The existence of 401(k)s serves as an admission that salaries/wages are too depressed to extend into retirement the coverage of costs associated with the standard of living a former employee enjoyed while employed. We are goaded, then, to play the game, to be complicit participants, lest we one day lose the comforts to which we’ve…
Until a dispute is resolved in favor of one of the participating parties, it might be supposed that once each party has articulated its argument and, in so doing, established the merit of its position relative to the positions of the other participants–as judged by the notorious Impartial Third Party–the arrangement of participants in order…
Many behaviors which initially appear incongruent reveal themselves, on closer examination, not to be. Often, such discoveries are made possible by differentiating the circumstances surrounding the behaviors in question. For example, one may observe the unconcern with which people converse in crowded places and wonder at why a lone stranger approaching on a hiking trail…
The pedestrian crosswalk signals were in my favor this evening; as I approached intersections, and just before I reached them, the red hand repeatedly yielded to the white man–or the white men, it might be said, since there was the one in the sign and the one that was me. It was as if an…
For one reason or another, I don’t recall it being thirst or hunger, with calm collection I set to wonder at the categories of food and drink humanity has yet to discover. It may seem that the point of view implicit in such a statement is neglectfully dismissive of the plethora and variety of consumables…
Why is a grapefruit known as such, given how dissimilar it is to a grape? More importantly, why is the question framed so? It is only a small perturbation that ripples through the query’s character if the edible nouns swap places, yet the question as written is more likely to be asked than its variant….
The circumstance of customers boarding airplanes shortly after ingesting their purchases affords food handlers employed at airports the opportunity to relax their adherence to hygienic practices. These shortcuts in neglect of cleanliness, while sure to be unpopular with the randomly visiting food safety inspector, can be confidently exercised by the self-centered server, who recognizes that…
Certain resources can be exploited without lessening their quantity. The idea is to mine with your eyes, to reap with your nondisruptive presence. What might one of these resources be? The forest comes to mind. No matter the number of times one stands at the edge of a neatly groomed crop field, stealing glimpses through…
Last year, while loitering in an apartment to which I’d just been granted admittance, I noticed affixed to a closet door a thin, glossy sheet of paper–a page from a magazine, removed neatly and elevated in status to an artifact more deserving of one’s attention than the other pages left behind. On the page was…
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