47 thoughts on “No Shirt, No Shoes – No Cash”

  1. america
    i knew the folks out there were not all on my wavelength but to be so far afield really surprised me
    dale
    to go from daily for years and years to gone surprised me
    vidiot nation
    it amazes me how much the information age has shaped how we live and interact
    yoga pants
    really?

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    The changes in the weather should not surprise me given all the evidence, but actually experiencing the day-to-day changes really does surprise me.

    The big one is in myself. After arriving back here a month ago, I find I do not want to work at the practice I owned anymore. So I am resigning today to go elsewhere (my friend’s practice in Savage). It will take 90 days to actually get out the door, but I am so ready. I did not expect this change in myself.

    The old girl is not dead yet.

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  3. Husband mentioned an article the other day talking about places moving to entirely cashless – one was a bank that will no longer take cash deposits (how will that work?…). I find it worrisome – all too easy for bad things to happen in an entirely cashless society. Sure I don’t actually use much cash these days (and there are large parts of the economy that still run on paper money) but I have not forgotten that one of the first actions in “Handmaid’s Tale” is that women had all of their assets frozen and turned over to their husband or closest male relative – and that is a fiction that could all too easily become fact.

    As for other surprises…right now every day is potentially a surprise (for good or ill) with EmoTween in the house. And I got some pleasant surprises in the comments on my annual review – that was nice.

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    2. The silver lining of government (or institution)– enforced cashlessness (? is that a word?) is that enterprising individuals will rapidly develop a replacement for cash. It might not be official, might only work in black and gray markets, but it will happen.

      Or, the backlash from going cashless will cause these institutions to reverse the policy.

      Chris in O-town.

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    3. i love the little visions that come along with handmaidens tale and my of favorite kurt vonnegut. he had one where the president was elected on the basis of who had the best hair and made the best tv appearance. in the 60s this was laughable.
      he had another one where the world was in trouble because of a mad scientific that invented a molecule that made water irreversibly make water turn solid. it got tipped into a puddle and leaked into a pond that touched the lake next door and the race was on. with north korea experimenting and the donatics running the show i am afraid the surprise may come as we sleep.

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  4. I thought we would be more cashless by now, Sandy has a weird attitude, clinging to cash in some odd ways.Until recently I avoided using the card for purchases under $5. Now I pay a dollar to $4 for my drugs with a card without a thought. I am surprised banks in MN do not charge you for walking into the lobby as they do elsewhere.I did not expect a population of 50,000 as we have here to have over 30 places to bank and that may new banks would be built and remain when you rarely see more than one car in the customer parking lot or in the drive-through.
    I thought computers and TV would be more merged by now.
    I thought my carpel-tunnel surgery would work.
    I did not expect my health issues; I had always been above all that; Sandy was the unhealthy one. Therefore I did not expect my life to become so limited. (I suspect HVS feels that, too.)
    I did not expect a miracle near-cure of Sandy’s colitis..
    Biggest surprise is personal: I spent my life in the vanguard, a change-agent, a student of the future, an embracer of (most) new methods and ideas. Therefore I concluded that unlike most old men I would not feel the world has passed me by as it has, albeit often passing me in a retro-direction.
    I am starting to see some of the changes in the stodgy old Lutheran church I hoped to see, changes to fit the electronic, stimulation-hungry, visual-seeking, short attention span younger generations, meaning those below 40. I knew I would not much like those changes but am glad they are happening.
    I expected a white backlash after the Obama presidency, but nothing like this.
    I expected a backlash against Science, but not such as this.
    I expected from the first that my grand daughter would be a miniature of her mother.
    I have expected for 20 years a shortage of teachers.
    I did not expected the on-line diploma mills.
    I expect you are tired of reading this list.

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    1. All except the last one…and I, too, was a bit surprised with changes in the Lutheran (& other mainline Protestant) churches – especially the berybvocal backlash against conservative Christianity.

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        1. i understand. I was not talking so much about attitudes and morality as worship styles. We belong to a liberal church. For one thing, the hard-core conservatives left and started their own right-wing hate church.

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        2. It seems strange to me that churches, which supposedly are based on the teachings of Jesus who said Love one another, are becoming so political and judgmental that when you say “right-wing hate church,” that that is no longer an anomaly.

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        3. It is indeed strange that there is such a clear divide between liberal and conservative churches. Like our neighborhoods, they have become more insular and divided in the last few decades. While there is comfort in knowing that my fellow parishioners also believe in a divinity that encompasses radical inclusion and social justice, I wonder if the church that I grew up in that likely had Democrats, Republicans, union workers, and lawyers sitting side by side in the pews was not healthier for the community at large.

