I get to feeling, at times like the world has gotten WAY more complicated than necessary, and I've expounded upon that. Last night was one of the great case-in-points, though. After Martha came home and announced that she wanted no more than one CD in the 6-disc CD changer in her car at a time, mostly because she couldn't figure out what was where, and how to access what she wanted, and, of course, the end of the day is NO time to try to attempt to address such an issue, I tried to get a compromise. I said that I'd either list the CDs that were currently in the changer on an in-car note pad, or simply play my CDs in the bottom three slots of the changer. We didn't really come to a clear resolution on that, but the whole situation quickly paled after we went to the store to buy a couple of things, only to have the "cash acceptor" at the self-serve checkout reject almost every bill we attempted to feed into it. After some amount of cussing at this infernal device, it eventually did take our money. Perhaps it was the cussing at it that made the difference; or maybe this contraption realized that if it didn't cooperate, at some point it would be replaced with a human being. Never mind the commentary that motorists and pedestrians just don't seem to wanna watch themselves like they used to, when moving in parking lots. If you're not talkin' on your cell phone immediately upon entering your vehicle, you're listening for the sound of your back-up alarm, which has apparently taken the place of real intelligence in some circles. A complicated, litigation-infested world, where technology means that Geoffrey Feiger has the job he does ostensibly because he didn't sing, or play an instrument so, by extension, he couldn't be in his brother's band. (You remember The Knack, don'tcha? With lead singer Doug Feiger? Yeah.)
And, when you're looking for a job, one of the things you have to be careful of, is to not walk into snares. I keep getting email messages about doing these "electronic funds transfers," which sounds like some of the more Ponzi crap one could ever experience. I keep wondering if something on my resume brands "stupid" on my forehead, or whether more people than myself have actually gotten these kinds of emails. I would be curious to know. I have never expressed any interest to ANY of these people, and I almost instantaneously delete any email of this kind. If you're out there, reading this, and are inclined to bother me with this kind of nonsense, don't bother, okay? I'm not interested. Any more than I was when I got a pitch letter from American Express, a company I never expected to hear from again after the first debacle in college; you REALLY don't wanna know the details around that first episode. Let's just say I figured on being on American Express' "Don't Even Bother" list for the rest of my days. Bizarre.
What's just as strange, but much more sad, at times, is living in a house where my stepmother is a Psychologist, and my father is succumbing, day-by-day, to the dementia that comes along with Parkinson's, or Alzhimer's, or whatever's really going on. Judging by the things dad does and says at times, I think his mind is getting to be a place that HE doesn't recognize every day. For all we know, he could see little green men line-dancing across the lawn in Tony Lama Ostrich boots, and just not be saying anything. He's apparently confessed to sleeping a lot, sometimes out of pure boredom. Can't say as I blame him, although I do wish at times that bait-and-snap sense of humor of his was a bit more readily identifiable. On the upside, his cardio (who is also my cardio, BTW,) says his heart muscle is strong, it's just the rest of him that's not as able as it used to be. After coming back from Stratford, I could see that even long travel, and some amount of relaxation still manage to take their toll on him. I can only hope that when the winter of my life comes, I will at least have taken adequate care of myself to perhaps not suffer the same fates that have befallen my dad over the years. If this is my dad in 2007, knowledge and care would have served him better, had it happened sooner, than all the opulent complexity of iPhones, back-up alarms and drive-through whatever the world had to offer.