Discipline is freedom

Love me always

You know, the other day, I was having a conversation with an old friend after her husband and I had gone out for a range day.

We were prepping food on their deck. I was grilling the meats because I don't care for professional sports, and thus I could stand to miss many major moments of whatever sportsball game was being watched inside, whilst simultaneously putting my modest background in sous chef employment to use for the first time in ages.

She and I discussed books we'd been reading recently, as their kids ran around swatting each other with toy lightsabers, and as a happenstance we wandered onto the subject of widespread illiteracy in the modern generation. This, of course, was accompanied by the requisite list of personal pet peeves with regards to poorly composed written communication (and a bafflingly coincident overreliance on such in digital format), the infectious rot played by social media in this trend, and the oft-confused distinction between reading a book yourself (like, you know, with your eyes) and listening to someone else read it for you.

One of the pet peeves mentioned by my friend was this unusual habit for a great swath of folks on the internet to write incomplete thoughts without context or punctuation, and expect others to understand whatever this unstructured nonsense is intended to convey. I recall chuckling at the time, as I've noticed this type of thing happening as far back as the MySpace days, and more recently across YouTube and Tumblr. My friend and I exchanged jokes, laughed, she sipped her beer, I sipped my bourbon, and around that time the potatoes were about done. So we went inside to eat.

I only mention this because it seems such strange luck you'd send me three words out of context like this in a puzzling display of the exact thing I was so recently laughing with my friend about.

I was a bit confused about how to respond at first, so I'll just say - whatever your intent - all three of those words are so utterly overused in today's world I'd regard them as having almost no remaining functional meaning whatsoever. I'll also recommend you do a bit of cursory research into where the term "liberal" originated, and a commensurate amount of research into just how many distinct ethnic groups the United States' federal government sweep under the umbrella label of "white" to get a sense of how hilariously reductive that term happens to be in a society that claims to care so much for so-called diversity. It's as stupidly, ridiculously oversimplified as the terms "Black", "Asian", and "Middle-Eastern".

All that said, hope you have a lovely night. Drink lots of water.

Now I know what a woman feels when she is getting ready to go out at night…

I just can’t decide what I’m going to wear tonight… if my flashy Mizuno, my beautiful Hiku, my old partner Adidas or my armor from Matsuru!