Holi[crap]day!

Man, this place is like a ghost town today. I'm not sure where all these people work, but it must be somewhere you can get a week off during a major national holiday.

Therefore, I conclude they probably don't work at my old hospital, where they let veteran nurses quit rather than give them a week of earned vacation, and hire in their stead new grads with subnormal IQs who are so retarded they end up in Orientation Limbo for what probably seems like years to whatever poor RN III pissed off management and got stuck with the scutwork. (I heard one of the new grads spent an entire day "orienting" not with a nurse, but with a unit clerk, and by the end of the day still didn't know how to page a doctor.) Go hospital!

Any hoo, I don't mind working most major holidays, because when you get right down to it, holidays are really annoying. People mysteriouly decide that instead of staying home, reading a good book and taking a nice nap on the couch, that they have to Go Somewhere and Do Something. What they end up doing, however, in their vain, delusional effort known popularly as Having Fun is simply to mob places and fuck up traffic for people who actually live there.

I would say this lemming-like collective drive towards insatiable consumerism, clogged highways and attendant disappointment and frustration is deeply ingrained in our souls, an ironic national quirk much like French people hate cow's milk, but invented moldy cheese for consumption. Ergo, our national psyche ends up enduring hours of pointless holiday traffic jams, milling around aimlessly amongst a stinking lot of tourists who are lost and can't seem to drive worth shit. Ironically, if predictably, this American pasttime of pointlessness ends traditionally with a sense of blunted rage and misgiving because damn, look at all these scores and scores of stupid ass tourists--I can't see a friggin' thing!

Me, I'd rather work and get paid time-and-a-half. Work is somehow more relaxing than the idea of taking a holiday along with everyone else.