Weird Pride Day 2025

The other day while I looking for something else (per usual) I found this old, poorly exposed photo of myself at BlogHer 14. That was 10 years ago but it all came back to me in a rush – the thrift store maternity dress (I was not pregnant, but it fit), the giant Etsy hobo bag with the too-long straps, my flappy bingo arms. And yet despite all my weirdness, there I was, looking happy with one of Luvvie’s tweets, probably the same day I met her and fangirled all over her for the first (but certainly not last) time.

It turns out today is Weird Pride Day! That’s a new one on me. Happy Weird Pride Day, people, my fellow weirdos. You know who you are.

Weird Then, Weird Now

I remember being at Mom 2.0 at some fancy hotel overlooking the Pacific and seeing all the beautiful mom-bloggers looking like glossy ponies with their perfect hair and curated looks, talking about their brand deals and thinking “Yeah, no one is ever gonna want me for that.”

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t really very jealous and it didn’t make me like them any less – it was just a club I knew I could never belong to. I have always been on the side of the weirdos, the oddballs, the quirky drama, band and literary magazine kids. And during blogging, I tended to fall in with those whose blogs exposed their oddness rather than built their brand, same as mine did.

Weirdness is a Superpower

Yesterday at jury duty, during jury selection, the judge asked if anyone had a reason that they would not be able to complete the 3-4 day trial. One man, who I had spent about 30 minutes chatting with in the jury room, said he was worried because he had panic attacks and just wanted the judge to be aware.

It’s pretty brave to say in a room full of 40 strangers that you have suffered from panic attacks, I think. During the next break, a small group gathered around him, talking about how panic attacks had affected them. A giant burly bald dude, a retired female nurse, a guy in a sharp wool suit. His bravery had given them the courage to speak freely about their experiences and to talk about what had worked for them (a peppermint inhaler, in case you want to try that).

That’s the world I want to live in. A world where the things we think of as oddities and weakness become our superpowers to connect people and show them that they’re ok, that we’re all ok if we’re doing our best and not hurting others.

Thank You All

I’m so glad for the weird bloggers I met back then and still love now. Too many to list. You took me under your wing, bingo arms and all, and showed me that, even if I weren’t a glossy pony, I was ok in your eyes. I owe you my thanks and my mental health. I am forever grateful.

The Worst Scammer Ever

One of my side hustles is officiating at weddings. I advertise primarily on Craigslist, province of the looney, quirky, and strange, so these events are often small, informal, last-minute affairs. But I truly enjoy it. I get to see nervous, happy couples commit to one another. I get to write a nice ceremony. And I get paid for something that doesn’t really feel like work.

In early February, a woman named KC emailed me to do a very basic ceremony for her – basically just signing the paperwork. She seemed absolutely strapped, so I gave her a great deal – I would meet her and her party at a local deli and do the damn thing for $75, since I was driving that direction anyway.

I showed up at the agreed-upon time, 2 pm, got a cup of coffee, and waited. And waited. Damn me for not insisting on a deposit, I thought. Stupid Craigslist, I thought. At 2:15, I stood up and walked out, texting KC “I left.” The message showed as not delivered. Whatever.

A few minutes later, she texted me. “For some reason, my last message did not go through. I am on my way.”

“I already left,” I replied. “Find someone else.” Part of me had a little twinge. What if I ruined this woman’s chance to get married? Eh. I was already miles away.

“There’s something wrong with my phone,” she said. “I sent you $100 via Apple Pay. Please come back.”*

I blocked her number.

I got to H-Mart and parked my car. I looked at my messages. There was a message from another number.

“Sue, this is HAROLDLYNN. We sent you $100 via Apple Pay. Can you meet us at the audit office.” (In Washington, for some weird reason, you get your marriage paperwork at the County auditor’s office. But KC had assured me she already had their paperwork, which she would have HAD to to get married that day, since there is a 3-day waiting period. None of this was adding up.)

HAROLDLYNN had more to say. “We can send you more money. Please meet us.”**

I blocked HAROLDLYNN’s phone number.

