Kirsten Mortensen's blog

And what to do about it.

From the article — quote from Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal:

[W]e’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new.

The hardest thing about life as a human being is that we get trapped inside our own minds.

As Sousa’s research shows, there’s a biological basis for this.

So if you’ve hit a high-stress patch in your life recently, you have to assume — assume – that your capabilities in the area of “executive decision-making” and “goal-directed behaviors” are impaired.

And then, for your own good, you have to do something about it.

It’s the only way out of the trap.

(The worst part being, of course, that people who are in the trap don’t know it . . . and that when you’re under stress is when you most need the very skills that you’ve lost.)

Okay, some of these kinds of forward-by-email jokes are kind of lame, but this one is spot-on — it HAD to be written by someone who actually knows rural Upstate.

Some of them really zinged me — just spot on: 4, 10, 22, 24, 36, 43, 45, 51, 61, 64.

And of course, 30. Because even after years of being gentrified by Rochester ‘burb living, I am proud of having Chenango County roots — I have a better grasp on reality for having grown up there, if I do say so myself :-)

Enjoy!

1. Your idea of a traffic jam is 10 cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway

2. “Vacation” means going to Syracuse for the weekend

3. You measure distance in hours

4. You know several people who have hit deer more than once

5. You often switch from “heat” to “A/C” in the same day

6. You stay in your house most of the summer because you aren’t used to the heat

7. You drive at 55 mph through 10 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching

8. You see people wearing hunting clothes at social events

9. You install security lights on your house and garage but leave both unlocked

10. One of your neighbors constantly has bonfires

11. You carry jumper cables in your car and your girlfriend knows how to use them

12. There are 7 empty cars running in the parking lot at the supermarket at any given time

13. Your idea of a huge party is one with lots of cheap beer and some people you go to school with

14. Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled in with snow

15. You think sexy lingerie is silk pajamas from wal-mart

16. You know 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, cold, construction

17. It takes you 2 hours to go to the store for one item even when you’re in a rush because you have to stop and talk to everyone in town

18. At least 6 people that you see a day have beards and stains on the front of their shirt

19. Cows are just part of the scenery

20. You or someone you know has a car that sounds like a big truck and can barely make it 20 miles yet no one says anything about it.

21. At least fives times in your normal travel day you will pass or be passed by a beat-up, old ass car that has had an attempted pimping out, such as a brand new oversized spoiler on a rust covered trunk, spinning HUBCABS, or everyones favorite, the performance exhaust on a car running on barely three cylinders.

22. You know that the phrase, “Goin up ta,” applies to going north, south, east, or west, up or down in elevation, and pretty much any other way you can travel.

23. The smell of freshly spread cow manure doesn’t bother you.

24. Its perfectly normal for your life’s aspirations to be working for the county.

25. Getting “dressed up” means tucking your shirt into your jeans and putting on clean work boots.

26. Holloween costumes are always designed around a snowsuit and winter boots.

27. You appreciate the delicacy known as Croghan Bologna, and serve it at all social gatherings.

28. On the same platter as the Croghan Bologna is a selection of flavored cheese curd, which you also love.

29. You know damn well that the verizon guy didn’t walk through your town going, “can you hear me now” because reception is, at best, limited.

