Due to travel, this weekend’s SubscribeStar Saturday post will be delayed, likely until Monday morning. Likewise, Sunday Doodles may be delayed, depending on my schedule tomorrow, although I will try to have it ready before the end of the day. Lazy Sunday will depend on tonight and tomorrow’s schedule, too, but I should have it up.
In the meantime, thank you for your support, and enjoy your weekend!
—TPP
As I wrote yesterday, I’m out on a rare vacation (other than Christmas, Spring Break, all summer, and every second- and third-tier holiday that falls on a Monday in the winter). I’m down in Florida visiting Universal Studios Orlando with my family, and it’s been an amazing, tiring trip. I tried filing away blog posts for while I was away, but couldn’t get enough done to have every day of my trip covered.
That said, we got back from Day 2 in the park a little while ago, and I’m slamming something out while playing with Mario Kart Hot Wheels with my almost-three-year old nephew. Here are just some observations from my vacation.
I’m on vacation this week, burning through my precious personal days in order to spend some time in Florida with the family. Normally, I wouldn’t feature such a recent post for TBT (I try to do posts that are at least six months old), but when going through my archives for vacation-themed posts, this was the closest fit I could find… even if it’s not Thanksgiving.
Regardless, I increasingly believe that workers need time off. I understand the economics of time off—it’s only possible with a great degree of efficiency and wealth—so I’m not unrealistic about it. It just seems that people should be able to take off Christmas and a few other key days. Just as folks will “unplug” from social media for twenty-four hours, shouldn’t we be able to escape work, even for a day?
Speaking of social media, it does seem that cell phones and e-mail have made it impossible to escape work. I have never worked a job that truly stopped at 5 PM. That’s likely true for most Americans. The ability to be connected constantly means that people expect you to be available constantly—there’s never truly a moment that I feel at rest.
Perhaps that’s a person problem, and my pathetic generation is particularly anxious and afraid of a ringing phone, but Lord knows I hate getting a call during my free time, limited as it is. There’s always the fear that it’s going to be some tedious, work-related issue. Such issues always seem to pop up right before, or even during, a break.
Oh, well. I can’t complain—or, at least, I shouldn’t. Work is a blessing. But like all good things, you can have too much of it.
With that, here’s “Brack Friday Bunduru: Workers Need a Break“:
Thanksgiving has come and gone, and Christmas‘s time—an ever-expanding season that stretches into September—has finally arrived. Today is Black Friday, the consumerist threshold that formally inaugurates the Christmas (shopping) season.
Black Friday, much like the holiday season it ushers in, has slowly stretched beyond its one-day window. First, the expansion went into Small Business Saturday, then Cyber Monday. Next came Giving Tuesday—a bit of charitable giving to close out the mad dash for savings. Once you’ve spent all of your money in big box stores on Friday, at the dying mom and pop joint in your town, and everything else on Amazon on Monday, whatever is left goes to the United Way.
Now Black Friday even bleeds into Thanksgiving Day itself. Doorbuster sales with lines forming up at 2 AM on Black Friday is spectacle enough; now, stores opening Thanksgiving afternoon or evening try to squeeze more revenue from zealous shoppers.
As a schoolteacher, I’m spoiled: with the exception of two years of my life, I’ve been involved in education in some way, which means I’ve always gotten a glorious Thanksgiving holiday. It rankles me, though, when service folks are denied even one day to relax and spend with their families (until I need to buy something at 8 PM on a Thursday, and that Thursday turns out to be Thanksgiving).
“They should get a better job, Portly.” Okay, sure, a perk of teaching, for example, is all the crazy days off; a perk of a professional job is to vacation or flex-time. Federal employees have to work on Black Friday, but they get every second- and third-tier holiday on the calendar as a paid vacation day, so I don’t feel much sympathy for them (plus, they work for the federal government).
But even taco jockeys and the weird, pushy old gay sales clerk at Macy’s need a day off to spend with their families (or, in the case of the weird old gay guy at Macy’s—an actual person I have in mind—his little lapdog, Snickers—that part is pure speculation on my part). There will always be those who want to work on Thanksgiving for that sweet golden time, of course, but wouldn’t it be worth it to shut everything down for a day or two?
Yes, if you work in retail, you’re going to work Black Friday. All the more reason—before clocking in for a twelve-plus-hour shift—to have the day of Thanksgiving completely off. Gotta have time to sleep off that turkey and dressing, at the very least.
Christmas is another one where I often forget—cozy in my cosseted bubble of quasi-academia—that most people work the day before and/or after Christmas. The idea of working the day after Christmas seems like a death sentence, but that’s not as bad as working on Christmas itself. Whatever Ebeneezer Scrooge is forcing his employees to work on Christmas Day should probably be imprisoned.
The folks in Medieval Europe had the right idea—dozens of feast days to celebrate this or that minor saint or hero. They probably went too far in the other direction, going overboard with merriment. I’m sure there’s a happy medium.
