Nothing deep or thoughtful…
Tag Archives: Independence Day
Plugging away…
It’s Monday. More specifically it’s Monday before the long Independence Day weekend. By itself, that would be all the reason by brain needed to be vaguely uninterested and disengaged for the next four days. I’m sure that’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to say out loud. I should be filling this space with key words like “commitment,” “dedication,” and “focus,” in case any of the bosses stop by to have a look around.
In my defense, though, it’s not just a response to a three-day weekend. Those are common enough – and while I surely appreciate them, they’re not usually enough to drive me completely to distraction. Tacking on an extra four vacation days to round out the second (and last) nine-day weekend of the summer, though, is a different animal altogether.
The first half of the year – the good half with plague restrictions and social distance and encouragement to stay home – seems to have slipped by effortlessly. I don’t in any way imagine the back half of the year – the part where we’re supposed to get back to an approximation of “normal” from the before times – will be nearly as pleasant. That means whatever days off I scrape together from here on out are going to be carrying an increasingly heavier weight of expectations.
So yeah, I’m just over here plugging away and trying to get through the week with as little fuss and headache as possible… and maybe looking out over the next six months and figuring out where I want to jam in the remaining 123 hours of vacation time to get the most bang for my buck.
Real independence…
Independence Day week is, in my opinion, second only to the week between Christmas and New Years in terms of how little actual productive work takes place inside Uncle’s vast machine. It’s true that not everyone takes the week (or four days) off, but for the most part the number of people on vacation approaches the point of critical mass where it becomes nearly impossible to get anything accomplished if it requires more than two people to be part of the decision-making or work flow. I’m sure there are plenty of old hands who might deny what I’m telling you, but experience tells me that this week is a dead zone for productivity. No matter how many memos you cram into the pipeline, if there’s no one there to read them on the other end, it’s just so many trees falling in the forest.
I’ve always felt like this week was the civilian equivalent to an operational pause – a breather before the long march through summer towards Labor Day and the close of the fiscal year. There are still plenty of people giving the illusion of getting something accomplished, but I suspect that if they were all honest at least half the emails they send are greeted with an out-of-office message. By early in the day Thursday, you’re going to find even the most dedicated of employees giving up the illusion and watching the clock with the rest of us poor dumb working stiffs.
That’s just part of the magic joy that is the trinity of three-day weekends in the summer. They feel different. They’re special. Maybe they hark back to being fourteen and having the whole summer stretched out in front of us like a never-ending weekend. Or maybe we just appreciate the reminder of the life we can look forward to in 20 year, 11 months, and 1 day… if we were so inclined to count the amount of time until we’re eligible for retirement.
Talk about celebrating a real independence day.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Rednecks with explosives. There’s something about Independence Day that makes the rednecks in Ceciltucky especially susceptible to doing stupid shit. Maybe it’s just the long day of drinking cheap domestic beer combined with too many hours in the sun, but I have no idea what makes them think setting off mortar-style fireworks in a relatively dense subdivision makes any sense at all. Trust me, your half-acre yard isn’t nearly as big as you think it is. Then again they’re still better than the asshats up the hill who will undoubtedly commemorate the nation’s independence with “celebratory gunfire.”
2. Egypt. Surprise! The revolution that knocked off the long-time president-for-life of Egypt is in the process of imploding. One only needs to look to the history or revolutionary uprisings to find that they have a nasty tendency to devour their own young. Our own revolution of 1776 is perhaps an outlier because we broke ties with the colonial past, but opted to replace the royal government of George III with a republican government that operated with similar institutions and powers rather than attempting something more like a wholesale change of society. I’d go so far as to speculate that for the average citizen, living under as a citizen under President Washington instead of a subject under King George didn’t change their day to day lives all that much at the micro level. How’s that for sacrilege on Independence Day? Now our associates who are trying to completely remake Egypt? Yeah. That’s a whole different ball of wax. I’m only surprised that it took a year to really get sideways.
