I'm assuming practically everyone in the entire world that has access to the internet knows that Donald Trump indeed got elected to be the next president of the United States.
So, SO badly, I want to be nice to the people who voted for him, but this is testing my ability to love others no matter what. I was really upset this whole week because of this. Dude, I cried on Wednesday. I'm unable to comprehend how so many people don't understand how scary all this is to us. Dude, I'm not an illegal immigrant, nor are my parents or my sister, but I still feel like something bad is going to happen to us by his hand.
I'm a female, a (half-)Mexican, and a Mormon. I wasn't old enough to vote in this election, but if I was, I wouldn't have voted for him.
Those are 4 kinds of people that he and/or his followers have shown animosity to.
Even though I was born here and am half-white, are they going to do something to me and my family? Are they going to punish me because I exist? Is anyone even going to help us, if this happens?
This is what scares us- the fact that not only are people being hostile to different kinds of groups, and are being just as sexist, racist, etc. as Trump himself, but so many people see this going on and don't care. It practically feels like a betrayal, especially since we have seen relatives and old friends that support Trump or think that it's pointless to "whine about not getting our way". (I'm not kidding, someone seriously said that.)
Excuse me?
I am not part of the anti-Trump protests, and can't agree with them if they get violent, but this isn't pointless. This isn't frickin' whining. Families will be torn apart; the economy will go down the toilet; so many more people won't be able to walk down the street without being physically or verbally attacked. The equality that people have fought for in this country for, what, over a century? That is already being destroyed.
As far as I can tell, Trump is a bad person. One who makes others become bad people too. And the ones who aren't straight-up bad people are led away by their own ignorance. Just with his campaign, he's made the country regress who knows how many years. If he makes it to the moment he officially replaces Obama (which he'll likely achieve, even with all the backlash and protesting), the Trump Regime will only make things worse.
Like I said, this has really made it so much harder to keep a positive disposition about everything, and it really sucks. I don't like feeling like this.
And I don't like fearing my own country's leader. He's probably gonna act a lot more like a dictator than a president. He already emulates Hitler, after all.
All I can think to do at the moment is try to remember what I'd sent Carter the night he texted that Trump was about to win. I was only half-asleep and incapable of anger, but I was still able to feel pure shame and disappointment.
Me: ... I'd been praying that the least-worst candidate would win and ruin our country the least, though I admitted I was pretty sure Trump wouldn't be that person.
But, well, since he's basically won... I dunno, maybe it's a sign that Clinton would've been worse, somehow. Or maybe in the near future, we'll realize that just about the worst thing we think can happen to this country happens, and in the end everything was okay. At this point, that's what I can hope for- that this is just to prove that what we think is the very bottom isn't after all.
That's about as close as I ever got to being optimistic. Well, besides hoping that he was seriously just making all of it up to get the presidency and doesn't follow through with absolutely anything he'd promised.
*deep sigh*
This is a very depressing topic, and I've already talked about it with a bunch of people throughout the week, so I'll change to what else happened.
We had a cardiologist appointment, where I did the dreaded exercise test. (That test seriously sucks, in case you ever wondered. I never even liked treadmills in the first place...) The doctor officially decided that there wasn't anything actually wrong with me (would've been nice if you said so the first time around, Doc), and was even hesitant to give a doctor's note, which is required for me to turn in exercise logs instead of take normal PE at school. At a normal school, I guess I'd be less of a poo about it, but it's much more of an inconvenience if I do it here- plus, I already finished them, dude- so I really needed it. He did, though he was still kinda iffy about the whole thing.
What I didn't understand was that, apparently, my results were a teensy bit above average for them. I lasted a minute-ish longer on the treadmill than usual. Does that seriously count people who are healthy? I can remember so many times in PE and self-defense club that I lagged behind most people. Though I can agree that I do better than people who have lung issues or heart issues or whatever, I don't think I'm at the average. They need to clarify what the heck that was even supposed to mean, cuz I refuse to believe what they seemed to be telling me.
Well, whatever the case, I got to finally turn in my PE stuff. I'm gonna check if my GPA's still good, and hope that I can get around to the rest of my Financial Lit assignments before the semester ends.
For the first time, I went to KF on Wednesday, rather than Tuesday or Saturday. Suddenly, some people I'd never seen before were there. Even more sudden, there were a lot more people than I was used to. More than the previous Saturday, and a whole family had been taking a trial run then. (Most of the family was here again.) It was fun, but also kinda uncomfortable to me. I liked having less people before, even if one of the reasons is only that there's more space for everyone to practice when it's not cramped. I'm hoping that my usual times haven't suddenly gotten so cramped either.
On Friday, my mom and I went to my aunt's house for three more episodes of Hasta que te conocí, which is the name of the series about Juan Gabriel. I think we're near the end now!
You know how I mentioned crying earlier because of Trump? (More specifically, I told my mom I wanted to say much of what I actually wrote earlier in this post directly to Trump's Facebook page, but she told me not to, fearing that doing that would make me one of the first targets, if he or his followers ever wanted to go searching for people to target. That made me cry.) Yeah... I sort of cried later, partly to do with him again. Really, I think it was kinda more like three things.
