lonecity.com

When it comes to dealing with emotional situations I’m just about as close to a rock as a person can become.  I don’t have trouble setting through funerals or watching friends walk away and it happens not only without tears, but also without sadness.  Its not that I’m uncaring.  I just don’t form the same kinds of inter-personal relationships that others do.  Thats probably a big part of why I’m not married.  Your partner wants to feel that life with them is important to you and I have trouble conveying that feeling.  Mostly I guess because I’ve never found anyone that I felt I needed to be around.  Still some people you cannot help but have creep in.

Over this last weekend I gave away the eldest of my three younger sisters.  Seated watching her standing before the alter listing to the words of the bishop and and holding hands with her future husband I actually felt a tear form.  Its a strange feeling to me.  I never expected it.  I actually felt some sort of loss.

I’m a bit late writing this weeks entry into my blog because of the whole wedding fiasco.  I had to request two days off and I spent the majority of the both of them hauling things around for my little sister.  Its true that the bride was just glowing though.  Even with all the panic and fervor as the wedding approached she simply lit up the room.

On another note, my brother drove out to attend the wedding.  Its a fourteen hour drive so I don’t get to see him all that often.  After the wedding and for the next day or two he stayed at my home and we played nintendo pretty much the whole time.  (except when I went to work)  I’m pretty sure somewhere along in my blog I mentioned how good a game twilight princess is.  It would seem he agrees with me as I spent most of the time watching him play.  While I seldom buld attachments to people I do greatly enjoy observing them.  Watching as he trys to solve puzzles that I’d figured out the answer to already was most entertaining.  (though it was tough holding back and not giving him the solutions.

Aside from the video games and the wedding fiasco I’ve also suffered through my first week of work at the new job.  My boss is pretty damn hard to read.  I have no idea if I’m doing what they want or not.  I do know I’m in over my head.  I’ve got to find an alternate source of income.  I need a way out but even before that I need a backup.  I need that feeling of security.

Beware of Signs

Over the past fifteen or so years that my family has owned this home I’ve had the opportunity to visit the trans-jordan landfill about half a dozen times.  We don’t produce alot of waste, but theres been a few times that I’ve needed to haul a large item away.  Once it was the railroad ties that came as a part of the yard decor with the home.  (I always hated them…)  Another was when my refridgerator gave up the ghost.  Most recently it was hauling away the server cabinets that I spoke of in last weeks blog posting.  The scrap metal guy who was supposed to handle it didn’t come through so I took them down to be recycled.

Anyhow, theres this one little sign on the side of the road as you enter the landfill that almost inspires me to do something.  I want to make a monster and paste it to the back of the sign so it looks like the sign is its mouth or something.  This clever little road sign has a message that is so ironic that it just jumps out at you.  Every time I’ve gone to the landfill I wanted to take a camera and photograph the sign but until this last trip I’ve managed to forget every time.  Sadly the picture didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped.  You can’t read the sign in the photo.  To sum it up, the sign reads “Beware of signs.”  Its almost as if its a foreboding warning that the signs around the area are like wild animals about to attack.

I have a broken dryer and I managed to find a cheaper replacement than I could get it fixed for.  I had planned to give it to a local shop that refurbishes appliances and resells them.  After seeing that my photo didn’t turn out I’m tempted to take the dryer to the landfill for recycling just so I can try to retake the picture.

That’s going to be the motto for this week.  “Beware of signs.”  Many changes going on in life with the new job and such.  They all seem like a sign that I need to do something other than just accept the transfer and keep on keeping on.  I’m pretty sure I hate my new boss.  I never wanted to be a (supervisor/lead/coordinator) whatever the hell they feel like calling it today.  I was perfectly happy bieng a grunt.  If it hadn’t come down to take a promotion or a layoff I’d never have accepted.  Unfortunatly I still need a job.  I’m ok managing people if I don’t have to do it.  If I see someone standing around I give them something to do.  I just don’t feel right about having to be responsible for them.  Two days in and I already feel like I need out.

My instinct is to ride it out because things are bound to get better, but all the signs that I need to beware of are saying other things.  Things like “run for the doors,”  “Find another job,” “It’s time to move on,” ect.

