Freakishly Happy

SO... two weekends ago we were in Washington DC
for a political conference (see what I forget to tell you about!). The
weekend was great, spring was in the air it was a balmy 42 degrees (up from the
20 degree weather we'd been experiencing up here), the trees had big fuzzy buds
robins abounded everywhere and it was perfect, well.. Nearly perfect.
Everywhere we went there were people talking on their cell phones. Now much
like an ex-smoker is much more sensitive to smoking, I am an ex-mobile phone
user and am very sensitive to cell phone, especially usage of the obnoxious
type. At the national monuments were teenagers gabbing away, in front of
the Declaration of Independence were senior citizens with phones to their ears,
even at the radical conference we went to were punks on cell phones (how totally
under the thumb establishment is that?).

I can not understand how we as a civilization have gotten to
the point where we can not even enjoy our national treasures without having a cell
phone conversation (Now I know that those of you who knew me during my cell
phone phase are going to jump down my throat, but hey, I’ve evolved and pretty
much mobile free for almost two years (okay, when we came back from Germany I
did have one, but it barely functioned)).I remember the good ol' days when people would talk to their friends and families in the privicy of their own homes, and would go to grocery store prepped with a written list and if they forgot something? Oh well.  But now it seems like we have to have constant connection with those who are not with us, while on vacation, at the grocery store and even in public bathrooms.  

The worst cellphone abuse we saw on our trip were on the train to and
from DC. The ride was fairly quiet until
we got to, you guessed it, New Jersey. It seemed like as soon as we crossed the
border there were at least 3 people around us having very loud conversations. There
was a woman 4 rows behind us who practically screamed into her phone for over
an hour. She would finish one
conversation and then call someone else 30 seconds later. As I said this went on and on and on and on. There were also several business people who
got on the train, who were obviously together, who each sat in the window seat
across the aisle from each other and proceeded to have a business meeting (this
is another rant all to itself). They’d holler
back and forth things like, “Susan, did you get the numbers for the BlahBlah
account?” and then would each hold very loud conference calls and then hang up
and bellow over the aisle again.

Try as I might it is
really difficult to ignore other people’s conversations, especially when they
are shouting. I have decided that there
should be a law, that if you are talking loud enough that the people around you
are forced to listen to your conversation, you should also be forced to switch
to your speaker phone. It is not fair to leave us wondering what he was
indicted for, or what stocks we should be purchasing. Either that or they should all be herded
together like smokers into a single cell phone section so that the rest of us
can go about our business in peace.

I am very disappointed...

Joni has a gift.

Joni has the gift of frustration and the deep sense that the world is a mess. Not everyone has this gift of vision.

It also means that she has a responsibility to lead us. To ask questions. To get us thinking.

Recognizing that something is wrong is the first step toward changing the world.

She's trying to understand why American's consume as much as they do. She's trying to figure out why people do things that are bad for them. She's trying to figure out why people are greedy and hurt eachother.

How can this even be a soap box? Over-consumerism is a big problem in America. Obesity, drug-abuse, gluttony, and other habituals are a big problem in America. People hurting each other and stealing from eachother is a big problem in America.

If she's genuinly trying to figure out how these things come about, then KUDOS to her! She has the passion for it. So rather than squashing her passion by attacking her because "she has been so fortunate and is spoiled" we need to encourage her and help her to find the answers to her problems. I've met a lot of people that have the same types of views as Joni, and not all of them have had "fortunate" lives, they are also asking these types of questions.

I also don’t understand how people can be so cruel. Just last night John was reading me an article
about how there are many payday loan offices preying on elderly and disabled
people. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120277630957260703.html?mod=todays_us_page_one)

Now if you don't really feel like reading the article I'll gve you a hypothetical example of what's going on. An disabled lady falls on some hard times, and it's going to be a few weeks until she receives her disability check. She needs to feed her family, so she goes to a payday loan center and takes out $200. Not being fully literate, she signs up for a loan with exorbant interest rates. The loan center is then entitled to say $300 of her $600 monthly check. Soon, the woman and her family are evicted because they can't keep up with their living expenses, and the woman is jailed for defaulting on her loan. Seriously, it's that bad. Read the article if you don't believe me :)

Now first of all, I really can’t fathom how this can
possibly be legal, and secondly I don’t understand how people are so horrible.
Now perhaps it’s because I’ve been very privileged, and I’ve never known want
of anything, but I do not comprehend how so many people, individuals to entire
governments are ruled by greed. How is
it that so many people are corrupted by the pursuit of money that they can degrade
the lives of others?

Why do people struggle and compete to live in a bigger
house, have a bigger flat-screen tv and a bigger car? Why are we, especially we
as americans, never satisfied until we’ve not only kept up with the Jones’, but
kicked sand in their face and left the Jones’ in the dust?

Now I’m not trying to say that I’ve got everything figured
out, or even sound like I do. But I really feel that we have reached a new all
time low, when stealing from the poor has become status quo, especially when
the poor are disabled and elderly. It’s disgusting.

I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking lately about
people’s motivations, and although John and my sister have tried time and again
to explain them to me, I can’t seem to get a grasp on it. Although this may be a little self-righteous
and egotistical I feel like many of my beliefs about life are common sense. For instance, in my world, people in general
realize, or should realize that eating those little pies, that come prepackaged
on the shelf, which have no expiration date and will probably be what is
feeding cockroaches come the apocalypse, is a bad thing. Now, I’m
not claiming to be an expert on nutrition, but to me this is a no-brainer.
Now that is just a ridiculous example of what I’m talking about. On a grand scheme, I can’t seem to figure
people out. Why is it that so many people take the cheap, lazy and most
efficient route through life, even though it undermines their own lives, their
communities and even the planet? Why is
it that so many of the people in the country have an insatiable desire to
consume? We allow ourselves to be
sponges that soak up all of the advertising that our corrupt media has to
offer, so that we’ve become like cattle on feedlots, who just keep consuming,
not because we are hungry, but because we are told to do so. Why is it that more people aren’t asking themselves
difficult questions? How did we allow ourselves to become so stupid?