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        1. Yes indeed. Only movie we saw last year except movies we saw with the kids, which do have stories.

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        2. I hope I can catch that movie at the Riverview when it plays – I just put a hold on it at the library and I’m number 1300 on the hold list. And they don’t even have it yet; it’s on order.

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      2. moonlight is a good story. my son was amazed they could make it for only 5 million. i told him there was no special effects budget. they just filmed folks and conversation. what a concept. robert osborne from turner classic movie died and with him my favorite contact with the good old days of movies. i loved to listen to him talk about his loe and discoveries and the people he knew and the stories and the ways movies were made. rip robert osborne, thank you

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    2. and then after that we had obama… have you seen w come out form under his rock and act like hes not the worst anymore. he has a sparkle in his eye and seems like a nice harmless little old politician who was used to run the gop mantra up the flagpole. this obama follower is just beginning to write the undoing of the union. i hope someone is taking note on how to prioritize undoing all the damage he is about to unleash on the universe.

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  6. I’d like to say I’m not surprised by anything since change is a constant in the world. My overarching surprise is the depths we have plumbed to reach the lowest common denominators in so many aspects of life: politics especially, but TV, radio for the most part, quantity over quality, public behavior and dress, language (although new words springing up relating to technology are interesting), and most of all, independent thought.

    Chris in O-town

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  7. I’ve been surprised by old age. In a casual way I always expected to live into my seventh decade or a bit more. I have been embarrassed to learn how shallow my thinking was. I never anticipated how much aging would demand of my attention, how pervasive its limitations would be or how long I would live with age as a dominant reality in my life.

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  8. I think the big surprise for me is how out of sync I seem to be with a lot of the general population. For example, I’m stunned that we still have reality tv because I’ve always thought it was just a cesspool but clearly a lot of other folks like it.

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  9. Over the course of my working life, changes in technology have rendered the work I was engaged in obsolete at least twice. I’ve had to reinvent myself to accommodate the change. Likewise I’ve seen other occupations disappear the same way. What surprised me then was not the change but the speed of it. Our parents could reasonably expect that they could work at the same occupation their entire working life, if they so chose.
    What surprises me now is that there seems to be a substantial faction of individuals that believe that a leader can insulate them from change by decree or even reverse change, that coal can be made once again an economically viable source of energy, that jobs replaced by automation can be recovered. Even more surprising to me is that those individuals seem to believe that insulation from change is an entitlement of which they’ve been robbed.

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  10. I never expected that I would change from a person who ignored politics as much as possible to a person who reads several news sources a day – and even reads whole articles and not just the headline. I’m the person who, years ago, stopped by my parents house when my brother was watching TV. Seeing someone on the screen that I didn’t recognize, I asked “Who’s that?” My brother stared at me in disbelief, then speaking very clearly as if to a complete idiot, said “That’s President Gerald Ford.”

    I am surprised by the change in phones from when I was young to now. We had a party line when I was growing up. Now most people have a phone in their pocket. And the things that we can do with our phones – I have a smart phone and I rarely make phone calls on it but use it frequently every day.

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    1. I was thinking about phones too. We grew up taking it for granted that voices could travel on wires, an idea that must have seemed rather strange and fantastic to our grandparents. Today I swapped SIM cards in a couple of phones, and I was sort of amazed at this tiny piece of plastic with little bits of metal in it. That’s it? That’s the little thing that knows where you are and can process your credit card payment and place your coffee order while it’s streaming audio and telling you whether it’s going to snow or not? All that power in such a little package.

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  11. Lots of you have mentioned changes that surprised me too. The most recent one for me is that after attending this Community Rights workshop over the weekend, I am climbing on board and hoping to be a leader in the CR movement. I’ve been able to lead folk dances and songs before, but this is different. First I have to accept that I could possibly lead in this way, which is a rather large change for me.

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  12. On Sunday it was 61° with very little wind. Today it is 29° with a steady 41 mph wind with gusts up to 59 mph and a windchill of 11°. Quite a big change, even out here.

    Our church has universally embraced our new male pastor with the extremely long, curly hair. It goes the way down his back. He sometimes wears it loose, and it looks like like Sir Isaac Newton is preaching.

    I wonder what will happen when those who voted for the current government realize the promised changes they hoped for don’t materialize.

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    2. first time i had it sneak up on me i was able to fix it with a diet of raquet ball for a month. maybe that would do it again… i haven’t tried

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  14. One consequence of the cashless society is that it’s become gradually less profitable for people to commit crimes like armed robbery or purse snatching. Such crimes are being replaced with others, like identity theft, which are inconvenient and time consuming, but ultimately nonviolent.

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