You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers from my occasionally multi-day delays when responding to her texts. THE HORROR.

Moms and dads are underpaid and underappreciated, just like the rest of us. But that’s true with any of the other million nuanced roles we have. I don’t want a Mother’s Day and I don’t want a Father’s Day because why are they more important than Brother’s Day, Babysitter’s Day, or Cousin’s Day? Sometimes those people are better for us than our parents. I personally advocate for every day to be Puppy Dog Day.

If we aren’t good at celebrating teachers or nurses or administrative assistants or parents without a nationally set-aside time to do so, then we need to start practicing showing these people we care on a regular basis. These dumb holidays are indicators that we suck at just celebrating each other as part of our regular life. Let’s please practice showing we value each other.

I hate Mother’s Day because my mother and I know where we stand with each other. I do not need any company telling me I need to remind her.

If crappy moms get to be rewarded for their bad choices on Mother’s Day, I want a Childless Woman’s Day. I won’t even need a babysitter, let’s just go get drinks. You can get me flowers and everything for not reproducing.

Mother’s Day should be permanently deleted from our calendars because it is sad. Those without mothers are sad, those who have lost children are sad, and those with abusive mothers are sad. Women who don’t have anyone to call them “Mom” are told on Mother’s Day that they are valued less than mothers. My role as a woman is not to raise offspring; I am adamantly child-free and intend to be so forever. The inherent assumption of celebrating the importance of mothers on a special day is that those who are not are less important. Again I say: being someone’s mom does not mean you know what’s best for them, or that you deserve a cookie, or that you are contributing to society any better than I am. I love my mom friends for so many other reasons than their motherhood. To me, their worth is not contingent on having offspring.

Women aren’t mysterious, temperamental, all-powerful beings who dictate the emotions of everyone around them. I want to be treated as an equal, not as an emotional bundle of explosives who needs to be constantly fed the reassurance that I’m valued.

If we truly love the women in our life, we’ll let them know without being told to do so.

I am a woman. I don’t ever want children but I do want you to tell me you love me when you feel like it, and hopefully that’s more than once a year.

What’s the worst part of Mother’s Day? Most moms I know are rad. They didn’t ask for this. At the risk of misrepresenting my loved ones: I don’t think they’d miss it if we just did away with it forever.

Happy Mothers Day. If you love your mom, you should probably tell her that more than just today.

Like any good story, it all began with margaritas. Hope and I were working the bar at El Rey with narry a customer in sight, an unusual scene for a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cloverdale. She posted a selfie of us with an accompanying request for comrades to come tell us jokes and buy our tequila.

Jim and McGowan answered that call.

As we all hung out while Hope and I made cocktails, we got to venting about a certain sense of elitism that has penetrated our beloved community. In short, assholes exist and they are unregulated. And I’ll go ahead and say it: a wildly popular Facebook group, Lunch in the Gump, is a safe haven for them.

Lunch in the Gump is a good idea in theory. It’s a place for folks to review restaurants in and around Montgomery, but you can imagine the ugliness that occasionally rears its head. Some reviewers are all too quick to call for the end of a teenager’s job because they IDed them for the purchase of alcohol. Or, heaven forbid your grits arrive luke warm. The humanity! These angry people, of course, hold themselves to a different standard.

I left the group several years ago because I didn’t need that negativity in my life. The group was just never meant for someone like me. I understand that all servers have bad days, which is beyond the comprehension of most members.

So McGowan, Jim, Hope, and I are around the bar at El Rey and naming this unfortunate trend of Lunch in the Gump to cater to the self-righteous. The group has twenty-eight thousand members, so it’s obviously not a failure. But the wheels have flown off this thing.

We joked about the idea of a satire group. A counter-culutural response to Lunch in the Gump, in which we unironically complain about the complainers. But then we weren’t joking, and the idea seemed too good to pass. And so Petty in the Gump was born with us four hoodlums as its administrators. Our goals were small and ill-defined. Honestly, it was an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave our friends a spot on the internet where they could make fun of what they needed to without hiding under the veil of pretending to be a food critic. We embraced the pettiness.

Political commentary began to fly right off the bat, with commentators chiming in on this trainwreck of a presidency. Restaurant customers were also an early and popular target, and it was a relief to many to see wait staffs fight back. Many jokes were crude and often unfunny, but mostly harmless. Some were serious, some were sarcastic. The best were the ones pointed at other group members. Jim kicked those off with a complaint that Hope and I wouldn’t give him a full lime in his vodka, chewed up and spat back out momma bird style. I found it hilarious.

