Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: evolution

  • The Quietly Perfect Holiday: Is There Any Better Holiday Than Labor Day?

    What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?

    For much of my life, I’d have to list Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve as my favorite holidays. But in recent years I think my penchant for Labor Day has exceeded my historical love of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

    Labor Day is a guilt-free holiday that is placed in one of the most beautiful times of year in the Seattle area.

    So many of our holidays (Thanksgiving, President’s Day) fall in the gloom of Seattle’s rainy season. Or they (Christmas, July 4th) have expectations or are just plain loud and overbearing. Or they (Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Day) have some guilt associated with them. Or (New Year’s Eve) I’m just plain exhausted from the demands of the previous month.

    But Labor Day is different.

    Families and Friends don’t expect us on Labor Day. Budgets aren’t destroyed shopping for food and buying presents. It is a day to reward us for our hard work and not to remind us of someone else’s sacrifice. It’s quiet. And September is usually perfect weather in Seattle what with the continued sun and 70 degree days.

    Childhood and parenthood can taint Labor Day, since it usually commemorates the beginning of a long school year ahead. But my kids are older. And my own school experience was decades ago. So that particular emotional taint of Labor Day is over. In fact, for me, Labor Day has just become the perfect expectation-free holiday.

    There aren’t carols written or sung about Labor Day. Labor Day doesn’t usually conjure strong memories of past times and places. But it’s a special day nonetheless. And it has become in my older and wiser years my very favorite holiday of the year.

  • AutoPay and Digital Music Are The Greatest Inventions In My Lifetime :)

    The most important invention in your lifetime is…

    The world has changed so much in my lifetime.

    When I was born, we’d never been to the moon. It’s possible it was all a hoax and we still haven’t been to the moon, but let’s assume that it’s real and we indeed have been to the moon. That was the year after I was born. Pretty amazing. In my lifetime, so much has changed, of course. There are too many inventions and changes to even begin listing since we all know what those are. But, for me, the greatest inventions have been autopay and digital music.

    How much I hated paying bills before the 2000s. How much drudgery it was. There were checks to write, stamps to buy so I could send in those checks, reconciliation at the end of the month to make sure everything was accurate. Then for every day spending there was so much speculation how much cash I might need, then persistent worry I might lose or miscalculate the cash. Now it all — everything — just goes on my Visa which I can then peruse in a few minutes at the end of the month, challenge quickly online with Visa if something seems amiss, and then pay with the click of a button. Every expense imaginable goes on that credit card, and it has just made everything so much easier to deal with!

    And then there’s music.

    How much time did I waste in my life making mixed tapes. Or rewinding cassettes. Or cleaning records. How much money I spent for albums that overall I didn’t like very much but had two songs I liked. And how many times did I have to listen to a song over and over and over again on the radio until the point a song that I might have once liked became absolutely intolerable to listen to, not to mention all the ads in-between songs. But with digital on-demand music, every song I could possibly imagine is right there for free.

    The world has changed so much. Many of these have been bad, some of these have been good, and there’s no doubt it has changed the world so very much in 50 short years.

    But my favorite changes are on-demand music and auto pay. They’ve made my life so much easier and more enjoyable — every single day.