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The first presidential debate.

You're not alive or well (or don't have cable or internet) if you don't at least know it was on tonight, and you haven't done your duty to democracy nor caught an historic moment if you missed it. I'm not going to go the fair and balanced route in discussing it because the media has done enough of that for us, elevating Trump to seem like someone he never was, namely, a serious candidate. Like I'm going to write about one serious candidate running against Archie Bunker after he gets an unexpected inheritance, so I'm going to say serious things, and expect people to take it seriously.

Haaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaa NO.

That's the only reason this debate was historic and why you really don't know what you were missing if you missed it. Feel the FOMO, because it's real. The proof of what we have on offer in November is neatly wrapped up in this one hour and some-odd minutes of verbal sparring (the some-odd mostly because Donald would not shut his mouth): on our right we have a strong, intelligent, poised, gracious woman who seems well-capable of leading; on our left, an asinine loose canon who speaks in more code than they could safely cram into that Da Vinci-something flick without moviewatcher's heads exploding.

While Trump didn't make some of his usual mistakes - like pointing out his sole African American supporter - he did hit all the typical buzzers for a Donald Trump appearance, debate personas be damned - including how he verbally ran over Hillary throughout, an immediately noticeable fact from the get-go. I have both praise for and wonder at her restraint, because I wouldn't have lasted two minutes being constantly interrupted. By at most the second or third time I would've brought the debate to an absolute standstill by a) asking Donald to stop interrupting, and when that likely failed, b) asking the moderator to warn him not to interrupt again.

I mean, seriously? We all learned when we were five unless we were spoiled brat bullies given no discipline, most likely because everyone was afraid of our rich, powerful daddy: you don't interrupt. You let people speak their turn. She's given two minutes, you're given two minutes. The rules are simple, clear, and as victimized as Donald has felt throughout the process of somehow stealing, killing or Russian-hacking his way to a win - none of which would raise an eyebrow over at Chateau MM, unfortunately - the rules apply to both of them, not just the person who doesn't happen to have a dick.

I don't know if she consciously thought of pointing out his interruptions but chose to grin and bear the many dozens, or if she simply didn't have the nerve to bring it up (perhaps she feared a "damsel-in-distress" look would not go over well with the mostly male, Hillary-hating faction) but the fact that the interruptions remained unaddressed by anyone, including the moderator, whose job it is to moderate, left me feeling sort of queasy. Did the moderator choose not to stop Donald's verbal barrage because he's a man and men interrupt, so to him Donald was displaying normal, typical male behavior? Did he choose not to comment because he was scared, or felt that he had to give Donald an extra-wide berth to rant on and on with to erase any notion that he was being "treated unfairly by the media"?

The lack of oversight against Donald's mouth took what would have been pure spectacle - Donald Duck vs. Hillary in a debate that people will want, but likely be unable to take seriously - and made it hard to endure. The verbal onslaught - the bullying, harassing, haranguing, "I win" nature of his interruptions was actually exhausting. I failed to hear the last five to 20 words of many of Hillary's sentences because Donald would jump in too soon. His cutoffs seemed not only timed to keep her from finishing but also to show her - and to show the world watching him interrupt her - blatant disrespect, a disregard for the thoughts she was forming as she spoke. It was a disgrace.

For all that I disagreed with how she handled his verbal warfare, Hillary was gracious and articulate; not wonky, boring nor dispassionate, as so many people seemed to expect. She seemed sincere in her desire to help everyday people get ahead, and said enough things I agreed with that the chorus of "Amen"s emanating from, of all people, me, was a surprise. Before I get into recounting Donald's Greatest Hateful Hits, I'll point out the one thing Hillary said that set me back, and the two areas where our known racist actually shined (he's either sincere or the greatest actor on earth, in which case we're in trouble, a topic which I'll address briefly at the end).

Firstly, that bit early on where Hillary said she wants to be our next president was unnecessary, at best. I don't need advertisements mixed in with my normal debate banter.

And I felt she lost me on the race question. She was quick to point out that things are not so bad for blacks (a view I strongly disagree with) and that they have their faith-based communities and churches. Which made me wince. A lot. It was the most racist thing anyone said, and this was one topic I thought Donald would fall on like a sword, while Hillary would shine. Instead of addressing how much minorities are hurting in very, very real ways (most of those stemming from clear, obvious lack of support from the whites who run everything) she dragged out tired old tropes and stereotypes in saying that well, they can lean on their churches and their faith during hard times (implied: so they'll be fine, OK? You can't kill them, they always go on somehow, so let's move on). That bit me. Hard.

