For the love of money...

I've always had an uneasy relationship with capitalism. I actually don't understand the love of money at all.

Sometimes I wonder if it was an irregularity of my brain that I was born with or if it was learned at an early age, because I always got the impression that while my father loved me, he loved money more. My parents divorced when I was only two years old, and I would see my father on occasional visits. When I visited, he was always working long hours at his job, bragging about how much money he was making; I would wonder why he didn't cut back on work or even take a vacation while I was around. I vowed that I wouldn't be like him when I grew up.

Anyway, I actually have a hard time understanding money on a deep level. I understand that there are wants and needs in my life that I can acquire with money, but still have a hard time seeing the need for acquisition and saving of money. I have to remind myself when looking for work that I need to consider how much money a job will make in addition to whether the job will be pleasant; in fact, sometimes it's more important, I guess.

I do have a hard time understanding why the needs in particular are not something one acquires whether one has money or not. It seems deeply wrong to me that we withhold food and medical care from people who don't have money, and I tend to distrust people who are okay with this. I'm not okay with it at all.

I wanted to tell a bit of a personal story, though; it's sort of a story about how all of this broke me.

Years ago, I was out of work and searching. I wasn't really worried, because I've always managed to find work, and, of course, I don't worry about money. However, I was married with two kids, and I recognized there was a need. I had good marketable skills; I had a lot of IT experience, and I'd been working for about a decade as a database programmer. I knew there was a good job out there somewhere.

A friend from church told me there was an opening at his company for a database programmer. It was quite a distance away, but he was sure the pay was good, so I went and interviewed. The interview was full of red flags. When I had studied database administration at Oracle years before, I had an instructor who gave us some advice. He said, "If you ever get an interview for a job, and they can't fully articulate what they want, don't take the job. It's going to go poorly, and it's going to be a waste of your time and their money." In the interview, I kept asking for specifics, and they kept giving me vagueness. "Well, we're sort of... We're thinking along the lines of... We know we're going to need a database for part of what we're doing."

I said I'd consider it, and went home. They seemed very interested in me, and kept sending me emails asking if I was interested, and what salary I wanted. So there were two problems: One, I didn't think this was a goid idea, both because of the vagueness, and the commute (it would be about an hour via train). Two, they kept asking me to name a salary, but I had always been told to never be the first one to talk about salary, because they would work down from your number.

So finally, I made a decision. I'd ask for more than I thought they would give me, and when they refused, I'd turn the job down. So I told them I wouldn't do the job for less than $70k. They offered me $73.5k. It was nearly twice what I'd ever made on a job before. I felt like I couldn't turn down the offer, so I agreed.

I showed up for work not knowing why I was there, and I told everyone who was supervising me, and many of my coworkers. Surely someone would tell me what I was there for. The first few days nothing much happened, which wasn't highly irregular. I figured it would take time. I got to know my coworkers, sat in on some meetings, took tours around the buildings. (It was actually an interesting place to work, as they were a contractor that mainly designed amusement park rides, including for Disneyland. There are rides currently at Disneyland that I saw visualized on computer screens before they existed.) I was told someone would get together with me and talk to me about my role in the larger project. Any day now.

And days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. I spent a lot of time blogging (late 2008) and going to lunch in restaurants that I could suddenly easily afford. Nobody ever came to tell me why I was there. I idly wrote some code, and looked at databases which were already in use, not really knowing why. Every day was eight hours of "work" with a one-hour break in the middle, and two hours of commute, leaving very little time for my family. I felt like I had become my father.

Finally, one day I came into work, and I couldn't log into the system. I went to IT, but nobody could help me, or even explain what was wrong. I did literally nothing that day. The next day, my boss called me into his office and explained that they didn't need me anymore. They gave me a good chunk of severance pay and kicked me out. The train that would take me back home would arrive at the station around 5:00. So I waited and reflected on the months that I had just wasted of my life.

I had earned a good sum of money doing nothing. Isn't that the dream? Isn't that what you strive for in a capitalistic society? For a time there, wasn't I a success story? It didn't feel that way at all.

