Tag Archives: Economics

Playing Solitaire

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The cards float down onto the screen from a magical heaven, and there they are, all laid out before you in orderly disarray, just waiting for you to sort deftly and arrange with a crisp CLICK from your mouse. You start to work, matching and categorizing, strategizing and prioritizing like an executive assistant. Your attention to detail is keen. Your task is accomplished in a matter of minutes. You are a Free Cell goddess! One additional click, and you can begin the process anew, amassing an empire of ‘wins’ and improving your statistics.

Inevitably, your mind starts to wander. “I’m supposed to be finding a job. I’m supposed to be updating my resume. I’m supposed to be generating income.” CLICK. CLICK. Drag….CLICK. Minutes tick by. You are mesmerized by a brilliant shower of red and black and white, diamonds in spades. Fireworks follow. Then you ask yourself, “Have I accomplished anything?”

Perhaps.

I am becoming aware of myself. Of my work ethic, my motivation, my skill set. I find routine incredibly easy. I find detail work effortless. And I find them both supremely boring, but somehow, not boring enough to get me angry in the moment. I become perturbed after the fact.

I want to be productive. I want to be useful, informative, inspirational. I want to be honest, authentic, and open. I want good and meaningful engagement with the world. And I keep sucking away my life at things like computer games.

Why am I stuck? Why don’t I begin something BIG?

I am afraid of failure. I shame myself constantly by mental audiotape. “You’re not qualified. You don’t have the expertise. You don’t have the style they want. You won’t follow through. It’ll be too difficult. It won’t happen.” Buzz words from the samples you just read ring in your ears.

“Go-getter. Self-starter. Highly motivated (fill in the blank) SEEKS…”

Is everyone more hard-working than I am? Or just more eager to appear so? Am I highly motivated to help Consolidated So-And-So get ahead? No, I’m not. I’m not philosophically supportive of this capitalistic system at all. I would like to earn an honest wage, live simply (at least by American standards) and physically, and keep contributing to something important until the day I die. Pay me $15,000/year to write passionately about the environment, to teach and inspire a visitor, to file and proofread and make coffee and encouraging remarks, and I will die happy. Each day would be an adventure, and I might leave for serial adventures in other employs, but I think that would be a fine life for me.

Right now, I’m in this dialogue. Free/Cell. Am I free? A jack-of-no-trades? How do I stop playing the game and start living the life?

Flak Friday

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I hate shopping.  It’s eerie to come home from a cozy, loving holiday weekend and find news that the larger world has sunk into madness.  While I was enjoying a two hour Swedish massage in the comfort of my daughter’s home, others were dying to obtain merchandise.  Fighting, heart attacks, assault with weapons and overnight exposure to the elements remind me of wartime conditions.  Are we at war as consumers?  Where’s my flak jacket?

Good grief.  I’ve never celebrated Christmas in a very commercial way.  As an Episcopalian, I tried to focus on the sacramental aspect of the holiday.  I spent a lot of time in church, singing in the choir, rehearsing the Christmas pageant and taking my kids caroling to shut-ins.  We made Advent wreaths, Advent calendars, wrote Advent letters to friends and family and donated money and gifts to charity in each others’ names.  It was never about Stuff.  As a kid, I made presents for my family.  My kids made presents for each other.  One year, Becca just wrapped stuff we already had.  My toaster, with crumbs, surprised me into a fit of laughter.  I could get sore about not being appreciated with a gift, but I took it as a joke on the whole scene.

Perhaps this is just my personality.  I am gift-challenged.  I’m not very good at giving or receiving them.  It’s not one of my Love Languages.  My husband truly enjoyed giving gifts.  My eldest daughter is a very creative, inspirational gift-giver.  They have a knack for finding grace and meaning in Things.  I have trouble with that.  I probably have an aversion to Things, actually, and definitely an aversion to shopping.  When I was about 9 years old, my mother took me Back to School shopping at a huge discount department store called Zayre’s.  It was August.  It was hot and humid.  Our station wagon had no air conditioning.  The store was not in our village.  It must have been somewhere in the Sahara.  It took forever to get there, forever to get the job done, forever to get home.  I was sick with heat stroke.  I remember my mother putting me in the bathtub and bringing me bananas to eat.  Sitting in the cool water, eating bananas was like heaven to me at that point.  I couldn’t imagine why I had been made to endure the ordeal that brought me to that state.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about Christmas this year.  I don’t go to church anymore.  I don’t think about Jesus in the way I used to.  I do love to celebrate with food and family and lots of love.  I like appreciating others and being appreciated.  I’m not sure how I want to embody that, though.  I always write a letter to my children for them to read on Christmas morning, a letter of hope and pride and blessing, I guess.  There are ideas I want to give, but not things.  However, William Carlos Williams keeps whispering “No ideas but in things” and I keep trying to understand.  Shall I give everyone trees this Christmas?  Or soil?  Or double helix shaped jewelry?  The sun?  Words?

A shelf full of ideas

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you….The Universe!  Applause, appreciation, celebration, Holiday.  Think I can pull it off?

To Ad or Not To Ad

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That is the question: whether it is nobler to support the hosting web manager directly or to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous advertisements that defray his costs.  Or to take up arms against capitalism and occupy cyberspace, thereby ending it.

My apologies to the honorable Bard.  I woke to a dilemma this morning when my sister noticed a “goofy” ad showing up on my blog that was totally incongruous to the serious, graceful tone that I’m trying to achieve.  I found out that through the Terms of Service that I agreed to when I started this blog, I had given my permission for WordPress to run ads on my page to defray their costs.  If I want to ensure that there will be no ads on my blog page, I can pay a yearly fee of about $30.  So much for the idea of truly “free” hosting.   To be fair, though, this is only the second time since August I have seen an ad on ANY blog that I’ve visited.  I suppose I harbor a vain hope that there is a way to avoid capitalism in my daily life, and unfortunately, that is just not possible.  What I do have is choices about how I will interact with this system.

What kind of choices do I get to make?  Well, I can choose to avoid advertising by paying the fee, like I would do with Public Television (if I had a TV).  I can choose to support local small businesses, like the family operations that fixed my car this week.  I can choose “no ad” products at the market and avoid mega-stores and franchises.   I can unsubscribe to all the junk mail I get online or through the Postal Service.  Come to think of it, I need to find a better way of doing that.  I am still getting junk mail in my late husband’s name at my current boyfriend’s address, which is kind of creepy in an absurd sort of way.  It will be four years in February since he died.  How do you turn that sewage off??

The fact that advertising is so ubiquitous is one of the things that makes it so objectionable.  We are bombarded to the point that we stop paying attention.  Our awareness is compromised, and that goes against the very thing I am trying to develop in my life.   How many advertisements do you see in your average day?  If someone came up with statistics about how many you encounter, how much time you spend reading them or viewing them in video, how much time you spend trying to dispose of them or avoid them, how much money you spend funding them (whether directly or indirectly), and how much noise and visual pollution they add to the environment, don’t you suppose you’d be surprised?  Possibly appalled?  Angry? Or wouldn’t you care?

I think that the sheer volume of advertising and the phoniness of it creates an atmosphere that is potentially damaging to the human spirit.  I want to point my canoe in another direction entirely.  My relationship with my blog host is not one that will allow me to get away from using currency, but I can get away from using advertising.  I wish I could trade singing lessons or a home cooked meal for the use of cyberspace. … Yeah, that would be neat.

Hey, WordPress! I'm making risotto tonight!