On being MIA, Glass-Steagall, entitlements, PDF’s, possessions, sushi, The Great Depression

I have been MIA here.  I have written a couple of blogs and not posted them because they were going to hurt someone’s feelings.  So I either have to wait for a long time, or revise them, which I don’t want to do because they are true and feel right to me, or not post them.  So this has created a logjam in my heart that did not allow me to post.  I’m going to try to correct that here by this “update blog” because I do, as always, have a lot to say.

Here a few of my thoughts…

And if there are any Republicans among you, please don’t stop reading because I like to make fun of Clint Eastwood talking to a fucking chair on national television.  Because at the end of my short political rant, it will be necessary for me to say something less than positive about my Favorite. Democrat. Ever.

I’m already tired of this idiotic political season.  This Republican (Tea) party wouldn’t nominate Ronald Reagan.  They wouldn’t mind the galloping horse of Alzheimer’s bearing down upon him and in turn us, just that he was too liberal for them when he wasn‘t all slogged down by senility.  I think we need to examine where we are going now that we have been shown how greed has brought down capitalism.  That is the real issue.  James Carville wrapped it all up in four words twenty years ago.  “It’s the economy, stupid.”  Why didn’t we sit up and listen then?  But it was a Republican Congress and my hero Bill Clinton who repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999, a law passed in 1933 after “The Great Depression”, that separated commercial and investment banking – and opened the door to the aforementioned greed that has had an adverse effect on many of our retirement plans.  Now they thought they were ensuring that Wall Street would remain the financial capital of the world but nope.  They gave the Gordon Gekkos of the world the opportunity to ruin us and these greedy pigs grabbed it and ran like the wind.  And don’t kid yourselves – we are in a depression now.  “They” will have to admit it soon.  But you know how “they” are.

If one more person refers to Social Security as an “entitlement”,  they will be entitled to my foot up their ass.  I have been paying into that system for over 40 years.  My life has not gone exactly as planned and I will NEED that money to survive.  I am presently taking applications to move in with you.  I will be bringing my dog.  I will do 75% of your cooking and all your laundry.  I will do most of the dishes this creates unless I am having a bad back spell.  Except in the summer, when I will be spending every minute I can in Maine.  My new roommate(s) may join me there where I will continue to cook and do laundry.  I will not be doing your vacuuming.  Under any circumstances.  Anywhere.  Any time.

I am unemployed.  I am not a negative person but it is likely I will never find another job in printing.  It’s a dying business.  PDF and the internet have BROUGHT HER DOWN too.  There has been a lot of “bringing down” lately.  Printing will re-emerge as a much smaller, commodity-based, lower quality industry.  It’s already happening.  That’s just the way it is.  Unfortunately, I have spent my entire life working in printing.  The last few years have been fiscally disastrous for me.  And why am I not depressed?  I have no idea.  Well actually I do.  I am a happy person.  Always have been.  I am not emotionally tied to my possessions.  I can sit and look around this room and see everything here.  What do I really want?  What would it break my heart to not have anymore?  My dog.  That is all.  I would like to keep my car and an internet connection.  You can have my cool Paris lamp.  And the flat screen and surround-sound system.  You may have my furniture; china and crystal; pots and pans; unless I am moving in with you and cooking as mentioned above.  I have some great pans.  My Chicken Cordon Bleu is to die for.  And my Boeuf Bourguignon is nothing to sneeze at.  I use Julia’s recipe.  My Paglia E Fieno does not suck.  My regular stuff is quite good too.  And I do make the best Caesar Salad on earth.  And I can make those great yummy yeast rolls we had in high school.  You can have my fancy carpets, my antiques, my outdoor furniture, appliances.  I’ve been playing with cheesecakes this year.  Coming along nicely if I do say so myself.  And I do.  I would like to keep Jake’s college graduation picture.  He looks so happy in it.  Still looking around the room.  Nope.  Nothing.  I will need clothes and a hair dryer and dog stuff.

And it’s not that I’m married to printing.  The problem is that my main skills lie in that area.  It is not easy to convince someone to hire a 56-year-old woman, allow her to change careers, and then pay her enough money to support her home, pay her mortgage, condo fees, utilities, and insurance.  She will still need to buy groceries.  Plus enough to take care of an aging, epileptic dog who needs constant monitoring and meds.  But I promise you.  I am still happy.

It’s been a beautiful, hot summer and I have enjoyed my days off.  One can spend only so much time looking for a job that does not exist.   Books have been read.  Time has been spent staring at a lake while reading these books.  A dog has been walked.  A god-awful messy office has been organized.  Clothes have been sorted and brought to consignment and Goodwill.

