If someone cuts you in line or is an @sshole to you on the street, just pretend the person owned millions in Lehman stock.
Don’t get mad
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Tag Archives: economy
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.
FARP
Friendships are recession-proof. So, my college friends and I have a t-shirt — See below
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.”
To have a voice in this chaotic world
I often wonder why I wanted to start a blog. Probably because in this loud, crowded world I wanted to carve out a space for my voice. Today was a weird day for me. We are a gay family — two women with a young boy. Our synagogue sent a general email burst to tell us that a religious hate group — the same group that celebrates every death in Iraq and picketed at Matthew Shepard’s funeral — were coming to protest at our synagogue this morning. Now, let’s think about that. We are a family and members of a synagogue, and today we were having a birthday party for our son. Imagine, the Cleavers (only not so much) with the Beav — we work, we pay our taxes, we are good neighbors, we have the grandparents and aunts and uncles to dinner every Sunday night, we do and give charity, we try to balance career with family, our son’s education and health comes first and his job in life, among others, is to do more for the next generation than we did for him. Why again is anyone protesting my life? My loving family somehow undermines the lives and futures of a poverty-level family without health care and without job training? If I were Republican I could see how my political, social and economic views would undermine that family. But I am a Democrat, willing to pay extra in taxes for universal health care, for prenatal care, for job retraining. And I assure you that amount I pay in taxes every year would shock that family. So, I am a tax-paying (and willing to pay more), synagogue going, hard-working, family woman who loves her partner and her son more than anything in the world. Oh, I am a lesbian. Ahhhhh, THAT’s it. Whaaaaaat?
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!!!!!!
The downturn and the ramifications
So this blog isn’t just about the humorous and the mundane, it is also about the disappointments.
Most people my age have younger parents. My parents were in their late 30s and early 40s when they had us. They were visionaries because, one generation later, most of my friends and I were that old when we had our own kids. My parents were born in the 1920s to immigrant, semi-literate parents. My parents lived through the depression, the wars and made the galactic leap beyond the Lower East Side and Pelham Parkway (in the Bronx) to settle down in midtown Manhattan where they sent us to private school, camp and schlepped us up to a weekend house. Now, it wasn’t exactly to the manor born because we lived in a tiny apartment (what did my parents know about personal space since they lived two to a bed and five to a room growing up?) and a rambling, ugly country house where there were no other weekenders. But we had all of the advantages and none of the handicaps of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. My grandfather would shake his head — anything is possible in America.
My whole generation (one my father’s side) had a choice — doctor or lawyer. You could be any type of doctor you wanted or any kind of lawyer you wanted (except medical malpractice). So, choose already because the elders had to talk to the next cousin and make sure that no two cousins picked the same field. Redundancies do not make for a robust web of intra-family professional courtesies. There was a method to this madness.
We were raised to expect to work hard and succeed. Success was the inevitable end of hard work. You could miss Mother’s Day or a family celebration — even great uncle Lou’s retirement party — if you were working. (But you couldn’t miss a funeral or a shiva because even if you didn’t like the person alive, G-d forbid you wouldn’t pay your respects after the end.) But I digress.
Success was measured by your ability to give more to your children and community than your parents did. A Nobel Prize was not required but not off the table either, so to speak.
So, here I am, a formerly successful lawyer. In 2006 and even into 2007, I was feeling entitled and self-satisfied and as if I were paying it forward more than my parents did when, all kind of a sudden, the financial backbone of the world gave way. Like a retaining wall giving way and taking the building and neighboring buildings with it. I am one of the neighbors in the building next door. I had everything given to me and then it was all taken away. The difference is that what I was given was given with love, optimism and a significant amount of expectation and what was taken was taken by systemic hubris and greed.
My parents had the “suck it up” view of life — no matter what, we are responsible for our lives and fear of homelessness is good. Fear is a motivator. Ok, I am fearful but I can’t come up with an exit strategy. Hopelessness is the enemy and must be repelled ast all costs. I try to imagine that I am the protagonist in a Robert Ludlum novel about an anemic looking, gray-haired, 40-something desk jockey — ok, work with me — who fights against the great evil of NO HOPE.
So call me Joan Bourne. Because I want my family to live in comfort and I want this world to be a better place for my having been born into it. But I am still digging out of the mud from the destruction of the retaining wall. Speaking of retaining, my ankles are retaining water and I didn’t give birth to my child. And I can’t sneeze with any sense of security (pause, for the women readers to understand). So, let’s face it — not having given birth didn’t save me from any of this and I didn’t get the larger breasts.
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