I actually met someone today who wanted one of Apple’s new iPad’s. It was one of those situations where the other person is thinking the exact opposite of you but their words are ambiguous.

Them: Oh my god, can you believe the new iPad that Apple is releasing?
Me: I know! What a piece of shit! What were they thinking?!
Them: What?! It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!

I take solace knowing that this is the first person I’ve spoken to face-to-face since its announcement that actually disagreed with me. I just don’t understand a device like this. It’s nothing more than a content delivery device, except the content that it’s capable of delivering is expensive and restrictive, while at the same time being free and freely available to anyone NOT using it. When did people start wanting to pay for things they can get for free? Movies, music, games, TV shows, and all other media can be obtained absolutely free of charge, and yet Apple is not only trying to make you pay for it, but they’re also trying to make you pay for the device that delivers it. It’s ludicrous!

For clarification, I’m not referring to illegally-obtained content. I’ve passed that phase of my life and have joined the anti-piracy ranks. If you want something that someone else is selling, you have to pay the price they’re asking. If you think they’re asking too much, don’t buy it. It’s just that simple. Fortunately, these days, content providers aren’t asking that much. Services like Lala.com and Pandora let you listen to music for free. You can watch TV and movies for free through Hulu and just about every major broadcast network posts full episodes of their shows to watch online. Flash-based games are all over the internet in every genre you can imagine. It’s the same exact content that Apple is trying to sell you, only it’s free and can be used without a special device!

Let me put this in perspective. TV is free. I can go out and purchase any television I choose, hook it up to a digital antenna, and get about eight channels of free HD television with remarkably good quality. If I want more than eight channels with better quality and more reliability, Comcast has a “digital economy” package that gets me 50 HD channels for $35 per month. That’s the regular price, not some temporary introduction price, and dirt cheap compared to buying the HD episodes through iTunes at $3 each.

If I want movies, I can borrow one from a friend for free, or for only $8.99 per month I can get eight to ten movies by mail (including delivery time) and unlimited access to streaming movies through Netflix. For that price you could maybe rent three movies through iTunes. If I want to play video games I’ve got my choice of new systems like a Wii or xBox or PS3, or I can get on eBay and pick up an older system like a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis (with seemingly the same quality of graphics as many iPhone games). Keep in mind that all of this can be done with practically every TV sold in the last decade.

However, what Apple has done with the iPad is the equivalent of a TV manufacturer deciding that they don’t want people watching anything on their televisions that wasn’t purchased directly through them. You buy their televisions at the same price that you’d pay for a regular TV, but instead of being able to hook up an antenna or subscribe to Comcast or rent Netflix movies, you’ve got to pay this company for every single individual TV show and movie you decide to watch. You can play games, but only the games that they sell. There’s some free content, but it’s limited, so you can watch the anchors read the news, but you can’t watch any of the video clips. You can’t borrow movies or games from a friend, nor can you lend anything to them. Essentially, unless it’s approved and sold by the manufacturer, you can’t use it on their TV.  That’s what the iPad is.  That’s what Apple has created and marketed as “magical” and “revolutionary.”

Do people really think this is a a good idea?!  What possible reason could people have to want to let Apple install a content store in their homes? It seems to me that we’ve become so driven by media consumption that we can no longer tell when we’re being ripped off.  Are there really enough people out there with enough disposable income to purchase every song and movie and TV show and game they want through iTunes? Even if there are, they either don’t know or don’t care that practically the same content can be obtained for free or at least for much less than the price Apple is charging. Don’t misunderstand me. The iPad certainly LOOKS stylish. It’s light-weight with a long battery life and a beautiful display.  I can easily envision myself loading it up with movies to watch on the plane ride to Tokyo next year.  It’s an appealing thought, but until it’s open enough to view whatever content I’d like, to include the ability to install any browser plug-in I choose (you know, like I can with every other computer in the world), then it’s really nothing more than an expensive way to give Apple more of your money. The iPad might as well be a well-designed $500 envelope for you to send money to Apple, stamp not included.

