If someone cuts you in line or is an @sshole to you on the street, just pretend the person owned millions in Lehman stock.
Category Archives: The Economy and its effects
The strong
If the strong really eat the weak, as the business saying goes, I am going to hang with the vegetarians and vegans.
Another meditation about the recession
If I had listened to every stock tip I was given, I would owe $1 trillion.
What the recession means
If you had just let the Joneses win, you would be ahead of them by now.
FARP
Friendships are recession-proof. So, my college friends and I have a t-shirt — See below
Desperately seeking meaning
I don’t want to seek meaning in religion. I want to seek meaning in the here and now. In something that contributes to the common weal (to use a pre-1800s word) and pays the insane mortgage — i.e., a conspicuously consumptive do-gooder. Corporate law does satisfy my task-oriented personality and does tap my problem-solving talents, but is that evolution or devolution? Did my grandparents endure what they did so that I should get “soft” doing this? They were as surely frontiers people as those who settled the West, only they didn’t commit genocide on Native Americans. A difference I enjoy pointing out.
iPods, Grout and Personal Space
iPods are great but you don’t hear NEW music. You form a shell around what you know and once those ear plug are in, no chance encounters with new music or new people can happen.
But I get that people need to set up a controlled environment to maintain sanity. My control cocoon is when I clean my bathroom and kitchen grout. Because I cannot control the markets, the trajectory (down) of my career or the health of people I love, but I can make some square feet of grout look great.
Nowhere to go but down
Push the panic button when financial planning means looking for the Cash Cab from Reality (?) TV.
More than losing money, I hate the loss of comraderie
I lost a lot of money in this down-turn, both in investments and income. I still love my financial advisor. Why don’t I still love my office? Maybe because everything that was wrong is magnified. Maybe so many are gone that I don’t have many contemporaries. Maybe we are all waiting for the axe. Maybe we are too stressed, and too tired of being stressed, to goof around. Maybe goofing around was ok when we had more work than we could handle but now it seems almost like putting a sign on your back that says “I don’t have enough work, so I am unnecessary overhead.”
Perspective
So, I decided to run to the office today because there are no clients expected in the office and I had already spoken to a few clients early in the morning (G-d bless blackberries and cell phones notwithstanding my prior entries) and I knew no one would get back to me until later in the afternoon. I ran by the Hudson River, listening to music that makes you want to fling yourself out of a window and feeling sorry for myself. I saw all of these people sunbathing and reading the paper and I thought, “don’t you know our whole financial system is teetering on the edge?” They did not look like they were laid off because they didn’t have that I-am-on-an-IV-drip-of-Ativan look. They were calm. I ramped up the fling-yourself-out-the-window (FYOTW) music with Carly Simon’s songs about losing her mother and Tracy Chapman’s songs about doing everything for unworthy lovers. Then, I past the Sanitation Department site and thought wow this is worse than working as a barista in Starbucks when Starbucks was new and clean. Then I kept running (ok limping) until I turned off the path in the 40s. I saw the most peaceful demonstration across the street from the People Republic of China’s consulate. The demonstration alleged torture and cruelty to members of Falun Gong. Homeless people were entranced by the serenity and silence of the protesters. So was I. Then I past construction workers who didn’t notice me because they are more polite these days (and NOT because I am 45). At a red light, I was privy to an intimate and heart-wrenching tid-bit about a seemingly not-quite-right older woman trying to hold onto her room in an apartment and her mother and sister being very distressed about the situation. Then the light turned green and the smell of Port Authority accosted me. Is this how bus travelers first experience New York? Calling Mayor Bloomberg!!!!!!