Bryce Moore's Blog, page 163

Dealing with Disney at Busy Times

There are all sorts of sites out there that will tell you when to visit Disney World. What time of the year the park is least crowded. And that’s all fine and good if you have little kids who can miss a week of school and no one cares, but once your kids start getting older and school actually matters, much of that goes out the window. You’re locked into the same time periods everyone else in the country is stuck with: Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break, summer vacation.

Sometimes you just have to go at a busy time if you’re going to be able to go at all.

I’ve just come back from a Disney trip that was by far the most crowded I’ve seen the park. I’ve been at spring break before. Magic Kingdom last Wednesday evening was pretty insane, for example. The park was just overflowing with people. Lines were 2 hours plus on the popular rides. Busy busy busy. And that was par for the course the whole time I was at Disney last week.

I looked at all those poor people, jammed in line as they went from one wait to the next, and I just felt bad for them. Not bad enough that I got into line with them, of course, but bad that they just must have thought that was the only way to do Disney.

The longest line I was in all trip? 25 minutes for Pirates of the Caribbean. And the only reason I waited in line all that time was that I’d just eaten Thanksgiving dinner, and I wanted to just sit around and chat for a while instead of doing something that would upset my already stretched stomach.

I wasn’t sure if my planning would pay off this time. I used Ridemax again, and I was disappointed that the interface hadn’t been updated in three years since I used it last. Maybe it wasn’t the way to go anymore. Touringplans was a new site I’d heard a lot about. Had I made a mistake?

But just as in previous years, the planning all worked like a charm. Ridemax has a dated interface, it’s true. But the plans it made for me were reliable and easy to use on a mobile device. My sister used Touringplans for her Universal trip the day before Disney, and the estimates were off by an hour at times. That’s some serious flaws.

I’ll admit I miss the old golden days of the original Fastpass system, where you could send runners off to the far reaches of the park to pick up Fastpasses as soon as possible, and then store them up and use them whenever you felt like. It was much easier to abuse that system than the current one. But even with Fastpass+, as long as you pick the right rides to reserve times for and pick the right times of the day to show up, you’re going to be fine with Ridemax on your side.

A few special bits of advice and experience from this trip:

Coming first thing in the morning is so important. We showed up at EPCOT 45 minutes before the park opened. As soon as we got through the gates, we headed to Frozen (in Norway), knowing the only way we’d avoid a 2 hour line was to get there first. We got to the ride 20 minutes before the park technically opened, and they were already letting people on (no doubt anticipating the long lines later). We practically walked on. Easy peasy.
When we showed up at Magic Kingdom early, the same thing happened: we were able to go on Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Little Mermaid, Barnstormer, Dumbo, the Carousel, the Tea Party, Small World, and Haunted Mansion in under 2 hours. If we’d waited an hour or two to start that, it would have taken 5 hours to get through them all.
With little kids, we’d show up for the park’s opening, go on rides, have lunch, and then go back to the hotel and take a nap. We’d then go back for dinner and more rides. This let us skip the busiest part of the day and still have some energy left in the tank for more rides and fun stuff at night.
With the new Fastpass+ system, if the ride you have a Fastpass for breaks down before you can use it, Disney gives you a replacement Fastpass that’s good almost anywhere else in that park, anytime that day. Yay! However, note that this does NOT work for Frozen in Norway. Trust me. I tried.

When Disney’s really busy, you basically have two choices: go without a plan, get on half as many rides, and spend most of your time in line OR go with a plan, get there early, go on everything you want, and skip most of the lines. Each of those options costs the same amount of money.

I know which one I’ll be sticking with.

Disney Food Reviews

You might not get much more out of me than Disney-related topics for the next few days, since that’s what I’ve been eating and breathing for vacation. So if you don’t care much for Disneyfied things, it might be better to head elsewhere. (Unless you happen to be interested in my health, in which case, read on to the end of this post.)

