ARTIST: The Commodores
TITLE: Nightshift
Marvin, he was a friend of mine
And he could sing a song
His heart in every line
Marvin sang of the joy and pain
He opened up our minds
And I still can hear him say
Aw, talk to me so you can see
What's going on
Say you will sing your songs
Forevermore, evermore
{Refrain}
Gonna be some sweet sounds coming down
On the nightshift
I bet you're singing proud
Oh, I bet you'll pull a crowd
Gonna be a long night, it's gonna be all right
On the nightshift
Oh you found another home, I know you're not alone
On the nightshift
Jackie, hey what you doing now
It seems like yesterday
When we were working out
Jackie, you set the world on fire
You came and gifted us
Your love it lifted us higher and higher
Keep it up and we'll be there
At your side
Oh say you will sing your songs
Forevermore, evermore
{Refrain}
Gonna miss your sweet voice, that soulful noise
On the nightshift
We all remember you
Ooh, your songs are coming through
At the end of a long day it's gonna be okay
On the nightshift
You found another home, I know you're not alone
On the nightshift
This song was a tribute to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, two musical legends who died in 1984. It was actually the commodores first hit since Lionel Richie left in 1982. Through these lyrics, the audience can tell how the writer and singers truly feel of their late, great, friends. Whoever wrote this did care for both Marvin and Jackie. The reader can tell this in the opening line, "Marvin, you were a friend of mine." It also tells of how the writer is coping with the lost. "At the end of a longer day it's gonna be okay...You found another home, I know you're not alone..." It truly is a great and peaceful song.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Obama's Financial Regulation
The New Yorker
Ratings Downgrade
by James Surowiecki
September 28, 2009 Text Size:
When Barack Obama went to Wall Street last week to make the case for meaningful financial regulation, he took well-deserved shots at some of the villains of the financial crisis: greedy bankers, reckless investors, and captive regulators. But to that list he could have added credit-rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. By giving dubious mortgage-backed securities top ratings, and by dramatically underestimating the risk of default and foreclosure, the agencies played a key role in inflating the housing bubble. If we’re going to reform the system, fixing them should be high on the list.
Unfortunately, that’s not an easy task, since over the years the government has made the agencies an increasingly important part of the financial system. Rating agencies have been around for a century, and their ratings have been used by regulators since the thirties. But in the seventies the S.E.C. dubbed the three biggest agencies—S. & P., Moody’s, and Fitch—Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, effectively making them official arbiters of financial soundness. The decision had a certain logic: it was supposed to make it easier for investors to know that the money in their pension or money-market funds was going into safe and secure investments. But the new regulations also turned the agencies from opinion-givers into indispensable gatekeepers. If you want to sell a corporate bond, or package a bunch of mortgages together into a security, you pretty much need a rating from one of the agencies. And though the agencies are private companies, their opinions can effectively have the force of law. The ratings often dictate what institutions like banks, insurance companies, and money-market funds can and can’t do: money-market funds can’t have more than five per cent of their assets in low-rated commercial paper, there are limits on the percentage of non-investment-grade assets that banks can own, and so on.
The conventional explanation of what’s wrong with the rating agencies focusses on the fact that most of them are paid by the very people whose financial products they rate. That problem needs to be fixed, and last week the S.E.C. proposed new rules to address conflicts of interest. But there’s a much bigger problem, which is that, even though nearly everyone knows that the agencies are compromised and exert too much influence, the system makes it impossible not to rely on them. In theory, of course, the mere fact that a rating agency says a particular bond is AAA (close to risk-free) doesn’t mean that investors have to buy it; the agencies’ opinions should be just one ingredient in any decision. In practice, the government’s seal of approval, coupled with those regulatory requirements, encourages investors to put far too much weight on the ratings. According to a recent paper on the subject by the academics Darren Kisgen and Philip Strahan, that’s true even when the agency doing the rating doesn’t have a long track record. During the housing bubble, investors put a huge amount of money into AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities—which would have been fine had the rating agencies’ judgments been sound. Needless to say, they weren’t. Despite subprime borrowers’ notoriously shaky finances, the agencies failed to allow for the possibility that housing prices might fall sharply.
