An Economy in Winter...

Even though it's Friday, it's technically the weekend. It's nice to have that bonus day. I slept in this morning and reveled in that fact. Of course, my idea of sleeping in is to just not have to get up for an alarm. Try as I might, rarely can I sleep past 8:30 a.m. anymore. I really don't mind that fact any more. I like to go to bed a little earlier and get up a little earlier. That's the way my body clock works and there's no point in fighting it.

I think it's a marvellous thing we have weekends. While I was being lazy in bed this morning and ignoring the million things I should do if I got up, I wondered what life would be like without weekends. We're a spoiled bunch if you compare us to the workers of yore. Back a few centuries, people used to get Sundays off as it was the Sabbath. That was it. They started earlier, worked later and didn't get time for much frivolity. One of the most depressing books I've ever read, Jude the Obscure, details working life during Thomas Hardy's period and, let me tell you, it was not fun times back then. Poor Jude always fancied himself an academic and dreams of going to University. When he finally does, naturally, being a Thomas Hardy book, it goes wrong and Jude ends up married with a lot of children, poor and miserable.

What I like about that book is it puts you into that time period; the first half of the book is Jude's early life in which he is manipulated into marrying a local girl and you get a feel for his working life. A stonemason, Jude's life is hard, exhausting and not the life he dreamed of as a young man. Reading the book, the simplicity of the hard lower-class life Jude inhabits, you can see how hard it must be. Daylight hours are spent working to provide a way to feed your wife and inevitable child.

It sounds weird but on weekends where I'm allowed to be a little lazy and not follow a schedule, I often think of Jude and his hard working life. I complain about my job but I have nothing to really complain about. I have a job; it's a white-collar one. My hands don't get chapped and blistered from manual labour. The worst that happens is I have carpal tunnel from working on computers and our office is always way too cold because we have to crank the air conditioning up to keep our computer servers cool.

I'm spoiled in more than one sense of the word. As I've mentioned before, I'm truly lucky to have a steady job. Each day that I watch the news, more and more factories and businesses are closing their doors and with the shutdown comes an enormous loss of jobs. It's already affected my family; my brother and brother-in-law have both been laid off. It's tough times. I hold out hope that this is just the darkness before the light comes trickling back in. I read someone's criticism of President Obama on Facebook yesterday. They want to know why his efforts to stimulate the economy aren't working. I say let the man be. It took eight years of George W. Bush in office to bring the economy down to the pits in which he left it. Obama's been in office less than eight months. Give him a chance.

That's the problem, I think. We're impatient. As a civilization, we have moved away from the slow and plodding times in which Jude the Obscure lived. Those were days in which horses pulled carts and ploughed fields, in which people went to bed when it got dark because there was nothing else to do. They were slower times. These days, we get frustrated if we don't get our instant gratification. Online shopping has become popular because there's no waiting in lines, no waiting for that annoying lady who decides to write a check in front of you and then can't find her driver's license to prove her identity. These are days when we scoff at people like her because who uses checks anymore? We connect to the internet like lightning, we cook our food in the microwave because it's quick: Who cares if it's soggy and doesn't taste that nice? It's nourishment and it's quick and yes, we forget that it's still hot and try to eat it before it's cooled down enough to put in our mouths and inevitably, we burn our mouths. We drive fast, the speed limits slowly increasing on the roads over time to accomodate the increasing speed of life.

So why, when we expect speed and instant gratification in everything else, should we expect to have to wait for President Obama to fix everything? I mean, shouldn't he be able to work magic? We elected him to fix things, to make the U.S. a better place. What's he doing? Twiddling his thumbs?

Yes, I'm being fascicious. When I read that comment on Facebook yesterday, I was irritated. I wouldn't want to be the President of the United States for anything in the world. No matter how popular you are when you're elected, unless you make everyone happy, that won't last. We tend to forget that sometimes, we have to take time to do things, we're still humans, after all. We can't yet teleport nor can we control the world by the touch of a button. For that matter, I'm glad about the button-thing. Though teleportation would be nice.

