When I was a kid, my mother traveled for work pretty frequently for the era, maybe five times a year. When she did, we would go to meet her at the airport and sit by the gate, watching and waiting fit her plane to get in. When it did, we would hug and cheer and I'd try to carry her luggage. She would bring me a keychain or a coveted snow globe from Baltimore or San Francisco or St. Louis. St. Louis always seemed so magical, with its towering, cyclopean arch. We weren't the only ones, there were dozens of families and friends around to greet their relations-errant.
Now, that is all changed. Fourteen years ago, a handful of assholes killed over three thousand people, destroyed a landmark, and made it impossible to meet your family at the arrivals gate.
That's not all, of course. The wars, the economic and political destabilization of the whole world, the fracturing of the American soul.
In a lot of ways, the terrorists won. We are changed. We are saddened and afraid. We are kind of lost. We still don't know how to treat each other. We rage against being gay or being religious or being from another country. We trashed the near east with two wars and we don't seem concerned about all of the refugees. It's business as usual under the new normal.
My kid goes to daycare with a United Colours of Benetton ad's worth of children. I'm hoping that I'll be able to help him understand why that's a good thing, why he should be happy and proud that he lives in a country that is diverse and accepting. Maybe in a generation he can meet his family at the arrivals gate.
Now that we've achieved a bit of financial stability, I went through and renewed some of the public good things that we have done in the past. Specifically, I sent donations to various public radio stations and production companies that we listen to:
WAMU - our local station, 88.5 FM. It's operated by American University and is the home of Diane Rehm and Kojo Nnamdi shows.
Radiotopia - production company for Love + Radio, Criminal, and 99% Invisible.
Gimlet Media - production company for Reply All and Mystery Show.
And I'm thinking about politics. I haven't had to think hard about who I was going to vote for in the last two presidential elections because my candidate was clear and the other guy was just... awful. In the last statewide Maryland election, none of my votes went anywhere because all of the entrenched incumbents kept their jobs and the cool new people were barely a blip. And there was Anthony Brown...
But this coming election has its hype and I'm concerned about the hype overtaking the relative wisdom of crowds.
Wisdom of the crowd is when, statistically, massive groups of people guessing at some arbitrary number tend to get it right on average. Think of the big jar of jelly beans. Ask enough people--some guess high, some guess low--and the average tends to be very close to the actual number. Planet Money did an episode about this.
So there's some truth to the adage that America elects the president it deserves (attributed to Toqueville, but who knows?). Elections should, by the wisdom of the crowds, end up with the president for the times, and well, if only we could have guessed that the September 11, 2001 attacks were even possible, we wouldn't have picked Bush or Gore (or Nader, for that matter). But we couldn't imagine it back then and we didn't, so we've got the history we've got.
I digress. I am considering whether to actively support a candidate for president. On the one hand, I think it's WAAAAAY too early. On the other hand, I don't really think it's going to get better.
I lean left. I was raised in the space beyond left, where there is no right or left, but only monsters made out of hair and vomit. In other words, basically an anarchist. As I've gotten older, I've figured out a few things and I respect government on a certain level. It's a level that probably makes me more of a libertarian than much else, but I just don't like the libertarianism that also glorifies guns. I like freedom, I like the government not meddling much in the lives of people, but I don't think I care for everyone to be armed to the teeth. Rather, I think I like the more utopian libertarianism that is probably more like Ayn Rand would have espoused if she wasn't batshit crazy.
That is, I think I'd like something like an enlightened egalitarianism. I want a government that lets the people motivated to do something great to do that thing and that takes care of the people who are unable or unwilling to do so. If you have an idea, you can prosper. If you don't, you can at least expect a modest wage and decent health care. There would be an overriding principle about not doing harm to others, also. You know, to avoid murder and war and taking advantage of the less-motivated than you.
A tangent: in my job, I work on cases in the EB-5 program. This program allows affluent foreigners to invest in companies in the US in exchange for green cards. There are some pretty technical requirements, like the company has to create (full-time, meaningful, permanent) jobs and the investment has to last at least a few years--you can't just dump your money into a project, get your green card, and cash out. Most of the investors in this program are Chinese nationals who invest in large real estate projects. If they meet the requirements, two years after they get their green cards, we do a review of their application. If they made the investments and created the jobs, they get to be full on permanent residents and can apply for citizenship in a few years.