I believe that President Obama is correct in saying that if we want to have a reformation, bringing down the big guys (the big businesses) would be the best way to start. I also believe that this guy saying that the credit-rating agencies are part of the reason why reforming will be hard. They control who which businesses will succeed and which businesses will fail. People will listen to them and that is because we and the government gave them too much power. In order to reform, we must start there.
Ratings Downgrade
by James Surowiecki
September 28, 2009 Text Size:
When Barack Obama went to Wall Street last week to make the case for meaningful financial regulation, he took well-deserved shots at some of the villains of the financial crisis: greedy bankers, reckless investors, and captive regulators. But to that list he could have added credit-rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. By giving dubious mortgage-backed securities top ratings, and by dramatically underestimating the risk of default and foreclosure, the agencies played a key role in inflating the housing bubble. If we’re going to reform the system, fixing them should be high on the list.
Unfortunately, that’s not an easy task, since over the years the government has made the agencies an increasingly important part of the financial system. Rating agencies have been around for a century, and their ratings have been used by regulators since the thirties. But in the seventies the S.E.C. dubbed the three biggest agencies—S. & P., Moody’s, and Fitch—Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, effectively making them official arbiters of financial soundness. The decision had a certain logic: it was supposed to make it easier for investors to know that the money in their pension or money-market funds was going into safe and secure investments. But the new regulations also turned the agencies from opinion-givers into indispensable gatekeepers. If you want to sell a corporate bond, or package a bunch of mortgages together into a security, you pretty much need a rating from one of the agencies. And though the agencies are private companies, their opinions can effectively have the force of law. The ratings often dictate what institutions like banks, insurance companies, and money-market funds can and can’t do: money-market funds can’t have more than five per cent of their assets in low-rated commercial paper, there are limits on the percentage of non-investment-grade assets that banks can own, and so on.
The conventional explanation of what’s wrong with the rating agencies focusses on the fact that most of them are paid by the very people whose financial products they rate. That problem needs to be fixed, and last week the S.E.C. proposed new rules to address conflicts of interest. But there’s a much bigger problem, which is that, even though nearly everyone knows that the agencies are compromised and exert too much influence, the system makes it impossible not to rely on them. In theory, of course, the mere fact that a rating agency says a particular bond is AAA (close to risk-free) doesn’t mean that investors have to buy it; the agencies’ opinions should be just one ingredient in any decision. In practice, the government’s seal of approval, coupled with those regulatory requirements, encourages investors to put far too much weight on the ratings. According to a recent paper on the subject by the academics Darren Kisgen and Philip Strahan, that’s true even when the agency doing the rating doesn’t have a long track record. During the housing bubble, investors put a huge amount of money into AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities—which would have been fine had the rating agencies’ judgments been sound. Needless to say, they weren’t. Despite subprime borrowers’ notoriously shaky finances, the agencies failed to allow for the possibility that housing prices might fall sharply.
I believe that President Obama is correct in saying that if we want to have a reformation, bringing down the big guys (the big businesses) would be the best way to start. I also believe that this guy saying that the credit-rating agencies are part of the reason why reforming will be hard. They control who which businesses will succeed and which businesses will fail. People will listen to them and that is because we and the government gave them too much power. In order to reform, we must start there.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
The Story of an Author
At the beginning of June, I received my freshman reader book; that book was A LONG WAY GONE. At first, I did not want to read this book because I am not much of a reader. I do not like to read, but there was just something about the book and the background story that as the month went on, made me want to read it. Ishmael Beah, the author of this memoir, seemed like a very troubled yet interesting man. At least, that is what I felt in the reading. When I finished the book, I was shocked at what goes on in this world and how very few people truly know about it. I just thought to myself that I would like to meet this man. Then my wish came true. On Tuesday, September 15, Ishmael Beah came toe Emens theater at Ball State University. Not only were my eyes opened when I read the book, but they opened even more so when I listened to him talk a little about his life. How he could have grown up in a peaceful village, just to have it destroyed when he was a child. Then to be running from those who destroyed the village, the RUF, the Revolutionary United Front, and lose all those people dear to his heart. And then how he joined the army, becoming a cold-blooded killer, and suddenly, being taken away to become a normal child again. All of this happended over a period of four or five years, and then he was able to be himself again; peaceful, good-hearted, and intelligent.