Well thats all I’ve got for this week.  We’ll see what happens in the next couple of days.  I might get a better picture of that happy little sign to post here later on.  Or maybe not.

Its finally over!  The doors are closed to the public.  The sign on the front of the building has been taken down and we’re well into stripping the building down to the bare cinder block walls.  We’re just a few days worth of shipping away store fixtures and I’ll never have to stop in utah county again!

I got a good sense of what I’m in for at my new store the other day and I’m positive its going to be more work and a worse job than what I have had before.  Still I guess I should be happy.  For one, I still have a job and among a recession thats a good thing.  Another is that the worse the job looks the more I’ll shine when I do it well.  (Just a chipper way of saying I’ll have to work my ass off.)

A couple of weeks ago I promised I’d put up a photo of the pavers I bought.  I finally managed to get the palm hotsync software re-installed so I can get the photos off my phone onto the computer.  (I hate cell phones, but I love the palm treo 650…)  This little beast does everything I need for an organizer and it has the phone built in for emergencies.  I leave the phone turned off, but its nice to know I have it in a real emergency.  So far its replaced my watch, my alarm clock, it works as a portable mp3 player should I need one, and a portable video player.  Most cell phones do all that now a days, but this beast has done it for me for going on three full years now.

My 700 or so new Lodgestone Pavers

Anyway, I don’t have a whole heck of a lot going on this week.  Its my fifth or sixth straight week of working 20+ hours of overtime.  It’s great for the paychecks, but really makes it hard to talk about anything but what I worked on last week for the blog…

I did make a really stupid decision yesterday that has bugged me most of the day today.  As the final teardown of the store commences we find ourselves throwing out things that we couldn’t readily find a buyer for.  One such thing is a pair of Network Server Cabinets that held the stores datacenter computers.  The servers go back to our network IT department, but the cabinet was to be disposed of.  Once we were done selling things it turned up that our cabinets were unsold and had nowhere to go.  I happen to know the store paid between $3000 and $4000 dollars for these two cabinets about two and a half years ago.

My immediate thought was not to let them throw away these cabinets, but rather to claim them and sell them myself on ebay.  So thats what I decided to do.  I loaded these very expensive monster cabinets onto my truck and dragged them home.  Here’s where the stupidity comes in though.  I don’t have a place to store them until I sell them.  I looked on ebay and these cabinets should sell at $500 used without a problem, but it might take a month or two to get them sold.   I’d also need a way to ship them freight.  (not going to happen)  So after a days debate and trying to figure out if I could convert them to pantry storage or a very obscure dvd cabinet I decided there’s just no way I can use or store them.  The final result is that I did what my store would have done.  I called a scrap metal guy and told him to come get em.  They won’t be an eyesore in my driveway by tomorrow.

I suppose it wasn’t as bad a decision bringing them home as I make it out to be.  Still I pride myself on not doing things like that.  Just the thought of making a few hundred bucks by doing an easy cary it home and ebay it move seemed like a good idea.  If I had a garage it might have been.  Oh well, done is done.  On to the final days of cleaning out the building and I’m on to a new chapter in my life.

Its strange how people can think of themselves as moral upstanding people and still do the most terrible things.  Con artists thinking they aren’t taking anything more than what people can spare will swindle the last dollar from a starving family and feel good about it.  Shoplifters will take from retail stores thinking that they arent hurting anyone but big businesses who can spare the money when in reality it comes directly out of the pockets of the hardest working most poorly paid people in the country.  The ones who have to stand there and smile and try to give good customer service to a bunch of filty thieves who have all day to do whatever they want.

A while back this subject came up when speaking with a co-worker in a past job.  For years he was a supervisor over many people at the kennecot copper mine in tooele utah.  Utah is well known for its mormon (moron?) population.  I’ll have to paraphrase a bit as I can’t remember exactly how he said it, but it went something like this. “Its strange how they look down on you for having a cup of coffee and for going to the store on a sunday but they don’t think twice about spending an hour of their employers paying time bullshitting in the breakroom.” It was a comment I couldn’t agree with more.