One of the EB-5 projects of note in the last few years was a little thing called the Barclays Arena in Brooklyn. You know, where the Nets play? Yeah. It can be a big deal. Other projects include wind farms, gold mines, hotels, condos, and lots and lots of other stuff. These projects are mostly organized by private companies who receive special designation from my agency. Our blessing really just allows these companies to participate in our program and raise money with the balanced promise of a possible green card at the end (but they can't really guarantee anything).
So in the news this week, Lobsang Dargey, a guy who runs an EB-5 company in the Seattle area was busted by the Securities and Exchange Commission for embezzling over $17 million for his personal use. I should point out that, in this program, if the investors' money is not used for creating jobs and according to the business plan, the investors can lose their permanent resident status after two years. This guy who was busted for embezzling investors' money is an immigrant himself (and a former Tibetan monk--wtf).
In the last few cases where EB-5 projects collapsed, the primary evildoer has been an immigrant himself. Anshoo Sethi, Joop Bollen, and now Lobsang Dargey (the former Tibetan monk). These guys are immigrants and they're making fortunes ripping off fellow immigrants. This former monk tells a story about how he's a self-made guy, an immigrant who pulled up his bootstraps and got really rich. But his bootstraps were just other peoples' bank accounts. They all looked at the opportunities they received, saw the holes or vulnerabilities in the system, breathed a sigh of relief that it didn't happen to them, and then turned around and thought about how many potential suckers are out there. It drives me nuts.
So my idea of a good society would have some protections to make sure that people like those guys don't take advantage of the rest of us. Be free, be safe, and be successful if you want to.
Pursuant to that, who among the presidential candidates will get us all closer to that? I've got to figure that out.
Now, one of the most beautiful songs I've heard lately.
This week, I think I did something that qualifies as an actual, real live financial success. I obtained a debt consolidation loan from some company on the internet.
I've not made a lot of wise financial decisions. Rather, I don't know if I've ever made a wise financial decision. They've either been OK decisions or stupid decisions. Buying the two houses in Akron when I was still a law student? Stupid. Getting married? OK. Getting married to someone with a job? Yeah, well, that made sense. I guess buying the 2004 Ford Focus was a pretty good idea, too.
But this was a new thing. It doesn't sound like a good idea. Getting a debt consolidation loan generally sounds like something you do to buy more cigarettes and/or hooch and/or lottery tickets. It has the stigma of payday loans, loan sharks, etc. Usury.
I got an offer in the mail and decided to look at it. Something about the logo, I guess. I researched the company and checked out competitors and figured out rates. Turned out that I could get a loan to pay off all of our credit cards for less than half of the interest rate of our lowest-rate card. Considering how we had been carrying a pretty big balance on one of our accounts due to costs with moving twice in a year, Carly being a stay-at-home mom for a little while, and costs associated with the money pits in Akron, the offer was tempting. Most importantly, the program looked totally legit and famous investor people were supporting this company in particular.
So there. I got a big, stupid, debt-consolidation loan. It'll save us a few thousand dollars over the next six months and help us save a little more for a down payment on a house sometime next year. Best of all, we'll pay it off in the next year and be mostly debt free. Well, except for:
Two houses in Akron;
All of our student loans;
Car loan;
Some money I probably owe my father;
We promised our firstborn to some guy dressed in rags a while back; and
Tyrannosaurs.
And now, this is one of the best songs written in the 21st century so far:
I don't have a Twitter account. I don't really want one except, maybe, to follow food trucks I like. I just don't see the utility. It is a mainstay of popular culture right now, but I think it's a vestige waiting to be vestigial. It's basically just texting to the universe. I'm hoping, in the near future, I'll just be able to send smellxts or something. Fart on U!
Anyway, a few things came up lately that I thought would be tweet-worthy. If I did that.
1. "Right after a shower is the only time you can dry your balls and then dry your face and not wonder, 'what's that ball-smell?'"
2. "WIFE GAVE ME THE PLAGUE STOP REPLACING BLOOD WITH GIN AND OR MEAD STOP NOTHING CAN SURVIVE IN THERE FULL STOP"
3. "Trying to teach my toddler the words to 'Pussy Galore' by the Roots... for daycare sharing circle."
I don't really have much of an outlet for my awful thoughts. After our week-long vacation in the mountains around Asheville, NC, I noticed that my creative brain really woke up. I started seeing in color again after a long period of government and law-induced sepia. And now, about three weeks later, it's almost dried up. My funny thoughts just seem cruel.
I've managed to keep on my resolution train for the time being. In addition to the first four books, I've read:
The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
That means I'm caught up for August.