I found in the days and months that followed, that this had broken me. If this was success, I wanted no part of it. Like most people, I was afraid of failure, but now, in addition, I was afraid of success. I didn't look for another job. I fell into a deep depression that worsened as the days went by. A year later, my wife had left me, and I was homeless. I eventually went back to live with my mother for a handful of years before I recovered, but I think there's a part of me that will never recover, even though now, years later, I'm back with my family and working full-time. (Although I'm not working with databases anymore, despite feeling back then that it was my calling.)

I don't know if there's a lesson in this, besides to be careful about accepting a job just because it pays well. I still don't like money, although I have to live with it. 1 Timothy 6:10 says, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." I believe this deeply. I believe that so very much of the evil that is done in the world today is being perpetuated by men who love money more than anything. We live in a system that rewards this pathological greed, and many people look up to the billionaires, despite the fact that they are the cause the problems of our society, and not the immigrants or the LGBTQ community.

Do you love money more than you love people? I think a lot of people do, and it makes me angry and sad and sick all at the same time. It's just pieces of paper.

The Violent Femmes

Feminism can be a tough issue, especially for a fundamentalist Christian. I've noticed that among my kind, feminism can be a dirty word, but it doesn't have to be. Strictly speaking, feminism is simply the belief that women are equal to men in value, and I would hope that's not something that many people in my church would dispute, at least when put that simply.

In the world at large, it's a lot harder for me to say how people view the relative value of women vs. men. This particular presidential election cycle has given us a lot of food for thought in this arena. Hillary Clinton came so close to being the Democratic candidate that I'd hope people wouldn't label her eventual failure as the result of sexism, although of course they have and will continue to do so. Sarah Palin, of course, has become the Republican vice-presidential candidate, thus resulting in an unprecedented amount of talk of "glass ceilings" by conservatives. In my mind, whether or not we get a woman President anytime soon, we've shown it's possible in theory. But I know so many people will question whether "in theory" can really measure up to "in practice". Since women have had the vote for so long here in the U.S., why haven't we seen a woman President yet?

There's a weird sort of sexism that exists in our society which is not often obvious, mostly because it's so ingrained in us. Men, far more often than women, are characterized by being strong and ambitious. A woman who exhibits those tendencies is often viewed as "bitchy", which is a nasty word that ironically implies that a woman is acting like a man. I don't say that humorously, but seriously. Even in the liberal town where I went to college, I remember having a boss that people labeled as a bitch behind her back; I would point out to these labelers that a man acting the way she did would probably be promoted out of her position.

This sort of verbal sexism, while fairly well-known, is actually symptomatic of bigger issues that lie under the surface. With Clinton losing the nomination to Obama, there's been some dialogue concerning sexism vs. racism. There's a funny (peculiar, definitely not "ha-ha" funny) difference between these issues. There are a lot of people worried that the first black President is likely to be assassinated by racists. Does anyone think that the first female President will be assassinated by chauvinists? I've never heard it suggested, and I think there's a reason why. Sexism, despite any supposed similarity to racism, works in a very different manner. Racists tend to look down on people of the hated race and say, "They're inferior, we must be protected from them," while chauvinists seem to say, "Women are inferior, we must protect them from us."

I recall many years ago, there was a "For Better or for Worse" comic strip in which the character Liz had discovered her boyfriend had been cheating on her, and in her outrage, she started punching him. A few people were apparently outraged by this, but of course, the outrage was only a fraction of what it would have been had the genders been reversed. Imagine Liz's brother Mike discovering his girlfriend/wife had been cheating on him, and punching her. I don't know if my emotional responses are typical of society as a whole, but the latter scenario almost brings feelings of nausea, while the former at the time hardly caused me to blink. But violence of any kind should bother us, shouldn't it?

It's a weird thing that I was thinking as I was pondering writing this. Back when Governor Schwarzenegger was running for office, a number of his interviews that showed him in a less-than-flattering light were publicized. Among them was one in which he talked about how much fun he had making Terminator 3:

"I saw this toilet bowl. How many times do you get away with this, to take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl? I wanted to have something floating there ... The thing is, you can do it, because in the end, I didn't do it to a woman, she's a machine! We could get away with it without being crucified by who-knows-what group."

