Gut Sickness

There is a feeling I get when I feel particularly ashamed of being human. A great example of this is something I glimpsed on the Reuters website.

2nd most popular article: Iran required to give up most of it's enriched uranium
1st most popular article: Donald Trumps's daughter, Ivanka, tweets new pregnancy.

UGH! Doesn't that make you sick? In what crazy world is Ivanka's pregnancy more important than Iran releasing it's enriched uranium? This one. My stomach gets upset and my face contorts to disgust.

After seeing that on the computer screen I had to physically remove myself from the room. I walked to the kitchen to get some water. In the living room some show was on about wedding dresses. Even now my stomach feels queasy. Ugh.

I will have to come back to this.

Back.

The wedding dress show is a reality show about people who buy wedding dresses. Problem customers, easy sales, and lots of money and a warehouse full of super expensive white fabric body coverings. But when I hear them talk up the wedding day as the single most important day of a woman's life (thought: of course they would talk up that day, they sell wedding dresses). Then the women parade around in front of their friends and family and try on various wedding gowns, gasp at the $10,000 price tag (or triple this in some cases) and pay it anyway saying, "Well I only get married once, might as well make it count."

Now before you think to yourself, "well actually lady, you will probably get married twice as the divorce rate is going up," I have to tell you that the divorce rate is going down, and has been going downward since the 60's. The current rate of divorce is about 41%, which I admit is rather high. But it has been decreasing. It's a oft-perpetuated lie that says otherwise. But accurate figures are seen when surveyed by legitimate institutions like the Fertility and Family Statistics branch of the Census Bureau and the Pew research center. Now, back to what I was saying.

These women buying these dresses for the price of a car that they will wear for a day...

I got nothing.

My brain simply does not compute. It does not make sense to me and I can't even wrap my mind around the idea of another person making that kind of decision: "It's the cost of new Honda Civic and I'll wear it once... but it is the most important day of my life, might as well make it count. I'll take it!"

You want to know the best part? Sometimes this expensive dress BANKRUPTS the women. Yeah. I know right? Imagine that post coital honeymoon conversation: "Wow. That was great -- by the way we are now fourteen thousand dollars in debt." BAZINGA!

I think the part that gets me is the frivolous spending of dump-trucks full of money on A dress and A celebration for A day. I see all of this, this industry, this institution and I think to myself... what a messed up place we live in. I understand far more than I am able to express, so I see these people and listen to the things they say and understand what kind of person they are, what they think about, how they think, what it must be like to live with them and so on.

Sometimes all I see when I look at this show is bipedal mammals acquiring white fabric at great cost to themselves and wear it one day in front of other bipedal mammals wearing expensive fabric so everyone can stand around and wear expensive fabric. It not unlike chimpanzees putting a leaf on their head starting a trend that others follow and they start revolving teir lives around acquiring said leaf, or something approximate. The sad thing is that the chimps know it is a game and drop it eventually.