Breaching Borders

 

Approaching the first checkpoint at the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border at Penas Blancas. Shot last March during my hurried border run trip to keep my drivers license valid. This currently is a thing of the past. At least for now during the pandemic.

Last night I came to a decision about where my personal borders are. My boundaries.

For the past ten days we've all been chuckling over the graphically bizarre hot mess that is Katie Joy versus Tati Westbrook. I willingly admit, I've joined in on the delicious schadenfreude nature of the lawsuit and the paperwork, and the speculations. But I am stopping right here, right now.

Why? Easy. I think, after viewing her live streams of the past week, especially last night, we're all just poking the deranged badger with the sharp spoon. It's just making the badger even more crazed. In my humble opinion. Not saying this is all 100% factual, this is just my view from the mean girls squad. My opinion only. Just like what is below is just my opinion.

I'm starting to seriously fear for her mental health as she's seeming more and more agitated and unbalanced as time passes. I'm fearful for her poor sick little son, whose mother seems so focused on trying to sue everyone that it seems likely it leaves him with the short end of the stick again. There are some very frightening real world consequences for this family that seem like they are coming to fruition. I am scared if KJ is not stopped she'll dig that hole deep enough that they lose their comfortable house, and everything else. 

I don't want to see her losing everything and living in a cardboard box on the streets while collecting tin cans and muttering about Tati. I do want to see her realize how awful she is being, and stop with the multitude of seeming lies, spend time with the kid.

That's another thing I just do not "get" about Katie, that I myself experienced. During my youngest child's growing up years dealing with her immune system disorders I was in turns a helicopter mom on the lookout for any hint of illness, while struggling to do everything to make absolutely sure that she had the most normal life we could provide. 

I took flack for that sometimes. At my old church people accused me of spending too much time and attention on my youngest. Once she was in high school and broke her foot playing soccer one of her teachers accused me of 'babying' her. Why? Because I was arriving ten minutes before the end of class to help her navigate the large school with a full backpack while she was on crutches. I remember looking at him, and not even replying to his words because he just did not get it that for my daughter to get overtired was enough to spiral into a bout of shingles or some other weird immune system thing. I guarded her health fiercely. Now as an adult she does that, and does it well. I have to think that has its roots into the years I plowed into making sure  she had every advantage she needed.

So I just do not understand how someone can possibly spent 20 hours a day online with a medically fragile child, and leave that child in the hands of mere nurses. It is not good for either of them.

That being said what lawyer Emily D. Baker said last night in a live stream upset me pretty badly too. I like Emily, and enjoy her videos on not just this case but others, so this is not necessarily me being upset with her, it was what she hinted at that rang my chimes. She said that the unnamed former Patheos coworker is likely to be called as a witness.

That would be me.

Let me set something straight. We're in a global pandemic. Rates in Guanacaste and all of Costa Rica are high and rising, even as the idiot government here has reopened completely to tourism. As I keep stating, a country the size of Wisconsin with a similar size population and similar infection rates. 

Me, having mast cell activation syndrome is going nowhere, not to the States to testify in anything, not nowhere. I go down to the grocery store and the pharmacy with the rare side trip to other stores like the Ipad repair place, and the odd walk on the beach. All the while masked, socially distanced, hand santizered, hand washing self. I take no chances. I refuse hugs, I don't allow anyone else close enough to do handshakes. I do not go to church or other risky places. There is no way in hell I am getting on an international flight, squeezed in with strangers using a variety of ruses to not mask the entire time spreading their cooties and Covid around.

I have friends who have flown in and out, and they are telling me how unsafe most of the passengers are behaving, and that its just insane right now to fly.

I am on a laundry list of drugs right now to keep my immune system in check, and when it gets really bad I'm put on a month or two of chemotherapy to tamp it down. Which makes me all the more vulnerable to picking up cooties and Covid. So I stay home 99.99% of the time, like someone with an awful preexisting health condition should do. I don't wish to die from Covid, and with my health issues I am primed to croak if I catch it. I'm going nowhere until they have a safe effective vaccine. That is my reality!

Secondly, as someone in the process of becoming a legal resident who has already paid her lawyer, and has them working on the mammoth several year process towards residency this is residency suicide during the pandemic. The government here has extended my visa and my drivers license here until the end of March, and I predict they will extend it out again because Covid is going nowhere.

What happens if I fly back to the States? I lose my place in line for the residency. Every penny we're spent on the process is just wasted. We much start again. It resets the clock on my visa, and I would be granted only a 90 tourist visa instead of a provisional one for applying to be a resident. I would have to buy that expensive travel medical insurance to be let back in, and would have to fly out again within the 90 days. It would cost us a lot of money, blood, sweat, tears and time. I cannot and will not jeopardize my residency application status for something so so dumb.

Thirdly, nothing I could possibly testify to would be so earth-shattering as to make a difference either for or against. I worked with her at Patheos. I knew her for about two years now. On my old dead computer I had some of the nasty correspondence between her and the powers that be at work at the bitter end. There is where all of the saved chats were stored too. 

She constantly complained about our fellow writers. She complained about a variety of people, including Tati Westbrook, but I cannot remember what she was complaining about in regards to Tati, some babbling about vitamins and other beauty bloggers. You have to understand she bitched about so many people to me that most of the time the things she said went in one ear (fingers) and straight out of the other. I just did not take it in, her complaining was so constant and pervasive I would punctuate our conversations with "uh huh," "I'm sorry," and "what meanies!", a pattern of inanities spilling from my fingers but not really meaning a thing, just reaction enough to keep her griping tamped down.

If called I will not go. If forced to sit for a deposition here I will plead the fifth on everything. I just do not want to be bothered at this point, and I have no desire to make any of this worse for anyone. So I'm shutting up about Katie for good this time. She's not worth this much aggro. I pray she shuts her mouth and soon, and comes to some sort of resolution with Tati Westbrook. She needs to settle, go offline asap and take care of her child in my opinion. This is getting stupid.

This is where my boundaries, my borders lie. 

Another view of trucks waiting at Penas Blancas. When there's no Covid and things are moving along at the border it can take up to three days to get a freight truck through the border. When we drive up to do the gringo shuffle to keep the visas valid we pass miles of these 18 wheelers idling on the way to the border.