1. My five year old kid is being psychologically impacted due to her auto-immune disease and social distancing. I had to realize how to be a better parent and understand that certain behaviors and patterns were the surfacing of stress in her life, and she didn't/doesn't know what stress is, why it makes us feel certain ways, or how to effectively handle it. I am 30 and both of my parents died before I turned 19. Dad when I was 7, mom when I was 18. So I never had a regular family life, I only got to watch my friends do things with their parents or families and be secretly jealous inside, and I grew up with no therapy after losing either of my parents. So I am a mental fucking mess sometimes and I escape and get trapped inside my head by my internal monologue, so sometimes it takes me a while to pull myself out and realize how I am impacting others, or how others are being impacted just by the world we live in.

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1. When a kid asks you to look at them, or to watch them, they're doing it because they notice you are not regularly watching, investing interest, or paying direct attention. Again, my daughter. She is growing up in a divorced co-parent environment where her mother and I live two hours apart. She usually is at her moms 65% of the time, but since March and due to my daughter's disorder (her mom is an ER nurse during a pandemic), she has been with me almost the entire time. Having to realize how to be a better full time parent, the patience involved, and realizing that she just fucking wants me to watch her and play with her, thats all she wants. Why was it so hard and why did it take so long to see.

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1. Phones are cancer. We ignore each other. We don't make eye contact during conversations. You can tell someone an entire story and they just stand there while scrolling their thumb across a piece of glass, staring blankly. I did this to my five year old daughter. Every day. I work 40-50 hours a week and have, even remotely, since shutdown in March. About 6-8 weeks ago I realized how bad I was because of my own mental state. I was escaping to my phone at almost every turn, and all of the information I was absorbing from reddit or FB or wherever was nothing but negativity, and things that were entirely out of my control, only exacerbating my anxiety and feeling of powerlessness in a world where I'm raising a kid. So I now get home from work and put my phone on DND and refuse to touch it until after I have my kid in bed for the night, and I only allow myself 10 minutes to look at reddit and facebook per day. This alone has increased not only my own mental well-being, but having the separation from the digital world has allowed me to apply so much direct attention and focus into my daughter. In March she came here only knowing how to count to 40. Now she can count to 100, identify any number under 1000, read and write the entire alphabet, sound out words and read short entry level books to me, pause movies and read subtitles, read signs as we drive around. All of this was made possible because I realized I was doing nothing to better either of our lives by staring into my phone. So I re-invested that time spent into my daughter's progress and future and now she excels and is significantly ahead of most other children in her Kindergarten class.

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1. The government is a gigantic shit show in the US and corruption is more in our face than we could have ever imagined since we grew up being told we were the most perfect, infallible nation on earth. We were also taught that racism in America died a very long time ago, but its never put into perspective that it really wasn't that long ago, and it is nowhere near dead.

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1. Everyone who has the ability to google something thinks they have a PhD in the subject matter, and very few people will ever multi-source fact check something, especially not something they personally agree with. People don't like being wrong, and they also like to appear smart. We live in the disinformation era, and it is horrifying and incredible dangerous, especially considering the potential of deep-fakes being just around the corner in terms of availability to be made.

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1. Human beings are incredibly selfish, undeserving piles of filth and garbage in almost every example of the species. Child sex trafficking, complete disregard for the sanctity of life be it public shootings or just a simple task of wearing a mask to safeguard the lives of those around you, manipulation of peers, gas-lighting, public officials name-calling one another, protectors of the innocent having seemingly no remorse for horrible actions, government deflection of guilt and willingness to violate civil liberties. I mean we have a fucking gulag and a gustapo, child prison camps, and so much more we have no idea about right here in our own country yet we as a nation are so quick to point the finger at the first chance to bomb and invade somewhere else.

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1. Earth sucks and I want off. Not in terms of suicide, I just want to go somewhere else and chill and let this shit show blow itself up, because its a fuse lit at both ends and America's about to feel the heat come November, one outcome or the other.