You don't understand a life - not a brief time, not "cycling in and out of poverty" - but a life of deprivation until you've lived it. I haven't - not really - but I spent 28 years in a mostly black neighborhood where many people did. I watched, day by day, year by year, as things never changed, except to get worse (crack, gangs, guns). And the church, as heavily as they did or didn't lean on one? Wasn't doing a damn thing for them, especially not to lift them up so they'd never have to live that way again. When she said that, a half-lifetime of memories came flooding back and I winced, because she dismissed their pain, and used a tired old trope about blacks and churches to do it.

Donald, on the other hand - and this was one of only two moments in the debate where I give him credit - though he lacked any plan to help minorities, spoke rather feelingly about them. I connected with what he was saying. He does have an ability to tell it like it is that Hillary doesn't entirely lack - she simply failed to use it in this one crucial moment, which I felt was to her detriment. People are not going to judge who will do the most for them by finding and reading their position paper. Maybe she has a great, wonderful position paper, but as we know, half the things politicians say to get elected will never come to pass, anyhow. I'm still waiting for Obama to end the NSA and give us all free internet. It rankles, these broken promises.

People will judge who will do the most for them by how that person makes them feel. And in that moment, Donald sounded like the only one pushing the right buttons.

Hillary made no major slip-ups by most common standards. There were moments where she seemed - especially as she listened to Donald say certain things or after she responded to them by saying things that are obviously very central to what she believes - a bit smug or self-satisfied. I understand she has avid fans and supporters just like him, but I think she should act a bit more circumspect and not play into her crowd with so many facial expressions. I found it off-putting - I've seen other women make faces like that, and whether the reason they were gloating was good or bad, I found I wouldn't want to be friends with them. I'm a woman, and I can say as a woman that I think we all want to be friends with you, Hillary, so knock it off.

The only other thing Donald did right - and I have to point out that he did it in the act of again doing something wrong by interrupting Hillary for the umpteenth time - was to say that our infrastructure is crumbling. This was another great Obama promise that went nowhere, the great fixing of our infrastructure that tax dollars were supposed to pay for by putting Americans to work rebuilding everything after the Great Recession put so many of us out of jobs and homes. Still waiting, are we not? Hillary did nothing to address his completely off-topic mention of this mess, but granted, there was no reason to take it up at that moment. But it's a wedge he can use against her if she doesn't address the topic eventually.

With any serious points - which I said I wouldn't get into but did, anyhow - dealt with, the debate was mostly a compendium of Donald's Greatest Hateful Hits. A 400 pound hacker lying in bed taking down the DNC (hateful, ablesit, antifat)? Check. Blaming every hateful thing he's ever said about women on his archenemy Rosie O'Donell, who twisted his arm until he cried to make him? Check. Hillary not looking fine-assed enough to be our prezzy (he looks a hot mess himself, but whatevs - also, ableist, misogynist, and an outright lie)? Check. "Law and order" repeated so many times - even over the moderator's admonitions - you'd think he was trying to start a Make America White Again rally (which he almost did)? Check. "Inner cities" said on repeat as a dog whistle to the Ford F150/gun-toting/beer-swigging crowd? Check, check, and check!

Did we do "the cyber"? Check. It's like a strange dance where you sit still behind a computer screen and pretend you're doing ballet while in reality, you're actually joining ISIS. I wish Hillary had the wit to pounce on it for the bad idiom it is. Word salads? OMG, total wordslaw around the "supporting the Iraq war" question - which is not a question, but a matter of settled fact, except according to him, where facts are the best word salads that have ever done the cyber. Not wanting to release his tax returns unless 33,000 emails undelete themselves and cyber over to the next debate? Check. Bragging about his business acumen because the fact that he dodges tax bills proves he has it? Check. And there's so much more, but until I replay the whole thing on YouTube, this is the best my memory might serve me.

I don't think either of them won or lost - not in the traditional sense, because we didn't have a traditional pairing. We had one traditional candidate, and then we had Donald. The intelligence and experience mismatches between them are so glaring that Hillary might as well have debated herself.

Both have avid supporters, and both are mostly appealing to people who's minds are made up, who won't change their minds unless Hillary makes a major gaffe that people across the aisle can agree is Just No or else if Donald makes an obvious misstep, like finally thanking his vast army of racist supporters for being so racistly supportive (something I'm surprised he didn't do tonight). He will be, after all, riding into office - if he does get elected - on their backs, and don't kid yourselves - if he does win, they'll likely demand their agenda be put forth, and he knows it.