"After coming out of the war, I had insomnia for many, many years. Just recently, I have been making progress and I can finally sleep four to five hours every night." -Ishmael Beah
Just watching him at the stand inspired me to just think about what may be going on out there in the world, that most of us are protected from. To truly think how many things we take for granted in this world is overwhelming. He has opened my eyes to the real world, and maybe someday, I will be able to do something about harm that is out there towards people and the environment. Hopefully, someday more people will get over their fear and actually bring aid to the other worlds not of their own.
"Only when we find ourselves in these circumstances, do we realize how strong the human spirit really is and how difficult it is to destroy."
-Ishmael Beah
"After coming out of the war, I had insomnia for many, many years. Just recently, I have been making progress and I can finally sleep four to five hours every night." -Ishmael Beah
Just watching him at the stand inspired me to just think about what may be going on out there in the world, that most of us are protected from. To truly think how many things we take for granted in this world is overwhelming. He has opened my eyes to the real world, and maybe someday, I will be able to do something about harm that is out there towards people and the environment. Hopefully, someday more people will get over their fear and actually bring aid to the other worlds not of their own.
"Only when we find ourselves in these circumstances, do we realize how strong the human spirit really is and how difficult it is to destroy."
-Ishmael Beah
Obama On Financial Reform
September 14, 2009
Obama on Financial Reform
The key line in Barack Obama’s speech today on the need for new financial regulation was the straightforward statement “Normalcy cannot lead to complacency.” This is a real danger: as I argued back in April, while it would have been disastrous had the government’s bailout efforts failed, their success was inevitably going to create the risk that “reformist pressure may well dissipate,” as people became less anxious about the survival of the financial system. This, roughly speaking, has been the pattern of financial crises in the U.S. over the past thirty years: big banks get into trouble and people start talking about the need for meaningful reform, then the banks work their way out of trouble (with the help of the Federal Reserve and bank regulators, and sometimes, as in the case of TARP, with the help of state funding), and the reforms never materialize. Obama’s speech, coming as it did a year after the failure of Lehman, was an argument for why that should not happen again. The substance of the speech was not new—the reforms Obama advocated were essentially the same as those Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner unveiled in late March. What was important about it was Obama’s rhetorical commitment not merely to tinkering around the edges of the financial industry, but rather to “the most ambitious overhaul of the financial system since the Great Depression.”
Of course, one speech does not a policy change make, and there are plenty of skeptics out there who are convinced that the possibility of meaningful reform has already vanished. On this reading, Obama waited too long to put his weight behind change, and now that the crisis is no longer in full bloom, the power of the financial lobby and the tendency to quickly forget about disasters will ensure that things are going to continue much the same as they were.
This is certainly possible, and it’s reasonable to wonder why, if Geithner introduced his reform proposals in late March, so little progress has been made on them. But I do think there are a couple of reasons to not give up just yet. First, and most obvious, the push for health-care reform has meant that other issues—even very important ones—got less attention over the summer than they otherwise would have. Perhaps it would have been possible for the Administration to make equal efforts on both the health-care and financial-reform fronts, but it’s plausible that concentrating on first one and then the other made more sense in political terms.