I often have trouble understanding why lines like that are drawn.  Like turning 21 and suddenly being magically old enough to drink, my credit score went from the low 500’s to the mid-700’s in an instant.  If you think about what a credit score represents, this doesn’t even make sense.  It essentially means that one day I existed as a terrible risk to lenders and the next day I was a desirable borrower.  It all adds to my feeling that so much of everyday life has been ruined by bad people.  I can rant about a lack of common sense in the world and make sarcastic comments about replacing under-writers with policy robots, but the simple fact is that those policies exist because there are bad people in the world who exploit good-will and those people have ruined it for the rest of us.

Philosophy aside, I’m so happy in my new place!  Jaxon and I stayed there this weekend and had a good time.  The windows are almost floor-to-ceiling windows so Jaxon can easily look out them.  He loves climbing up and down the multi-tiered deck in the yard and he had a great time running through the house and hiding in closets.  The house came with a hot tub, and while I didn’t really think I’d use it all that often, I soaked in it for a bit on Saturday when Jaxon was napping and I can honestly say that it’s something I can see myself doing on almost a daily basis.  It was lovely!

I’m already envisioning all of the updates I can make to the house.  First on the list was to mount my computer to the wall of the built-in desk in the kitchen.  Done!  Next up is pavers in the back yard with a small fire pit.  Or maybe new lighting fixtures around the house.  Or perhaps I could put together a small garden for spring.  So many options!  Of course, I could just focus on actually moving my stuff over first.  One step at a time.

Like many reptiles, Axas eats crickets. Once per week, fifteen live crickets are dropped through one of the small openings in the top of his enclosure and the lid is quickly locked back in place, lest he try to make a break for it. If you’ve never seen a gecko eat a cricket, it’s really a very primitive, predator/prey sort of experience, as Axas slowly maneuvers himself into position and patiently waits for a cricket to pass by his motionless face. Then, when the time is right, he strikes! Pouncing swiftly and deftly, he engulfs his pray which disappears into his gapping mouth. Then he slowly and carefully repositions himself for another attack. The whole thing is quite primal.

A few months ago, Jaxon was with me on my cricket run and I discovered that he loved everything about it. He enjoyed the pet store and the friendly employees there. He liked watching the crickets jump around in their large tub while they’re wrangled up and dumped into a bag, which is then filled with air like a balloon and handed to him to carry. They bounce around in the bag and he laughed and smiled as he watched them. He enjoyed it so much that I decided to make it a regular part of our Wednesday night routine. He’s really good at it now and the pet store employees all know him. He says, “rickets peace” which the clerks know means “crickets please.” And after they hand him the bag he says, “tank-oo” meaning “thank you.” The first few times he shook the bag but now he carries them very carefully with two hands, right in front of his face so he can see them. I hand him two dollars which he then hands to the check-out clerk. We get thirty-five cents in change, and some of the clerks even try to count it out for him. Then he walks away beaming with the “rickets” clutched carefully to his chest. I think he likes the responsibility.

When we get home with them, he likes to stand on his stool and stare into the terrarium while I dump the crickets in. Whenever he’s at my house he always takes a few moments to look in at the “echo” and watch the crickets. He laughs as they jump around, but quickly loses interest before Axas starts eating. This week was different, however. Usually Axas is at the back of the enclosure but tonight he was towards the front where Jaxon watches from. As I released the crickets to their final home, one happened to jump quickly right in front of the hungry gecko’s mouth. With food literally falling right in front of him, Axas went for it. However, in his haste to capitalize on the opportunity, he didn’t bother to set himself properly for the attack. He was slow and his pounce was clumsy. The cricket saw him coming and tried to jump away, but even a slow gecko is fast, and his jaws clamped down on his dinner. Barely. He only caught the back third of the cricket, enough to ensnare it in his jaws, but not enough to kill it outright.