I’m back from Disney, and as I said on Facebook yesterday, my vacation was not kind to my diet. In fact, between stress eating over the election, followed by helping to run a statewide library conference, and topped off with a Thanksgiving vacation to Disney, my healthy goals tanked hard. I was not looking forward to getting on the scale this morning. Before I left on vacation, I knew I was already up to 191.2. Much higher than I’d hoped to be before my Disney food binge, and far too close to my line in the sand weight of 195. I debated (briefly) trying to watch the food intake some over the trip, but I ended up deciding against it. I was on vacation, dangit. I was going to have fun.

And fun is exactly what I had, especially when it came to food. One perk of going when we did was that we got the Disney dining plan for free. This means each day we each got 1 snack, 1 quick service meal (fast food), and 1 table service meal (sit down, nicer). It’s a veritable slew of calories. Here’s a rundown of all the damage:

San Angel Inn–Mexican restaurant inside the pyramid at EPCOT. Very good food, though the service took a while. I can’t honestly remember now what I ate, but I remember waddling out.
Marrakesh–Morrocan restaurant at EPCOT. A first for me. The food was very good, and there was a live dinner show. I had beef shish kebab and some sort of flaky dessert that I wasn’t too fond of. But fun to eat a cuisine I haven’t tasted before.
Tuskerhaus–African-themed all you can eat buffet in Animal Kingdom. Character meal with Mickey, Goofy, Donald, and Daisy. Great food, with a lot of variety of things you just aren’t going to find every day. Plus, the jungle juice (guava, passionfruit, and orange) was divine (though I was also very thirsty). I’ve eaten here three times and loved each one.
Akershus–Disney princess dining with a Norweigan theme at EPCOT. I had meatballs and all three of the desserts (mousse, rice puddinng, and apple cake). Princesses were Belle, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, and Snow White. MC was ecstatic. The food was really good too.
Crystal Palace–We ate Thanksgiving dinner here (in Magic Kingdom) with Eeyore, Pooh, Piglet, and Tigger. Seeing Eeyore was fantastic (of course), but the meal did leave a bit to be desired. Good food, but probably the worst of the restaurants we ate at over the vacation. Just your standard American fare.
Ohana–I still love this Hawaiian-themed restaurant at the Polynesian Resort, but Denisa wasn’t crazy about it. Too much meat. (It’s essentially a Disney-fied Brazilian steakhouse.) All you can eat, delivered right to your table. Steak, chicken, pot stickers, wings, salad, and the best bread pudding I’ve ever had.
Raglan Road–Probably my favorite restaurant of the trip. It’s an Irish pub-theme in Disney Springs, complete with live music and a dance show. The food was excellent across the board, and we were seated right by the stage, so we had an excellent view of everything going on. I had shepherd’s pie and a dark chocolate mousse creation for dessert.
Be Our Guest–Really the only quick service meal worth mentioning, but it was very impressive. It’s at the Magic Kingdom. They let you get reservations ahead of time, and then you order at a counter and they deliver the food to your table. Delicious, but also expensive if you’re not on the plan. ($21/person, I believe.) The theming of the restaurant is great, though: straight out of Beauty and the Beast. I would go back here in a moment. I had the roast beef sandwich, fries, and a triple chocolate cupcake for dessert. All were delicious.

Would I do the Disney Dining Plan again? Only if it were free. It’s so. much. food. Left to my own devices, I think I’d pay for a few table meals at EPCOT and split a bunch of meals elsewhere. It would be pricey, but it still wouldn’t be as much as the dining plan when you pay for it. The food is great, but there’s just too much.

Add to that a bunch of snacks and other meals, and things weren’t looking too good for the home team when it came to the ol’ diet. But I had a great time, and I wouldn’t go back and change things. That said, I was very worried about the scale this morning.

Survey says?

193.2

I only gained 2 pounds! I was pretty stunned, to say the least. I think a large part of it is that I was walking a ton at Disney, paired with the fact that while I ate a lot each time I ate, there wasn’t too too much in the way of grazing. All those in-between nibbles can really add up.

That said, I’m still in detox mode for the next while. I want to avoid sugar for the next week or two at least, and give my body a bit of a break before I turn to fudge and eggnog and peppermint ice cream for a brief spell over the holidays.

If you’ve read this far, you’re either far too good of a friend, or way too interested in my health. Thanks for reading, either way!

