Month: July 2011

by

Legerdemain

Ah, WordPress. Every so often you feel the need to change things, to switch them around a bit, move words slightly left or slightly right, make lilliputian adjustments. One might not notice if one had not spent some time in this place.  I wonder about this need to adjust and mark.

I have been working so much on the book that I keep wanting to hit the save button on this like I do on my word processing program, but the code doesn’t work here.  It’s a useful habit, this saving of documents every few minutes, but it’s weird when the fingers do it without the brain making a conscious choice.

For many days I have been the proverbial chicken with a missing head.  I often feel as if the body is carrying on without me, a pinball chicken body, bouncing and careening from moment to moment.  This exhausts me. I made the mistake of checking work email a moment ago.  Oh, how I wish I had not done that.  It pulls my head from my body and throws it into my office, and right now, I want my head at home, with the body.

While I feel like my head is operating without my body, I think I’m giving the impression of managing it all, like a circus performer balancing plates on sticks, one here, another there, one high, another low.  From the outside, I appear to have all the marbles in a jar, but really, this is an illusion, a sleight of hand.  Move closer and one will see that the marbles aren’t together at all.  It is just a picture of the marbles in a jar, the light adjusted somewhat to give the appearance of reality.  Look behind the picture and you will see a chicken running without its head and the head is nowhere to be found.

by

Lucky

Our house smells like roasted sugar. Well, burned sugar actually.  This smell is the result of a confluence of unplanned events.  First, Milla turned over a plastic bear bottle of honey in the cupboard above the stove in an effort to extract every last molecule of the stuff from the bottle.  Second, I forgot to turn off the burner on the stove this morning after making eggs.  Third, after heating the stove and the air above it all day long, the honey in the bottle began to melt and drip down into the drip pan — hence the name, drip pan, although I doubt this is what the stove designers had in mind exactly.  Thus, the result was burning sugar.  There is now in the drip pan a pile of charred honey. It is the color of hematite.  It’s actually quite beautiful. We’re lucky we didn’t burn down the house.

by

Anticlimactic

The interesting thing for me in finally finishing one of my books is how anticlimactic it has been.  I finished it, then sat here and thought, Okay, it’s done.  I will have to read through it and edit, but the bulk of it is complete. It seemed as if the occasion deserved something more, but it really didn’t.  If there has been a sincere shift in my thinking over the last few years it is this:  life is about the ride, not the destination.  This book just proved to me how much this has sunk in and become a part of me.

Time to rouse baby and get her dressed.  I love the smile she gives me when she awakens.  This morning before I got out of bed, I was lying next to her and she wakened for a moment, then patted my chest for milky, and gave me her lovely smile before latching on and going back to sleep.  Ah, baby love is the best love of all!

by

Rick Santelli is an Idiot…Still

I posted this a while back.  See it here.  I was responding to this moron the first time he opened his idiot face and let venom spew.   Of course, since he’s still slithering around out there, the post continues to garner hits, over two years later.  I reread what I wrote, and I can’t really improve on it.  All I said is still true.  So I’m posting it again.

Rick Santelli is an Idiot

I can’t believe this guy.  I heard him spouting off about how Americans shouldn’t pay for their neighbor to have one more bathroom.  I wanted to reach into the screen and slap his ugly head.  What an idiot.

Here’s a clue, Mr. Smarty Pants:  People who are in foreclosure are in foreclosure because the system is a mess, not because they are “deadbeats” and want a free ride from the government or their neighbors.  Want to point fingers, idiot?  Point them at the banks that overvalued properties in the first place to get people into questionable loans so brokers could collect bigger fees.  Point those fingers at the lenders for telling consumers that their ARM loan wouldn’t be a problem because they would be able to refinance in three years when the rates change (and hey, rates have been going down forever, so  why shouldn’t this continue? Your payment will be lower!) while simultaneously neglecting to point out there would be no way in hell any traditional lender would refinance property that is mortgaged for more than it is worth.  And oh, be sure to keep it a secret from the borrower that refinancing will not be an option if you lose your job.  How about pointing the fingers at lenders who convinced people to take out that second mortgage or a HELOC to “consolidate their debt” without pointing out that trading unsecured debt for secured debt would make bankruptcy pointless should the need arise?  How about pointing fingers at the pathetic and useless Bush administration who drove us into an economic crisis and higher unemployment than we have seen in decades?  Let’s just blame the victim for losing their job.  They should have known to move to China or India ten years ago so they would be there when their jobs were shipped overseas.

I heard the jerk in an interview claim that buyers should have hired lawyers.  Guess what?  Lawyers aren’t free.  And assuming someone could afford $225 an hour to hire one, a lawyer wouldn’t hire an appraiser to know that the bank overvalued the property.  Plus hiring an attorney when you buy a house is theoretically unnecessary anyway.  Mortgage brokers and lenders have a fiduciary duty of care to their clients.  This means they are held to a higher standard of care in dealing with the public.  They are expected to act EXTRA honest because it is expected that they have greater knowledge about the mortgage industry than consumers.  How does this work, Mr. Santelli?  Are the consumers supposed to suddenly educate themselves so they can catch dishonest bankers and brokers?  Would you hold a patient to the same duty before going to a doctor?  Am I supposed to go get an MBA before I go to a financial expert to ensure they are upholding their fiduciary duty?  Should I get an MD before going to the doctor?

I can’t stand the mentality that we are not obligated to help one another.  Guess what?  We are all in this together.  We can sit in our foreclosed bunkers with our guns aimed at our neighbors and barbed wire wrapped around our hearts to protect us from the enemy, ensuring we keep that property because, hell, it belongs to us, right?  We don’t need to share.  Or we can grow up and realize that society at its heart means social.  It means taking responsibility for one another.  It means what we do for each other we do for ourselves. It means we care for and protect one another and when someone is down, we offer them a hand up.  Taking care of one another is the stuff life is made of.  The alternate choice is to live like Rick Santelli, cold and alone with his gun pointed at everyone, dragging his loot into the afterlife.  Good luck with that, Buddy.

P.S. Being a stock-broker might be a high risk financially, but it is not hard work.