Where Do We Go From Here?

God, I am so sick and tired of all the news about corporate bonuses and greed and mismanagement. Barack Obama, for all his good intentions, has no real solutions. Seriously, how do you fix a financial system that is beyond monetarily broken and well into being morally bankrupt? How much more money can you keep printing before it starts to look like the bills of a Monopoly game? How much of that money can you possibly snort before you realize you are asphyxiating the developing world? How many more rules and regulations can we possibly weave only to see the entire web blown away by a sneering sneeze from the Bankers of the Universe? How many more classes in ethics and compliance can these bankers be forced to take before we rescue them from a coma?

It makes me wonder.

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people, sharing all the world

Part of me thinks there's no way John Lennon could have really believed this. I mean, really. It makes for a nice pop song and a great awwwww.... moment, but who in their right mind would think about giving up all their possessions? If he were alive today, wouldn't he be living with Yoko in their penthouse apartment in Manhattan? Would he really be a man without any possessions? I am not attacking John. I'm just wondering if he could really have relinquished the hundreds of millions of dollars that he would be worth today were he still alive.

Is there a way we could create a world without any possessions? Or would that be a world of sheer animalistic instincts, of survival of the fittest where the weak get gunned down or hacked to pieces with machetes? Or is that the world we're living in right now?

Where Is He?

OK, I know I've said that I liked the cute/geeky type on this blog before, but I must say I would not mind a sports-minded type who could watch baseball with me over a brewski. Korea is dismantling Venezuela 10-1 through the sixth inning in the semifinals of the World Baseball Classic tonight. I am loving it. I might be loving it a little more if someone was watching with me. Korea Fighting!

OMG, Look How Kawaii Ryo Is...

I blogged about Ryo Ishikawa before. He missed his first cut playing at Riviera a few weeks ago, but he is well on his way to playing the closing rounds at Copperhead in Florida this weekend. How frickin' adorable is he standing there AKIMBO? And LOOOOOK at his golf club covers!!!!! He has a cover that looks just like HIM!! And he has another one that looks like a BIG, BAD gopher!! I just want to give Ryo a BIG HUG!!! He's so cute I can't stand it! Too CUTE, too KAWAII!

Anoop Dog!

For those of you who have never had a migraine, I highly recommend not having one. The one I just had put me out of commission for half of Saturday, all of Sunday, ALL of Monday and half of Tuesday. My last dose of Anacin wore off 8 minutes ago, and I am praying that I can sleep tonight without it. Last night, I had to cry myself to sleep. Partly from the pain, but I'd be lying if I didn't also say partly from self pity. There is nothing, nothing, nothing fun about a migraine. OK, so what can I blog about tonight that won't require more than 15 brain cells? American Idol!



After not watching for a couple of seasons, I am hooked again. They've just got a great cast of singers. My favorites are Anoop Desai (love, love, loved his rendition of Willie Nelson's Always on My Mind), Danny Gokey, Scott MacIntyre and Megan Joy. But I wouldn't be upset to see Allison, Kris, Matt or Michael win either. I am pretty sure it will come down to Danny and Someone Else. You heard it here first! OK, dear readers, that's about all I have in my head tonight. I sign off listening to Patsy Cline's rendition of Walking After Midnight which Megan sang terrific tonight!

180 + 180 = Right Back to Where I Started From

A day after Warren Buffett told the world that everything was going to be all right, I feel so comforted. I think that's something that I miss about having a partner--hearing someone tell me that everything will be all right. I don't know if I attribute it to loneliness or desperation--it can't be both!--but the two dates I went on last weekend weren't exactly filled with what Carrie Bradshaw once termed za za zu.

The first guy was last Friday. 5'9, 180, Asian. Face pic only. I should have known, but I dared to hope. I smiled my Botox smile--the one that freezes and doesn't know what to do with itself--when I saw: the most perfectly round, potroasted, pot belly. We had coffee, and covered our common interests over the course of twenty minutes. So... call me, he said. At the twenty-first minute.

The second guy was on Saturday. The one I went to see the movie with. In the pic he'd sent me I could tell he was about 180 as well. What I didn't realize until I met him in person was that he was only 5'5. J.T., meet Steroid Smurf. We walked into the movie theater and all the boys were staring at him. As we settled in to watch the unwatchable Watchmen, Steroid Smurf wasted no time in grabbing my hand and having hand sex with me. Painful hand sex. Steroid Smurf insisted on cracking all my knuckles. Bite down hard. But then. Squeeze my muscles. What? Squeeze. Uh, you want me to squeeze your bicep? And now my tricep. Oh. My. God. As if the movie weren't bad enough, now I was being forced to engage in this bad, bad, bad whispered-cringingly-in-the-dark dialog with a Saturday morning cartoon charater gone terribly wrong.

