Every year, my partner of a decade and I have Christmas with her family. My family is Jewish and we also spend at least one night of Hanukkah with them. For all gatherings (including birthdays) the gifts are almost exclusively chosen and purchased by the one who is more directly related to the recipient. It always feels a little weird to me that their family gets me gifts, but they never receive anything exclusively from myself, it's just very vaguely implied that the gifts are from us as a couple. To be fair, their parents give gifts as a couple (always from their mom). Also, I would never ask my partner to purchase gifts for my family in addition to theirs, they're already stressed enough by finding something for their own family. I've never brought this up with my partner as I don't want to make them feel either obligated to or guilty about implicitly declaring that they don't want to.

I see news articles that the vote to release the files might not happen until the first week of December, but yesterday saw a massive dump of emails.

Are these two separate things? Why are they categorized like this? Do we know how different they are from each other? Who has actually seen what's in the files?

Nobody likes voting for the “lesser of two evils.” Casting a vote in favor of someone who is diametrically opposed to your viewpoint(s) absolutely sucks. The shitty reality is that we aren’t going to change the electoral process in the next two months.

If you don’t see either major candidate as a champion that you can support, it seems more beneficial to see it as selecting your enemy for the next four years. I would rather fight against someone that I have a chance of changing. At minimum I would rather protest against someone that I think has a lower chance of authorizing lethal force against a march that I attend.

Voting for a 3rd presidential candidate (or not voting at all), is letting someone else make that decision for you.

That said, we have got to get out of this constant cycle of only having two options. There’s too much money at a national level to start there. We’ve got to start local and get third party candidates into offices at a city level, then state, then national. It’s going to take a long time and it should have happened so very long ago. We can’t change the past, we can only change the future. The only time to start changing the future is in the present.