KC texted me from yet another number. These people clearly had a surfeit of phones. “You need to send us our $100 back if you aren’t going to show up.” I blocked that number, too.

I had realized they were likely scammers, even if I wasn’t entirely sure how the scam worked. I looked it up on Reddit when I got home.

It’s def a scam. If you were to pay them a chargeback would immediately occur and you would be out $100 and the $100 you rec’d thru Apple pay would disappear

I looked in my Apple Wallet. Indeed I had $100 from a transaction from a Chime card. I thought it would disappear but it was there the next day, so I reported it to Chime, where the puzzled CSR said “Well, there’s nothing I can do for you.” I had to try hard to make him understand that all I was doing is letting them know about the scam so they could use the info I had – the transaction number, the many phone numbers – to possibly catch the scammer. “Well, I talked to my manager, and there’s nothing I can do for you,” he said. Man, it’s hard to get good help these days.

Last night – almost a month after the original incident, I got this text:

Apparently they sent me a real $100 and now it is mine and not theirs. Haha! Without even trying to, I scammed the scammers.

It strikes me that they spent a LOT of time to try to possibly earn $100 of ill-gotten gains. I hope the find a job, because I don’t think they are cut out for Apple Pay scams. Personally, I wouldn’t mind someone scamming me like this in the future, because that $100 is still in my account.

*I realized later that she had briefly blocked my number, so she could say she couldn’t get in touch with me, so I would leave and she could then text me and pretend to be frantic and send me the $100, probably from a stolen credit card.

**HAROLDLYNN wanted to send me more money so they could get more money back. Their initial plot was foiled when I offered them such a good deal to officiate their wedding.

Whew, this is complicated!

This is What Democracy Looks Like

Wet. Very loud, cheerful, and wet.

Happy As Kings

“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.” R.L. Stevenson

The pharmacy line at my local Safeway forms in the hair products aisle. From one end to another, hair products. Pomades, dyes, shampoos, conditioners, smoothing sprays, anti-frizz cream, things to calm your hair, plump your hair, fix your tragic hair issues.

Standing there waiting to pick up a prescription, I had a thought.

“Remember soap?” I thought. Remember when the products in the bathroom were just toothpaste, bar soap, and shampoo – and that was it? Maybe a jar of Camay cold cream if you were fancy.

Now the onslaught of things has my head spinning. Why are there so many things? Do all old people feel like this? One minute you have 4 choices of bar soap (five if you count Lava, the soap with actual rocks embedded in it), and the next you have 300 types of hand soap in scents like “Rain,” “Fresh Linens,” and “Spring Morning,” all of which have the aroma of a urinal cake at a biker bar.

For me, I think it started when I went to Grocery Outlet twice in one day. Grocery Outlet is where weird, odd and quirky products go to die. When you walk in, you never know what you are going to find. Banana-Blueberry Cheerios. Vegan cheese slices with jalapeños. Seven varieties of cauliflower crust pizza.

You have to read every product label carefully because things that may seem at first to be familiar products almost always have some twist. You think you’re getting your regular dish soap, and you get it home and find that it is chile-lime dish soap.

It starts to be overwhelming, all of the endless variety. I was in the coffee aisle and I spotted coffee pods that were strawberry chocolate coffee flavor and I broke down sobbing. “No one needs strawberry chocolate coffee!” I howled, clutching my sideburns.

No, I didn’t really, for two reasons: one, because I’m not on an episode of Real Housewives where people have inappropriate outbursts over stupid things in public, and two, because I trimmed my sideburns too short to clutch. But what I did do is shake my head sadly, thinking about the wasted human effort involved.

I mean – someone thought of strawberry chocolate coffee, and got someone to approve making it. They put together a project plan and a budget and got a project manager or two and had meetings and a timeline and a calendar and deliverables and created an identity and picked a color scheme and developed packaging and developed the product and tested it and marketed it and went into full production and packaged it and put it on trucks and sent it around the country and WHY? WHY? It’s strawberry chocolate coffee, people, someone should have stood up and yelled “STOP! WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? THIS IS MADNESS!”

But no one did, obviously, and now this sad product sits sadly on Grocery Outlet’s sad shelves, selling for $2.99 (soon to be $2.47, then $1.99, then $1.47) and making me sad.