Diving into Disney Planning

The Disney trip is fast approaching, and that means that (no matter what else I’ve got going on) I needed to get serious about planning what we were actually going to do. Why? Because it’s Disney at Thanksgiving, which means the parks are going to be filled to overflowing. As longtime readers know, I’ve been to Disney a fair bit over the years, and I remember the days growing up when I’d wait in line for an hour or more to be able to go on Big Thunder Mountain. Two hours wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

So when I do Disney, I plan fairly extensively. There’s a service called Ridemax that I’ve used in the past, and I’m using it again this year. (Though this year I almost chose Touringplans, instead. And in hindsight, I’m wondering if that might have been a better option. They seem like they have a lot more resources at their disposal. I held off because they were new to me, and I’d rather go with the tried and true method that’s worked for me in the past.)

With Ridemax, you basically enter all the rides you’d like to go on each day, and it spits out a schedule for the order to go on those rides so that you have as little wait time as possible. I used it a spring break six years ago or so, and it worked wonders.

I know that some people would rather keep things open and free. Disney has an app that shows the current waiting times for all the different rides, and that certainly is an approach. But my problem/fear with that one is that it really only works for the lesser rides. The big ones (Big Thunder, Space Mountain, Seven Dwarves, Frozen, etc.) have long lines almost the whole time, so you need to have a gameplan for getting on those rides if you want to avoid sitting in line for hours on end.

The way I use Ridemax is to set up a plan and then give myself a bit of redundancy. Have a second time planned to go on favorite rides. Plan things out ahead of time so that I know I’ll be able to go on everything we want at least once, and then if I feel like going “off schedule,” I know the times in the schedule when that will work. In other words, skip a ride here or there if it isn’t vital or you know you’re going to come back to it later. Though honestly, my experience has almost always been that the schedule adds in padding time as it is. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and have extra time anyway.

Of course, a lot of a successful Disney gameplan during busy times boils down to a few principles:

Arrive first thing in the morning. Be there when the park opens. That way you can knock out some of those big rides when there hasn’t been a chance for a line to really materialize.
Stay late. People go back to their hotels at night, so you can just walk on rides that usually have long lines.
In light of this, you might want to head back to your hotel for a break in the middle of the day. That’s when lines are longest and crowds are biggest.
Book your restaurants ahead of time. Anyone thinking they’re going to walk up to a place that only takes reservations is in for a rude awakening.
Avoid parks with Extra Magic Hours. Sure, you can get into them early and go on a few rides fast, but as soon as those extra hours end, then the normal crowd shows up, and the majority of people don’t park hop. You end with a park that’s just jam packed for most of the day. No. Fun.

This time, since I’m going with my sister as well as my family, it required a bit of extra planning. We had a quick chat to make sure we were on the same page when it came to the rides we all wanted to go on. That’s why I’ll be going on Dumbo for the first time ever. (Her kids love it. Who knew?)

Disney takes a lot of planning my way. The day free dining opened, I was on the phone getting my hotel reservation. I didn’t get the place I wanted, so I kept checking back every day until I did. Then I checked plane flights for forever until I found something that worked in my budget. Next up was making dinner reservations 180 days out, followed by selecting FastPass+ 60 days out. Now I’m scheduling each day for which ride to go on when.

I know it seems strange to some people to plan things out so much in advance, and I can understand the argument that it takes away the spontaneity from a vacation. It’s a big pain to plan it all, true. But once you’ve got it all planned out, if you’ve done it right, then you don’t even really notice the plan that much.  Everything just works how its supposed to. To me, people who don’t plan a Disney trip are like people who decide to drive to California from Maine and just kind of wing it on the way when it comes to what to do and where to stay. I understand that it can be done that way, and that you can have a lot of fun doing.

It’s just not how I would approach it. Not with three kids who all want different things out of a trip, for one thing. Not while I’ve got to keep track of a budget. So I go the heavy planning route.

Thank goodness it’s almost done!

Decision Overload

I hit a wall yesterday. I got back from work, and I was just done. Done done done done done. I couldn’t think about anything. Couldn’t make decisions about anything. I just wanted to sit down and do nothing for the whole evening.

