Here it is Monday, and I feel like I didn’t have a “weekend.”
It was one of those hectic working weekends, where Saturday and Sunday were packed from morning to evening with office obligations and important jobs on the home front. As a result, there was no time for the relaxation and lazy hours that make the normal weekend so enjoyable. No golf, no afternoon trip to the movie theater, and no whiling away the morning hours listening to music.
I was feeling a bit sorry for myself this morning for missing out on some mental down time, then I told myself to suck it up. A weekend is a relatively modern invention, after all; for most of human history our ancestors had to work hard every day just to get by. Sometimes life just doesn’t allow you to punch a clock.
Curiosity drove over a Martian rock and broke it open, exposing a dazzling white exterior. The striking ivory color indicates the presence of hydrated minerals in the rock. As any person who walks around with a water bottle knows, “hydration” requires water, and hydrated minerals are those that are formed when water is found. Curiosity also has detected clay-type minerals in a different rock — another clue suggesting the presence of water at some point. These discoveries are part of a growing body of evidence that running water once existed on this part of the surface of Mars.
What’s a year, anyway? It’s a rough approximation of how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun, marked according to a calendar decreed by a long-dead Pope. Logically, calendar years mean little. They help us account for the seasons, and plan our activities, and look ahead to when we hope it will be warmer — but that’s about it.
I’m not sure why this is so. I probably am just extraordinarily cheap. I may also believe, deep down inside, that picking up a penny will bring me good luck. Or maybe I was a panhandler in a past life and old habits die hard.
How do dogs maintain the same zeal for eating when they consume the same food, served in the same bowl, morning and night, day after day after day? Imagine if you were required to eat the same bowl of kibble, moistened to form a limp, fake quasi-gravy, and needed to shove your head into the wet food in order to chow it down. No rational person would tolerate, much less want, such a diet. We don’t even feed death row prisoners the same food, day after day.
There’s lots of information out there, but what does it mean? There are ratings on-line, but how are they developed? If you’re in your 50s, talk to your friends and you’ll learn that many of them have already gone through the process with their parents. They may recommend a place or warn you away from a place that they describe, in awful terms, as a kind of institutional hell on earth. You appreciate the warnings, but it also scares you to know that such places may exist and a bad decision may land your loved one there. The significance of your decision seems increasingly overwhelming.
I’m not surprised by Newsweek‘s demise, and I suspect I’m not alone. When was the last time you subscribed to Newsweek or bought one at a newsstand? We subscribed to Newsweek, as well as Time, Sports Illustrated, Sport, Life, Look, and other magazines when I was a kid, but Kish and I haven’t subscribed to any newsmagazine in years. (The only periodicals we get these days are the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and by Kish’s edict we’ll get them until the 12th of Never.) I can’t remember the last time I bought, or even read, Newsweek.
Then my thoughts wandered to what’s happening in Syria and other troubled places, and I thought: I’m lucky to live where I can take my dogs for a quiet walk in the pre-dawn hours without risking life and limb.
Fortunately, I don’t often hear angry voices — and this guy was livid, shouting at the top of his lungs, his furious words, muffled into indistinctness by the window, echoing down the dark streets. I snuck a peek out the window, lest he see me and train his rage in my direction. There he was, four stories down, a one-legged man sitting in a wheelchair, gesturing angrily at no one that I could see. What was he doing on a downtown Cleveland street at that pre-dawn hour? What had caused his awful, uncontrollable anger?
But there are negatives, too. Sometimes Facebook causes you to learn more about people than you really want to know. Perhaps their posted political, religious, or social views deeply offend you, and then you have to decide whether the situation merits “de-friending” the person. People really seem to struggle with that decision — and when you think about it, it’s really a new kind of social decision.
People who announce de-friending decisions seem to treat the decisions as momentous ones. I don’t blame them. In the old days, you typically had to make public breaks only with unsuccessful boyfriends and girlfriends, and you had to cope with the hurt feelings only from those people. Now, the “de-friended” person may be a co-worker or family member, and you’ve got to deal with the fallout from your decision in a totally different context.
Never before have so many people stayed in regular touch with so many other people. Isn’t it great to have so many friends, and in such a quantifiable way!