And there was Jaxon, inches away, watching in horror as the cricket hung out of the gecko’s mouth, writhing in pain. Another quick lunge and a snap of his jaws and Axas had completely consumed it. Jaxon screamed. Then he started to cry and bang on the glass, repeating “RICKET! RICKET!” over and over again. Then came the long wails of “RIIIIIICKEEEEEET!” as I swooped him up, patted his back, and removed him from the scene of miniature carnage. He cried for five full minutes and no amount of comforting seemed to stop the tears from streaming down his face. He was obviously devastated that one had been eaten. Perhaps he thought of them as pets, since I let him have so much responsibility over them, and he had formed some sort of emotional attachment to them. Did he think that we simply purchased the same fifteen crickets every week? I often wish I could see his thoughts. Of course, maybe he didn’t care about the crickets at all. Maybe the simple fact that he had just watched one living thing get eaten by another was traumatic for him. Either way, he wasn’t happy about it.

After about half an hour I was finally able to convince him to go back into the room and look into the terrarium. I didn’t want him to suddenly be afraid to go anywhere near it. Axas had eaten his fill for the day and was resting comfortably behind his little pond. Jaxon looked in, smacked the glass, and in a very stern voice said, “echo!” Then a cricket hopped in front of the glass where he was looking in and he smiled and looked at me. Did he think it was the same cricket that had been eaten? I’m not sure, but he was suddenly ok. He watched for several minutes, longer than I have ever seen him stare in, and then walked away to play with one of his toys, clearly satisfied that the gecko would not be eating any more crickets tonight.

He’s asleep now, and I’m wondering what, if anything, I should do with this situation. If he was five and his goldfish had just died, I would probably sit down and talk to him about it. But he’s only two and with his limited vocabulary, it would be a very short discussion that he likely wouldn’t understand at all. He doesn’t seem to be afraid of Axas, since he went back into the room later that night on his own and looked in for a moment. I guess I’ll just assume that he’s ok and see what happens next week. I don’t plan on letting him watch when I dump the crickets in though.

This is the story I think of when I read articles like this, along with the accompanying comments.  In my opinion, the comments are more entertaining than the article itself.  They’re filled with techies ranting and raving as profoundly as they can about why the article is wrong or why it’s right or why the person three comments up is an idiot.  Every once in a while someone will claim to have some secret understanding that everyone else has missed, and you’ve even got one or two that make very valid and logical points that are promptly ignored by everyone around them, as if the truth of the matter isn’t what’s really important.  Of course it’s not important.  The whole thing is akin to furniture salesmen arguing about the latest advances in desk drawers.  Does the average consumer really care?

However, since this blog is now my outlet for the rants that fill my head on a daily basis, I’m going to give my reasons for why I think this article, and nearly everyone who commented on it, is wrong.  There was one person who got it right.  About three-quarters of the way down, gmat says:

I always have a hard time understanding anyone who looks at every product as a “one size fits all”

This is the sentiment I’ve been preaching for years.  Computers don’t have to be an either or, and new products are perfectly capable of standing on their own without needing to be compared to other products in the same category.  Why is the Apple vs Microsoft fallacy so important to some people?  Why do we, as the followers of tech news, have to immediately judge every new product that comes out as either a gift from the gods or completely unfit to even be spoken of?  Why can’t I love my Apple iMac for the media powerhouse that it is, while at the same time enjoy the wonders of hard-core gaming on my Windows machine?  Why are we forced to pick sides?!

Well I, for one, refuse to do so.  I have yet to see a bit of mainstream technology, released by a reputable company, that didn’t have at least some practical use, and Google Chrome OS is no exception.  When reading through the comments, I especially disliked those who insisted that it will be a failure simply because it caters to a niche market.  I can easily see a Chrome-powered netbook sitting on my kitchen counter and functioning as a super-charged recipe book; one that allows me to easily share new recipes with friends, sync grocery lists with my phone, and display not only pictures of what the finished dish should look like, but also video of how to create it.  That’s something that the giant 24 inch screen of my iMac couldn’t easily accomplish, and a niche that my Windows computer has far too many wires and components to adequately fill. And who says that Google’s goal isn’t to fill a niche?  Who said that this OS is Google’s attempt to compete with Apple and Microsoft?  In my limited observation, I’m of the opinion that Google doesn’t even want to be the next Apple or Microsoft.