3. Buttons. I learned something new yesterday. Apparently the buttons, zippers, and other fasteners on men’s and women’s clothing are on opposite sides. I had spent the last 35 years blissfully unaware of this fact… and now that I know about it, it bothers me. It’s not the button location that bothers me so much as the idea that something so simple in daily life has eluded my notice for so long. It’s left me pondering what other little details on everyday life I’ve managed to avoid noticing.
A message on your birthday…
Today is the 236th anniversary of American independence. It would be exceedingly easy to wrap this post up in the flag and let it be. I’ve done that often enough in the past. Like most other birthdays, we don’t spend much time on the 4th looking at the things we collectively got wrong. That’s ok. We don’t go to Great Uncle Leo’s 100th birthday party and remind him about all the times he screwed up. It’s just tacky. But still, there are going to be plenty of blog posts, news articles, and talking heads eager to point out every flaw. There are plenty of other days in the year to do that. I like to think of today as the perfect opportunity to look see beyond the mindless cheerleaders and the cranky detractors and look at our country for what it really is: a work in progress.
Our founders knew times would change and they gave their fledgling republic the flexibility to change with them. We’ve made some really, really bad decisions as a country… and then we’ve changed direction to right those wrongs. We’ll make more bad decisions in the future and in time we’ll correct those too. Part of the joy of America is that we don’t usually stay on the wrong side of history for very long. In 1776, the United States was one of the few examples of a working republic in a world ruled by hereditary monarchs. Almost two and a half centuries later, only a handfull of monarchs are left and most of them exist as heads of state and not heads of government. As a new founded country we went to war against piracy on the high seas rather than paying tribute, we fought brother against brother to decide what kind of country we would be, passed up the opportunity to gather an empire of our own, stood up against laundry list of tyrants bent on world domination, and then more or less built the modern world. At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader, America is kind of a big deal.
For good or bad, right or wrong, she’s my country and I’m incredibly thankful for having been born a citizen of this great republic.
Inner teenager…
It’s Friday. Before a three day weekend. I’m more than a little surprised that there are more than three people even in the office pretending to work today. Even with a mostly full staff pecking away at their keyboards, it’s painfully obvious that the biggest game in town today is watching the clock roll on towards 4:00… or 3:01 if the powers that be keep up with long-standing pre-holiday tradition. Either way, it’s safe to say we can mostly write today off as professionally useless.
On a related note, I’m usually accused of being a 60 year old man at heart, but long weekends have a tendency to bring out my inner teenager. The anticipation of being turned loose. The rush of heading out the door. Rolling down the windows. Turning the radio up. Forgetting about work for a few days. For me, at some basic level, that’s what freedom feels like. Maybe that’s not such a bad way to kick off the Independence Day weekend.
Musings on the 4th…
It’s hard to come up with a new 4th of July blog that doesn’t repeat the same things I have said year after year. I’m not going to go on about the laurels due the giants of the American founding and I’m not going to rail against the useless hippy bastards that want desperately to think the world is a place of sunshine and puppy dogs rather than the dangerous place it is. All I can really say is that today is the Independence Day, the High Holiday for those of us who pray at the altar of republicanism (that’s a small ‘r’ in case you missed it).
Even I’m not arrogant enough to proclaim that the United States infallible in our actions, but I will argue vehemently that we have done the best we could with the world we inherited from the failing empires of Western Europe. In good times and in bad times, I remain unashamed to say before you and before the world that I love my country. For me it has been a land of opportunity that has given far more than I had any right to hope for while demanding so little in return. I know I’m biased, but I don’t shrink from saying that taking all things as a whole, my country is the greatest on earth, not necessarily because of the global reach of our military or our role in global trade, but because of the nearly unlimited opportunities available to this son of a cop and a teacher. I couldn’t possibly ask for more than the chances I’ve been given… and for those yet to come.
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