Raj Lulla

Renaming your Gulf does not make your Florida any bigger.

I’m never going to change an executive order.

But I can be here, now, and make a difference in the lives of people around me.

I can help hold the sky up.

/🧵

I’m not saying don’t be informed.

I’m not saying don’t be active.

I am saying that sometimes resistance looks like being unbothered. It looks like putting my phone down and playing basketball with my kids.

It looks like inviting my refugee neighbors over for dinner.

13/

He didn’t take those things from me. I poured them into the internet outrage machine.

12/

I also know that my fear and my rage didn’t decrease the length of his first term by even one day.

But it did steal hours, days, and weeks of my life. It stole my attention away from my kids. It stole peace and joy and creativity from me.

11/

I don’t plan to get addicted to the outrage machine again.

He doesn’t get to spike my cortisol everyday and take years off my life.

Yes, I know that he has already said some hateful things and that the electric car/mad scientist guy did that really bad salute.

10/

When we got to the next inauguration, I welcomed the new president‘s promise of a “boring” administration.

After the PayPal/electric car guy bought the bird app, I logged off the internet news as well.

Again, the sky returned to its rightful place.

9/

I became addicted again to the outrage, now from the opposite side.

I knew every racist thing he said and every hurricane map he faked.

I knew how he told us to inject bleach and sunlight into our veins.

The sky was falling again. Any day now.

8/

It was weird that God chose a guy who lied and cheated a lot, but He supposedly hated a guy whose biggest crime was wearing a tan suit to work.

I found myself on the outside of my own party and my faith community. Eight out of ten evangelicals didn’t agree with me.

7/

Then a weird thing happened.

My party fell in love with a reality TV star and known scam artist.

I assumed all of my “truth and justice” friends would oppose him the way we opposed big government encroachments.

But people started saying things like, “God has chosen him.”

6/

The same Obamacare I actively opposed during my cable news days.

I’m not sure where those dirty Marxists scurried off to when I turned off the TV, but damn if their healthcare reforms didn’t change my life.

5/

When I found a new job, my taxes were the same. None of my friends got rounded up by the thought police.

Life continued on as normal.

A few years later, the Affordable Care Act made it possible for me to start my business without having to worry about employer-provided health insurance.

4/

I went from a daily stream of sky-is-falling warnings about the “radical Marxists” in Obama’s White House to rewatching Scrubs and The West Wing on DVD.

The weird thing was: as soon as I stopped watching cable news, the communists stopped encroaching on our freedoms.

3/

I was a pastor and a Bible teacher, and we were both heavily involved in the evangelical church.

But when I got laid off from the Christian school where I was working, we couldn’t afford cable anymore.

We stopped watching cable news cold turkey.

2/

In 2010, I stopped watching cable news, and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. 🧵

Up to that point, my wife and I watched conservative news shows every day. Like, we recorded them to watch when we got home from work.

1/

More than 1 out of every 3 Wordle players got skunked today!

Were you one of them?

Even the Bot got beat.

I want a version of @nytgames.bsky.social’s Spelling Bee that rates the quality of your “not a word” guesses and gives you bonus points based on how funny they are.

Mine tend to have a theme.

After cleaning out my Grandma’s house last year, I have things that remind me of her all over my house.

Today I remembered grief is like time travel. I’m standing there making tea in my house, but I’m also by my Grandma’s bedside, holding her hand as she labors to breathe.

Sorry for your loss.

Speak for yourself. I’m Adele. 😜

7 Super Bowls, eternal youth. He definitely made a deal with the devil.

My daughter just now:
“Tom Brady looks like that at 47?
And you’re only 40?
He makes you look like you’re 1500 years old.”

Did you see @kerrielegend.bsky.social’s super helpful Bluesky primer on her Substack this week?

Saaaame.

I’m trying my hand at a screenplay that I really believe needs to exist.

No idea if it will ever see the light of day, but I’m having fun.

#writer

One question I had: you mention filtering people who stray from the topic you follow them for. Do you do this for everyone?

I post about a wide variety of subjects, though I hope that my writing voice is the unifying theme. Do you think this is a mistake for growing my Bluesky presence?

Still working my way through it! Blowing my mind.

Weirdly, that’s one of the better client ghosting scenarios.

How long do I have to wait after watching the Bob Dylan movie to pick up my guitar AND avoid being a middle-aged cliche?

Ooh, looking forward to it! Your post on leaving Meta is what inspired me to check back in over here.

This is a screenshot of my alt text from the photo in my original post because I dread the idea of writing something hilarious and no one seeing it.