Nothing like the holidays bearing down on you full speed to whip up the stress. With less than 10 days to shop and with nothing bought and an austerity budget that would make British PM David Cameron wince, I'm feeling it, baby, I'm feeling it. So today I'm taking the only logical approach--a post dedicated entirely to meat. We'll begin with news of a recent study that has found that apparently, looking at cooked meat causes men to relax. The authors started with the opposite hypothesis--that the ingrained competitive nature of men and the ancient hunter reflexes would cause them to become tense, possibly sizing each other up as to who would win in a squabble for that rib-eye steak. (Well, that last part was just a little imagineering on my part. But they did expect the opposite of relaxation.) Here's Stephen Colbert's hilarious take on it from a few shows ago:
There seems to be a weird obsession going on with meat right now. On the Food Network, which used to be all about cooking, we have instead a parade of portly guys touting the biggest greasiest meat piles they can find. Guy Fieri routinely hunches over mammoth burgers and pronounces them "money." And over at Man v. Food, the host (whose name I forget) pounds down every gross restaurant eating challenge he can find, including one called a "Manimal" in Maine that consisted of an eight-patty cheeseburger, two hot dogs, fries, coleslaw, large soda and a milkshake with coffeecake mixed in. Apparently the hunting reflex has vanished, but they're still trying to symbolically dominate when it comes to eating. Then there's this:
Yes, just in time for the holidays, a bacon and sausage creche, with the mini-weenie Baby Jesus lying in a bed of sauerkraut. This is...well...yeah. Then again, if you're worried your child might grow up to be a dreaded vegetarian, you can start him/her off right with this product: No, this is not a joke. It is--or was--a real product that, according to the Internets, boasted four slices of bacon per scoop. It was introduced by J & D's, makers of Baconnaise and other bacon flavored items. The company quit selling the baby formula, according to the Huffington Post. But no matter, they got the desired publicity.
Meanwhile, there's meat as fashion. Lady Gaga got all the attention for her meat dress, but she's not the only one. It took only a couple of clicks to find these and other interesting meat clothes. Add to cart?
Feeling relaxed yet, guys? Because I think it's time to RUN for your LIVES.
The New York Times ran an interesting story on happiness the other day by John Tierney. Apparently there's a study now that suggests that if you let your mind wander while you're doing a task, you're more apt to be unhappy later. The study, conducted by Harvard psychologists, used an iPhone app called "trackyourhappiness" to randomly call people around the globe and ask them how they were feeling. The results: People who reported stray thoughts and daydreams were less likely to be happy a few minutes later and the stray thoughts caused the unhappiness, rather than the other way around. (Read Tierney's account here, and also in Science.) And okay, I guess it makes sense that if you start fantasizing about finally having that loan paid off that you took out against your 401K so your kid could get through the last semester of college, that the thought might lead you to unpleasant other thoughts such as: Why did tuition go up by double digits at the state university for each year beginning when my kid enrolled and why didn't student loans cover everything and why won't time go faster so we can stop paying $50 a paycheck? Wait. Hold on....Trackyourhappiness? Really? A stranger will call you up, ask you what you've just been doing and then how you felt about it. And people willingly signed up for this? Maybe it's just me, but doesn't that kind of put the science in question? First of all, these are people who have iPhones. Secondly, they are paying a monthly charge for the connectivity, so they are likely fully employed. And third, they are extroverts who would willingly discuss deeply personal matters with an anonymous someone taking notes. I've seen iPhones. If I could afford one, I'd buy it and then spend the rest of the time skipping around and laughing with glee. Rrrring..."This is a Harvard scientist. What are you doing right now and how do you feel?" "I'm just bagging up a pile of warm dog poop. And I feel FANTASTIC! I have a job and an iPhone." So probably, the results are skewed because of the sample. But it might be interesting to see what the survey would look like if a different population was sampled. Rrring..."Hello. This is Harvard calling. What are you doing right now and have you had any daydreams lately?" "I've just robbed a convenience store. Daydreams? No, can't say my mind wandered. Gotta go..." Rrring..."Hello, Harvard University here. We're doing a study on daydreams and happiness. What have you got for us?" "Sorry, I've got six craft in my sector and five waiting in a holding pattern. Can't talk now, man." "Ok, only just tell us, have you had any daydreams in the past half hour?" "Look--no--I--well, no. But...' "And do you feel happier than a half hour ago or no--" "Oh yeah, yeah. Sure, great. I--oh s**t!/ (connection lost). If the results hold, then these non-daydreamers would also be the happiest. Me, I'm a die-hard daydreamer, and that's never going to change. I'll never be Zen enough to focus only on brushing my teeth. In fact I've had at least six daydreams just while writing this post. They're like little vacations you take inside your head. Vacations I desperately, desperately need. I will never give them up on the elusive promise of a slight increase in happiness. So sorry, Harvard. Tell the positive thinking industry they can take my property and my dignity. But they'll take my daydreams only when they pry them from my cold, dead brain pan.
So here we are. It's been a year and eight months since the big income cutback. We've tried various ways to make money--selling stuff in our garage left from the previous owner, writing a garden book, etc.--and sometimes we've been successful. We've slashed our household spending to the bare minimum (ask us about our front tires) and then spent a lot of it in a fit of rebellion this year because, dammit, we need a life, too. And now our second austere Christmas is looming and there is no indication that our situation is anything but permanent. So how's my positive attitude coming along? That's hard to say. I suppose the best way to track something like that would be to somehow put all my emotions on a chart, and if it were possible to do something like that on Blogger, I would. But since I don't really feel like working out a lifetime emotion chart, I'll just have to describe it. I'll skip past childhood and adolescence, and go straight to adulthood. Graduation from college and getting that first job--euphoria. Finding out how hard it was to live on a reporter's salary--the Dumps. Getting a better job--euphoria. Getting married--euphoria. Having kids--daily euphoric highs followed by Dumps, lots and lots of dumps. Finding out how hard it is to live on basically one salary--well, you can see how this is going. My chart would look like just about anybody else's on the planet. Now that we're approaching Christmas, have added a 16-year-old driver (but not a car) to our insurance and are looking ahead to college, I really should be in the dumps big time. But I'm not. My emotional chart has flat lined. No elation. No dumps. It's just hard to get excited about anything. (I identify a lot with author TM Shine, who wrote this really funny piece recently in the New York Times.) Is this a good thing? Maybe. Back when I thought I had control over anything, I was always getting upset and unhappy because I should have done better. Then I'd get out a legal pad and start making lists. When things went well, I'd be flying high. What I have now sounds a lot like resignation, but I don't think it is. It's more detachment. I haven't stopped wanting the nice stuff that goes with money. The new clothes, the respect, the occasional movie, the feeling that your car isn't going to shake apart at speeds over 60 mph. It's just that I'm exhausted from caring anymore. This is how I imagined Buddhism. Detachment. Why care about a world you obviously cannot control? And I'll say this: It certainly does protect me from scraping along the desperate bottom as I did a year and a half ago. It doesn't exactly feel like happiness, though. But I'll need a lot more than Zen detachment to make things better. Now where's my legal pad?
