. . . admitted my mistakes

. . . at least to myself. I had a talk with my daughter last night, unloading on her all my negative feelings about people trying to screw me around. She helped me see that it was really my fault. . . I should have foreseen problems ahead and met them head on. Instead, I just sat tight, thinking everything would be fine. This is not a good thing. I should not be afraid to discuss payment for goods and services. I should put a value on my time and talents. And I shouldn't bargain against myself. I need to look out for myself first when dealing with people, no matter how much they may appear to be friends. This attitude is opposed to the way I usually think, but I guess I live in a fairytale world. As an attorney, my daughter has learned this the hard way. She tells me it gets easier the more you do it. I hope she's right. So today, maybe I'll try to face my main problem head-on and deal with it. It makes me sick to think about it, though. Perhaps I will detail the problem more in future posts, but not until after it's resolved.


We certainly live in interesting times, don't we. Last night I watched the current President, who pre-empted an interview with the previous President on CNN, tell us that the market is not functioning properly. One of the candidates who could be the future President decides that he's not going to campaign any more, but instead will focus on the financial problems of the country, and the other candidates says, "Hey, you need to be able to do more than one thing at a time if you want to be President." Meanwhile, Congress argues over whether we should let the foxes back into the henhouse to clean it up and whether we ought to pay those foxes a lot of money to do so; and Warren Buffet spends $5 billion. It seems to me (and I'm no expert) that if perhaps there could have been individual bail-outs of the folks who couldn't pay their mortgages a couple of years ago, maybe the entire greed-based crisis today could have been averted. I remember seeing ads on TV a few years ago, telling people they could get money with mortgages up to 125% of the value of their homes. That's crazy and possibly unconscionable, but when people are desperate and/or uninformed, it's a powerful enticement. But everyone just sat back and thought everything would be fine, instead of recognizing the problem and meeting it head-on.


The collage above is a mixed of various textures: one picture is a scan of paper towels left from wiping up paint; another is a picture of text from an old newpaper, and there's another picture of crackled texture. That's all combined with a Photoshop creation. Just playing around on the computer.