There was a time when people saved up to go on a vacation, to travel, to pay bills, to do just about everything. Apparently, that is no longer the custom. Nowadays, the new way of getting money quickly is by crowdsourcing, going to the public and asking for help on the Internet which, if you want to call a spade a spade, is another way of saying people are panhandling to large groups of people. It was one thing when …
I came across an article written by a woman in upper management that really rocked my boat. She spoke about things I might have heard in former centuries, certainly not in this century. She said that men are larger, so if you’re sitting on a bus, the man takes up more space and that’s as it should be. He’s entitled to take up more space on the train or bus. If he earns more money than a woman for the …
There were plenty of things that were wrong with my generation but there were a lot of things that were right with it, too. I think the thing I miss most about it is that we learned how to entertain ourselves without the necessity to buy everything that came out on the market. There was also a lot less “keeping up with the Joneses” in my day because the Joneses had about as much as we had and consumerism had …
We tend to think of women in this country as having all kinds of educational opportunities and all kinds of career opportunities. But is this really true? The majority of women have jobs; a small percentage of women have flourishing careers. It’s not necessarily that women don’t want more, that they don’t want brilliant careers, it’s more that they don’t know how to achieve those goals. They don’t know how to take those first baby steps. There are certainly more …
Every Election Day, someone who is very dear to me, tries to make me forget to vote. This year, he called me up on Monday and asked me if I had been watching the news and I answered, “For the most part. Why?” He then told me that Election Day had been moved from Tuesday, November 4th, to Wednesday, November 5th. Smiling, I happily told him that I had gone to vote the first day that the early voting sites …
When did we become such consumers? When I was growing up, no matter what was going on in the world, good times, bad times, I saw women wearing makeup. It was a sure bet that they would give up everything else, but they wouldn’t give up their makeup. During World War II, when nylon stockings couldn’t be found, women painted a line up the back of their legs to make it look like they were wearing stockings. In those days, …
I’m not a lover of social media sites and, up until yesterday, I had never been on one. Well, actually, I still haven’t gotten on one but that’s not because I don’t want to give it a try, it’s because I can’t figure out how to get on it and how to find out what all those buttons mean. Anyone who knows me, can attest to the fact that I’m technologically challenged. That’s just a nice way of saying that …
I’ve always wondered how we’re going to survive as a species if we keep killing off our enemies and they keep killing us. I’ve wondered how our planet is going to survive the abuses we wreak on it like the fracking that is slowly causing our land to open up, engulfing property and lives in newly created vast sinkholes. And I keep thinking how our overindustrialized cities are putting such hardship on our planet and depleting our natural resources. And …
In my day, women married young, had babies when they were scarcely past their own childhood, and also divorced at a fairly young age. I remember hearing mothers telling their very intelligent daughters not to let their boyfriends think they were smart because otherwise, they would end up as old maids. They were also told to work as secretaries until they married the boss (it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man) …
Have you ever lived with someone outside of marriage? In America, there has always been a stigma attached to children born out of wedlock, whereas in Europe, it has always been an accepted practice. We seem to place so much value on the institution of marriage but we don’t look too closely at what happens to a couple between “I do” and “I don’t.” Women used to think they were settled for life if they could get married and start …