I’ve been coming to work at a normal time like a good little girl this week. Meaning anywhere between 8:45 and 9:15. Closer to the former, actually.

This is a big deal for me because I have been a total “slacker” lately what with the leaving the house around 9:00 and ending up getting to work by 9:35. Which OF COURSE doesn’t affect my work in any way, but in this fine, overworked nation, the rules imposed on six-year-olds in the first grade as relating to tardiness get carried over into the adult working world.

In Spain, people stop working and take a nap in the afternoon, which is very good for the body and the brain. That will never happen in this country because this place was settled by repressed Puritans who thought that rest = laziness. Many Europeans get a 35-hour work week.

Does it say somewhere in the holy bible that a person must work forty hours a week? Why not thirty? What if you could get the same work done in thirty hours? I know I could.

I think some time in the next decade I need to spend a couple of years living outside of this godforsaken land of repression and hypocrisy. See what the world is really like, what life is really like.