By now the pundits have weighed in on the Comedy Central Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Either he wasted an opportunity to engage middle-of-the-road folks who are turned off by politics and do not vote. Or his rally was simply an exercise in irony and too-cool-for-school self awareness. On the one hand, the rally didn't do enough to stir people to action in tomorrow's election. On the other, nobody really watches cable news, so why get so worked up about his media criticism? Yet the press, obviously, was annoyed. We watched almost the entire rally live, giving the house a sedentary vibe so weird for a Saturday that my daughter said it felt like Thanksgiving Day and the Macy's Parade. I would have gone if I could have. But alas, not enough money. (Although I briefly considered hopping a freight train chugging slowly past our house.) Apparently no one knew what to expect. Some news organizations wouldn't let their reporters attend (on their own time off) out of fear of being partisan. Yet the very non-partisan appeal to reason and moderation also kept it from getting huge amounts of prominent space. And they all have good points (she said, reasonably.) But it's too bad that no one talked about the opposing force of the rally, as personified by Stephen Colbert. It's too bad nobody mentioned the fear. Because that is what I think the rally was really about. How can any of us maintain that go-get 'em American spirit in the face of seemingly overwhelming fear about every possible thing, 24 hours a day? I don't mean just the fear you see hyped on the evening news--the child predators, avian flu, carcinogens in the drinking water. The heartbreak of psoriasis. I'm talking about the very real fear many of us have now, of waking one morning without a job, or health insurance, or a home because of forces beyond our control. Colbert, in character as a faux conservative TV host, made a pretty good opening, supposedly cowering beneath the stage in an underground bunker. I've felt like that, after looking at our budget and counting the days until my daughter looks toward college. How can you get up the guts to spend the money on night school, or invest in your own business or apply for a new job when you're worried you may get thrown out of the house you've paid on for a decade? How can you dare to take the risks involved in improving your station in life? It's fear, plain and simple, that is the paralyzing force that hobbles us and keeps us from being the great nation we used to be. FDR had it exactly right. Right now we have the realistic fears about joblessness. And on top of that, we have all the other fears pumped up by people who want to sell us something or force us into an ideology. So yeah. If you wanted the rally to be a call to action against certain political parties, then it probably was a failure. But me, I looked at all those people on the mall--250,000 by some estimates. Out of that many, a lot are probably as scared as I am right now. And yet here we are, able to enjoy a sunny Saturday, laugh at a few jokes, forget about our troubles for a couple of hours. Some say that's irony. I say it feels like optimism.
So on with the laughs. Here's the latest, an Auto-Tune send up of Stewart's closing speech:
Wow. Has it really been two weeks since my last post? I guess I just lost track of time. Because I was so busy. And, as we all know, busyness equals happiness. At least that's what a recent psychological University of Chicago study claims is true.People are actually more happy when they have some task to do, even if it's a somewhat meaningless task, according to the study, which you can read about here. I wasn't exactly thinking of my future happiness when I signed on to run a two-day music event in which 770 students would perform for a critique. It was just a lucky combination of extreme need on the part of the music teacher group I'm in and extreme guilt on my part. They were in desperate need of someone to run this festival. I hadn't volunteered to do anything of substance in quite a while. Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. That was back in early March. In the intervening months, I noticed the effect I was having on my fellow teachers. I would mention the festival and some would wince. Or pat me sympathetically on the shoulder. Some were overly solicitous of my feelings, carefully approaching as one would a suspicious device at the roadside that could yet explode. I began to hear about how this festival had "eaten people up alive." Ha ha! The event was last weekend. Somehow, I managed to come out on the other side. No doubt about it, it was a lot of work. A whole lot of work. I keyed in entries, did books, made the schedule and answered incessant email questions. I barely saw my family for a couple of weekends. But it was completely doable--mainly because people before me had set things up so one person doesn't do it all. I had way more experienced people taking care of the judges, the food and the printing issues that I certainly couldn't have done on my own. It went smoothly, I am told. We had a couple of dramas here and there. But none of the apocalypses that could have derailed things and scarred me for what's left of my life. So, has the whole experience made me happier and more optimistic? Well, yes and no. The "yes" answer is mostly in retrospect. I like it (in retrospect) that I was able to contribute so much to such a great event. Kids got to learn to play pieces from the foundations of Western music (this year's theme was Classical Era music). Teachers got feedback on their teaching. Parents and everyone else got to hear some fine playing and exposure to Western musical heritage. But there is a little "no" mixed in with all of that. No one likes the full-on stress of something like this while it's in progress, especially if they're feeling as new and green at the job as I was. And there were so many, many pieces of paper to lose. Back to the good side--the extreme busyness has made it easy for me to take time off this week. Watch a soccer match or a movie in the middle of the day? Hey, I earned it! Best to enjoy that entitlement before it wears off, though. So yeah, I guess overall the experience did make me happier. At least on a temporary basis. We'll see if it lasts. Let's end on something silly and sad. First the silly:
Now the sad. Sad to see a good piano get destroyed. But it is an interesting concept for a piece. Read more about it here.
I'm still feeling the strain of putting together a two-day piano festival coming up in three weeks. So rather than fill today's post with what undoubtedly would be gibberish, I'll give you something fun. Here are a couple of things I ran into while looking for the money tree clip I posted earlier. Apparently, there are people out there who are being creative with money--and I don't mean financiers and their bizarre investment creations. Here's an example of what people can do who look at a dollar and see it for what it really is--a piece of paper.
Or how about these fantastical fish? It's so satisfying about seeing dollar bills tamed and brought into submission to make something beautiful.
Then there's always this idea for a home decor replacement of the piggy bank. It's fun, once you get past cheesy production values.
We've had a lot of ups and downs the past couple of weeks. But the garden has been one thing that definitely lifted our spirits in spite of hard times elsewhere. To see a bigger post on that, check out Mike & Roxie's Vegetable Paradise here.
Reading economic stories has been a bit surreal this week. Take the New York Times. One day, people over 50 are worried that they've been involuntarily consigned by their layoffs to an old age of cardboard shoes and shopping carts. The next day, experts tell us the Great Recession is officially over. (But the "non experts" in real life say hell no, it isn't.) I should feel vindicated that someone is saying the same thing I've been saying since the recession started--that it feels like people in their 50s have been dropped off on a desert island while the party cruise line goes on without us. We'll have less income to put our youngest kids through school, less to take care of our own parents and less in our pension funds to support us though we'll live longer (unless the rampant age discrimination makes us all so depressed we just decide to end it all.) And then, the second story about how on paper, the recession is already over, yet most people are still so miserable they don't see it that way. That should make me feel good, right? Someone agrees with me. You can't say the recession is over until people start getting their jobs back. But it doesn't. It doesn't make me feel good or optimistic at all.So instead of fixating on those two downers, I'm looking at a bright and happy film that was promoted today on my web browser home page today. It is a film about a money tree. Filmmaker Amy Krouse Rosenthal and friends hung $100 of folding money in a little tree in downtown Chicago and then filmed the reaction. Here is the clip from YouTube:
As you see, an amazing number of people walked on by without noticing. I blame this on the fact that many were talking on cell phones. Damned electronic devices. What we need is a phone with an app that is like a money alarm. It would detect the loose $20 blowing in the wind and alert you with a happy song. Like maybe this one from Looney Tunes. (Just ignore those guys in hats. I have no idea who they are.)
