Mortgage envy and tradeoffs

March 1, 2009 1 Comment

I love Salon comments. This week, Mary Elizabeth Williams writes about her family’s slow descent into a subprime mortgage  to help them keep on the heels of the joneses who can afford nice brownstones in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. It seems a little self-absorbed to do an article like this and fail to report outside one’s own situation. It might have at least protected Williams from comments that scorn her for whining about the rich people in her neighborhood when she does not have it so bad. (In her defense, this is an excerpt from a book, so maybe the rest of the book goes more broad). As a few other commenters point out, if she and her husband chose to be freelance writers, didn’t they know they wouldn’t enjoy the same lifestyle as NYC’s  bankers and lawyers? Unfortunately, in New York, that lifestyle is simply being able to afford a house. Anyway, here are a couple of the most interesting comments. Emphasis added, in some places.

What the writer fails to appreciate is that if you want to live an unconventional life, you can’t complain you are unable to afford the perks of those who’ve slaved in the salt mines doing “regular jobs” for years.

I’ve seen this in people who’ve gone overseas on their own initiative and then come home 5+ years later and don’t understand why they can’t immediately live like those who never left. Whatever they did “over there” isn’t on the radar of American employers and the absence of a credit record won’t help them with lenders.

I guess I feel fortunate that I don’t envy the lifestyle of anyone else. I always knew what I wanted and was cognizant of what I would have to sacrifice to achieve it.

Yikes–you’re gonna get killed in the letters section with this!

I can understand wanting to shill your new book, but man are the folks on this site not going to give you the love right now.

She’s not talking about the titans of Wall St, earning multimillion dollar bonuses. She’s talking about people who are doing well.

Why are they so much more comfortable financially than she is? Because they looked at the market and figured out what it took to earn a salary that suited the lifestyle they wanted. They went to B school. They took jobs that maybe weren’t “fulfilling’. I wanted to be a writer, my husband wanted to be an airplane pilot. We’ve spent a lot of our careers in Accounting. We haven’t always lived in the place we’d prefer to live. However, we have a very nice life and we probably are the sort that MEW hates.

You can buy an entire city in the plains states for the price of a New York loft. And believe it or not, there are people outside of New York with a full set of teeth and a head full of brains.

I do have to say, living in NYC is definitely worth some extra money.

Yeah, my daily trip to work is enough to tell me that there are plenty of people out there who are worse off, but if every sad story has to compete in this way, what’s the point? The author’s experience is rather topical and I appreciate the view from the inside.

The lamentations are predictable, but the market has always defined the tradeoffs: How much are you willing to trade safety, convenience, space and stability to live out your vocational dreams in a close-in, culturally hip area? How move-in ready do you need your cultural surroundings to be—do you want to build it from scratch or have others to spend time and do all the heavy lifting constructing it for you? If you opt for the latter, you’ll pay top dollar, so working for the corporate master may be in your future. The built-in equilibrium is that today’s urban pioneers have already left in search of new affordable frontiers. So, your “spoiled” expensive neighborhood has likely become a sterile chain-store filled anywhere USA — filled with self-congratulatory drones living vicariously through the efforts of the former residents, the glow of the area’s former coolness rapidly dissipating.

The way these people put it, the tradeoffs can be pretty easily defined.
Conventional vs. unconventional job=Well-paying job vs. less well-paying job=Carroll Gardens vs. Jersey City. Well, at least it did. Who knows what will happen during the repression (recession+depression).
I know where I come down, at least at the tender age of 25: As Art Buchwald, not Einstein, supposedly said, “The best things in life aren’t things.”