Which is what I ended up doing, really. Denisa deserves a gold star for being able to cover for me for the evening. I was completely useless.

The problem, of course, is that I have a lot of things still to do. A family vacation over Thanksgiving to plan, for one thing. Work emails to catch up on. Chores around the house to get tidied up. And instead of doing any of that, I just lay in bed and read.

It was like every time I thought about getting up to be useful, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I get like that every now and then, and thankfully it never lasts long, but it’s a real downer when it happens.

The good news is that things are better today. I’m tearing through my to do list and checking things off left and right. Usually that’s all it really takes me to get myself in gear: make up a really good list so that I have a handle on everything I need to do, and then work on getting some of the small things off that list. It doesn’t even matter what they are. As soon as I feel like I’m getting things done, my brain freeze seems to thaw, and I can function again.

But man. Speaking from recent experience, that overloaded feeling is a big ol’ bummer.

Maine Library Association Annual Conference

Another MLA annual conference is in the record books, and I for one am very glad to have emerged from the other side. I go to a fair number of conferences each year, but I only actually take part in running one. This one. And it’s made me appreciate how much work goes into a successful conference. There’s a ton of moving parts, and staying on top of all of them can be dizzying.

This year’s conference was a great success, I think. We had a record turnout (183, which was 60 more than we had last year). We were at a new location (Sunday River, a ski resort in western Maine), and everyone seemed to like the new digs a lot. (With the exception of temperature, which was kind of toasty the first day.) The keynotes were a great success, we had a large variety of programming, the food was great, and we had plenty of exhibitors on hand to show off their latest and greatest to attendees.

What all goes into a conference? Tons. Weekly meetings that stretch back to February. Discussions about what to have for a theme, what kind of programming tracks to have, who to invite as keynotes, when to have it, where to have it, what to eat, what to charge, how to promote it, how to lay out the program, what kind of freebies to offer.

Each and every decision needs to be weighed and deliberated and ultimately made. You’re going to make some good decisions and some bad decisions. Would I have changed anything about this year’s conference? Sure. I would have asked Sunday River to have a coat rack on hand, for one thing. That seems like a little thing, but when lots of people are asking the same thing, it all can add up.

There are other things I’d tweak as well, but overall, I’m really pleased with the whole thing. (And I’m *really* pleased that it’s over.) At this point, I’m looking forward to doing other things for a while and taking a break from all those decisions and plans.

A huge thanks to all who took part in the planning, but also to all who came. We can plan all we want, but if no one shows up, then what in the world was the use of it all? And thanks to all who presented. That can be tough to do, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience doing it. Really, from the beginning to the end, the conference was lovely. Here are a few highlights:

Playing a rousing game of Battlestar Galactica in the foyer of the conference wing. The humans (my side) lost, but we made a valiant effort. And we got to be poked fun at by the state librarian, who I really think was just jealous that he hadn’t thought of board gaming in the foyer first.
Dan Wells’ talk on dystopias will stay with me for a while, especially his observation that we live in a dystopia and have for years. We just don’t think of it all the time because we live in District One (to reference Hunger Games)
David Lankes’ talk on information vs. data. vs. knowledge was also thought provoking and challenging. Just what I want from a great librarian keynote.
Working throughout the weekend with some of my best work friends ever. I spend a lot of time with my presidency and MLA comrades in arms, and even though it’s stressful, I really don’t think I could be with a better group to help me get through it. We work hard, but we have fun.
Waking up at 4:45am to take Dan Wells to the airport was a reminder to me that humans aren’t supposed to wake up at 4:45. For anything. They’re certainly not supposed to function for an entire conference day the whole day after doing that. Apologies to anyone I said anything stupid to yesterday. I was not in my right mind.
Reminding myself just how much I don’t like eating too much sugar. It’s about all that got me through the conference, but I’m paying the price now. Just in time for Disney food coming up . . .

There’s a ton of things I could rattle off, but I’m behind at work and need to cut things off here. Thanks again to everyone, and I look forward to doing it all again(!) a year from now.

