Hurricane Jill

Unwound

(this post was written on New Year’s Day, 2009)

Woohoo! Happy New Year everyone!

2008 wasn’t too bad, overall. Nothing particularly horrible happened, although it was disappointing not to find a PGY-2 spot. I did finally wake up from the nightmare that was the second half of fourth year, and put my life back together. And decided that people can damn well reap what they sow, and I have every right to be pissed off that my career would so easily be derailed over the supposed interest–nowhere in evidence from my perspective–of someone who’s notoriously a player when it comes to relationships.

It still makes me angry when I really think about it. But sometime early in 2008 that constant, visceral fury I’d felt for most of 2007 dissipated. I wonder now if anyone had any idea that it was there. I express more anger now, mostly because I know it will blow over and be gone. But back then I was concerned that if I let go of it, my anger would far exceed the provocation.

Yeah, so I entered internship with the kind of visceral anger it takes most interns the whole year to build up to. And as the year went on, I actually grew happier rather than more beaten down. You can see it in my blog entries. Toward the latter half of the year, they become markedly more humorous and irreverent, and less tightly wound and defensive.

Cheapskate rationalizes an iPhone

Well, I’ve prepared all I can for tomorrow. The scramble packet has been assembled and scanned into a file that I can either fax or email. I have three phones–two for outgoing calls and one for incoming calls. Two internet fax numbers–one outgoing, one incoming, and I’ve uploaded all the documents I might possibly need to send out into their autofax function. And one faculty member who’s offered to speak to PDs on my behalf, and whom I can reach tomorrow.

I can’t think of anything more to do. Ugh! All that money I spent on interviews…to have it come to nothing is just crushing.

But I have managed to find somewhat of a silver lining in all of this. Thin and fragile as it is. I’ve been looking for an excuse to upgrade to an iPhone since the 3Gs came out last June, and this whole scramble business has provided an excellent one: I needed two more temporary phone lines. So I bought a Go Phone for super cheap, that I’ll cancel as soon as I’m done, and upgraded my regular account to a family plan for $10 extra dollars a month to get a second line on it, used my old phone for the new line, and moved my real number onto the iPhone. All told, it’ll cost me $80/month. Which is still cheaper than most people are paying for a single line iPhone account. And since I don’t have a land line, that’s still a pretty reasonable amount to pay for phone service.

Yay me. But it goes without saying that I’d gladly trade the iPhone to be matched right now.

Please please please let something come through for me tomorrow.

House of cards, chapter 3

The thing speaks for itself.

House of cards, chapter 2

The Bank of England has written a fairly lucid and accessible explanation of the current global banking crisis. It’s worth noting that, while leverage ratios did increase worldwide, the largest increase was at U.S. banks, which may have been serving as a worldwide safety net in prior downturns. Also noteworthy is the fact that home equity lending represented nearly 50% of losses at U.S. banks, compared to 10% plus or minus 4% at UK and European banks.

House of cards

People have been speculating how low the Dow Jones Index will go. The University of Google served up this handy chart, showing its historical value all the way back to 1900 (click on the chart to enlarge it so it’s actually readable).

Note the logarithmic scale. Contraction seems to be logarithmic, just as expansion is an exponential function. But that’s neither here nor there. The question is, when will it stop. And here’s my prediction:

5500.

I didn’t just pull that number out of thin air. I picked it because that’s where the Dow was in 1996, before the housing bubble started ballooning. At that point, it was just called a housing “boom” because construction was up and everyone considered it a legitimate effect of the general economic prosperity of the time.

But I bought a condo in 2000, and by that point there were already lots of crazy loan programs out there, ready to sign you onto a sketchy ARM loan you could only afford if the interest stayed ridiculously low, with a separate loan for the down-payment you also hadn’t saved enough for. People were nervous even then about the prospect of buying too late in the “bubble” and getting caught with their financial pants down when they tried to sell.

As for me, I went with the slightly less sketchy option of purchasing a foreclosed home directly from the bank, and using my conventional loan preapproval from my own bank to negotiate a better rate with no down-payment in exchange for taking out a conventional loan from the bank that owned the property instead. I sold it two years later for 150% of what I had paid. I was moving to Seattle and didn’t think I’d ever be living in Houston again.

Little did I know. Man, it would have been nice to still have that place post-Katrina.

Anyway, my point is that I think the Dow will fall all the way to its pre-housing-bubble value before it recovers. Granted, mine is a very unsophisticated analysis. But the housing collapse is what’s driving this turndown, and I think it’ll keep going until the house of cards is entirely flat.

Stranger than fiction

I’ve seen this on a few blogs, and decided to post it here because:
a) I’m a lemming
b) I have 18 more days to kill, and
c) It’s funny.

How To Make Guys Like You

Also, it reminded me of conversation I had several times with my mom, back in high school.

Mom: Pay attention to those nerdy boys. You may not like them now, but someday they’ll be the ones you want to marry.

Me: {eye roll} Maybe so, but they also won’t be so socially retarded by that point. Right now, however…(so heartless)

Mom: Yes, but if you latch on to one now, he’ll be rich someday, and totally devoted to you because you paid attention to him when no one else would.

Me: No, that just means that when he divorces me to marry the hot young trophy wife, I’ll be rich. (heartless AND cynical)

Mom: There are worse things in life than being rich and single. (FTW)

I confess, though, what I was really thinking was “who said I don’t like the nerdy boys?” But that’s no way to pick a fight with your mom.