Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Ick, the Down Side of Enjoying a Good Blog

Walter's post from yesterday really stubbed my emotional toe. That, coupled with a nightmare I had Monday night of leaving Olivia in a hot car, has left me wandering around disjointed, constantly feeling I have forgotten something or shouldn't be happy when a minute of joy creeps into my day. Anything I have to write feels banal, pointless. And once you go down that slippery slope, you might as well just rent "Life is Beautiful", pull covers over your head, and call it a month. Then, Tuesday evening, I retrieved this from the mailbox.

Do NOT read this article if you want to ever drive/vacation/use airconditioning/buy your kid a toy with two-and-a-half hours' worth of twist-tie removal/consume anything ever again. I'm sure the doom is accurate, and I know that everytime I do anything I am ruining the earth and single-handedly melting the key (think Domino Number One) polar ice cap.

My birthday is coming. And I am one who loves presents. But creeping into my mind is the fact that the Louis Vuitton plant probably spews pollution into the air on a per-bag basis; that DeBeers is not good for the people who fatefully live near their mines; that the purchase of anything for myself has an opportunity cost of not even giving to charity .001 percent of what Bill and Melinda Gates manage every year. And thanks to Walter's words of experience, that while I tug on a beautiful ribbon giving way to an object of desire, someone out there is eating some hard, dried macaroni.

The main thing is that I had to wait for him to post again; I didn't have the nerve to follow those kids' plights with some insipid story about me or insensitive pictures of someone blissfully enjoying their oatmeal, like this:

3 comments:

Walter said...

Thanks for the photo of Olivia. It's on my desktop.

Anonymous said...

Ooooh. She is cute. But she is enjoying about to have oatmeal. Surely she can't consume 100% of the food presented to here. Isn't she still at the 50/50 or maybe 60/40 stage of consumed/external food ratio? Wait a minute. I just blew up the photo. She's already had a bite. Eewwww.

Anonymous said...

The dried macoroni really got me. Meanwhile my kids had homemade pancakes, bacon and cereal for breakfast this morning.