I think the economy is terrible now. It saddens me to drive by stores, factories and restaurants that were once busy and teeming with life fading in the sun, their windows taped over, the signs identifying them removed or sitting their sadly in the grey light of day. Yet I know it'll take time for things to move towards an upswing, to start to improve slowly. In a way, it's like we're in a Winter Phase of the Economy. The bright, sunny days of success and extravagence we had in earlier years have faded away like summer and now we're caught in the barren, yellow-and-grey frozen stage of winter.

Yet, for every Winter there is a Spring to follow. I firmly believe that. I'd like to think that Spring will come sooner than later but, as it was back in Jude the Obscure's Day, when there was no Weather Channel or local news to tell him whether it was going to warm up, I'd like to think it's just a question of waiting for the storms to pass. It may take months, it may take years but eventually Spring will come and our economy will improve.

So, on days like this when I get to be lazy in bed, knowing that it's a long weekend, I take pleasure in that fact. I take pleasure in the fact that even though the world outside my apartment is one of a winter-economy-landscape, we at least don't have the long, dark life of Jude the Obscure. It's all about looking at the small pleasures in life. Sometimes that's all you can do.

Happy Friday (and Independence Day, to all my U.S. readers).

Mr. Obama, Please Save the World Market!

It's back to work today. I suppose I should write about the inauguration since that's definitely the topic on the radio and everywhere else. I know places that have closed for the day out of respect. Not us. Maybe we'll watch it on the internet at work since we no longer have a TV. It's hard to say. Yet, by the time I go home tonight, we'll officially have a new president.

The last inauguration I watched was that of Bill Clinton. I was still in high school then. Maya Angelou was reading an inaugural poem and our English teacher wanted us to see and hear history being made. She was a great English teacher, probably one of the reasons I'm a writer now. I'd like to tell stories of how she believed in me, how she made me believe I could become a published writer.

She didn't. Mostly she was just good at giving feedback and giving me lower grades on papers than I expected which, I suppose, made me work harder. I craved her praise because it meant something. When it came, it would make me happy. When I got a lower grade than my best friend, I would be miserable, wondering what I'd done wrong. I was much more competititive then and I wanted to be the best. I don't think I ever was. My other friend was also a writer and went on to major in it in college. Of the three of us, I'm the only one who ended up wanting to be a full time writer. Maybe there's something to being the average one in high school; who knows?

What I do know is that I remember that teacher more than any other. I remember everything about that Inauguration Day. My best friend and I were in the 'pub' room where we'd be pasting together the latest issue of our high school newspaper. Back then, we used to use a waxer to do layouts, sticky tool-lines to break up content, cropped clip-art to make it more graphic. We didn't yet have the technology to make a shiny, professional looking paper; instead, we thought it was great if the tool lines were straight.

That was the nice thing about being in journalism; we got to spend our lunch hour being silly in the pub room instead of having to sit in the bleachers at the gym, waiting for the bell to ring. When it came time for the Inauguration, our teacher gathered us around a TV set that had been purloined to a classroom. We got to hear Maya Angelou's "A Rock, A River, A Tree" poem live, to see Bill Clinton at his freshest, before the years in office wore him down and aged him.

It's funny. Today is one of the most historic inaugurations ever. Naturally, I think that it's a great thing that we now have a black president but I'm also sad because it's such a big deal; it's one of those things that should be unremarkable, the best man or woman should win the job regardless of their skin colour, race, sexual orientation or sex. Yet I suppose it's still a step forward to the day when none of that does matter and for that reason alone, it is historic.

I'm hoping Mr. Obama does a good job in office. I'm hoping that he lives up to the hopes and dreams that so many have pinned on him. I'm hoping he magically restores our economy so that I don't have to hear horrible things like the local Cost Plus World Markets are closing. I love the World Market. I love that you can buy British goods, German chocolate, wine glasses and Strongbow Cider all in one place at a very decent price. I love the way they give free coffee and tea samples. I love that they have an old-fashioned toy section where the toys don't beep or flash but rely on a child's imagination to make them come alive.

But I digress. I don't think Barack Obama can save the World Market though that would be very awesome. I do think he can start to lift us out of this scary economy where so many have lost their jobs and the threat of more victims looms. It will take time but today is a good start to hope. Sometimes it takes a fresh view to get things going again. Here's hoping President Obama can do that.

Happy inauguration day.