Consumerism

If You Ever Had Enough


I found this on a yoga blog.

What I have now, probably for the first time ever in my life, is enough.

I am not complacent about it.

I recognize that relationships are active and therefore require tending. I know that nothing about the strata of society I occupy is immune to disaster.

But in societal terms I have come to recognize as my norm, what I have is plenty. There isn’t a single thing or experience I lack. My emotional well brims and is replenished continually.

Perhaps this is what has been nagging at me of late.

My conscious mind – conditioned as it has been by years of North America consumer driven life-style and middle-class faux career ambition – feels I am not working hard enough to be … what? I don’t know. My inner-self has been quite weepy about it in a pushed around little girl sort of way.

She knows we have enough. Time to acknowledge it and let a few things go.

I have dreams. Modest and unassuming. But they are not deal-breakers for me and really never were.

I have enough. It’s almost verboten to say that out loud as many people fear it invites the active mocking of the fates. That’s flatly ridiculous. Nothing is permanent and fate has nothing to do with that anyway.

If you ever had enough, could you recognize it?

A fair question.

Road Random


Winnipeg was cold. The Holiday Inn where we stayed was having a hill-billy family special which attracted the range of the spectrum for the working class version of a weekend getaway – renting a poolside suite for an overnight. Children frolicked under the benignly neglectful eyes of parents draped across Kmart special deck furniture seemingly unaware that should their child begin to exhibit signs of being water-logged, their lack of swim attire wouldn’t necessarily spur one of the few properly attired parents in the pool to step in for them.

Rob certainly wasn’t going to step up. In fact, between cold hard stares that made the teacher in me kelly green and the clipped warnings to two not so little girls about watching their surroundings, he was ready to help a few of the offspring of the wet but still basically unwashed to Davy Jones’ locker.

“Next time,” I said, “we’ll have to remember to ask for a room on a floor above the pool.”

“We won’t be coming to Winnipeg again,” he replied.

Problem solved.

It wasn’t as bad as Battleford. We stayed at the Super 8 because the only other hotel is owned by the casino. We stayed there the time before and listened to a herd of teenagers thundering overhead …. all … night … long.

The Super 8’s clientele is made up of the men who are working in the area on the various temporary projects. At breakfast on Friday morning, they watched us with bemused looks as though vaguely recalling wives and children of their own.

Hotels in Canada are a hit and miss affair. Canadians accept truly awful accommodations as the price of admission, but the former full-time American in me has to sigh heavily.

It took an hour to cross the border. The line stretched on forever but as far as I could tell, no one was being anally probed, flogged or water-boarded, so I have no idea what the hold up was.

North Dakota was water-logged. At one point before Grand Forks, the water was up on the road and it lapped the edges for a good while between the border, on and off, until after Fargo.

In Minneapolis – we shopped. I totally went ugly American and bought an awesome sticky, thick yoga mat that I have coveted ever since I spied another woman in my training using the brand. We outfitted Dee for soccer at Dick’s (yeah, that’s what it’s called) and got her one of those Razor scooters.

And we ate at Panera Bread. We have no Panera Bread. I don’t know why. Just like we have no Target. Another unsolved mystery that begs for resolution. The only way Minneapolis could have been more awesome would have been a trip to Target. I think it’s Target’s Mecca of origin after all.

We swam again. The hotel was not full, so we had the pool mostly to ourselves but for a young couple and their two quite wee children and the young wife’s sister.

Rob was looking forward to a soak in the hot tub after a long day’s drive, but the sight of two swim-diapered young-uns in the bubbling water changed his mind. Mine too. What are people thinking when they put incontinent children into hot tubs?

The husband was a redneck. No, he really was. Cowboy hat, boots and button-down long sleeve striped shirt. Very Kenny Chesney except for the beer gut and the fact that he looked a little drunk which contrasted with the Coke can he was sipping on like a baby on the teat.

The two sisters were enjoying the children and trying to chat. He was suggesting that it was time to go back to their room about every ten minutes but the two year old boy kept objecting.

“Wouldn’t ya rather watch tv?” Cowboy Daddy said. “We have a tv back in the room.”

Sad? Scary? Clearly not a future that bodes well.

After they left, we had the place to ourselves until the teens, hot tubbing middle agers and grandmas began to pour in. Clearly, the mall was now closed.

The Macbook is (almost) Dead


The macbook’s history is a relatively short one. Purchased the day after Black Friday in 2006, it enabled me to go wireless, which ended up really facilitating the courtship of Rob and I after we met in mid-December of the same year. My desktop, also a mac, was inconveniently located in my bedroom. Inconvenient because Dee still slept in my bed and her bedtime was early. I couldn’t be on the computer once she was tucked in for the night.

But now, the macbook is near history. Problems this summer with the blue-tooth led to its being turned off and now it’s developed some sort of corruption that crashes the internet browser every five minutes or so. It roars like a jet plane most of the time due to a fan that rarely stops running.

Sigh.

I guess it is back to PC’s for me. We have a house full of computers – literally – and financially it makes no sense to run over to the Apple Store to replace the macbook.

I will be able to archive files on an external hard drive and transfer them. Which is good. I have way too much writing and three years of photos and music on it. Rob thinks he can wipe it and reprogram it, but there is no guarantee it will fix the issue or that he will have time anytime soon to do this.

“Do you want a new macbook?” he asked. “We could just replace my laptop and use it and the desktop.”

“And the netbook,” I added.

I like macs. User friendly in the extreme as long as nothing ever goes wrong. But when something glitches? Forget it. Steve Jobs has designed them to make it impossible for the ordinary person to identify and fix the issue. There is just no mechanism for diagnostics for the user. The physical make up even is such that a person needs special training and tools just to get into the dangit things.

Much as I would like one of the new desktops. They are too expensive and ultimately they all possess the same fatal flaws that keep user in thrall to the Genius Bar* at the Apple Store.

As long as my writing is saved and re-archived on another machine, it doesn’t matter what the machine is. Computers are computers. Tools to an end.

Alas then poor Macbook, I knew it well, Horatio.

*The Genius Bar is where you take your Apple products to be fixed by in-store techs, who often can do little more than replace or box up your mac to send away to be replaced/repaired. The “genius” part is how no one questions the fact that macs either work great or just intermittently and that by getting a customer in the store periodically, more product can usually be sold to them despite the defective by design nature.