Insult has been added to injury for me this week. I have been once more turned down for work. The required job components? Excellent research abilities, writing fluently, and good typing skills.
Oh, the irony of it all…
Some weeks really are better than others. Sometimes, it feels like the universe just wants to bitchslap you so hard that you fall backward and are knocked unconscious. But hey, that could just be my high stress level talking.
Otherwise, it’s been a hot, muggy, and moody week for me. A little something positive would be nice right now. Still, I remain optimistic as often as possible. Optimism is often the only driving force we have left.
I did get out to enjoy the peaceful serenity of a berry farm this week, picking blueberries in a field where the warm, breezy atmosphere was interrupted but once by the incessant twitter of a mobile phone. For a while, I longed for the simplicity and plainness of the pioneer era. We often make our lives more difficult than they’re supposed to be. Keeping up with the Joneses and grabbing for the latest in high-tech, low-imagination gadgetry.
We often think of those early settlers as being backward and dim-witted, but I can’t shake the thought that they had more brains than we do. They could handle basic life without a microwave or plasma screen television. Reading and creative storytelling were actual forms of entertainment. There was no need to panic over an energy crisis or fuel consumption, since horses and the hay they eat are both renewable resources. It might have taken two years to build a house, but in 50 years you knew it would still be standing.
My friend Chris mentioned a few times he has always felt he was born in the wrong time. Perhaps I share that vision, though my proper decade predates his by miles. I really adore the works of Mark Twain, as well as his wit and humor, and there are those moments when I wish I could fall asleep beneath a tree and wake up back then, as a slight variation of his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Perhaps it’s why I feel a sudden nostalgia for classic American literature. Twain. Bierce. Hawthorne. Irving. Poe. Some of the best, brightest, and warped minds of a forgotten age.
.
