Thursday Thoughts
Email subscribers—thank you. This is likely the only week you’ll get blasted with weekdaily emails from me—I’m testing out the different constructs, so let me know what you think.
As I aim to settle into an irregularly regular schedule (semi-regular?), if it’s written on a Thursday it will take the form of Thursday Thoughts, a proven (on Facebook anyway) approach for presenting random things that have recently crossed my mind. I’m planning to, some weeks, post a summary version on Facebook and provide more detail here; other weeks, they might only show up on FB.
We’ll see how it goes.
File under “There’s a First Time for Everything”: I can’t stop thinking about the Gettysburg Address these days, particularly this line:
“…government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from this earth.”Honest Abe is probably rolling over in his grave, as the government he so eloquently described is pretty much on life support now. The same root issues that drove the division of the country in the late 1800s are the same ones that drive division today. Only today they are magnified and amplified—thus they are more polarizing—with a big assist from technology, an ever-growing need for instant gratification, shrinking attention spans, and a pretty deep-rooted need to be right, to win. Politics is no longer about policy, and it’s no longer about “the people.” I read an article in The Boston Globe the other day, and it both surprised and scared the crap out of me. It’s 2020…any thought of another Civil War should be enough to break people out of the alternate realities that they have created and figure out what they can do to put the Pledge of Allegiance back on the non-fiction shelf—because as it reads now, it’s a fantasy.
Oh, and one interesting thing I just learned about the Gettysburg Address? It’s only 10 sentences long. That’s it.
Speaking of politics, this is the last Thursday Thoughts before the election. So first things first, if you haven’t already, vote! Secondly, well, no matter the outcome, I can’t even begin to imagine what this collection of thoughts might look like next week.
I wonder we’ll have a confirmed outcome by the time I wake up next Wednesday—or whether we’ll be waiting for things to be counted or whether the outcome will be contested. No matter who wins, we will have many months of chaos, and it will take many months for us to realize how far we’ve fallen. And I’m not sure how this will happen but somehow the masses in the middle have got to figure out how to talk the extremists on opposing ends of the spectrum off the edge. We need to put the policy back in politics, the people at the center of policy decisions, and we need to stop using political party as the catch all for personal ideologies that in almost all cases have nothing to do with politics. Like racism, gender, sexuality, etc. For starters.
Oh, since I mentioned “gender,” let’s change the subject for a second to women’s clothing. Why is it that you can’t get a pair of women’s jeans with pockets deep enough to hold anything more than a quarter? Because who even carries change anymore anyway? Or how about shorts with more than a 3” inseam? I see all kinds of life-changing “from the gym to the wherever” shorts for men…I click on the ad only to find either they offer nothing at for women, or nothing equivalent. If you make shorts for 50 year old men, make shorts for 50 year old women. I don’t always want to wear leggings when I work out (way too hot in summer), but shorts with a 3 inch inseam just don’t work…especially say, if I’m going to be lying on the ground doing dead bugs. It makes me wish I knew how to sew. I would have used this quarantine time to make a full line of everyday middle aged womenswear. Anyone out there sew? I feel like this is a real problem that we could solve together.
As COVID conditions persist, let’s not get locked into bad patterns. Everyone is worrying about something…so be compassionate, be empathetic, and be grateful. To others and to yourself.
These conditions aren’t easy on anyone. People with kids at home have it different than people with kids away at college…than people who have no kids but maybe an elderly parent, or a sick family member, or an illness that they’re dealing with…than people who find themselves out of work or unable to enjoy the retirement they worked so hard for…everyone has something. If you feel like have it relatively better, be aware of that and feel some gratitude for it…if someone you know has it relatively worse, be empathetic…don’t try to help them by telling them how much worse it could be. We’re all trying to get by. We need to find ways to be there for each other, when we can’t actually be there. We also need to be there for ourselves. For me that means looking at my work calendar so I can schedule a day off and go to Costco with my mom. Because I happen to love going to Costco with her, but also because I love their Kirkland brand Marlborough Ti Point Sauvignon Blanc. And the stuffed peppers. What do you love at Costco?
Speaking of COVID and not being able to be there and getting back to the election…I noted this separately yesterday: the US recently reported a weekly record of more than 500K cases…and if this is you-know-who’s (hint: he’s very orange) idea of turning the corner, he must mean it in the “you’re being chased by a murderer and you turn a corner into an alley and end up in a dumpster hacked into 1000 pieces” kind of way...but since then I learned that as recently as yesterday, he also said “If you vote for Biden, your kids will not be in school, there will be no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas, and no Fourth of July!” Dear Mr. President, people voted for you and there were no graduations, weddings, Fourth of July…with Thanksgiving and Christmas unlikely. Hello?
It totally blows my mind that he keeps blaming problems of the current administration using a future hypothetical. And what gets me heated up even more is the number of people who take it at face value and parrot it back without taking a second to analyze what they are proselytizing.
I love the song Time After Time, and I especially love Eva Cassidy’s version of it. That said I was deeply saddened when I heard it used in a commercial the other day…for Kay’s Jewelers. Why does it always have to be about money? Nothing worse than taking a great song and then selling out.
Music has always been a big part of my life. From the olden days of making mixed tapes sitting on the floor and trying to press play and record at the exact right moment to catch the number 37 song on Casey Kasem’s weekly countdown but without him speaking to burning CDs to making Spotify playlists for pretty much everything, I love music. And for the last few months I have been all about my Quarantine Playlist on Spotify. What tunes are keeping you going these days?
I honestly can’t believe that Colin Kaepernick is still out of football. Cowboys QBs got dinged two weeks in a row…someone’s gotta need an arm, no?
I think the fact that he’s not playing is a sad reflection of how divided we are. This isn’t a statement about which side of the divide one stands on…it’s about the nature and size of the divide. In some ways I think Kap was ahead of his time…he saw and felt discrimination and he decided to use his platform to call attention to it. Instead of generating a response about and driving attention to the problem of systemic racism, it became a polarizing debate about how he did it, taking the focus away from the problem, going in a completely (I think) unintended direction, and creating more division and more problems in completely unrelated areas. The fact that we can’t seem to have intelligent conversations about Black Lives Matter without being sidetracked by All Lives Matter or Police Lives Matter is infuriating…it shows the depths to which people don’t understand, and the more time passes I’m saddened at realizing the depths to which some people don’t want to understand. Seriously, if you can’t explain why you’re taking the position you’re taking, at least give that cause enough respect to understand it. I’m not looking for people to change their minds…I’m looking for people to make fact-based informed decisions before digging in their heels.
Lucky 7. Feels like a good stopping place. Thanks for reading. Happy Friday Eve.
Loving these Thursday thoughts! My recent "on repeat" albums are Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride, Tame Impala's The Slow Rush, and Beyonce's The Gift (don't let The Lion King label fool you - it's my favorite album to dance to while I fold laundry)!