The Beauty of Simplicity and The Car You Are Sick Of Hearing About

First I have to introduce you to Ginger. She is my new 2009 Mazda Miata. Ginger says Zoom Zoom.

Anyone who has known me for a while knows I fell in love with the Miata at first sight in 1991. I finally was able to buy one in about 2000 but had to sell it shortly after that. My wonderful husband has helped me to buy this one, fully loaded with a Bose stereo system, heated leather seats, canvas top, and the upgraded suspension package. Basically if it is available for this car it  has it. She  does not feel like the rickety damp hummingbird my old was. This is a comfortable, sleek racing machine and since I have never had so much as a parking ticket in my life I think its about time I took my chances.

Mark is building a small house in the back that he is calling a shed. This will hold all the junk in the "basement"so that Ryan (his son who is 21) can have a place to sleep, Mark can have his pool/ping pong table, Miranda can have her friends sleep over on the huge couches and I can have my laundry area and some decent storage. This will basically double the size of our house.

We borrowed Ryan's pick-up truck to haul lumber from Home Depot (though I prefer Lowes, I hate the color orange) and once I mounted the thing like a mighty steed, I found some tell tale signs of what Life As Ryan is like. I call it:

YOU MIGHT BE A REDNECK IF...

You own a pick-up. Period.

This pick up requires a ladder, a stepping stool or you to be under 40 to be able to gracefully board it.

...your dash is decorated with your baseball cap collection.

...Your console looks like this:

...and Carrie Underwood's song applies to it.

At first this was all quite funny to me. Ryan certainly fits your stereotypical redneck from Florida. But the more I was in the truck the more I thought about Ryan and the more I started to envy him.

Ryan is at an age now where he is truly on the cusp of manhood and teenagerville, a place most of us navigate poorly or never really do at all. But Ryan is different. Ryan knows who he is. He knows what he likes. He knows what he believes in and has the courage  to stand up for those beliefs. He and I do not see eye to eye on many issues, but his beliefs are so pure they command respect. He is who he is and if you don't like it then you don't have to be part of his life. This all coming from a person who is 21 years old. I know many 50 year olds who have not reached this level of self acceptance. He has his friends and his interests. He has his hobbies and he enjoys his work, which he labors at at a pace I could not have managed even at his age. He pays his bills and he is honest...when it counts (come on he IS 21 still). He respects his parents, the country, and the women, family or friend, he loves. Riding in that truck I realized that Ryan is a simple man. Not dumb, oh no, not by a long shot, but he has a simple life and it suits him.

After a while some questions came to mind. Think about your life. Do you know who you are? Can you list your true friends? Do you know your passions and do you go after them? Do you live your life for yourself and everyone else be damned? Do you have a code of ethics you are proud of and that you uphold? These are not easy things to accomplish, yet Ryan had managed to do it before he was legally an adult. Have you? Maybe its not the antidepressants, alcohol or tranquilizers we need, its simply to live more genuinely.

So yes, he is redneck and I will always have a blast poking fun at him about it, but my sense of self is not as developed as his, I cannot count true friends on more than one hand, and at times I care too damn much what others think of me, and I am almost as old as his mother!

The next time you run across a person who fits a stereotype to a tee just remember that the cliches they represent come from being who they want to be, and if that means country music, chewing tobacco, cowboy boots and a HUGE truck, so be it. 

Tonight he is having a bar-b-que with some close friends, probably around the bonfire in the back yard. They will drink beer from a bottle and probably get around to talking about last year's deer season and listening to some country classics...and all of them will be nourishing their souls on a level I am not true enough to myself to come close to.

You are a good person Ryan. Your father is proud of you, I love you like my own son and you are turning into a fine man (though you should be nicer to your sister, she worships the ground you walk on you know. And running water  over your dirty dishes wouldn't be too bad an idea either, oh and those greasy uniforms......)

Another New Era Begins

Seems people's opinions on liberals and conservatives are pretty well entrenched these days. Personally, I blame the media for creating 3 types of Americans.

On one extreme we have the liberals. Liberals are thought, by conservatives, to be nothing but lazy, good-for-nothings who are too stupid or high to care about the fact that the constitution is being ripped up right in front of their eyes. Liberals have no respect for anything, are all Atheists, which of course makes them evil, want to take all our guns away, and are going to be the downfall of this nation. These ideas, plus the fact the Old White Guard sees its days numbered, have many extreme conservatives stockpiling guns and Spam and building fortresses in Wyoming.

Then you have the other side, the conservatives. To liberals, conserves have no humanity in them. They are money grubbing old white bastards, richer than Americans  should be allowed to be and would not give their own mother a dollar for a loaf of bread if she were starving. They all go to church and believe Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs when the earth was formed 6000 years ago, that Christ is coming soon and the liberals are destroying our freedoms. They cannot say anything without using one of the following words: freedom, America, God, constitution, entitlements. The real words they want to say are forbidden (we are all mortified because there is a black man in the white house...shhhhh).