This was appalling to me, and I imagine to many others, but after making two movies (Terminator movies, that is; he's made far more than two overall) in which he beat the crap out of male adversaries, wasn't beating the crap out of a teenage girl in some sense a very "feminist" thing to do?

How bizarre to think that violence against women could be a positive thing, helping to modernize our culture! It's not such a crazy idea, either, as Anna Quindlen, the very feminist columnist herself, wrote a column near the beginning of the war in which she insisted that if this war meant reinstating the draft, then women should also be drafted. Quindlen's probably twenty years older than me, yet she manages to make me feel awfully old, or at least old-fashioned. Something about this seems dreadfully right somehow. Why is it that I can accept the idea of a woman being the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, yet I quail at the idea of women serving in the armed forces? Clearly, while I claim to accept women as equals, there's a part of me that can't quite do it.

I think the problem of women in the workplace not being recognized goes back to this, too. I've worked in a lot of offices with a lot of men and women, and I think it pervades the culture in a way that is hard to overcome. It's not just a matter of the men in charge not accepting the competency of women, but I think on some level, a lot of women are either aware of this tendency in their male superiors or don't accept competency in themselves. Possibly both. Over the years, working in various office environments, I've noticed that the lower levels of the org chart are overwhelmingly filled with female employees. Not being managerial material myself, most of my coworkers seem to be women, but it's the exceptions that are interesting. It's seemed to me that the tendency of men is to say, "This job sucks!" and so either push for a promotion to a cushier job or quit. On the other hand, women seem to say "This job sucks!" and then just sit in their chair and keep doing it year after year. Either women don't think they're worth more, figure that their true worth doesn't matter in the face of perceived worth, or perhaps stagnate due to an innate craving for stability.

After all, there's something about striving for advancement that implies risk-taking activity. A friend of mine told me (and I think he's right, although I don't have any data to back it up) that most people only make truly big career advancements when they change jobs, not when they get promoted within the same organizational structure. It does seem to be true that women have a stronger need for stability than men do. That being true, perhaps it really does take balls to make risky decisions. Without risk, one can't succeed in a big way, but on the other hand, one also can't fail in a big way. I wonder, people often talk about how men make up a large percent of top executives in America, but what portion do they comprise among the unemployed?

We men tend to be irrational, impulsive, and yes, violent. And we run the world. Is it any wonder things are in such turmoil?

If a train leaves Los Angeles at 12:25...

I had to take a train to go to a job interview. It was just far enough away that taking the train made more sense than driving my own car. It might have actually cost a little less in fuel costs than the ticket ended up being, but who wants to deal with L.A. traffic? So train it was, and the interview went reasonably well. I just might get the job, actually.

The thing that turned out to be the real problem with the day was the return trip. The station nearest to where I interviewed is one of those stations where the train doesn't stop every time. I had to get up at five to drive to the station and catch the right train, which is not that big of a deal, but interviews take all of...well I couldn't imagine one going longer than two hours, tops. So about an hour there, about an hour with time in transit from the train to the office and waiting for my interviewer to get out of a meeting, then an hour and a half of interview and tour of the facility. It's about 10:30, and the next time a train stops at the local station is 3:30. I briefly bemoaned not checking the train schedule more carefully, but it was a tad less than four hours, and I was bound to have lunch anyway, so no big deal, right?

So, I get a ride to the central station, which should actually have trains stopping, but I'm faced with a choice. It turns out there's a train leaving the station at 12:25 heading my way, but it's not going all the way to my station. I can take this train and wait for a train about two hours later that will take me all the way, or I can take that later train from my present location.

Once again, this should be no big deal. It's really a matter of deciding which station I'd like to sit at for two hours. Of course, not being a regular train rider, I have no idea what the other stations are like. I’m thinking about lunch, as I said, and there are a couple of snack bar/hotdog stand-type places where I am, but I wonder, could there be something better at the next station? I decide to stay and have a hotdog, which wasn't bad, although perhaps a bit pricey, and I ended up spending all my cash. I went to the platform and waited.

Soon, I started to wonder if I'd made the wrong choice. I don't know if you've ever been in a big city and spent time hanging around the train station or bus depot, but you wonder (okay, I wonder, I can't speak for you) whether one of the big problems that people have with public transportation is the sort of people who hang out at train stations and bus depots. I suppose like everywhere else, the majority of the people there are fairly "normal" as fine as one can expect of your average citizen, but then...

