Is the Easy Way Always Better?

I use my dvr recorder a lot so that I have something to watch without commercials on a Sunday afternoon when there’s nothing interesting on!…I select the program from the guide and click “record/all episodes”. That’s easy right?…Way easier than figuring out what time it is on and then programming it to turn on for one hour and 10 minutes at a certain time of day. The only problem with this is that I miss the ending of every single show I record because the guide knows what time the show is “supposed” to be on but it always starts 2 minutes or so late. Well! I guess I really haven’t saved myself any time at all by taking the easy way of recording the program. In fact, I have just wasted 47 minutes watching a show and have no idea how it ended. Of course this obsession with knowing the ending of things may be an issue for all of society these days. People read books and flip to the end cause they can’t wait. We renew our cell phone contracts early in order to get the newest gadget because we want it now! We buy prepackaged/microwavable pouches of foods that sort of taste like the food we wanted so we only have to wait the 30 seconds it takes to heat them up. We ask on the first date, “Where’s this going?”…not because we are all into someone, but because we’d hate to waste time getting to know them if it isn’t going anywhere. Guys sometimes do this in bars to the opposite extreme. If a girl seems to be too into having a conversation instead of offering up a late-night make-out session, he will often dismiss her very quickly. It all depends on what he is looking for in the moment. He probably won’t marry the girl he is looking for that night but she may tie him down by calling his wife sometime during the next 6 months or so “accidentally.” This will leave him with just the “easy” girl when his wife throws his stuff out the window and takes custody of his children. There’s nothing that says “love” like being “all that’s left over” once a guy loses the love of his life! That’s beautiful! Personally I’d rather be the girl that a guy like that says, “Forget her. She’s not drunk enough” about. This gives me the opportunity to giggle as I watch him walking out the door at 3am with the girl in the low-cut top who was much less of a conversationalist because I already flipped to the end of that story.

So what’s this fascination with knowing how things are going to turn out? I am VERY guilty of this. I try to just enjoy myself along the way but there is a very anxious side to me. I mean…who wants to bake the cookies all day so they taste like the ones Grandma used to make if we can have a half-assed cookie from the store right now right?…Wait a minute…Slow down…Why did Grandma make the cookies? Did she make it so she would have them around later or did she make them because she loved to bake? I’m quite sure that the feeling of handing them to her Grandchildren warm on the plate and watching their smiles as they ate them made her want to bake more again the next day but it wasn’t the only reason. It was what she wanted to spend her time doing. She lived to take care of people and loved putting all of her energy into preparing for these special moments. The homemade cookies and the handmade gifts that she created for us for our birthdays were far better than the expensive ones children “expect” today. Grandma doesn’t make cookies anymore because she’s too busy driving the grandchildren to their friends’ houses so they can play video games (that they own themselves but want to play somewhere else because they can). Parents work day and night to be able to afford ipods and cell phones for their 9 and 10 year old children. People, in general, skip over the good times along the way while we are anxiously awaiting the “ending”…wait…Hold on!…It’s time to make some cookies. Buy the ingredients from the recipe and invite someone over to make them with you. You’ll recognize them in the store. They are the things in the baking aisle that cost 1/10th of the cost of the baggie next to them that you simply need to add water to. Those taste okay and they look fine on a plate but how much love was baked into them? It might be worth taking the time to smell the cookies once in awhile…This is the time we have to work with. We can always write our own ending later…