Monkey In a Suit

Via Average Jane

50 Random Questions

1. What color is your toothbrush?

I tend to get Orange and Blue even though I left Chambana four (!!) years ago (almost to the day, damn).

2. Name one person who made you smile today:

Mentos.

3. What were you doing at 8am this morning?

I was on the train talking to a girl who lives in my apartment building about how I switched my Fall travel plans from Hawaii to India (Rajasthan, Shimla & Dharamshala if anyone is interested). She’s Indian, recently migrated, and finds me fascinating from an anthropological perspective (I think).

4. What were you doing 45 minutes ago?

Working on a series of contracts, reading on the internet and planning my healthcare committee (B-School App stuff is ramping up, y’all).

5. What is your favorite candy bar?

Cadbury’s with Fruit and Nuts.

6. Have you ever been to a strip club?

Yes, a long time ago.

7. What is the last thing you said aloud?

[Insert Agency Name] gave me clearance on that deal so I think I’m going to go ahead and schedule the closing on Monday.

8. What is your favorite ice cream?

Saffron or Mango

9. What was the last thing you had to drink?

PG Tips Tea, which I drink by the gallonful during the workday.

10. Do you like your wallet?

Yes! It’s new.

11 What was the last thing you ate?

A mini mars bar. I feel ill from it, actually.

12. Have you bought any new clothing items this week?

No, and I’ve even quit stalking the Banana Republic website because I decided travelling was more important than clothes and I’m getting a completely new wardrobe next year anyway.

13. The last sporting event you watched?

*blank stare*

14. What is your favorite flavor of popcorn?

I don’t like popcorn. I spent most of my adolescence in orthodontics.

15. Who is the last person you sent a text message to?

*blank stare*

16. Ever go camping?

Yes. Not a big fan.

17. Do you take vitamins daily?

Yup.

18. Do you go to church every Sunday?

Nope.

19. Do you have a tan?

I got one in Belize but it’s been fading away. I’m usually a shade or two lighter than I am in California when I live in the Northeast.

20. Do you prefer Chinese food over pizza?

Yes.

21. Do you drink your soda with a straw?

No, straight from the can.

22. What did your last text message say?

*blank stare*

23. What are you doing tomorrow?

Studying. I think I might go see the new Sam Raimi movie with my dad.

25. Look to your left, what do you see?

My phone and a stack of contracts.

26. What color is your watch?

I rarely wear it-but my sister’s in-laws gave me a Coach watch with a maroon/tan logo band and silver watchface during the gift exchange that comprises an Indian wedding.

27. What do you think of when you hear Australia?

Crocodile Dundee, scaling bridges in Sydney, kangaroos, koalas, Outback, Barrier Reef

29. Do you go in at a fast food place or just hit the drive thru?

I don’t really eat fast food except for Zankou Chicken and they do not have a drive through.

30. What is your favorite number?

8

31. Who’s the last person you talked to on the phone?

My boss.

33. How many states have you lived in?

Plenty.

34. Biggest annoyance right now?

I wish it were next year and I was in school already.

35. Last song listened to?

Magdalenha by Sergio Mendez.

36.Can you say the alphabet backwards?

No, I didn’t catch that episode of Sesame Street.

37. Do you have a maid service clean your house?

Yes, twice a month. Paradoxically, it has turned me into a neat freak.

38. Favorite pair of shoes you wear all the time?

Clarks Mary Janes.

39. Are you jealous of anyone?

I use it to motivate myself to change my own life-so it isn’t as much a deep seated envy as a fleeting desire to get what they have.

40. Is anyone jealous of you?

Who knows?

41. Do you love anyone?

Yes.

42. Do any of your friends have children?

I have colleagues with children but a goodly portion of my friends fall into the thirty-something-professionals-who-aren’t-even-married-yet category.

43. What do you usually do during the day?

Discuss the giving away of money.

44. Do you hate anyone that you know right now?

No because I am the ultimate low attention span a-hole-I don’t care enough about other people long enough to really get a good long-term hatred going. I am usually temporarily highly irritated by people but I find that when they exit my life I stop thinking about them entirely.  

