Rabbit, Rabbit
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In June 1968, the country was in turmoil. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. On June 6, Robert Kennedy was.

I was seventeen and had always cared passionately about politics and our nation.

At seventeen I cared much more about my love life. No I’m not giving details here. The book is about my late adolescence through my early 20’s.

It wasn’t the book that I set out to write. But it’s the book that’s moving along.

And so I go to Myrtle Beach, deathly afraid of sitting in coach, because I have gotten sick after riding in coach but never in first class.

However the flight is just under two hours and I have never gotten sick after a short flight. I guess the eight Aeroflot rides in the Former Soviet Union, which began this vicious bronchial cycle count as one ride.

I am going to try not to blog next week as blogging can be a good excuse not to write.

Also, I feel out of words. I will never consult a book that tells me what to blog as that, to me, would be defeating the purpose of using a new medium my way.

As I said I’m out of words. I do hope I’m not out of book writing words. There is always my Sally Brompton horoscope to inspire. It’s on the sidebar

Actually I’m not out of words as much as angry. Somebody, not the health insurance company, cashed my May check. It’s not due until the 25th but I always pay it early. Yes I know, never use a check.

When I saw that the account was delinquent, I called. After almost an hour on hold, I was told somebody would call me back. I insisted on speaking to somebody who could help me,

That’s when I found out that they were going to cut me off today. But I Fedexed them a check.

Two things I don’t understand: the envelope was metered 5/24. If it wasn’t due until the 25th how could it be delinquent?

If I paid in April and that check was supposed to be for June, how could they cut me off in June?

I asked if having paid every bill on time or more usually early counts for something. Yes, they wouldn’t report me to a credit agency.

Since they were going to cut off my service and I had paid for the month of June, shouldn’t I be reporting them somewhere?

I learned yesterday that it truly doesn’t matter if you play by every rule. When I asked at the pharmacy for a good health insurance company, the pharmacist said “they all suck. And cut people off for little reason.”

Stumble it!

I guess I have to mention in every second post that no spam has ever been sent out by Courting Destiny. I’m still getting returned mass emails.

I forgot to mention in this post that lying begins at the top. Bush lied about WMD’s. Has there been an impeachment hearing? Isn’t that a bit more important than lying about sex? We condone lying when it’s convenient or expedient and condemn it when it offends our morals. Therefore I can’t condone lying at all.

Dari, a new blog friend, has a son in Iraq. She’s one hot momma. See her in her IMPEACH BUSH tee shirt. I did used to throw in IMPEACH BUSH into every post, but then the IMPEACH BUSH coalition was formed

Here’s a link to
Liz’s article. It’s very beautiful.
Bone wrote a wonderful 3WW

“Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners,” it says. “But just remember that ‘what goes around comes around,’ meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out.”

It damn well better.

The Dean of Admissions at MIT admitted to fabricating her credentials when she first had a low level job at the MIT admissions office in 1979, and whenever promoted to the next job then the next was too ashamed to say anything.

She has a book out on not stressing about being admitted to college. She should know.

Marilee Jone’s deception has made me spend the past five hours wondering about “worth” and am I really worthy or not.

It brought back the “I am a fraud” feelings.

I hope that MIT prosecutes Jones to the full extent the law allows. I hope Oprah doesn’t invite her into her show. She lived a lie for 28 years. I don’t care if she claims to have felt guilt.

Real guilt would have stopped her from writing her book. It would have alerted her to the fact that people probably knew she was perpetuating a fraud.

It would have kept her awake nights. It might even have caused her to confess, at a time in her career, when she wasn’t the Director. If MIT liked her so much they might have sent her to school to get a degree. There are always truthful options.

It doesn’t matter how good she was at her job, how many people she helped or what she achieved. Her entire career is based on lying.

She committed a true crime. She also took jobs from people who earned them because they spent many years studying and doing the prep work.

She couldn’t even keep the schools she was supposed to have gone to straight. If she felt true guilt she would have remembered which one she was supposed to have gone to. She had so much faith in her ability not to be discovered as a real fraud, she didn’t even try to remember.

Jones claimed to have been a scientist by training. I find that mind boggling. She invented an entire back story.

I know what it feels like to feel guilty and to have done absolutely nothing wrong. It can be paralyzing, and was for too many years in my case. Continue Reading »

Stumble it!

I think whoever has been sending out spam in the name of Courting has stopped. I had no idea that with an “alias account” anybody can set up an account using any dot com address. Nobody had to hack into my cpanel or blog or anything.

This is legal. It shouldn’t be. The only recourses are to use the ultimate filter program and not allow any email with your URL to be sent to you, and to contact your ISP as technically they’re not supposed to let spam come through. We all know how that works….

