Dateline NoCashland: Freecycle Roundup

After several months in NoCashland, I’ve discovered something surprising: it can be fun. I’m well aware that it will be a whole lot less fun when the unemployment runs out in April, and it will be pretty dire if we hit, say, July and there’s still no job happening. But since September 22 I’ve gotten pretty good at living low. The amount of spending I’ve cut down on is substantial; I was never that profligate in the first place (my biggest indulgence was a regular manicure), but I’m still surprised at how not painful it’s turned out to be. I went to a birthday celebration for a friend last week, and she told me how relaxed and happy I looked. (We worked together at another financial services firm whose name loosely rhymes with the phrase “Old Men’s Backs.” Did that conjure up a creepy image? Perfect.)

I attribute my newfound radiance to the fact that the past three months are the first in years in which I have consistently gotten more than five hours of sleep per night. (And even that sleep wasn’t good. While I was at BigAnonymous I once had a dream in which I was in a plane – I’m one of those who gets very anxious when it’s time to fly, and I’ve had nightmares about planes crashing and malfunctioning in every way you can think of – and I looked out the window to see that another plane was on a collision course with us. The other plane’s sides were made of metal mesh, and I could tell even from where we were that it was filled with office supplies. That’s right: I had an anxiety dream about a flying load of office supplies. It should come as no surprise that the comparative relaxation of working at home is glowingly obvious even to a drunk person in a pitch-dark hipster bar.)

One of my favorite NoCashland coping tools is Freecycle. It is awesome. Several times a day I get a digest of messages from people who are giving stuff away. And people are giving away some amazing stuff. Some gross stuff, certainly (note to the people who offer used makeup: throw that shit out. Old eyeliner can give you pinkeye, and half-used lipstick just makes me shudder). But some amazing stuff. In the past couple of weeks alone, I scored an electric sander, which I intend to use to sand down these:

before lacquering them in shiny shiny black lacquer and reupholstering them with this silk brocade:

That’s a crappy picture, but the background is silver and the flowers are very pale pink and very pale blue embroidery. It is beautiful. And I found the chairs on my street, about three blocks down.  My neighbors apparently all have more money than me; frequently their trash is nicer than most things I own. So for a little elbow grease and a sander from Freecycle, I’m going to have some fabulous chairs, just as soon as it gets warm enough for me to spend some time in the alley behind my building.

I also scored a swivelly ergonomic office chair. Remember the Ergonomic Plea? It turns out there is someone upstairs! Her name is Jeannie, she lives in Washington Heights with her husband, and she has totally saved my ass -- not to mention my neck, back, and shoulders.

So I’m a huge Freecycle fan for very practical purposes. But Freecycle has a whole other dimension which I didn’t expect, because if you read it regularly, you can get a pretty interesting insight into what New York (or wherever you are) is up to. Some recent samples:

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OFFER: Swarovski crystal “puchi” dog leash:
http://puchibag.com/lead_swar_ruby_sm.php

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 OFFER: Country Living – Country Lifestyles Collection- Starter Set
 This is the "Starter Set" of a decorating book series offered by Time-Life Books many years ago. Included is a three ring binder, a set of dividers and the first chapter only. The description of the series is as follows: "Combining the best of the old with the finest of the new this book shows how to create the country look in your home by providing practical know-how on how to make printed furniture, handmade quilts, stenciled floors, and preserves in the larder to evoke the comfort of a country home." It's in excellent condition. Also included is a small bag of potpourri, Spiced Apple scent.



These are from the same poster. A poster who paid $179.99 for Swarovski crystals embedded in a retractable leash handle, and who also bought a do-it-yourself kit on how to turn your house into something Laura Ingalls Wilder would have lived in if only her houses hadn’t kept getting nailed by tornadoes and fires and things. This yin-yang pair had me completely confused - until I realized that that’s why only one of the three chapters is offered. Clearly, our intrepid, aspirationally-homespun poster read one chapter of instructions on how to actually, you know, do things yourself and came to her senses (from the email address it’s clear that our poster is a woman), realizing quite rightly that anyone who is going to purchase nearly $200 worth of Swarovski crystals mounted on a plastic mechanism that probably cost nine cents to make and which any sentient person knows will break after about four uses has no business even attempting to find a space in her apartment that might conceivably be referred to as a larder, much less try to make preserves to store in it.

