Columbus Day

I was thinking just now, as I joined the line of cars turning around in the post office parking lot because they, too, forgot today was Columbus Day…

I isn’t it funny how so many things we do in life just don’t make a lick of sense? Like waiting in line--does waiting in line EVER make any sense? Does your vision of the future show Lieutenant Data, Captain Kirk and Captain Picard lined up at the spacevenience store waiting to buy a gallon of homogenerous nutra-drink?

Plus, waiting on human beings is bad enough, but if you work in the high-tech field, someday add up the amount of time you spend waiting on computers. Now THAT’S scary.

How about paying money for something with commercials in it?

Flashback: I was eleven years old, adjusting the rabbit-ears on my 12-inch black-and-white TV. My brother was reading a popular science magazine.

“Look! It says here that this newfangled thing called “cable-TV” is coming to the East Coast! Just think! Instead of having commercials interrupt your show every ten minutes, you just pay a monthly subscription fee!”

Gosh, we were naïve. Just let me put on my Dave & Buster’s sweatshirt and my Red Man Chewing tobacco ball-cap and I’ll go cancel my magazine subscriptions.

How about…obeying traffic signals when you can see there’s no cars for ten miles around? Are we man or sheep?

But I’ll bet you, like me, started slipping those little rules as soon as your sweaty teenage fingers closed around your plastic-enclosed drinker’s permit. Red becomes yellow, yield becomes merge, and stop becomes pause-and-twist-the-head-twice-to-both-sides-while-the-car is rolling. Then you notice that the nondescript car half a mile down the road has a man with a hat on in it.

I bet he was just grumpy because he had to work on Columbus Day.