Well, I'm sitting there, and this guy comes up and strikes up a conversation. No need for fine details, but the guy turns out to be this homeless ex-convict who just got kicked out of his rehab home, and is on his way to another one. Actually, as homeless guys go, he seemed to be set up pretty well: he had a big duffel bag full of clothing which seemed to be clean, and much of it new; he had some food and some books; he had some money and a ticket for the train; and he had spent the previous night in a hotel.

Still, he was obviously not in great shape. Rehab seemed to have done him good, as he was adamant that he wanted to stay away from drugs (although he wouldn't mind a beer or two) and out of jail, but still, drugs are tough on you, and after all, while it didn't seem likely that he was going to end up sleeping on a bus stop bench that night, he was still homeless. Already feeling wiped out from the day, I just felt eaten up inside for this guy who's unloading his problems on me, and I had nothing I could really do to help him. I kept thinking to myself I'd have rather taken the earlier train and not had to deal with this.

I realized something, though. If I'd taken the other train, I might have found myself sitting at a train station without even a hotdog stand, and nowhere to go to get any lunch at all. If that had happened, then surely this story would have been quite different, and no doubt I wouldn't have had the imagination to think that surely if I'd waited, I'd have ended up sitting for over an hour with some stranger telling me about his triumphs and troubles with Narc-Anon. I'd just be sitting there fuming at myself that I'd made a very poor choice, and surely if I'd stayed put, I'd have had a fine time waiting for the later train. Of course, I'd be wrong.

I’d have rather skipped lunch and not had to deal with somebody else's problems, but realizing now my situation and lack of imagination, it's entirely possible that even at a stop farther down the line I might have run into some much more unpleasant fellow, or found that the station had no shade to sit in, or by some random chance, I'd have run into some vengeful ex-girlfriend or the earlier train could have crashed. Who knows?.

I find it fascinating how human nature leads us to notice coincidence, and attribute it to "luck" or even sometimes "miracles". There's been a lot written on the fact that when a psychic makes twenty predictions, and one of them comes true, people say "Wow!" in response to that one, but forget the nineteen failures. Yes, I've heard a lot about this phenomenon, but not so much on its flipside: the noting of pessimistic coincidence.

The fact is, no matter which train I had chosen, I would likely have complained of whatever results I got, claiming that surely, I had made the worst choice possible. If I'd driven, I would have spent hours stuck in traffic, beating myself up for being so foolish as to not take the train. If I had decided not to bother interviewing for the job since it was so far away, I'd have wondered if I had been extremely foolish to not even try and see what my chances were.

Pessimism is easy, and I fall into it a lot. I don't know what the cure for it is, but I do know one thing. As I sat on the train writing this, heading to my home where I would spend the evening with a wife and kids who love me, I realize that somewhere along the line, I could have easily made some series of decisions that had led to me being a homeless ex-con drug addict standing on a train platform and telling my troubles to some stranger.

Microsoft magic!

I don't believe I mentioned it here, but I recently got a new job doing IT support in an office. This week, the main IT guy is on vacation, so I'm on my own for the first time, and today I got my first support call.

"Hey, can you come figure out why such-and-such program isn't launching for me?" co-worker says to me, so I go to her desk. I fiddle about for a minute, checking out whether her connection is working. Finding nothing useful, suddenly the lightbulb comes on over my head. Aha! The old classic!

"Why don't you turn off your computer and reboot, and see if that solves the problem?"

It worked.

Awakening the sleeping dad

After complaining about my own lack of consistent posting in my other blog, I've now gone over a week without posting at either of my blogs. It's not like I have a big enough audience of regular readers that I really need to explain myself, but I guess I personally feel the need. Plus, it gives me a chance to vent and complain, which we all really enjoy don't we? Or is it just me? (I noticed a few years back that I am actually entertained by the rants of people who seem to complain all the time. Whether it's an unexplainable personality quirk of mine or whether hearing other people's complaints makes me feel better about my own life, I don't know. I've always said that that's why I enjoy listening to The Smiths, who, for those of you not familiar, here's the lyrics of one of their biggest hits. I pop in an old tape, and the more pathetic Morrissey gets, the more cheerful I get. Go figure.)