But I digress. Amy's project took place just last summer, when people were plenty hard up for cash. So I can only assume Chicago must be the land of plenty and we should load up our possessions on the old pickup truck and move there. But wait! Apparently Amy was not the first to come up with this idea. Someone in Australia did it too, and then used it for a commercial. Here's theirs:
I can't help noticing that the Aussies put their money on a little more of a challenging tree, so people had to hop and climb to get it. Michelle Obama, there's an idea there for you and your efforts to curb obesity. So could this become a film-making trend? Could it happen here in Kansas City? I'd like to end with a plea: Oh filmakers. Oh, behavioral scientists. Please, please come to our neighborhood with your magic money trees. (And not that Australian money, either, but real American dollars. ) I promise I'll look up. I promise I'll notice. Until then, I'll just tend my apple and cherry trees, grape vines and home garden. It's not quite the same as picking a bushel of money. But almost.
I've heard a lot of suggestions about how to be more happy. one of my grandmother's favorites was to "just keep busy." I've been trying that one out in earnest this fall, by signing on to run an annual festival for piano students. The past week and a half has been spent almost entirely in front of the computer, entering, scheduling and re-entering 770 some students and 85 teachers to play and work shifts. I don't know yet whether this has made me feel happier or more optimistic about things. But at least I can use it for an excuse for just now getting around to a post that should have been done a week ago. The news was that--surprise--money can buy a little happiness. The study, done by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, explains income's effect on two kinds of happiness--day-to-day and the overall feeling that your life is working out. Yes, people. The science is finally in. As to the former kind of happiness, the magic number is $75,000. The farther below that figure you make, the less happy you are day to day. And on the overall feeling that life is working out (which is how I'd describe optimism or positive attitude) well, money has an impact on that, too. If your income keeps going up above that $75,000, it turns out you have much more of that warm glow of satisfaction with your life. (Accounts of the study here and here.) So if your life was chugging along fine before the recession, if your family was making at least $75,000 and you kept getting raises then...you were more happy. But if during the past year, you were driving along at highway speed and the car suddenly shifted into reverse? Hmmm. A lot of people could have told us this a long time ago. I know we certainly can attest to the impact on happiness of a family income well below $75,000. Somehow, though, it was a surprise to others, who apparently believed until this study the bromide that "Money can't buy you happiness." Wha...You mean it can? I blame the mythology that's sprung up about the "Greatest Generation." According to a certain segment of pundits, the generation of the Great Depression and World War II all pulled together and sacrificed with smiles on their faces. They all just gritted their teeth and raised themselves up without any help. Not a soul secretly cheered on the Bonnies and Clydes of the day. They were truly saints. If you ask some of them, it sounds true enough. My grandparents certainly had a lot of heart-warming stories about sharing and good deeds during the Depression. If you said, "Money can't buy happiness," Gram would have heartily agreed. But I also notice they were both scared--scared to death--of even the slightest blip in the economy. When that cloth-coated Republican President Richard Nixon called for wage and price controls (yes, a Republican. Wage and price controls. You can Google it.) they were all for it. Any thought that we might be about to return to the Depression brought visible shudders. Yes, there were a few good times. But go back? Not on your life.
Who is John Galt? I've been thinking about that classic question, from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged quite a bit lately. In the book, Galt is a super capitalist genius, a Gulliver sort of hero who is being tied down by small-minded parasites who want to redistribute his wealth for the public good. Contemporary conservatives started talking about this fictional hero shortly after the last election, and there was a lot written about how all the talented "John Galts" of the country would be tempted to just quit--go on strike--if they were going to be taxed and regulated. Then how would people who were not captains of industry--all those mere employees--get along? Ha ha. They'd be barely able to feed and dress themselves. Every so often, you'd see a sticker "Who is John Galt?" And there were plenty of people who would suggest that, of course, it is the nation's richest one percent, because obviously they have all the brains. No one had better tick them off, or we'd be in big trouble. Because it will take a lot of creativity to get us out of the mess we're in. So I've been thinking. Where are the creative ideas? As far as I see, this creme de la creme is not being tied down. They still have their jobs and incomes. No one's stopping them. Yet here we stay, in the same fix as ever. I bring it up because of a piece in the New Yorker about the Koch brothers, whose Wichita company Koch Industries is one of the richest in the nation. (If you haven't already, drop what you're doing and read it here.) If ever there were John Galt characters, it would be David and Charles Koch, who built up the family business inherited from their father, and now use their billions to thwart any attempt at business regulation. But if you look a little deeper at the family itself, as portrayed in this article, it also says something about the state of creativity in this country. Fred Koch, the family patriarch, started things pretty much from scratch. He was a chemical engineering graduate from MIT who invented a more efficient way to convert oil into gasoline, and the company was built around this invention. The company was successful, but when his sons took it over, they boosted it into the stratosphere. Note here, that the father was the one with the bright idea. He actually created something--a tangible product for sale. His sons have no inventions to their names, however. All their mental genius has been directed at business deals and at rebuffing attempts to regulate them. In a way, I think that's why we're in all this trouble as a country. We're too many generations away from the inventors. They've never been hungry. They've never felt the sting of being rejected by a higher authority (Fred Koch's invention was not accepted by American oil companies. He had to get his start working with Joseph Stalin in the USSR.) All that one percent have done is create money--for themselves mostly. This is why we're not seeing the expected answers to our problems. This top one percent have grown too soft and complacent. It's too bad, because at the same time, we're also worrying about a "crisis in creativity," as written about in a recent Newsweek. So the question begs to be answered. Who is John Galt? Maybe it's us.