The problem seems to affect overly religious people more than your average folk.  Far right wing republicans as well.  Perhaps its the other way around though.  Perhaps they’re mentally deficent and that makes them religeous or republican.  Either way if you think about it its obsurd the kinds of acts these people commit and feel right by doing it.

The gay rights folks have been on the tv protesting alot lately.  Personally I don’t care one way or the other but its outrageous to me that the churches can spend MILLIONS of dollars promoting anti gay legislation that serves no real purpose.  Who the fuck cares what the defenition of marrige is anyway?  It does siken me to think that these people actually feel good about themselves for doing it.  This is tantamount to a hate crime and needs to be treated as such.

Anyhow I didn’t really want to go off topic and talk about the fags and the morons this week.  What really brought on this train of thought was a shoplifter in my store yesterday.  We’re two days away from closing the doors forever and a 50 something grandmother dressed like a church lady comes in to rip us off.  Seariously folks a store in its last days of liquidation doesn’t have anything worth stealing anyways.

This woman has to have some slip in the line between right and wrong and must actually believe what she’s doing is ok or something.  She heads over to the video game section and gathers up the last of the remaining ps3 games, brings them to the empty part of the store and hides them under a shelf.  Presumably she expects them to still be there when the discounts have gone up and to get them for next to nothing.  Perhaps the thought was “I wasn’t really stealing if I buy the merchandise for pennys on the dollar?”  Whatever the justification was she obviously knew she was doing wrong, chose to do it, and felt ok with her decision.  She did it right in front of me!  Then she came over to me and tried to make idle chit-chat.

What a fucking piece of human filth.  At least a robber has the courage to know he is doing wrong and to act the part.  A car jacker isn’t going to dress in church clothes and pretend hes a good person.  Hes going to hold up a gun and tell you get out of the car.

I see the same trash worthy traits in some of my co-workers.  Its funny how the idea of ethics is only an ideal.  You either chose to do right or chose to do wrong.  Instead of coming up with some elaborate scheme to buy an appliance for pennies on the dollar why not just steal the appliance?  It seems like people actually believe that as long as they paid something for it it wasn’t actually stealing.

I can understand the motive for shoplifing in children.  They want something.  They don’t understand the consequences.  They take the shortest route they can concieve of to get it.  Its when the same mental path gets taken by an educated adult who damn well knows better that it pisses me off.  If they’re a junkie I can see where the motivation might exceed the sane sense.  I can understand even if I don’t agree with it.  What really fucks with my head is when someone like this woman does it.  She obviously was capable of buying the games.  She obviously knew what she was doing.  It was just somehow skewed to where she wasn’t thinking what she was doing was wrong.  This brings me back to the thought about the right wing republicans sponsoring hate legislation.  Somehow these people have an unbreakable sense that what they belive is right not only for themselves but for everyone and even if its a total load of bullshit.

I belive strongly in the total and complete separation of church and state.  Your religeon has no place in politics.  Spending millions to sponser a bill and to influence voters to pass a bill defining the “defenition of marriage” is an outrage to me.  The government has no reason to even know if people are married.  Marrige is a religeous institution.  I’m going to have to stop writing now because even thinking about these stupid people any more will keep me from sleeping tonight.

Over the past dozen or so years I’ve grown to become what I would call a patient buyer.  If something looks too expensive I wait it out for the right opportunity before nabbing it.  More often than not this strategy has ended in dissapointment as I’ve gone months (sometimes years) without getting the latest video games while my friends have all played them.  I’ve put off home improvements due to the cost and I find that I live below the everyday persons standards.  Ok put simply I’m a stingy bastard.

As the location I’ve been working to liquidate grows ever closer to its demise I’ve watched the prices on things and made my list of what I’d buy if it were the right price.  You may or may not be able to guess, but its not a very long list.  Perhaps a half dozen things even caught my eye and less than half of them are something I’d actually ever buy. 

