This flight that we went home on Christmas Day -- I woke up at about 3:15 to -- 'cause we were supposed to check in at 4:00. I wake up at 3:15 and the flight has already been rescheduled. Because there was so much fog out of Detroit that planes were not allowed to fly into or out of Detroit. Um, so that was at 3:15. We get to the airport to check in at 4:00. And by the time we get to the airport at 4:00, we get rescheduled again. Then -- 'cause we were supposed to fly outta Minne- -- the Detroit flight was supposed to go outta Minneapolis. So then we get to Detroit, and the flight has been rescheduled another -- a third time. We have to now fly out of Seattle. We get to the Seattle Airport and the flight's been rescheduled for another time, um bec- -- and they won't -- and instead of letting us go on the stand- -- on the empty seats that are on the 11:30 flight 'cause, um -- no, they make us wait to the, to the 4:30 flight. So we arrived four hours later than the tickets that we purchased, um, into Hawaii. The -- there's always standby seats. So there's usually like seven standby seats on every plane. But Alaska Airlines says “No, it's our policy that we cannot let passengers go on the stand-by.” But they would -- Alaska would rather make you wait five hours, five hours at the Seattle airport than give you one of those empty standby seats. I, I -- that, that is just bad, bad attitude. If they have the, if they have the flights, and we've been rescheduled to -- through no fault of our own, they should have let us get those empty seats and not make us wait.

I do have a headline that I actually knew nothing about until yesterday. I knew that the University of Michigan was playing in the Rose Bowl because I heard somebody at work talking about it. And I thought "Okay cool. That's their last -- like that would be their last game." Like -- and I, I asked somebody after the fact, as I'd kind of forgotten that it happened and then I asked somebody about it and they said "Yep, they did win." And I thought "Oh good for them. Like the season's over right?" I mean, I just didn't even think about it. So then I was at work yesterday evening. And somebody came up and was like, "Oh, just in case anybody's interested, you know, Michigan's up 17 to something" and I was like, "Wait a minute, didn't they play? Is this the Rose Bowl? Like didn't they already play?" I was so confused, had no idea that the national championship was a thing or happening or that they were in it had, had absolutely no clue. Um, so I was happy to hear that they won. I have real no allegiance to Michigan or Michigan State at all. I have friends and family that have gone to both universities and I did not attend either university. So I definitely am, am not like a lot of people and have a strong, strong feeling towards one or the other. I think they're, they're both fine institutions, but it's just fun that any school, anybody from this, you know, the state of Michigan, um, was -- you know, did so well and, and was you know that -- the national champion.

Answering the prompt: “Do I know anyone who is part of a MLM?” So living on the westside of Michigan, you obviously hear about plenty of people that are involved in Amway, or at least I did at one point. It feels a little bit less common now. But I had a friend in college who -- I won't say the relationship ended entirely because of the MLM, but that certainly did not help. So my experience with her was I was dating someone that lived in a different country at the time and, you know, we had been really good friends, she and I, for a long time. And so he was visiting. I think it might have been the first time he was coming to the US and she wanted to meet him, which totally normal. And we went out. It was herself and her husband and then me and my partner at the time. And, you know, we had a perfectly unremarkable dinner, it was fine, no red flags. And then my partner went home -- he was here for a couple weeks -- and he messaged me and said "Hey, like, what is Amway?" Or you know, “What is, what is this?” And I was like, "Why are you asking me that?" And he said that shortly after -- I, I guess we must have met up with her like right before he left. So a couple days later we'll say, he's asking me what Amway is and it turned out she'd reached out to him and basically pitched it as like "I would like you to be the Irish arm of my, of my pyramid. You know, this will make us a lot of money." And so it just put him in a really weird position because this is a new friend of mine -- or a new friend that he had met of mine and he didn't really want to like, be rude and say no but he's obviously really uncomfortable. So I, I reached out to her and said, "Hey like that wasn't totally cool, you know, to put him in a weird position. Like you don't know him, you met him for an hour, whatever it was that we were out for dinner. And basically I would have appreciated it if you'd gone through me first." And this was not the first…

Qualities of my life that have eroded over time would include handwriting. I was born in 1990 and that means that the entirety of my schooling career, if you'll call it that, involved taking notes by hand. And if you wanted to copy your friend's notes, unless you were rich and had a digital camera -- as opposed to a film camera -- you would have to copy them by hand. So it literally didn't matter. You -- the only way to get notes was to have them by hand or have somebody give them to you. And so for 20 some years, I was handwriting notes to lectures and classes and everything like that, right? And then I stopped going to school, and then computers became, like, the main thing. And then I took a lot of assistant jobs with data entry as the main job, and then I learned to type insanely fast, to toot my own horn. Ah, apparently a hundred-some words per minute at 99% accuracy is kind of weird, I guess? At least in my area it is, which is kind of sad to me, but whatever. Anyways, transferred my fingers to doing a new skill rather than handwriting, and so now when I have to write something longer than a grocery store list, my hand cramps up. And by that, I mean like, my muscles freeze. Like, my, my fingers get stuck in weird positions and I have to kind of crunch ‘em to get ‘em to go back. And I -- if I write, you know, a few lines, I have to shake my hand out. And you know, I've had my share of mental health struggles and they say, "Journal!" and I'm like, "No! Absolutely not! That hurts!" It has eroded. My God, it's, it’s eroded so bad that like, if you could imagine my life as a statue with a face, the nose is gone. Like, I cannot write to save my life. Like, it’s just -- after a few sentences, it’s just: crunch! And I, I know I have to not be the only one. I cannot be the only one. Like, nobody talks about this, but like, I have to not be the only one, right?

Huh. Something of mine that went missing mysteriously... It's really ironic this came up, because I was just thinking about it the other day. When I lived in Vancouver, I took a trip to Whistler, which is where the mountain hills where the Olympics were for, like, snowboarding and stuff in 2010. We go, we see the Olympic Village, we take the gondola ride up on the mountains, it's beautiful... and I bought this cute dainty little Canadian maple leaf necklace, and I have no clue where it went. Like one day, it just was gone. And I'm still devastated, and that was 11 years ago. I lost it in 2013. So sometimes I think to myself like, "Oh, I'd love to get another,” but like, if I'm gonna get it, I want to get it again from, like, somewhere I know, not just like ordering it on Amazon. It was such a cute necklace and it meant so much, so that's one that, like, bothers me. I really miss that necklace.

"Have you ever purposely left something like a drawing in a public space to leave your mark? What was it?" I've worked in [town name] for 10 years as a preschool teacher, and then I moved out to [town name]. What a difference it, it was, going from this huge metropolis to teeny tiny cow town. When I was leaving, I didn't want anybody to forget me -- not that I thought I was forgettable! But I put a picture of myself in everybody's closets. I, I came back by probably about five years after I left to visit with everybody, and the one teacher was still there and she pointed to her closet, and my picture was still in there some five years later. I marked my spot.