Really?
This auctioneer has to be the most clueless person on the planet. Last time I checked online, our federal government had borrowed about $2 trillion from the Chinese.
And I’m sure we can pay them back, no problem.
If we just find the right attics.
Hardwired
By Lisa
There was an article in the newspaper the other day that scared me. No, it wasn’t about carbohydrates.
It was about our brains, and the gist was that by going online and cruising lots of different websites, we’re actually changing the wiring in our brains, and this will result in an inability to concentrate and …
Huh?
Where was I?
What?
Uh oh.
This is bad news. Five minutes ago, I was supposed to be working, but I took a break to go online. I stopped at all my favorite gossip websites, like perezhilton.com, people.com, and the superficial.com, then I moved on to gawker.com and gofugyourself.com.
I’m not making that last one up. It’s about fashion, as you would guess if you knew how fussy I am about which sweatpants to wear.
I also visit work-related websites, like galleycat.com and publishersweekly.com, and I post on Facebook and Twitter, too.
Friend me. Follow me. This way we can get to know each another without changing out of our sweatpants.
I make lots of other local stops on my train ride through the Internet, and my track winds around and around in circles, does a few loop-de-loops, zooms around a cloverleaf and spells out CALL ME, GEORGE CLOONEY before it returns to the station.
And this will mirror the wiring in my brain?
I’m tempted to say it’s mind-blowing, but that’s the point.
Plus it’s unfair, because the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Everybody deserves a break from work now and then, according to federal law and McDonald’s.
You deserve a break today. At least six times today.
So how can it be fair that what you do during your break can break your brain?
That’s like making a funny face and having your face freeze that way. And if you ever wished that on anybody, I hope you’re happy now. Our brains are all messed up because of you.
The article even had a Test Your Focus interactive, so I took the test, which involved red and blue bars in various formations. I went with my best guess between Yes and No, and scored a -.33 percent, which seemed pretty good to me, considering that I didn’t understand the directions.
I couldn’t concentrate.
To make things worse, imagine you’re a middle-aged woman.
Stop screaming.
It’s not funny.
It takes a real man to be a middle-aged woman.
If you follow.
Anyway, all middle-aged women know that something happens to the brain after fifty years of age. I even read an article about it, but I can’t remember where. Or someone told me, what’s-her-name. And I think the article said something about declining hormone levels causing a decrease in brain function. It talked about menopause creating confusion, a wandering mind, and “brain fog.”
Or something like that.
It was hard to pay attention. At the time, I was daydreaming.
About you-know-who.
Also I like my fog in the air, not between my ears. Weather, stay out of my head.
To return to topic, all I know is, menopause is bad news, brain-wise.
Consider the implications.
What this means is that those of us at a certain age have a double whammy, when it comes to the computer. In other words, if you’re cruising the Internet without estrogen, you should stop right now.
Step away from the laptop.
You won’t understand anything you read. And even if you did, you won’t remember it.
You’re a goner, cognitively speaking.
You’ll fare no better, offline. One of the articles said that brain fog can roll in at any time, and “women find themselves often worrying whether or not they have forgotten to turn the iron off.”
Heh heh.
Silly women, who forget to put the butter churn away, or leave their darning needles all over the floor, where the unwary can step on them, getting a hole that needs … darning?
Darn it!
Well, I, for one, never worry about turning the iron off, because I never turn the iron on. In fact, I don’t own an iron. And between the iron and the laptop, I’ll choose the latter. In a pinch, you can press your sweatpants with a laptop.
Don’t ask me how I know.
Bank Angst
By Francesca
As a young writer starting out, my number one fear in life is not having money. Money for rent, money for food, money for my dog’s food, and occasionally money for those boots that make my legs look four inches longer than they are.
I can stand to skip a few meals anyway.
But you know what my number two fear is?
Managing my money.
And I don’t even mean fancy stuff like investing in mutual funds or something. I don’t have money for that sort of thing.
Not after those boots.
I get nervous and intimidated by the easy stuff. Just walking to the bank gives me the willies. Even tasks that should ease my mind are anxiety-inducing, like depositing a check. When I got my first major check after moving to New York, I took it to my local bank, met with an employee to open an account, and offered the check as my first deposit into my savings.
“Oh, let me show you our new check deposit function at the ATM,” he said.
“We can’t just do it now?” I asked.
“I could, but the ATM is much faster and easier. And no envelopes!”
What’s wrong with envelopes? I like the security of an envelope’s embrace. I even like that it’s sealed with a spitty kiss.
I would seal it in my blood if it made my money any safer.
But I was too submissive to object, so I allowed myself to be marched over to the ATM machine. Following his instructions, I obediently swiped my card and punched in my pin. The machine prompted me to insert my check.
I looked at the banker for reassurance, still clutching my check.
“Just put it in!”