Points for initial item buying: 2.
Points for self-awareness and efficient use of Freecycle: 8.
Average: 5, plus a one-point bonus for the sheer balls it takes to admit you bought a Swarovski-encrusted leash in the first place.

Score: 6

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WANTED: Wall decorations with which to decorate walls!

Okay! Okay!

Hands down my favorite request ever.

Score: 10.


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WANTED: hemp seed/nuts

Posted by: "Betty" (much as it killed me, I have changed this name. Please note, though, that the quotation marks around the name were part of the original post. Points for you, “Betty.” That’ll keep the fuzz off your trail, man.)

I know it's a really long shot, but I need hemp nuts/seed. This is for eating, popular 'superfood' for humans & animals alike. It's not for me, but my ailing pet. It perks her up.

Pickup anywhere there's mass transit.

“Betty” 

Ah yes, the old “that’s not mine, it’s my brother’s roommate’s pet’s.”

Wait -- my pet’s? I’ve got to hand it to you for choosing a mute scapegoat, Betty, cause let me tell you, when my tenth-grade best friend found out I’d blamed her for that stash of blow my parents found in my jewelry box it took a lot more than a scratch behind the ears and a pack of Snausages to keep her clammed up. I take off my nubbly wool hat with the earflaps and those long braid things that look like bell-pulls to you.

Still, you’re probably right that getting your “hemp nuts/seed" is a long shot. What’s maybe not such a long shot? A quick trip to the hoosegow.  But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, "Betty!"

Points for charming if misguided attempts at cloak-and-dagger-style shenanigans, and also for being self-aware enough to know that you should stick to mass transit rather than operating a motor vehicle yourself: 8

Points for creativity in requesting this for your pet, and because that “perks her up” line nearly made me do a spit take on my keyboard: 7

Deduction for stooping so low as to blame your habit on your pet: 3


Average/Total: 4

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Somehow I feel like “Betty” should have scored higher, but I actually had no intention of assigning points in the first place. Ah, well. In the nature of Freecycle, I’m sure I’ll be seeing a post from her again.  And if she writes requesting a file baked in a cake, well, hey!  Surely someone out there has a box of cake mix just lying around unused.

Dimon in the Rough

We interrupt this recent spate of college teaching applications to bring you the following, jaw-dropping testimony from Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase. Dimon was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse four Wall Street CEOs testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission this morning, attempting to explain what the hell they were doing while all the money in the world broke. He said plenty of stuff, but here’s what had me scraping myself off the floor.
“Somehow we just missed that home prices don’t go up forever, and that it’s not sufficient to have stated income…”
That bit starts at 16:06 in this audio file, run this morning on WNYC:

Let’s take this one clause at a time:
“Somehow we missed that home prices don’t go up forever”

Brian Lehrer rightly pounces on this part (listening to his own slackjawedness about JPMC’s failure to stress-test falling housing prices is pretty great), but I’d add this: 

Uh… really, Jamie? There are two reasons I could have told you that:

One: Disclosures

For every single product a financial services firm markets, there is a disclosure that says, in one form or another, “Listen, just because we’re telling you to invest in these products doesn’t mean that at some point they’re not going to drop in value. We make no guarantee that this thing is going to go up forever, because that just doesn’t happen. If you stick it out long enough, over the long haul we’re betting you’ll do okay, but frankly we’re not even allowed to say that much, because honestly? We don’t know that that’s true. No one does. And in the meantime, you could lose your shirt.” At the bottom of every piece of marketing literature I worked on at BigAnonymous was something they called a Bank Box, which looks like this:






This language is required by financial regulators to keep those poor silly Joe Schmo average investors from getting confused by all those super shiny dollar signs they’re chasing into thinking that their investments are guaranteed to go up forever. Financial services marketers aren’t even allowed to put graphics that show an arrow going upward in case the poor investor gets hornswoggled into naively thinking from the arrow alone that up is the only direction the market goes. (At least, in the United States. What firms are and aren’t allowed to put on their marketing literature varies from region to region, country to country, etc. – in Taiwan, for instance, you can’t show a picture of Buddha or you’re considered to be claiming that your investments are buoyed by divine intervention.)

