Mr T's rants and ravings

So I have to finish writing up my business commitments for the new year. The first draft is due today. Yes I am taking a break. I’ve been working on it most of the day so far. After the last several very rainy days I felt like I needed some fresh air and some sun. So I moved out to my back yard. I am under a sort of awning I guess you could call it and sitting on a hammock. Occasionally I lay down but I’m pretty much working on the laptop except when I am going through printouts (I still need paper some times). It’s a relaxing environment.
There is a rill with babbling water running through it about 40 yards behind me. I hear birds singing and there is a squarel eating some food I left out for him about 30 yards away. He just chased a chipmonk away. Occasionally of course a car goes by and that is less calming but since the road is freshly paved it is not so jarring as it was.
Technology makes this possible of course. The wi-fi reaches hear easily. I have both my cell phone and a portable landline for my business number sitting on a chair beside me. I can easily send things to the printer inside as it is on the network. I have all the benefits of an office but a whole lot more. It would be very hard to have to work in a regular office on a regular basis again. I could do it if the job was right but honestly there would have to be more than just money involved.
Is this the way of the future? A year ago I would have said yes but the price of gas may change things. Oh sure one saves money going to work but if it become to expensive to live outside of cities because any other travel is too expensive people may not be in such a hurry to adopt the idea that they can live and work anywhere. City life causes its own troubles though. Without good mass transit travel in the city is no fun at all.
Well for the time being I can afford to live where I do. And I can work from anywhere. So life, for now, is good.

I believe that everything has a story. Some stories are trivial and some are not. I suspect that one can’t tell if the story is big or small by the item though. Money is an example.

Yesterday I found a five dollar bill on the ground. It was wet and dirty but there is no way of telling how long it has been on the ground or how it got there. It may be that someone lost it and never knew it was missing. Perhaps they had plenty of money and losing was lost in the noise as it were. But on the other hand perhaps to the person who lost it losing it mattered a good deal. Could it have meant the difference between a good meal and no meal at all? Could it have meant that they ran out of gas on the way home? There are all sorts of ways where losing $5 could be a big deal to someone.

I also found a dime yesterday. Now a dime is a whole lot less valuable than a five spot so it probably didn’t change anyone’s life. But I’ll bet if one really thought about it one could make up a good story about it.

So I found $5.10 yesterday. The dime is going into my change fund but I’m not sure about the five. Spend it – on something fun or on regular expenses? Or put save it for something? Tough questions. What do you do with found money?

So this is a risky post. I’m going to talk about naked people. Sort of. The big news today was that Lindsay Lohan has taken part in a photo shoot to re-create the last photo shoot that Marilyn Monroe did. The pictures are in New York magazine. Apparently the pictures are so popular that the magazine’s web site crashed. The Today show showed some of the pictures with a big read "ribbon" in strategic places.

This brings up item number one. Apparently you can show as much of a woman’s breasts as you want as long as the nipples don’t show. This is an advance from the past. The old "I Dream of Jeanie" show was not allowed to show belly buttons. The original Star Trek was not only not allowed to show nipples but could not show the underside of a breast. I had no idea the underside was so much more titillating than the top side. Sigh.

Recently I watched a few minutes of a show on Discovery Channel or Travel Channel (I wasn’t paying much attention) that was chronicling life in an African village. The women wore nothing but jewelry above the waist. The nipples were magically airbrushed into invisibility. I guess if you can’t see them they aren’t there. And if they aren’t there no one will get all excited. I mean really, do they think no one knows what they look like?

Coming back to Ms. Lohan’s photo shoot. I’ve seen some of the images from Marilyn Monroe’s shoot. They have been on display in an fancy art gallery near where my father lives. They’ve been put on display in the windows with no Today style red ribbon. Apparently no one complains. Now I think the images are more artsy than erotic though I’m not sure I’d be comfortable having them on display in my house. They are not quite our style. I suspect that Ms. Lohan’s images are the same. But somehow I doubt that the people whose traffic crashed the web site were looking for art.

Outside the US attitudes about showing the human body are different. Bare breasts, and other body parts, are more common and people tend not to get all worked up about it. I was on a beach, quite unexpectedly I assure you, where a number of young women were topless. Honestly you can get used to it pretty quickly and it need not get one all hot and bothered. I asked a BG student once about a visit a group of them made to a nude beach oversees on a field trip and his comment was that "not everyone looks good naked." No kidding!

But of course in the US we make such a big thing of it that when people do see it they get all bothered because, in part I think, they think they are supposed to. Is this helpful? I’m not so sure it is.

Now I am not advocating a sudden and dramatic change nor am I suggesting that we need more nudity in the world. It just seems that f the way we treat the nude form contributes to the objectification of women. We let or perhaps encourage people to look everywhere but at the face. It becomes all about how a woman looks and not who she is. I think I need do little more than suggest one watch a minute or two of "Deal or No Deal." Does anyone really believe that show would be as popular without "hot women" in short dresses with lots of cleavage holding the suitcases? I don’t think so. Could you recognize any of them by their faces? Somehow I doubt it.

The photographer who took these pictures is an artist to be sure. But it seems like everyone else involved from Ms. Lohan to the magazine are just using her body to make money. And that seems to me a shame.

There are times when I just want to get away from it all. I get tired of the people, the work, the phone, the Internet, the TV and pretty much all the distractions of daily life. I read an article today about a guy who built a cottage in his back yard to get away a little. I think I like that idea. Of course people can find you a little too easily there so maybe some times you have to go further away.

I like to go to my Dad’s house when he isn’t there. Now don’t get me wrong I love visiting my Dad. In fact I’ll be visiting him in about a week and a half for a couple of days. But he has a house in a summer resort area that he’s not always at in the winter. To me going there then is just relaxing. Now I could not do it often or for long. Mrs. T went away for a couple of days tonight and I miss her already. But sometimes and for short times it is a good recharge.

Probably the ideal world would be to get away from everyone but my wife with us each going our own ways during the day. I’m sure not ready to live completely alone for a long time. Although to be honest, if not for my wife, I think I could get used to it.