.  I have a very human need to blame SOMETHING when I feel that I've been narrowly avoiding violence these past 15 years since I moved out of my parents' house.  

I also work in the public with a LOT of young adult males who are impoverished, and their use of drugs and alcohol is something I've learned to detect pretty quickly.  For a public librarian, hearing about the trifecta of causes that go along with a mass shooter is just horribly scary.  

It would be nice to blame guns in all this, it really would.  I am not a fan of guns myself, and I fervently wish that they had never been created, let alone necessary in our past to resolve conflicts worldwide.  Guns are designed to bring death to others: that is their ultimate purpose. But it really does come down to the choices that a person makes behind the weapons they hold, and it's people, not guns, who are pulling those triggers and choosing to kill others.  

We're at least 100 years too late in realizing that a gun (or 5) in every house is a bad idea.  There's no backing out of the 2nd Amendment at this point, and even I would object to a country-wide seizing of all weapons from the hands of citizens.  Our police forces use militarized weapons, sometimes against our citizens, and I am not comfortable enough with The Man to think that the powers that be will always know best or act in our best interests.   

Of course, I'm a big believer in universal background checks for firearms, but even with strict regulations in place that deal with firearm purchases, you still can't predict when someone might choose to use that weapon against others.  

Without an ability to read people's minds, we're left to find problems with our society and decry them, without being able to DO anything about them.  

How do you get the angry loner to become less angry?  

How do you create a world where poverty isn't a problem for anyone?
How do you get people to understand that kindness and selflessness help make us all better?   We WORSHIP selfish assholes who squander their wealth on shit they don't need!  We give them television shows and follow their lives on social media... hell, we even let one of the biggest, most selfish assholes in our country run for president!  
Where are our shows about good-hearted do-gooders who want to make our planet a better world?  Where are our shows that teach compassion an empathy?

Oh wait, we lose those when we stop watching Sesame Street.  

Instead, we get a media full of rich jerks flaunting their wealth, news of gunmen getting famous for killing, and of everyone acting outraged that these shootings happened in the first place.  

So you know what?  I give up.  I'm not going to solve this problem.  I don't even know enough about it to write an accurate blog post when I'm mad.  

All I can do it show kindness and give help to those who come into my library and into my life.  And raise my kid to do the same.  

Everywhere I Live Gets Shot Up by Psychos... er, by Gunmen Likely Suffering From Psychosis

Does anyone else mentally check off a city they have once lived or worked in when they hear about a mass shooting?  Or is that just me?

I grew up in the Mountains above San Bernardino, and worked in San Berdoo's main mall for years while putting myself through college.  There was a LOT of gang violence in San Bernardino for many years, but I remember it mostly being gang-on-gang violence with limited numbers of casualties each time.

The mountains I once called home also had that fun Christopher Dorner manhunt and police slaying incident happen in them, and the final cop that that guy killed was my childhood next-door-neighbor.

I attended college at UC Santa Barbara, which, you probably know, had a horrible mass-shooting from a chauvenist nut-job a few years after my family and I left the area.  Some of my best friends from college had previously lived on the same street that asshat started the shootings on.

We moved to Marysville, WA after we left Santa Barbara, then to Lake Stevens, WA a year later.   I worked at the Marysville Library when a clinically depressed guy  drove around shooting at police officers both in Marysville and our new hometown of Lake Stevens.  A few weeks later, the Marysville-Pilchuck High School shootings occurred and our library staff had to help distraught parents without cell phones try to get a hold of their children while the school was on lock-down.  

I am EXTREMELY lucky to be able to say that I have not personally lost anyone in any of these attacks.  

(Technically I have lived and worked in two smaller towns that have not yet had the misfortune of having a mass-shooting... but I'm not about to publish their whereabouts because even though I don't believe in superstitions, I still refuse to jinx them.)

I'm not going to use this blog to take a stand for gun control or against the media for their roles in glorifying and over-hyping gunmen.  

I'm just a librarian who is FUCKING SICK OF THIS SHIT.  

You know what I am going to take a stand for?  Kindness.  Compassion.  And working to reduce the stigma of mental heath disorders.  

Without kindness, we have intolerance, meanness and mercilessness.  

Without compassion we are jaded, self-centered assholes whose focus on our selves as individuals makes it impossible to make the world better for our future generations.  

And without our country actively working together to help those who need mental health services, we get armed gunmen whose anger and desperation leaves them thinking that shooting a bunch of innocent people is the best way to get what they want.  

Gun control only works when you have pre-cognition and can accurately predict when gun violence will occur... and guess what?  That's NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN, folks.  