30. Your proud of your redneck-ness and where your from.

31. You can name everyone you graduated with.

32. You know what 4-H is.

33. You ever went to a party that was held about 20 miles down a deserted dirt road.

34. You used to drag “main.”

35. You said the ‘F’ word and your parents knew within an hour.

36. You schedule parties around the schedule of different police officers since you know which ones would bust you.

37. You never went or thought about going cow-tipping.

38. School gets canceled for a sports team going to State

39. You could never buy cigarettes cause all the store clerks knew how old you were.

40. When you did find someone old enough to buy smokes for you, you had to drive down country backroads to smoke them.

41. You never missed a Homecoming parade.

42. You still go home for Homecoming.

43. It was cool to date someone from a neighboring town.

44. You had a senior skip day.

45. The whole school went to the same party after graduation.

46. You can’t help but date a friend’s ex.

47. Your car is always filthy from the dirt roads.

48. You think that kids who ride skateboards are weird.

49. The town next to you is considered “trashy” or “snotty” when it is just like your town.

50. Getting paid minimum wage is considered a raise.

51. You refer to anyone with a house newer than 1980 as the “rich people.”

52. The people in the big city dress funny then you pick up on the cool new trend two years later.

53. You bragged to your friends because you got pipes on your truck for your birthday.

54. On Fridays, anyone you want to find can be found at Main Street or the Dairy Queen.

55. Weekend excitement involves a trip to RiteAid.

56. Even the ugly people enter beauty contests.

57. You decide to walk for exercise and 5 people pull over and ask you if you need a ride.

58. Your teachers call you by your older sibling’s name.

59. The closest “cool stores” are at least 45 miles away.

60. The local phone book has only one yellow page.

61. You leave your jacket on the back of the chair in the
cafe, and when you go back the next day, it’s still there, on the same chair.

62. You don’t signal turns because everyone knows where you’re going, anyway.

63. You call a wrong number and they supply you with the correct one.

64. You have to name six surrounding towns to explain to
people where you’re from.

65. Driving to the party on a four wheeler is quite normal.

66. The town population increases by one-third when the universities go on break.

67. When somebody says “Thats billy fucillo HUGE” you know exactly what they are talking about

68. You laugh your head off reading this because you know it’s true and then forward it to everyone in your address book, which is actually half your town.

(On the occasion of learning that an acquaintance has died.)

A perfectly lived life would be one in which every moment lived was lived perfectly.

The next best thing is to make amends, where one can, for mistakes made in the past.

But making amends takes time; one can’t stop living entirely to devote one’s time to making amends alone — and even if you did, it would mean you weren’t living — you’d be taking time off from living to mend old mistakes — itself a compromise.

So we begin life, quickly find ourselves in in arrears, then do our best as we go along. And inevitably leave some business unfinished. We take care of the big mistakes, as much as we can, to the best our ability — at least we do if we’re smart, because those are the things that drag us most quickly into the mud.

But no matter what, our time runs out, and we die. Hopefully without too many regrets. But do any of us die with none?

I doubt it. We’re none of us saints.

For many many years I’ve had a recurring motif crop up in my dreams: crashing planes. Last fall, after one particularly hideous go around (I couldn’t save my daughter, either) it hit me — the crashes symbolize death — my own death — the death of my body and along with it (in a flash of fire and fear and grief) its cargo of mind.

I experiment with being okay with that. A month or so ago it occurred to me that well, the worst that will happen is that I’ll be what I was before I was born. Not an original thought. But of some comfort, progressing me in some small way to learn to live unafraid. Yet still only a type of bargain. And no bargain, no religion, no spiritual belief, can really deliver the assurance that we need to completely dispel the awefulness of it, this death thing.

Time will run out. Time will run out . . . some small mending, at the least, will be left undone . . .

If you’re nervous about your finances today, wait until the Obama tax plan kicks in.

From Ned Barnett at The American Thinker, who by way of background notes that over the past 10 years, he’s earned from $50,000 to $100,000 per year — so he’s not in the category of the “more than $250K ‘evil rich’”:

I’ve worked as the state level media and strategy director on three Presidential election campaigns — I know how “promises” work — so I analyzed Senator Obama’s promises by looking for loopholes.

The first loophole was easy to find: Senator Obama doesn’t “count” allowing the Bush tax cuts to lapse as a tax increase. Unless the cuts are re-enacted, rates will automatically return to the 2000 level. Senator Obama claims that letting a tax cut lapse — allowing the rates to return to a higher levels — is not actually a “tax increase.” It’s just the lapsing of a tax cut.

See the difference?

Neither do I.

When those cuts lapse, my taxes are going up — a lot — but by parsing words, Senator Obama justifies his claim that he won’t actively raise taxes on 95 percent of working Americans, even while he’s passively allowing tax rates to go up for 100% of Americans who actually pay Federal income taxes.

Making this personal, my Federal Income Tax will increase by $3,824 when those tax cuts lapse. That not-insignificant sum would cover a couple of house payments or help my two boys through another month or two of college.

Barnett encourages us to go to this page on the IRS website, look up the tax tables for 2000 and 2007, and check his assumptions for ourselves.

In addition, Obama plans to eliminate the income cap on Social Security tax. So, for example, individuals making more than $94,700 will now pay an extra 12.4 percent tax on every dollar earned above that figure.

