Weekly meme dump! I siphon through the crap to bring you the funny

I haven't done a good job by actually releasing these once a week and I probably shouldn't call it that.

A little backstory: About 3 years ago I got fed up with all the senseless arguing and what not that goes on in major social media over politics and global issues so I just decided to walk away from them. I've never been much on Twitter so that was easy to let go of. I got totally rid of IG and held on to FB only because so many of my friends refuse to transition over to other messaging apps. If they would all move I would gladly leave that behind as well but I suppose there is only so much damage that FB's data gathering can do when I'm speaking to my Aunt Janet about how farm life is treating her.

Now the only real social media that I check regularly is 9gag. I don't really know anyone on it IRL and that is just fine with me. It used to be a lot better than it is now because it has been infiltrated with politics and Ukraine/Russia stories whereas it used to be a place just for memes. It is still pretty funny though if you manage to pick through the shite to get to the good stuff. It can take a while. These are the memes that I found in the past however-long-it-has been that I found funny or meaningful, or both.

One of the questions that always comes up when you are meeting new people is "where are you from?" It's a stupid and tried question but what else are you going to ask someone that you just met unless they have a T-shirt on with a band that you also like on it? When I try to explain that I am from Nebraska and Virginia (lived about equal amounts of time in both states before leaving the US) not very many people actually know where either of those are. This is fair enough because my geographical knowledge of other countries isn't very good either. If someone tells me they are from Newcastle for example, I just have to pretend to have any idea where that actually is, I believe it is somewhere up north but I could be wrong about that. I know their football kits are black and white for the most part.

I never really aspired to own property when I was living in America because the only jobs I had there post college were travelling jobs. This kind of job worked out for me because I've always had a wandering nature about me. I didn't want to get rooted down in one place and then only get to take 2-weeks of vacation every year. I wanted to explore.

However, in the time that I have spent living on this planet I have seen how completely absurd housing costs have become in the USA and I can totally get where people are coming from when they say that even with 2 incomes, being able to afford a house in America is something that most people will not be able to acquire even with hard work and a good job. When I see what houses cost, or even rent in the USA these days I am just in awe that my parents, with only my father working, were able to afford rather large houses for them, me, and my 3 siblings all having our own rooms.

Things have gotten very expensive from what I can tell in USA and most of the people that I know that still live there are either renting or they are "house poor." That is not the life I want to live and it just reinforces my feeling that I made the right choice to leave USA nearly 20 years ago.

I'm a borderline alcoholic. I don't try to pretend that this is not the case. In expat circles there can be a lot going on but almost all of it involves getting drunk. These days I normally only have 2 choices as far as drinking is concerned: Admit that I am going to get trashed before I even start, or simply do not start. I know people that can go somewhere and only have a couple of drinks over the course of several hours and I always think to myself "how did you do that?" For me, drinking beer almost seems like a race but I am an impatient person and always have been. These days I only go out drinking if there is something to celebrate other than just celebrating drinking. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it,) it seems like there is always something to be celebrated even though I only know about 50 people locally.

Reposting Tweets is frowned upon by many users in the 9gag community but since I don't even have a Twitter account nor do I look at Twitter I wouldn't even know about funny things like this if someone didn't re-post to 9gag. Therefore I welcome them.

This is also something that is kind of funny when I run into "new American expats" who still have one foot back in US and A. I don't know if they are not aware that the rest of the world doesn't function like America or if they are just extremely patriotic. I have used this exact retort in multiple conversations since I first read it and it always gets a good response from anyone that hears it. I'm not bashing on my own nationality or anything, I still like my country and most of the people in it, but come on man! If you are going to move to the other side of the planet at least be open to the notion that things don't function like they do in California in the rest of the world.

That'll do me as far as the meme sharing is concerned. It's been kind of a slow week since 80% of the stuff on 9gag these days is some sort of political programming the likes of which I left FB and IG for in the first place. I hope that the community can sort this out since it is, at least for now, democratic and determined by the users what gains traction.

I leave you with a really cute picture of Nadi, my dog. This was the pose she was in when I brought her to the gym with me. She just chills near the fan and every now and then we strike cuteness gold.