I sometimes feel guilty, on grocery day. Times are hard and money's tight. Yet in my cart I have brown eggs, hamburger and chicken from Good Natured Family Farms--a regional company. Clinking around in the cart is my empty, returnable milk bottle from Shatto, which I'll return for another half gallon of skim that isn't much less than a whole gallon in a plastic jug. Despite our big pay cut, I haven't been able to let go of these vestiges of better times. But sometimes I hear a nagging voice. "Spoiled. Selfish. Pretentious. Rich and silly." And let's not forget "elitist." I started buying these products gradually. First came the ground meat. There had been an E coli outbreak and also some talk about mad cow disease. The smaller supplier would be less risky, I decided, because the ground meat would come from fewer cattle. I started buying the milk because it was fun to buy in a glass bottle, but continued as I read more on bovine growth hormone. The chickens just tasted better. But then I started reading about conditions in large factory chicken farms. The free range eggs followed. I didn't mind paying a little more. We had the budget for it then. Now, though, I beat myself up a little each time I put one of those items into the cart. We decidedly don't have money to splurge on higher grocery bills. We need tires and a front-end job. What kind of a sissy would sacrifice her budget because of unfounded worries about food safety? Then came the recent egg recall, and suddenly my concerns don't seem so unfounded and my higher-end groceries seem like money well spent. The past decade has brought a steady stream of bad news from the food companies. I started buying these products to regain just a little control over what we eat. We started gardening long ago for many of the same reasons. Except gardening saves you money. I always figured the savings offset the higher price of meat and dairy. But it got me thinking: Does this response make me an optimist or a pessimist? I always came down on the pessimistic side before. All that thinking about food safety. The recalls and poisonings are just temporary aren't they? Just fleeting blips on the radar field of an all-wholesome food system. But today I'd argue the opposite. Buying better quality makes me an optimist. I am following the manly man American tradition of solving my own problems and guiding the invisible hand of the marketplace with my own God-given pocketbook. Buyer beware. If more people join me, the food supply really will get safer. And maybe the earth will get a little cooler. So I'll continue to spend a few dollars more on more wholesome locally grown products, because today it doesn't seem so much like a frill. In fact, quite the opposite. It's a whole lot less expensive than the doctor.
I remember giving a speech back in ninth grade on inflation. (Yes, I was that type of nerdy student. A partner and I later did a project on the gold standard. This was all for an English class. Lucky I'm a girl or I surely would have been beaten up regularly.) The speech is still pretty clear in my mind because I hated giving speeches and because this one went well with the use of a visual aid to keep my hands busy. Since this was before the days of PowerPoint, I made a poster with a circle on it. It was really pretty simple. As my little taped man moved around the circle, I'd talk about supply and demand, wages and prices. As wages went up, demand went up, and as demand went up, prices went up until supply caught up. If it didn't, then there'd be pressure on wages to go up again. It was the first time I thought that I got how the economy worked. I look back wistfully on that day, because if one thing is clear, I'm completely at sea in the new world of global economics. In early 2009, I used to watch the stock market, hoping it would be a predictor of how things might go for my family. Surely, if there were jobs and a healthy middle class with wages steady or rising, then this would be a good thing for demand and for business, right? But I found that the stock market seems to be an entity to itself, operating in a planet on the far side of the sun from where I sit. When jobs come back, that's a bad thing because business will have to pay more for labor or treat their workers better. Good consumer confidence, or a surge in retail sales--that's a good thing, right? Well, maybe, but a stronger dollar ruins everything. In fact, nowadays the stock market only seems to affect my life if it's on the downswing. The big crash of '08? We felt that right away. The big rebound of the ensuing months? Not so much. True, our savings were regained, But then we weren't doing anything with that but trying to save for old age and college. Our everyday life didn't change like it did when we took the pay hit. So I've been hitting the books. Recently, I read three economics books back to back: The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?, by Ian Bremmer; Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by Anon, N+1 and Keith Gessen; and IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, by John Lanchester. Result: I understand a bit more about state capitalism and derivatives, but I don't like them any better. Other result: It's becoming increasingly clear that--just like global warming scientists--the people who know the system best are not going to be listened to, and we'll all suffer for the stupidity and short-term greed of the majority. Harsh, I know. But the more I read, well... Lanchester, an English novelist whose book is both as fun to read as Diary, but still manages to explain the complicated financial terms, was the most dour. "Looking back, it turns out that we've just lived through an economic golden age. It turned out to be a fake golden age, one based on debt and on an unsustainable credit bubble and underpinned by a financial system which was, it turned out, taking crazily miscalculated risks--but we didn't know that at the time. In fact, most of us had no idea it was a golden age; we didn't know that we were living through what for many of us will turn out to be the best economic times of our lives. I wish someone had told us...." In the time right after the first big corporate collapse, he says, Westerners had a chance to reflect on why ever increasing riches don't seem to make us any happier. "We in the West can do something that no people in history have done: we can show the world that we know when we have enough." But he also says he doubts that will happen, because we don't really feel all that rich, even though by world standards, we are. And we are all about to start to feel poorer, because we're getting the bill now for the excesses of the past. Sad, but true. But, when you've spent all your life as an outlier, paying off your credit cards, living in an older home that you can afford, shopping from the used and unfinished furniture stores (and sometimes the trash bins!) to keep from overspending, this assessment is a little hard to take. But oh well. There's very little we can do about it. Except maybe quit playing the worker ant and saving for a happier tomorrow that will never come.
When a scientific study can be summed up with this opening line--"People think they're more liberal than they really are"--well, I just can't resist. Where? Where are these people who find the liberal label so irresistible that they have to claim it, even when they aren't? Certainly not at any gathering I've ever attended in the states of Kansas or Missouri. Most people I know are scared to death to use the L-word, even if it does fit them. Who would be crazy enough to identify as a liberal when the shoe doesn't fit? Nevertheless, that is the lead of a recent story in the New York Times about a British study of political attitudes worldwide. The researchers asked 136,000 people over the course of 20 years to rate themselves as righties or lefties, on a scale of 1-10. Those answers were then compared with how well people agreed with the statement, "Incomes should be made more equal." The result: People thought of themselves as more left-leaning than their answer to income distribution indicated. The researchers theorized that the more educated people--who identified themselves much more inaccurately as left-wing--were in fact, fiscally conservative. They were liberal on social issues, yet voted with their pocket books as fiscal conservatives. Well, okaaaay....I guess the fact that this was a study of people in 82 countries makes it more understandable. It's far more accepted to call yourself a liberal elsewhere, where there's a more live-and-let-live approach to social issues than in the US. At least in Europe. Perhaps "conservative" just doesn't have the same cache there and elsewhere as it does here. But you have to wonder about a study that's been going on for 20 years. In that amount of time, the popular definitions of liberal and conservative have changed. It's kind of like Sarah Palin now calling herself a feminist because she believes in woman power to enact all kinds of restrictions for women on abortion. You see, right-wing feminism means seeing your gender as equal and rising up to recognize the power of life. This has startled some of us who've taken all kinds of verbal abuse for years over this very term. If there's one thing we've learned, it's that being a feminist is the same as being an anti-Biblical, scaly demon who is an abomination to nature and God. Now it's okay? What next? This from a wing of the Republican Party that has spent the past three or four years debating whether people who disagree with them are "true Republicans" or just pretender in-name-onlies who need to be purged. Hmmm....Does this mean we'll soon see Karl Rove and his ilk lobbying to be called liberals because they believe in liberty from taxes and regulations? Will Rush Limbaugh suddenly stop talking about "femi-nazis" and start schmoozing with the "femi-nicies?"
