Ok, as any regular reader of my blogs (Cammy, this means you) has probably noticed by now, I'm not on any sort of regular schedule of posting. This is my first post of April, and we're closing in on the sixth day of the month (Happy Tartan Day, all you Scottish-Americans out there!) I'm sorry if anyone has missed me, but I do have a life offline, as the photo above is meant to imply.
So, I'm a little dismayed at reading this in the New York Times. The story is about a few bloggers who have died because of the stress of posting regularly for paid blogging jobs. Of course, I'm not getting paid to blog, but I do get paid to write and edit. That is, after all, what I was placed on this earth to do, as far I've been able to tell. (Though the cats beg to differ.) But blogging is not worth dying over, no matter what someone gets paid.
Now, I must admit, it never occurred to me that my occasional posts might be worth a minimum of $10 each. I mean, come on! Who in the hell cares what I have to say? I don't care what presidents and members of Congress have to say, most of the time. (Funny aside -- at least I think it's funny -- I was driving home just a little bit ago and heard John Lennon's Give Me Some Truth and I thought, if I ever run for any office, that'll be my theme song.) So, I can't imagine making $10 for the fifteen minutes I might spend writing a drafty piece of crap like this. And surely, if I were getting paid per post, I'd write a whole lot more and would soon demand more than $10 per.
The economy sucks right now. I think it's a fairly nonpartisan thing to say and altogether accurate for most people. I live in an affluent nook of America, and I see people struggling. It's not necessarily that they can't pay their bills but they're feeling their bills in ways that they weren't before. I was talking to a friend a couple weeks ago and she put it perfectly. She said, "I was in the super market, and I overheard a mother tell her kids, 'no, we're not going to dye Easter eggs this year.' The reason, my friend continued, is because the price of a dozen eggs has skyrocketed. In my area, each egg costs twenty cents. That's right. Per egg. Remember when your kids could toss them to each other during summer camp because they only cost about a nickle? Fun and laughs were cheap then. It wasn't so long ago.
Now, if the bloggers in the Times story had their heart attacks because they had slathered on layers of cholesterol from eating twenty-cent eggs and buttered toast, perhaps I'd have a little more sympathy for them. But no, these poor guys died because they were working their buns off to have a chance to pay for the frigging eggs and butter. I have sympathy for them; I think they should be regarded as casualties of war.
The price of eggs is up in part because the price of gasoline is up. The price of gasoline is up because some moron decided to stick other people into a hornet's nest in the Middle East and now we're quagmired there for at least another decade. Neither Hillary nor Barry (Barack) nor McCain is going to solve that little Rubik's Cube any time soon, no matter what they say (and in this regard, I think only McCain has been close to honest). So get used to expensive eggs, expensive milk, expensive gas, and cheapened lives.
I've got better reasons to die. And as the photo above suggests, better reasons to live. I may just have to start blogging daily in order to pay for the basic necessities.
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