As soon as the check’s perforated edge touched the ATM’s steely lip, it was sucked inside the hungry mouth of the machine.
I was surprised it didn’t burp.
“Confirm the amount,” he said, pointing. “Is that right?”
I don’t know, is it? Was that the right cent amount at the end? If I couldn’t remember the precise cent amount, why did I think my memory was correct about the dollar amount? I was thrown into a tailspin of doubt, and the only paper to confirm it was now within the beast’s metallic innards.
“Cool how it eats it up, huh?”
Cool?
I felt queasy.
The other source of agida? Online banking. But I survived the journey of setting up my manifold security settings, so I figure I might as well use it.
Still, I’m terrified of messing up. Whenever it’s time to pay my bills online or transfer funds, I become neurotic. I clear my table of everything but my laptop, I turn up the lights, I turn off any music or TV. Environment conditions must be optimal for my uninterrupted focus as I slowly read each page and deliberately click on each command.
Everything about it is too instantaneous for my comfort level. For example, why is my online banking site the only website on earth that does not have a confirmation page before paying money? I can’t buy lip-gloss from Sephora.com without it confirming the contents of my cart, my Beauty Insider Rewards points, and my shipping preference. With online banking, I can mistakenly pay my cable bill an amount with an extra zero in a single click.
That’s never actually happened, but it could!
Certain online features are just needlessly threatening. Right at the top of my account page, it says, “INSUFFICIENT FUNDS” in big capital letters, and I always th
ink, also in big capital letters, “OMG MY BANK ACCOUNT HAS BEEN EMPTIED!” before I read below where it says, “To help prevent overdrafting your account, we automatically send you an email when your account has insufficient funds.”
You really want to help me, online banking? Don’t alert me to my alerts in such an alarming font size. It overdrafts my blood pressure.
Whatever competency I have achieved with online banking has only crippled me with paper banking. In the rare instance when I have to write out an actual check, I must double check every step to make sure I did it right, which makes me feel like a complete idiot.
Some people can forge checks; I aim to get my own signature in the right place.
But kidding aside, is the Memo part important?
I save every piece of literature from my bank, and I organize all mailings in an OCD folder system. I get anxious right before I open my account statements, even when I know I haven’t overspent. I feel like some terrible revelation lies behind the envelope.
Maybe I don’t like envelopes after all.
I’m terrified of identity theft, so I’ve thought of the most convoluted passwords—letters, numbers, words, acronyms, palindromes. No one is guessing my password.
Least of all me.
The flaw in my strategy was clear when I was studying abroad in Italy. I needed to get cash from an ATM there, only to find that their number keypads do not have letters like American ones do. I remember my PIN number in part by remembering a word. I had no idea what the numbers alone were.
Aha! I pulled out my cell phone to use its number pad as a guide, only to be reminded that the BlackBerry has a QWERTY keyboard, not the old phone one.
Stupida.
So there I was, sitting in a Roman café, trying to re-create the old phone keypad on a napkin.
The number 1 has no letters on it, does it? 2 has ABC …
Finally, it occurred to me to Google image search “American ATM keypad” on my BlackBerry’s mobile web. I felt like some sort of foreign criminal, but it worked.
And they say technology makes our lives more efficient.
But I guess my anxiety about money is a normal part of starting out on my own. Everything gets easier with practice.
Now if I could just make a bit more to practice with.
Tempus Fugit
By Lisa
Time flies.
Some of you will say it’s a cliché, and others will say it’s a proverb, but it doesn’t matter which to me. I’m not too cool for school, and have no complaint with clichés. A great thing about getting older is that you come to see the profound truth in even the simplest of ideas. And I’m finally beginning to understand that Time Flies.
There are too many reminders for me to ignore, especially around tax time. I’m self-employed, so I pay taxes each quarter, and on this past April 15, I thought, didn’t I just pay my taxes? Was it really a few months ago, when it seems like a few minutes ago? Every time I turn around, I’m writing checks to the government, supporting all manner of astronomically expensive God-knows-whats, so that the time of my life has stretched like taffy into one continuous check written to the government.
I know I shouldn’t complain about paying my taxes when there are so many Wall Street bankers who need the bonuses, Maseratis, and Manhattan brownstones that I’m buying them. And now the government is suing them for all the bad things they’ve done, which means that I can keep writing checks to the government to cover the costs of the litigation. This is great news, because I was afraid I would have extra money on my hands and nothing to do with it but buy dumb stuff like food, or maybe stick it in the bank, where it would help the bankers fund their defense of the litigation brought by the government on my behalf, thus maintaining my continuous stream of check-writing.
It’s financial recycling.
All the money the government gets, it turns into compost.