I wrote a while back about how I’m starting to work on remodeling the kitchen.  One of the items I had on my wish list was a stainless steel wall oven unit.  Sadly and somewhat happily it sold before it ever got to a reasonable price.  Sadly because it puts finishing my kitchen further off, but happily because that cash hasn’t yet escaped me.

The other Item I’ve been eyeballing for a while now is some lodgestone castlewall pavers.  I made up my mind years ago (litterally) that I wanted to do a feature in my yard using them.  I’ve never done it because I simply wasn’t willing to pay full price or even a moderate discount for the brick.  This time it got the better of me though.  I told myself if enough of the brick was still there when it reached 60% off that I’d take it.  Well I ended up paying about 34% of its original retail for four pallets of pavers.  Then I got over a hundred more for ten bucks.  In a liquidation sale the stores not only sell off merchandise, but also fixtures.  There was a decorative feature in the store that used these lodgestone pavers and I bought it priced as a fixture.  The trick there is that the liquidator has to get rid of various things so he can turn over the building to the landlord.  By offering to tear down the display he got some free labor and I only paid less than ten cents per brick.  A deal I was quite happy with.

Anyhow, I’m planning on using the stone pavers to build a waist height raised bed garden in the back yard come spring.  (Another month or so)  I’m not one for gardening or doing anything oudoors really, but I know my mother loves it.  She’s getting on in years so making it the kind of thing she can do without getting down on her knees is important to me.  So far it cost me about $350.  $310 for the retail discounted brick, $10 for the fixture brick, and another $30 in gasoline and a meal for my helper.  It took four truckloads plus a day and a half to haul all that brick home.  By truck loads I do mean loads too…  I loaded my Dodge Ram 1500 down to the point where the bed was almost setting on the back tires and the tires were bulging out at the sides at each run.  I was trying despirately to avoid having to make a fifth run to get the last of it.

At least it hasn’t broken me though.  I’ve been working nonstop for quite some time now, clocking in at least twenty hours of overtime each week.  The day I took to haul home the brick was the first sunny day I’ve seen in months, and it happened to be my only day off.  Yes I’m feeling a bit overworked and yes thats why I’m writing my weekly blog update on a monday night instead of on the weekend.  The last few paychecks have squared away some unexpected expenses that had arisen before and I expect the next upcoming one to have enough extra left over to cover the full $350 I invested in the pavers. 

Now its just down to finding enough time off work to install them, and to figuring where to get dirt to backfill the new garden.  I’m sure I see free dirt from time to time, so it shouldn’t be too hard.  I just need to find some during the right time so I can get it done before its time to start the spring planting.  I guess I’ll watch cragslist for stuff I can get for free and I’m concidering the city landfill.  They’re bound to have compost I can pick up for a song and a dance. 

Well thats enough for this week.

As the economy continues to grind further and futher into recession and despirate measures from the government to boost spending and credit abound my current place of business also draws nearer to closing.  This isn’t the first time I’ve been tasked with shutting down a retail store, though it is the first time doing one this large.  As I had expected the number of people in our employ who “stick it out” has dwindled. I expected we would shed most of our management team.  Normally I wouldn’t care who stays or goes, and really I don’t.  But I lost one last week that I’m not sure I can let go without caring.  Its not that she chose to leave that bothers me.  (it wasn’t really a choice)  What bothers me is that I didn’t see it coming.  There were maybe two people whom I expected to be there until the end and she was one of them. 

As I left one evening she was there and we were discussing what we would be doing tomorrow.  The next day she was gone.  As is the case with corporate firings there was no official discussion about what had happened.  Its all under wraps and for a few days I was left to wonder why.  Finally I got a little piece of mind as someone not held by the stigma of a corporate veil knew what had happened and let it slip.  Apparently our corporate loss prevention has accused her of embezzlement and they attempted to have her arrested that night after I left.  When stopped by LP she handed over her keys and left before the police arrived.  They say they have proof that she got into the computer and adjusted pay rates using someone else’s password (including her own).

