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.
Sgt. Pepper’s is generally viewed as one of the most influential albums ever recorded, and its lavish, beautiful cover fit perfectly with the music inside and the beginning of the Summer of Love. From the iconic front cover, with the Beatles surrounded by photos of famous people at a gravesite, to the lush and sparkling interior photo of the Beatles in the satin band uniforms (which is where the auctioned album is autographed), to the back cover of the song lyrics and a picture of the Beatles featuring Paul McCartney’s back, the Sgt. Pepper’s cover is a tantalizing treat for the senses. But $290,000?
America is a land of stressed-out worriers. We lose sleep over the latest epidemics and health scares, over diseases like SARS and bird flu, and over chemicals in our food and horsemeat in our tacos. We fret about gun-toting nuts charging into schools or gunning down innocent theatergoers and about rogue police officers on random killing sprees. We agonize about the prevalence of sexual predators and other sickos who might kidnap or molest our children. We brood about the bad economy, and whether we can keep our jobs, and whether the college graduates in our families will be able to even get a job in the first place.
I’ve never been in a hot air balloon, nor have I ever been to Luxor, where the fabulous Valley of the Kings is located. But, I could very easily see myself visiting Egyptian antiquities and being tempted to take a balloon ride that would allow me to get a bird’s-eye view of all of the sites. Such tourist options — like the opportunity to go parasailing in the Caribbean, or go skydiving, or engage in similar kinds of novel vacation activities — are so commonplace that we tend to assume that they are extraordinarily safe. But, of course, things can go wrong, and if they go wrong when you are in an unsupported balloon a hundred yards in the air the consequences are more likely to be devastating than if they go wrong when your feet are on the ground.
Those of us who are fortunate, and who don’t suffer from chronic depression, can’t possibly understand what it truly means to be depressed. It’s like a person who has known only perfect health trying to understand what it is like to live with constant, crippling pain. You can’t comprehend the life-changing impact of permanent pain until you personally experience sustained physical torment whenever you draw a breath. For the depressed person, the agony is just as real and just as unbearable.
Your wedding day is one of those days — like the day your first child is born — where the intensity and unprecedented nature of the experience deeply engraves every action onto your memory. Even after the passage of decades, you remember that day, still brightly lit in your brain cells, when the recollection of every other day before and since has dimmed and fallen away, lost forever in the fog of a lifetime of experiences. But your wedding day is, and always will be, special and distinctive.
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.
Of course, we’ll buy a new dishwasher — what American house could be sold without one these days? — but first we’ll do some careful research to assess which brand is most likely to stand up against the relentless pounding that occurs in the Webner household.
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.
Now, we tend to ease into the holidays. You might call it “holiday creep.” The days before and after have gradually become part of the festive celebration. It’s like we’ve adopted the concept of The Twelve Days of Christmas, except there are no partridges in pear trees at the office. It must drive the productivity experts nuts.
