No gender day ~

My son told me something that is pretty sad today. He's a senior in high school. And it's senior week at the last football game of the season this coming Friday. So they have theme days all week. Today is senior citizen day, so he just like he thinks is senior citizen dresses. He had on some khaki pants with the legs rolled up a little bit so you could see his tube socks. He had on the Elmer fund style baseball cap from Canada. He had on the button-down plaid shirt. And then over that he had on his grandfather's jacket that he wears on a regular basis but that fit the outfit almost perfectly. And then he got a cane from the basement to round it out.

But he was telling me that then even last year and years past they would have a gender swap theme day where guys would dresses girls and girls would dress as guys. But that because of the whole rising of the attention on the transgendered and homosexual and all of that that they canceled the swap day because they didn't want to offend anyone that is transgendered.

Sad as it may be a good joke with them about it. I told him that it was probably also because it would be an unfair competition because somebody that didn't dress as the opposite sex would never be able to compete with somebody who does it all the time and has all the tricks down and all the tools and everything like that.

He laughed but I was glad to see that it was a pained laugh because of the weirdness of it.

Sodom and Gomorrah are starting to sound very familiar.

Saying no ~

People don't want to say no anymore. I've noticed more and more that when I ask people hey do you want to do this or send them a message or a calendar invite they don't respond. It's frustrating because it would be nice to be able to plan things and get a yes or no and no whether or not it's going to happen. But instead of responding they just ignore and say nothing.

Unless it's a yes. If it's a yes there is an enthusiastic response and off we go. But the US usually comes very late and close to the time of the event, as if they don't don't really want to commit until the last minute unless something else comes up.

As I think through this phenomenon I'm starting to believe that it's because of the marketing that is everywhere. We are bombarded with ads and shows, reading material, videos on the Internet, and every other type of media that we take in. We don't really want to say no, and it's often too much of a pain to stop the ads so you just don't go back or you stop reading that and move on to something else. But you never say no and push back on it.

So as marketers continue to provide for our attention in every venue they can open our responses are conditioned to be one way or another. And as we go along people commit less and less.

It's also a personal thing where they don't want to offend and so instead of saying no and having to explain them so they just don't say anything.

Makes it hard to plan anything and makes me think more and more that people don't like me. I guess it's true what Gary Vaynerchuk said: marketers ruin everything.

Pleasing ~

Pleasing is a word that is not used much today.

With all of the social awareness that will practice nowadays when I hear the word pleasing automatically think of a negative connotation of someone being forced to do something to make someone else feel happier. Mostly in the context of dressing up, or performing a sex act, or something like that. But to be pleasing to someone at least to me sounds bad before it sounds good.

Pleasing is a positive word. I used it today when I was capturing something in my journal when I said that it was pleasing to talk to my daughter. I got pleasure out of it. And there's nothing wrong with getting pleasure out of something. One of the things that we are wired for is to seek out pleasure. And as long as you keep those pleasures from becoming outrageous or infringing on somebody else there's nothing wrong with. Sounds pretty libertarian but it is the way that I feel.

I seek pleasure in my use of technology I ease myself with something I do. Like shopping for new gadgets. Like watering my plants. And thinking up new ways to water the plants.

So pleasing is a good word.

Peanut butter snob ~

I have a confession to make: for most of my life I was a peanut butter snob.

When I was growing up my mother bought Skippy peanut butter. I remember using Skippy peanut butter to make my first peanut butter sandwiches and my first peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for my school lunches. I remember trying different peanut butters and thinking they tasted terrible.

As a 55-year-old man I finally bought store label peanut butter and it was good. I bought the chunky peanut butter or crunchy so that it would still have a lot of peanut flavor. Not that that makes any difference, but it does in my mind. And when I got home I put little bit extra on my peanut butter sandwich so that I could really say I had tried it. I had bought to the big jars so I hope that I could like it and choke it down.

It was fine! Tasted just like me to butter. Texture was good. Taste was good. Label looked weird. And I imagine that's what the problem was, all the marketing.

So as I go along I'm slowly breaking down these barriers that the big companies have put up to my ways of thinking. In their cornering of my dollars into their pockets is changing. Now if I can just get it out of my head that they're the same ones that make the store label peanut butter and all the other stuff and that were being over charged for almost everything that has a brand name to it I would be doing a lot better.

Not into sports stories ~

One of the challenging things that I face is so many things are based around sports. Devotionals, books, stories, everything is based around competition in sports and either winning or losing our partnering to cross the finish line together and all that.

As a guy who is not into sports and does not like the head-to-head competition and the basking in the glorying of beating somebody afterwards this is hard. I enjoy the stories when their positive but so many people that I see walk up to each other and tell each other you must feel bad because of how your team did and it's not uplifting at all.

So I don't know what to do with that other than avoid it and not read it and when I run across to hide it on my newsfeeds and move along.

No gender day ~

My son told me something that is pretty sad last fall. He was a senior in high school. And it was senior week at the last football game of the season this coming Friday. So they had theme days all week. On senior citizen day he just dressed like he thinks a senior citizen dresses. He had on some khaki pants with the legs rolled up a little bit so you could see his tube socks. He had on the Elmer Fudd-style baseball cap from Canada. He had on the button-down plaid shirt. And then over that he had on his grandfather's jacket that he wears on a regular basis but that fit the outfit almost perfectly. And then he got a cane from the basement to round it out.

But he was telling me that last year and in years past they would have a gender swap theme day where guys would dress as girls and girls would dress as guys. But that because of the whole rising of the attention on the transgendered and homosexual and all of that they canceled the swap day because they didn't want to offend anyone that is transgendered.

Sad as it was it made for a good joke with them about it. I told him that it was probably also because it would be an unfair competition because somebody that didn't dress as the opposite sex would never be able to compete with somebody who does it all the time and has all the tricks down and all the tools and everything like that.

He laughed but I was glad to see that it was a pained laugh because of the weirdness of it.

Sodom and Gomorrah are starting to sound very familiar.