Value Judgements

This is one of those things that strikes me as blindingly obvious. Which, to hear my father tell it, means that I'm the only person who sees it that way. Perhaps I'm simply bad at convincing other people to change their valuations of persons, places or things, and everyone else who's tried it was simply having an off day, but I've never seen someone be convinced to change how much they've valued something - or someone - simply because someone else told them to do so, regardless of how much vehemence went into the telling.

Up in Lights

Because if it's worth doing... it's worth overdoing. Although I will give them credit for how quickly they set this up and tear it down every year. Most of it is gone already.

The Season

So it's Christmas Eve again, and I was out and around for part of the day, and, as one might expect, there was a lot of last-minute Christmas-gift shopping going on.

The Christmas season in the United States is derided every year, by a wide variety of people, for being overly commercial, crass, materialistic, et cetera. And those criticisms come from far and wide. One social media post showed people and shoving for flat-screen televisions, and commented about how people were better behaved in the United Kingdom. They were displeased with me when I pointed out that the photo they used was not taken in the United States, but was from a Black Friday sale in the United Kingdom last year.

And I won't leave myself out of this. I've been dubious about Black Friday, and other parts of the holiday season, not the least of which being the fact that it seems to begin the day after Halloween - when it doesn't start on the 5th of July.

But Christmas and birthdays are the two times of year during which most of us give gifts to the people in our lives. And Christmas is the prime time to travel to spend time with family and/or friends in places distant from our own homes. And so it takes on a meaning that it really can't contain and that it wasn't intended to have. And I'll admit that I'm bad about this myself. My parents became Jehova's Witnesses when I was an adult, and they, generally don't celebrate most common holidays. My father was livid the time I'd forgotten, and wished my mother a Happy Birthday. With the common days that I'd usually thought about buying or doing something for my parents being off-limits, my gifts to them dropped dramatically. And when I did think to buy a gift for them, it tended to sit around in my apartment until it seemed safe to send it - and I remembered to do so.

Christmas bears the weight of our need to do things for the people in our lives, and that, in part is what contributes to the atmosphere that it's taken on. Maybe if we spread that need out throughout the rest of the year, Christmas would seem less crazy.

Decade

Hello!

Today marks ten years since I started writing Nobody In Particular. It is not, I think, what I first intended it to be. My original goal was to create something of an insider's guide to my little portion of the United States, hence the "Just Another Random American" subtitle. But I don't know that I really understand the United States, the Pacific Northwest or suburban Seattle any more than the average person, and while I have a habit of overanalyzing things, society is not really one of them.

A few years into it, my now ex-girlfriend noted that Nobody In Particular is where I complain about the world. The world and I don't always get along well, and when I don't have someone nearby who is willing to listen to me rant about it, I'd sometimes write it out instead, and post it here. Which, I believe doesn't do anyone any good. So, for decade two, I think I'm going to try to take a different tack. Less "current events that annoy me" and more "things that have legitimately caught my interest."

The world in an interesting place, and I think that I should pay more attention to the parts of it that are right in front of my nose. So we'll try it, and see how it works.

Treading Water

One mom-and-pop pharmacy in Oceana received 600 times as many oxycodone pills as the Rite Aid drugstore just eight blocks away.
Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

While the article mainly goes after the major distributors of opioid painkillers as the culprits of West Virginia's overdose epidemic, I was hoping that they'd spare some word count for the pharmacies dispensing the drugs. Because it strikes me that unless that "mom-and-pop pharmacy in Oceana" was raking in sales like nobody's business, it's a pretty safe bet that they understood that they were selling addictive drugs to addicted people. And there's a story in that.

For all that I understand the appeal of weaving a narrative that lays the woes of a community at the feet of uncaring outsiders, I think that even more compelling (if not as comforting) are the stories behind why local people aid in those woes. Because for a small independent pharmacy to be handing out painkillers hand over fist, someone was likely confronted with a choice between complicity in the deaths of addicts desperate for a high and watching their business go under. And sure, it could have been a successful business "motivated by greed" (as often goes the mantra in such stories) but it seems a high-risk strategy just for another Lexus or a lakeside cabin.

It's a missed opportunity, because it shows us a side of poverty that we don't often see. While we are often shown stories of the desperate poor, the people who are working multiple jobs or just lost in their own sense of helplessness, the stories of those people who turn to doing things that are legal, yet damaging to the people and the community around them because it's the best option that they have available are thin in the ground. But I think that they're instructive, because they illustrate what people will do to hang on.