Two Legs Bad. One Leg, Even Worse

When Karen is in a lot of pain, she sometimes tells us that she wishes we were too, so we'd know what she's going through. We tell her that's not very nice, that we're not wishing the pain on her, that we're doing the best we can for her, that caregiving for an angry person isn't exactly the life we would have chosen, and that our wish for her is that she could be pain-free. Well, dreams do come true, at last. I woke up this morning with a debilitating pain in my leg. I can barely walk. I actually noticed it last night when Karen woke me up to change the input on the TV so she could stop watching a DVD and go back to regular programming (we have a new DVR and remote [which has nothing to do with her not being able to change inputs, I'm just bragging a little]). I assumed it would be better in the morning, because isn't everything? So far, it's not, but I've taken some aspirin. If I was making this up, my new replacement bike would arrive today to mock me, but no, it's still mocking me somewhere between Federal Way and Anchorage.
Recently, I heard an interview with William Deresiewicz, railing against the Ivy League. His thesis is, “The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.” He calls them, and his book, Excellent Sheep. Which, is fine I guess, but a little irritating.  My dad said you don't have to go to college to learn how to spend money. May I add that you don't have to go to an expensive college to learn how to feel bad about your life? It's not just the young entitled that don't know the purpose of their lives. It just gives you the luxury to indulge  your angst. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, sure you're depressed, but what does that have to with the fact that the cows still need to be milked?

In any event, it's the furious sheep that are so annoying. Just like you wouldn't let a fox guard a henhouse, why would you let Fox guard a sheepfold? The oxymoronic thought leaders on the right didn't want socialized medicine and released their sheeps of war to attack it, arguing for mandates and subsidies for insurance companies. When they got what they wanted, they turned their ovine marauders loose on it chanting,  "Obamacare bad, the exact same thing by a different name, good. And, also Benghazi."