Anyway, the thing that's getting me down is just life in general. As I'm sure I must have mentioned, I'm working two jobs right now, and it's wearing me out. I like a good solid eight hours of sleep, but tend to get four most nights these days. It's not fun making just enough money to get by while you don't get sufficient sleep or time together with your family. The way it's affecting my blogs is that I don't seem to have the mental energy to think coherently enough to write in a manner that feels proper to me. I actually have several unfinished posts stored up in this blog, and one in the other, but when I go to write on them, it doesn't sound right. For now, writing a little post of personal complaint, I feel more accepting of sloppiness, but the post I was working on this Monday seemed like an important one, and pretty much every post on my other blog is one I consider important. (And anyway, Exodus 21 is a really tough chapter to comment on!) The random gibberish that I type in a half-sleeping haze just doesn't seem sufficient for some topics.

Perhaps the worst of it for me personally was Tuesday. Blogs aside, which in the grand scheme of things are of course nothing, I got up before the sun, and came home after dark, never seeing my family at all. That sucks. I remember the one thing I worried about when I got a second job was that I'd turn out to be like my father.

Time for personal disclosure here. When I was two, my parents divorced, and so I really have virtually no memories of my parents together. (I do have a few, which surprises me, as I don't know that many people remember being two years old.) Most of my early childhood was spent with my mom, with something like twice-yearly visits to my dad's house. My dad at that time worked as a nurse, pulling the graveyard shift at the hospital. He always told me that doing graveyard was a great opportunity, because he was able to pull down lots of hours, since nobody wanted the shifts. However, on those twice yearly visits, he didn't often take time from work, and I would sit and watch television while he slept off the night shift. I wanted desperately to spend time with my dad, and grew to dispise his work and his dedication to it. Oddly enough, as an adult, I get a feeling of comfort rather than unease that most others feel when visiting the hospital; somehow I associate it with something warm and parental.

When I was discussing with my wife whether or not to get a second job, it was something I mentioned to her: the fact that my dad was someone who, from my point of view, seemed to sleep through my childhood. I didn't want to be that for my children. I wanted to be someone who would hear "Yay! Daddy's home!" rather than "Shhh! Daddy's home." and have my children wonder who I was beyond a snoring lump in the master bedroom.

The thing is, this is the sort of thing that I hope people only do because they have to, while I suspect my father did it because somewhere inside, he valued money more than relationships. This is the part where I start to feel sad about other people's problems rather than enjoying hearing complaints, because the people with the real problems in life hardly ever seem to be the ones complaining; they're too busy working to dig themselves out of their problems. I can complain, but in the end, this is only a temporary thing. My wife will be going back to work soon part time, as my childen are now old enough to start preschool. I'll drop my second job, and get some training to start a new career that will bring me more income. I've got a Bachelor's degree, and am looking to get a Master's in the future, and I have a lot of opportunity for upward mobility, even though my present situation is far from ideal. I'm not looking to own a big house and a fancy sports car, only to live my life with my family with some savings in the bank for emergencies and knowing that I will be able to send my children to college some day if they choose to go there (which I hope they will). I really think that I'll get there some day, maybe even within the next year or so. I also realize that there are many, many people who are not only not there, but will never get there.

There are people out there with families to support that they have to work two full-time jobs at minimum wage in order to do so, and their children must hardly know them. They sacrifice having the sort of personal relationship that (I hope) we all want to have with our children, not for a brighter future, but so that they don't starve. Sometimes it seems like one of the biggest injustices in life: that there are people who are trying hard to make life and families work, and are contributing to society in an irreplaceable manner no doubt, but never quite make things work out for themselves. Call me an anti-capitalist, but I have a hard time stomaching people who make millions of dollars who are doing it only for the purpose of making tons of money while there are others making next to nothing who only want to feed their children and put a roof over their heads.

So, depressed over my blog, depressed over my own problems, depressed over other people's problems, and even depressed over other people's successes, I take a moment out to complain. I hope I have entertained.