LoLo Ballz, and Covid Anxiety Dreams Meets Ego Depletion
Back years ago when I was in one of my social work positions I worked with a 21 year old girl who styled herself as a rapper named "LoLo Ballz" Clearly this was not her real name. She was a very attractive girl with waist length wavy chestnut hair, a petite figure and a pretty face. If you'd have been casting a teen movie you might have cast her as the ditzy Valley Girl sort of friend.
LoLo was harmless, but she used to just stress me the heck out every single time I had to interact with her. It wasn't just that she did things like interrupt a IEP (Individual Educational Plan) meeting to shout, "Quick! Quick! Can someone explain how you give a blowjob!" The blowjob thing is a long story involving an inappropriate relationship with a married man she worried would cheat on her with his wife. Or her propensity for practicing her rap music filled with phrases about selling crack on the mean streets of Compton with bitches, hoes and the N-words. Or her inane chatter about the wonders of Justin Beiber,
It was more the fact that she seemed to be the dumbest gal on the planet. Later I learned she'd been a serious alcoholic so many years before getting sober than it had caused her significant brain damage. She was a hire through some sort of government program, and would have been difficult to fire.
I didn't like to have to make work for her when she showed up in our division. Once I gave her a foot high stack of treatment documents that had been audited and asked her to put them in alphabetical order. Simple, right? She did it, in about three times the time it should have taken. The documents were in alphabetical order all right, but by first names. She had to redo it, complaining copiously about how I should have told her it was last names, and how wrong I was, how was she supposed to know that.
She was my bete noire at that job. I never knew what was going to set her off. It could be something as simple as my telling a therapist I needed their John Hancock on a treatment document and Lolo busting out loudly that she could not BELIEVE! I was referencing that shitty movie. I sighed, smacked myself in the head before telling her she couldn't say "shitty" in the office and definitely not around the minor patients before explaining what a John Hancock was.
It was constant, it was relentless. Every single time she opened her mouth I could feel my blood pressure climb. I knew my reaction to her was my reaction, and she was never going to be fired. Eventually I forced myself to try and think positively about her, send her good thoughts and prayers, and it did start to transform that irritation I was feeling. I tried to continue to explain every "Hancock", working expectations and how offering oral sex to a married man to keep him off his wife is a very bad plan and why.
Lately I've been having even more intense Covid dreams, the last week about being on a reality show. I sleep dreamless and hard from 11pm to around 5 am, get up just long enough to pee, and go back to bed for two hours. The dreams happen in that two hour window. I'm not sure why I'm suddenly so much jumpier and nervous about the pandemic, but I am. Very much so. I guess because it's stretching on so long.
Add in a recent spate of stupidity, and there you have it. Me very cranky. Cranky about seeing a croc eating a toy poodle. Cranky over tourists drunkenly falling from golf carts. Me irritated by others insisting I do this or that no understanding I have stepped away from that part of my life. Me cranky over non maskers. Me cranky over fighting with the aduana over the value of my N99 masks where we cannot agree on the value of the Pound Sterling against the US dollar and the CR colones. Me cranky over every single bit of stupidity surrounding me, feeling like I did around LoLo Ballz for so long.
It's been five weeks since I stepped away from No Longer Quivering, and I think I'm now decompressing from that and this horrible year, while trying to help Jim diet. Ending up with zero emotional energy, in ego depletion mode.
How did I come to this realization, besides feeling oddly drained these weeks? One thing, the flood of contacts I've been having with strangers, fans of Without a Moral Compass. In the past week I've been inundated with contacts insisting I had no right to vote from overseas. Too much on top of the crazy struggle mail in voting was this year.
I was puzzled and irritated by their words because I've voted before mail in from overseas. Heck, mail in voting has been a thing in the States since just before the Civil War. I have to give a shout out to U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica and VoteFromAbroad.org for their help this year. They were tremendously helpful! As a U.S. citizen living abroad I am very qualified and legal to vote from here. I am not a C.R. citizen, merely a resident with an application in for that residency certificate. Even if I were a resident here I could not vote in C.R. elections. As it would be illegal.
So why was I getting spammed about this? Because it turns out that voting records is exactly what Without a Moral Compass is using to try and justify her requested dismissal of Tati Westbrook's lawsuit. She's apparently been ranting about this to her followers in great detail completely misunderstanding what voting rights laws actually are, like the newest version of LoLo Ballz talking to other Miss Ballz.
The fact is that you can own property anywhere in the U.S., or abroad and not necessarily actually vote where you own. I have investment property in different states and here, yet established U.S. voting laws say as long as I am living overseas my legal voting address is the last one I lived at in the U.S., which I no longer own, my old house. Legal voting addresses are not proof of where someone lives. They just aren't. It's a dumb argument.
Even dumber I allowed myself to be pulled into fighting with this legion of LoLo's with much the same effect as with the original LoLo. One of the kind ladies opposing Without a Moral Center recently said that we need to start being extremely kind to these super fans. I think back to my LoLo Ballz struggles and conclude wholeheartedly. I don't have the stamina for the fighting and cannot be educating the masses on things like voter laws and addresses.
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