Perhaps I shouldn’t let strawberry chocolate coffee make me so sad. It’s just the sheer muchness of things, so many things, the endless gaping needs we create for ourselves and then attempt to fill. We’re like Navin in the movie “The Jerk”:

“I don’t need any of this stuff. I don’t need this. All I need is this ashtray…and this paddle game…and this remote control, that’s all I need…and these matches. The ashtray, the paddle game, the remote control and these matches – they’re all I need. This lamp…the ashtray, this paddle game, the remote control, matches and this lamp. That’s all I need.”

When I was living in Gladis (my 23-ft Class C RV), I got bounced out of the world of muchness, simply because I had no room. If I wanted a new coffee cup, I had to get rid of one of my other coffee cups because there was no space in the tiny cabinet for another.

I remember walking around a street fair in Phoenix, looking at the arts and crafts and thinking “I don’t need…anything.” Everything was so bright and shiny and dazzling, and so unnecessary to me at the time.

Then I moved into my little single-wide mobile home and it seemed so big, and stuff started to encrust on me like mussels on a pier piling. I have three teapots and one teakettle in this house, for one person. Of course two of them are for sale in my Etsy shop, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are here, taking up space. I battle against stuff, but stuff gets the better of me.

I’m not sure what I’m exactly trying to say. Maybe come over for coffee and we can talk about it. I bought some that is pistachio-coconut flavor that you’re just going to love.

In This Together

First, an apology – yeah, I don’t know what is going on with the comments section. Apparently it keeps kicking people out after they type one letter. And it is so challenging to express yourself fully in just one letter, isn’t it? I went in and fooled around with the settings, so maybe that will help. I was able to post a test comment with no problems. If that didn’t fix it for everyone, we are at the end of my technical abilities. If it persists, I will talk to WordPress and try to get some help.

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I have been thinking about interconnectedness a lot lately. How we all belong to each other and to everything. We think we throw things “away” but there is no away. Our impatient outburst becomes someone else’s bad day. Our happy smile lightens the burden of a stranger who needs one small piece of hope.

It’s enough to flatten you if you think about it too hard. Five hundred years ago, someone went down the wrong street and met the person they would fall in love with, and because of that wrong turn, you are here now, reading this. Whoa, dude.

My sister was the last of the family to abandon California (*sniff*) and I went to visit her in her new South Carolina home. She happened to have moved to the same county where my father’s mother’s family had first arrived in the United States in the 1700s. She asked “Do you want to go visit the cemetery where our ancestors are buried?” and I said yes, of course.

Side note: it is in Laurens, SC, which is not, as I assumed, named after Revolutionary hero and abolitionist John Laurens (who I only knew from “Hamilton”), but Henry Laurens, a wealthy slave trader and rice plantation owner because of course.

Our first ancestor in the US was Edward Garrett. Many of the men in my family still bear the name “Garrett” as a middle name.

This is the headstone of Edward’s daughter, Elizabeth. Look at Edward Garrett’s wife’s name. Ann Owsley. An odd last name. The same odd last name as my best friend from high school in Ventura, California, 2,414 miles away (more or less) from the spot I was standing when I took this photo.

I contacted Benton Owsley and knew he would have his geneaology handy because he is LDS (Mormon) and that stuff is important to them because Mormons like to go around baptising everyone, living or dead, so we can all party in heaven together. Some people hate that idea, but I think it springs from kindness. I mean, if that trick works, by all means, snatch me up into Mormon heaven. The lack of coffee is going to make me mad, though.

ANYHOO, Benton checked the records, and sure enough, my high school BFF and I are cousins from 7 generations ago, all the way across the continent. When Edward and Ann met, they never knew that, almost 200 years later, two teenagers would spend hours racing around in a MG Midget, going to the beach, and eating pop rocks while telling bad jokes.

I don’t know what the moral of this story is. Be a good ancestor? Be decent to each other? You never know what will happen? All of the above?

Do you have any stories of interconnectedness that you can post in the comments section, if the comments section will let you post?

Good luck to you all!