But back to the study. Apparently one other thing researchers found was that people who think of themselves as lefties, and who really ARE lefties, also were happier than their right-of-center counterparts. Happier about what is not clear. But yeah, I can see it. Maybe they're just happy not to be so confused.
Having a birthday is always a good time to look back a little and assess where you are. My birthday was last week. And all in all, I've got to say I'm feeling a lot better about just about everything. This is not because of any recent economic news. We've been bombarded with warnings about a double-dip recession and deflation. The newspaper industry isn't in any better shape than it was. Unemployment and age discrimination remain prevalent. And, honestly, our family outlook hasn't improved that much, either. We're still living with a huge income cut for the foreseeable future. Our savings are still down. And our daughter--who still hopes to go to college--gets older each day. So my feeling better doesn't have anything to do with outside events. It's because we're still here. In our house. With at least part-time employment. Yes, there's a lot to be said for survival. And a lot to be said for remembering how bad things were. We are at the point now, where I can look back to last year and say, "Wow. Compared to this time last year, we are on Easy Street."
Last year I spent many sleepless nights wondering whether we could possibly survive on 33 percent less money. What would happen to college loans we couldn't repay? How would we deal with those super high utility bills in the heat of summer and cold of winter? For one thing, we were blessed with only a moderately hot summer last year. By the time the cold weather hit, I had learned the tricks of the new budget. So we never had to blow off the utility company. In fact, our hard-core resistance to spending for even the smallest of life's pleasures kept us from frittering the lump cash sum we got when Mike had to go part time. Of course, it gets tiring, always having to look at the unraveling and threadbare bathroom towels and never getting to eat out. Among other things. It gets tiring, always having to tell your daughter no. So we took a chunk of that money and went on a big trip last month. Because we earned it. No apologies. And it felt great.
This time last year Mike was being mercilessly pummeled from the right-wing blogosphere in a very personal way, and I had to watch as these people kicked him when he was down. Believe me, fury is not a pleasant emotion. Now, though, the fun has apparently gone out of it and they've moved on to other targets.
Last year, I was consumed in fear. The thing I was mostly afraid of was what would happen to my daughter's future if we became insolvent. I'm no longer so afraid of that--not because we're any less likely to become insolvent, but because I've realized how short-term a problem her future is. Only three years until college. Come what may, we have the resources to hang on that long. And on the bright side, our reduced resources may make it easier to get the grants and scholarships that are a matter of course for most of us in what used to be the middle class. We've just got to get her to college. And once that happens, we'll have some more options as well. So it's been a better year. Dammit, I might even say I felt optimistic about the months to come. But I don't want to jinx it.
Speaking of economic good fortune, last week's birthday makes it possible for me to now get into the city swimming pool for $1. There's a brighter tomorrow ahead. Happy birthday to me.
A year ago, I discovered what I thought was my non-evil twin--a woman named Gretchen Rubin who is from Kansas City and happened to be writing a book on happiness. Only instead of endlessly carping about things, as I usually do, she fills her blog with advice on how we can improve our outlook. The Happiness Project: or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle and Generally Have More Fun (HarperCollins 2009) hit the shelves last December. The lengthy subtitle pretty much sums it up. Rubin's idea seems to be that if you just change yourself enough--if you stop nagging, remember everyone's birthday, start exercising, organize your closets, make more time for your kids while at the same time getting to bed earlier--you will feel happier. She knows it works because in the end, she does feel happier. She backs that up with anecdotes written by readers of her blog who have followed her plan, which includes charts in which you grade yourself daily on how you're doing. (I'll go out on a sexist limb here. It seems really unlikely that many men would take all this trouble.) You see, Rubin recently lost her job and is recovering from a serious illness and...no wait. I've got that wrong. Rubin was editor of the Yale Law Journal and clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor but now writes books and lives in New York with her husband and two children, whose two sets of doting grandparents visit often. Then one day on a bus, it hit her. She just wasn't happy enough. She should try to do better. The huge list of new chores and duties was not really an expression of guilt and self punishment for her success. It really wasn't Okay, okay. I won't go down the sarcasm road. Rubin is well aware that there are plenty of people worse off than she is. She makes that point early on. So I want to give her the benefit of the doubt. But I have to point out that she doesn't always make it easy. The cocktail party on page 13, for instance. An acquaintance attacks her idea. "And anyway," he persisted, "you're not a regular person. You're highly educated, you're a full-time writer, you live on the Upper East Side, your husband has a good job. What do you have to say to someone in the Midwest?" Yes, the Midwest. That hellhole where regular people live who don't have good jobs or a lot of education. And they also don't have cocktail parties. I can never imagine this conversation without turning it into a little movie. After that line, the camera would weave through the living room, past the canapes, picking up bits of conversations along the way. Some well-dressed men are gathered in a corner. The punch line: "...and we were selling those things, and I mean they were hot. But all they were was worthless paper. What are you gonna tell the people in the Midwest?" (Fade to sounds of uproarious laughter) There's also this sentence: "But when my clerkship with Justice O'Connor drew to a close, I couldn't figure out what job I wanted next." Why does that irritate me so much? It's not an unreasonable thought. I guess I just can't help applying it to people I know. "When I was laid off after 20 years, I couldn't figure out what job I wanted next." Which brings me to the central point. The Happiness Project is the victim of horrible, horrible timing and questionable editorial judgment. The research and blog were started back in early 2006. March of that year is the first entry in Rubin's blog archives. The biggest recession in our generation's memory started, by most accounts, in 2007. The stock market went into crisis in fall of 2008. At that point, someone should have said, "maybe we ought to rethink this. It seems like the obstacles to happiness right now are bigger than cluttered closets and lack of exercise. People are losing their homes. If we print this, people are liable to say your projects are just icing roses on your wedding cake of a life." Toward the end of the book, Rubin does try to address that. She says she wants to develop happier habits now, so she can fall back on them when something bad does happen. I'm skeptical about that. The mild discontent she's dealing with now will have no relationship whatever to severe loss that could happen in the future. And if the bad thing is something financial, it will be harder still, because many of her projects involve buying something--a spot in an exercise class, a file box, bluebirds for her collection. I just don't have the faith that these things will make her better able to ward off the blues in bad times. Because I know it doesn't work. I used to do this sort of thing, but in reverse. As a kid, I'd imagine in vivid detail all the very worst things that could happen to me and my family, and how I might deal with them. I thought of this as a sort of vaccination against the schizophrenia that struck my mother in her 20s. In my child's mind, I thought she must gotten sick because she was not prepared enough for bad things. My mental constitution was going to be stronger. Did it make me less neurotic as an adult? You can ask my friends. But I sorta doubt it. Her more compelling argument is that she wants to be able to say she appreciated the good times while she had them. That, I can't argue with. Rubin had a great opportunity in The Happiness Project. She had the ear of a book publisher and an agent. And she had a historic moment in history--a time when we all could use some happiness. What we needed was something more. What we got was a bestseller.
