The Spider Web

The recent economic troubles are hitting my industry particularly hard. In my business, hiring and overtime freezes have been instituted and layoffs have started. Business is really bad; we’ve suffered our worse month in recent memory. It’s very scary. Gut-clenching, nail-biting, “this-is-real” scary. Fear of being unable to maintain my family’s current economic position in society is a real, literal, almost physical thing. This could hurt me and my loved ones bad.

There are other factors, too. The housing depression’s hurting us. We bought high, almost five years ago, and I can only hope our house is worth what we paid for it. Thinking we’d make a profit on the sale, right now, is unreasonable. So, we’re locked in this expensive corner of the country for now. I have a high mortgage, my property taxes go up every year (I shudder to think what effect an Obama presidency will have on that monthly check. Blood. Stone. You know the rest). I’m hesitant to check the current value of my 401k. Then there’s my hospital bills, a newborn, the Little One in an excellent but pricey school … I don’t know how we make it happen. But we do, barely. There’s no safety net.

This has me thinking about a spider web. A big one, long silky strands that you can see only when you face them at certain angles. As you travel to the center they get more and more dense, interlocking and crossing paths. It sways in the breeze and at first glance it looks pretty secure. Even a strong wind doesn’t break it. It holds. It stays where it was meant to be, though that looks like a haphazard construction. It fills all the holes and empty spaces, and it does what it was designed to do, what it is supposed to do.

What happens when a little bug lands on a far corner of the web? It sends a slight vibration, a little tremble up the connecting strands, through the center, and eventually resonates through the whole damn thing. What if I were to walk up to the web and, with my hand, grab one or two strands that seem to be anchoring it to a tree or branch or whatever, and yank hard enough to tear them off. The whole web feels it. If I yank hard enough, or grab enough strands, the whole web undulates. Harder still, and it eventually collapses, destroyed.

The web is our economy, of course. But what scares me most with this metaphor is that little bug that torques the web by landing on it. You know what that bug is? Emotion. Human emotion. Fallible human emotion. Our economy fundamentally sits upon a mantle constructed from the aggregate emotional quotient of our society. You may think the foundation is money, but it isn’t. You may think the foundation is reason, but it ain’t that, either. It’s emotion. Everything we do, including everything we do economically from purchasing to saving to investing to chatting up friends, neighbors and coworkers about the economy, falls back on emotion.

So what has this little pessimistic meditation on the Great Credit Crunch of ’08 done? It’s given a teeny tiny bit of its self to the mass of emotion that’s roiling up in the American consumer at this very point in time. I’ll talk to my wife, she’ll talk to others, maybe a handful of people will read this. You get the point. But is there a bigger point? What the heck am I getting at, besides griping about how bad I have it as if it compares at all to what my grandparents went through? (It’ll probably compare nicely to the malaise the country endured during the Carter presidency.)

Maybe there is no point. But I could take this opportunity to clasp your shoulder, lift you up and prop you up (giving strength to others is a good way to feel strong yourself, even if you aren’t) and say, boldly, “There is a better way!”

This.

TRFD Update

Weighed myself this morning and was more than pleasantly surprised. Shocked is a better word. Minus eight. Minus eight! As in, I lost eight pounds on this diet in five-and-a-quarter-days.

My wife’s telling me most of what I lost is water weight, though I don’t think so. Yeah, the bloat from my belly is significantly less, and I think my neck is narrower. These are the two places which serve as LE’s flab indicators. When I lose or gain, we all see it in those two spots first. So, the raw food thing is working.

It’s not a hundred-percent raw foods thing, either, so don’t get turned off by that. My first two meals, breakfast and mid-morning snack, are raw. Fruits. That’s as far as I need to go at this stage, unless I want to go farther. Four out of the five days I did, and had salads. Yesterday afternoon I had soup with a whole wheat muffin ’cause it was chilly. My afternoon snack needs to be raw, either nuts if I’m at work or an apple or banana if I’m home. Dinner can be cooked, and it can be anything as long as it’s not processed or fried. I’ve had chicken and veggies a couple of times, chicken with potatoes, and veggie lasagna. Then it’s back to raw for dessert. I’ve been doing real yogurt with fruit and a little bit of granola thrown in. Once I ate melon, which works for me at night. Everything gets washed down with lemon-tinged bottled or filtered water.

The best part about it? The strangest part about it? I have not been hungry! I never would have thought it could be this way. I mean, how can you not be hungry eating vegetables and fruits all day, right? Well let me be the first to testify. I have not been hungry. Even when I go a little long between meals, I’m not as snarlin’ ragin’ get-out-of-my-way to get to the next plate of food. So, it’s working on a couple of fronts.

I do expect to hit a plateau. My goal is to be minus twenty from my pre-TRFD weight. I’m thinking a few more pounds’ll come off, then the old straight-n-level will show its ugly face. We’ll see …

Francis of Assisi

Yesterday, October 4, was the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. Now, I’m not a Franciscan in any way, spiritually or philosophically. I always felt the order to be too touchy-feely emotional for my introverted self, and their brutal withdrawal from the world and embrace of poverty is something I just can’t do, even if I didn’t have all the responsibilities I now have. But I do know a bit about Francis, mostly from reading G. K. Chesterton’s wonderful semi-biography about the saint.

October 4th always brings me to recall the fall of 2002. After slaving away couple of months at a very nasty place (see entry, here), I found much better work, both in pay, quality of coworkers, and the work itself. It was my second job in New York City, based out of a skyscraper just north of the Chrysler Building. The air was crisp, my life was suddenly stress-free, and I was enjoying all the city had to offer.

My lunch hour soon settled into a fairly standard routine. I would attend noon mass at the Church of the Transfiguration a half-dozen blocks away. What a wonderful church! Headed by Fr. George Rutler, who’s a semi-public figure, an Anglican convert who wrote highly acerbic articles for the New York Times and National Review. I enjoyed immensely listening to his sermons. He truly had a superb command of the English language, and an encyclopedic intellect. The daily mass strengthened me and encouraged me in ways that it had never done before.

This went on for several weeks. Then, October 4, for some reason I can’t remember, my lunch had to be short. I went online to see if there was any place closer, and, to my surprise, there was a Church right around the corner in my building block. If I oriented myself properly in the skyscraper I worked in I’d be looking down on its roof. The Church of St. Anne, I believe. So, I went there to catch a quick mass before I’d be needed back at the office.

A complete contrast to Fr. Rutler’s church. More like a meetinghouse for Alcoholics Anonymous. Really old-fashioned pews, and artwork of such beauty on the walls (one of the many reasons I love the Catholic Church). The confessionals were working even as mass was going on. There was an almost tangible spirit of connectedness that I have never felt anywhere else. The sermon was on St. Francis, and the incredible pains he bore for Our Lord, and the sufferings that plagued him until the end of his life, and the priests and deacons were visibly moved. I was touched.

Unfortunately, it leaked out that the bank that I was working in was scheduling a reorganization, and they owned up to the fact that our department would be dissolved over the next weeks and months. Figuring I’d be up against a last-in first-out ultimatum, I made a phone call and took another job, which started about two or three weeks later. So, my remaining time as a New Yorker was spent divvied up between Transfiguration and St. Anne.

And it was time very well spent.