I think the issue is not being self absorbed. Its about treating a lack of self focus with stuff.

The human populations around the world, not just US is engaged in a pandemic. The pandemic is afluenza.

People want to be richer and have more stuff from diamond rings to gold chains to new cars to the latest blister value pack from Costco. They buy more and more stuff to help document and prove their success. They waist more stuff as the old stuff breaks because its easier and cheaper to buy a new replacement than to get the old one fixed.

We are not so much self absorbed in ourselves, but absorbed in obtaining the recognition of success from others. As we achieve baby steps in this direction, we make our neighbors see slightly greener patches of grass in our yards and then they get infected as well and escalate the process.

Now, just to be on the up and up, I write this as I have a half eaten cake in a box up stairs in the house.

We had some friends come over last night. They brought a cake for a going away party. They left the half eaten cake here (one of those 18 " x 24 " cakes) purchased for about 6 adults, and 11 kids (4 of which were teenagers , 3 girls and one boy). That's 432 square inches of cake or 864 cubic inches of cake.

For 17 people (if the cake had been completely eaten) that would have been 50 cubic inches of cake each, 25 square inches or a piece of cake that was about 5 inches by 5 inches for each person.

Now with 3 teenage girls in the mix, that actually provides a negative cake ratio, plus, 3 of the adult women were on diets.

That meant that the remaining kids and 2 adult men had to eat the cake.

That means 78 cubic inches of cake for each of 11 people.

Now, 4 of the kids were under age 7 and have appetites like birds, so instead of eating their fair share of cake, they only ate about 1 cubic inch of icing and gave 2 cubic inches of cake to the 5 dogs present. As they had only been apportioned about 8 cubic inches of cake of their 78 inch quota, the remaining 5 cubic inches of cake went into the trash.

So that was 20 cubic inches of cake to the trash and not in nice pleasant ways that can be salvaged later.

Now, not to bore you with the math and cake accounting, but long story short, there is still about 400 cubic inches of cake left.

The kids are 'tired' of eating cake and don't want to touch it. Kids are heavily effected by afluenza even at an early age and everything they want to eat needs to be fresh out of whatever container it originally came in.

So that means that myself and the other adult male will likely end up eating the rest of the cake for breakfast, lunch, and supper until its gone.

That means that I will have to run an additional 20 miles this week and swim at least an extra mile.

* I should note, that this all happened after it took me a week to finish off brownies brought by the same visitors the weekend before!