Today, we modern Americans work our fingers to the bone. That’s one reason we’re great, and I’m a firm believer in hard work. All the more reason, then, to take a day or two during this time of year to slow down and relax a bit. We hustle and bustle through the Christmas season with such rapidity and motion, we don’t take the time to savor it.
Shutting down everything but essential services—God Bless police officers and emergency medical personnel for being there on Christmas and Thanksgiving—would be an admirable goal for at least Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as well as Thanksgiving. Open your store up at 12:00 AM on Black Friday if you want, but don’t make your employees come in until right at that moment.
These are just some stream-of-consciousness thoughts I’ve had as I’m wrestling with questions about the proper balance between work and life. But hard workers could use a little downtime with their families during the Christmas season.
I’m hitting the road with my family for a fun-filled trip to Florida. As such, posts will be a bit shorter through the weekend.
That said, it’s also the perfect time to catch up on some reading. Classicist and antiquarian Quintus Curtius just released a massive collection of his blog essays, Digest, which I am excited to, um, digest.
Readers may recall a post I wrote last summer about an essay from Curtius about the ocean. That essay is indicative of Curtius’s depth of thought and erudition; his mind is keenly analytical, and he writes with the perspective of someone who has lived and learned much.
If you’re ready for your blood pressure to spike before you even eat your cholesterol-thick breakfast, here’s an example of the delusional loonies on the Left: a California woman (almost) divorced her husband because he voted for Trump.
This story is a bit old, as it dates back to early 2017, but it’s indicative of where our nation is. It not only demonstrates the intense loyalty of the Left to their progressive dogma, but also how cheaply marriage is held.
The short version is thus: 73-year old Gayle McCormick threatened seriously to divorce her husband of twenty-two years when she found out he voted for Trump (ultimately, they merely separated permanently).
Well, the Commies and “natural conservatives” in Nevada have spoken, and it looks like Bernie Sanders is going to sweep the state’s caucuses. That means he’s currently leading in Democratic delegates heading into South Carolina’s primaries this Saturday.
Joe Biden appears to be in second place, somewhat surprisingly, with l’il Pete Buttigieg in third. That’s going to make South Carolina a big showdown between Sanders and Biden. Biden is banking on blacks in South Carolina to buoy his flailing campaign. Buttigieg will likely flame out (no pun intended) in SC, and the rest of the South, because of those same voters—blacks do not like homosexuality.
All that said, Bernie appears to be in the driver’s seat. While folks are predicting Trump will mop the floor with the ancient socialist, a Sanders nomination is a very dangerous development.
It’s finally here—FIFTY WEEKS of Lazy Sunday. I started this little feature with “APR Pieces” (the feature of last week’s TBT) one year ago, and today marks the fiftieth edition (that’s what the little “L” in the title means, for those not familiar with Roman numerals).
When I took the blog daily in 2019, I realized I needed at least one or two days of easier posts, as churning out seven totally original posts a week is tough (even writing five is challenging sometimes). Thus, Lazy Sunday and TBT were born. While TBT is a fun way to look back at past scribblings, Lazy Sunday is useful for grouping disparate posts thematically.
Naturally, Sunday is one of the slowest days for views, and I don’t often put a “read more” tag on Lazy Sunday posts, so they have pretty low views overall (I imagine many subscribers read the posts in their e-mails, then click-through to the linked pieces; my limited data from WordPress suggests as much). So that’s all to say that the “Best” of Lazy Sunday is still way below my most-viewed posts.
Anyway, that’s enough sausage-making. Here are some of the most-viewed Lazy Sunday installments:
There you have it! Six beefy Lazy Sundays to reread and re-enjoy. There are forty-nine other good ones, too! Show them some love.
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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Teaching is a profession that attracts complainers. Teaching requires some risk-tasking, but it’s fundamentally a job for folks that want great degrees of stability. When that stability is disrupted, teachers, being creatures of habit and order, get ornery.
That might explain, in part, the high turnover in the teaching profession. We live in an increasingly disordered world, even in the classroom. Part of that disorder is the assumption that children are somehow wiser and more morally pure than their elders.
That’s a notion that goes back at least to the counterculture movement of the 1960s (not to blame, pedantically and predictably, all of our problems on that misguided, suicidal decade): the youth a moral vanguard, crusading against the long-established order and its absurdities. The outraged shrieking of a youngling carries with it, the culture suggests, greater weight than the elderly master with decades of experience and accumulated wisdom.
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I’ve written a couple of pieces (here and here) about the so-called “God Pill,” and specifically Roosh V‘s remarkable conversion to (Orthodox, it seems?) Christianity. Roosh’s conversion, it seems, is quite sincere, and he’s put his money where his belief is by unpublishing many of his books dealing with “game,” the art of seduction.
Roosh wrote an essay about a month ago, “How I Turned To God,” in which he explains the events and influences that led to his conversion. Roosh was the archetype of the atheist materialist: an evolution-espousing microbiologist, who then began a successful—if only in the material sense—career as a professional Don Juan.
He literally had sex and wrote about it for a living. As he writes, “How could a man who was so far from God come to have complete trust in Him practically overnight?”
The Portly Politico 