I pulled into the parking lot at work the other day. Temperatures were in the single digits. Since I've been there for over 10 years, I get a "Preferred" parking spot in a select area. Which means that I don't have to walk as far as less tenured employees do. There are well over 1,000 people who work where I do, and there really aren't enough Preferred spots for all of us longer-termers. You need to know all of this to understand how piggish it is for someone to take up three spaces in a premium area. That's right, this Bozo parked so that he was taking up three spaces.

So, what does it take for a person to be this oblivious or this selfish or this mean-spirited to ace two other people out of a closer parking spot on a frigid day, when even a few extra yards through the ice and snow can be minor torture?

I've also noticed that there is not a lot courtesy on the road. Few people wave anymore when you let them in. People speed up on the freeway to cut you off. And, even though you KNOW they know that lane ends after the light, they still try to speed up and cut everyone off getting over to the left lane.

Are the times a changin' or are people really ruder than they ever have been? I guess you can look at the Bible and say, with all of the stuff that went on, human nature hasn't changed much.  But I also believe we hide behind our cars and our electronic devices.

People feel safe and anonymous in their cars. They can drive like a-holes, no one knows who they are, so they can get away with it. They can be rude over the phone, because they're not making human contact, they're talking to a machine, which doesn't have feelings or a life. This de-personalization makes it easy for us to be lousy human beings, because somehow, we're not dealing with other human beings, we're dealing with machines. So if I call and yell at some Customer Service rep about my cable being out, I'm just venting to the wall. She doesn't have a family at home. She isn't sitting there wishing she'd finished her college degree instead of dropping out. She doesn't want to scream back that if she could make the GD cable work she would, but it's not her fault that a squirrel got fried in the transformer.

We seem to lose sight of our common humanity. We all really want the same basic things. A home that's warm and loving, a good life for our kids, food enough to fill us, good health, good friends, a decent job. Safety. Comfort. Financial security.

The irony, of course, is that we've created "social media," so we can keep in touch with one another. And yes, Facebook can be a wonderful thing. It can also be a terrible thing, because, again, people type things they would never say to someone in person. And, as good as it is, you can't reach out on Facebook and give someone a hug. You can only "poke" them.

There were a lot of things I said I'd never do. I'd never have kids. I'd never turn into one of those moms who brag about their kids. I'd never buy a Kindle. Which just goes to show, you should never say never.

Once again, I'm shattering one of my "never's" -- writing publicly about stuff that is on my mind. After viewing countless blogs about moms and artistes and other people who make stuff, I knew there wasn't really anything I could bring to the table. Then I decided, there's so much noise out there, no one will ever read my drivel anyhow, and it's good exercise for my brain. Which is diminishing in capability as we speak. So, what the hell. I'll write for myself. If anyone finds my blog and has any interest in it or me, you're welcome to take a peek into my off-the-wall mind. (I work with disclaimers a lot, so I feel compelled to get this all out from the start.)

I am a baby boomer. On the younger side, but I still qualify. My mother managed to get all six of us into the Baby Boomer generation (my brother was born in 1964, at the tail end.) We seem to be going out of fashion, as will happen with an aging generation. I was in a Marketing meeting a couple of months ago, and they showed a graph with the number of people in each generation: Baby Boomer, Gen-X and Gen-Y. The latter two lines ran across the page in a relatively straight line. The Baby Boomer line took a slow but steady dip downward. We may not be dropping like flies, but we are definitely dropping. It was a sobering moment for me. How important is the stuff I do or the stuff I own if I'm just part of a graph with a line that's heading south? I started to think about the Baby Boomers who are no longer "whinneying" with us. (Obscure reference to A Child's Christmas in Wales.) Two of the Beatles. One of the Monkees. Don Grady (Robbie Douglas from My Three Sons).

Okay, so much for pulling Debbie Downer out of the mothballs. I decided it's time for me to do. Start working out in earnest. Lose a little weight. Eat a little better. Write a little blog. Smell a few more flowers and let go of some of baggage I've been lugging around. So here I am. We'll see how long my resolve sticks around.

And, yes, Have a Nice Day.