I sincerely hope that she didn’t get arrested and booked.  I can vouch for her  character and I am positive that this is not something she did as an attempted crime.  But then again you never really can know a person.  Still I know the way the management world works.  Its not my job to ship pallets of fixturing between stores but when it needs to be done I know how to do it.  Since I’m familiar with the process and my boss doesn’t have time to do it, the task somehow magically gets done.  You can read that as “I take care of it.”  Since she used to be a Human Resources Manager prior to her most recent position it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that this was one of those tasks that just magically gets done.   One day the evaluations and pay adjustments need to be entered in, and someone has to take care of it before the deadline.  She has the experience and knowhow and the person who “should” be doing it doesn’t have the time.  Of course there might have been a “slip” in judgement and perhaps her evaluation was a little better than it should have been.  I really don’t know.

The facts that I do know are that her character seemed to me to be strong.  She easily made enough money that taking from the coffer wouldn’t have been needed.  Coupled with the fact that her husband has a masters degree and a very good engineering job that supports both of them even without her income I don’t see why this could have happened.  We had a discussion at one point where I told her I had cashed out my entire retirement fund and payed the full sum down when I bought my home.  BTW, thats a good move in my oppinion despite all the financial planners negative remarks, I’m a lot better off than folks who are freaking out about the economy right now.  I have a nice low house payment that I can make even working a part time job and only minimal fear of forclosure.  As we were discussing retirement she showed me a statement of her retirement investments and boasted about how she was on target to retire a millionare before she’s turns 40.  (again thats without her husbands income)  Knowing that I really don’t see how a few thousand dollars netted by fudging the numbers would have been enough to tempt her.  She’s also been very adamant about immediate firing of associates for time theft.  She’s probably let go of a dozen people in the last year for clocking in and then doing something other than work for a few hours.

Its too bad that I’ll never know.  I’ll probably never see her again regardless of whether she is prosecuted and whether or not she’s found guilty.  Even if I did happen across her once I wouldn’t ask her what happened.  I wouldn’t feel right pushing up bad memories to someone who I concider a friend.  I’ll miss her and belive it or not I’m kind of sad she’s married.  I would never concider dating or even approaching a married woman but had she not been married when I met her she’s exactly the type of gal I’d be chasing after.  Intelligent, well shaped, strong personality, willful and definately high maintenance.  I give off an air of hating the whole high maintenance idea, but secretly thats exactly the kind of girl I see myself ending up with.  I really did like her and regardless this doesn’t change my oppinion of her.  If she were my wife I’d have forgiven her for something like this in a heartbeat and done everything in my power to make it go away.  Fancy Lawyers couldn’t cost enough.  I wonder if the guy she’s married to feels that way too.  Probably he does.  I’d hate to think that they’re having a rocky time now because he’s making her feel worse about what proably amounts to two seconds worth of bad judgement.

Anyhow I guess I just needed to get some of these strange feelings off my chest.  Thats what a blogs for right?  For me to spew random prattle about whatever is bugging me…

I’m sure I have mentioned before on my blog that I’m just a bit of an anime fan.  (that first sentance should really be read as freakish otaku geek)  I’ve even managed to get my poor little brother hooked on my bad habit.  So the other day he called me up to tell me about a new website he discovered to watch anime online.  Theres plenty of sites that boast illegal uploads of pirated anime.  You practically can’t look for information online without stumbling across them.  This site is different though.  Its actually legit, paid for, licensed material.  It kind of shocks me that nobody managed to do it sooner.

I should mention here that I’m not bieng paid to promote this site.  Its just something that I’ve stumbled across and I felt it was worthwhile to give a reccomendation for on my blog.  The site is hulu.com Their business model appears to be very close to that of broadcast television.  They license a movie/tv series and then pay for it by streaming commercial interruptions.  The only difference between them and good old broadcast tv is that they are on demand over the internet.

I’ve always felt shafted by my cable tv providers (this includes all of them.)  The way I figure it if I pay to watch a show it shouldn’t have commercials.  Thats why I’m paying.  If they want to provide the show for free then Amen to the commercials.  I don’t mind supporting a good cause by concidering the things they are pitching if they spend a few bucks entertaining me.  In this respect hulu has gotten it right.  They dont charge you to watch their service, but you do have to watch the commercials.   I suppose thats why tivo went over so well though.  I’m probably not the only american who’s sick of paying $50 to $80 a month for the channels that aren’t broadcast, then getting screwed over by bieng forced to watch the commercials anyway.