Finishing Narnia

You’ll recall that I started reading aloud to my daughter over the summer in an effort to get her reading skills improving. It continues to go wonderfully. Her reading has gotten better by leaps and bounds. She’s not off the charts, skill-wise, but she’s right in line with where she should be reading, and I feel like my efforts have really helped get her there. Better yet, it’s become a tradition the two of us enjoy a lot. She reminds me when I forget, and it’s something she looks forward to every day.

We finished The Last Battle on Saturday, completing The Chronicles of Narnia at last. It’s always been one of my favorite series, and reading it with DC was a real treat, as I got to see it through her eyes for the first time. The Last Battle is one of my favorite books ever, and it especially hit home with me this time through.

For those of you who don’t know, the Last Battle is the story of how Narnia is destroyed. This place that you’ve been with through six books and loved dearly just gets completely wrecked by a stupid selfish monkey, and for what? He wanted some nuts. (I’m oversimplifying here.) The first half of the book is just brutal, as you see this place you love get ripped apart. Characters you’ve cherished get cut down, and awful, terrible things happen every page.

It’s painful to read, especially to a big fan of the series.

So you’d figure it would be a book I’d hate. But the thing is, just when you think it all can’t possibly get any worse, the heroes of the book die. And so that’s just the last straw, right? But when they die, what happens next is so lovely. The entire world ends up dying as well. Again, that sounds terrible. But CS Lewis basically sets out the whole final judgment, and you see the entire world of Narnia quickly get judged, and you follow the ones who pass to heaven.

DC, as I’m reading all of this to her, stopped me and looked at me with bright eyes. “This is heaven, Dad!” And I loved seeing that expression on her face as she figured it out. Because for how terrible the first half or even two-thirds of the book is, the last part is bliss. You see all the characters you loved come back. The world come back. Everyone is reunited with their families and friends. And it just keeps getting better and better. It’s one of the best presentations of what I hope heaven could and will be like.

At this time in our political history, it was very nice to me to remember that things can improve even when they look like they can’t possibly get worse. That even an unsalvageable situation can end up with a happy solution. True, it takes faith and divine intervention, but that’s some of the things that get me through a lot of my struggles.

Anyway. There’s your bright spot for the day. I’m off to work on library conferences some more. Thanks for reading!

Social Media Ettiquette

I post things on Facebook. Quite a few things. And I keep my privacy settings “public” because I’m happy to have strangers see what I write and think. For the most part, it works wonderfully. People can share my posts easily, and I enjoy the variety of views and conversation that follows.

But.

Every now and then, it breaks down. I’ll have people show up to the party who don’t really want to talk or listen. They just want to lecture or say why everyone else is wrong. I’m fine with even that, as long as they generally stick to the topic I was writing about. True, I have to step in now and then to knock some heads together, but fine.

Here’s the thing: the rule I have always followed is that if I don’t know someone (or at the very least I’m not Friends with them on Facebook), then I won’t post on someone’s wall. I’ll happily engage with someone on a public page. No gripes with that. But if I see a friend liked something on someone else’s feed, and it pops up in my feed, I’ve always treated it as off limits for commentary there. What I’ll do instead is post it to my own wall, where I’ll give my commentary.

And I think that’s been my assumption for social media etiquette. You can see what everyone posts, but you’re not supposed to comment on a stranger’s wall. Comments are there for Friends. But is this just something I’ve imagined? Am I expecting too much from the internet?

I would love to hear what other people think. In the meantime, I have a conference to run, so I’ll be very scarce online today and tomorrow.

On Veteran’s Day

In honor of Veteran’s Day, Denisa and I have been working our way through Band of Brothers, the HBO miniseries based on the book by Stephen Ambrose. It follows the story of Easy Company, a group of American paratroopers who fought in World War II from D-Day through the defeat of Germany. (Tonight I think we might watch Saving Private Ryan, the movie that spawned Band of Brothers. Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg took their experiences filming SPR and decided the subject deserved a more in-depth version. They executive produced the miniseries, and Hanks directed one of the episodes.)

