Deliberation? Delightful.

Jury Deliberation starts today...

If liberation means setting people free, then deliberation clearly means locking people in a small room.

Source: Here's Larry David getting out of jury duty on Curb Your Enthusiasm
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Después de la gala...

Voy sin tiempo. Adjunto foto del momento en que la viuda de Kubrick y Jan Harlan subieron al escenario...

A ver si mañana consigo rato, os escribo y contesto los comentarios... madre mía, menuda noche, menudos mosquitos...

(¡Ah!, un poco decepcionante "Reflejos")

My Two Cents

(by Ryan...apparently people are confused about who stresses out about money the most in our family...)

The "Financial Crisis," which is being described as the worst financial dilemma since The Great Depression, has been on my mind - A LOT. Even after stewing over it for a couple weeks, I can hardly discuss it without getting fired up. It is like discussing a recent argument before you have had enough time to really calm down. You know the type, where everything you say only gets you more riled up and angry. So if I storm off before I finish, then please forgive me.

Money brings happiness is the epic lie that is bought and sold by Americans to Americans around the clock (don't worry we are generously sharing it with the rest of the world too). It is a foundation of advertising and is subtlety shown on televisions and movie screens even when commercials are not. It is hawked in the suburbs, on the freeways and at my last high school reunion. Americans have bought the lie so fully that money has become the tool of measurement for how "well off" our fellow Americans are. This isn't even a very good lie. We see examples of its deception all around us, so much so that even reading it we immediately lump ourselves into the category of enlightened souls who don't buy into it. But is that true? Have we really declined the lie? Don't we think that if the house was a little bigger or the car a little nicer or our clothes a little better then we would be happier. Yet each upgrade does nothing to permanantly change our overall satisfaction. We get a momentary buzz and then go on to look for our next fix.

Our greed has made even us uncomfortable. However, rather than quell the greed, we have shifted our paradigm to accommodate our greed by commuting our wants to needs. Americans don't even know the difference between wants and needs anymore. Could I really not survive without cable/dish, another cell phone, another car, a pedicure, a new <fill in the blank>? Really? Would it kill me? And so we change our language to obscure the truth. "I want" becomes, "I deserve." Things that used to be classified as an extra or something we want is now justified because we "deserve" it.

So Americans buy what they cannot afford. When I went to buy a car, most dealers could not understand the concept of negotiating the price of the car. They always wanted to negotiate the monthly payment. "How much do you want to spend a month?" The exasperated salesman would plead. Americans define what they can afford by whether they can make the minimum monthly payment. This might seem reasonable to many, but what usually gets neglected is an accurate calculation of what they really need left over for daily expenses not to even mention what happens when the car breaks down unexpectedly, or some other unintended expense pops up. "Isn't that what credit cards are for?" NO! This is how we end up people making monthly payments on houses and cars and furniture and electronics and credit cards and on and on. "So what?" "Why do you care?" Let's just pretend for a minute like all the foreclosures going on around the country aren't affecting my house price, my job market and my investments. That mentality is wreaking havoc on my government.

We live in a country with a representative democracy which in our case is a great representation of the people behind it. Our government buys WAY more than it can afford. Way way way more. Last year alone we overspent by roughly $330 Billion (a third of a TRILLION dollars). We treat our national budget like our personal budgets, except for unfortunately we feel less burdened by the national debt plus we have avaricious politicians who are all too eager to help us spend our money on ourselves to cinch up their re-election efforts. This only exacerbates the problem causing us to dip even deeper into the hole.

Currently the US National Debt is $10,029,611,831,671 (That's just over 10 TRILLION Dollars). That boils down to $32,901 of debt per PERSON. If your kids have as much as mine do, I am looking at a debt of $230,307 for my household alone. And once you factor in the money we owe for all the programs we have obligated ourselves to but not saved for (i.e. Medicaid, social security, Medicare, etc.) that figure jumps to a little more than a half million Dollars per household. Do you have half a mill' lying around the house somewhere? "So what?" "Why do you care?" Well -

Question: Do you know what number is even bigger than the amount the government overspent last year?

Answer: The number of Dollars we paid towards INTEREST on the national debt.

Our debt makes it increasingly difficult to balance the budget from year to year. Sound familiar? So if we owed less ... we could spend more on those things we "deserve" like health care, poverty, job creation, etc. Heck we could plunk down more than half of the government's original bailout package without needing to ask China to "spot us" $700 Billion till next payday. Our Dollar wouldn't be falling through the floor. Heck ... maybe we could keep more of our hard earned money in our own pocket.

We are such a nation of overspenders that the Holy Grail of government finance is to balance the budget (that's only the yearly budget). Let's forget that no one (except for Bill Clinton during the high times of the 90's) has managed to do that for decades. But we don't even bring up (except for "crazy" Ross Perot in the '80s) the idea of paying off the national debt. We can't even stop the bleeding from year to year.