I know this is going to make some people nutso, but I never feel so American as when I'm watching the MLS. I'm not talking about the wealth and world domination that causes so many to chant "We're Number One!" This is not the chest-thumping pride that comes with having things our own way across the globe for decades, with having the biggest military or being able to boss small countries about what form capitalism should take. None of that feels all that good to me anyway. This is more the American feeling from the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. It's the feeling that everything is grand and new and possible, with a little elbow grease. It's the wide-eyed enthusiasm for new inventions and world's fairs.It's the same feeling I used to get at House on the Rock in Wisconsin, with its rooms full of mechanical marvels. It's optimism. And it feels great to just succumb to it. There aren't many chances to do that in America these days. For the most part, we've done our building and growing. Our best inventing days sometimes seem to be behind us. Traditional American sports are larded with money and fans. But the MLS is still an exciting frontier. Attendance is on the rise, youth players are sticking with it into their teens. They're adding teams and building stadiums. And best of all, it's still a small enough sport that your season ticket can get you in to numerous events where you can talk to players and get autographs. I've shaken hands with Kansas City Wizard Jimmy Conrad several times. Try saying that about an NFL star, or any Premiership player in England for that matter. Speaking of England, when I was there a few weeks ago, I had a chance to observe how they reacted to the terrible spanking they got at the hands of Germany in the World Cup. Here's the Sun:
Other papers were only marginally more restrained. In fact, there was endless carping, despair and calls for firings. I'm not saying Americans aren't capable of the same vitriol. If there was an NFL world cup and the American team lost that badly, I'm sure the columnists would have been comparably irate. But there isn't an NFL world cup--or a baseball world cup or a basketball world cup. And that's just the point. By taking the risk of competing in a sport where we have a disadvantage, we become American again. It's not about the winning. It's about believing. My family watched the US's last game--against Ghana--at Ye Olde Cock in London. (Yes, that's really the name.) The bar was packed with American ex-pats. When the final whistle blew, the crowd spontaneously broke into The Star Spangled Banner. It was the one and only time I've ever felt moved by our national anthem.
Forget the Rolling Stones' refrain. Sometimes you can get what you want--and a little extra besides. Not too many days ago, I lamented that some publicity-seeking faux streakers were more fun to watch than the Kansas City Wizards lately. The Wizards had just lost to Chiv....well, let's not talk about it. Because the Wizards have redeemed themselves. And then some. What did they do? *They got a record crowd of over 50,000 to come out to Arrowhead to watch a match. *They convinced one of the top sports franchises in the world to make an appearance in Kansas City. Manchester United, of England, has also been our family's favorite English team for years. *They got us all in to see the newly refurbished Arrowhead before any of the Chiefs season ticket holders. (Sorry, Chiefs fans who are not rich. Your area does not look that much different. But I hear the luxury boxes are nice.) And, oh yeah, one more thing. They won! It was 2-1, with the Red Devils' only score coming from a penalty kick. That same penalty forced the Wizards to play one man down for the entire second half. But they won anyway. Which caused one more good thing to happen: It shut the mouths--momentarily, anyway--of all those soccer haters. You know the ones. "Soccer will never catch on here because Americans need high scores, they can't pay attention long enough, the game's boring," and yap yap yap. Well, here's a look at the crowd we saw yesterday: The north side stands were just as full. And while this wasn't a sell-out, it was the biggest crowd ever to watch a match in Kansas City. It keeps this city in the running for a future World Cup game, if the World Cup does end up in the US again. (For more, check out the Star's soccer blog The Full 90.) Just for that extra little dollop of goodness to put things over the top, the Wizards became the first MLS team to beat Manchester Utd. Yeah, sorry haters. But the beautiful game is catching on here (check out this story in the New York Times about that.) And personally, it feels good to be on the winning side of a trend for a change. Lord knows, it gets frustrating when your favorite TV shows and food flavors are always getting discontinued for lack of sales. And so, because I am optimistic about the future of soccer in this country and the Kansas City Wizards in particular, I declare this
"Sometimes you've just gotta say, 'What the f***.'" True when the Tom Cruise said it in Risky Business. And true today. Here's the situation: We've been living for over a year with a huge reduction in pay. We've denied ourselves. We've cut back. We've jiggered and re-jiggered our spending. We've looked for other sources of income. Yet somehow we managed to keep the "severance" money and even add to it a little bit. It's been a long, hard slog. Financial sages would tell us to keep at it, to save and save because we in no way have enough of a cushion for the next time the big boys in Wall Street decide they need an infusion. Keep living small, lowering our expectations and dreams. Adopt the attitude of a hunted gazelle. And it is at this point that we must reply, "What the f***." Because I'm tired--we both are--of the feeling that someone else gets to tell us how to spend our money. And of the feeling that, now we've come down in the world, we shouldn't expect to own nice things or take nice trips. And so a plan was hatched. We'd plunder a huge chunk of that cushion money we should be fearfully clinging to. We'd take a vacation--a big one--to visit my brother and his partner in Sweden. With a week's side trip to see the sights in London. Crazily irresponsible? Maybe. But Irene is only with us three more years. Life is short. I don't want to spend it like a hunted gazelle (ala the advice of Dave Ramsey). I want to be living and doing. So we went. And it was so, so worth it. We used to take vacation car trips all the time when the boys were little, but years of middle-class erosion have made us cut back on those. I'd almost forgotten how great it is to get the family (in this case, the three of us. Our oldest son came on his own dime, and the middle son was not able to come because of other commitments.) all together on a great adventure--seeing new things, eating new foods, learning about a different part of the world. For a while, we could enjoy ourselves in happy denial of what's proved to be a dismal year for income. For a while, we didn't feel like people being cast aside. And it did shake a few things loose for me, creatively. So who knows? Maybe I'll find a way to make that money back. In the meantime, we're carefully paying back the credit card (yes, the credit card) out of the remainder of that slush fund. Hard times could come again. There could be layoffs. But what the f***. No one can repossess our memories.
Post script: In my haste to get this post done quickly, I left out one very beautiful thing about this trip. After we got to Sweden, Mike (my brother) and Faith insisted on paying for most of the biggest expenses while there--hotels, tickets to London, etc. It was so generous...I get choked up even now thinking about it. So thanks, Mike and Faith, for your hospitality and your generosity.
One streaker at a ball game: A little unusual, yes. It may get a mention on the evening news. But it's not unheard of. But four streakers? All wearing matching flesh-colored thongs? And not one news outlet speaks a word? Something is up, my friends. The streakers provided the only entertainment an otherwise dismal match Saturday evening between the Kansas City Wizards and Chivas USA. It happened near the end of the half-time break. A few players--possibly reserves--were out on the field, kicking the ball around when suddenly this guy rips off an obviously tear-away outfit and starts running. After watching him for a while we notice there's another nearly nude guy sprinting from another part of the pitch, and then another one at the far end. I think there were four in all, but there may have been just three. Honestly, it's hard to concentrate on the numbers when there's a bevy of jockstrap-clad fitties capering like wood nymphs just in front of you. Here's the YouTube video, from a vantage not too far from where we sat in the Cauldron.