“Look,” says the Bank Box. “What a bunch of ninnies those average investors are! We have to remind them at every turn that the market is not guaranteed, and that things don’t go up forever. After all, they don’t have specialized knowledge of market history or super-magical money powers -- like our expert finance people, who we have to pay exorbitant salaries and bonuses to in order to keep them in our company because they know so much more than we do, clearly have -- and might not remember things like the tech bubble, or the Panic of 1907, or 1987’s Black Monday, or a whole host of other times when the market took a tumble and gave itself a big fat concussion. So we have to protect them from themselves and remind them of the single most basic rule of investing EVERY TIME WE TALK TO THEM. Otherwise who knows what might happen?”

Executive gift suggestion for Jamie Dimon: a plaque engraved with a bank box.


Two: Isaac Newton 

Even if Jamie Dimon had never heard of a bank box, or FINRA, or the crash of ’29, he’s heard of Isaac Newton, right? Any self-respecting 12-year-old who’s heard the story about the apple could tell you that housing prices, like apples, must someday fall.


But the real showstopper is the second phrase:
“...it’s not sufficient to have stated income...” 

A stated income loan is just that: you tell somebody how much you make, and if they think it’s enough, there’s no other proof necessary. In other words, at a certain point in mortgage-backed security feeding frenzy, this is pretty much what it took to get a loan from a lot of places:

Babe in Cashland presents

HEY GIMME: A Very Very Short Play (TM)

Applicant: Hi, can I have $250,000?

Lender: Depends. What do you do, and how much money do you make?

Applicant: I’m a master plumber, I make $65,000 per year.

Lender: (makes note) Well, let me check something. Hang on a sec.

Lender picks up phone.

Accountant: Acme Accounting, can I help you?

Lender: Yeah, I got a guy in my office wants two hundred and fifty grand. Says he’s a master plumber and makes $65,000 a year. Can you check that for me?

Accountant: Sure. What’s the name?

Lender: Why do you need his name?

Accountant: Well, don’t you want to see his income statement so you can verify he really makes that?

Lender: No no no, I don’t care about that. I mean seriously, why would I bother with that? I just wanna know from you, is it possible, in theory, that a master plumber living where this guy lives (or says he lives, since I haven’t verified that either) could possibly make that amount per year. I don’t need to know if this particular guy does, mind you. I just need to know if someone like him could.

Accountant: Sure. But I can also check on this guy specifically, if you want.

Lender: Hah! You’re a card, my friend. And, may I say, what a hardass! But seriously, don’t worry about it. Just the vague idea that someone sort of like this guy could probably bring home the dosh he’s claiming – well, hey, that’s enough for me. I mean come on, what could go wrong?

Accountant stares at phone, shrugs, hangs up.

THE END

(Obviously this is fictionalized -- but barely.)

And apparently Jamie Dimon was shocked, just shocked, to find that this method of lending resulted in some people not actually having the money that they said they did, which resulted in lots and lots of defaults on mortgage payments, which resulted in... well, I don't need to tell you what that resulted in. So here’s what I suggest: let’s all go to Jamie Dimon’s office, right now, and say this:


Cause apparently, the answer is going to be “OKAY!” Excellent! Financial crisis solved. You’re welcome.

Love, The Zombies.

Happy New Year.

(via Wolf and Fox)

614 south 3rd 2r: A Rental Horror Film

Hello there! It's been awhile since I went into hibernation, I know. But it's been a busy sort of hibernation: I've been on the job hunt. For the right job I'll move anywhere, but Philadelphia is at the top of my list. I grew up there, it's close to New York, it's got a ton of universities and colleges, I have friends there... there are a lot of pluses. So I went on Craigslist last night to check out apartments. The below is billed as a "virtual tour" -- but I'm not fooled, and you won't be either:

614 south 3rd 2r: A RENTAL HORROR FILM

0:00 Right off the bat we’re on the express train to Creeptown: cheap hardware store letters – one dented -- slapped unevenly on an unfinished wood door that looks so flimsy you could split it with a cardboard box top. (Check out the hole on the lower left, which looks like it was made by something only slightly sturdier than a pencil tip.)

0:02 Two seconds in and we’re in CHILDREN OF THE CORN territory. Creaky door, wobbly camerawork (clearly amateur -- possibly psychotic!), apparently abandoned messes everywhere. Is that the top of a toilet tank on the sofa?* Also there appears to be an unused fireplace that is full of crap. Wow, do I want to live here.

0:13 More abandoned stuff, including what appears to be the end of breakfast. What happened in this place? Was there some kind of raid and everyone split out the bathroom window? Plus this camera work is making me nauseated. Let’s not mention breakfast again.