I have the same feeling about the state, federal, and local tax bills that come in the mail more often than a Valupak, which is saying something. They break up the monotony by coming in colors, and they even have a little chart that shows how I can save money by paying today, instead of three months from now. I always pay right away, not only to save money but to avoid collisions with the other checks I’ll be writing to the government. This way, I can alternate by writing checks to the state government every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and writing checks to the federal government every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
Of my life.
Every Sunday, I’ll order more checks.
Time flies when it comes to other things, too. I have an old truck that I use sometimes, and it broke down the other day, so I had it towed to the shop, where they informed me that the last time it was inspected was January 2009.
“2009?” I was confused. “Did that come yet?”
“Sure did,” answered the mechanic.
Sheesh! It doesn’t even sound right. What sounds right is 1955.
The mechanic added, “Your registration expired, too.”
“But I just renewed it. Did you see the sticker?”
“The last sticker on your license plate is from 2008.”
“That’s not possible,” I said, reeling.
“I’d check, but there’s no registration card in the truck.”
Of course there isn’t. Silly man. It’s the first thing I lose. Still, I said, “Maybe the registration sticker fell off?”
“Unlikely,” he said, and I knew he was right. They put Krazy Glue on those registration stickers. You could mend the space shuttle with a registration sticker.
So I had to go to the auto tag place to renew the registration, but not until I had stopped by the ATM to take out the extortionate $104 it costs, which must be paid in cash, so it can be more easily composted by the government.
And the ATM machine charged me a $3.00 fee, which will undoubtedly be sent to the bankers at their houses in the Hamptons, where they can use it to light their cigars.
So you know where this is going.
Time flies.
And so does money.
History Lesson
By Lisa
Once again, everybody’s cranky about something, and I’m not.
Not that I don’t get cranky, we all know that I do. For example, don’t get me started on politics, taxes, or how hard it is to find jeans that fit.
But this time, everybody’s cranky that a local history museum sold two thousand artifacts. Among them, a horse weathervane went for $20,000 and a cigar-store Indian sold for a million bucks.
Wow.
I’m not angry at the museum. On the contrary, I admire the museum. I wish the museum had negotiated my book contract and my last trip to the mall.
What kind of historian is financially savvy enough to sell an old weathervane for twenty grand? This would be the Donald Trump of historians. In school, I used to think history was boring, but if I had known it was worth cash money, I would have paid better attention.
And how about that cigar-store Indian?
First, did you even know a cigar-store Indian existed, outside of a cowboy movie? And second, are you allowed to say cigar-store Indian anymore, much less pay a million bucks for one? Since when are stereotypes for sale?
The only thing that bugs me is that the museum didn’t try to sell me anything. My cash is as good as anybody else’s. Why wasn’t I offered some top quality, grade A history? And who are the new buyers?
I mean, er, historians.
We need to know their names and addresses, so we know where to go to see the history. I wonder when they’ll have us over. I’m free Tuesday, but not Wednesday. How about you? I’m sure they’d be happy to show us. After all, it’s our history.
Or at least it used to be.
The museum said that it sold the history to improve the museum building, which makes sense to me. What good is history without a nice building to stick it in? I think the best plan would be to sell all the history, then build a really go
rgeous museum.
With microsuede sectionals and a plasma TV.
And the museum also said that it needed the money to provide dehumidification and air-conditioning, which is crucial to history.
Who knew?
I always thought that history got along fine without AC, but maybe not. That must be why George Washington wore a wig. His hair was a mess, in that humidity.
I can relate.
Later, after our museum gets the new air-conditioning, we can go visit anytime. The next hot day, let’s all go to the museum and enjoy the cool air. We may have lost the weathervane, but we got the weather.
Another reason I think it’s okay that the history museum sold the history is that I’m jealous.
Jealous, jealous, jealous.
After all, I have history. Lots of it. And most of it isn’t even as pretty as a weathervane. I really wish I could sell some of my history.
Which?
My second marriage comes immediately to mind. But nobody’s dumb enough to buy that.
Except me.
Also the sixth grade. I would sell you the entire sixth grade for a song. That was not a good year in my history. I had moved to a new school and nobody liked me. And I had just gotten glasses and a bra.
I only needed one of those things.
Guess which.
iLisa
By Lisa
I need a smartphone, but I’m not smart enough to know which one.
First off, I’m not even sure what a smartphone is. For example, I don’t know how it’s different from a cellphone. I assume that a smartphone is a cellphone that does things other than make and receive phone calls, but how many things do you have to do to qualify as smart?
It’s a lot to ask from an inanimate object.
Or, for that matter, from a human being.
I do only a few things, myself. Right off the top of my head, here’s what I do: write things, eat things, and pet things.
I know I’m like a lot of other humans in this regard, somewhat limited in my functionality, which means that if people were cellphones, we wouldn’t get into Harvard.
Best Friends, Occasional Enemies Page 15
