Saturday Six v.1

A little known subset to the immensely popular Thursday Thirteen, I present the Saturday Six.

Six Things That Control Your World, Over Which You Have No Influence

1. Big Oil - No kidding. Did you put gas in your car this summer? Since then, the price has dropped about a dollar a gallon and I haven't heard about any big new discoveries or any wide-scale drilling projects. Price manipulation. Ya think?

Besides, so many things are made from petroleum, that to escape its influence would mean living in a cave - which would eliminate #2 and #3...

2. Television - Playoff and big-time sports start at ridiculous hours for those of us here in the Eastern time zone, advertising is invasive, we are persuaded to buy products we do not want or need and the cost of cable is outrageous. For those of us in restricted environments (condominiumns) who are stuck with either cable or rabbit ears, what else are we to do?

3. Microsoft - I'm trying to use my computer, but I cannot, because I have that little yellow shield in the toolbar telling me that I have new updates to install. Ignoring it, the shield has decided on its own to install the updates. Then, intrusively, it presents this little pop-up every ten minutes warning me that the computer will restart automatically unless I instruct otherwise. It's like having a kid in the back seat asking "Are we there yet?" every ten minutes. Have you seen this lately?

Microsoft: Controlling your life longer than you can remember.

4. Your Emotions - Like the prision colony at French Guiana, there is no escape. Any efforts to stifle them are fruitless. Desire is the best reason and biggest excuse for anything we do. "Because I want to" is controlled by our emotions, and fight them as we may, they exert great moral gravitational pull on us. We are taught from an early age (by religion or our guilt-induced upbringing) to "control your emotions", which is about as difficult as controlling anything else on this list.

5. Money - The key link to desire and the rest of our angst-riddled existence is the power of money. Otherwise, we would live in a world of barter, and what fun would that be? Lots, right?

There's always someone on #2 using #4 to get you to spend more on something you didn't have yesterday and won't need tomorrow. Usually, we got along fine without whatever it was, but we are told that we need it, want it and cannot live without it.

6. Time - There isn't enough of it, and try as we might to "save" time with devices and other such nonsense advertised on #2, all they really do is separate us from #5 and usually wind up costing us more #1 running around looking for it. Face it folks, there is only so much time, and each new thing we add to our lives (like Blogging) only takes up more of it.

Ask yourself if you really have more time to spend on the things you want to do, even though our lives are supposed to be easier with all of our new technology. If you ask me (and you didn't) our lives are more complicated than ever, and the more time we spend fighting our emotions, earning money, playing on the computer, driving our asses around and watching 200 cable channels; the more complex our lives become.

It never stops.