0:19 Look quickly or you’ll miss the foreboding shadow of Camera Man. The plot thickens!

0:22 Apparently the ceiling is an extremely important feature of this apartment. I couldn’t agree more, by the way; I for one would never consider moving into an apartment without a ceiling, and I recommend you don’t either. I used to work for a real estate company, so you can take this advice to the bank.

0:26 OMG! The door is squeaking again! Youguysyouguysyouguys, from the way Camera Guy is swinging his camera around I don’t think HE expects anyone either! I think we can best describe this POV as “terrified giraffe.”

0:35 A quick pit stop as we move quickly down the hall in search of a hiding place to point out the washer and dryer. Excellent! Washing all those bloody clothes will be a snap.

0:51 Look, this bedroom ceiling has a light in it! That is awesome. Also, I’m now blind.

1:06 Okay, we all just gave silent thanks that the toilet was empty, right?

1:09 More with the ceiling. Listen, we get it. The apartment has ceilings in every single room. Congrats! But you’re still kind of freaking me out, Camera Man.

1:13 That blue box is a case of baby wipes. There is a baby here. Could it be a killer baby who loves breakfast and ceilings? I can’t tell yet. But I’m worried. Very, very worried. Things are getting creepier by the second.

1:16 AAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!!! IT’S HIM!!! IT’S HIM!!!!!! He totally slipped up and showed himself on camera, and now he has to kill you!!! You know that this is true because of the lovingly shot homage to the shower scene in PSYCHO that follows. I am telling you, prospective tenant: RUN. RUN NOW.

1:24 Whoa, was that a back flip, Camera Man? Oh, prospective tenant, getting away is going to be harder than I thought. In fact, let's face it: you’re dead.

1:28 Especially because the bathroom window leads straight into a concrete wall. Yep, sorry. You’re toast.

1:35 and 1:36 Hear those things that sound like a pile of throwing stars and a baseball bat? What? I’m just asking.

1:38 Okay, hold everything. We are now in the full glory of this video, and I think this screen shot says it all. Please note that I have not digitally altered this in any way, first, because I do not have the software to do so and second, because even if I did I wouldn’t know how to do it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Floating Muppet Heads of Death:

We LOVE it at 614 south 3rd 2r… come join us... join us... join us...

1:40 - 2:04 In a redemptive, practically touching, totally Hollywood moment, the last few moments of this "virtual tour" show the POV of someone walking down a white (well, beige, really, but who quibbles at a time like this?) hall, toward a bright light. Good night, prospective tenant, wherever you are. If I wind up moving to Philadelphia I'm sorry we won't have a chance to meet; you seemed like a nice person.

______

*Apparently not. But in this place, who can tell?

Honestly, Do I Have to Get a Restraining Order?

Hey, BigAnonymous:

STOP SENDING ME STUFF.  You laid me off on September 22, nearly eight weeks ago.  Get over me.

Seriously, you're like that boyfriend who dumps you but then keeps calling "just to say hi."  For God's sake, do us both a favor and move on.  I have a novel to write.

NaNo, Day 6: An Ergonomic Plea

Chair, I’d jump around for joy
If only you were ergie
You know if I were Josh Duhamel
I’d do you like you were Fergie*

Desk, I’m with you all day long
Trying to be word-y
And that’s all good -- so is it bad
To wish that you were ergie?

My jaw is clenched, my back’s in spasms
My neck wants to flee to Jersey
Cause the tools I have are nice and all
But let’s face it -- they’re not ergie.

So if there’s Someone Big upstairs
I know that you’ll have heard me
And answered all my fevered prayers

When you send me something ergie.

____

*or, you know, whoever.

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My work! My luck! My work! My luck! (apologies to CHINATOWN...)

Meeting yesterday's NaNo word count goal was like pulling teeth. 1,667 teeth.  But, done!  (1704 teeth, in fact.)  So today's tidbit is in the "the harder I work, the luckier I get" vein.  Here's looking forward to the luck.

My experience is you always get lucky if you’re willful enough about it. I discovered when I was in my twenties, and I started trying to make work, that if I would spend even more hours on it, luck would kick in on some story. And then you have to be ready to throw stuff out, too. You’re making room for the better stuff that’s going to come.

    -- Ira Glass, producer/creator/host, This American Life

Read the full interview here.

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