Our government is so ridiculous that while we are trying to figure out how to revive our economy, the senate couldn't help but tack on an EXTRA $100 Billion of pork (i.e. $100B of the spending has NOTHING to do with the bailout). Seriously? We are facing the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression and we can't keep from adding on spending amendments to the bailout package. Incredible.

In the presidential debates, you would have thought that Jim Lehrer was trying to pull teeth when trying to get the candidates to explain what parts of their budgets they were going to cut in order to account for the huge price tag of the bailout. Both candidates couldn't identify anything concrete the first time around. Then on the second pass one of the candidates had the audacity to hope that I wanted to hear what spending he wasn't going to cut AND then added that he would not abandon plans to expand the budget to include a health care plan for every American that no one on either side of the isle is very clear on how we will pay for it.

I am obviously beside myself with indignation over the American people's spending habits. I realize that you might not be able to cough up your half million right now, but we can be a little more reasonable in our personal spending as well as the type of spending that will earn our vote for our city council person, our senator and our president. If we don't make some serious changes to our own habits, then maybe, just maybe we can create a financial crisis that will finally beat the Great Depression once and for all.

The Mom Who Cried Wolf

Here's your scenario:

You're 40 minutes from Co-op Preschool starting AT YOUR HOUSE. You are all ready, except the house needs to be cleaned. Big kids are off to school and little kids are dressed.



Oh wait, big kids aren't off to school. Gabe has just shown up at your door, bawling, with two stranger-moms, who found him after his big bike accident. (Apparently, it's not a good idea to have your lunch bag swinging from your front handle bars, as it can get wedged between the tire and the bike and cause your tire to completely stop and throw you over the front of the bike). He is bleeding from a big scrape on his chin and seems to be in a lot of pain. You thank the nice moms who walked him home and carried his bike and you bring him inside.



You give him Tylenol and clean the cut and hug him and then you tell him to lay down and try and relax. But he keeps crying. Well, yelling, actually. Gabe howls really annoyingly loud when he's in pain. You, frankly, get kind of annoyed (it's just a chin scrape after all) and tell him to settle down. Besides you have preschool and you'll just see how he feels in 2 hours when it's done.

When you head back upstairs, to your room to do your hair, you watch him (on your bed) continue, 30 minutes after the accident, writhe in pain, holding his jaw and saying he can't open his mouth. It kind of makes you start to cry.

But you pride yourself on not overreacting to illness or accidents--your kids are tough and, after all, you know when they're really in need of medical help. You don't want to be the kind of mom who Cancels Preschool For No Reason And Makes The Doctor Get An X-Ray When There's Nothing Wrong! Right?

So what do you do? Seriously. What would you do?



This is what I did:

I called a Preschool Mom, told her we'd reschedule for Friday morning and asked her, through tears, to call the other moms.

I then called the doctor and they had me come in.



When I get there, the doctor doesn't seem to think anything's wrong (and I start to feel annoyed/stupid that I brought him in when, logically, there couldn't be anything REALLY wrong from a chin scrape), but then she felt something at the point of pain and decides to send him to X-ray.

We went and got the X-ray. Gabe is, of course, at this point, not crying at all but still can't open his mouth. (He swears he's lost a tooth, but when asked to count with his tongue the teeth on the opposing side, he realizes there are the same number of teeth on BOTH sides. Phew.)

We got home and he asks if he can go to school. I say "Um, no, we should wait and find out if your jaw is broken"--which OF COURSE I don't really want, except the little part of me that wants this to be a big medical deal, so I don't feel dumb for the uproar I caused all morning.

They call. The jaw is fine.

Fine. Totally fine.

Now I'm officially Mom Who Cancels Preschool For No Reason And Makes The Doctor Get An X-Ray When There's Nothing Wrong!

Here's Gabe and Chin-in-Question, who really was/is in a lot of pain and can only eat yogurt and soup for dinner, because he really can't open his mouth.

Seriously, I hate this dilemma. How much of a "deal" do you make of injuries, illnesses, owies, complaints? When are you overreacting? When are you neglectful? Ryan's always telling me to take them in, or call someone, when I think they're fine. Which then makes me feel neglectful and selfish, but really I just think I have a lot of experience with doctors, what they can and can't do to help and with my kids and how each one reacts to pain, etc.




So anyway, today I really hurt my reputation as Mom Who Only Reacts To True Medical Emergencies. I'll have to ignore a few ear infections and stitch-needing cuts to bring my average back up.

El sueño

El sueño, el maldito sueño, el puto sueño hace aparición cuando uno menos lo necesita. Me encantaría comentar el Plutón B.R.B. Nero de hoy o subir algún vídeo de Londres o quizá contar cómo ha sido la obra de teatro, pero no puedo... son más de las 3 de la mañana y en unas horas tengo que salir para Barajas rumbo a Sitges...

Nos leemos desde allí.

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Read also: How to make a portfolio website?

The Trial Goes On

Jury Duty Today

Here's the courtroom scene from Woody Allen's Bananas (which I have never seen):