Take the ATM story for example.  Does the owner of a single ATM want to be the next Wells Fargo?  Of course not.  And just because they’re in the ATM market doesn’t mean that they’re trying to compete with a national bank.  The fact that both own and operate something called an ATM doesn’t automatically create a direct link between the two.  They each exist in the ATM world to cater to entirely different consumers.  That’s exactly how I view Chrome OS.  Just because it’s called an operating system, doesn’t mean that it’s designed to compete with Windows or OS X.  Google has never been the type of company to look up at a giant like Microsoft and say, “What can we do to compete with them?”  If that was the case then they’d be charging for their services and running commercials featuring celebrities spewing dialog like, “Hi, I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC, and I’m a Chrome OS netbook.”  Instead, they look out at the world and say, “What can we do to make people’s lives simpler?”  They’re not designing an operating system to replace the other operating systems in our homes.  They’re designing it to compliment them.  They’re saying, “This is what people already do with their computers, so let’s give them a computer that will help them do it better.”  And that, to me, is why Chrome OS will be successful.

I was having a quiet evening in with just myself and decided that I was too lazy to cook.  I had heard something about Domino’s having a new pizza recipe so I decided to give it a try.  I called them up and a gentlemen answered the phone and asked what he could get for me.  I didn’t need much, so I asked for the price of a medium two-topping pizza.  $12.99, I was told.  Having ordered many a pizza in the past, that seemed a little high.  I can recall times when I’ve purchased as many as three pizzas for less than $15.

I should take a moment to explain that I’m not a pizza connoisseur.  I have never in my life tasted a pizza, that I’ve purchased from a reputable pizza establishment, that I didn’t like.  Certainly there’s some pizza that’s better - much better - than others, but I tend to think of the taste scale for pizza as starting with good and moving up.  Bad pizza just isn’t something I’ve ever experienced.

So not wanting to spend that much, I asked a question that I’ve always assumed was a standard question when ordering pizza.  ”Do you have any specials right now?”  I was a little taken aback when the answer I received was, “Well what are you looking for?”  Was this person just lazy and didn’t want to read off the specials, or were there just so many specials that he couldn’t possibly read them all off in a timely manner?  Either option seemed unacceptable to me.  Regardless, was it not obvious what I was looking for?  I had just asked for the price of a medium two-topping pizza, and was clearly unsatisfied with the answer or I wouldn’t have asked for the specials.  I wasn’t in his shoes, but I’d like to think that if I was, I could conclude that my customer was looking for the best price he could get on something resembling a medium two-topping pizza.

Clearly, this person did not make that connection, so I answered his question with, “I’m looking for the best price I can get on a medium two-topping pizza.”  He answered that they didn’t have any specials on medium two-topping pizzas, and then instead of volunteering what specials they did have that might get me close to what I wanted, he paused and waited for my response.

I was getting frustrated, and it was only made worse by the fact that I could tell he was getting frustrated as well.  This was his job.  With no menu in front of me, this person was my only link to the products that his establishment was selling.  Did he really expect every customer who called in to automatically know what they wanted?

I made things more clear for him.  ”Can you please tell me all of the specials you have for one pizza?”  He replied, “We’ve got one large two-topping and an order of wings for $15.99.”  And then he paused again.  Seriously?  There was one special right now involving one pizza?  At least I had my answer to whether or not he was lazy.  I was angry now.  I thought my use of the phrase, “best price” implied that I was looking to spend less than 12.99.

