Monday, March 15, 2010

Who Decided This Pleasure was Guilty?

My name is Kelly and I am a napper.

“Hi Kelly.”

There are few things that are so enjoyable, and feel so verboten, yet, aren’t actually bad for you, as a nap. Doubt that napping is looked down upon? Subtly mention that you catch a few winks in the middle of the day in your next corporate meeting, and check the reaction of your colleagues. That look isn’t admiration.

Naps are on my mind today because I’m craving one right now. Thanks to the nuisance of daylight saving time (a pox on your house, George Vernon Hudson), I’m unusually tired this afternoon. Add to that the wet, gray conditions outside, and crawling under the sheets sounds near heavenly.

But this situation is not my ordinary nap scenario. While napping as an antidote to sleepiness seems rather practical, it is not the napping in which I typically indulge. No, I’m a fan of the Sunday Afternoon Nap: the nap I take just because I can. What is it about crawling into bed in broad daylight that feels so decadent? I get into that bed every night, and rarely even notice it. But during the day . . . that’s self-indulgent delight. It’s the sense that I’m getting away with something; that time is wasting and I’m not doing anything useful; that any minute someone could call, and, catching the sleepiness in my voice, ask, “Did I wake you?”

So, in the end, I suppose I’m grateful that napping is frowned upon in the adult world. If it was acceptable--or heaven-forbid, encouraged--I wouldn’t enjoy it half as much.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Oh, The Humanity!

My employer happens to be on a health and environment kick. This week, the company announced that all facilities will become smoke-free over the course of the next 12 months. Kind of a big deal when you consider that we have more than 320,000 employees spread across 160 countries. Smoking was already prohibited inside buildings, so I didn’t really consider this all that revolutionary. Although it will be nice to walk to my car without having to go through the occasional cloud of smoke from the folks who prefer to smoke in the parking garage than go outside.

Apparently I misjudged my colleagues.

I have never seen the kind of reaction to any announcement that I’ve seen to the smoking ban. People are ranting about big brother, socialism, and 1984. The themes that seem to tie the ranting together are discrimination and the infringement of personal liberties, with a passing nod to Constitutional rights. One of my favorites was the guy who quoted Ben Franklin: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Now I don’t ususally like it when anyone claims to know the thoughts and intentions of those who lived centuries before us. More often than not, we tend to assume that the people we like and admire have intentions pretty close to our own, and that people we dislike have mothing but nefarious purposes. But I’m going to make an exception for myself. I’m going out on the limb to say that when the founders of this nation were crafting the documents we now hold (near) sacred, they were not thinking about the 21st century office worker’s right to smoke wherever they felt like it. I have a hard time equating a cigarrette during working hours on private property with essential liberty.

Am I missing something? Am I blindly allowing The Man to chip away at liberty, ignorant of the fact that the next thing to go will be something important to me? Or, as I suspect, will we be able to look back on this from some not-too-distant future, and realize that smoking has very little to do with liberty?