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Dreamed that the world blew up last night. Now, no one panic, because it was just one of those weird dreams that make no sense. It began with me as a character in the movie De-Lovely, which I’ve not gotten a chance to see yet, then moved into something more science fictiony. The world blew up, and there was this talking golden retriever. But it must not have been too bad a blow up because gravity still worked and there weren’t many people gone, or dead. For a post-apocalyptic dream it was darn mild. Jon brought me some fast food which I don’t even like as if it were a treat, when what I wanted was chocolate croissants. But as out there as this dream when the alarm went off this morning my first thought was, wow, I didn’t expect the alarm to work after the world blew up. Not fear, not anything but mild puzzlement that the alarm worked when the world had gone away as we know it.
Do you ever wonder where the really weird ass shit in your brain comes from? I do. I wondering about a lot of things that the majority of people don’t give any thought to, but surely most people would wake up from a dream like that and wonder where it all came from.
Maybe part of the dream came from the fact that I’m reading the essays of E. B. White. The author of CHARLOTTE’S WEB, one of my favorite books, but he wrote a great deal more than just that one book. Sixteen books altogether I think. The essays begin in 1938 or so, and go to 1975, or so. At first I jumped around in the two collections, THE ESSAYS OF E. B. WHITE, and ONE MAN’S MEAT. Then I started simply reading them in chronological order. Not only can you see White’s growth as a writer and a person over the years, but the world changes. The essays in the thirties are somehow less anxious. Even the essays during World War II, seem less anxious than his essays in the seventies, when he literally lists a paragraph of things to be anxious about. The world as we know it, is no more. Change happens and the world moves on. We can like it, or not like it, but our dislike doesn’t stop it from happening.
But would we really want time to stop, and nothing to change? If you say yes to that, go to any old cemetery where the graves date before the early 1900s. Look at how many of the graves from the 1800s are children’s graves. The reason people had a lot of children was partially because your chances of raising any child to adulthood was damn slim. Many families in England (I’m not sure of other countries.) would name more than one daughter after the mother, in hopes that one daughter would survive to grow up. This tradition is one of the things that contributed to names like Margaret having so many nicknames: Marge, Margie, Margo, Peggy, Peg, Meg, Maggie, Meggie, Rita, Greta, Maisie. I know I’ve left out a few. The nicknames were what you called the different little Maragarets, so that they wouldn’t all actually have the same name when you were talking to everyone. As medical science got better and more kids began to survive, you ended up with the nicknames becoming names in themselves, because it was just too confusing to have three Margaraets at the dinner table.
But it’s not just medical science that I’m happy about. I’m a woman, and there has never been a time, at least in most of the civilized world where women have had more rights, more privelages. I am the major income for my family. I am the bread winner, and my husband is just fine with that. I still run into men that can’t deal with that, but the secret is to date below thirty, or at least below thirty-five. I’m sure there are some men that are evolved enough to deal with a strong, independent woman, that makes more money than they do, but I didn’t find many of them when I was dating. And yes, ladies, there are idiots below thirty, too. And for the men’s side of things, unfortunately, there are still woman out there that see a man as a way to quite work and be taken care of. I find that they give the rest of us a bad name.
Another thing to check out in the cemeteries is how many wives a man buried in his life. Childbirth took a lot of young women. I and my daughter Trinity would have died in labor without some pretty high tech stuff. So change is good, not bad. But it can be scary. Just hold on, and know that the world changes, but it does not end. It’ll be okay, just remember to buy the chocolate croissants instead of the fast food hamburgers. I mean if you’re going to eat food that would make a personal trainer weep, go for the chocolate.
A NOTE TO ALL THAT ARE READING ALL THE BLOG STUFF I PUT UP TODAY. THIS IS THE BLOG THAT I TALK ABOUT IN THE “I HATE TECHNOLOGY BLOG”. It magically reappeared, even Jon doesn’t know why it went away, or why it came back. I pressed some other buttons trying to re-edit something else, and viola, it’s returned from the grave. Anyway, you guys get two blog entries sort of for the price of one. Enjoy.