Did I go from swimming 400 yards a session to a mile a session? Yep, sure did.

But a competitive swimmer would have been unlikely to notice it as it took about 18 months of just naturally building up to it to do it.

But for God’s sake, why tell people they’re not moving enough or RIGHT? Let ‘em move as they enjoy!

BINGO.

Uh, in the good way. :-)

I know what you mean. I suck at bowling. If I break 100, it’s an unbelievably rare occurrence. About 75 is more typical. And yet, I bowl in a league. I was talked into it by people who “needed a fourth” and there was a giant handicap for me and therefore they insisted that my suckitude would not be an issue for them at all. I haven’t gotten any better at it and I don’t expect to. But the team is in first place. And they think it’s because I function for them as a good luck charm. And they don’t mind in the slightest that I am terrible, and they genuinely enjoy my company as a person. Otherwise there’s no way I’d keep doing it.

Yeah, this “dignity of working” thing is a bunch of crap. It sounds good, but really, anyone who doesn’t have the leisure time to spend 20 hours a week in the gym basically gets spat on in America. I’d be a trustafarian and do what I love all day in a second if I could. (Not of course that I actually want anyone I love to die and leave me money. I’d rather it came from some secondary relative I hadn’t even met more than once or twice when I was too young to remember them.)

My webhost (which is otherwise quite a good service) recently accidentally charged many (or all) of its users for the next, uh, 2 years or so of service all at once. That’s $200-$500, depending on how the accounts were set up. They paid everybody back and then some, even paying overdrafts for folks, but banks being banks it didn’t happen right away and people got understandably touchy about their cashflow problems.

On the message board where people were talking about this, there was such a division between the people for whom suddenly missing a couple hundred dollars is, y’know, a problem… and I really think that’s probably the vast majority of people… and people for whom it’s apparently not. People were saying, in so many words, that if you couldn’t afford a multi-hundred dollar upset that should never have happened, that you shouldn’t be running a website in the first place… you should be looking for “a real job.”

Like this billing fuck up was some intrinsic economic barrier that naturally existed in addition to a $10 a month or so fee in order to regulate who had access to the privilege of web presence. If you’re running a cash register or slinging coffee, you ought to know better than to try.

Here I see parents way richer than my family was going nuts trying to figure out how to put their kids through college. I have students – several students – who can’t hear well because of untreated ear infections in infancy. Hell, I had a kid with ulcers whose parents resorted to faith healers because they couldn’t afford the treatment. There’s a lot of stuff like that. I realize that there are also absolutely top-notch schools within a few miles of mine, with drama programs, and technology, and great student-teacher ratios, but the existence of these schools doesn’t help my kids one bit.

Sigh. Depressed now.

Sigh.

You’ve smacked the nail on the noggin here!

Honestly, I don’t think people value work. Most (but not all) people talk about the value of earning an honest living as a way to discourage any kind of social welfare, not because they truly respect those who work. I have yet to meet a person who worked in a service position who was not treated like an lowly idiot on a daily basis. My friends and I have been: spit at, insulted, cursed at, had customers do things like pee on the floor to get revenge on us (true story, though not mine). We’ve been called losers, idiots, mental retards, wastes of life. We have been told that we are too stupid to perform normal functions. We have been condescended to. We have been told that our sole function is to grant our customers every desire, no matter how impossible or degrading.

While I’m sure that not everyone out there is like that, I do believe the many people see only their own value in society, and not anyone elses.