a blog for kate and gracie and friends
I feel like there is a rule that forbids a blogger from blogging on their honeymoon, but as I sit waiting for Aaron to get ready to leave the cottage, that rule seems rather silly to me so I am breaking it. It’s almost 11:30 am on our first full day in Sint Maarten and it is pouring out. And it has been for two hours. And everytime I look up something online about rain on this island, I read about how it never rains for more than a few minutes a day. Hmm.
Off to explore! In the rain.
I’m aware that this blog has turned into a real snoozefest lately and I apologize for that. I know that I am nowhere near as busy as most people in the universe, but when I get busy I just don’t handle it well. I get cranky. And lately I have felt busy. And cranky.
I feel like work is piling up like crazy and everytime I think I have a handle on things, something drops out of the sky requiring my immediate attention. Relatedly, I feel so anxious and angry and sad about these political events that I don’t know where to focus my attention. As a former member of our union’s board and a current member of its bargaining team, I have been very active in meetings to discuss these goings on. Meetings after work and on weekends. And it’s been frustrating. Last night, I dreamt that Walker had us all corralled in a warehouse and he took out some sort of machine gun to keep everyone under control (even though everyone was under control). It was pretty upsetting.
On a positive note, though, I’m very excited that our long-awaited honeymoon is in T-5 days. Sint Maarten/Saint Martin, here we come!
I haven’t posted in awhile. I’ve been struggling with what to say. It’s been a rough week in Madison, a rough week in Wisconsin. As an extremely active member of my union, and former board member and current bargaining team member of that union, I am extremely disappointed in the governor’s budget repair bill. Disappointed is an understatement.
I love Wisconsin. I love family farms, clean lakes, green trees, the Packers, cheese curds, its little towns, Madison and Milwaukee, the University, the Capitol and its beautiful accessibility, the court system, and its humble people. I love the history. I love that the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. I love that the Republican Party, based on anti-slavery principles, was founded here. I love the history of Bob La Follete and the Progressive movement: primary elections, workers’ compensation laws, unemployment laws. I don’t love the McCarthy era or the Sterling Hall bombing, but I do like the passion that seems so inherent to Wisconsinites.
At yesterday’s rally at the Capitol, I saw that passion first-hand and I cried. I watched as thousands and thousands of people attempted to make their voices peacefully heard. There were so many signs, some very clever but all, as Aaron pointed out, with correct spelling, grammar and syntax. There were tons of kids because Madison’s schools had closed due to a sick-out caused by the introduction of this sweeping bill. There were elderly people and high school students, and people of every age in between. There were nurses, teachers, police officers, firefighters, electricians, iron workers and cab drivers. And yes, lawyers. In the two days of protests I attended, I saw only two counter-protesters, one on each day.
People are upset. People are upset because of the hefty paycut that has been proposed (and will most likely pass). People are upset because the numbers do not seem to add up. But it’s clear that people are extremely upset that Walker has chosen to all but prohibit collective bargaining for State and local employees in the very state that made such a thing possible in the first place. It feels like Walker hates everything that I love about Wisconsin.
I know, or at least I think, that someday, this will pass. That even though this feels like a hurricane, we will weather this storm. We will come out poorer, but we will come stronger. Wisconsin, I love you.
It’s time for the big reveal! After ripping out the carpet in our bedroom, I sat in front of the computer day after day trying to decide how to proceed. Should we put in hardwood? Should we put in bamboo? Should we put in linoleum? Should we put in carpet? Should we do it ourselves or leave it to the professionals? Should we do the entire first floor (about 950 square feet) or just the bedroom (about 175 square feet)? Should we buy from a big box store or a local place? Argh. The possibilities seemed daunting.
After just days, though, of having to stare at that nasty vinyl tile, and after almost six years of living with that dreaded carpet, we pulled the trigger and went to the locally-owned Eco-friendly Flooring, which has a little showroom on East Main Street. We could not be happier with the flooring. We chose a very light-colored bamboo and had the shopowner’s husband install it for us. All in all, the total cost was about $1100. We were told it was a day’s work, but it ended up taking three due to a late arrival on the first day and a sick kid on the second. Still, I would choose this option again in a heartbeat. I am so happy with how it turned out. I think it is just beautiful. I hope you like it, too.
Bedroom before
Bedroom after
Ok, you can’t see the floors that were there, but you can see the amazing job Aaron did on the bedroom walls. I love the color! It’s Sherwin Williams Hyper Blue. Here’s a better shot of the floors.
Bamboo floors
Floors
I also want to note that for some time now, I have wanted to buy some Picasso prints. Specifically, the ink drawings he did of animals. I have been enamored of The Dog or Dog for some time now, but haven’t been able to get myself to commit. Why? Because I can sometimes be cheap. Weird, I know. So I got it into my head that I would just do some of these drawings myself and that’s what I did tonight. For under $5, I bought two enormous sheets of paper and a black Marvy marker, and for just under $60 I bought three black frames with thick white mattes from Target. I cut the paper, drew my animals in pencil and went over them in marker. I stuck the paper in the frame and voila! Three framed “Picasso”s for $65. Actually, it was even less because I used only one of the large sheets of paper.
Owl and Dog
Camel
In a recent post, I used The New York Times’ piece on the business that is law school to rail against the predatory nature of law schools. I told you, Dear Reader, that I would have a post to come about the students who attend law school. This is that post.