My dear and generous friends and family have taken me out to dinner, brought me iced coffees and coolattas from DD, made me laugh, lifted my heavy stuff, bought me sushi.  You have no idea how much I love sushi.  Thank you all very much.

This is all I have for now.

Have a great Labor Day.  It’s beautiful out there.

It’s fucking snowing. Again. And again. And again.

I can’t let this one go by.  This is what Hilary Rosen said.

“What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues.  And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.  Guess what.  His wife has actually never worked a day in her life.  She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we – why do we worry about their future?”

Clarifying her point, Rosen apologized Thursday and said she meant Ann Romney was not the best example for her husband to use on the campaign trail as a woman who understands the struggles of working class moms.

And then our President says this.  “First of all there is no tougher job than being a mom.”

Well Mr. President.  How about your job?  I’ll bet that one is just a teeny weeny little more difficult than “being a mom”.

Here’s reality.  Get up every day since you graduated from high school and GO TO WORK.

There are six inches of snow on the ground.  It’s 15 degrees outside.  Six more inches are predicted by the end of the day.  Get up 2 hours early.  Put on your snow boots and your sweats and your winter coat and gloves.  Shovel your driveway, dig out your car, clean it off and warm it up.  Take a shower, do your hair and make-up, put your boots and winter coat and gloves and hat back on, clean off the car again, drive to work.  You will be late no matter what you do and someone will criticize you for it.  And you will have hat head all day.  If you’re lucky, your employer might let you out a half hour early.  Then you can go outside and clean off your fucking car again and drive 20 or 30 miles to get home and that will take you an hour and a half.  Oh.  And your dog hasn’t been out now for 12 hours.  Or your kids are ready for dinner and cranky when you walk in the door.  Or the power is out because the snow dropped a tree on the wires to your house.

Or maybe, you are embroiled in some god-awful political situation at work.  All you want to do is go to work, do your job well, get paid, leave.  That’s it.  So you stop on the way home to do the grocery shopping.  And fill the car with gas.  You have 60 cents a gallon credit at Stop & Shop so it only costs you $68 today.  Make dinner, stop the kids from fighting without losing your temper and screaming like a shrew, help with homework, give baths, read stories, have a conversation with your husband.  Shit.  Shit.  Shit.  You forgot to buy diapers.  Moron!   Back to the store.  Throw in a load of laundry.  Load the dishwasher – if you have one.  Get your own clothes ready for the next day.  It’s midnight.  The alarm goes off at 5.  Your husband wants to have sex.  So do you.  But my god you’re tired.  You get up the next morning and drag yourself to work.  To be greeted by that same fucking political situation perpetuated by the person who had enough power to “work from home” yesterday.  And you have a cold.

Or.  How about this.  Be in the exact same situation.  Just eliminate the husband.  So you have less income but you can fall asleep a little earlier because the kids like frozen fish sticks for dinner and no one wants you to have sex.  But you had to load the kids into the car when you went back out for diapers.  And take them into the store where they cried because everyone was tired and they wanted candy bars and you said no.  And the other people in line are giving you major stink eye because you have your kids out late, they are wearing pajamas, they are crying.  You are exhausted and can’t stand one more minute of today and give in and buy the chocolate.  Stink eye increases and the old geezer in back of you is whispering to his wife.  You are one lousy fucking loser mother.  And it’s only Monday.  But at least you won’t run out of diapers until pay day now.  And when you get home the kids have melted peanut butter cup all over their clean jammies.

I’m not done.

The political situation at work has gotten worse.  And you are dodging bullets every day.  What is wrong with that person anyway?  Why does he have such a big ugly hard-on for you.  You need your job.  You don’t want to cry.  Women ALWAYS cry at work.  Guess what?  You’re fired.  You are broke.  And relieved.  What is wrong with you!