The media will only get its shit together when we stop watching them constantly and take a stand against their ludicrous sensationalization... and guess what?  That's ALSO NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN, folks, because the instant we all hear about a shooting we immediately start tweeting and blogging and yelling about how sad it is, thus adding our own voices to the neverending OUTRAGE that circulates without any solutions.  

So, to the presedential candidates out there jumping toward gun control stances I say this:  Focus on making our stand not against guns, but against cutting funding toward mental health facitilites.  Overturn Reagan's bad and short-sighted policies and OPEN more long-term mental healthcare facilities.  Work to staff them with people who are adequately trained how to deal with these kinds of violent patients that cost us millions each year.   Create a campaign blitz that empowers those with mental health needs to seek out treatment and not hide in the shadows.

The easy way is not the best way for us.  Rhetoric needs to MEAN something, so, for the love of all things sane, DO SOMETHING THAT IS ACTUALLY HELPFUL THIS YEAR.  

EDIT: Yes, I should probably not call people "psychos" in my title if I want to reduce stigmas. I would never call any person seeking help or even exhibiting signs of mental illness "psycho" in a million years.  But if a person goes around killing innocent people because their mental illness makes them think that's a good idea, that likely falls under the DSM-V's definitions of a person suffering from a psychotic disorder or psychotic break and, thus, are very likely "psychos."  

On Sportsing

So this funny thing happened to me last year:  I watched football.  On PURPOSE.

As someone who grew up in Southern California where there was no major NFL football team that everyone cheered for, I don't remember a single time before I moved northward to Washington where someone I knew said, "Oh, that's Sunday - I watch football that day."

Basketball, sure - I mean, the Lakers were kind of a big deal there for a bit.  But I was jaded by years of forced basketball participation at my religious elementary school (who combined P.E. with "team practice" so you literally had no other option but to be on the team) and could never get into it. 

I dabbled in baseball for a while in my "tweens" when I was so awkward at softball that I began to question my devotion to swinging bats at balls... I have an uncle who is also a ridiculously huge Dodgers fan (we're talking full-car emblems taking up both sides of the Dodger-Blue car AND at least one tattoo) and it was hard not to be enthusiastic about the team when he was around.  

But, I found out a secret about baseball while I went through this baseball experimentation phase... now this is tough to admit, so brace yourselves:

Baseball is pretty boring to watch. You get about two minutes of excitement for every hour of play if you're lucky.

So naturally, after finding this out, I gave it up and never looked back.

So, in summary: sports just weren't a thing that people who didn't play them ever really got into when I was growing up.  My dad didn't "sports," therefore neither did my brother, and since I generally only dated music elitists (or, as their kind is currently known: hipsters) at my high school I never had anyone share the passion for sports teams before.

But then I got to Washington.
And everyone is wildly into this Seahawks team.
(Which is putting it mildly.)

And I started to understand what makes people want to "sports."

First of all, when it's rainy up here... oh man is it hard to make yourself go out of the house and do things sometimes.  You really have to find things to do inside that make you happy.  And you always need a reason to hang out with your friends - sports is an excellent way to bring food, booze, and camaraderie into your afternoon without really any effort on your part.

But you know what else also helps?
Football is pretty damned entertaining.
The NFC championship game this year was crazy intense.
And unlike baseball, you're constantly marveling at how these players get into the kind of shape where they can do these crazy tackles repeatedly and still be able to form coherent sentences afterward.
It took 30 years for me to actually try watching football, and even though I'm lost with a lot of the rules and terminology, I'm lucky enough to have friends who are into football who don't mind my asking them mid-game, "Where's the pocket, anyway?"

Will I ever become the kind of person who watches all of a team's football games in a season?  Meh, probably not.  But chances are next year I'll watch more than just two.
One thing is sure, though: I'm never going to be the kind of person who makes enemies out of random strangers - or friends - over sports teams.  Those people who mock each other in public for wearing another team's colors?  Yeah, that's not really my thing.

"MY TEAM!"  "NO, MY TEAM!"

I never want to be SO into a sport that I find my emotions totally controlled by random strangers playing a game hundreds of miles away from me. I'll never know stats on players or the names of all the players.  But I will get excited when my team wins and I will probably get swept up in all the madness after the superbowl, too.
Am I a fairweather fan?  Nah, I'm more of a tag-along, but I'll probably tag-along no matter how well the team is doing.  At least I imagine that I will...  I don't really know, though, since the Seahawks have kind of kicked ass since we moved up here.  ;)

So, in short, this fangirl book nerd has gotten into sports a bit, and would appreciate it if her hipster friends would pretend they're not rolling their eyes about it.