Once again it is budget time at our county, and I have been spending
some time in finance committee meetings, trying to cut a couple-three
million dollars from budgets that have already been whacked to the bone
over the past few years.
There is some other sh!t going on there that I absolutely, positively cannot talk about, and it is making me crazy and angry.
So this post is definitely NOT all sweetness and light and pretty yarn.
* * * * *
Customer: “I thought I should let you guys know your phone isn’t working.”
Me: “OK - are you sure you’ve been dialing the correct number?”
Customer: “Yes, I’ve been trying 0800-2100 all week, and it never goes through.”
Me: “…0800-2100? That’s not our number - our number is ****. If you don’t mind me asking, where did you get 0800-2100 from?”
Customer: “Right there, on your door.” *points*
Me: “Sir, that’s not a phone number…those are our business hours.”
Customer: “I’m going to see this on NotAlwaysRight.com, aren’t I?”
Me: “Yes… yes you will. Have a nice day!”
The above is from NotAlwaysRight.com. I am ashamed to tell you how many hours I have spent over the past couple days reading the anecdotes there. They confirm to me a fact that I try to ignore: that well over half the population is below average, at least in English-speaking countries in the industrialized world (that would be the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the countries where these stories come from). Not only are an amazingly huge number of people stupid, they are also utterly selfish snd self-centered and pretty much a waste of space.
Thanks (I guess) to Dr. Mel for sending me the link. It has completely destroyed my hope for a positive future for the planet. Darwinism does not seem to be winning, and the idiots are about to take over the world.
* * * * *
Friendly neighborhood curmudgeon here. I am gonna make some people mad with this. If you are one of those people, please stop reading now. Go click over to lolcats or sneezingcow.com or someplace else.
It is September, the time of year when Americans (and Canadians) of a certain age go back to school. Even those of us for whom those school days are but a vague and distant memory clouded by time and too many illicit substances in the 70s, September brings a feeling of new starts. We evaluate our wardrobes. We pick out cozy sweater patterns and buy wool, even though the temperatures hover near 80℉ (27℃). We clean out the closets and have garage sales. We think about pots of soup simmering on the stove, the smell of wood smoke even though we live in a 12th floor apartment in Brooklyn, the crisp feel of autumn leaves beneath our feet.
And, if we have followed the American dream pattern (graduate from high school, graduate from college, get a full-time job, get married somewhere in there, have a couple kids, buy a house, acquire a mortgage and a minivan, etc., etc.) we may very well have children that we are sending back to school. "School" in this case may mean middle school, senior high school, or college. In any case, we are sending Our Preciouss out into a new-to-them situation where there may lurk peril. Or danger. Or mean people. Or even outright criminals.
And we fear for our children.
We have raised them from helpless infants into some vestige of independence, the degree of which will vary with the age and maturity of said offspring. We have nursed them, we have soothed their wounds, we have talked them through various episodes of trauma. We have encouraged them to venture forth, and (good grief!) they have listened and... gone forth.
We are proud of them, but we fear for them as well. Understandable: we have all experienced in some degree the unhappiness that life can bring.
So we blog about how hard it is to see them leave, how we fear for them, how we weep happy tears, yada yada yada.
I say, Get over yourselves.
What did you think would happen? Your kid would live in your basement until s/he has to cart you off to The Home?
Of course they are leaving. Celebrate it and Move.On.With.Your.Life.
Summer, 2002: #1 son is 17, I send him off to a six-week seminar at the University of Michigan.
August, 2003: #1 son is 18, I send him off from rural Wisconsin to New York University. Greenwich Village, Manhattan.
September, 2003: He tells me on the phone how a guy tried to pick him up at a blues bar, thinking that because he had an attractive face and long blond hair that he was a female.
August, 2004: I arrive home from working at the library to a message on the answering machine. "Mom, I borrowed someone's cell phone to call you. I'm standing in the middle of 29th and Broadway waiting to be arrested [for protesting at the Republican National Convention]. I'll try to call again when I know what is going to happen." He subsequently spend 40 hours in a wire cage in Guantanamo on the Hudson, an abandoned bus garage on a pier where all the protesters are housed; he slept on the gasoline- and oil-stained concrete floor using his shoe as a pillow.
August, 2005: I send him off for his semester abroad... in South Africa. Along the way the airline goes on strike and he spends five days in a hotel near Reagan Airport in Washington, DC, waiting for the strike to end and for his eventual transport to Pietermaritzburg.
November, 2005: I get an email from him telling me how he had been robbed at knifepoint in downtown Durbin.
July, 2007: I put him on a plane for Mexico, where he will live for the better part of a year among the Zapatistas. When we voiced some concern about his safety as a (relatively wealthy) American traveling and living among poverty-stricken revolutionaries, he responded that there hadn't been any murders for over six months. He spends his time in a remote village without sanitation, telephone, mail service, or electricity. He lives on beans and tortillas and, on a really, really good day, rice; he loses a pound of body weight every 64 hours for the first two months he is there.
At none of these partings, in any of the related events or traumatic emails, or while he was far away did I shed so much as one single tear.
Do you want to know why?
Because I realized at some point that I was lucky. My son was going places he chose to go.
There are millions of mothers, and sweethearts, and wives, and children, who have had to send their loved ones off to much worse places. Much, much worse places.
Iraq.
Afghanistan.
Places where other people will be actively trying to kill them.
And there are other mothers, etc., whose children are not sent anywhere, but who must watch their children grow up in wretched poverty and the disease and filth that accompany it, simply because they were born in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Rwanda or Chiapas or Somalia or Laos or India, or any of dozens of other places on the planet that are not as rich as the US.
I am lucky.
We are all lucky.
We are all incredibly lucky to have been born in relatively affluent circumstances in affluent countries. We did nothing to earn that. It just happened.
That is what is called "luck."
And so, in the words of Our Cookie, "Suck it up, Buttercup. I don' want to hear no more wailin' 'bout how hard it is to see your baby go off to middle school/high school/college.'
Just be glad there is no one shooting at them.