We’ve banned one member so far and have had a slew remove themselves from the fun. The banned member used the N-word in an incomprehensible post about cheaters. In our private chat, the admins acknowledged that we didn’t want to regulate things too much, because the point of the group should be for people to post their dumb complaints. But we also agreed that certain language would not be tolerated. Our moderator, William, gave the accused a well-worded and petty warning against future posts like that.

Of course, the dummie had to respond by spatting off against all the admins, saying we don’t know her and never will. We believe she genuinely didn’t have racist intent in employing the word, but was just showcasing her vast ignorance. Yelling at the admins and mod was what ultimately did her in, since she couldn’t take the feedback that white people just plain shouldn’t use that language. In true petty fashion, we didn’t kick her out in such a manner that the group is no longer visible to her. We intentionally set it so she could see the group existed, but couldn’t be in it. That part was my idea. 🙂

In retrospect, we should have banned her after the original post.

Other members have left because they never wanted to be a part of the pettiness in the first place (understandable) and their dumb friends signed them up against their knowledge. One guy removed himself when he saw that we booted the racist, saying he grew up in the hood and could speak however he wanted. For context, he is also white. Doncha just love it when the unwelcome filter themselves out?

It has been one week since the idea came into fruition and we have 350 members. Posts have largely been memes and inside jokes, with a heavy dose of sass and unchallenged pettiness.

Nobody has complained that their grits are not hot enough.

I did a grown up thing and quit my job. BE PROUD.

Training for a marathon takes up a lot of time and so does work and so does school. My work time is split across several different restaurants. I quit this particular job because the energy I was giving it was detracting from other, more important things. Two important bits of my life right now are completing this marathon and doing well in school. So there goes over half my income out the window, but at least now I have an extra thirty-five hours in my week. Which I’m evidently using to blog.

Money is important and so is not going bonkers. My credit card was (nearly) paid off but my sanity was waning. Something needed to change if I wanted reclaim my life. As it turns out, bartending at a barbecue joint was so not for me. My last day pouring beers and running chicken wings was the day before I flew out to Orlando to compete in the Star Wars Half Marathon. I got to run 13.1 miles with the freedom of knowing I was more unemployed than I was the day before.

Naturally, I’ll have to fill the financial void with something. My godlike charm and supermodel looks can only get me so far. I’m ok for now, since I still have my other jobs. But still, those student loans are only growing larger and I need to think about chipping away at them eventually. Here’s to making grown up life choices!

I seem to be in constant flux with how to make my life “work.” Should I focus more on income? Hobbies? Self improvement? The balancing act is fragile and it doesn’t take much to disrupt it. Life is about more than just living below your means – it’s about getting to where you want to go. It’s a pet peeve when I hear people complain about their situation without actively taking steps to change it. I love progress. We can move forward and change our lives if only we have the chutzpah to just do it. Sometimes that means quitting your job so you can instead train for a marathon and get a Masters degree.

You needn’t worry: everything is okay and nothing that I know of is on fire.

You just gotta know that Mother’s Day is a terrible holiday and I don’t understand why it’s celebrated. I’m not just going off on a silly diatribe; I need to be taken seriously for like 800 more words, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mother’s Day is a day for acknowledging, privately or publicly, that we appreciate and love our moms, right? Whether I love my mom is nobody’s business, and so I’ll choose to keep that between me and KG. Fine, we can all live with that.

What about if I love my mom but don’t show her affection that meets her expectations? What about if I hate my mom and feel forced to show her some sign of love or otherwise suffer the consequences?

Let me take a deep breath and shout just a moment so everyone can hear me: some people are terrible mothers. We need to stop this monstrosity of a cultural value that momma always knows what’s best. You know why? Because some mommas don’t vaccinate their kids. Some teach them to bully. I read a Facebook post recently from someone who was proud her kid wrongfully accused someone of being a pedophile.

Some moms suck.

A child-mother relationship is always incredibly complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all to it.

I don’t – repeat, do. not. – believe mothers are marginalized members of our society who are largely mistreated the rest of the year. Sometimes we set aside time to celebrate the undervalued, but what are moms suffering from? My mom suffers fro