I’ve moved down to Maryland – which may be a temporary location for a bit, but none-the-less it’s time to retire this RI Life Blog. See you in the MD Life Blog!
I’ve been thinking more and more about how our society focuses so much on “higher education” and forces individuals to feel as though there is nothing aside from going to college, and working a corporate life. We rarely meet people who have their own carpentry shop or a metal-worker. Those that have these professions are “artsy” and sell their work at fairs, and markets, but they aren’t commonly used. The era of Ikea and Pier 1 Imports has made this work or craftsmanship a rare thing.
I find myself surrounded by friends and family who feel trapped and forced to do the traditional thing and walk the beaten path when they would probably really enjoy being a blacksmith. Or areal bare-bones farmer. Or carpenter. Where have these professions gone? Now it’s all the big corporate farms and Ikea and Kay Jewelers. It seems as though one of the problems with the way our society has taken shape around these professions is that those about to attend college are not able to explore the other fields that would have interested them.
Today, the only form of “apprenticeship” is an “internship”. Instead of learning by putting your hands on metal to shape something physically, we intern at a law firm and push paper. Instead of carving a chair from wood or building a house, we intern at a software firm to sit in front of a computer all day. Rather than learn from a well learned farmer on horticulture and livestock, we prep ourselves for a corporate world of assembly lines.
Don’t get me wrong – those that like the corporate world should enjoy it. Those that get a kick from working on a computer all day should do it! Hell – I’m one of ‘em. I’m mentally stimulated by the puzzles and challenges I face every day – challenging myself to accomplish more and to do it better. But my point is that too many people feel forced to do what I love, and what happens is that you have flight attendants that open the emergency exit and slide out of a plane; you have people who are miserable in their professions because it’s not what they want to be doing. There’s nothing wrong with doing what you want to be doing. And if you don’t know what you want to be doing, learn about new things- explore what intrigues you, learn from those who know of it, and see if it’s something you would enjoy.
Alright alright – so you know what really grinds my gears?
Escalefters. YEah that’s right. You may be innocently ignorant, but when you see dozens of other people around you standing on the right and walking on the left – why the hell would you just stop and stand and chat on the left? Look around, will ya? And what bothers me on top of that is that they don’t even seem phased when someone behind politely says “excuse me..” – they act as if their right to bear arms was taken away from them. Though they’re not as bad as the next lot of people…
Neurotic Mergers. You know them… or maybe you’re one of ‘em? You know- when a lane of traffic is in an exit lane or merging and it’s slowing down because of traffic, and some jackass decides it’s his god-given-right for him to speed on passed a different lane and then just at the last minute merge into the stopped traffic? To borrow a quote from George Carlin’s sketch about people who should be killed: those people just ought to be “put on gurneys and castrated with fishing knives”. Those that actually use the emergency/shoulder lane to cut all of the traffic ought to be shot. Twice. Neurotic mergers are the worst. When I meet someone that admits to being one, I openly call them jackasses. and I mean it. After I called him on it, my friend whined, “but it would then take me hours to get to work!” So I laughed at him, and after he finished his nervous forced laugh, I called him a Jackass again.
Now another group of people who are really funny–at least, I laugh at them but I don’t think that they’re actually funny–is those people who play really loud music in their beat-up, 1994 honda civic *with tinted windows* – either rap or reggaeton, usually, and the sound of the trunk rattling is what you hear before the actual music. These jokers don’t even know that their meek attempt at baddass-ity has turned them into flat-out jokes. I find it quite amusing.
Another group of lame individuals is the helmetless biker. I never in my life wish to see a traffic incident more than when a biker, who thinks his nuts are bigger than his head, zooms passed me on a motorcycle without a helmet on. As the biker passes each car ahead of me I will the tires of the cars (or the bike) to just pop and cause mass confusion and panic…. it’s bad – I know. I really should get myself checked… but seriously; the biker’s asking for it. Now – the darwinian award would have gone to this one biker I saw zoom past at 70 in a 55 in his silly t-shirt flapping up against his back, and not only was he not wearing his helmet, but the helmet was on the backseat of his bike! I don’t know if it was strapped there or what, but it just chilled right there behind him, and he biked on without a care in the world. After a few minutes of looking out for a mangled bike, guess what was in between two lanes of the highway going 0 in a 55 instead? His helmet. That’s right – his what-mu$ta-co$t-hundreds was straddling two lanes in traffic, and the guy would go miles without realizing it fell off his bike. I chuckled to myself.
