Amy Currioman

My boss wanted me to attend a business related convention to represent our company and I reluctantly agreed to do it. He had arranged for me to share a motel room with three other ladies I had never met before, in order to save money. Well, I arrived last night and met the ladies for the first time. They had already met each other and had gone out for drinks and were feeling no pain. They were laughing and giggling and hollering at each other to “Shut up” until about 2am. When the room finally quieted down and they went to sleep two of them snored quite loudly. I spent a sleepless night sleeping in a too hard bed with a total stranger, listening to the sounds of fire engines screaming past and the snoring of my room mates. I will be very glad to get home and sleep in my own bed as soon as possible.

One of the great debates that I see almost every day on Facebook is the one around health care. One of my Facebook friends wrote that she had just seen a documentary on television about a group of cancer patients who had lost their jobs, and therefore lost their health insurance benefits. Since there are no affordable health insurance plans available to them, they cannot get the treatments that they need to fight the cancer, and they are going to die.

This is a very sad state of affairs. Most all of the other modern countries have a health insurance plan that ensures that everyone that lives in the country will get life-saving medical care. A lot of people here in the United States feel that if the United States adopts a socialized health plan that the entire foundation of the American way of life will be broken. I think that a lot of people are confusing themselves, not realizing that a democracy is different than a republic (and the USA is a republic) and the difference between capitalism and socialism. There is an old saying that too much of any good thing can kill you. I think in this case too much capitalism is killing Americans. What do you think?

There are a few people in my family that I dearly love but sometimes they drive me crazy! These people frequently vent their problems to me and they sound like they are asking for help in solving their problems but when I ask them if they’ve tried a particular solution they dismiss the question or suggestion without even hearing the words coming out of my mouth. And they get upset that I would even ask the question. I guess the best thing for me to do at this point is to simply express sympathy without offering any solutions. That rubs against my grain but that is probably what I should do in order to keep peace in the family.

Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed that it is getting more difficult to find ladies clothes that fit me.  I’m too small for the plus size dresses but too large for the misses size dresses.  According to the size charts of the catalogs, I am the perfect size 12W.  Which is a size.  But no one carries that size – the catalogs start at size 14W and go up.  So I’m in a fix.

Every time I get a fashion catalog in the mail, I look through it and find a few styles that I’d like to wear.  But I can’t find anything that is my size.  And I get really aggravated that most of the outfits that I like the most are either dry clean only or made out of polyester.  I want something that will breathe and be washable!  I don’t think that is too much to ask!

I either have to lose weight to fit into a misses fashion size, or gain weight to fit into a plus size fashion.  I don’t want to gain weight, and although I wouldn’t mind losing a few pounds, with my lifestyle it will be very difficult to do that.

And to be perfectly honest, I don’t like how a lot of the women’s sized clothes look like maternity clothes with their empire waists.  Or they look like tents.  I think that the fashion designers could put together some clothes that are nicely tailored that don’t make the women look like fools!

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that for at least the past ten years I’ve been hearing my friends and families tell me that they are no longer getting raises at work because the employer is claiming that they can’t afford to give out raises and keep the doors to the business open.

They are not even being given cost of living adjustments, so their purchasing power keeps decreasing while the cost of living keeps increasing. I keep hearing on the news that there are a lot of people living in illegal tent cities around the country because they can no longer afford to live in a house or apartment. And the police keep rousting these tent cities. Where are these families supposed to go? The shelters are full, or in some cases refuse to take them because many of these people are disabled and can’t work and the shelters won’t take anyone that won’t or can’t look for work.

This is so very sad. I don’t know what the answer is, but this is really a tragedy on our own soil.