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Mind Boggle

posted by Mique @ 9:27 AM 0 comments

Some Lady In Malaysia Sewed My Undies

I worry about what I worry about. This may(!) indicate a mental problem of some kind, but at least it keeps me entertained.

I worry that somewhere in Malaysia is a tiny woman who has sewn up my pajamas. It could be a man or even a little kid, I guess, but the worry is still there. The nature of the worry is this: my jammies consist of a blue tee-shirt and shorts, the shorts in navy blue with a repeating pattern of cute little white polar bears ... what must she think?

Oh, I know she is probably thinking mostly "Wow, it's really hot in here!" or "How am I gonna feed my family on what they pay in this dump?" or "I'm here all day every day, when am I going to get to the market?"

But at least occasionally, as she is dragging another half-yard (or the metric equivalent, which I think is a macro-coulomb) of cute-polar-bear fabric across her tiny work space, she must think "What kind of childish giant wears XXL polar-bear jammies? We have made forty thousand pair of these just today! Could these possibly be the same people who are ravishing our Islamic brothers in Iraq?"

Or, I worry about the Chinese masses, gathered to tip back a few cold ones of whatever it is Chinese masses tip back at the end of their work days, chatting together about their work:

"Today, I made one hundred thousand 1½"-long toy cars for the Americans. They are lime-green metallic raodsters with huge chrome engines, day-glo orange windshields, and flame jobs! If this is the kind of cars the Americans are grooming their youth to lust after, we will surely soon crush them!"

"Yes, surely! I myself just yesterday lifted with my mammoth dock-side crane forty cargo containers, each with ten thousand plastic pill boxes within! Each pill box had separate compartments for each day of the week! Not only that, but for every day, there was a separate compartment for morning and evening pills! Each compartment was easily large enough to contain a dozen or more pills! These Americans must be teetering on the brink of physical collapse!"

"Or perhaps their recreational drug habits are much worse even than we have been told! Ha-ha!"

I also have a pair of jeans that has sewn into a seam a label reading "Made in Bangladesh" and then just below that, "Hecho en Bangladesh." This blows my mind. I picture a tiny Bangladeshi woman (here, my cultural literacy fails me, and I substitute an Indian woman ... the same woman, by the way who also works in Malaysia), who sees this label and must wonder. Bangladesh was previously part of Pakistan, which was previously part of India, which was previously part of the British Empire, so I figure this little lady can read English. But does she read Spanish? Even if not, she can surely figure out that the two phrases say the same thing, but she must wonder. Okay, maybe just the first time ... the novelty probably wears off after the six or seven thousandth pair of jeans you throw together.

My own take on this label is that some cocaine-addled executive, high in his office in the headquarters tower of the multi-national Arizona Jeans Company (ext. 1988) in suburban Teaneck, missed the board meeting where it was decided that the Mexican workers were sucking away too much of their bonus money when the Banglasdeshis were willing (and happy to have the opportunity ... we're doing them a favor!) to work for half the amount. Or maybe, he hasn't visited much of the ole USofA recently, but according to his reading on the net, it's for all intents and purposes a fully bi-lingual country now, so just roll with it.

I worry that while it is true that George Bush has squandered any good will that the people of the world may have momentarily felt towards us after the events of 911, the rest of us, K-Mart shoppers, are also doing everything we can to give the world a bad impression with WTMI - way too much information.

(Go visit The Riley Family Website - http://jmyke2000.googlepages.com/home)

posted by Mique @ 10:59 AM 0 comments