45. Do you use the word ‘hello’ daily?

Yes, but my sister and I both pronounce it “hallo” or “hullo”. Also, I pronounce the word pronounce as “PRO-nounce”. It’s possibly the only Canadian inflection I have left.

46. What color is your car?

White. Ugly I know but I cared so little when I was picking it out on the lot that I just pointed to the first Civic I saw.

47. Do you like cats?

I’ll have to think about that one…I mean…I’ve owned several.

48. Are you thinking about someone right now?

No, I’m thinking about my headache and how I’ve been squinting more.

49. Have you ever been to Six Flags?

Yes.

50. How did you get your worst scar?

Smallpox vaccination.

$10 that someone manages to claim it’s sexism against women!

Holy crap, I am prescient. Or just logical. Did I not say this was going to happen? Didn’t I say that corporations were taking advantage of conversational marketing to skirt the rules? Finally the government has seen fit to be concerned about how businesses can circumvent federal regulations by using social media in order to advertise their products.

I’m way less concerned about Frito Lays than being paid to publically announce correlations between the results of a personal genotyping test and genetic disorders. And advocating, or personally reminiscing about “actions” you could have taken based on the results of that paid-for test*.

Upfront-let me say that I don’t care that people get paid to blog, ads or anything else. I don’t run ads on this site because I wouldn’t make any money, I already have to disclose my finances to my employers on account of what I do (and they happen to be rather picky about where I get my money) and if I wanted extra cash I’d go teach LSATs again. I do, however, care when corporations use people who nonchalantly discuss the effectiveness of complicated technologies when they have no educational background in the subject at hand. Because I think it’s sleazy and underhanded. And if you want to run an advertisement saying your Carbolic Smoke Ball cures swine flu I’d rather you bleed time trying to get the government to approve your ad rather than approaching a blogger and having it farmed out through the “didya hear?” method. From the blogger side-I’ll cut the average blogger a lot of slack. But I do think that there is a movement within the blogging community for bloggers, especially parent bloggers, to be recognized both as legitimate writers as well as entrepreneurs. My feeling, and I suspect it’s a sentiment that’s only going to grow, is that if you are going to hold yourself out as a business then you take your lumps and act like a responsible professional. This includes actually working with the product you’ve been requested to review, turn down reviewing products you have no idea about and write an unbiased review thereafter. But please please please don’t straddle the line between whining about how we should all get along, WHATEVER WORKS FOR YOU, how you want to be recognised as a legitimate businessperson and how you think it’s completely unfair that the FTC is finally treating you like a legitimate business.  

Quite frankly, this tempest in a blogpot reminds me of the historic fight over advertisements and the movies. And we all know how that turned.

Get to dialoguing on how to handle this, bloggers! You can’t have your cake and review it too.   

*No matter, that many of the same people already complain about why we can’t have “free healthcare”. Newsflash, in a “free healthcare” system you don’t get to badger your doctor about expensive testing based on your irrational opinions about your genetic history.

I hope at least some Republicans take him seriously. I wrote something up along these lines but then realised what a Bad Idea it would be to publish it, so I never did. Suffice it to say that I am both a fan of Ms. Sotormayor, but I am extremely opposed to her statement that the richness of a Latina’s life gives her more empathy/compassion/insight into the world than a white man. Case in point-Clarence Thomas vs. J.P. “Ritchie Rich” Stevens. Example #2-I’ll vote for 10 privileged white men before I ever vote for a certain Indian politician.

But we all say ridiculous things sometimes, so let’s get over it and get her confirmed. Both the current President and Judge Sotormayor are people that can serve as role models for this country-and their ethnicity and political leanings have nothing to do with it. Rather, it’s their commitment to hard work and leaving behind the baggage of their upbringing without forgetting where they came from that impresses me.

Daisy the Dog Twitters

Oh dear. This may be the best thing ever. Daisy had me hooked at “I am a dog that is learning about the internet.” There may be a Julius de L’Orange (yes, that is his name) Tweetlefest coming to a blog near you. I will never pass up the opportunity to be more of a cat lady (than I already am).

