3 posts tagged “divorce”

What's on your holiday wishlist?

Same thing that was on last year:  to be divorced and sell the house.

Well, I've been doing some locked posting other than the lyric of the day, but I know there are people who aren't on vox that read my blog and have been wondering what's up.  Therefore, a year in review - especially since today was a major significant day in my family last year.

So:

• This time last year I was in Philadelphia waiting for my aunt to have her kidney removed because she had kidney cancer.
  She's now doing very well - better than she has in years.
• Around the time of my grandmother's 90th birthday, things came to a head with my not-soon-enough ex and we decided to divorce.
  I'm still in that process and am tired of it.  I just want it over.
  
• I started living life the way I want to, on my terms, as who I am. 
  This is the healthiest and happiest I've been in years.  I have good friends and have really found what's important to me. 
• Work is work.  I'm always looking for something else, but in the current climate of FL libraries, I'm hesitant to change jobs.
  I like what I do and most of the time where I do it.  Right now, I have the hat trick of stress:  divorce, selling a house and people close to me dying.  I don't need to add a 4th stressor.

The only thing I can add is that at this exact time, I have had, for the better part of the past 2 weeks, in and out of my head, the following song.  For those who get it, bear with me.  It's a rollercoaster that I'm not really minding riding at the moment.  It is what it's supposed to be.  And it's all just fine.

This is not about love
Cuz I am not in love
In fact, I can't stop
falling
out...
I miss this stupid ache.
-Fiona Apple, "Not About Love"

From this week's Rolling Stone

The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago.  And while Bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average.  In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year - the richest five percent of the population - will pocket almost half of the money.  Those who make less than $75,000 a year - eighty percent of America - will receive barely a quarter of the cuts.
...
According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hourly wage of the average American non-supervisory worker is actually lower, adjusted for inflation, than it was in 1970.  Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared - from less than thirty times the average wage to almost 300 times the typical worker's pay.
...
Although corporate executives have always had the power to pay themselves lavishly, their self-enrichment was limited by what Lucian Bebchuk, Jessie Fried and David Walker - the leading experts on exploding executive paychecks - call the "outrage constraint."  What they mean is that a conspicuously self-dealing CEO would be forced to moderate his greed by unions, the press and politicians:  The social climate itself condemned executive salaries that seem immodest.
Lately, however, we have experienced a death of outrage.  Thanks to the right's well-funded and organized effort, corporate executives now feel no shame in lining their pockets with huge bonuses and gigantic stock options.
...
Under Bush, the economy has been growing at a reasonable pace for the past three years.  But most Americans have failed to benefit from that growth.  All indicators of the economic status of ordinary Americans - poverty rates, family incomes, the number of people without health insurance - show that most of us were worse off in 2005 than we were in 2000, and there's little reason to think that 2006 was much better.
...
Finally, there's the government's most direct method of affecting incomes: taxes.  In this arena, Bush has made sure that the rich pay lower taxes than they have in decades.  According to the latest estimates, once the Bush tax cuts have taken full effect, more than a third of the cash will go to people making more than $500,000 a year - a mere 0.8 percent of the population.
...
Furthermore, the administration has engaged in a systematic campaign of disinformation about whose taxes have been cut.  Indeed, one of Bush's first actions after taking office was to tell the Treasury Department to stop producing estimates of how tax cuts are distributed by income class - that is, information on who gained how much.  Instead, official reports on taxes under Bush are textbook examples of how to mislead with statistics, presenting a welter of confusing numbers that convey the false impression that the tax cuts favor middle-class families, not the wealthy.

Basically, what it means that if this hadn't been allowed to go on, I might be able to sell my house and move on with my life.  If he hadn't been so concerned with the richest of the rich instead of those that actually make this country work, the misperception of a bad economy (or maybe it's an accurate perception) and the general malaise felt by people in my income bracket would be less and people would be more willing to buy. 

Read the whole article.  Be outraged.  Write your elected officials.  Maybe we can actually get the momentum to switch back to us working stiffs...