Second, when I spoke to Barney Frank a couple of weeks ago, he seemed certain that Congress was going to pass legislation dealing with the biggest financial-reform issues, including creating a resolution authority (which would allow the government to unwind too-big-to-fail insitutions, much as the FDIC does with ordinary banks today), regulating derivates, creating a systemic-risk regulator, and creating a consumer-protection agency for finance. Now, it may be that Frank was simply trying to put a brave face on the situation, but to me it sounded as if his confidence was genuine.
It’d be a mistake, of course, to underestimate how much power financial lobbyists exert on the Hill, and it’d also be a mistake to think that Wall Street itself is, on the whole, interested in serious reform. But I think there’s also a danger in adopting a completely bleak view of the possibility of reform, because it amplifies the danger that we’ll adopt an attitude of learned helplessness toward Wall Street. The idea of learned helplessness, which was introduced in the late nineteen-sixties by the psychologist Martin Seligman as a result of experiments with dogs, is that when people are subjected to repeated negative events that they have no control over, it’s easy for them to become convinced that they’re permanently helpless, and that there’s no point in trying to change things, because all such efforts are doomed to failure. Certainly Wall Street has subjected the U.S. economy to repeated disasters over the past thirty years, and the fact that we haven’t done anything to change this meaningfully may make it seem that we can’t do anything to change this. But what was doesn’t have to be what will be. The government is not, in fact, helpless. It has the power to restructure the financial industry in useful ways. And the public will to do this is there, too. We need to be realistic about how hard the fight for reform will be. But deciding in advance that we’re doomed to fail is going to make it less, not more, likely that the program Obama advocated today will become reality.
Posted by James Surowiecki: The New Yorker
"But deciding in advance that we're doomed to fail is going to make it less, not more, likely that the program Obama advocated today will become reality," James Surowiecki.
That sentence right there is why the US is in such turmoil. When people have no optimism, and believe that they and everything else is going to fail, it will. President Barack Obama is the executive leader the these United States of America. He was voted into office in order to bring the US out of the situation it is in. But when the American people constantly have disbelief in the President, then the US will have no where to go but down. The American people as a whole need to believe in Obama and that what he is working for is for the good of the country. There is no need to criticize everything that he does. Give him a chance, and change will come.
Obama on Financial Reform
The key line in Barack Obama’s speech today on the need for new financial regulation was the straightforward statement “Normalcy cannot lead to complacency.” This is a real danger: as I argued back in April, while it would have been disastrous had the government’s bailout efforts failed, their success was inevitably going to create the risk that “reformist pressure may well dissipate,” as people became less anxious about the survival of the financial system. This, roughly speaking, has been the pattern of financial crises in the U.S. over the past thirty years: big banks get into trouble and people start talking about the need for meaningful reform, then the banks work their way out of trouble (with the help of the Federal Reserve and bank regulators, and sometimes, as in the case of TARP, with the help of state funding), and the reforms never materialize. Obama’s speech, coming as it did a year after the failure of Lehman, was an argument for why that should not happen again. The substance of the speech was not new—the reforms Obama advocated were essentially the same as those Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner unveiled in late March. What was important about it was Obama’s rhetorical commitment not merely to tinkering around the edges of the financial industry, but rather to “the most ambitious overhaul of the financial system since the Great Depression.”
Of course, one speech does not a policy change make, and there are plenty of skeptics out there who are convinced that the possibility of meaningful reform has already vanished. On this reading, Obama waited too long to put his weight behind change, and now that the crisis is no longer in full bloom, the power of the financial lobby and the tendency to quickly forget about disasters will ensure that things are going to continue much the same as they were.
This is certainly possible, and it’s reasonable to wonder why, if Geithner introduced his reform proposals in late March, so little progress has been made on them. But I do think there are a couple of reasons to not give up just yet. First, and most obvious, the push for health-care reform has meant that other issues—even very important ones—got less attention over the summer than they otherwise would have. Perhaps it would have been possible for the Administration to make equal efforts on both the health-care and financial-reform fronts, but it’s plausible that concentrating on first one and then the other made more sense in political terms.