It’s a remarkable miniseries, and an important one for people to watch, I believe. (It’s available on Amazon Prime in its entirety.) Yes, it’s violent and graphic, and yes, it has strong language, but it gives some insight into what war is really like and at what price victory comes. (It’s based on the firsthand experiences of Easy Company members, related decades after the war, so some of the accuracy has been called into question.)

Ten episodes in all. Approximately 10 hours long in total. It shows training camp, D-Day, Bastogne, Berchtesgarden, and more. The acting is sharp, the characters well portrayed, the production values excellent.

Last night, Denisa and I watched the last two episodes. I found “Why We Fight” to be particularly moving. It’s the episode in which the soldiers first come across a concentration camp. Seeing the reactions of the soldiers. The confusion on their faces as they tried to take in what it was they were looking at . . . It’s contrasted so well with showing the rest of the German people to all of it.

I remember being over in Germany and talking to some of the people there who had lived through World War II. I lived in Weimar for 6 months. It was the Culture City of Europe for that year. The home of Goethe. And just up the street from me was Buchenwald. I saw the ovens firsthand. Saw the rooms where the prisoners were shot or operated on. And I spoke to Germans who had been there while that was happening.

As a missionary, I was able to go to people’s homes and get to know them in a way no tourist could do. This was my home as well for that time. I talked to people on the street. In the parks. Everywhere. So I feel like much of what I got to experience was about as authentic as it can get. One conversation stays with me. They said that they didn’t “know” Buchenwald was there. It wasn’t like they could drive there. It was restricted. But the wind blows down from Buchenwald into the city sometimes, and when it did, they could smell the smoke.

They didn’t officially know what was going on. But they knew something was happening, and they chose not to acknowledge it. And that’s something they’ve had to live with all these years now. It’s conversations like that which have made me feel the need to speak out against Trump’s rhetoric. For the majority of Germans, life under Hitler was just fine. It was tons better than it had been without him. He brought Germany back from the wreckage of World War I, and he made Germany great again.

But that greatness was built upon the bodies of minorities, literally. It was built on the deaths of millions. Jews. Roma. Homosexuals. Jehovahs Witnesses. Mentally handicapped. Political dissidents. It was built by labeling anyone different as less, and blaming those differences for the ills of the country.

I’m a patriot. I want America to succeed. But I want it to be with a clean conscience. I never want to be looking back at my life, decades later, telling a young missionary about how I didn’t “know” what was going in my country, even though I recognized it. True, Trump hasn’t done anything yet in terms of policy to even come close to what Hitler and the Nazis were doing, but scroll through the news, and you see the stories of so many racists who have been emboldened by Trump’s victory. My own high school had a story about it today. This is real. This is happening.

And a good man would speak out against it. Would use the enormous following he’s made for himself online to say that it’s not right. To say that people need to stop saying and doing those things, and that such actions will not be tolerated by him or his administration. The people who voted for the man should be calling for him to do that as well. Publicly. Vocally. Because the continued silence by them and him implies acceptance.

I love Germany. I love the German people. They are like any other people, and the mistakes they made are the same mistakes people continue to make on a daily basis. The only difference is a matter of scale.

On this Veteran’s Day, I honor the soldiers who have fought for this country and the freedoms we enjoy. But at the end of Band of Brothers, we hear a speech by a German general to his troops as they surrendered. It could have been given verbatim by an American to his soldiers. The Germans were fighting for their country. Being brave and valiant doesn’t make the country or the cause right. That’s up to the leadership and the people to ensure we always have a strong moral compass.

It’s up to us. Each of us. And we can’t forget that. We can’t forget that just because things are improving for me means they’re better for everyone or, worse yet, coming at the expense of a group of people in particular.

Home Construction Excuse

Sorry about the lack of a post today. I’ve been working on putting the floor down in my addition all day, and it just ate up all of my time. Tomorrow I’ll be back to normal, I hope. For today, you’ll just have to get by without me.

On the 2016 Election

It’s not often I find myself completely at a loss for words. I’m pretty vocal about what I think, especially online, and I almost always know just what that is. Last night as I watched the election results with my family, I went from upbeat optimism to guarded optimism to anxious optimism to, well, let’s just skip right to the end, where I turned the television off at 11:15.

