Monthly Archives: November 2005
This Just In…You’re Not Special
According to the recent findings of the nonprofit American Self-Esteem Foundation (ASEF), you are not special at all. You, your friends and family members are neither special, unique, nor are you possessing of any singular gifts or talents. In effect, you are just a random cell combination similar to billions of other random cell combinations that serve no other purpose than to suck air and collaborate in the collective food chain. The full report, commissioned by private sources, will be released early next week, and researchers are expecting the findings to cause controversy, especially those which compare the average school child to that of simple pond bacteria. “There’s absolutely nothing in the world wrong with being totally unspecial and unimportant in the grand scheme of things,” lead researcher Charles Umbert said. “Just like God has no special plan for sea plankton, he also has no special plan for little Timmy or little Sally or any of your doltish offspring — no… Read more
The Cult Of Work
I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters. When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of ”The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants,… Read more