I am totally hung up on how this is legally allowed. i understand the Internet is realtively new. Al Gore didn’t invent it until 1974 I adore Al Gore so I say that with both great fondness and sadness that he never had the chance to lead our country.

I understand that blogging began in 1997, the same year I bought my first PC. i hated the Internet then. Lucia and i went into chatrooms that were supposed to be about literature but were meeting places. We just weren’t interested.

I have watched the Internet change in the past decade. It is a much easier place to navigate. Thanks Google. Between your search engine and Gmail I’m a much more relaxed and happy person.

If I hadn’t switched to an Imac I know that my computer would have been very slow yesterday, probably have been corrupted and died a sudden and violent death.

I was actually going to send out apologizes to the people who sent me emails telling me to stop harassing them. Then I thought how stupid can I be?

People who go to the trouble of sending those emails wouldn’t believe me, could cause trouble and really i wasn’t going to dig through the email shard to see.

There has to be some kind of Internet regulations. I know that a solicitation directly asking for money in a Ponzi type scheme is considered to be fraud. Pretending to be Paypal is because again it’s a direct way to get money

Why isn’t there regulation so that if a person owns a dot com, or any other dot address, people can’t use the dot com address for spam purposes?

If the spam hadn’t stopped, i would have canned my blog. I don’t love it that much.

Yes we have filters now, and other safeguards to our computers.

But somebody was legally allowed to send out spam using my address. I consider that harassment and a crime as it’s my blog’s name that is being disparaged.

Stumble it!

I don’t know if it will be lost or not, it’s only just begun.

Love having this space where I can say anything, and nobody really notices. It’s pure blogging, nothing more, nothing less.

To live in Manhattan really successfully, you need, I think a second home. Unfortunately when many were still affordable, I didn’t realize that I could afford one, and I was into traveling far far distances. I couldn’t for a few years because I wanted to be within driving distance, not that I drive, in case something happened to my mother.

then 9/11 happened and my Mom died shortly after. I look too American, and only really speak English. I didn’t want to go to Europe and hear how horrible my country is. i didn’t want to have to wear a tee shirt constantly that said ‘don’t blame me….”

I do love this country passionately. After 9/11, I tried not to place blame on our government. I wanted war While that passed quickly, I was still stuck with the label “American.” Expats would come home for visits and tell us how horrible we were. I still resent that as they couldn’t know what it was like.

Now I’m free to go anywhere or do anything but feel stuck in place. I don’t understand how so many people can afford second homes. Do they think real estate, any real estate will always go up in value, and it’s better to own a second house, even if heavily mortgaged, than to invest?

That seems to me to be akin to borrowing money on margin, something I won’t do as I have seen the consequences. Do people care about consequences anymore? Or has the sum of action plus reaction changed to more action?

People talk so much about the wonders of mortgages and how they’ll just borrow….Then they will magically pay off the mortgage in five years and buy a bigger house, or pay just enough to afford to borrow more to buy a bigger house. They tell me that real estate speculation is still the future, and I’m missing out on a great thing.

The sub prime market is collapsing. I believe that will affect the entire economy but I have been told that I’m a pessimist.

Nobody wants to talk about the economy. Nobody wants to talk about how one action causes another action that….

We’re in the midst of an election that began too early for me because issues, real issues such as artificially low interest rates aren’t being addressed. Nobody talks about how entire areas such as metro New York are no longer affordable.

Thus many people who work in New York moved to the Poconos. They have to get up at 3AM to be at work at time, are exhausted, have no time to do homework with their kids, and still because of variable rates being adjusted upward default or risk default on their homes.

Usually they do have health insurance for themselves and their kids for their jobs, but if they work in the private sector, might not be able to afford to buy their share of the insurance. 401K’s? Most people who moved to the Poconos can’t afford to put the max in, and oft times now have to borrow from their plans just to pay bills.

Many people who move to the Poconos are single parents. Others divorce because of the pressures. Some leave their jobs because the pressures are too great. There goes the health insurance and 401K, plus the house. The kids haven’t really been neglected. It’s just hard to monitor their homework and lives when you’re exhausted all the time.

How are we supposed to move ahead as a society if we let one very hard working segment fail?

I haven’t heard one candidate address these issues in total, yet unless all problems are attacked together none will be solved.

If individuals fail, we usually put the blame back on them. They should have been able to afford the mortgage. They should have expected interest rates to go up. But mortgages were being handed out like heroin to a junkie, and everybody told them not to worry about the rates going up.

They’re not us. We’ll always do well. Yet if our equity is tied up in our homes, and we get sick then laid off, what happens? We become them.

Sometimes I hate how my mind works. I go from thinking about how I waited too long to buy a second home to how our society fails.

I just want one candidate to say these are all the problems: I don’t know all the answers but I sure know the problems, and I know how to find great minds that can work on these problems.

Stumble it!