Words mean things - midget ~

I saw a story yesterday about a man that makes a lot of money acting in TV shows commenting on the use of his kind of people in a live action remake of an animated feature movie.

What? I described the story without saying all the words that offended him and offend some of the others. So now I'll use the words.

The guy is a dwarf. Midget, dwarf, little person, height-challenged, whatever. It's not a bad thing, it's just a descriptor to put him in a box so that when we talk about him you know who we're talking about.

The feature movie is one that was made in the early 20th century by Disney. And he was talking a lot about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

I think it's a shame that our attention-driven economy is so hungry for controversy that it looks for all the "content" that will catch and capture attention and generate discussion like this that one guys being offended causes an entity like Disney to react the way that it did.

I think it's comical in general that the "social-minded" among us are so right and righteous that they get upset that an actor who is playing somebody else isn't actually just like the somebody else that they're playing in whatever special classifier that they're focused on this week is. Like the people who get upset when they see an old Lone Ranger show and see that a white man is playing Tonto. Or when the see a non-homosexual (read heterosexual) play the part of a homosexual in a show.

It's a show! They're actors! They are paid to study and learn and think about being somebody else.

Furthermore, the show is fake. It is not reality! It is exaggerated escapism from the reality of a person's daily life made to manipulate your emotions!

I just wish people would go by the maxim that was taught when kids were spanked and punished for not acting correctly and people actually got put in jail when they broke the law: "If you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all."

Women taking care of business ~

One of the most interesting things about our society right now is they encourage men to be responsible and do the right things but it's funny to see women huddling together taking care of things and older women raising younger women trying to teach them the right ways to do things. It's kind of sad in some ways because you don't see the man there. Or if you do see a man he's got two kids with him because he's divorced and it's his weekend of the kids.

But it's such a weird time right now because there's so much pressure to change our societal norms and it's having a profound effect. It's fascinating because what's happening is more more people think that you know whatever goes is normal to the point that a show about a hospital in New York City in the third season has a scene where a woman kisses another woman and the other woman that has been heterosexual her whole life but says this is the only normal thing in my life and goes with it. Kissing another woman and being with that woman sexually is the only normal thing in that heterosexual woman's life. Wow!

So I like it when I go to church. I like it when I go to the Catholic Church on the Friday night fish fry during Lent and talk to a man who's been married to his wife for 60+ years. I like it when I see what I know as normal and I get to be with people like. I don't like to see all the stuff that I do not consider normal on TV and video.

Weird experience at Walmart ~

I had one of the weirdest experiences in my life at a local Walmart recently.

I was moving through the store purchasing things from all over the place. I was pushing my cart and doing my thing. I was being a good consumer.

I'm 58 years old at this point. I move will and feel like I am physically fit. And I don't feel like I appeared to be an aged person.

I made it to the bread and coffee and tea file. There is peanut butter and jelly on one end, a lot of curio egg instant coffee things at the other end. And on the other side a lot of bread and tortillas.

I made the mistake of parking my cart on one side of the aisle while reaching for a package of tortillas on the other side of the aisle. When I started by motion there was nobody on the aisle with me.

As I reached to select some tortillas from the stack of extra-large carb friendly protein rich tortilla packages on the other side of the aisle I heard the telltale sound of another card approaching me.

From my peripheral vision I picked up a massive person pushing a normal sized cart and bearing down on my current location.

As this person approached my current location I looked up and saw the fierce look on the face of a female with her hair pulled tightly up to the top of her head in a bun with a man in tow behind her looking pleadingly at me. She was bearing down on me as if I was a possum in the road blinded by headlights at 2:00am in the morning.

I grabbed for a package of tortillas and then stepped back across the aisle behind my cart for some protection. Foolish, because the cart was on the other side of me and she would've hit me anyways. As my snatch at tortillas happened I pulled the perforated plastic off of a package of tortillas but left the package there on the shelf.

This woman bore down on my position and then blew through where I had just been standing one second ago as if I did not exist or as if I was a squirrel or possum on the road.

"Bitch" was my first thought. My second thought was pity. My third thought was racism, sadly.

Common decency says you pause and wait for people, especially the aged like me. She apparently had no intention to do that. I must not appear aged enough for her to have any pity on me. Or maybe it was the color of my skin or the color of her skin and the experience she has had over life.

All in all it was an interesting but valuable lesson. Don't try to buy across the aisle at Walmart. You'll get run down no matter where you are or who you happen to be.

Lesson learned!

The GOAT ~

I've watched as things that I was taught were corrupted and turned against what I believed. Things taken to such levels of exaggeration that went around to the other side and became the accepted norm. And it's hard!