I've managed to keep my drinking down for a while now, too. In the beginning of June, I started a long, mopey post about drinking. "I come from a long line of alcoholics..." It's old hat. I think I've been telling that story for a while. But this spring, I just realized I'd been drinking a lot more than I was comfortable with. What was one or two beerstwo or three times a week became two or three beers a night. Every night. For most of a year.
Forget the drinking part, it was just expensive!
But yeah, I hate a routine, especially one that is hardwired into me, so I broke it. In June, I dialed back to my earlier quota and even took a full two weeks off with no drinking at all. July was a little heavier, with vacation thrown in there, but now I still take at least three or four nights off a week from drinking.
I also cut my coffee consumption down and I'm trying to keep the sweets at bay. But it's not easy, dropping all my vices. Legos. I just have to get Legos every now and then.
OK. Back to the grind.
EDIT: Oh, shit! I nearly forgot. I started running some. Not as much as I should, but more than I have. I try to run at least a few miles every weekend. In July, I ran an 8K in Rockville and in August, I ran a 5K in Georgetown. I plan to do at least one organized race a month, building up to a 10K at the end of the year. The goal is to do a half marathon next year, maybe a full marathon the year after that. You know, before I'm 40.
The Wolf woke up sick, today. Inexplicably. He was fine--excellent even--yesterday. Today, he had a fever of 103F for a good hunk of the day. We dosed him with Tylenol and tried to keep him hydrated. A good hunk of his calories today were chocolate milk.
By mid-morning, we thought we had him under control enough to go to breakfast. We headed to one of our favorite brunch spots, the Busboys & Poets location in Hyattsville. It was a somewhat damp but nice morning and we opted to sit outside. The hostess put us as close to the main road as we could get and not actually be in the road. We were a little puzzled by this, but hell.
We go to this spot about once a month, but it has been less often of late. The last few outings haven't been stellar. There weren't any screaming problems, just rough edges. A muffin was stale, they didn't bring the side order of eggs, they forgot to refill coffee.
Today wasn't terribly busy. It was busy, just not terribly. We sat and entertained the kid, commented on the fumes and noise from the road, people-watched. And waited. About 25 minutes later, we hadn't seen a server within about 50 feet of our table and no one had come to get our drinks order or anything. So we left. We walked down to Franklin's, where we were seated immediately and the friendly people took our order. They don't do breakfast, but it was already almost noon, so we just opted for light lunch options.
Unfortunately, by this time the Wolf was beyond his comfort level, his fever was creeping back up, and Everything Was Wrong, so we had to box all the food up and head home. It could have been worse, but it really kind of ruined the day.
The kid was up and down all day, and we just put him to bed without a whimper--he was just exhausted. We spent most of the day watching TV and snacking on whatever was around.
It's rough when the Wolf is sick, and he's been sick a lot. He was born early and has a sensitive immune system. His lungs aren't super strong because they weren't as developed as they could have been when he had to start using them. He just goes from hero to zero really really fast. It's hard to watch. All his hilarious vibrant sweetness becomes a long, sour, flat note on a viola, dragged out for hours.
He's also had a share of injuries this week. He headbutted my knee when trying to climb over the dog the other night. He faceplanted on the stairs of a slide at the park and scraped up his chin. Some kid at daycare got into a tantrum and clawed up his pretty face. Throw in his general paperwhite paleness and he looks like a hockey bruiser coming in after a particularly long bender.
Poor Wolfie. At least chicks still dig scars, amirite?
Every Tuesday, I get together with three of my best friends to play Diablo III. One of them is in Ohio, one splits his time between State College, PA and somewhere near Ann Arbor, MI, and the third one lives about six miles from me and works about a mile from my building. I went to law school with two of them, I was in two of their weddings and attended the third's (on a day where I thought I was supposed to take the MPRE but got the dates mixed up and Pam, O Pam, you dragged me through the brambles over that one). Two of them were in my wedding. We're great friends and we get together on Google Hangouts every Tuesday to talk while we play a video game.
While we're all logging in and checking our characters' inventories and tweaking our builds, we talk about stuff. It's one of the few times I get to vent openly about whatever bothers me.
The thing that upsets me the most, of late, is how, with all this education and resources, my wife and I were living paycheck to paycheck for the last few years up until about February. Between moving and changing jobs and hustling to find the right place to stand and not get terrible sunburn, we have had to burn our savings, max out credit cards, and defer student loan payments basically forever.