Second, when I spoke to Barney Frank a couple of weeks ago, he seemed certain that Congress was going to pass legislation dealing with the biggest financial-reform issues, including creating a resolution authority (which would allow the government to unwind too-big-to-fail insitutions, much as the FDIC does with ordinary banks today), regulating derivates, creating a systemic-risk regulator, and creating a consumer-protection agency for finance. Now, it may be that Frank was simply trying to put a brave face on the situation, but to me it sounded as if his confidence was genuine.
It’d be a mistake, of course, to underestimate how much power financial lobbyists exert on the Hill, and it’d also be a mistake to think that Wall Street itself is, on the whole, interested in serious reform. But I think there’s also a danger in adopting a completely bleak view of the possibility of reform, because it amplifies the danger that we’ll adopt an attitude of learned helplessness toward Wall Street. The idea of learned helplessness, which was introduced in the late nineteen-sixties by the psychologist Martin Seligman as a result of experiments with dogs, is that when people are subjected to repeated negative events that they have no control over, it’s easy for them to become convinced that they’re permanently helpless, and that there’s no point in trying to change things, because all such efforts are doomed to failure. Certainly Wall Street has subjected the U.S. economy to repeated disasters over the past thirty years, and the fact that we haven’t done anything to change this meaningfully may make it seem that we can’t do anything to change this. But what was doesn’t have to be what will be. The government is not, in fact, helpless. It has the power to restructure the financial industry in useful ways. And the public will to do this is there, too. We need to be realistic about how hard the fight for reform will be. But deciding in advance that we’re doomed to fail is going to make it less, not more, likely that the program Obama advocated today will become reality.
Posted by James Surowiecki: The New Yorker
"But deciding in advance that we're doomed to fail is going to make it less, not more, likely that the program Obama advocated today will become reality," James Surowiecki.
That sentence right there is why the US is in such turmoil. When people have no optimism, and believe that they and everything else is going to fail, it will. President Barack Obama is the executive leader the these United States of America. He was voted into office in order to bring the US out of the situation it is in. But when the American people constantly have disbelief in the President, then the US will have no where to go but down. The American people as a whole need to believe in Obama and that what he is working for is for the good of the country. There is no need to criticize everything that he does. Give him a chance, and change will come.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Obama's Health Plan
NEWS ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORKER
September 10, 2009
Atul Gawande: The Road Ahead
Before President Obama’s speech on health care, I wrote out a list of what I thought we needed him to do.
1.Make clear the stakes.
2.Make clear what we get under his reform.
3.Understand our fears.
4.Convey strength in the face of them.
5.Speak to our core beliefs as a nation.
I thought he did this and did it amply. He made clear that our present system is damaging our people and damaging our economy. He made clear that if we accepted the challenge and the struggle, we could have better insurance coverage without preëxisting condition exclusions or sudden disappearance of benefits. Those of us who are self-employed or unable to get coverage through work could have the kinds of insurance choices and discounts that big companies and congressmen can get. Those who don’t have the money for this coverage could get tax credits to offset the costs. The elderly would get a better drug-benefit package.
There was nothing here that was watered down or unfamiliar, either. He did not skirt the realities that this would have to be paid for—that government would be requiring many businesses to cover their employees and most individuals to carry insurance coverage, and that he would be using money from ending subsidies to Medicare HMOs to help finance the bill. And he spoke with podium-pounding conviction in response to the absurd charges that this would involve government takeover of our doctor’s offices and to the deeper fears that those charges fed into.
After far too many weeks, he again became the Barack Obama one could rally behind—the cool-headed president willing to face long odds and enemy fire, rather than the coolly calculating professor with the academic’s annoying certitude.
As I said, he checked all the boxes on my list. And yet I remain concerned that he may not have done enough.