One of the latest things is the focus on promoting the "greatest of all time". The culture I'm in is so focused on sport and competition and winning the "honor" of being "the best there ever was" and "the greatest of all time". Being Americans of course we shorten that to GOAT. And so now I'm watching the symbol that people have used for devil worship be promoted as representing the greatest thing in the world.

As I watch "settled science" on biology get overturned in the name of personal preference of sex and sexual orientation, as I watch men get declared as the greatest female athletes of all time, as I watch the church turned in to the butt of jokes and the villain in movies and video games, as I watch more and more people do illegal things because nobody is watching them I have to wonder

I read chapter 1 of the letter to the Romans and the Bible and wonder again if we are living that out right now.(https://www.bible.com/bible/97/ROM.1.MSG)

As they keep talking about limiting and tracking all cash transactions with digital currencies and other symbols that we will just have to wave over a sensor and I see fellow Christians react in fear but I actually welcome it. Because the sooner these things happen the sooner my Savior comes back. Come, Lord Jesus!

Running on empty ~

A few weeks ago I did something uncharacteristic for me. I ran my vehicle recently to a point where the empty alert light came on.

I'm a "VIP" with our grocery store and we had built up enough points for $0.60 off per gallon of gas to maximize our savings when I fill my truck up with gasoline so I drove around for three days watching the fuel gauge to get closer and closer to the E.

Finally on the day that I knew I could stop by us at the grocery store I checked the gauge and decided to go for it. I drove to work in the fuel tank was almost empty. When I got off of work and started the engine of my truck I looked at how low the fuel was on it, said a prayer asking God to stretch out my last little bit of gasoline to help me make it to the store, drove by six other gas stations thinking that I was being foolish for doing this and that I'd end up running out of gas and have to call my wife to come and save me, and set out.

I made it! The gas light came on a few miles before I got to the store. I pulled in to the store thinking I was about to run out of gas. Then when I filled the tank I discovered that I was down to about half a gallon of gas left in my tank. Thrill! I felt like I had accomplished so much by saving so much on my full tank of gas. And then it hit me because of all the stress and fretting probably wasn't worth the little bit of money that is saved. What a ride!

Take your vitamins ~

My dad was funny as he got older. After I was an adult anytime that I would call and maybe have a cough or a catch in my throat or runny nose you would express his concern about my health and then asked me did you take your vitamins?

According to him vitamins would prevent a whole array of illnesses. I think he just took a basic multivitamin, nothing fancy. But he took one every day.

Despite all the stories about vitamins passing through your system undigested I remember one where Geritol had been pushed for a couple of years through marketing as baby boomers were getting older. And then they did big stories on how porta potty companies would find that after they filtered through the sludge and waste they had all these whole Geritol pills in the screens left over. So I guess the marketing was working, but the pills weren't really being digested and absorbed.

I went through a time where I thought you had to take all your vitamins separately instead of a multivitamin plan. So I bought the little packets that he ripped open and ate a handful of vitamins. That was expensive, so I figured out if you spent a little extra and by individual bottles of the different vitamins and you could make your own mix and feel better about yourself and feel like you're smarter than everybody else because you're only taking what you need.

I guess that's what it boils down to. The placebo effect is real and if you put your faith in taking a vitamin to keep you well more than likely it will. I know that through the COVID experience I have picked up the habit of taking zinc every morning. I read in several places where the common cold like what COVID started out as before it evolved, however it evolved, was a lot like the common cold. So I take zinc to prevent several things. And so far it seems to be working!

But I always thought it was funny how Dad. would ask that every time I or my wife would get sick. I'm glad that he cared!

Watering down our language ~

I read an article recently about our over use of positive and encouraging words is leading to the watering down of the English language. The author focused on words like excellent and unbelievable and incredible. Those over-the-top words that are used so often now in order to get attention.

One of the interesting things in the article was one he said that overuse of the word waters down its special feeling and descriptiveness. When you hear something is "amazing" over and over and over the next thing that is "amazing" isn't quite so much because amazing now means less than it did before.

Sometimes I wonder if social media has done that to us too. Relationships with people use to be different, especially at a distance. When you had friends outside of your daily circle of existence or even your weekly or monthly circle of existence you would plan special trips to go and see them, you would make the effort if you were in their town to stop by or at least call, and those events were special and cherished afterwords because they don't happen all the time. Now with social media you see and hear from them all the time. Or at least you think you do. And so people tend not to call or make the effort to see you when they happen to be in your town.

At least that's been my experience. What about yours?