43 - 0

That’s what I sometimes feel I’ve accomplished with my life so far.

It’s not a completely bad thing. I am still technically employed until the end of the month. The person I’ve been temporarily replacing returned to work on Monday the 30th, throwing my life back into disarray.

At last count, I currently have 4 job applications out there awaiting some kind of result. I’m hoping for one of the three jobs at the hospital or clinic. I also think there may still be some occasional work in my current position, as the rest of the crew wants me to stay on, and the boss is looking for ways to get permission to keep me on past my deadline. So it would seem that my evil plot to make myself the indispensable man at work has taken hold.

On a completely unrelated note, I had thought that ‘indispensable’ was spelled with an ‘I’ and not an ‘A,’ but my Word™ program automatically corrected it for me. Then I paused to look it up, and it apparently is spelled with an ‘A.’ One of maybe 7 spelling errors I’ve made in my life. That’s 7 more than I’m actually willing to admit to making.

On a second completely unrelated note, Word™ has made a complete mockery out of the previous paragraph. Never before have I had to do so many “click-and-correct” and “click-and-ignore” functions in one paragraph in my life. Maybe I’m getting senile already?

Oh the hell with it. It looks like everything in this post is going to be completely unrelated to everything else in this post. Onward with the typing.

I looked up what I’ve done with the blog this year. This is only the 28th entry of 2009. Kind of a sorry state, but it wasn’t completely my fault. I was unemployed for over 7 months, and didn’t have a lot of Internet access all that time, so that’s the biggest reason for it. The second biggest reason would probably be that I was unemployed and therefore didn’t have much going on in my life at all.

If any of the above sounds like I’m getting depressed again, don’t worry. I’m not. This is actually my way of doing a quick take-stock of what’s currently happening in my life, and my resolving to make 2010 and my 44th year on this rock a much better one than all of the previous ones.

A closing note: I have mastered time-travel. I’m actually writing this yesterday.

My annual rant in a rerun

One of my pet peeves occurs at this time every year. I've written about it before, so there's no real need to write about it again. I'll just do my famous copy-and-paste from that entry (dated July 5, 2007) and post it here.

"The only . . . thing that bugs me as much is on Thanksgiving when people tell me, “Happy Turkey Day.” I know that in this instance, people just think they’re being cutesy, but STOP IT. I do know that this holiday has come to symbolize gorging yourself more than anything else nowadays, but that still does not change the name of it. Not everybody eats turkey on that day, either. Some have ham. Some have roast beef. One year, when I was a kid, I asked my mom to make us ribs. She loved to tell the story of how she was standing in the supermarket checkout lane, surrounded by people buying turkeys and hams, and getting strange looks from them. One woman was bold enough to ask Mom what was the deal. Mom just said, “My son wants me to make ribs for Thanksgiving.” Most of the people around her then expressed their desire to do the same, but couldn’t, because their own families would have a fit.

So, please, folks, put some thought into what you’re saying."

Happy Thanksgiving 2009.

Facebook musings

There’s a lot of political discussion over at Facebook, just like there is in any social medium or gathering. Personally, I voted in an unofficial poll just this morning about whether Political Correctness has gone too far in the U.S.

Of course it has. As I wrote in my comment, in my opinion: “Political correctness is and has been a new form of fascism. It goes against the concept of freedom of speech to constantly have to monitor everything you say just to avoid offending somebody else's oh-so-delicate sensibilities.” An example of this can be found in one of my previous entries on this blog. I was called to task for using an “offensive” word in my post title, because it’s an offensive label to a segment of society. Never mind the fact that I stated quite clearly that I was using it to describe a situation and not a person. Never mind as well that it’s my damn blog; I can write however I choose, and you are free to choose not to read it. I may have lost one or two of my 3-4 readers at that point, but hey. Freedom of choice, folks. If I don’t like something, I exercise my right to avoid it. I don’t try to force my values on others.

Another issue that keeps cropping up over the past few years is the Pledge of Allegiance. There’s an absolute fury right now over the possibility that the phrase “Under God” may be removed from the pledge. Never mind that those two words were NOT included in the original writing of the Pledge. I remember my mom telling me about the two words being added in the 1950s, when she was going to school, and the main focus at the time was that everybody griped about having two more words to say every morning. (Anybody who feels inclined to comment negatively about my mother on this point, don’t. Your comments will be deleted.)

There was a link posted just this morning mentioning a story you may already have heard about. I made a comment there as well; my comment didn’t have anything really to do with the story but the Pledge itself. I have nothing against the Pledge, in either it’s original or revised form, but in my comment I mention: “I remember saying the pledge every morning in 1st and 2nd grades, and then it just kinda vanished after that. Looking back, I have to wonder what was the point of having us say it. At that age, I really had no idea what it was all about. For all I understood of it, I may as well have been reading a paragraph of 'The Brothers Karamazov.' It was just a morning ritual, nothing more.”

After reading the story, I have to admit that the kid in the story is a lot smarter than I was at his age. I wouldn’t have pieced any of it together the way he did, let alone had any kind of opinion on it one way or the other. My main focus at that age was making it through the morning to recess, and then making it through the afternoon until dismissal.

I don’t really have anything conclusive to say about either topic other than what I’ve already written. I’ve made it such a point to avoid anything political over the course of my adult life that I’m just not as well informed as I should be. To be honest, though, I really prefer it that way. I save a lot of money on aspirin.

November 10, 1942

Mom would have been 67 today, which is still too young to be gone. A curse on thy house, O pancreatic cancer.

Miss you, Mom. Every day.

Dona Nobis Pacem