I know I made fun of its tweets a lot, but the following definition from the Overt Dictionary rings true: “Goldman Sachs: a banking company which gathers all the bright minds in the world and plugs them inside of its hierarchal machine.” This might just be true, given that the author of the Overt Dictionary has anything but a bright mind. I don’t know if all those bright people truly went to Goldman Sachs (I, for one, seriously doubt it), but one thing is for sure: they didn’t join the group that created the Overt Dictionary.

I just saw a commercial on Canadian TV that said, “48% of Canadian women wash their sheets once a month. Even more women wear their clothes at least twice before washing them. This is why our detergent…” This is just weird. Is the commercial suggesting that Canadian women are dirtier than Canadian men, which is why we need to pay special attention to their dirty habits? Or that men never do their laundry and can’t be interested in the detergent?

This is one of those cases where ideology trumps profitability. There are crowds of single men who do their own laundry and partnered men who do the family’s laundry. Yet, the commercial fails to target them entirely. This would be a much better world if profit trumped ideology. But it rarely does.

I’m reading a book titled “Aquamarine Blue” that offers stories by autistic people about the way they see the world. Here is one quote that resonated deeply with me: “I never could understand why anyone would want to parade their lack of interesting thoughts, the fact that they have nothing to say for themselves and lead completely uninteresting lives, and therefore need other people’s private lives to have at least some conversational topics.”

I like this quote because it explains to me the baffling mystery of why there are so many people who eagerly follow every development in the personal lives of excruciatingly talentless starlets and TV personalities. I remember how after Obama was elected, dozens of people kept recounting to me some story about a puppy he was going to buy for his daughters. These are the same folks who buy all those tabloids and devour the very trivial gossip about the lives of the so-called celebrities.

Over the past week, I have had an opportunity to observe my sister and her partner with their 20-month-old daughter Mika. Mika is a very active, curious and rambunctious child. She is like a little tornado that is always on the move. She needs to be involved in new exciting activities and be exposed to new impressions on a constant basis.

Mika’s parents adore their little girl and are unwavering in their determination to provide for her developmental needs. It’s hard because these two very hard-working adults need to find extra time and energy to invest into their daughter. Mika is fortunate in that her parents are not inclined to pathologize her very active personality and will never strive to make her more comfortable to be around at her own expense. They teach her to be polite and responsible and provide her with a calming routine. It is all done through communicating with her and never through recurring to medication.

Many kids, however, are not nearly as fortunate. Born into a culture of entitlement where many adults see any kind of mild discomfort as a horrible imposition on their freedom, kids are often medicated into compliance with drugs that zombify them and make them easy to handle. The temptation to avoid the hard work of finding ways to channel an active kid’s energies into positive, creative directions by pumping them full of drugs is always there for people raised in the culture of instant gratification.