My approach wasn’t working, so I tried something new.  ”Ok, what’s the most pizza I can get for less than $12.99?”  ”Well, we’ve got a special for two medium two-topping pizzas for $11.99.”  GAH!  It took every ounce of will-power I had in my body not to yell at him.  My very first question was for the price of a medium two-topping pizza and the price I was quoted was $12.99.  And yet for some reason I was forced to jump through hoops to find out that I could get two medium two-topping pizzas for $1 less than the price of one?!  I’m sorry, but that’s intentionally deceptive.  If the special price for two pizzas is less than the regular price of a single pizza, don’t offer the single pizza as an option to your customers!  If someone inquires about a single pizza, let them know about the special.  And if some customer happens to call in and say that they don’t want the second pizza, charge them the price of the special and just give them one!

Here’s how the conversation should have gone:

Him: Thank you for calling Domino’s, what can I get for you?
Me: How much is a medium two-topping pizza?
Him: Regularly it’s $12.99 but we have a special right now and you can get two for $11.99.
Me: Great, I’ll take it!

Was that so hard?

My mortgage lender is currently a shining example of a remarkable lack of common sense.  Here’s the situation.  I’m currently applying for a mortgage.  I also have student loans which are in deferment because I’m still attending school.  My lender is asking for two things:

1. That my student loans be in deferment for at least 12 months.
2. That my monthly payment after the deferment period be no more than $250 per month.

The first part is easy.  I have six months left of school and then the normal deferment period of six months will make a total of 12 months of deferment.  The second part is where I’m getting tripped up.  Naturally I intend to consolidate my loans and take a graduated repayment plan.  Based on calculators I’ve found on the internet, this will put my student loan payment at $221 per month.  However, I’ve called my student loan lenders and they’ve all said the same thing; until I actually do the consolidation, the only thing they can put in writing is what my monthly payment will be for each loan.  The minimum payment for each loan is $50 and I have 18 different student loans.  That means that on paper it’s going to look like I’ve got a $900 per month student loan bill!  Of course, doing the consolidation will automatically put me into repayment, thus losing the 12 months of deferment.

In other words, without the consolidation I have 12 months of deferment but not the monthly payment, yet with the consolidation I’ll have the monthly payment but not the 12 months of deferment.  This is insane!  I just keep thinking to myself, certainly a little common sense should apply here.  Under-writers aren’t robots, are they?  Shouldn’t they be able to see the dilemma?  Or is the mortgage world so shell-shocked that it’s taking the opposite approach that it took a few years ago and denying people who might be well-qualified?

I’m being told that it’ll work out and there’s nothing to worry about, but until I actually have the keys to the house in my hands, I’m not getting my hopes up.

Fortunately I have rational friends who are quite good at telling me when I’m being ridiculous.  As one friend put it, Shanan is a fantastic mother and Jaxon was in good hands.  After all, how many people do you know who put their child in a car seat on a plane?

So after falling asleep well after 4:00 AM and waking up less than three hours later, I was entirely unprepared to face the day.  I showed up for work, got sick to my stomach trying to remember if I told Jaxon I loved him, and promptly went home after several co-workers told me I didn’t look well.  I paced my apartment until I finally got a text message saying that they had landed successfully and that he had actually enjoyed the ride.  That’s when I breathed a big sigh of relief and passed out on the couch for several hours.  Now here it is, 1:00 AM, and I’m completely unable to sleep because I slept through the entire day.  At least I don’t feel sick to my stomach anymore, although knowing he’s so far away and that I couldn’t get to him if he needed me is driving me insane!  I need to calm down.  It’ll be the first Friday I’ve had free in over a year.  I should enjoy myself, right?  Maybe I’ll try to see a movie or something.

I used to tell my friends that I was morally opposed to doing my own work on my house.  I called it my theory of economics: if everyone did their own work, we would be depriving the people who currently do the job professionally of their livelihood.  Landscapers, fencing professions, and carpet installers would all be out of a job.  The economy would collapse!  Then the economy really did collapse, but that’s another story that we’re all familiar with.  The truth is, I was just afraid.  I was working under the assumption that since I wasn’t a professional, I couldn’t possibly do the work nearly as well, or end up with anything resembling a satisfactory result, as someone who did it for a living.