As streaking goes, one is pretty much the usual number in 2010. And loincloths? Pfft. Exposure is the whole idea. So an apparently organized streak with such consideration for children in the stands is unusual. It should have merited at least a couple of words from the local news. But nothing on the channel we checked. And no mention in the Star. Very strange unless... The whole thing was a stunt for an MTV show. That's the buzz on the web-o-sphere and it does make sense. Apparently streaking at a sports event is on the to-do-before-you-die list at The Buried Life--a show which, coincidentally, has a cast of four young men. Here's a link to their Facebook page, where their friends congratulate them. It also begs the question: How much did the Wizards front office participate in this? Did they seek it out for the publicity when the show airs, or were they as surprised as everyone else? In any case, it was an evening brightener as Kansas City slogged through the match against Chivas, who hadn't won a game in two months. The score? You don't even want to know. The Wizards are going to have to tighten it up to keep from being humiliated in the friendly against Manchester United on the 25th. But I forgot. This is an optimism blog. So forget the depressing score. Thanks, MTV.
PS Yes, I have been gone for a while. More just as soon as I get caught up from a great trip.
There isn't much gloom and doom that a little summer can't fix. Or if not fix, then at least make palatable. After a week of worrying about the outward rippling of the oil spill and the headed-in-the-wrong-direction stock market, I looked up from pitting cherries and saw the World Cup ahead. And it beckoned like a platter overflowing with pork bacon. Ahh, football. Nothing soothes the pain like football. And this has been a particularly good weekend for it. Let's start with the Wizards. They hadn't been exactly a source of joy the past few outings, after a two-month string of losses and ties. But things were looking up Thursday when we went out to see them against the Philadelphia Union. They stomped the Union 2-0. And it's a good thing, too, because if they hadn't, we'd have been really screwed. Philadelphia is an expansion team that's only been playing since March. Needless to say, they haven't had much time to get it together. Add to that the fact that they have--hands down--the ugliest kits ever. Vomit- (or maybe Boy Scout-) colored khaki with a dark stripe up the front shows every least bit of sweat. Amazingly, I could not find a picture of a player in uniform on the net. But here's one from a merchandise web site: They'd have to be dispirited. But we'll take the win, anyway.
Then the World Cup. Three games per day for a couple of weeks, until the group stages are over. And I could watch every one of them. I really could. We watched the US tie England today with a raucous crowd at the Power & Light District. (And are happy and relieved to come away with 1-1, after a very, very lucky mistake by England's keeper.) I'd never been to the P&L before, and I was, frankly, a little worried about going. All I'd ever heard to this point was about how strict the dress code is, and how the area has a whole list of deportment dos and don'ts. It sounded a little like going to Sunday school. What would happen if I accidentally swore? (A definite possibility.) I pictured a security guard propelling me by the elbow, telling me never to come back. (It turns out I needn't have worried. On our way out, McFadden's was pumping a song out onto the sidewalk with the refrain, "F**k, yeah!.") It all got me thinking how we've come a long way since the last World Cup. Four years ago, when we attended a watch party, it was at the Chief's Arrowhead indoor practice facility. At the time, Mike and I bought jerseys, convinced it would be our last chance because the Wizards were for sale and we'd soon lose them. This year, we're watching at the Power & Light and celebrating progress on a new soccer-specific stadium in KCK. Four years ago, few of our daughter's teammates parents paid much attention to professional soccer or the World Cup. Today, most of them went to parties all over town to watch the match. A lot's been wrong the past couple of years. Layoffs, oil spills, hazardous products, greedy corporations. But today I'm thankful that appreciation of football is on the rise. For a change, something is going in the right direction.
Ahem, as I was saying... Yesterday I was distracted by the YouTubes as I sat down to write about an article on baby boomers and happiness that I saw in the Kansas City Star. Today, I'll stay more on point. The story, written by Amy Sheridan, attracted my attention because of the headline: Come on, baby boomers, get happy. Sheridan marvels that the so-called Baby Boom generation has a gloomier outlook on life than other generations, as measured by the Pew Research Center. What followed was the newspaper equivalent of a hearty slap on the back and a "Smile, why dontcha?!" Her words: "Happiness and satisfaction can be yours today, right now. All you have to do is decide to be happy." Then she peppered us with the usual claptrap from the happiness industry. Learn to laugh at yourself. Treat yourself to fun clothes. Get involved! I've been reading this stuff from so-called happiness experts for months now. Are others benefiting from it? Because it doesn't help me a bit. It's a little like the doctor who tells you to lose weight after you've been trying and trying, but doesn't offer any ideas on how. Or the financial adviser who says "You don't have enough income. You need to make more money." So I looked up the Pew Study and found: A) That it was taken in early 2008, a few months before the big economic panic. B) That despite our supposedly high incomes, we are worried about finances. C) That we've been gloomy since our 20s and that the folks at Pew seemed genuinely puzzled by it all. All I can say is that if baby boomers were more worried than the rest of the population back before even Bear Stearns folded, then that proves we're smart. We totally called it. And we've been reading other indicators right as well. Maybe more younger people are getting laid off, but don't tell me we shouldn't worry until we see who gets hired back. A lot of people in their 50s have dependents still at home, mortgages, elderly parents and a long life ahead of them. And they're spending more time out of work. Each year they spend unemployed makes them one year older and less hireable, because of the ageism that is rampant in this country. (If you're still unclear, read this letter from the Kansas City Star.) The Pew researchers spent some ink wondering why a generation that supposedly has had it so soft would have such a low expectations. I'd like to take a crack at that one, too. The 60s weren't only hard on the "greatest generation." They were hard on us, too. Just as we were reaching adulthood, our president lied, cheated and resigned. Our older brothers were dying in a murky war we didn't understand. People were screaming at each other over race. And we knew the world expected no less than that we'd somehow top the feat of putting a man on the moon. And after the 60s? There hasn't been a single year that our generation wasn't blamed for something. The coming Social Security fund crisis. The increase in household debt. The bubble in home prices. Low productivity. Mouthy latchkey kids. Loose morals and teen pregnancy. Coarsening of the culture. All the Baby Boom's fault. Given all that, I'd say gloominess is a perfectly reasonable reaction.
