Oh Tom, happy belated birthday to you!

That post office story makes me laugh. I am sympathetic to how americans fail t see the value in other cultures if only because travel tends to help that and international travel to distinctly different cultures is prohibitively expensive here.

Not just because of the cost of a plane ticket either. We don't have the kind of..I don't know...combo of safety net/job security/something else that makes selling all your stuff to travel Asia for a few months as my British friend is doing.

tommyrot,

I am sending that link to my class. We just had a class discussion about individualist vs. collective orientations.

thanks. quite timely.

We don't have the kind of..I don't know...combo of safety net/job security/something else that makes selling all your stuff to travel Asia for a few months as my British friend is doing.

Lots of countries don't have that. But they also don't have any conviction that they're the big dog in the yard.

I think that's a huge part of it--the luxury to not have to care, because you can probably get what you wanted anyway.

I just mean that makes traveling easier.

Thanks for all the thoughts on the sausage last night. I tossed it. Today I have run a million errands. I am finally getting things off my list that my parents have been nagging about. It feels great to tell them, "Yes, I did get that done." Still no job and no resumes sent out today.

More than two weeks vacation time would help.

From ABC:

Another hypothesis -- one that is becoming increasingly accepted -- is that certain non-edible varieties of pine nuts are being passed off in the marketplace as the edible variety, Munk says. Some researchers have implicated China in exporting these non-edible pine nuts.

Gee, the country that gave us poison dog food and leaded toothpaste is selling inedible pine nuts as edible? Whodathunk? Let's only import ingestibles from countries with a functioning FDA equivalent, kthkxby!

I just mean that makes traveling easier.

On the flip side, the lack of desperation for jobs means there's less of a need to travel. Look at all the countries with less job security than the US.

Jamaicans get out plenty. And we can't hop a bus/train to get there. Many of us travel because we feel we have to.

I just got a fancy big new computer monitor, and I barely know what to do with myself! It's bananas. And might actually help my neck/shoulder issues!

I don't know if I'll ever figure out how to effectively use two screens, though....

I don't know if I'll ever figure out how to effectively use two screens, though....

Email goes up on the left, other applications on the right. Works like a charm.