Life is good. Yes it is. See why it’s becoming good for me personally. Though I believe Horry County SC was the one county Obama didn’t take. I will be there for the general election where I will finally have a vote that counts. In the post below I included Caroline Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama. Caroline Kennedy can say the things many of us feel with more authority simply because she is who she is. I wish I remembered more about her father’s administration and less about his death but I was young…
The post below also has Bob Herbert’s truly excellent article “Questions for the Clintons.” It’s a rare Sunday that doesn’t belong solely to Frank Rich in my house…..
This article is about the death of young icons. Baby boomers grieved when James Dean died in 1955? As the oldest baby boomer was nine, and the peak year for baby boomer’s birth was 1957, this was almost impossible. I was four and rather doubt that I ever heard of James Dean.
This isn’t a petty mistake, but a common one. You young un’s seem in a hurry to make baby boomers senior citizens, and I refuse to be aged up before my time.
About things I don’t understand:
“
You had a lot of people who graduated to a level of consumption they could not really afford,†said Adrianne Shapira, a retail analyst at Goldman Sachs. “Two-hundred-dollar pairs of denim were plausible when home values soared, but now $100 jeans are looking more reasonable.â€
Can somebody explain to me how home values soaring made buying expensive things reasonable? Me thinks I’m out of touch If people really believed that borrowing against inflated home values made sense then they should pay the price.
Unfortunately their greed, the banks and brokerage houses that allowed this behavior are dragging people who acted reasonably down with them.
The stock market surged in August 1982. I worked near Wall Street then and remember that day well. Wall Street was empty of human traffic. Some people think the stock market is at the end of a 25 year cyclical upswing. I do remember October 1987. The recession that happened then hit New York harder than most places. The housing market didn’t dip then but when it did dipped hard and long and didn’t begin coming back until 1994 though most people held off selling until 96 or 97 or later.
I realized why I’m having such a hard time putting my apartment on the market. It’s irrational but based on how I have always felt less than because of non verbal learning disorder. My problems are physical organization and spatial in nature. No matter how hard I try or how great my apartment looks I’m always afraid it will fail every test. I have quit jobs that I excelled in as I was afraid all my mistakes would be discovered. Even if I hadn’t made any serious ones. Even if most people made more serious mistakes than I did.
The life long effects of NLD or NVLD are insidious and horrible. Success has never meant anything to me. Failure has and if I’m not really failing I will figure out a way to make myself feel that I have.
Now that I truly understand this I can conquer it. No thanks to many people. I was the cute flirt who worked at a better than most professional level but flirted, and didn’t act professional. or did but still flirted. If only I had been aware of my flirtatious behavior I might have enjoyed it.
Then I learned to control my behavior but the mental effort was hard. I have learned to be totally immaculate. It’s not easy and I still hated myself when I got a coffee ring on a glass table as just cleaning it so streaks don’t show is difficult for me.
People tell me guilt is a useless emotion. They don’t understand how constantly feeling like a failure brought out the guilt meter.
I wish that there were support groups for this. i’m not plugging myself when I say my posts on this have become widely read. I wish that I had never had to talk about it.
Selling my apartment is bringing out every fear, every feeling of worthlessness and more I have experienced. I refuse to give in so forgive me if I use my blogs to talk about it.
Just don’t make me a senior citizen before my due date. They say baby boomers refuse to grow old. It’s not us that talks about us as if we are.
Everybody I know had kids late. Everybody I know thinks of retirement as a far off luxury–and they usually didn’t borrow against their homes. Living in the New York Metro area takes money. Lots of money.
A friend and I were talking yesterday. It’s difficult for us to believe that come Fall we will have met 40 years ago. The first time I remember meeting him was at an Airplane concert in the bandshell in Central Park where a large group of kids from my school had driven in from Long Island to hear the concert, get stoned and then I guess go to Hong Fat in Chinatown as we always did. The next time I remember meeting him was before a dance, The End of The World Dance at school. It was so 60’s. We still take a bit too much pride in being such great late 60’s people
But we’re not 60 yet so don’t rush us. He didn’t even become truly “successful” until his 50’s, though he had glory moments.
We have much left to do and don’t plan to go gently into the night. We have only really truly begun.