The stone faces of his conservative enemies made clear the limits of what words could do. I was struck that for nearly the entirety of his speech, he spoke facing not the camera or the Democrats but the Republican throng. This has become a test of who we will trust. Are we going to trust the Republicans, with their predictions of dark disasters that will result from going along with a President they do not believe should be allowed even to speak to our schoolchildren? Or are we going to trust this still new and untested President enough to give his changes a chance?
Obama has continued to defend policies that would push us, for the first time in history, in the direction of encouraging doctors to make more rational, better coördinated, less costly clinical decisions. This includes experiments with changing the way doctors are paid, a clinician board to identify inappropriate care, and a “fee” (i.e., tax) on extremely high-cost insurance premiums. I was also made hopeful by his willingness to break with Democrats and admit that the medical malpractice system is itself broken and, although not the cause of our cost crisis, a wasteful contributor.
But this is just a start. Our current health-care system presents seemingly insurmountable difficulties. It is too big, too complex, too entrenched, bloated, Byzantine, and slowly bursting. What may be most challenging about reforming it is that it cannot be fixed in one fell swoop of radical surgery. The repair is going to be a process, not a one-time event. The proposals Obama offers, and that Congress is slowly chewing over, would provide a dramatic increase in security for the average American. But they will only begin the journey toward transforming our system to provide safer, better, less wasteful care. We do not yet know with conviction all the steps that will rein in costs while keeping care safe. So, even if these initial reforms pass, we have to be prepared to come back every year or two to take another few hard and fiercely battled steps forward.
In this way, successful reform will have to be more like a series of operations, with x-rays and tests in between to show how we’re doing. Embarking on the effort will be among the most severe challenges we take on as country. Outside the settings of war and economic collapse, we’ve never sustained any policy effort of this scope and duration. It is perfectly possible that our next push will be defeated, or used as an opportunity to dismantle the progress we’ve already made. But I can see no other choice. We can only forge ahead.
.Posted by Atul GawandeInNews Desk
| In the News
This is a good sign of change in our country. Obama will bring change and the health plan is one way he will accomplish this. Although not everyone in this country believes in President Obama, just wait and see, change will come.
September 10, 2009
Atul Gawande: The Road Ahead
Before President Obama’s speech on health care, I wrote out a list of what I thought we needed him to do.
1.Make clear the stakes.
2.Make clear what we get under his reform.
3.Understand our fears.
4.Convey strength in the face of them.
5.Speak to our core beliefs as a nation.
I thought he did this and did it amply. He made clear that our present system is damaging our people and damaging our economy. He made clear that if we accepted the challenge and the struggle, we could have better insurance coverage without preëxisting condition exclusions or sudden disappearance of benefits. Those of us who are self-employed or unable to get coverage through work could have the kinds of insurance choices and discounts that big companies and congressmen can get. Those who don’t have the money for this coverage could get tax credits to offset the costs. The elderly would get a better drug-benefit package.
There was nothing here that was watered down or unfamiliar, either. He did not skirt the realities that this would have to be paid for—that government would be requiring many businesses to cover their employees and most individuals to carry insurance coverage, and that he would be using money from ending subsidies to Medicare HMOs to help finance the bill. And he spoke with podium-pounding conviction in response to the absurd charges that this would involve government takeover of our doctor’s offices and to the deeper fears that those charges fed into.
After far too many weeks, he again became the Barack Obama one could rally behind—the cool-headed president willing to face long odds and enemy fire, rather than the coolly calculating professor with the academic’s annoying certitude.
As I said, he checked all the boxes on my list. And yet I remain concerned that he may not have done enough.
The stone faces of his conservative enemies made clear the limits of what words could do. I was struck that for nearly the entirety of his speech, he spoke facing not the camera or the Democrats but the Republican throng. This has become a test of who we will trust. Are we going to trust the Republicans, with their predictions of dark disasters that will result from going along with a President they do not believe should be allowed even to speak to our schoolchildren? Or are we going to trust this still new and untested President enough to give his changes a chance?