And he’s going to raise Capital Gains taxes. Too bad for you if you are one of the 50 percent of Americans who own stocks in, say, your 401K, and the market turns around.

Ah. No worries. What’s important is that 67 percent of Americans BELIEVE Obama is going to cut middle class taxes.

I bet he can keep insisting he’s cutting taxes, and his adoring public will continue to “know” that he has. Just like they “know” so much else about him. Democracy in action!

Yeah, I know it makes no sense. But look at it. So big and . . . bricky. Those gorgeous windows, can you imagine how they frame the view when you’re inside looking out?

And right there on main street. Nothing would go down without my knowing about it. Nothing!

Technorati Tags: old brick building somewhere in Upstate New York

Of all the things I’ve read lately about our current coaster ride, the most revealing was this couple of paragraphs, way down in a January 15 piece in the Wall Street Journal by Susan Pulliam and Serena Ng, titled “Default Fears Unnerve Markets.”

The article is about a class of derivatives called credit-default swaps. If you’ve never heard of them, it’s because they aren’t the sort of deals available to the the likes of you and me. The article does its best to explain them by analogy: they “work like a side bet on a football game.” Institutional traders place bets based on the perceived odds that other parties will default on bonds or loans. Then they buy and sell their bets amongst themselves.

Here’s the bit that opened my eyes:

With no central trade processing of credit-default swaps, defining trading-partner risks can be a Herculean task. Mr. [Warren] Buffett learned the difficulty of unraveling such complex instruments in 2002 when he directed General Re Corp., a reinsurer that had been acquired by his Berkshire Hathaway Inc., to pull back from the business of these swaps and other derivatives. It took General Re four years to whittle the business from 23,218 contracts to 197 by the end of 2006.

Doing so involved tracking down hundreds of counterparties to General Re’s trades, many of which Mr. Buffett and his colleagues had never heard of, he says, including a bank in Finland and a small loan company in Japan, to name just two. One contract, Mr. Buffett says, was designed to run for 100 years. “We lost over $400 million on contracts that were supposedly” safe and properly priced, “and we did it in a leisurely way in a benign market,” Mr. Buffett says. “If we had to unwind it in one month, who knows what would have happened?”

We’re about to find out “what would have happened” because it’s unfolding right now. Bets are getting called. People are finding out that liabilities they pushed out the door a long time ago have invited themselves back in and are licking their lips, ready to start biting arse. The stock market makes the headlines but it’s only a proxy for the real bloodbath.

Keep your fingers out of the way if you can.

Technorati Tags: economy, stock market

Technorati Tags: NYC skyline, September 11

Yes, replacing aging bridges before they fall apart is important. But in some cases that means we’re losing bits of history, not to mention personality to yet more dull old concrete.

I wish I’d gotten pictures, for example, of the old Hoxie Gorge bridge on Route 81, near Cortland, N.Y., before it was demolished last fall. I can’t even find any stats on how high it was (some locals nicknamed it “the mile high bridge” though, to give you an idea of how high it seems when you’re on it). It spans a gorge along the Tioughnioga River valley. It’s being rebuilt now and will be safer as a result, of course. Before we’ve lost that gorgeous arched steel forever, and nobody seems to have noticed.

I did take the time yesterday to get some pictures of the bridge across the Chenango River in the town where I grew up, Oxford, NY, because this one is slated for replacement as well.

Just another backwater steel bridge, yeah, I know.

It’s got a connection to Oxford beyond just the practical, however. The design uses a “Burr arch truss” that was invented by Theordore Burr — a cousin of Aaron’s — who was an Oxford, NY native around the turn of the 19th century. Burr’s design made our bridges strong enough to support heavier vehicles, including trains. He built the first bridge across the Chenango in Oxford and also a gorgeous house which, today, is the town library.

From the piece linked above:

The “Burr arch truss”, used two long arches, resting on the abutments on either end, that typically sandwiched a multiple kingpost structure. Theodore Burr built nearly every bridge that crossed the Susquehanna from Binghamton, NY to Baltimore, MD in those days. His successes made him the most distinguished architect of bridges in the country. Today’s modern bridges with their graceful arches can be traced back to Theodore Burr and his contemporaries.

