Quotable: Celebrating Independence (and other random thoughts)

Printed on the back of the menus at "My Sister's Place", a family restaurant in Grand Marais, MN:

In this home of the brave
and this land of the free
they've burned women for being
a little like me.

- Sharon Seivert

Love it. Grand Marais as well as the quotation. Funny how I've spent 24 years in the Chicago area (15 of that in Chicago proper) and a lifetime grand total of about a month in northern MN, yet a week after my most recent trip up there I'm more homesick for the Northwoods than I ever am for the city. Sigh.

A friend once told me that had I lived a few hundred years ago, I would have been burned as a witch. He's probably right. Whatever I'm not happy about in my day, it could be a whole lot worse. Something to be grateful for when I am (like this evening) restless, dwelling on those aspects of my immediate circumstances with which I am impatient or discontent ('cause on the whole I've got it pretty darn good and I know it), and distressed by the state of the world at large . . .

I hate shopping. Even when it's a matter of (relative) necessity, let alone an activity for its own sake. Today I went for a proper grocery run for the first time since the beginning of May (due to finals, moving, and being out of town), and then to Target for a handful of things that are useful to have in a new apartment, like sponges, a broom and mop, and salt and pepper shakers. It was the first time in several months that I'd been in a big box store. It gave me a headache and made my skin crawl. I just wanted to get out of there. Even Wild Oats (a franchise natural foods store, less yuppie than Whole Foods but same idea) was a little overwhelming. Other than farmers' markets and little neighborhood co-ops (which I love), thrift stores (which I have fun with for a few hours a season, seeing how well I can update my wardrobe for $20 or less and coming home with bragging rights on e.g. a good-as-new pair of J. Crew wool pants for $3), and bookstores and camping gear outfitters (guilty pleasures even when I'm just window-shopping), I really would not mind never going shopping again.

At least I live in an era and a region where as a twentysomething single woman I can have an education, legal rights to my own apartment, employment opportunities other than prostitution, freedom to be out in public alone, and the privilege of getting to be my own self and say exactly what I'm thinking without fear of execution.