Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

It seems societal issues are a common theme of mine. About 6 hours ago, I happened to be sitting down and for what ever reason, a snippet of that horrid Christmas song, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came into my head and I realized what an interesting story it is, laced with both societal issues as well as authoritative control issues. An individual (Rudolph), is deemed unacceptable by his peers. An authority figure (Santa Clause) does nothing to allay these issues, thus Rudolph is ostracized. Then, the authority figure realizes that the individual's unique characteristics are required and thus uses his influence to bring the individual back into an acceptable state in the eyes of his peers. So basically, this story says (to children and others) that if you are different, you're crap unless a societal authority figure approves of you. Hmm. Interesting. Okay, so actually it isn't interesting, but it was better than writing about my floating widget or my bathtub faucet leak finally getting fixed. (Geez, it's only been three months.) And I'm sure there are lots of people writing about the big-assed power outage in New York, etc. I feel very fortunate. The only deleterious effect I've encountered thus far is not being able to get to one of my email accounts because the server is housed somewhere in New York. *shrug* Life could be a lot worse. I'm grateful it isn't.