Who here is sick of receiving e-mail forwards like “To women everywhere from a man who’s had enough”?
Normally I have at least a nodding tolerance for such stereotypical humor. Not this time. Maybe it was the wrong time of the month for me to be reading it.
I kid! In fact, I just thought it demanded an answer – especially if it would give me a chance to be just as sexist and condescending as the original author, whoever he is.
Each year a mid-January day is designated “Blue Monday” — allegedly the most depressing day out of the 365 or 366, according to a formula concocted by a guy named Cliff Arnall.
A former tutor at the University of Cardiff, Arnall seems to have created Blue Monday as a publicity stunt for a travel agency. Still, the reasoning seems pretty sound to me: A combination of consumer debt from holiday spending, post-holiday letdown, crappy weather and failed New Year’s resolutions make us feel like hell.
Last month I was fried extra-crispy: too many things to do in too little time before I left for a seven-week trip to Alaska. Will Chen over at Wise Bread did a telephone intervention, i.e., I sort of melted down while he was on the line.
Bless his heart – he didn’t start to make bad-cell-reception noises and say that he couldn’t hear me so we’d have to talk some other time. (Like, um, never.) Instead, he listened to me whirl and howl about so many things I wanted to do, so few days until my plane left, so many professional plans but no time in which to bring them to fruition.
Then he gently encouraged me to think about how I’m spending my time.
Until recently I was a fairly confident person. I took buses and trains both here and in other cities.
But after being mugged in Seattle’s Westlake Center transit tunnel, I lost my happy thoughts. To paraphrase the little kid from “The Sixth Sense,” I see bad people – everywhere.
Getting older is not for whiners. Since my late 40s, midlife health concerns have included thyroid imbalance, elevated blood pressure and creeping weight gain. A couple of mammograms looked iffy but turned out to be OK. The asthma could be better.
Mostly I’ve handled these issues with equanimity. But that was before the doctor ordered me to spread my own poo on a chemically treated card.
Made you look, didn’t I?
Seriously: One of the six people in my “pod bed shared room” brought some machetes back from the Congo. The situation is too convoluted to explain because I’m on free wifi at McDonalds and I’m getting glared at for sitting here so long.
Short form: He spent several hours in a jail cell when his souvenirs were discovered.
“They took my pocketknife, too,” he said, sounding dispirited. “They told me any blade that locks is illegal, and any blade longer than three inches is illegal.”
“Most machete blades are longer than three inches,” I agreed.
The blogger at the The Quest for $85,000 is about to become an empty nester. Her son’s set to move out soon, which means all four fledglings will officially be launched.
It will be odd, she muses, to live “on my own terms again without worrying about the impact my choices will make on impressionable lives.”
Quest: You don’t know the half of it. For starters, you’ll be able to walk around in your skivvies without giving your progeny a sight they can’t un-see.
Some couples choose to go to one income: to have a baby, to go back to school, to start a business. For others the change is involuntary and terrifying: layoff, illness, a business going under.
Those who seek change have the option of preparing for it. Those who have change thrust upon them can only scramble to minimize the damage.
J. Money has started a “Million Dollar Club” at his site, Budgets Are Sexy. Nicoleandmaggie from Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured isn’t rushing to join.
(I’m not really sure which of the two bloggers wrote this, so I’m going to guess that it was Nicole. I have a 50% chance of being right.)
Nicole and her spouse are making some smart choices, such as paying the mortgage off early, being canny about retirement funds and living on less than one salary. In this post she noted that throwing every extra dime and spare minute toward millionaire-hood would get them there faster.
But.
Wish I had a piece of the hosiery industry in Anchorage, where you remove your footwear after you enter someone’s house. Knowing you’ll be unshod regularly means making sure your feet are decently covered.
Once when I was an Anchorage Daily News reporter I took off my shoes at an interviewee’s home and discovered a rent in one sock. It’s hard to look professional when your big toe has its eye to the peephole.
Obviously Alaska is not the only place where indoor shoe-wearing is frowned upon. People in other cultures live this way too – and so, increasingly, do U.S. residents, as a quick Internet search indicates. Sometimes it’s because they want the carpet to last longer. Sometimes it’s because they don’t want spike-heel scratches on the hardwood.
And sometimes it’s to keep you from tracking in poisons.