Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Spoiled
Yesterday kind of sucked and the sucky feeling is carring over into today.
In the morning while Ian slept, a friend stopped by with chocolate donuts. That's not the sucky part. I love donuts, and I love friends just popping in.
We hung around talking for a couple of hours. Ate three donuts each. Blew off primo nap time to chat rather than work. Still not the sucky part.
My friend told me that her husband has still not been able to find work. It been almost a year. She might work the stores at Christmas time. She told me that another family from the neighborhood is leaving the city. He, a carpenter with a PhD in Philosophy, has been unable to find work, so they're heading up to the Berkshires.
Later in the afternoon, while Angela watched the kids, I drove to NJ to shop at Target and Whole Foods. On the way back, a crazy Middle Eastern guy cursed me out because I asked him to move his car backwards five inches so I could parallel park better. You're spoiled and you've always been spoiled, he screamed at me. I walked away rather than get into a fight.
(Do I get lots of cool points? I drive a standard in the city and parallel park.)
Later in the evening, I got a call from an old high school buddy. Like my morning friend, her husband has been out of work for a year. He's a civil engineer. After he finished the nuclear power plant in NH, the firm laid him off. They've been getting by with freelance work.
He's on a short list for a job in NC. They're considering it. The schools in their Boston suburb aren't great, so they would like to move anyway. However, schols aren't that great down in NC either. The Chapel Hill area is good, but the rest is average to poor.
I keep hearing that all the economic indicators point to a recovery, but I don't see it.
Maybe I am spoiled. Not because I want five more inches of parking space, but because I expect that MBAs should have jobs, that people should be able to live in major metropolitan regions regardless of income, that good schools shouldn't be hard to find.
Sorry to post such a downer. I told you I was in a sucky mood.
OK. One thing amused me today. I was reading the Hillary Clinton story in the New Yorker. She was going to an event at a Westchester library where she was met by a crowd of admirers. "Also hanging around outside was a man in a bright-red devil's suit, waving a sign that said, "I sold my soul to Hillary."
Yesterday kind of sucked and the sucky feeling is carring over into today.
In the morning while Ian slept, a friend stopped by with chocolate donuts. That's not the sucky part. I love donuts, and I love friends just popping in.
We hung around talking for a couple of hours. Ate three donuts each. Blew off primo nap time to chat rather than work. Still not the sucky part.
My friend told me that her husband has still not been able to find work. It been almost a year. She might work the stores at Christmas time. She told me that another family from the neighborhood is leaving the city. He, a carpenter with a PhD in Philosophy, has been unable to find work, so they're heading up to the Berkshires.
Later in the afternoon, while Angela watched the kids, I drove to NJ to shop at Target and Whole Foods. On the way back, a crazy Middle Eastern guy cursed me out because I asked him to move his car backwards five inches so I could parallel park better. You're spoiled and you've always been spoiled, he screamed at me. I walked away rather than get into a fight.
(Do I get lots of cool points? I drive a standard in the city and parallel park.)
Later in the evening, I got a call from an old high school buddy. Like my morning friend, her husband has been out of work for a year. He's a civil engineer. After he finished the nuclear power plant in NH, the firm laid him off. They've been getting by with freelance work.
He's on a short list for a job in NC. They're considering it. The schools in their Boston suburb aren't great, so they would like to move anyway. However, schols aren't that great down in NC either. The Chapel Hill area is good, but the rest is average to poor.
I keep hearing that all the economic indicators point to a recovery, but I don't see it.
Maybe I am spoiled. Not because I want five more inches of parking space, but because I expect that MBAs should have jobs, that people should be able to live in major metropolitan regions regardless of income, that good schools shouldn't be hard to find.
Sorry to post such a downer. I told you I was in a sucky mood.
OK. One thing amused me today. I was reading the Hillary Clinton story in the New Yorker. She was going to an event at a Westchester library where she was met by a crowd of admirers. "Also hanging around outside was a man in a bright-red devil's suit, waving a sign that said, "I sold my soul to Hillary."