Either way, it looks like he won by his camp's standards and Hillary won by hers. And I think this election will be a mess.

Further reading: 19 WTF Moments From the First Presidential Debate, because we all have so many WTFs.

Windows 10 has its own EXIF remover, which I came to discover only after I tried and failed to use EXIFStripper on the photos I posted tonight. Windows (or the program itself, I'm not sure which one dropped the ball) won't let me drag and drop images into the tool anymore.

I found this extremely odd so tried variations on where I dragged from (Downloads, Pictures, OneDrive, the Photos app itself) and variations on how I ran the tool (both as Administrator and not as Administrator) only to find failure all the way through. At which point I Googled and came upon 3 Ways to Remove EXIF Metadata (and yes, whoever wrote it needs an editor on that title, STAT) only to see Windows 8 and 10 have their own built-in stripping utility that works pretty well.

I say "pretty well" because certain metadata like F-stop, exposure and other clueish items get preserved, but at least dead giveaway stuff gets stripped out, not that it really matters - I keep geolocation turned off, anyhow.

Just got done reading The Politics of Pockets. You know how sometimes in school you'd listen to a classmate run on and on to answer the teacher's question, and want to raise your hand or interrupt so badly, sometimes/especially when their answer was clearly incomplete or wrong? (You didn't do that back when I was in school, or you got the hand you raised cut off, and your mouth duct-taped shut for the rest of the year. Times might've changed.)

That's how I felt reading this article, because you know what's sexist? Insisting you need a certain look for fashion, then deciding the fact that you're stuck with it is sexist, is sexist. Pockets make your pants hang more saggily in the front. They add weight and heft that can mess up how fabric falls against against your skin - again, especially in the front. And that's just the short list of Reasons Why Pockets Suck.

On the backs of pants, pockets can be problematic: set them too low and your backside might seem too low; set them too far apart and your backside might seem too wide. The opposite of both states also holds true, though I've never heard anyone complain that their ass looks like it sits too high up on their body. For these and many other reasons women's clothing designers long ago chucked the pocket in favor of more slimming and often more flattering, pocketless designs.

I can't help but envision the uproar in a world in which women were pocketed and men pocketless by virtue of a different set of values in place hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. "Only the oppressed must carry so many things around", the reasoning might go. "Look at men with their flat-fronted fashions, using human reticules to carry everything around for them - yes, using us! Is this not slavery? Why do I have to carry this entire kitchen cookware set in my pocket? Men just don't understand how badly we want to be lightweight and free like them."

This isn't a case of being unable to make feminists happy - this is a world in which pocketed or pocketless, we simply never will be happy.

I have my own relationship with pockets. As a child I didn't need them. As a teen who grew up reading fashion magazines I understood why they were The Enemy of high fashion and my figure. As an adult I've want them for work - dozens of pockets covering everything I wear, along with the ability to grow more, as needed - but away from work I have problems with them.

I have an otherwise gorgeous pair of dark denim shorts I don't wear because the back pockets sit too low. I've tossed or donated many pairs of pants and jeans over the years because the back pockets sat too far apart or the front pockets were too thick and bunchy for comfort or style. I can't say how many a) pajama pants, b) jeans, c) dress pants, and especially d) shorts I've taken scissors to and cut the front pockets out of because they crumpled, billowed or bulged, making for a bunched-up and sloppy look. Not to mention in the heat of summer I'll do nearly anything to not sweat just short of crawling into my freezer, and the more pockets you remove, the lighter your clothing becomes.

But I also see an intersectionality between pockets and economic issues. Rich US women, for example, don't wear clothing with pockets; they also don't carry their own purses or cell phones because they have handlers to do those things for them. I need pockets at work only because I'm at work. Elsewhere pockets come in handy only because of what I need to get done or to hold things I need to get through my day or survive. But if I'm rich then I don't need pockets, though I might want them for more non-essential things, so I'll likely go without pockets more often - if not altogether.

'Twas just a matter of time. The kittens came to us with no issues - no worms we knew of, no fleas, maybe some runny litter box issues now and then but otherwise seemed in good health. It was kitten paradise, a kitten Disney World, a near-perfect kitten utopia. I've never had such seemingly healthy kittens! They're nice, too! I've never had such seemingly nice ones! If you gave me flash cards of kittens in the past I'd speak of flattened ears, blackened pupils, broken lamps and endless smashing up of everything, because kittens.

