Bad times made better by Happy Meals

I miss the days before the dot.com bubble burst. Those were fun days (even though we knew it couldn't last). My husband, at my request, bought us two adult Happy Meals. Those dot.com days were happy -- there were daily articles on the "next next big thing," we talked weekly about the "next killer ap" and there were monthly articles on the rise of female executives and the age of Aquarius (sounded good, anyway). These days, we hear about killer aps, but it is generally meant literally as causing death instead referring only to market competition.

These days, I find it hard to write anything, whether fiction, journalistic or essays. The book I fantasize about writing and occasionally draft chapters for seems to me best suited for more heady times. Perhaps, that is only wishful thinking on my part. To write it now seems even more an act of treason, especially in a climate where some people are toeing the line for the war effort. Even those with enough ego to make artistic statements in recent times, they tend to lack subtlety.

Now that I've named the malaise I feel -- the weight from watching news about warmongering, anti-woman, price-gouging, corruption, and secret ways to stick it to everyone -- maybe now I can work up enough rage to release that head of that steam once in a while by sticking it to my fictional characters or doing mental and verbal gymnastics with an essay or two that require more than fifteen minutes of sustained thought.

By the way, those McDonald's pedometers I mentioned in a blog entry last week (which has gotten an amazing number of Google hits) is no pedometer at all. It is a stepometer. We both got the black models. They have no ability to measure distance -- only steps. Still, that's something to get for free in a brightly-colored cardboard box. The color orange almost always cheers me up.