In all this, we have been kind of screwed by the bank that gave us loans on houses in Akron that we couldn't really afford way back when, just like everyone else who got loans back then, and our credit has been crushed. Every little thing puts us further and further away from actually settling down and planning for the future. But we've finally gotten over the hump and squeezed a few of our assets to get some liquidity and pay down some debts. Finally, about eight years after law school. Even then, it's not great--we've managed to dedicate all of our free money for things that are ultimately going to tank our finances anyway, but it won't be as bad as it could have been. More on that later.
We're not alone in this. Many of my friends are just sort of coasting or crawling along, doing everything they can to secure future paychecks and maintain some level of happiness along side that goal. The painful part is when we actually talk about the details. On paper, Carly and I make a lot of money. We aren't eligible for a lot of tax credits that regular people are. Based on our income, we're in the top 5% of U.S. households. It doesn't feel like it. If you look at our student loan debt (about three times the rent I paid in law school) and rent (more per month than my first car cost) and other expenses and it puts us somewhere closer to the median. And still, no summer homes or white picket fences in our future for a while.
Now I feel like I'm whining. But it's somewhat justified. I'm most concerned with how the Wolf is going to make it through his first decade or two. In the last few years, we've moved four times. We're looking at doing it again in a year and a half. We want our kid (maybe another one by then, who knows?) to have some kind of stable physical home. Because of that, I have set my career aspirations on a slightly different path and I'm pretty sure we'll never move back to the NYC area.
We're going to live in the Great Swamp forever, I think. Carly really loves her job. Mine's good enough--I have opportunities on the horizon in DC. I don't want to cause another move again for a long time. I want to buy a house. I am considering changing my phone number to a DMV area code.
Before all that, we need to bail out of two houses in Akron and pay down about $10,000 in credit debt. It's do-able. Hopefully this year. We have a realtor and a plan.
It has been over six months since I quit Facebook and pretty much all social media except Instagram (which isn't super social) and Google+ (which is nothing at all, in its entirety). And in the last month or so, I have started to feel the pull again. I've started to feel it because of a podcast called Reply All.
This year, I made a couple of resolutions. My first one was to do something creatively significant. Specifically, "to create something of merit." Carly considered that a reason to procreate a second time. I mean that I want to write or paint something that I'm proud of. Another genetically engineered semi-clone would be OK, too, I guess.
The second, easier resolution was to read at least one book a month for fun. My first four included:
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
Dreadnought by Cherie Priest
I was ahead of schedule for April, so I decided to take the rest of the month to catch up on podcasts. I like podcasts. My favorites include, but are not limited to:
and many more (This American Life, Too Much Information, Serial, The Moth, The Truth, FilmSack, Invisibilia, The Soundtrack Series, and so on and so on and so on).
I made Carly download Player FM (these are all so linkworthy) to listen to some of these wonderful things. She, of course, discovered a few more. One of them was Reply All.
The first thing I noticed about the podcast was that all of their episodes were labeled "Explicit Content" on the app. Considering the authors (many of them contributors to other radio shows related to podcasts I listen to), I was somewhat surprised. So I gave it a whirl.
The podcast is ostensibly "about the internet." The hosts are proud of their geekdom and try to make sure that we all get a chance to see inside the weird world they live in. The main part of the show, though, is trying to explain and give context to this bizarre electronic universe that occupies so much of our lives. To accomplish their goals, they heartily utilize the tools of the internet to tell a broader tale--mailing lists, Facebook, Twitter. They respond to their social media commentors during subsequent shows. They have this huge conversation--this huge, interesting conversation--going on, and I only hear a bit of it.
To geek out a bit, it's like reading the Marvel comics Civil War crossover back in the day... but not any of the related sub-parts of the story in the various ongoing series. You only get the highlights, the bold plot changes. You don't see the fine-grained bits of the story.
And I feel like I'm missing out.
They make me want to start a Twitter account again. If only to follow food trucks (to figure out when they'll be near my workplace) and occasionally enter into Reply All contests.
There it is. The last room in the townhouse is about done, which means we're finally unpacked and we can call this place home for a while. As Carly said, "and then we'll just move again."
This weekend, we got stuff to plant in the backyard. Tomatoes, peppers, figs. Yeah, figs. Carly says that the deck in the back of the house is the best part of the place, and I don't disagree. It's well shaded, off the main drag, and big enough for a small party to hang out. The greatness of the deck outweighs the other little foibles of the house.
Neighbors recognize us. They wave.