Well, this is that post with a bit of a twist. You see, yesterday Aaron and I saw Inside Job, the documentary about the global financial crisis that hit in 2008 and continues to be felt around the world. While watching Inside Job, I thought a lot about that Times article. The article features a guy, Michael Wallerstein, who must be nominated for Biggest Ass Ever to Come Out of Thomas Jefferson Law School. I’m pretty sure he’s the favorite for the win. The kid is annoying at best, completely slapworthy at worst. Wallerstein calls himself part of the “Bailout Generation,” which is a totally new term for me. He seems to think that because Washington bailed out Wall Street, they may do the same for him and his student loans. His loans, by the way, may be $200,000, they may be $300,000. He doesn’t really know.
That attitude drives me crazy. Let someone else clean up my mess! But then after seeing Inside Job, I realized that it drives me crazy for another reason as well: it’s completely delusional. There is no Bailout Generation. At least not for people like me. Or even people like Wallerstein. The bailouts were, and always will be I fear, for the rich. And there will be no repercussions for those who receive them. Those folks go on to run other companies, run universities, run parts of the government. They go on to buy yachts and more houses in the Hamptons. They go on to write the tax code and financial laws. The repercussions of the pernicious actions of the rich, and of the government’s bailouts of the rich, don’t affect the rich, they affect the rest of us. They come in the form of an avalanche, hurting no one at the top of the mountain, but everyone on the way down and piling the most amount of damage on those at the very bottom. [I know the analogy isn’t perfect because, obviously, anyone in an avalanche’s path is going to be destroyed, but let’s just pretend it works.] Washington is not going to step in and help Wallerstein with his massive debt. It’s massive to Wallerstein, but it’s just one person’s debt and it’s meaningless to Washington. [In fact, Aaron told me recently that the interest paid to one’s student loans won’t even be tax-exempt as of 2013. As college and graduate school prices soar out of control compared with personal income, Washington has decided to get rid of the teeny tiny thing they did to help graduates out after accumulating massive loans to pay for an education.] Paying off Wallerstein’s debt — or any middle class or poor person’s debt — is not a priority for our government. There will be no bailouts for those who need the help.
Inside Job is a really great movie. It’s full of great footage of what the economic crisis really did — there are people living in tents in Florida, there are thousands of houses that sit empty and boarded up, there are people waiting in line for food stamps. There is great footage of the decadence and hedonism and arrogance that led to the crisis — Lehman Brothers’ six private jets, prostitution and cocaine, estates with acres and acres of land. But what really makes the movie so great is its simplicity. Over and over we hear that the financial world is far too complicated for us poor, pathetic lay people to understand. Economists laugh at reporters, as if their questions are cute or silly. And while I know that there are all sorts of things in this universe I do not understand, it does not take a genius, or even a BS in economics, to understand what went on here. It was greed.
The movie contains dozens of interviews of economists – some who had warned that the economic climate was becoming increasingly unstable and some who still pretend that they could not have seen this crisis coming. There are so many delicious bits in this movie! Some of the super fun ones come when the director, Charles Ferguson, interviews Frederic Mishkin, a professor in Columbia’s Business School, who also happened to be on the board of the Federal Reserve from September 2006 until May 2008, when he resigned. When Ferguson asks Mishkin why he resigned just as the world needed the most help, Mishkin answered that it was because he had a textbook to edit. Brilliant. Documentaries are so great when a director can get moments like that on film – it’s better than anything scripted. There’s also a perfect moment in the Mishkin interview in which he discusses his paper on the stability of Iceland’s economy. [The movie had started with shots of Iceland and a brief summary of how Iceland’s economy was a total house of cards. For more on Iceland’s nuttiness, I highly recommend this article in Vanity Fair from 2009.] Of course, Mishkin had taken money from Iceland’s Chamber of Commerce to write the puff piece. What may be even more interesting, though, is that his current resume cites the paper as a piece on the INstability of Iceland’s economy. When asked about the change, Mishkin dismissed it as a typo.
There are so many other great moments in the movie; moments when you laugh to keep yourself from crying. Ferguson is a polite, but tenacious, interviewer, which strikes an absolute perfect note, I think. My favorite thing in a documentary like this is when the director can get a previously cooperative subject to ask that the camera be turned off, which happened during part of the Ferguson interview with former Under Secretary of the Treasury during Bush 2, David McCormick. You can almost feel the satisfied grin of the movie’s crew. Zing!
Over the past couple of years, I have heard people state, or at least imply, that the homeowners who bought more than they could afford caused the economic crisis. I am now asking myself why I never felt that way, but why I am quick to blame Wallerstein for his behavior. Both groups of people have been swindled, really, and both groups of people could have known better. Of course part of why I blame Wallerstein is because he comes off as incredibly arrogant and entitled. And the poor homeowners highlighted in Inside Job did not speak English and were literally preyed upon by unscrupulous lenders and brokers. But both of those groups are probably extremes. Most people who have gotten themselves in over their heads are most likely in between. They maybe could have done better due diligence (what does this paperwork really say? how much do we really bring home a month? what kind of jobs are actually out there for recent law graduates? etc.), but both groups are clearly the Little Guy caught up in a savvy, greedy, well-oiled machine. So, while I am all for personal responsibility and owning up to your mistakes, we are talking about money-making practices that are designed to prey upon and chew up and spit out the person who is just looking for their little part of the dream. We aren’t talking about greedy kids or greedy working-class people. We are talking about folks who want to further their education or to put their family in a house. Those aren’t money-crazed people looking for a bailout. They were looking for a loan.
So while I put some responsibility on the students in this law school game, I put the bulk of the responsibility on the schools. The law schools, afterall, are supposed to teach ethics.
