I like to forget about PostSecret, so I can go back every few weeks and read a big hunk of new postcards. Here are some good ones…
The woman and I watched Closer last night. I never went to see it in the theatre since the reviews at the time were lackluster, but that’s what I get for listening to someone else’s worthless opinion. It’s got great characters, great and memorable dialogue, and Natalie Portman spends one scene nearly buck naked.
What I liked about “Closer” is that it reminded me of all the sh*t and pain that’s mixed up in love. The entire movie is break-up / infidelity / love / loss / revenge concentrate. It’s every bad relationship experience you’ve had condensed into two hours. It’s real. But, it’s not all negative, just realistic and maybe cynical. It’s not just about relationships, it’s also about how people can be dishonest and screwed up because they’re self-loathing cowards. It’s a cycle: you seek someone to love because you have a hungry hole in your chest, you get involved with someone else because the hole is never really filled, then you betray your first lover and whip yourself with the resulting guilt so that everything falls down around you and you can be even more unhappy and pathetic. It takes work to be happy, dammit. I really believe that.
Like I said, there are some fantastic lines. Clive Owen is the star of this film, without a doubt, but everyone else is really good, too.
Some of my favorite lines:
Dan (Jude Law): You’re an animal.
Larry (Clive Owen): Yeah? What are you?
Dan (Jude Law): You think love is simple. You think the heart is like a diagram.
Larry (Clive Owen): Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood!Anna (Julia Roberts): Why is the sex so important?
Larry (Clive Owen): BECAUSE I’M A CAVEMAN!
In June, the American personal savings rate dropped to 0%!! This is absurd in the extreme.
I know few people of my generation who save. Our Baby Boomer parents grew up in a very different world. The world before instant credit and credit cards. A world without computerized databases where our collective histories and behaviors could be recorded and analyzed. Now we have social security numbers, drivers license numbers, and persistent electronic records. Our parents grew up when the financial world was less ominiscient. Everyone was largely innocent and naive when it came to credit. Credit cards themselves have only existed since 1951. In the old days, you had to be careful who you extended credit to. Nowadays, no one is really a credit risk. You can track a debtor anywhere in the country if they’re drawing a paycheck, and backruptcy laws have been introduced to make it more difficult to escape your debts.
That said, “a large proportion” of Americans are not saving and have never saved, Salisbury acknowledges. “That’s largely a function of income…. They’re just barely managing to survive as it is, and they don’t have enough income to save.”
A recent Consumer Federation survey found the lack of savings was especially troublesome to women. More than 70 percent said they worried about their finances in the last year, and two-thirds said that unexpected expenses – things like the furnace breaking or the car needing to be fixed – were the cause of that worry.
That’s because they had little or no money set aside. More than 40 percent of all women had less than $500 in the bank. For those 25 to 34 years old, the percentage without a rainy day fund jumped to 55 percent.
Many of us never learned anything about balancing our own books and socking money away, but we’d better since we can’t expect anyone else to do it for us. Why should they when it pumps billions of dollars into the financial sector of our economy? There are a few things you need to learn if you ever hope to be on top of your financial situation. Luckily, financial matters are very simple.
Principle 1: Spend less than you earn. Save the rest.
This is difficult for some people, but it is absolutely necessary if you ever hope to get in the black. Things will always cost more than you think and you can never predict every expense that might arise, so save for a rainy day when you receive those periodic windfalls. If you’re perpetually treading water you have two options: cut spending or make more money. You can do both for optimum effect. I know it seems like you have no room for spending cuts, but believe me you do.
Things that should be cut if you cannot save money each month:
If you do all these things you will be amazed at the result. I promise you’ll have at least three hundred dollars more than you normally would at the end of each month and that’s equivalent to a raise of $2 an hour or $4000 a year. After a few weeks, you’ll also probably look better and fit into those pants that have been miraculously shrinking.
Principle 2: Know where your money is going.
How much are you spending on late fees, overdraft charges, interest payments each month? How much is your auto insurance costing you each month? How much do you spend on gasoline, or food each month? You should have some idea, and that will allow you to adjust accordingly. I highly recommend using something like Microsoft Money or Quicken. You can get either of these used off eBay or Amazon for about $20. My normal routine is to get up each morning and open Microsoft Money, which then automatically downloads all my bank transactions from my bank and sorts them according to category and payee. I also use it to track and manage any credit accounts, loans, investments, and accounts receivable. With reporting and automated bill reminders, it has become my financial command center. Knowledge is power. Don’t be afraid to peek under the hood of your financial life. It’s probably not as bad as you think.
Principle 3: It’s just paper and numbers.