Don't get me wrong: our kittens run endlessly, battle constantly, and play unendingly, they just aren't as crazy as almost every other kitten I've had. I guess I've never had such sweet and relatively sane kittens before who also happen to not want to destroy the place.

Kitten utopia began winding down with the discovery of worms last week and concludes this week with the discovery of fleas. Flea dirt, to be precise. I've seen dark gray bodies darting around Pip's white fur for a few days now but they're so healthy, like the kittens they're running around on, I can't catch them. And Bowie can hardly stop scratching but until it gets bad you're more likely to win Lotto than find a flea - he has no undercoat and his fur's so short and sits so close to his body there's no pushing your hands or fingers through it to find anything.

I keep the place clean, usually vacuuming twice a day, keeping countertops disinfected, staying after litter boxes, dusting/wiping down everything at least a few times a week, and so on, so I'm thinking I might keep it too clean or else I would've seen the evidence I've been looking for by now. I was making my bed today when I realized the top half of the fitted sheet was full of flea dirt. I put my glasses on, bent down to look closer, and saw some tiny, swirly little black poops along with dozens, if not hundreds, of little black blood specks.

The fitted sheet is a light eggshell/almost beige color so there was no seeing if there were flea eggs or not, at least not with my eyes, even with my glasses. But! Sweeping off the dresser across from my bed the other day, I saw what I suspected were flea eggs, so now I'm thinking they most likely were, indeed.

After a hellacious time on the phone with at least a half dozen local vets ("Hi, I have five cats - three are kittens, I think they all have fleas, but I can't afford to bring anyone in right now") I gave up and decided to get what I needed online after three vets told me they wanted at least one cat or kitten, all wanted to do rabies shots, one said I could do the "cheaper" shot for just $5 less because the shot might kill it, and one wanted all five animals in STAT for around $500 worth of work, while yet another "strongly advised" me to bring in as many as possible.

A few insisted on heartworm tests to prescribe Revolution, which they also insist upon because "nothing else works" (biggest load of crap ever), a few insisted upon feline HIV tests, and the one who wanted all five in STAT wanted 1) heartworm testing, 2) FIV/FPV/F-everything, 3) five stool samples to "make sure" about the worm situation, 4) would only prescribe one vial of flea medicine per cat, and 5) wanted to run tests for all the common kitty maladies - this after I told them I don't have the money to bring anyone in. I was ticked because this place is so close I could walk, but it was the one place reading me the Riot Act, so oh, well.

The other reason I went with online ordering was I didn't like the doctor's choices. One was jumping up and down about Effipro. What the hell is that, even? I mean, I googled and still can't figure it out (ETA: googled again - it's Effipro, not Fellipro - thank you, dyslexia. It's like Frontline and Sentry, which are pretty "meh" bad as far as efficacy goes). Another went gaga over Cheristin. Works great - kills not just the fleas but even your cat, according to some terrifying search results I saw. Revolution's nothing, Capstar is crap, Advantage isn't made anymore and people seem pretty down on Advantage II - so I searched my memory for the best stuff I'd used in the past and finally hit on Activyl. I used it during 2013-2014 2015 (found a post I made after writing this in which I wanted to order it, but hadn't yet; there's no follow-up but I found an email confirmation on the order; the same post discusses at length how Frontline was not just "meh" efficacy but didn't work at all - "maybe six fleas died", I wrote) and don't recall cats dying or fleas living, so I looked it up - rather strenuously - and while it didn't get 100% good reviews (nothing does) it got more than any other flea med. So I ordered it.

Before I could even do that, I had to sit down with Win10's calc for a spell because a) I'm broke so b) how the fuck will I do this? After picking out what I could afford - five vials sold separately after the bulk prices came in at $5 more than what I had in PayPal and checking, combined - I ran the numbers; doing it in separate vials would leave $5 in checking after my laptop keyboard comes due on Pay After Delivery at the end of the month.

Buying in bulk isn't so hot, anyway - though the combined total would've only been $5 more than what I spent on separate vials, the smaller bulk sizes (a 4-pack for the kittens, a 3-pack for the adults) would've left just one adult and one kitten vial after treatment, which meant I could only treat one adult and one kitten next month without buying three more vials to treat all five. That still would've saved money when it comes time to re-order, but I was $5 short, so I payed my poor people's poverty tax and moved on.

The kitten and adult vials are shipping from the same vendor sometime before this weekend, so I guess I'll just have to try to keep things as clean as I can until they get here.

