The First Post

  Well, 2014 and the new year are here at last.  This amazing new blog that you are reading is here at last too.  Not to mention this is a new post – the first actually – and, well, the whole “new” theme seemed to be recurring a lot so I decided to pull the old cliché and apply the theme to this post.  So rather than calling this “The First Post” I probably should have named it more appropriately as “An Essay on the Quality of New”, or “New: an In-depth Dissertation”.  I know, I know, you’re about to tell me about how boring the subject-matter is and how I should discuss something more important, like Obamacare, or Syria, or gay marriage.  But that’s all unoriginal and has already been covered by just about every blog and news source in the country.  So just stay with me.

  When I think of new, I usually think of the shiny kitchen appliances seen in Home Depot.  Or if not that, I’ll think of some amazing feat of civil engineering such as a skyscraper or a huge freeway.  But in reality, new is just an attribute applied to something newly come into existence.  I might pick up a shiny penny and assume its new even though it could be fifty years old.  The same could happen with my newly polished thirty-year-old oven.  

  People of today’s society don’t so much care if what they’re seeing, smelling, touching, etc. is new, rather than if it seems new.  My mom constantly watches house buying shows on TV, and I’ve repeatedly witnessed people asking for a “turn-key”, “move-in ready” houses in a hundred-year-old neighborhood.  There are also shows in which people will buy an ancient house and then “flip” it, renovating the whole house, stripping the house down to its bones and updating it from the ground up.  People don’t care when their house was made, they just care about the open floor-plan and updated appliances.  In certain shows, women will “renovate” their mom’s dresses to fit the current fashion.  Incidentally, the name of the show is “something borrowed, something new”, new essentially meaning some dress that is prettier than the borrowed one.  In the same way, no one cares how old my blog is so long as it looks pretty and I agree with them.  

  Everybody wants everything to look pretty and shiny.  They couldn’t care less whether it was really new or not.  It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

  It has gotten to the point that “new” is almost synonymous with “pretty”.  Never mind that “new” is a completely subjective and relative term.  Is new that which is only one year old?  One month old?  A day old?  An hour old?  We all have different ideas of what qualifies as new and what qualifies as old.  A young child will see his sixty-five-year-old grandparents as ancient, while the ninety-year-old will see just about everybody else as young and spry.  As a down-to-earth, wise (and humble too) person, I am one of the few who have the ability to see everything from the bigger picture.

  

  Well, those are my opinions.  I only understand the problem; how to mend the misinterpretation of “new” is beyond me.  I won’t ramble on any longer.  I shall try to have a review of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” sometime next week, maybe, slightly possibly, *shrug*…