If there’s one thing I want to emphasize it’s that money is just money. It is no measure of your value as a person. If you haven’t saved much of anything up until now, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or that you’re stupid or lazy. Do not get emotional about it. Your fear will paralyze you. Money is just a tool, a means of exchange for goods and services. Keeping more of the money you earn will make you feel more secure only if you stop worrying about it. Change what you can and don’t obsess over everything else. If you’re in debt, find out how much and do something about it. The first thing you can do is cut up the credit cards and stop using them. This will cost you exactly nothing. When you throw away this crutch you unlock the creative potential of your brain. Without credit cards, you’ll have to start thinking of ways to not run out of money because you’ll have no other option. You will become more active and creative. What can I cut? What can I sell? What can I do to make more money? Is my job doing enough for me? What other options do I have? Credit turns off your brain and forces you to forestall important considerations. You can walk without credit, but your thinking will need to change. Instead of “I can’t afford that” you’ll have to start thinking “How can I afford that?”.
The lucrative global business of taking advantage of lonely, gullible, and / or greedy Americans. MSNBC: ‘Nigerian scams’ keep evolving It bears repeating, but do not deal with anyone in or from Nigeria. Also, do not trust anyone you ‘meet’ on the Internet. When I worked at NCSoft, I used to discuss this with my coworkers, my contention being that online ‘relationships’ are inherently less real in some difficult to define way. Working at a video game company I was most certainly in the minority since most of the people I worked with had friends they spent time with only online. But I have seen it happen time after time, online friends betraying one another daily because of the ephemeral nature of online relationships. When I worked as a “Game Master” for Ultima Online I saw many cases where people would get scammed out of valuable items or entire accounts by people they thought of as close ‘friends’. People they ‘knew’ for months or years. This can happen in real life, too, but I would contend that real life presents greater obstacles to ill-doers in terms of detection and consequences. For one thing, in real life, it’s harder to pretend you’re of a different sex or age. Online you can be male, female, young, old, rich, poor, married, or single. Also, if you trick someone IRL (in real life, as we say) you are liable to get your butt kicked.
Today I found out that one of the members of my club worked for the Austin Police Department as a psychologist until his retirement two years ago. I knew he was a psychologist by training, but I didn’t know anything more than that until today. After the meeting I told him my father worked for the APD in the late 70’s and early 80’s. He inquired after my dad’s name and it turns out he actually remembered him after twenty plus years. I told my dad about it later over AIM and he was pretty surprised. The world is a very small place.
Interesting discussion on the subject of psychopathy and the mind. Psychopathy as the “flipside” of anxiety:
James Blair: This is difficult to disentangle. We know that other pathologies – I mean, anxiety disorder for example, is associated with massively overactive amygdala activity, and if you treat anxiety disorder successfully, you’ll see a reduction in that amygdala activity. And in many respects, psychopathy is the flipside of anxiety disorder, and so potentially we’re imagining that there may be treatments that will allow us to boost that amygdala response, and so help these individuals out. But as regards whether it’s a fundamental problem caused by a specific set of genetic information, or whether it was caused by a particular environmental trauma, at a specific age; that question at the moment we just have no answer for.
I watched a great movie this weekend, Vozvrashchenie (The Return). I was doing my regular tour around Blockbuster trading out rentals and I just picked it up. I think everyone should watch it because it works on you. You’ll carry it with you for days after. It deals with subjects everyone has some experience with: having a father and being a father. There is at least one important female role, but most of the story revolves around two brothers and their estranged father who shows up out of nowhere to take them on a journey. The journey with this father they’ve never known is an initiation into manhood squeezed into 7 days. The sons are faced with harsh lessons and each reacts differently to the experience.
The older I get the more I think about what type of father I will be. I also find myself looking back at what I learned from my father and the role he played in helping to shape my character and personality. I don’t know how much was intentional, but there were often lessons woven into the things my dad did with my brother and me. Like how he would send us to help our elderly neighbors, or how we always had to help him work on projects for our grandmother like building a deck or cutting the grass. Family was always important, so was being a good neighbor. I still try to remember all those things.
Looking around, people seem no more complicated than wind-up toys. Take one human being molded by experiences during childhood (when everything has significance beyond appropriate measure), fill them full of fundamental assumptions and beliefs, then set them loose on the world. They will act with nearly complete predictability. And why? Because we do not know ourselves. We do not understand or comprehend that we distort what we perceive as reality. We have so little control over the most basic ways we view the world. One person sees a landscape of relationships, a reality circumscribed by familiar faces. Another person sees a world filled with pain and deprivation, where people exist to inflict pain or have pain inflicted upon them. A third person perceives other people with indifference and exists in harmony with the natural world. The same goes for what people expect out of life. Many people have low expectations for themselves and for life, and many times this seems caused by an unrealistic understanding of life. I try to take the world as it is, and find my value in it. It requires an attitude of openness and compromise because if you set out to impose your view on the world you will find nothing but disappointment.