Obama has continued to defend policies that would push us, for the first time in history, in the direction of encouraging doctors to make more rational, better coördinated, less costly clinical decisions. This includes experiments with changing the way doctors are paid, a clinician board to identify inappropriate care, and a “fee” (i.e., tax) on extremely high-cost insurance premiums. I was also made hopeful by his willingness to break with Democrats and admit that the medical malpractice system is itself broken and, although not the cause of our cost crisis, a wasteful contributor.
But this is just a start. Our current health-care system presents seemingly insurmountable difficulties. It is too big, too complex, too entrenched, bloated, Byzantine, and slowly bursting. What may be most challenging about reforming it is that it cannot be fixed in one fell swoop of radical surgery. The repair is going to be a process, not a one-time event. The proposals Obama offers, and that Congress is slowly chewing over, would provide a dramatic increase in security for the average American. But they will only begin the journey toward transforming our system to provide safer, better, less wasteful care. We do not yet know with conviction all the steps that will rein in costs while keeping care safe. So, even if these initial reforms pass, we have to be prepared to come back every year or two to take another few hard and fiercely battled steps forward.
In this way, successful reform will have to be more like a series of operations, with x-rays and tests in between to show how we’re doing. Embarking on the effort will be among the most severe challenges we take on as country. Outside the settings of war and economic collapse, we’ve never sustained any policy effort of this scope and duration. It is perfectly possible that our next push will be defeated, or used as an opportunity to dismantle the progress we’ve already made. But I can see no other choice. We can only forge ahead.
.Posted by Atul GawandeInNews Desk
| In the News
This is a good sign of change in our country. Obama will bring change and the health plan is one way he will accomplish this. Although not everyone in this country believes in President Obama, just wait and see, change will come.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Case of the Mondays
Monday is the worst day of the week. A Monday in any month is the worst; it means that the weekend is officially over and that it is time to start a brand new work week. In this case, work means school and school is never fun, although it is very beneficial to everyone. Just waking up Monday morning, one may think, "Here we go again," or "Here goes another sucky week." And then, once Friday comes around and classes are over, we think, "Thank God." But those two days go by fast and once they are over, "Here we go again." This brings me to my main point, but just for the majority of students who actually have classes on Monday and have to wake up early to go to their eight o'clock class. That is not me. See I have no classes on Monday which means I get a three day weekend every week and when I wake up Monday morning and turn to the clock to see that it says nine thirty, I think to myself, "Ahh looks like it's too early too get up yet." So for all of the people who think that your Monday is bad, just stop and think of me and say, "Damn him."
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Memoir
One night during dinner, I was sitting with my mother and she had just made a delicious roast, one of my more favorite dinners. Somehow, as we began talking, the conversation landed on the topic of my past babysitters. That is when I told her about my first babysitter and how she would lock the few other kids and myself in the basement while she did house work. I did not know at the time that what the babysitter was doing was wrong, but as I told my mom the story, it became clear to me that I should have told her much sooner than I did.
Everyday was the same, waking up around six in the morning and my mom dropping me off at the babysitters house on her way to work. Each morning, the babysitter, Becky, would make her daughter, son, and myself a mayonnaise and bread sandwich. That is it, she would cut the sandwich into four squares and serve us each four squares. We were forced to eat them and to this day I'm not sure if I actually liked the sandwiches or if I just did not want any trouble, so I ate them; but now, I can say that I cannot eat mayonnaise now or I will literally throw up on the spot.
Everyday was the same, waking up around six in the morning and my mom dropping me off at the babysitters house on her way to work. Each morning, the babysitter, Becky, would make her daughter, son, and myself a mayonnaise and bread sandwich. That is it, she would cut the sandwich into four squares and serve us each four squares. We were forced to eat them and to this day I'm not sure if I actually liked the sandwiches or if I just did not want any trouble, so I ate them; but now, I can say that I cannot eat mayonnaise now or I will literally throw up on the spot.
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