I started my own business when I was a girl of eight.
It was the nineties, and everyone was really excited about the new millennium. We all had our eyes on the future. We thought that everything was going to get better forever. Bill Clinton had balanced our national budget and we all walked around feeling it all the time. Even us kids were confident and happy as we walked down the street in our jelly shoes and our little plastic barrettes.
Click the link: https://www.usa.gov/budget for more information about the US national budget. Plastic was still the wave of the future then. It was so clean and modern and exciting. We didn’t know that in a few years it would have clogged the oceans and made its way into every single stomach of every single seabird in the world.
Plastic is one of the scourges of the modern era. I hate buying things in plastic if I can help it. Most of the time, I can’t help it. Or if I can, it costs way more money.
For example, if you buy a half gallon of organic milk it’ll cost you about five dollars. A little more than five, but you get the idea. A gallon is seven and some change. The half-gallon is in cardboard and the gallon comes in a big plastic jug. If you wanted to buy all cardboard, you would be paying about three dollars more for the privilege.
Did you know that not everything you buy with a recycle symbol is actually recyclable? Many plastics are marked that way even though the manufacturers know that only a very small minority of municipalities are able to recycle that particular number. It makes them look greener without actually having to put forth any effort.
A New Way of Looking at Things
Have you ever seen the movie Poltergeist? It’s a great movie. It was directed by Tobe Hooper. Many people think it was directed by Stephen Spielberg, but those people are wrong. He produced it, but he didn’t direct it.
He was too busy directing a little movie you might have heard of. It’s called E.T. Spielberg said that Poltergeist was the American nightmare to E.T.’s American dream. I think that’s interesting because they both seem like a nightmare to me.
A bunch of government agents show up at their home in E.T. to take away an intelligent being who had become a member of their family. He was so strongly connected with Elliott that it made the two of them sick to be apart. It was cruel and unnecessary.
It’s the perfect visual metaphor for how the government does its business.
Poltergeist is looking at the other side of things. Namely, the way in which private businesses are able to take advantage of consumers. Click here for more information about the rights of the dead.
I’ll now briefly describe the plot for you, in case you haven’t seen the film. You’ll really be lost without it.
Story
It starts with a little girl, Carol Anne, talking to a static television set. Her father, played by Craig T. Nelson, sits sleeping in a chair a few feet away. The national anthem plays.
There are some guys digging in the backyard to make a pool for the family. They’re really gross and keep hitting on the fifteen-year-old girl as she tries to go to school. One of the men leans in the window, helps himself to a cup of coffee, and tries the food mom is cooking.
While they’re digging up the pool, they find the cigar box the family had just buried their bird, Tweety, in a few days before. Tweety had no time to decompose and join the eternal beings of light, which it is everyone’s right to do. Is that why everything happened to this family? Can the disturbance of a soul so small bring about the wrath of the otherworld?
A lot of people don’t think that animals have souls. I most emphatically disagree and think that they all have souls, especially the mammals. I know that’s a strange qualification but hear me out.
About Mammals
Mammals are animals who give live birth and feed their young with their milk. We know that humans bond with their babies through the chemicals that pass between mother and baby. So why, evolutionarily speaking, would it be any different for any other mammal? It’s how we’re made to function.
I don’t believe that mother dogs don’t love their puppies. We like to think that they don’t because it makes it easier for us to separate them. I use dogs as an example because we’ve been evolving alongside dogs for over a hundred thousand years. There’s no way to know what humanity would have been like without them.
If you say you’re not a dog person, well, I simply don’t believe you. It isn’t possible. Sure, you might not like dogs. Maybe a small one bit your kid sister when you guys were small, and it never sat right with you.
Or maybe you draw a thin mustache on your face with eyeliner pencil every day and it makes dogs distrust you so every single one that meets you growls at you and it makes you uneasy which makes the dogs more uneasy and on and on until you just can’t see a way to getting along with them. That’s fine, that’s totally valid. If you’re wondering how to settle with the IRS by yourself, you should keep reading.
You should just call them and tell them what you’ve got to offer. Lay it all out with brutal honesty. They’re all good people working there and have your best interests at heart. You have nothing to fear.
I wish you the best of luck with your trial.
Also read: 25 Best Small-Business Apps