One is just the stress I've been dealing with. I only got but a short reprieve from my heavy to-do list last month. I've been getting less sleep, and my eyes and/or head hurt a lot more often than they used to. The fact that it was harder to focus in school because of a certain president-elect certainly didn't help matters.
Two was that I was feeling pretty indecisive about where else to apply besides the U. That's yet another stress in and of itself.
Third was... well... as you might've noticed, I wasn't only upset about the Trump situation itself, but how it was making me think, feel, and act. I was a lot more bitter than usual, as much as I tried to not be. I was not able to think about how good people are, only thinking about the bad. Even worse, when I realized this, I started thinking that Trump might've been turning me into a bad person, too, or making me more like how I used to be in 8th grade. (How I would be on Facebook, FFN, etc. was often not very pretty.) While there was a lot of things I liked about 8th grade, that was one aspect of my personality that I'd tried to leave behind in the past. To feel like it's crawling back into me is terrifying.
I told my mom this stuff when I was about to go to bed, making me cry all over again con enjundia, and she seemed rather shocked by the third one. If she'd been on Facebook years earlier, though, she surely would've understood what I meant. (Speaking of, I don't think I've hidden those old posts on my timeline yet. I really need to, cuz I'm just so ashamed of that.) When she got over it, she said that I was still better than that, because I was actively trying to not be mean. I still don't think that's enough. I'm not going to be happy with being bitter, whether I'm fighting it or not.
By the time my dad came around, all I could come up with to explain my crying to him was that I just couldn't relax lately, and I've kinda been beating myself up a bit.
At least we resolved a little more the second reason today, and I'm gonna be praying even more than usual to be calmer and be able to get everything I need (and want) to get done without exploding.
(The people who said senior year was the best and most chill look like total liars to me right now.)
At least something really cool happened this week, considering how sucky things usually were. Yesterday, I went to Science Day at the U!
The first class/workshop/whatever was some undergrads telling us about how they got to where they were now, how they got to do research, and what they were researching. They told us about serpentinization, how plants and animals chemically defend themselves (the manchineel tree, "manzanilla de la muerte", employs at least three different ways intended to savagely kill caterpillars), and some stuff about mutating worms.
The second was about studying animal genetics- specifically, pigeons. Trust me, it was a lot cooler than it sounds. (I was also happy to hear that the people in animal genetics helped those in human genetics with their findings and technology, and vice versa, so I could help advance more than one kind of genetics no matter where I ended up working.) I found out some fun facts about pigeons, learned a bit of how they study genetics in actual labs (I mean, that's what I intend to do, so SCORE!), and actually feel like I might have found a lab I'd want to be part of, when/if I go to this university.
The "Four-winged pigeons" in the title is because of the discovery they focused on for this class/lecture/whatever. They'd been trying to find the genes responsible for whether pigeons have scales or feathers on their feet, and found that the feathered feet appeared to actually be caused by the normal (scaled) feet gene being overrun by the gene that puts feathers on their wings. Thus, their feet were basically being turned into a second pair of wings.
It sounds totally crazy, but you see the feathers some of these poor pigeons have, and they're literally the exact same as the ones on their wings, and sometimes just as long.
The third was about forensic identification. The subject matter was already pretty interesting, but it was made so much better by the guy that was actually teaching. He was a total jokester, and had a lot of different experiences to tell us about beyond the main information. He made us smile and laugh a lot, even though he was freaking telling us about dead bodies!
At different points in the day, I was pretty sure I spotted two or three kids from my school, but what freaked me out a bit was that I'm pretty dang sure I saw one of my friends from 7th grade. I had no idea what to do!
Look, I already have a hard enough time keeping up with old friends, because once we stop talking, I kinda feel like I should just let them remain part of my past. My friends from 3rd grade and Beka are practically the exceptions- and even then, I rarely send them messages or anything; I only get all hyped up if I get to see them in person.
This was one of the friends that I thought just didn't want to hang out with me anymore. It hurt when I finally accepted that as fact, and I'd therefore decided that I'd basically return the favor.
I somehow didn't ever expect to see her ever again, despite still living relatively close to my old house and school. Yet here I was, seeing her within the 540 kids that attended this event.
I honestly stared at her a bit, trying to figure out whether it was really her. I'm pretty sure she glanced at me, surely feeling my gaze, but I have no idea if she'd actually recognized me or not. The moment still left me shocked and a bit anxious. It didn't even last long, because just a minute later I glanced back around, and she'd disappeared.
Yeah... I'm not sure what to do. Should I be attempting to start up a friendship with her again? Or just pretending it never happened?
Last thing that happened this week was that there was this year's Young Women's in Excellence (or whatever that's actually called). Weirdly enough, they did one event for the young women in the whole stake, rather than each of us doing it within our wards. And instead of having the Young Women coming up to talk about what they'd done throughout the year, then having refreshments, they served us dinner, then gave chocolates to the girls that had done stuff in their Personal Progress. (I wasn't one of them.) Dinner was lasagna.
'Kay, I guess that's everything... Well, besides this pic of the moon. Of course, my phone's camera sucks at taking pictures of the sky, just like any other phone. I did my best to edit it, though, so the second should look cooler. Just a little bit.
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