We went walking through the hood today, just to the store and then over to a nearby park where Wolfie went down the slide head first for the first time. He loved it, but got a little bit of a friction burn on his hands and we had to stop. The kid is interacting with the world in new ways every day. It's a riot. We're starting to hear subtleties in his weird words, picking out the differences between "sit" and "stairs" and "socks." Most of the time, it's a short sentence. "I sit," which means, "I want to sit down, here, now." It usually sounds like "OH SHIT."
There are a number of houses for sale in our greater neighborhood. Most of them are stupidly overpriced. Our neighborhood has been targeted by realtors. People keep leaving doorhangers or sending promo things or even knocking on our door--they go door to door in this hood--asking if we are interested in selling. We tell them we rent, and we just moved in, and they smile and leave. Then we get more letters.
I miss having the freedom of my own place. I also don't miss the obligations of paying property taxes and mowing lawns. Carly certainly wants to buy a house sometime. She talks about how she likes our neighborhood and is constantly checking real estate prices on Zillow whenever we drive through a new area.
I spent the first ten years of my life in a trailer at the edge of a trailer park. The next ten were at the house my parents still occupy. After that, it's been a new place almost every two years. Thayer. My folks' house again. Thayer again. Glenwood. Sugar Street. Raritan. Newark. Jersey City. The apartment on Georgia Ave. This place. It would be nice to not be a nomad anymore. I want the Wolf to appreciate having his own space, something he can rely on. Fewer permanent addresses.
One of the great wonders and frustrations of my modern life is mass transit.
Here I am, in an air conditioned metro car, stuck between stations, listening to podcasts over my sweet headphones, tapping away on my smartphone, watching the time drain away when I need to pick up my kid.
This week, Carly is out of town on business, which means I am a single dad. Without me picking him up, Wolf will probably be eaten by the daycare ladies. When I do finally rescue him, we have only a few hours to eat and play and run around before he crashes. Somehow, I need to find time to feed myself and do dishes and unwind before I crash.
Six months later, we have finally gotten away from the old landlord.
We found a townhouse about five blocks from the old place. It's a little older, used to have a bug problem, and has a few maintenance issues, but it's bigger, has a backyard and a porch. We got a grill of our own for the first time since we left Ohio. The kid and dog both love running around outside, and it's a hell of a lot quieter. There are no neighbors upstairs stomping around, no sirens right outside our window and solid cinderblock walls between us and the next townhouse over.
The move nearly bankrupted us. With the sudden cost of movers, paying double rent and utilities for a month, security deposits and everything, we had to dump out all of our savings and burn up a bunch of credit balances we were just getting ready to pay down. Six months later, we're no longer living paycheck to paycheck. It has been hard.
The Wolf's health has finally improved, also. From about Thanksgiving to the beginning of March, we all had some kind of illness or another. In December, The Wolf came down with RSV which led to pneumonia. He was in the hospital for about three days, lost a bunch of weight, and had a cough that lingered for months. I think he and I are just now getting over that--I still have some phlegmy mornings every week.
When we broke our lease at the Flats at Wheaton Station, Gables--the management company that owns the thing--took the option of imposing a penalty of about $2,000 on us. We tried to negotiate with them, because we thought it was really their company and their building that made the living conditions untenable, but they had nothing of it. They actually didn't even return our emails. Last month, we started to get letters from a rent collection agency.
The guy at the agency was quite cool. He was in the process of putting the file together to report us to the credit bureaus, but noticed that there was an old address on the file, so he gave us a call. "It seemed odd that they'd send a demand notice to the address that you broke your lease to leave from..." he said. I explained how the whole thing evolved, and we resubmitted our offer of paying half of what Gables was demanding. He said "that's about the most reasonable offer I've heard from someone like you and I've been doing this for over 20 years." He said he'd send it up and was optimistic that it would be accepted.
It wasn't. Gables wanted the whole amount.
The best he could do was 80% of the total, which is what his contract allowed him to collect without any input from Gables. So we did that. Hopefully, all these shenanigans won't affect our credit.
That matters so much now because the credit market is so shitty, you have to have a credit score of at least 720 to even be considered for a home loan. With our debt burden including the houses in Akron, old credit cards that bubbled up only a few years ago, weird little utility payments that we believe we paid but don't have any records of now, stupid, stupid, stupid lawsuits from former clients, and all our student loans... our scores aren't great.
But we're getting there. Our careers and our salaries are doing just fine. We've got a month or so of savings right now and a few ways to put our numbers back together. It's a slog, but we'll get through it.
