Deeper than the snow, that's for sure.

Today was a snow day. Nothing like a 2 hour delay to muck with the regularly scheduled life. By consensus I handle late days. I don't get charged for partial absences, unlike my husband. He generally has an easier time handling a full day off, so he get's those. He gets play days, I get hurry up and wait days.

I was feeling restless and not knowing what to do while I waited for the magic hour, so I picked up my latest read which is a self-help book. I was attracted to it by the catchy title "Why your life sucks". How can you not buy a book like that? So I was reading the bits about how if you don't take care of you everything else will be out of whack. Every little annoyance will be magnified into an unstoppable avalanche of anger. Things will be completely and unbelievably out of proportion.

And when I dropped munchie at school, I saw an object lesson in this very thing. A grown woman had a meltdown while dropping off her kids because the traffic wasn't moving through the carpool loop (the school 'kiss and ride' if you will). Huh? When the busses show up cars don't move. Period. Why would you start yelling at the janitor because the cars aren't moving? Needless to say it wasn't pretty. All I could think was - lady you need some you time.

Today at work "Miss Decorative" (whom I think I will just call the dish) showed up at 12 or 12:15 and was gone by 1:15. It got the guys ranting and raving too. This is the first time that the reformed slacker in the office has gone off on the subject of parity. It's an ongoing debate. Reformed used to be the subject now it's the dish. He's peeved because she has the utimate "get out of jail free" card. She's "buddies" with one of the EVP's. She'll behave how she pleases and there will be no consequences. We know that, and sometimes it pisses us off.

How nicely it all meshes with The Babe's soul searching. This is the world. As Reformed said "Damn maybe I should get blonde hair and boobs then I can do what I want". The world isn't run by the smartest (look at our pres. shrubby), the best don't always win, and bad guys often drive the best cars. We all know it, mostly we accept it.

We want better from our pastime. If we're playing make believe, damn it, we want good and noble and we want the reinforcements to be haloed in the rising sun to the east as we ride out to meet our foes. What we get is the real world in funny clothes. Not all the horrors of the real world, but enough of the politics, cronyism and such that the dream's a bit tarnished.

Why did it work better when we were new to it? We expected less of it. Others were the leaders and we didn't care so much because we were new to it. The game didn't necessarily change it just didn't matter then because we were powerless but we expected to be powerless. Now with years and experience and awards, we no longer expect to be powerless - but often we still are. There are other factors at work here.

On the whole I lost my rose-colored glasses during the BOD freedom of information fight and the process of becoming Baroness. There are still things I love about the game, and some I hate. Most I've decided just aren't worth the emotion. When I think it will be fun, I play. If it isn't, I stop. If only I had that kind of freedom with the rest of my life...