Rant #2,517: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

I see on my Yahoo homepage that Ivanka Trump, the adviser to the president, who happens to be her father, Donald Trump, told the world that she is learning to play the guitar during the pandemic.
 
She said this during an interview, stating that the pandemic has allowed her and many others to “reconnect with life’s simple pleasures.”
 
However, many have taken this comment to the extreme, likening it to Nero fiddling while Rome is burning—with the recent announcement that eight million people have fallen into poverty due to the pandemic.
 
Trump said she took up guitar because her husband, senior adviser to the president Jared Kushner, was working very late nights, and after she put her children to sleep and finished up her own work, she needed something to do.
 
Of course, people are so, so, so sensitive today to just about anything, and of course, Twitter is the outlet that they use instead of playing guitar to fill up their free time.
 
One Twitter respondent stated, “That’s cool. 24,000 New York City residents died.”
 
Look, anything with a Trump name on it today is going to come under fire from people who simply do not like the president, to the extreme that if you get a pimple on your face, you trip on your kids’ toys on the floor, or you get into a car accident, it is going to be “Trump’s fault.”
 
And quite frankly, people responding on Twitter to anything have too much time on their hands, but the president uses Twitter too, so I guess it is the current place to vent any frustrations that you have.
 
Me, I don’t think I have been on Twitter more than a few times. I had gone on it several years ago, looked at it here and there, but I never got into the Twitter culture, so I haven’t been on it now in a long time.
 
I guess I have other places to vent my frustrations.
 
Heck, I guess that I vent them right here!
 
But anyway, I know where Trump is coming from. Sure, it is for the wrong reason, but the pandemic has given many of us a lot of extra time on our hands, and rather than go onto Twitter, it is an opportunity to go back to basics.
 
Trump also said that she has broken out every board game that she has, and has played all of them, but al lot of people think that with her comments, they are the ones being played.
 
We have lots of problems in the country, and a woman with the responsibilities that she has should be using her time to right those wrongs, not learning to play guitar.
 
I get that, but how many of us work 25 hours a day, even with a job to go to?
 
Everybody needs some free time to do what they want to do, and even someone at this level needs that too, in particular with her husband working 245 hour days (yes, I did mean 25 hours, meaning that they are working all day—plus).
 
Me, being out of work for so long forced me to do other things to fill up my time after my daily, and ultimately fruitless, look for work, like writing a novel. Whether that novel will ever see the light of day and get published is another story, but it filed in so much time over a couple of months of inactivity.
 
I also digitized a lot of my records during this period, and I still try to fit in some digitizing now that I am busier with this remote job that I have.
 
So what’s wrong with doing something for yourself every once in a while?
 
Everybody screaming on Twitter about how insensitive Ms. Trump is, I mean, do you work 25 hours a day, even if you are employed?
 
The one silver lining of the pandemic—and there is only one—is that it has forced us to re-examine our priorities, making our families paramount, putting them where they should have been in the first place.
 
And if we do what we are supposed to be doing during the day, what is wrong with taking some time to do personal things, things that make you happy?
 
Again, I guess anything associated with Trump will get the hairs of some people in total disarray.
 
I would tell these people a message that I think would fit into the Twitter regimen of words and letter that you can post:
 
“Chill out, just chill out!”