THE OTHER THING
- I have read that some charities are giving a lot of their funds to other charities. They attend each others’ Big Dinners and Speeches and they enjoy each others well meaning company. All tax free. Whee. You can see the charity people in the society section of the papers. Me? I like charities and can’t wait until I can become one. I’m not saying this is a problem of ultimate concern, like Global Warming, or Wealth Disparity, or the National Obesity figures; but it is something I can chew over and I can gripe about to my neighbor without getting caught up in a forever fight with him over whether this is a left or right wing take-over of the American way.
- Speaking of chewing: Studies show chewing gum impairs brain function and over-all cognitive thinking; but it also can suppress appetite and remove unwanted bacteria (if it has artificial sweeteners) – So, it is a hard choice to make and what good is cognitive thinking if you have to go around wanting to eat all the time?
- Here is a good one: The increase of older people in the U.S. (Disclaimer; I am counted among the ‘older people’) is equivalent to a mass immigration of people, the likes of which this nation has never seen before. Also, please note, for whatever it is worth: 40% of the 50 million U.S. Latinos are under 21 and it seems like nearly 100% of U.S. Caucasians are over 65. “Feed me, take care of me.” Is what we old are saying to the young. It is getting so interesting these days, I want to stick around just to see what happens to us all.
- “Where do you want to be in the next five years?” This is one of those smart-Aleck questions Human Resource types like to ask of the poor interviewee. There is no correct answer, of course. The HR person has already made up his mind about you before you figure out what you want to say about how you’d rather win the lotto than work for a living and maybe someone in your family will die and leave you money and you will never interview for another jerk-water position again: but you just sit there and smile and pray whatever you say does not go against you. The reason I bring up this “Five-year” question is studies show most of us do not think past next Thursday (I am with most people in this regard). And maybe most of us – Latinos and Caucasions – have chewed too much gum in our lives and are not thinking straight and have not planned for the future and the future, itself, may not ‘Provide’. The obvious answer is we will have to all work in harmony together – young, old, Black, Brown, White – but this is going to call for a big turn-around in our behavior, since we cannot even agree on what’s happening to the weather this Thursday. (p.s. I got the job after answering the ‘”5-year” question. But I was no good at it and eventually had to seek gainful employment elsewhere. There is no moral to the story – except that it took me more than five years to get where I wanted to be.
I’ll end this with a repeat quotation from last week’s posting, since it is so pertinent to today:
“See that you don’t go crazy”
Best, Chris
Part Two of NOTEFLIX’S Double-Bill presentation of our “Troubles in the Garden” story line: Our hero, the Multicolored Bluebird of Happiness, wishing he was out of the scary universe of cellular life and parking lots and such – has been granted his wishes and has landed in the Rooted Field of Un-Removed Stumps; a place not much better than where he just was – but yet a little closer to home. (The adventure continues…)