Filed under Explore Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Why I love Cary Tennis

February 11, 2009 Leave a comment

I am often noticing (and partaking in) the Internet’s corrosion of communication, reduced to writing in “lols” and “ur funny”s, but one beachhead in the field of spontaneous and meaningless words is Cary Tennis’s Since You Asked “advice” column on Salon.com, not only because he goes beyond the trite “what you did is wrong. This is the proper rule” response of the typical advice writer but because, per the policy of Salon, readers also weigh in.  I also love that Cary shares, as he does with today’s letter, from a woman who has been hurt by a precarious relationship, how he relates, how the letter affects him personally:

Thank you for the bracing echo of toughness here — you offhandedly say the pain is now less a stabbing agony and more a dull ache you live with but can’t quite ignore, and although I ought not take pleasure in your suffering itself I take pleasure in the precision with which you render gradations of awfulness way outside the scale of day-to-day suffering.

This stuff is so good!!  We all relate!  And then the commenters offer up some goods of their own.

I missed the idea of the MF [motherf--er] and what I know about NPD [narcissistic personality disorder] is that it really was the idea.

Take a hard look at your life and see what needs to be changed. Don’t wait for the fairy Godmother to come back or cast someone else in that role. Say ‘Yes I can.” and make the changes you need to make.

It’s hard, it’s lonely, but in the end, learning to succeed, whether it’s at work, friends, or love is a very valuable life skill.

How less than often do these conversations take place in real life in our mire of small talk and superficial relationships and fears of “being vulnerable.”  How often have we scolded ourselves for letting our most intimate conversations take place through the faceless medium of the web?  And yet, the truth is, writing out one’s thoughts is a way of communicating sometimes so much more genuinely than the necessary spontaneity required of conversation.  Cary Tennis proves that the Internet is good for something!

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

The ’60s examined, again

April 9, 2008 1 Comment

To this day, people have been eager to blame their problems — moral decay, crime, violence, and the plight of the family — on a permissive generation of misfits, delinquents, and revolutionaries more powerful in myth than they ever were in life.

–Dennis DeGroot

Gary Kamiya pens a great review in today’s Salon about St. Andrews historian Dennis DeGroot’s The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade.  The review presents the book and the questions it asks in the context of other, possibly more sweeping condemnatory works on that era. 

At least the way Kamiya tells it, DeGroot appears to have a pretty well-honed set of praises and critiques for the era, such as the following sentiment, with which I strongly agree:

On the scanty plus side of the ’60s ledger, DeGroot lists the “longterm effects of the sexual revolution,” which resulted in “sexual relations [being] accepted as the business of the individual rather than the state.” He sees gay liberation as the most impressive outcome of the sexual revolution: Although he acknowledges that women gained sexual freedom as a result of the ’60s, he is harshly critical of what he sees as the era’s decoupling of sex from love (in which he echoes Bloom), as well as what he claims was its rampant sexism.

DeGroot further levels the full weight of perspective in his evaluation of the ’60′s significance, in a clever historical re-telling approach:

But DeGroot also employs a more ambitious and unorthodox technique, using what he considers the decade’s truly important events to reveal the ultimate insignificance of the counterculture. His book is broken into 67 shortish sections, most of them dealing directly or indirectly with the counterculture, but a number covering extraneous subjects: the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, the Vatican’s “Humanae Vitae” encyclical, the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, the Watts riots, the Vietnam War and so on.

What I gain from this sort of review is that there is no great or terrible era of history.  Moreover, those eras whose values are debated most vigorously when the aura or zeitgeist that made them Eras have long passed are the periods that supporters and detractors alike view as responsible for informing our present values. 

One thing that gets me a little is that the experience of women, blacks, gays, etc., today are often laid at the doorstep of the ’60s, as if that brief time of social unrest is responsible for everything that happens since, that at some point in the late 1970s, Americans ceased at defining and re-defining themselves, that their experience was enveloped by the 60′s attitudes.  Particulary, DeGroot’s suggestion that the direct result of ’60s counter-culturalism was ’80s and onward consumerism is not causually sound. 

Kamiya puts it very well, too:

A good cultural historian is like a biographer: He must be capable of empathizing with his subjects, seeing the world through their eyes. Equally important, he must also consider that historical change does not always take place for obvious reasons. Even a narcissistic, indulgent or just plain silly era can change the world, in ways that are as imperceptible as the workings of evolution.

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.