frittering meaninglessly

It's a week of kid-home-from-school-for-Succot-holiday, and the week started today, Sunday. Daughter has 3 bat-mitzvah parties to go to this week, and one of them is a beach party, so she needed to be suitably kitted. We got her a new bikini and a modest tank top to wear over it, since what she really wanted was a 'tankini' -- she's not yet ready for prime time. And that was pretty much the extent of my day. Hey, it's hot, I'm sore from a workout yesterday -- and okay, I'm an internet addict, alright?

I also spent some time with an old Alan Watts book called "The Wisdom of Insecurity" that I picked up at a yard sale in Toronto a couple of summers ago and never found time for. Here's what he says about "the Age of Anxiety":

There is the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down -- traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. [...]

Consequently, our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to "dope." Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This "dope" we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction -- a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.

To keep up this "standard" most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family ... and so on, ad infinitum.

This was written in 1951. It seems that in the most significant ways, not a lot has changed in the past half century. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Mr. Squarepeg was off today doing manly deeds like taking the "new" car into a nearby Arab village to get a deal on some bodywork -- the car we bought had been in an accident that the owner didn't see fit to properly repair, and it bothered me to start out that way. I likened it to doing deep cleaning on a new apt. you've just moved into; I don't mind my own grunge so much, but who wants to live with someone else's? In fact, Israelis frequently do a whole renovation on a new apt. before they move in, never mind the cleaning. I guess this was more like the reno. When I complained during the negotiations about the rough job on the whole right side of the car, the seller agreed to drop his price by another 1000 shekels, and the repair only cost 700... so we apparently came out ahead on this one.

Not that anyone's keeping score.