I want to meet someone reasonably cute/geeky. He should be height/weight proportionate. He should share my love for movies and bookstores and tennis and golf. Please Santa, I can't wait until Christmas.

Questioning Warren Buffett

"Everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that man has ever created."

"We're in a big war, and we're going to use money to fight it."

"If you don't trust where you have your money, the world stops."

Oh Mr. Buffett. How could you? When I really do like you. You are exactly what a nice, happy, next-door grandfather should look like. I suppose you had to say these things today because that's what everyone expected you to say. But we are in a crisis brought about not through some faulty mechanism in a money-making machine but a human nature that evolved over thousands of years to its present state of Net Worth = Personal Worth. If the greatest economic machine the world has ever known brought us to our current state of dismality, how great could the machine have been in the first place?

Well, let's just use more money to make it great again. So we can all end up where we are at the moment again and again and again? What does it say about the world we live in when the money-making machine says the single greatest thing you can place all your hopes and dreams in are pieces of paper with the words U.S. Treasury Bills printed on them? (By the way, I don't think it's a coincidence the words "In God We Trust" aren't printed on T-Bills.)

Have people become machines that register an error sign when they try to place trust in other people like SEC regulators and Bernie Madoffs and Alan Greenspans? And if we can't trust those people, how can we trust people like our parents and friends and colleagues and even nice grandfathers like you? Are the faces of dead American presidents destined to become the only things humans can plug into and interface with? How can we create a world where money isn't the biggest problem we're always trying to solve?

Watchmen

One reason I love watching movies at the theater in Chelsea is that the seats are comfortable and the crowd is cute, the viewing experience, a quiet one. Tonight, there was something else altogether: chemistry. All thanks, of course, to the movie being shown on the screen: Watchmen. In a word, Don't. (Watch. It.)

The anticipation in the theater was palpable. It was a packed room. We were all there for an experience. At 2 hours and 45 minutes, it better be an experience. Ten minutes into the movie, the guy next to me was fast asleep. I am not making this up. (He awoke on his own.) I expected people would need to go to the bathroom during this movie. I had to go once myself. After an hour and a half, I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, and made sure that I took time to admire the urinals and wash my hands and dry my hands under the dryer (twice), and check my messages, and grab some water at the fountain (in the hopes that it would make me go to the bathroom again).

Back in the theater. I settled in and waited for the movie to get better. We all did. In the darkness, you could have reached out your hand and felt the confusion. When was the movie going to get better??? No need to look into the eyes of the person next to you. Just reach out and touch. The sense of loss. The befuddlement. Time slowly (very slowly) slipping away. But at last the credits rolled. And still we sat. When was the movie going to get better??? The lights came on. But all you could see were looks of concern. Is your brain still in one piece? Are the muscles in your eyes functioning correctly? Please don't leave me behind in this place.

On the escalator going down the two cute boys in front of me were whispering. Weren't we supposed to like this movie? I summoned my courage and whispered to them. It sucked. They looked behind, slightly startled, the way you always are when you hear the truth. It sucked, I repeated. They murmured, still too shell-shocked by what they had witnessed. As we all left the cinema house, the slight chill of the New York City wind embraced us in one final moment of bonding. Not that it was necessary. We all had the scars to show from our terrible battle.

Is President Obama the One... for this Job?

I have no deep thoughts to share on this question. I am simply wondering these days if he is the right person to lead us out of this financial quagmire. Is it just me, or does he seem to be missing from the news these days? Has he been drowned out by the numbers? Unemployment? Retail sales? Home sales? Billion-dollar bailouts? His days of speaking to large crowds in the stadiums seem to be a thing of the very distant past. Today, telling Americans that it was a good time to buy stocks, he sounded, dare I say it, rather ordinary.

(Hilary Who? I don't know anyone these days who's talking about foreign affairs. It's a pity that she was roped into taking Secretary of State. At the very least, I think she should have been given another chance to tackle health care. I think she could have been doing so much more were she still in the Senate today.)

I was not thrilled to hear President Obama recently stake his re-election chances on the success of the stimulus package that just passed. It seemed like a tactically incorrect thing to say. Like he was taking his eye off the ball. You never take your eye off the ball. Unless you can't see it in the first place.