Why are Mondays always so grim? We hate Mondays because somehow it symbolically means we have to stop everything we love doing and go to a job that makes us feel confined. As Americans, it is in every one of our natures to want to be free, and Monday certainly epitomizes everything anti-free. I know the economy is in turmoil, and unemployment is at an all time high with major historical giants falling on hard times and giving pink slips just as the Holiday approaches. Maybe though, if you look at it differently, it could be a time of re-birth for Americans. Do what you love for a living. Think outside the box. America is no longer the place to come to find work punching in and out each day. It is still about hard work, but a different kind of hard work. Mental work. It is time for Americans to reach out and embrace their inner creativity and find a way to serve themselves. It is still the land of opportunity! As I was watching the Amazing Race last night in India, I thought to myself, look at how these people live. It looked like complete chaos. We are very lucky here that we still have so much dispensible income that we can buy all the items that keep popping up on the market. How can we complain when most are just trying to stay afloat in a certain "way of life." Playstations, and Xboxs, and Wiis, and $100 American Girl dolls, and plasma televisions, and cell phones and I-pods. How are we affording all of those luxuries? And those are just middle class luxuries. We have to think hard about what we have to offer this world and work 24 hours a day to network and make contacts and sell our ideas. It is amazing that we can have ideas and actually turn that into a bank deposit, isn't it? We are the luckiest people on the earth that we can find every way to make money if we just put our mind to it. We have the freedom to be OURSELVES and that is the greatest thing we could ever ask for. We are so blessed to have freedom to go to church, to blog about anything we want to, to create a masterpiece of art or literature on any subject we wish, to go out into the street as a woman without a man or a headcovering, to have enough to feed ourselves and our children at an "all you can eat buffet. America news reports may make it seem that we are "down in the dumps" but we need to realize just how lucky we really are.