Well thats all I really wanted to talk about this week.  As an anime fan, (not an anime pirate) I really believe in buying the dvd’s and supporting the artists.  Needless to say its pleasant to see a video on demand service showing anime that wasn’t blatently “stolen” from its copywright holders through the guise of letting the unscrupulous users do the theft.  I’m talking to you youtube and veoh.  Everyone knows that your services are filled with pirated material and thats where you are making your money.  Its one thing for a dishonest person to pirate a movie and if he or she gets caught they’ll get what they deserve.  Its a whole other thing for an entire business model to be built around helping your users pirate copywright materials.  So for anyone reading this give hulu a try.  They get a big thumbs up from me.  Oh and BTW, hulu is not just for anime, theres all kinds of commercial video goods there, and so far its all free to the viewer.

Its difficult to write about saving money when you simply don’t make enough to save.  I wanted to write todays entry in the blog about how I was planning to save up some cash for needed repairs and wanted upgrades to my kitchen.  I guess What I’m really going to write about is the fact that I don’t seem to be bringing enough money home to have any left at the end of the bills for saving. 

One thought that had crossed my mind was to leave the money in adsense that has collected over the past year or so.  (No this site doesn’t make any money… But I have managed over the last year to finally get to the first $100 payout from my other website)  It occured to me later on though that letting google hold on to the payment until I had enough to actually do something with it was a really bad idea.  The big G has a rep for taking peoples income if someone complains, even if the person who got a complaint didn’t actually do anything wrong.  Using google as a sort of temporary savings account would be kind of like leaving it on the dashboard of my car.  Who knows if it will be there when I come back for it.  Most people are honest but theres still a pretty good chance I’d come back to a broken window.

This leaves a dilemma though.  If I cash out the $100 I’ve finally built up, It will be spent long before I get up to enought to really feel like I got something for my money.  I want to retile the floor in the kitchen where its starting to come up, and as you can guess $100 isn’t going to buy the tools let alone the materials.  It might cover the grout if I go for the cheap stuff…

Anyhow, I know this weeks blog post is a bit late.  I’ve been working overtime so I haven’t been here to write a new post for a while.  My company only offers overtime about as often as haleys comet comes around.  If they’re offering it, I have to take it while I can because its a once in a lifetime deal.  (mix that with the fact that I had to choose between grocerys and car insurance this month and you’ll see why keeping up with this blog is just a tad less important.)  Btw, I chose the car insurance so I sit here typing while dreaming of what kind of foods I can scrape together from the assortment of old canned goods left in the pantry.

Well, until next week…  (perhaps I’ll lose some weight)

President Obama is about to wrap up his first week in the white house and I’m surprised there hasn’t been more exciting news.  I’ve never been a racist or thought that way at all.  Still I would have predicted at least one major tragedy to be headlining the news as the back woods white supremecist groups get their panties in a bunch over the nations first black president.  All in all I’m glad to see it turned out this way.  I had almost lost faith in people completely and seeing that my fellow citizens are capable of behaving in a manner befiting of a human bieng puts off my theory of everything.  Even us pessimists can’t be perfectly negative all the time.

Alot of speculation has come to surface about what his first days in office would see accomplished.  Shutting down the prison at guantanimo bay wasn’t at the top of my mind and I’ll admit it probably didn’t win him much popular oppinion.  I have to give him credit though.  He doesn’t back down.  Regardless of whether the american people are afraid of terrorists or not he’s willing to do the right thing, stand up and be a man.  Bush retaliated at the first punch thrown and acted like a little kid and a bully.  Thats not the america I believe in.  I was devastated the day our troops invaded iraq.  I’ll admit there was a problem there and something needed to be done.  However I always felt in my heart that we as americans were above that.  We don’t attack other countries, we only defend ourselves.  I was proven wrong.  Its nice to see obama taking steps to reverse the damage that the bush administration has done.  Where bush hurt this country more than anywhere else is where its most important.  He hurt our pride.  The guantanimo bay prison may harbor the most outrageous criminals known to man but as americans we still have to treat prisoners as though they have the basest of human rights.