A recent revelation about my own career changed my mind.  I work as an “IT field technician” which basically means that I make a decent living by knowing how to use a computer and being willing to help others who know less than me.  I was recently stopped by a woman who needed help with some sort of conferencing equipment.  I will be completely honest and say that I knew nothing about the equipment that I was being asked to help with.  Had never used one before, nor seen one used, but in this woman’s mind, the fact that I was an “IT guy” instantly qualified me to assist her.  The solution to her problem was simple.  I checked the cables on the back to make sure everything was connected properly, and then picked up the laminated instruction card that came with the machine and followed the instructions step-by-step.  It worked.  She marveled at my technical prowess, insisted that she had followed the instructions herself without success, and declared that I must have some sort of magical “tech aura” that she was lacking which explained why it worked for me and not her.  I’ve heard so many people reference the tech aura that I sometimes wonder if it actually exists.

Of course it doesn’t.  I’m a competent, educated individual who likes to solve problems.  No magic involved.  I’m certain that this woman is also a competent, educated individual who simply saw a technical term like “IP Address” and became afraid that she was going to break something.  Very likely the same fear that I experience when I try to imagine myself installing a new sink faucet or laying pavers in the back yard.  Maybe all I need is a little confidence and I can find my inner do-it-yourselfer.

I’ve already started to make a list of things I want to do to the house.  I know, that can turn out horribly bad if the worst happens and I don’t get the house.  I just can’t help it though!  The house is move-in ready but there are still so many upgrades and little cosmetic changes that can be done to make it my own.  I’ve got 19 things on my list so far, ranging from small projects like adding a garbage disposal to major undertakings like installing an underground sprinkler system.  I estimate it’ll take me the better part of a decade to finish everything.  First up?  Playroom for Jaxon!

I’ve never really been one to track my mileage or pay attention to how much I’m paying in gas.  I viewed it as a necessary expense that I didn’t really have a choice about, like paying your power bill.  You turn on the stove when you need to cook something and you turn the heat up when you’re cold and a blanket just isn’t enough and you don’t really stop to think about how much it’s costing you.  You just get the bill at the end of the month and you pay it without questioning the amount.  My paradigm for driving is the same.  I have to drive, at the very least to transport my son, and driving requires fuel, so it’s not like I could choose to stop buying gas.  Nor do I put any significant thought into where I’m going.  When I need milk I have to go to the grocery store, and the best way to get there is to drive.  I don’t have a choice.  However, when I sat down and saw that I was spending $300-$400 in gas per month, I realized the choice wasn’t so black and white.  Maybe I could just drive less?  There’s a novel idea…

So I’ve set myself a gas budget of $100 per month.  At first I thought that was pretty low, but I decided to give it a shot.  If I can make it for just one month, then I can increase it a little bit with the knowledge that if I had to, I could make it on less.  When I did the calculations at $100, things didn’t seem so bleak.  My car can go about 300 miles in the city on a full tank of gas, which can be purchased for roughly $45.  So $100 is two tanks of gas, plus a little extra if I need it, which is about 600 miles per month.  So in a typical 30-day month, I should be able to drive 20 miles per day.  20 miles!  When I saw that I said to myself, “This is going to be easy!”  It’s about two miles from my apartment to my job and the one main road that runs between the two has everything I need.  So in theory, I should be able to stick to 10 miles per day if I had to.  How wrong I was.

