Last Saturday, Andrea hit the brew pub in town.  It’s usually busy there and last weekend, while they were celebrating Oktoberfest, was no exception.  Andrea made her way to the bar where the bartender took the man’s order to the right of her, then to the left of her, skipping her.  Andrea pointed this out to the bartender and he said, “I was pointing to all of you.” Which Andrea felt was precisely the problem.  Can a woman not order a stein of beer at the bar unaccompanied?  Fellow bar patrons, perhaps in an effort to maintain the festive atmosphere, offered up excuses as to why this transgression possibly took place.  I’m guessing that some of you reading this have had several reasons come to mind as well or think we’re overreacting.  And maybe we are.  But given the current political environment, perhaps you can see how being overlooked while trying to order a beer could lead a woman to want to smash the patriarchy. 

I just watched the first episode of Lisa Ling’s This is Life Season.  This episode was titled, Sexual Healing, and focuses on culture’s dysfunctional relationship with sexuality.  In one scene, a tantric healer leads a group of women in a meditative exercise during which she loudly states, “They don’t want us to have empowered vaginas!”. I laugh until I recall that that’s actually true - - just yesterday the presidential administration rolled back Obama’s contraceptive mandate making it okay for employers to withhold birth control on religious grounds. As an HR professional, who works at a company that’s self-insured, I can tell you it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to pay for birth control than it is to pay for labor and delivery.  This is not to say that this is the only reason I think that this “plan” is absolute horse shit.  I could go on but won't.

The world seems out of control so Andrea and I have been focusing on bringing order to where we can: Our house. Today we purchased a shoe rack and a hanging item we’re using to organize sheets.  After we put both to use, Andrea asked, “What took us so long?”. A question neither of us could answer. 

We also picked out a new countertop for our kitchen. I’m hoping it gets installed before we’re nuked off the face of the earth by North Korea or Thanksgiving - - whichever comes first (I'm guessing the former rather than the latter).

A Facebook pal and former high school classmate recently attempted to shift the focus away from politics and negativity and asked people to share what they did this past week for others to make the country a better place.  I simultaneously thought this was a good idea and then experienced a feeling that felt an awful lot like nostalgia for the days when people posted pictures of their kids, recipes or jokes instead of what Facebook's slid toward, which led even FB founder Mark Zuckerberg to recently apologize for the divide.  Mark - how could you know?  How could any of us have known?!

Trying to identify a way in which I made the country greater this past week seemed a little bit daunting.  After all, people in congress didn't even do that this week!  So I say, think global, act local.