The writing was already on the wall by then. I didn’t want to subject myself to being both tired *and* disappointed. And if I woke up in the morning and discovered a last minute miracle fixed all of this? Wonderful.

But I woke up and checked and nope: no miracle.

So what do I think? What do I say? I’ve been mulling it over and over and over, like many of you. And in the end, I guess I’ll use a trick I turn to whenever I have writer’s block. I write about the block itself. Write around it. So what follows is *not* the sum of my thoughts on the election results. Those thoughts can’t be put into words just yet, it seems. But it’s a series of thoughts I have around it.

Running a country is a team sport. Living in a country is being part of a team. Sometimes that means that everyone agrees with what you want done. Sometimes it means that the majority thinks things should be done in a different way. As much as you might wish things were different, elections are what they are. We live with the results, and we move on.
Labeling people is something I’m against, period. I don’t know of anything good that comes of reducing a complex human being to one category, whether it’s “gay,” “Trump supporter,” “Mormon,” or anything in between. This isn’t to say those categories don’t matter. They do. But they should never be substituted for the whole. So just as I’d hope our country doesn’t make a blanket ban against “Muslims,” I’d also hope we don’t dismiss an entire slice of the country as “Trump supporters” and write them off as racist, close-minded bigots who just want to shoot things. Because that isn’t true. It’s true for some of them, sure. But not all.
Why did so many people vote for Trump? The best argument I can think of for Republicans is that Trump was the head of their team for this game. Sure, they didn’t like a whole lot of what came out of his mouth, but by electing him, they hoped to elect a group of people who would agree with their world view. They were electing a Vice President, Cabinet, and Supreme Court justices. It was more than the man.
That said, I’m deeply disappointed in the Republican party and the people who voted for Trump. As I’ve said many times on my blog, I believed Trump stood for far too much evil. That he had to be spat out no matter what. I’m shocked so many women voted for the man. (42%) Shocked so many Latinos voted for him (29%). But even as I write that, I remind myself about my earlier point. People can’t be labeled. They’re more than a race or a gender.
To comfort myself, I keep in mind how many failed promises presidents have made over the years. How often they end up falling short of what they said they’d accomplish. But then I remember we also handed Trump a united Congress and an empty Supreme Court seat. We cleaned the car, waxed it, topped off the tank, and tossed him the keys. Where does he want to drive it? I think of all the areas that worry me: global warming, gun violence, racial violence, international relations, nuclear proliferation, a return to the Cold War mentality, the economy, ISIS, terrorism, social security, healthcare, and more . . . No wonder I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around all of it.
Much of what Trump will actually do is a big question mark in my head. I’ve been living with a Trump Lite governor for the past 6 years or so. LePage pretty much can be counted on to say stupid things, do stupid things, make Maine look idiotic, and get not a whole lot done. At the moment, I’m feeling like that’s the best case scenario for the next four years. Really hoping I’m wrong.
Globally, the world might be on its own for the next few years. Trump seems set on a return to some isolationist ideas. Some of that might speed up a trajectory I’ve already been observing: the rest of the world realizing it doesn’t need America. In a rush to make America great again, I can’t help wonder if we’re going to make America irrelevant.
Last night, Trump could have said anything he wanted in his victory speech. I suppose I’m glad that he at least tried to make things sound like he’s going to be less than insane? Though I wonder how long that will last.

I just sort of feel like America was inspired by The Apprentice and decided to go with a real live reality TV show. Unfortunately, I’m worried it’ll turn out more like Wheel of Fish than The Amazing Race.

Usually after I write these blog posts, I feel like I have a better handle on the world. Like I’ve come to an understanding. Often I write to find peace with difficult subjects. But here I am at the end of the post, and there’s still no peace to be found. In the end, all I have to turn to is the knowledge that awful things have happened in this world before. It remains to be seen if a Trump presidency will be as awful as I’ve feared. But even if it is, the world will go on. I do have faith in humanity, even when humanity reminds me how good it is at making poor decisions.

Hope has to continue. And I guess I’ll leave this post at that.