I’ve read arguments from military advisors that this is a bad move.  They say we are at war and that we have to treat these prisoners as war criminals.  To that I say yes.  If they are truly guilty and they we at war they don’t deserve a trial in the american court system.  They’re not americans they’re the enemy.  We should execute them!  Holding on to a notion of treating them with respect and then torturing them only injures our pride and our reputation.  If they’re the enemy kill them.  If they’re not let them go. 

The true enemy of the american people is not these people.  Its the radical islamic belief that blowing up complete strangers is going to win them a place in heaven.  Killing a martyr is the last thing we want to do and thats all the iraq war accomplished.  What we should have done is instead of spending billions on blowing up towel heads with guns, we should have spent those billions on printing anti-islamic anti terrorist propaganda.  We should put an end to putting international criminals on trial before sentancing them.  If the FBI or CIA catches a known international criminal entering the country they should be executed without a trial.  (right there in the airport by a firing squad)

Plain and simple Americans shouldn’t be profiteering from war.  We’re better than that.  When an enemy attacks we take them out.  The rest of our military energies should be spent advancing our military advantage over rivals so they know better than to mess with us.

Enough about my american beliefs, Getting back to obamas first week.  The other half of obama’s week seems to have been spent working on the economic crisis.  I’ve made my thoughts known before.  The best way for our government to foster the growth of our country as a whole is to let the economy crumble.  You have to demolish old buildings to build skyscrapers.  Bad business models need to fail in order for newer better ones to compete.  Its real world natural selection.  I see billions in spending and a rush to spend it.  Well I don’t feel the need to rush.  In fact I don’t see the need to spend.  Instead of spending to avoid cuts we need to spend our energy making sure what gets cut is what really needs to.

On the news a few days back was a protest from parents of autistic children who were upset because funding for special education for autistic children was cut.  Now I understand that they feel like their children are bieng left behind, but they shouldn’t.  Realistically their children are entitled to exactly the same education as everyone elses children.  If their children aren’t able to go to school because of autism its the parents responsibility to pay for special schooling to prepare them to attend a normal school.  I’ve heard it argued that if we take away this funding these children will grow up to be wards of the state and cost us even more.  Again I disagree.  Perhaps they will grow up poorly but that doesn’t entitle them to be supported by my tax dollars as an adult.  America is the land of equal opportunity.  I don’t remeber ever reading that america is the land of extra opportunity for those less capable. 

Its cruel I know but we can’t stand in the way of natural selection.  We cut a weakness into the heart of our society by giving more to the weak so they can survive.  If an arm has gang green, we cut it off.  We don’t let that infection continue to grow until it kills us.  Drawing upon our strongest people to pay for unemployment benefits to people who really don’t try all that hard to get a job hurts us.  Paying for viagra, diabetes and asthma pills through medicare programs hurts us.  It would be a sad day when our government really starts to make these kinds of cuts.  Alot of people will be affected.  You don’t need to worry though, because that day will never come.  Try as we might with economic stimulus packages and other bandaids on the economy the united states will die long before our leaders grow enough balls to stand up and tell their constituents that the best thing for our country is not to “help” them anymore.  We’ll continue to foster weakness and eventually we will falter and fail to a country who is more brutish in their policy.

Obama for me represents hope.  I know he isn’t any more likely to make the kind of cuts I see as needed, but at least I see a man with the cojones to stand up and make the cuts he believes in whether someone is going to whine about it or not.  I only hope he sees a different path for our future than I do.  There is some hope for change in his plans for the spending on alternative energy.  Perhaps he sees a fix on the horizon that eludes me.

Picture a scene where a mother in a park buys two ice cream cones for her children.  One child is rowdy and more excited about running off to play on the monkey bars.  The other child is calm and composed.  This child is carefully licking the ice cream so it doesn’t drip.  Care is taken so that every last bit of this ice cream can be savored.  By now we all know how this story ends.  The careless child drops the cone and in an effort to curb the whining little brat mom steps in and does the unthinkable.  She forces the well behaved child to give up half their cone to appease the other child.  This scenario, however simple and unmeaning really represents how life has been for me all along.  It doesn’t matter how hard I work, how good I behave, or even what I say when someone comes for it.  I always earn my ice cream cone and someone else always gets it.