 Liberals see these extreme conservatives as pitiful , ignorant and paranoid Fox news zombies if they are poor, and scheming world dominators who hate anyone who is not Christian, male, white, straight and rich. "Let them die, it will decrease the surplus population" said the most famous of all extremists, Ebenezer Scrooge.

Then we have the last group who, to me, are the worst group of all. They are the bulk of the rest of America, the truly disenfranchised. They fit in neither extremist category, but because excess sells, the news media only presents the interesting fart left and far right. These middle of the roaders have nowhere to go. They trust no one in the government even though they desperately want to. But they all seem to have very strong opinions on things, yet have no idea what is going on in the world. The news bores them, or scares them, or they do not understand it, so they simply ignore it but ah, bring up any type of current event and they will talk you ear off on the subject they know nothing about. Oh and they are the first to bitch about their representatives or the president but refuse to set foot in a voting booth.

Today I watched Barack Obama be sworn in for a second term. I did not think there would be much of a turn out. I did not think people would care much, or even bother to watch it on TV or listen to it on the radio. After all, the exciting parts are over. We elected our first African-American president 4 years ago and re-elected him 2 months ago so the thrill is kind of gone. But not for me. I wanted to see it again. I wanted to recapture that feeling of hope, and progress and change, all those things Obama so artfully pulls out of me and yes, I do still have faith in him, and even if he ends up failing and going down as the worst president we ever had,  just the fact that we elected him , TWICE, speaks volumes about where our nation is really headed...hopeful and strong into the future.

I am sure liberals to all degrees, including myself, were joyous for many reasons today. Some to celebrate that we again elected a black president, that Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass would be proud as hell, that Americans  can embrace change, we can get rid of the old guard and, if for none of those lofty reason, we can officially thumb our noses at the conservatives and their extremist band of crazies.

My first impression when I turned on the TV, was of a bland second term swearing in. But wait. I looked around and Washington DC was packed full (over a million I heard later on) of people, all bundled up in coats and scarves, little children in mittens and Hello Kitty knit hats. I saw elderly black women cry as Obama spoke, I saw hope in a young white woman's eyes, I saw a small freckle faced red headed girl waving her flag and smiling, almost as if the good feelings there had overcome her (she was obviously too young to know what was going on). And I looked at her face and I saw our future there, just for a moment and I was inspired. When it was over I wished more people had seen it.

 

I headed out to Target shortly after that. I got out of my parked car and the very first thing I saw, I kid you not, was  a man in an Obama/Biden tee shirt. Then I saw a teenager in an Obama tee shirt. When I got into the building I began shopping an overheard a woman on her cell phone talking about how Michelle may not be the snappiest dresser but at least she dresses for herself and not for all of Washington. I heard another person on the phone breaking down Obama's speech, almost like he had it memorized. Then and elderly white woman passed me in what looked like a very expensive sweat shirt, machine embroidered with the presidential seal and Obama's full name around it. I was astounded. This WAS a big deal after all. All the pundits said fans of Obama the first time around were now disappointed, had lost hope, were angry and felt cheated but what I felt today, what I saw today, was just the opposite. I saw that same hope, I saw people excited and happy and looking toward a bright future. I didn't see apathy as I had expected (and I imagine if I were not at a store like Target and in a store like Neiman Marcus I would have seen people crying and carrying signs that this marks the end of the world...like it was supposed to do the first time he was elected...hmmm...).

I guess my point in this is that yes, Since Obama was first elected things have gone nutty in this country, both among the citizenry and among the politicians. Yes there is great fear, of what I do not know, but my guess is it all boils down to a fear of change. But fearing change comes naturally to humans. What doesn't come naturally to us is embracing that change despite the fear. It is not natural for humans to see the future they want and make it happen, regardless of what others say or think. We do not dare tread where others have not, it is not safe, it is not prudent. ...Unless you are an American.  If you rise up above all the fear, the fighting, the horrible name calling. If you look past the lunacy of threats of secession and the nation crumbling and civil war. If you look past our elected officials acting in such childish and spiteful ways these past four years, and of family members pitted against each other over ideas and ideals that never came to fruition. Rise above it and look down. What do you see? We are still here. We still voted our hearts. We kept the faith. We had a peaceful transfer of power. We are still a nation. We are strong, we are proud, we are the U.S.A. and today we took another step into the future, we elected our African American president for the second time, with hopes and dreams still intact and THAT my friends is what has built this nation and will keep her going and THAT is why after the ceremony, after the people in Target, I sat in the parking lot and wept.