It makes me so sad to see so many people around me running on a treadmill of despair.
Now perhaps that is a little dramatic,
but it really saddens me to see so many people that I care living a cycle where
they go to a job they hate, come home and watch tv, which by making them feel
inadequate causes them to feel the need to buy something, which they have to go
to work to pay for, after which they watch tv and still feel inadequate and have
to go buy more stuff. Now I know that
many of my family and friends kind of smirk when they think of how John and I
choose to live. Many have even expressed concern about us, and wonder when we
are ever going to grow up. If growing up means joining that cycle, then never.
We lived that way for awhile, consuming heedlessly, and we were a little
miserable. Honestly, we loved playing together too much and work was seriously
cutting in on our play time. We both began to seriously ponder why it was that
we were working, and realized that a large part of the money that we were working
for was being spent on stuff- ergo the less stuff we had, the less we’d have to
work. The less work we do, the more time we have to do things that we enjoy,
like reading and thinking about rants like this one.

Now, I’m not saying that our life choices are perfect, nor are
they are for everyone. But if you take a
minute to consider your own lives, how much do you enjoy your job? What is it
that you are working to attain? Could you rely on less money if you were to
give up a few unnecessary things? Would you enjoy more free time to do the
things you love?

Okay this rant has gotten a little sidetracked. To sum up, I
really wish that people would stop and think more about why they do what they
do- and maybe if everyone did a little more of this the world would be a better
place.

Okay, I'm going to say it... I don't like Christmas music.  Well, at least not the vast majority of Christmas music that they play in department stores or over the radio.  This began as a tiny little nugget of annoyance way back in 1999, when I worked at this kiosk in the mall, and in order to keep things politically correct, they only played Christmas music that was pretty religiously ambiguous. Unfortunately, this limits what they can play to only about 10 songs, which are replayed incessantly.

This annoyance has been growing over the years, and is now a full fledged pet peeve. I think I may start a tally counting the diversity of songs played on the radio, and then count how much airplay each song gets in a given work day.  I'm guessing Walking in a Winter Wanderland gets about 17 plays per day.

 Furthermore, has anyone noticed that there aren't really any NEW Christmas songs?  The newest one I can think of is Happy Christmas (War is Over) by John Lennon and Yoko Ono which came out in 1971.  Three decades of nothing new, unless you count Kenny G., which I don't. 

Imagine that you are walking down the road on a nearly 100 degree day. As you walk down the path you spy something up ahead, and realize that it is a dead deer carcass. The sun and high temperatures have not been so kind to our friendly woodland friend, and as you pass by you notice an offensive and penetrating odor. Against your better attempts at self-control, you also notice that the animal is puffing up and beginning to decay and it's not very pretty.

Now imagine that the road your are walking on is your intestines, which are also at close to 100 degrees, and that the dead deer is the hamburger you ate yesterday. Just something to think about.

Ranting:
So I know this is old news for most people, but what *insert favorite explicative here* is going on with the pet food recalls?!?
So if you haven't heard, in the last few months many of the nation's top pet food brand have had to recall thousands (if not millions?) of tons of their dog and cat foods because they were contaminated with poison. Okay, I can maybe understand if one company accidentally got rat poison in one of their batches and maybe 1 or 2 animals was killed. But come on, really- 97 brands of dog food and 82 brands of cat food. Some groups are estimating that over 3600 pets have died because of the neglect and profit mongering of these companies.
How the hell did the poison get in to the food in the first place, you ask? When the rat poison was added to the pet food in the form of glutens, they made the food appear to have a higher percentage of protein then it actually did. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon… rat poison is cheaper than real sources of protein. It all comes down the mighty *kindly add another explicative here*-ing dollar.
And guess what? The story gets better! That’s right. Since thousands of stores across the country had to get rid of thousands (if not millions?) of tons of pet food, and didn’t want to lose too much profit in the deal, guess what they did with it? Well obviously, they sold it to large factory farming corporations to feed to the chickens and the pigs. That PEOPLE are eating. And in the articles it says that researchers don’t THINK it will affect humans. Okay, C’mon.
Does this not seem like a bad idea to any one else?!? Okay, so now the animals in the factory farm are hanging out all day in their own feces, on their huge lots, with thousands of their own kind, often injured or too pumped up with growth hormones to support their own weight, and NOW they are eating rat poison? Now if I wasn’t a vegetarian before, I would seriously consider becoming one now. These corporations don’t give a flying *explicative* about anything or anyone- except for their bottom dollar. I ‘m not going to be surprised in a few years when people start dropping dead because of tainted food passed on to us by these large corporations with a big smiley faced stamp from the FDA
People in this country are far too complacent. We need to start reading labels and start questioning thing. What the hell is all of that stuff that comes after sugar in a bottle of Coke? Where is our food coming from? Why do we have to have food trucked up all the way from Timbuktu, when we can grow similar, fresher, higher quality foods here at home? Why do we allow the lowest price to dictate most of what we do- when it is hurting not only the environment and the people making the product? Not to mention the stuff we are buying is of sub-standard quality (meaning cheap plastic crap) and it causes us to have to spend more to replace it in the first place! Open your eyes people. Start using your dollars and your sense (get it, it’s a pun…) to tell these corporations that we will not stand for this. We will not fall victim to their bottom line.