It’s the 11th of January and that means that by the end of the day I should have driven no more than 220 miles.  Yet my trip meter says that I’ve driven 210 so far this month.  A two mile drive home will put that at 212, which is certainly within range of my plan, but not by much.  And the worst part is that I didn’t leave home at all on Saturday!  Didn’t even step out of my front door for a whole day.  That means that I’m driving over 20 miles per day.  HOW?!  Most days I drive to work and back home.  That’s four miles.  Sometimes I pick my son up or drop him off at daycare which adds a few more miles, but is still less than 20.  I’ve had to take one day this week to go to the house for the inspection, but the house is only half a mile from my work.  I haven’t gone to Portland at all, nor have I taken any casual drives.  So where the hell am I going?!  Do I need to keep some sort of log book, track every single drive I take, and map it out on Google Maps?  I think I might have to.  I don’t see any other way of getting my driving, and thus my spending, under control.  The good news is that I’m still under my goal, but it’s frustrating to believe that you’ve set yourself an easy goal, only to find that it’s extremely difficult.

While driving back to work today after the inspection of the house that I’m trying to buy, I noticed a man wearing an odd t-shirt.  On the front of the shirt, in big bold letters, was the statement, “I Love My Dick.”  I glanced back as I passed, certain that the back of the shirt would contain some sort of punch line or advertisement for a politician named Dick or something that would transform the crude statement on the front into a witty play on words.  Sadly, it did not.  The back of the shirt was blank which unfortunately meant that the statement on the front was to be taken at face value.  This man was proclaiming his love for his genitals for all the world to see.

I rolled my eyes and felt a twinge of disappointment for our great nation.  My first thought was, “How does a shirt like that even get made?!”  Someone had to have come up with the idea, put it down on paper, and submitted it to someone for approval as an idea that should seriously be considered for production.  That someone could have been the manager of a local t-shirt shop or some company that produces shirts with strange sayings or images on them.  But either way, someone actually approved the idea and passed it along to yet another person who then applied the statement to a t-shirt.  Some store manager or owner would then had to have approved the shirt as something that was worthy to be sold at their establishment and when this man walked in to purchase the shirt, he had to have judged it as being something he was willing to pay money for.  Finally, he had to have paid some employee who then accepted the money and sold him the shirt.  And out of all those people, not one of them looked at it and said, “Is this really a good idea?’  The sad part is, all of them must have answered, “Yes” or the man wouldn’t have been walking down the street wearing it (I’m assuming that he did not create the shirt himself and that he did, in fact, pay for it).

I’ve grown to expect these kinds of cynical reactions from myself.  However, moments later, my mind wandered into foreign territory: a hypothetical argument against the First Amendment.  What gives that man the right to walk down the street wearing such a blatantly crass and rude statement, at the risk of offending everyone around him and being immediately judged as a lower class of person?  I’m sure if confronted he would reference his freedom of speech, however I’m certain that’s not what our founding fathers intended when they penned the Bill of Rights and the amendments to the Constitution.  These were men who were building a nation that was distinctly separate from a nation of tyranny.  A nation where speaking out against the ruling class would get you beheaded or hung.  A nation where worshiping a different god, or even the same god in a different way, would get you burned alive.  Certainly our founders had a much nobler definition of “freedom of speech.”

It is of course ridiculous to think that someone should be arrested, or that it should even be a crime, for wearing a shirt with a crude statement.  Yet doesn’t it also seem equally ridiculous that the very foundation of our country not only defends such a choice, but also declares that it is one of our rights as a citizen of the United States of America?  After all, history is rife with examples of individuals and groups being persecuted for exercising their freedom of speech.  The McCarthy era, for example, is stained with the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of American communists and socialists, because they spoke out against the government.  And isn’t that precisely what was intended by our founding fathers?  Isn’t that the right that should be defended by our freedom of speech?  Just a thought.

The inspection of the house went well.  No major defects, or even minor ones really.  Some of the rooms felt a little small after I started to measure and envision my furniture in there.  And yet the more time I spent there the more I loved it!  The inspector even found a chimney in the attic that ran down to the living room where a fireplace has been walled up.  I’ll know on Tuesday if the mortgage will go through, although supposedly I’m “pre-approved” so I shouldn’t really have anything to worry about.  Sadly that won’t stop me from stressing myself out with worry all weekend.