Today is a typical day for me. I get up, wash my face, and try to wake up enough to be able to function long before I want to be up. This is in part due to the fact that regardless of when I go to bed, my first alarm goes off at 6:30 am. This is for those days where I have things to do in the morning that I need to be up for. Since that happens far more regularly than I care to admit, I've given up on just doing it then and get up early.
Getting up early does have its advantages. Anything - such as cleaning out the cat box, doing laundry, cleaning my room - all of these things can be done while it's relatively cool. Once it starts getting warmer I don't have as much energy to do these things. By that time, I need to take my shower and get ready for work anyhow, so having all of my housework done before I leave for work is actually rather refreshing.
Right now Reidar is sitting in the window, bending the blinds down a little, as he watches outside. My cat will spend hours staring out the window if I'd let him do it. Behind me my husband is snoring away, still dead asleep. I'll wake him up in a few hours, when it gets closer to the time when I need him to take me to work. Not having my driver's license is rather a pain for the both of us, but even if I had it today he'd need to drive me anyhow. He has to go do the testing for a potential job today.
Um...how about NO
My friend posted this in her blog. This is one of those things that greatly disturbs me. It's becoming more and more difficult for people to cope with the swiftly changing facets of their lives. People aren't able to handle stress because our society has given us an unnatural expectation of what we're supposed to be able to handle. I'll be the first to say that I'm among those who has a hard time with stress - but I also have a LOT of stress in my life right now that I can't do anything about. I'm not going to run out and get a shot to fix things. I'm going to start whittling away at what is stressing me out and eventually work it all out.
My friend also pointed out that a lot of old time science fiction has, in fact, become science reality lately. She's right. Communicators in Star Trek? Push-to-talk cell phones. Heck, cell phones in general. Talking to someone in a distant land/planet/on another ship? Jump onto Skype, set up your web cam, and chat away with someone in another city, another state, or even another country. It doesn't matter. You can have face to face talks without ever being in the same room.
Even our politics have shifted dangerously into the realm of what the heroes of those old sci fi stories were fighting against. There is so much going on in the world that is fundamentally wrong and it seems that the vast majority of the people in the world don't see it, don't care, or won't lift a finger to stop it.
Now I'm not advocating joining radical groups of protestors. I'm too old for that kind of crap anyhow. But it would be nice if people actually paid attention to the world around them and voiced opinions in the right way and to the right people to help things change for the better. It's not likely to happen because human nature is what it is.
Humans, for all our position at the top of the food chain, are fundamentally weak creatures. We have to have someone tell us what to do. We're herd animals masquerading as predators. Don't get me wrong - we have our predatorial instincts. It's what leads us to declare war on one another for reasons like "religion", "political differences", and "racial purity". But who declares these wars? Not the ordinary, every day people. The leaders we look to for guidance declare these wars, make the policies that can either open life up or restrict it, and in general have power over everything.
In America, the government controls pretty much everything. They tell you where you can go to see the doctor and how much they can charge you. They tell you what drugs are safe and what drugs are not. They're frequently telling us natural remedies are wrong and only the chemical creations of laboratories are safe for us to take. They even have a regulatory division to tell parents how to raise their children, and if they step out of what the government considers "normal" those children are consequently taken away and lives are ruined.
I have been told by many I should be proud of being an American. I'm free here, I'm told. And compared to what I've heard from friends in other countries, America isn't that bad a place to live. But I recall a statement that I believe Ben Franklin made: "Those who give up liberty for safety deserve neither liberty or safety." What have we given up to have the privilege of living in one of the "greatest nations in the world"?
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