A financial lightbulb

There's nothing like a good recession to open your eyes. Nothing like this has happened in (most of) our lifetimes. Do we need proof that politicians and financial analysts have no better idea of what makes the world go around than the rest of us? They make a good, believable show of it, but in they end, they only care about the bottom lines.

I have to remind myself that the nice person I talk to on the phone doesn't really represent the company priorities even when they genuinely think they do. They're not deliberately misleading the people they talk to. In the end, they can neither accept blame, nor take responsibility for their employers. The executives are good at taking credit when times are good and avoiding prosecution when they mess up. To get out of a jam, just quit and start up your own consulting business.

There was a recent article in the NYTimes about PHD physicists who work on wall street. They're referred to as "Quants" (another way to say "nerd") and figure they can make money if they can do a small fraction better than a random guess.

On the upside, I understand better what my grandparents lived and how frugality affected an entire generation.

Makes me want to just put my money under the mattress.

Do I sound bitter? Don't answer...

What do you call her again?

The limbo of my marriage leaves me asking, what do you call a spouse who is no longer a spouse, but to whom you are legally married? Here's a list, but none of them really does the situation justice.

The mother of my child
My Ex
My parenting partner
The sponsor of my graduation education
Someone I used to know
Someone I used to be partners with
My separatee
The person I'm too entangled with to be independent
My future ex
My financial entanglee

This has happened to other people. Why isn't there a word for it? Any suggestions out there? This whole thing is going to take a while, so I need a word...

Here come the politics

The open discussion of important political topics by the Obama administration, so long brushed under the rug, gives me some optimism for the future of the country. Health care concerns have been bothering me for a long time (since college), but have recently moved to the top of the list of the issues that are important to me (since I became a dad?). I have to say it is probably one of the few issues that causes me to even consider life in a different country.

As we've seen lately, even a life's worth of planning and savings can evaporate in a bad day on wall street. In economic terms, money is the assignment of a specific value to hard work. Which is is the real commodity?

Honest people have been losing their hard-earned retirements as wealth is concentrated at the top of the social pyramid. Administrators and executives are rewarded for juggling the money that has to come to represent work. But as companies are backing out of pension agreements and health care costs are increasing much faster than income, we have lost both money and the perception that labor is worth something. Money gets concentrated at the top, but real work is rooted firmly in the ground.

We have not lost any capacity to work. Instead, we have bought in to the collective delusion that money and work are the same. It's similar to blindly placing value on standardized test results and grades instead of the quality of the education provided. One has real value and one is a largely unquestioned societal illusion.

This leaves me asking, is playing by the rules worth it? It also makes me wonder why we can't commit as a nation to taking care of each other. Americans generously provide economic assistance to nations in need and to the victims of natural disasters. The suggested that we guarantee health care to all Americans is greeted with screams of "socialism" from the far right. Dialog is stopped in the societal equivalent of a filibuster.

I think and hope this argument is falling flat these days. What is wrong with social democracy? Most western countries offer health care to their citizens. Socialized medicine is not the same thing as socialism or communism. Are we ignorant enough as a society that we can't distinguish shared medical costs from oppressive government? Is the cold-war era fear of Soviet Communism still controlling us? Stalin would be proud of his enduring legacy. Isn't that what tyrants and terrorists want?

The cost of public panic and fear is too high! It leads to paranoia, loss of freedom, and the funneling of endless resources into unnecessary and ineffective international conflict. Fear has dominated our politics in recent years.

Maybe I should be more specific here--fear motivates both sides. The abstract fear of military attack in the present seems to threaten rural residents of our country while the urban population seems more fearful of future and even more abstract things like not being able to afford to educate our kids and making assure that we'll have reasonable access to health care when we need it. It's the difference in timescale that distinguishes these fears.

On the other hand, none of us really fear much about things beyond the end of our own lives and those of our families. I like to think that I do think of the future beyond my own existence but is this really possible? I doubt that I'm so different from others in this regard.

It is heartening to see American diplomats addressing concerns that are important to me: international dialog again instead of unilateralism, health care, education, and environmental degradation. But those are topics for another time.

Enough heavy stuff for today. I'm going fishing this weekend. Nothing like a day standing in cold moving water to clear your head, bring you back home and make you appreciate what you already have. Who cares about catching the fish?

DWB

Things for people who do too much

OK, I finally get it. I'm one of those people--I compulsively take on new projects. I can't help myself. I want to get the most out of life and appreciate every minute of it. I only do it because I have an unquenchable thirst for learning. It's an addiction. Am I a hedonist? An experience junkie?

I've got to slow down and simplify. Maybe that's the gift of parenting...a quick, merciless, brake-squeeling, halt to the pace of life. Like hitting the ground after a good ten-story fall.

Or maybe the gift is the speeding up of time so that we never have enough time to appreciate the little things. Is that a gift? I'm certainly not bored, but I have learned that you have to pay interest on borrowed sleep.

I could never have imagined this as a kid. One thing leads naturally to another, then you find yourself at the age of 40 asking, "How did I get here? This is not my beautiful life..."