In a rare edition of Squeaky Wheel Gets Oiled, Other Person finally pushed my landlord over the edge this morning with a text about the roof leaking this weekend (as mentioned in my last post, it took three trash cans to catch some of the water and I just let it rain on my bed because there was nothing I could do except re-arrange furniture but my bed weighs, literally, hundreds of pounds thanks to solid oak this/thick mattress that, and so does everything else. It's not Ikea, even if most of it cost me nothing).

Come to think of it, even re-arranging everything wouldn't get my bed out of the way, as it's huge and so is the expanse of ceiling leak we're dealing with. There's no place I could put it that would get it out of the way.

I was blissfully unaware OP had pushed my landlord anywhere, much less over the edge, when I first got up (OP's not the greatest communicator; there was no note or text) but I wasn't on my second cup of coffee when the landlord appeared in our parking lot and started unloading tarps just as cheap and crappy as the one that's been on our roof off the back of his truck. So I went outside to find out what was going on. Little did I know I was about to get asked many, many questions in return.

"Have you got shoes?" he said, staring at my feet after we'd talked about the roof for a few minutes. I tend to wander around barefoot in nightclothes and a bathrobe unless I'm working or going out, and our shoes stay outside on the front porch to keep the inside floors clean, and I was talking to him from the front porch, so I just slipped them on and met him in the parking lot, where apparently he wanted me to look at the roof.

Next thing I knew I was getting a crash course in geometry, or in how his previous tarp placement ought to exactly correspond with the location of our bedroom ceiling, so was I sure the roof was leaking? What was I supposed to say? "Um no, I might've imagined it, you're alright, never mind" - seriously? "Well, yes", I said, "I'm sure", and he got the text from Other Person today, I went on, reminding him he was the one to tell me about it just a few minutes ago.

"I know that", he said, "but I've got the tarp where you say it leaks". "Well, maybe it's leaking through the tarp", I suggested. "But it can't be leaking through the tarp", he insisted. I didn't argue, but it could be leaking through the tarp - a sharp pinecone or branch hitting the roof at high speed or the wind pushing under and catching the tarp - any of those things could put rips in it, allowing water to run through. I mentioned this to OP recently, as well, but got shut down, so I wasn't going to run the same theory by this guy, because maybe it's just guys. And I'm not one. I don't try to figure out why they can't imagine a tarp leaking.

"You can come upstairs and look where I left the trashcans", I offered. "They're exactly where they were last night to catch the leaks". "No", he said, shaking his head. "I just don't see how it's possible", he went on, "- do you see where that tarp is?" he asked, pointing. "Yes", I said, "and where it is isn't covering the roof above our bathroom door, which is where the worst leak is". "It is covering it", he insisted.

Changing the subject slightly, I said, "You know the guy on the other side of us had to throw his mattress out because of this, right? That it's leaking in his bedroom, too?" Silence. "That that's his mattress laying on the curb over there?" I asked, pointing behind us.

"Yeah", he said. "Well, you don't have any tarp over his roof. The tarp stops short of our bathroom and where it's leaking in his apartment is well to the left of that, so the tarp should've been extended more to his side of the building," I said, waving in his apartment's direction. "It is over the bathroom", he said. "Our bathroom's over the hallway and the tarp's not over the hallway", I said, pointing to the front door to indicate the hallway directly behind it that runs into the main part of the house - the bathroom sits right above that.

"It is there", he insisted. "Okay, fine", I said, because it's an obvious fact that it isn't, and I just can't even. "You're sure it's leaking", he said. "Come upstairs, I'll show you where", I offered again. "No", he said. "I have pictures!" I said. "No", he said, shaking his head. "Of all the leaks", I continued, "of the water stains themselves, of exactly how wet it got". "No", he said, "that's alright, I'll just put more tarps up there."

Really...after all that?

It started raining while he was still up on the roof, but whatever he'd gotten done by then (I still haven't seen it) seems to have helped, as it rained hard for hours, steadily, but I haven't seen one more drop of water. The rug's still wet from yesterday's rains, though, because the way the water travels down the exposed wood ceiling beams before it hits the floor, the entire back end of the carpet approaching the bathroom gets soaked.

In other news, a roofing company's supposed to come out tomorrow to give the owner an estimate ETA, 9-21-16: hasn't happened yet but the owner, as far as the landlord's heard, still hasn't gotten any checks from the insurance company ETA, 9-21-16: still no word on that. But in other news, we should be glad we didn't take the vacancy on the other side of us: not one week after new tenants moved in their pipes burst - yet another issue caused by the storm.