There's more that bothers me about this piece, though. It's the source. The Star's tag line mentions that Amy Sheridan is the founder of The Baby Boom Network, an on-line group dedicated to the well-being of this generation. So I looked up the web site. What the Star's tag line failed to include is that Sheridan is also selling us something. A book, (on stress-free aging) an online course on optimism and of course, her services as a presenter and motivational speaker. Her "articles" are just a way to draw in business. Here's a quote from one of those "article" ostensibly about baby boomer statistics: "Your goal is to be aware that there are many different options open to you and that you should take advantage of the services and products specifically being developed for you." (italics mine) This is sneaky, very sneaky, because it so subtly crosses the line between a genuine news story and an ad. It's an article of dubious value in the space usually reserved for features, in the same font and headline style as FYI's other features. But it's written by someone trying to draw in customers. Here's why this is a bad thing. Let's say you're a reporter and your father owns a large department store in town. And you want to write a story about something department-store related, say, pricing policies. No matter how fair you are or promise to be, most papers will not let you do it. It creates a doubt in readers' minds. You could be soft on your dad's store. You could be trying to drum up business. Doesn't matter if it's true. The doubt is all that matters. Exactly the same thing is going on with Sheridan's piece. This is ethically wrong and I'm very disappointed in the Star for running it.
I was all set to write about an item I read in the Kansas City Star today headlined "Come on, baby boomers, Get Happy." I have all the links tabbed across the toolbar, ready to go. Because if there's anything that makes me want to bring the caustic, it's a rah-rah headline like that. Sort of reminded me of that Office Space line, "Someone's got a case of the Mondays." And it's here I veered a little off course. I went to YouTube, and typed in "case of the Mondays," to illustrate my point. And came across this:
Have I been regretting the fact that I left cubicle land (which is increasingly what daily newspaper offices look like) to be at home with my kids? And that I now feel stuck and poor because there are no jobs and I've been out of the office workforce too long and nobody wants to hire anyone over 50? I apologize. These films, apparently from security cameras, really bring back the memories. The desk pounding, the wastebasket kicking, the obscenities. We never had any actual fighting, though a couple of guys had some finger-poking-on-chest action over semantics. (Are you calling me an a**hole? No, I said don't be an a**hole.) Ah yes, I remember the anger. It's funny to look back on, but was absolutely no fun at the time. That part, I don't miss at all. So, despite my intention to blast away at Amy Sheridan's piece on baby boomers, I ended up feeling better about my life's choices. But don't think I've forgotten, miss "licensed mental health counselor and trainer." Meet me here tomorrow, and we'll finish our business.
My mission to control the nonstop freaking out over financial issues continues. It has not been easy, let me tell you. But I do find that the teachings of the Dalai Lama about taming one's mind have something to offer me. Example: Two things in the mail today. First, a notice from ACS, which handles one of our college loans, saying we're overdue by a month. This despite the fact we've had no notices that the newly negotiated payments were starting back up again. Or what date they were due. I went straight to anger, as usual. What do they mean overdue? Where was our paper or electronic notice? What do they think they're trying to pull? Then despair. How will we ever get out of this black financial hole? We're stuck. We don't deserve a trip this summer. Later, though, we found ACS was glad to correct the situation, send us a notice and restart the payments so we wouldn't start a month behind. All my emotions were unwarranted. Fail. The second was a notice of telling us we have a $500+ shortage in escrow. I will be as a stone. I will be as a block of wood. $500? Really? But yes. According to Wells Fargo, our payment will go up by $30 a month if we pay it as a lump sum, or $74 a month if we use their 12-month plan working the shortage into the payments. This is perplexing. Last year's escrow shortage was just over $250. I can't remember ever having a shortage of more than $350. What gives? I can't imagine taxes went up by that much. So maybe it's the insurance. And what's insurance doing with increases by that much in such bad economic times? I will be as a quiet pond. I will be as a granite statue. Ahhh. I guess we'll just have to do some digging and find out.
I've been keeping the TV on today, checking in every so often with CNN for news of the "top kill" plan to deal with the oil leak that got underway a couple of hours ago. It's not often that I turn on TV during daytime, except possibly to check in on the markets. I think now I remember why. As I waited for British Petroleum to get things going, I heard the following: *Q and A with a financial guy on whether the USA could become the next Greece (not that likely), along with another story wondering if Italy will be the next Greece. *A leaked BP memo that explained a cost analysis on worker housing to find the cheapest dwelling structures acceptable. The on-site trailers chosen allegedly put the workers at higher risk for injury if there was an explosion. Incredibly, that's not the worst part. The worst part is BP used the Three Little Pigs as a twisted analogy to decide "which type of houses should the piggy build?" *The investigation into plant conditions that led to a recall of children's name-brand medicines widens. This one has been off my radar because we no longer use children's medicine at our house. But people have complained of becoming ill, smelling an odd odor in the medicine, small black flecks that are possibly metal, and an unnamed bacteria contamination. *There's some kind of drug war starting in Jamaica now. The one in Mexico has border people so scared they've convinced President Obama we should put up a wall and have National Guard troops patrolling the border. Every so often, someone writes a beard-scratcher asking why Americans are so fearful. Well, ahem.... Maybe it's because we realize we're hooked into a type of capitalism so extreme that it is immoral. This type of capitalism doesn't care about your sick children or the ecosystem or whether the products are good for you. It doesn't care about the long term. It exists only to earn the maximum profit for business owners or stockholders. And it had a part in every one of these horrible things that have happened. In this type of capitalism, government (in other words us, the people) has no will to regulate the financiers who brought down economies, or raise taxes to enforce drug laws or inspect medicine plants. Ideally--for the corporations--we'd have no control at all. Proponents of this type of capitalism have been working a long time to get things to this point. Some of them will tell you that the free market will take care of itself. In this world of unicorns and waterfalls, business will not behave badly because they won't want to be shunned by customers later when they're found out. Right. Excuse me, hippies, while I go bake some hash brownies.
Now we see that those boys and girls in suits need some tough cops on the job just as much as anybody else. Trouble is, we aren't showing any signs of a backbone yet. So how to be empowered, as an optimist? Well, yesterday I signed the petition to boycott BP. I know, I know. It's largely symbolic. (In fact, CNN also ran a story today about the many invisible arms of BP and how we're powerless against them.) But then, I am a consumer who knows how to hold a grudge. Remember Rely tampons? The ones that caused all the deaths from toxic shock syndrome in the early 1980s? I held a personal boycott against Procter and Gamble--widely mocked by my co-workers--for two or three years. I got a list of products. I bought only Lever Bros. soap. It wasn't all that undoable. The Internet has made it much easier to get that same product information. Maybe my pocketbook voting won't do anything. But it will make me feel good. Now, off to check on progress on the oil leak.
Welcome to my journey. I am a piano teacher and composer and former newspaper reporter who took time off to raise kids and never made it back. Inexplicably, I am not a natural optimist. Is it possible to change?
Advertising will be a new feature on this blog for the time being. These Google ads use cookies to serve ads based on visits to this site. The cookies do not use personal ID, such as name, phone, etc. If you want to opt out, please click here.
Yes, just in time for the holidays, a bacon and sausage creche, with the mini-weenie Baby Jesus lying in a bed of sauerkraut. This is...well...yeah.
No, this is not a joke. It is--or was--a real product that, according to the Internets, boasted four slices of bacon per scoop. It was introduced by J & D's, makers of Baconnaise and other bacon flavored items. The company quit selling the baby formula, according to the Huffington Post. But no matter, they got the desired publicity.
Posts
