I think I'd look great with Vulcan ears

I wish I was a Vulcan. Cool. Dispassionate. Not given to emotions. Logical. Awesome pointy ears. I know I'm a girl, and that's precisely why I want to be Vulcan. Have you ever broke down crying when your boss yells at you? Being a girl can suck.

I've noticed a new wave of emotions since having a baby. It could be hormonal, I suppose. I had normal girl hormones before and pregnancy is like adding five new ingredients, turning up the heat, and stirring the pot rapidly. Childbirth is where that mixture explodes and your body and hormones may be similar to the ones you had before, or you may carry an eternal aversion to vinegar and a higher propensity to get canker sores and cavities. I'm still sorting out the damage. (Men. Be thankful you are men.)

So I'm not sure if my body is trying to kick start back into normal gear and keeps hitting me with these random emotional spikes, or I am the new owner of a set of supercharged mom emotions, but I keep crying over the littlest things.

I went and watched the Warcraft movie within a few weeks of Genevieve's birth. It's a high fantasy movie based on the high fantasy computer game World of Warcraft. So there are orcs, but they aren't Tolkien's orcs. They do tend to be violent and bloodthirsty, but they are a strong tribal society valuing family and clan and the honor of a good fight. One of the orcs is pregnant and her and her husband go with an invading force, and when they turn against the wrong of their fellow orcs, both her and her husband are killed. The baby, still very young, was in a basket on his mother's back, and, Moses-style, he is cast into the river to save him. And he makes all these little baby noises that I knew now being a new mom and I almost started crying in the theater.

I heard a story of missionaries in China during the Boxer rebellion and when they came for them, the mother hid her six-month-old daughter with a note on her explaining what had happened, went out, and was executed. The baby was found alive two days later, but I cried thinking of the baby all alone, nobody to hear her cries or feed her or change her diaper.

I got mad watching Maleficent and seeing the incompetent pixies give the baby princess carrots to eat by plopping them in her bassinet and then all sleeping that night, deaf to her cries of hunger. FEED THE BABY!

This happens with startling frequency. A baby lives in my heart and so my heart bleeds for babies. I already had this weird protective streak that although I didn't want children for the longest time, something would stir in me whenever I heard of them being hurt or abused or their innocence stolen and childhood ended long before they actually grew up. It's a noble sentiment, but I hate breaking into uncontrollable tears. I hate crying. I hate the weakness of emotions.

So the thing that set me off yesterday and continues to make me cry whenever I relate it to anyone was a stupid .gif on Facebook that was clearly meant to be funny. You could say it "triggered" me. It looks like and old-style painting of a woman stirring her pot on a stove. She moves like a paper doll and lifts her spoon out of the pot. And then, out of the pot, comes a little hand, chubby, fingers spread, reaching, searching. The women then uses her spoon to poke the hand back in the pot.

I stared in shock as the .gif replayed, the hand continuing to reach, the woman continuing to cook. It is supposed to be funny, I tried to tell myself. A woman cooking a baby is supposed to be funny. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. I know I have a problem with over-analyzing everything, but HOW is this funny? Is it the flagrant disrespect for human life that is in imagining a helpless infant being literally cooked alive? Is the baby reaching out for help, or are we pretending that the baby is actually somehow fine despite the flames under the pot and the baby is just reaching playfully? How many times has my own baby lifted her chubby little hand, fingers spread, to my face to touch it?

Every time I've recounted my horror at this .gif, I've started crying. I'm crying now. It makes me want to cry out to God for forgiveness for our country as we've allowed ourselves to forget that babies, even ones not yet born, are lives, souls, people.

Bah. I hate crying. Even when the situation seems to deserve it.

We're sorry. So sorry.

Michael Moore posted this on Facebook. I know because friend of a friend or something.

1. Hello rest of the world! My fellow Americans are asleep right now so I thought we could talk privately and maybe I can explain what happened yesterday.

2. Hillary Clinton won the election on Nov 8 by 2.8 million votes over Donald Trump. Which is to say, she lost. You are correct, this is not a democracy.

3. Back in the 1700s, in order to get the slave states to join the USA, the founders gave those states "extra votes", letting them count their slaves but not let them vote.

4. So yes, it is ironic that this racist idea called the Electoral College has, 225 years later, ended up benefiting the candidate who spewed racism hate.

5. Trump is not president until he's given the oath of office at noon on Jan 20th. So we will continue to fight and hope to find a legal, nonviolent way to stop this madness.

6. Ok, people are starting to wake up in the US. I wish I could give u better news. As bad as it seems, I'm sorry to tell you, it will be worse. We are a broken country at this point.

There seems to be a lot of stupid in this and it bugs me so much that I want to address it.

1. Obviously you know that posting it on Facebook in English hardly makes it private from your "fellow Americans" so the whole framing of the post is just a story you're telling yourself. Got a lot of the rest of the world following you on Facebook, Moore?

2. Clinton did not win the election. She got more votes. And no, it's not a democracy. It's a Republic. "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury." It's purposeful.

3. I don't know of the validity of this. I would think that since it's population based, it would be current to today's population? Anyway, just because something has bad origins doesn't mean it's a bad idea. The slavery part aside, that doesn't mean the electoral collage is bad.

4. Ironic. And irrelevant.

5. What are you going to do? I know leftist think that Obama was the best thing since sliced bread, but you know some of us felt like the world was ending under him and we didn't throw a hissy fit. I hope you think he is bad enough to rip the country apart over, because denying our laws and process and a valid election (Russia may have tried to change your minds, but they didn't reopen the investigation) would destroy our civilization.

6. It's funny that you think the rest of the world is sitting around with bated breath being like, "Will Clinton, the defender of LGBTQs, abortion rights, and everything good in the world manage to make a comeback or will the evil racist narcissist Trump get into the White House?" Because, point #1, you aren't actually talking to the rest of the world, you're telling a story to America. And this is a Facebook post... you have plenty of space to spell out "you."

But the one idea that really strikes me wrong is the idea that the rest of the world cares. The rest of the world is somehow comprised of bleeding heart liberals who are appalled at those right-wing Republican Trump voters. Ah yes, we, the kind and gracious leader of the world were corrupted from inside. We are no longer worthy of you following us.

Maybe there's a few countries like that. I don't know which ones they are. But a lot of the world doesn't give a crap about LGBTQ rights and abortion rights and whatever is in the liberal agenda for today. A lot of countries are very racist. They treat women as second class citizens. They practice female genital mutilation. They kill dissidents and protesters and journalists who publish articles disagreeing with them. And LGBTQs. I'm sure they're all torn up about it.

Don't get me wrong, the US drives me crazy sometimes. I think taxes are just short of theft and our basic rights, including the right of association, are being quashed. We're reaching the level of thoughtcrime with our PC patrol of speech.

But this is one of the best places to live if you are a woman. Or a Christian. Or black. Or Jewish. Apologizing to the other countries for that?

Most of them probably only care what's in it for them. Can they pay enough money to buy out Clinton? Can they "make good deals" and have Trump give their evil a blind eye? We're sorry, we're sorry, some people are against trans people using the bathroom they want. Think that goes over in Saudi Arabia? They're all tore up about it.

Syria and Iran and Ukraine probably care. The US has their fingers really deep in those pies, so it does directly influence them. I wonder who they actually rooted for.