So you go on unemployment.  You do or do not find a job right away.  It doesn’t matter.  You are screwed whether you work or not.  You need the money.  That is why you put up with the office politics for so long for all the good it did you.  You’ll get another job some day.  Hopefully you can keep up with the mortgage/rent payments until then so you don‘t lose your home.  The cable/phone/internet – you can‘t cancel these – the kids will go out of their little kid minds without TV, you already gave up your cell phone to save money.  And if you think there is any other way on earth to find a job except the internet – I‘m here to tell you this is 2012, not 1980.  Now you get to throw your resume into a black hole of unresponsiveness.  Let‘s return to the bills – gas and electric, car payment and gas for the car – don‘t forget the $68 to fill the tank, insurance, taxes, the one lousy credit card you use for emergencies that never seems to go down.  You can‘t give up your high blood pressure meds or you’ll have a stroke, especially now.  You have got to pay the Cobra – you and the kids HAVE TO HAVE health insurance.  You know that is true because 4 years ago you had an ectopic pregnancy out of nowhere that almost killed you.  Anything can happen.  And remember when little Johnny broke his leg?  That stuff costs a fortune and you never know when tragedy will strike.  And sometimes it feels like that the only love you get is from the dog and he has seizures and needs very expensive blood work twice a year and is on two meds and now shows signs of liver damage because of the side effects of the Phenobarbital – and the stuff he needs to take to save his liver cost three times as much as the anti-seizure meds so what are you going to do?  You‘ve had him longer than you‘ve had your children, you love him, he loves you – he might be the only one who is happy to see you when you get home.  Except the one in diapers.  She still loves you.  You are sure.  The battery in your car dies.

Finally.  You find another job.  It pays a little less than your last job but there are benefits after three months.  The Cobra payment for your family is $948 a month – it’s killing you.  It’s more than your mortgage.  And you don’t get any vacation this year but after next January which is 8 months away, you will have two weeks vacation every year!!!  And after you work there for 10 years, you will have three!!!  Yippee!!!

I could go on and on but even I’m getting tired of this.  I have worked forever.  And I have actually enjoyed it most of the time.  But some of this stuff HAS happened and is happening to me.  You try to take the bad with the good.

So yes.  Being a mother is very hard work.  Anyone who thinks it isn’t is an idiot.  I did not have children but I saw my friends struggle with jobs and motherhood.  I saw my mother struggle with it.  Ann Romney is lucky that she had options and was able to CHOOSE to stay home with her boys.  She seems like a very nice woman.  But if I am given a choice, I would choose someone else to speak for me and my friends when it comes to putting your nose to the grindstone, getting out and cleaning the fucking snow off the car, and driving to work with menstrual cramps after you got your mother to watch little Sally today because she‘s been barfing since 2 AM so you only slept one hour last night instead of five.  Just sayin.’

So I return to my election year rant.  The economy is in the toilet.  People need jobs and food and shelter and love and understanding, and are turned away from homeless shelters every day.  Hey it’s April.  It will only get down to the high 40’s tonight.  Of course I live in Connecticut, not northern Maine or Alaska.  It will probably be a tad chillier there.  The North Korean nuts are acting up.  George Zimmerman shot and killed that poor child and it took 46 days for him to be arrested.  Syria.  The sign I saw for gas yesterday said $4.20 per gallon.  Health care.  Health care.  Health care.  I am paying my Cobra.  Wall Street has stolen our money and not many are angry because they just don’t understand.  Well some do – Occupy Wall Street.  And we hear politicians say we don’t have rights to entitlements like Social Security.  I’ve been paying into that fund since 1972.  Damn right I’m entitled.

Come on people.  Let’s set Hilary Rosen’s poorly chosen words, for which she has eloquently apologized, aside.  Let’s talk about the issues.

I had a thought. And it’s not about love or fornication or potato salad…

My friend Maria posted a blog link on Facebook.  Here it is – http://vaginaedamerican.blogspot.com.  And I read and I LOVED!!!

This gave me a thought.  I’m going to try a blog not about love or fornication or potato salad.

Kate Middleton has great outfits, the beautiful Jessica Simpson is naked on the cover of Elle, Whitney Houston OD’d and her daughter is apparently kissing her adopted brother, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are arguing if English should be a requirement for Puerto Rico to become a state, Lehigh beat Duke and Norfolk State beat Missouri and your bracket choices are in trouble, a urology center on the Cape is offering free pizza with your vasectomy scheduled during the NCAA tournament – you can even have your consultation on line, when Cookie Johnson met Magic she thought “this could be really good”, Sherri Shepherd may be cheating on DWTS, Snooki is pregnant…

I could go on and on and sometimes I do but really, who gives a fat rat’s ass.

Our economy is in the toilet.  People need jobs and there are none, not too many anyway.  No one can afford gas.  People are losing their homes and living in their cars or on the street.  Homeless shelters turn people away every single day.  The economy is collapsing.  Nuts worldwide are getting Nukes.  Joseph Kony – let’s not let him continue.  Now that we know about him, that would be a more real crime.  We have SEALS and the CIA at our disposal.  Our government keeps saying the unemployment rate is down but its not.  People have exhausted all their money and benefits and have dropped off and dropped out.  Jerry Sandusky raped children and people knew and didn’t say anything.

And Americans are getting all stirred up about birth control.

Not very proud of us today.