So, there’s been a lot of media coverage recently about what this crisis means, and how to explain it to the common man.  Terry Gross recently did an interview with Gretchen Morgenson looking at AIG spending and how it’s tied to mortgage-backed securities, and all that fun financial terminology that eventually led to America ending up in the toilet, swirling slowly around the bowl.  And NBC’s Dateline is also looking at how Wall Street and Main Street are linked together.  If I have to hear that phrase one more time, by the way, I’ll scream.  I’m glad that all of this investigative media is going on after the fact. As they say, hindsight is always 20/20 (but only if you still have a vision coverage plan. )

The more I hear and learn about this, the more sleazy I feel. I am looking inside Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, only about asset-backed securities and the nooks and hideous crannies of capitalism.  I don’t mind capitalism at all.  What I do mind, is the morons who decided to purchase sub-prime loans. A lot of shows treat them like they are the victims of all of this. Oh no, Countrywide gave them too much money and they couldn’t afford the payments on the house.  Well, guess what, dipwad. It’s YOUR responsibility to know how much house you are able to afford.  It should be the first thing you look at. It’s actually something I am looking at right now as my husband and I are beginning to look for a house that we will buy sometime in the fall or spring of 2010.  Do I want this house?

You bet your sweet biddy, I do.  I want to park my fine whip in that two-car garage and relax with a mojito on the second…or third floor while my maid asks me if it’s time to take out the spring Wedgewood china yet. Maybe if I’m feeling bored, I can go out onto the mini-sea that’s behind that house.  Or play polo with the horse I buy to match the siding.  I could do all of that. But, I’m not retarded.  I know, as much as I yearn for open foyers and Pella tempered windows, I cannot afford that house.  Apparently, the owners couldn’t either, because it was one of the houses my husband, mother-in-law, and I saw this weekend as part of our foray into foreclosed homes as a possibility for our first house.  My mother-in-law (and later my mom, online), took one look at the house and said, “But how are you going to wash all those windows?”  That’s because they’re not retarded.  They understand that if we buy that house, no matter the price (because now the bank owns it), we will go into DEBT.  We are not ballin’ as hotshot DC corporate types.  In fact, we are ballin’ on a budget.  If I buy grapes for more than $1.49 a pound, I cry for a couple days softly into my pillow.

So if we can understand it (via our immigrant parents), why can’t Americans that were born in this country?  I don’t mean to completely harangue against all Americans.  But the Americans that bought houses and didn’t understand their obligations are ruining my country for me.  If you are buying a house for $600,000 and you are making $10/hour, it is totally not the company’s responsibility to babysit you and make sure that you are living within your limits.  Maybe in Finland.  But definitely not here.  And now, I am screwed, because of people that failed to do their own homework.  And the government is now bailing out those companies who didn’t do their homework as well and check out these shady borrowers, but instead resold it to Lehman Brothers, AIG, etc, and crashed the economy.  Thanks, fellow subprime Americans.  Now not only will I not be having my mojito, I’ll probably have to grow the mint for it in my new-age Victory Garden in the future, if the government keeps bailing out the companies right and left.  I, for one, am jubilant about the prospect of paying off billions of dollars way into the future.

Oh how I wish I could get my hands on one of these babies for my apartment. Unfortunately, it looks like it will not be meant to be.

I’ve been all around with clients, caught up in Valetine’s Day, and generally thinking of other good excuses to slack. For today, I have two deep questions to ponder. The first, is shown below:

What the heck do I do with this turtle? I bought it at Target at their after-Valentine’s-Day sale, and thought it might be useful as a serving dish, as well as possibly a change collector, a wall decoration, an impromptu plate, and possibly a planter, although I don’t think it’s deep enough. What do you think I should do with this? It is too cute to sit in storage.

And the second quandary concerns the Yiddish versus Hebrew debate, which apparently, has been raging for quite some time now. So the main deal is that Hebrew was established almost single-handedly by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who believed that, as Israel was created, Jews should have a single language to unite them. The reason is that because Jews had been in the Diaspora so long, they had formed their own languages or had assmiliated into the languages of the countries where they lived, making the debate for a national language in Israel a veritable one.

Many religious Jews objected to the use of Hebrew on its basis as the “holy” langugage of the Torah, making its use in every day life too profane. These Jews still believe in stoning people that don’t dress modestly enough in their neighborhoods.

So, anyway, my position on this whole thing is pretty clear, since I half-taught myself, half-took in college Hebrew so I could feel more connected to being Jewish and now use it on a somewhat regular basis to make snarky comments about random people on the street.

The fact that Yiddish is almost a dead language was pretty much, to me, a moot point, until I saw this article:

Hebrew is the language of the state of Israel and the Bible, but a growing number of Jews around the world are reclaiming Yiddish as the language of their culture, creating a rift with some Hebrew speakers. Before the Holocaust, Stalinist persecution and mass assimilation, Yiddish — a fusion of German, Hebrew, Slavic and other languages — was the daily language of 11 million people.

Which leads to the question, why would someone want to speak Yiddish by choice? I always referred to Yiddish half-jokingly as the language of the oppression, when Jews were not free to make their own choices and had to cobble together a language from Russian, German, and Hebrew, which sounds just as horrible as it looks. Yeah, my grandpa speaks Yiddish and I consider it an important part of my heritage, but really, I want to stay as far away from it as possible.

Here is one possible answer:

“I’m all for my kid learning Hebrew, but Yiddish is a diaspora language just like I’m a diaspora Jew,” Berger said.

Yeah, I never really felt close to Hebrew as I did to the Yiddish sayings that my mom exasperatedly exclaimed all throughout my childhood. But the more I studied it, the more beautiful it became to me, and the more I associate being Jewish now with knowing Hebrew almost more than anything else. To me, Hebrew is a poetic, graceful, moving and flexibile, macho language; the sabra, whereas Yiddish is the old, almost feeble Jewish sage, ready to retire from the world.

Yiddish words, to me, always seemed like crippled ineptitudes of Hebrew words cobbled together through the filmy frame of the past. Balabusta comes from ba’alat bayit; bris comes from the much more steady brit; goniff comes from ganav; Shabbos is really Shabat; and yontif is really Yom Tov. To me, they sound dischordant, weak, useless, in place of the strong Hebrew words that form them.

But hey, if you can have Yiddish Cat in the Hat, why not?

Every day, I strive to be like this woman.  I hope she doesn’t mind me linking to her blog, because she is amazing.Basically, not only does she work, she also cleans and cooks and does EVERYTHING, every day.  And she does it cheerfully and gives helpful hints. I read her blog a lot to get decorating tips, as well as general house tips, such as this one, in which she talks about how to set up a medicine cabinet:

The first part being because space in a medicine cabinet, like this one for instance, is often quite limited. With items you use daily like dental care, hair care, and cosmetic, products filling the space, items of irregular use, should be stored and contained in alternative areas like under-cabinet, wall shelving, closets and the like.

Secondly, regardless of storage position, medications should not be stored in the bathroom. With the concentration of heat, humidity, and strong temperature and other conditional changes, medicine can lose it’s potency long before it’s expiration date. Rather, be sure to store medications in a cool dry place, safely away from children’s reach

How does she know all of this? Seriously.   This is what ours looks like right now.  Actually, nix that.  I can’t even find my camera to take a picture. *burns with shame*