In the real world, the government plays the part of good old mom.  I work very hard to put a little money aside, start a business, and be a successful person.  (not working out nearly as well as I’d hoped, but I still try.)  Out of that income the government takes a portion as tax.  I think thats great.  After all, I can’t afford to pay police officers, build librarys, and pave roads.  A small stipend from everyone makes these larger projects possible.  Heres where I get a little upset though.  Child tax credits, Earned Income Credit, ect.  I don’t have any dependants to claim so my tax money is taken and litterally given to families who have so many kids they can’t afford to pay for them.  They’re rewarded for being irresponsible and its my ice cream cone they’re getting.

Lets move this to a bigger scale.  I put every cent I can into trying to start a successfull business.  Its barely afloat and likely won’t succeed.  The numbers are just against it.  Still I know that its only chance is for me to continue to infuse my money into it and work hard.  In the end if it fails I’m out what I invested, and if it succeeds I might retire with a little bit of a nest egg.  All in all its a fair system.  So when a company thats making hundreds of billions of dollars a year (auto makers!!!) all of a sudden sees an economic downturn I feel they have the same gamble as I do.  Ten years ago I started hearing people talk about wanting more fuel efficient cars.  Solar energy.  Hydrogen Cells.  Ect.  The big three auto makers ignored these requests completely and focused on building monster sized SUV’s for a quick profit.  The fact that the big auto makers are now failing is a direct result of thier lack of forsight.  Had they turned some of those billions of dollars into research on fuel efficency and driving down the cost of new technology people would be lining up to buy their cars.  So what happens?  They go crying to uncle sam (mom) and they get half my ice cream cone.  I’m sorry but they don’t deserve it.

I’m a harsh realist, and I believe that letting the big three go out of business is the right thing to do.  You have to prune a tree for it to grow stronger in the places you want it to.  Its going to hurt a lot of people but the folks who had 300,000 houses and were making $80 an hour on an assembly line were getting more than they deserved.  This in turn swings to inflation with all this money thrown around.  In the end the big three auto makers are hurting the us economy more than they are helping it.  Its time to let them sink or swim.

Now lets scale back to a more personal level.  Last week I heard through the grapevine that a distant cousin of mine had her children taken away by the state.  I don’t know the details, but I don’t think it was anything sexual.  Rather I’m sure it was related to drugs or something like that.  None the less I’ve always known she wasn’t fit to be a parent.  Both of her ex husbands are doing prison time now.  Her oldest child was taken away a year ago, and now the younger two are as well.  With the way those children were growing up I honestly cant say I feel bad for her.  Starting fires, doing drugs, burglary, car theft…  Horrible parenting all around.

So now she’s coming to take away my ice cream cone.  The state needs to place her children into foster care and she knows that I’m the only one who has a job, owns a house, and doesn’t have kids that is reasonably close to where she lives.  I really was surprised when the state came asking if we wanted to adopt the kids.  It wasn’t expected.  Still from looking at the pattern I shouldn’t have been.  She’s gone and screwed up her life.  Now she wants me to pay to raise her children.  She wants the pleasure of bieng able to see them but not the responsibility of caring for them.  Well at least I can say no. 

Before all of you start to think I’m a horrible person for saying no, I have to say that I don’t feel any guilt in refusing her pleas.  I quite honestly believe that for those children to have a chance in life they need to be taken as far away from their mother as is humanly possible.  They should never be allowed to see her again.  I would be doing them an injustice by taking them in.  Couple that with the fact that I seldom work less than fourteen hours a day and would be wholly incapable of bieng around enough to act as a parent, and I don’t have anything to feel guilty for.

Well there is one thing I can feel guilty for.  I did take some pleasure in saying no.  It felt good not letting her have my ice cream.  Perhaps I really am a monster.