In April, 1818, he advertised in the Oxford Gazette, that he had “devoted eighteen years of his life to the theory and practice of bridge building exclusively, during which time he had built forty-five bridges of various magnitude, with arches from 60 to 367 feet span.”

Back in those days, small towns didn’t carry the stigma (often undeserved of course) of being home to small minds. It was perfectly in keeping with the vision of the time to found an Academy here, for instance — it was expected that the best and the brightest would be out in “the wilderness” and would look for ways to get a classical education.

The building is the town’s middle school today. For now. It’s on the river flats, and was flooded badly last year. The town isn’t sure they’ll be able to fund insurance on it any more — and so it may well be junked in exchange for some cheaply built ugly modern thing. Hopefully someone will find some other use for the building. It’s a treasure, but unfortunately small town upstate NY resources don’t always allow the luxury of preserving treasures.

Technorati Tags: Oxford, New York, Chenango River, bridges, Burr arch truss

That’s been my motto lately. Because I’ve felt like I’ve been pretty boring. At least on the outside, lol

It’s not that I haven’t been busy. I’ve been reading a ton of books — all kinds of interesting books — like I just finished-but-one-story “The New York Stories of Henry James” — which I picked up while in NYC of course. Only I haven’t felt inspired to blog about it — more fun to immerse myself and not assume the arm’s-length relationship that writing about it would require.

I’ve been working on revising my last-novel-but-one, which like my most recent novel got some passing interest from agents but wasn’t good enough to get anything more.

It’s been a painful process, the revision, because I’ve been confronting my own . . . naivete, if I want to be nice about it — incompetence, I think to myself in my less rosy moods. How could I have written so stupidly and not realized it? Sigh. Writing novels is without question the most difficult thing I’ve done, ever. Having to do major surgery well after I’d hoped The Thing Was Done only brings that point home all the harder.

I’ve been golfing a bit more lately, which has been nice. Will blog about that some more in the next few days.

And I’ve been writing for another site I’ve launched, WomenGolfApparel.com. I undertook this venture as an experiment: can I monetize my writing by creating a content-rich site and then run Adsense ads? I’m happy to say results so far are promising, although it has nowhere near the traffic I’d need to, you know, buy that nouveau-Italian palazzo-style McMansion with the the spinning hot tub in the back yard that I’ve had my eye on. ha ha ha

But it’s been fun, and IMO satisfies a real need, also. Especially if you don’t live in a major market, finding fun, stylish golf apparel — if you’re a woman — can be a pain. Many pro shops don’t carry much women’s clothing (due in part to their general focus on male golfers, but also because women’s shopping habits are different, according to an acquaintance who ran a pro shop with her husband for awhile. Men do things like notice it’s raining and buy a raincoat on their way out to the first tee. Women want to shop shop — and don’t combine that with their trips to the course to play.)

Even general sporting goods stores like Dick’s shortchange the women in their golf apparel sections — at least that’s been my experience. You might find one or two racks of women’s golf clothing. And it gets picked over fast, so you finding your style can be a problem.

Another major hole: it’s really really hard to find out what, exactly, the LPGA pros are wearing. I’ve been trying to hunt that info down, and it’s not easy. In some cases, it’s probably because they aren’t wearing endorsement-deal stuff. But as I wrote here, I think it’s also because the media is hesitant about covering what pros are wearing. We don’t interview Tiger about how cute his shorts look — wouldn’t it be insulting to focus on a woman pro’s clothes instead of her game?

But the fact is, when women see a golfer on t.v. and like what she’s wearing, they want to know how to buy that piece for themselves. At least according to the anecdotal evidence I’ve encountered.

So the site will, I hope, help women in a couple of ways — it will help them find opportunities to buy golf apparel online (I try to find news about deals!) and it will help them track down what the pros are wearing.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a women golf apparel newsletter now as well, which features an interview with Geoff Tait, one of the founders of Quagmire Golf. The interview discusses how golf styles are changing, partly because LPGA pros are breaking old style conventions. I plan to send the newsletter out within a few days — if you want to be on that mailing list, drop me a note or sign up here. If you’d rather just read the interview online, it’ll be published on the main site sometime later in August.

So yeah, I’ve been busy. Just not blogging. But that’s one of the nice things about having a blog, if I don’t post, what does it matter! I have only myself to please ;-)

Technorati Tags: women golf apparel, writing, blogging