And our hands feel empty though they’re full, all the time

The latest issue of the New Yorker not only donned quite a lot of a savory shade of green on the cover, yet it also featured one of my recent favorite words: ersatz.

Yesterday I saw a license plate that said “YEM” and it made me smile.

Rant of the minute: FACEBOOK FREE GIFTS
1. Applications are idiotic. Present yourself as you will in real life, do not angst about how you appear by customizing your page on a social networking tool.
2. Gifts mean more if each person only has one to give: how much thought do you put into giving something that doesn’t cost you anything? If you are limited to one free gift, you are more inclined to use it in a witty or meaningful way.
3. Proceeds go to Breast Cancer research. If you’d like to cheat them, you don’t really deserve to be alive.

I saw a guy in a tie that looked exactly like Barack Obama panhandling on the streets of Richmond, Virginia.

ACTUAL CONVERSATION

Me: Blah blah blah gas is obscenely expensive

Canadian: Oh really? What is it?

Me: You would have no idea what to do with that if I told you, as I only know what it is in American dollars per gallon.

Canadian: Well when I was in Mississippi, some of the guys calculated it and gas is much cheaper in southern Ontario than in the States.

Me: Um, gas isn’t the same price everywhere “in the States”.

Canadian: Ya, I know.

Canadian: So, any bad hurricanes yet?

In ancient times, people were nothing. There are reports of villages consisting of, say, 300-1000 people. That’s seven hundred people that may or may not have existed, and it’s nothing either way, as bygones are bygones and such a relative number could never be on the test anyhow. Nothing at all is known about these people: we can’t even discern their sexes. Today, practically every individual in the civilized world could be profiled according to age, sex, race, sexual preference, average toenail length, income level, religious affiliations, education levels, health conditions, country of origin, occupation, favorite British musician… and even with all of this information, it is still nothing to anyone. Profiling our society better doesn’t make our lives more meaningful; I feel as though it would almost be better to be anonymous than to be categorized like merchandise. It’s not dry facts that makes a person who he or she is, though I can’t spew a cleverly worded phrase that captures exactly what constitutes identity either. Mankind used to wander about and herd cattle and live and die in such a setting. Today we are more industrious than we can even understand amidst it. There are innumerable layers of complexity to modern lives and in each decade radical progress is made over the last as the world grows newer and more innovatively improved. To what avail?