My writing resolution for the year is to make a personal move away from lolcatese, FAIL! and TYPING IN ALL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS because all three things have started to personally annoy me and I know that I reach for all these tools when I’m being lazy about properly phrasing a thought that I have in my head. We may have to settle for snide italics on this here blog. Also, less posting.  

So, the title refers to the fullscale meltdown going down in the media over the latest revelations about Edmund Andrews, his book and the New York Times.  If you’d like some more links and analysis, please head over to She Started It. All due credit to her for bringing this up-I rarely read the New York Times (Wall Street Journal enthusiast, sorry) so I would have missed the originating essay in the Sunday Magazine had she not linked to it.

It’s difficult to figure out where to begin with this mess. First and foremost, I’m worried that the self-made drama of people like Edmund Andrews (at this point my sympathy extends to having to shield his children from the inevitable fallout of this whole mess rather than his actual financial problems)  undercuts a stark reality-that underwriters completely threw out traditionally accepted standards during the subprime mortgage years. Sad to say but I’ve been privy to the concept of overleveraged financial transactions for longer than I care to admit. Maybe that’s why I wrote about the impending mortgage meltdown sometime in 2006 and I talked people out of subprime/ARM/creative financing every opportunity that I had (that I actually had to is a sad state of affairs in and of itself).

The thing that irritates me about this whole drama is that it shifts the debate on regulating the industry-I smelled something fishy about Andrews in the original essay ($700 for J. Crew, $1600 beach homes and Whole Paycheck, b*tching about child support and remarrying someone from “high school”  raised some red flags for sure) and I agree with critics levelling the “you made your own bed” charge against his woe-is-me-tale. However, I can’t help but feel that the Edmund Andrews meltdown restructures the debate from “What the f*ck was your underwriting department doing you sleazy jerks??” to “See, it was never an evil banker plot!! You did it to yourself!”

I don’t think my eyeballs could roll further back in my head. Look-no matter how annoying people like Edmund Andrews may be, no matter how tenable the position that the mortgage meltdown was partially caused by a lack of personal responsibility (a position I fully support)-it doesn’t take away from the overwhelming evidence that a whole bunch of people who should have known better and probably did know better basically decided to get theirs while the getting was good and then cut and run to let you and me pick up the mess. And that, to me, is a wholescale washing of one’s hands on certain legal principals that make capitalism possible-including but not limited to Due Diligence, Duty to the Shareholders, Up the Ladder Reporting of Financial Fraud and a whole bunch of other fiduciary duties that I’ve forgotten since this isn’t a bar exam and I’m not required to have them on tap memory bank style anymore.

And frankly, the idea that this is a problem caused by Bush’s Republican administration, or the way it’s been phrased as the Bad Republicans letting Big Business Get Away With It versus the Democrats Standing Up for the Common Man or the Democrats Pressuring the Bankers to Start Lending to Minorities is also pretty irritating. I do really like the way Obama and his advisors have  handled the situation. However, the pressure to decrease lending standards started long before Bush II (arguably back to the 80s). There are plenty of people on both sides of the aisle who have been complicit in what caused this whole mess (hello, Chris Dodd).

I understand that there is a strong streak of independence in American political culture and it’s one that I laud. I don’t wany a nanny government either. On the other hand, I don’t think the road to socialism is paved with a requirement that the private sector should follow the most basic principals of corporate law.

Biggest difference between 1994 and 2009: Michael > Troy. Lelaina…please don’t settle for Troy! Ethan Hawke looks like he has crabs and will go on to cheat on professional amazon and goddess like Uma Thurman.

Angst Factor:

1994: I totally get this. My parents suck. Lexington sucks. I don’t want to be Indian. Math sucks.

2009: Daddy? Aren’t teenagers and people in their early 20s really, really f*cking annoying? (Baba: Yes. You have to think very hard about how cute they were when they were little. On the other hand, they want to converse about more interesting matters)

Lelaina:

1994: OMG, she is so cool and I love the way she dresses and I totally get where she’s coming from.

2009: 1) Read your contracts you silly twit and 2) You’re going to get paid!  Everyone has to start somewhere. STFU. Please don’t dump/cheat on a guy that  is so nice to you for a greasy loser like Troy.

Also, while Winona Ryder was gorgeous, holy crap Janeane Garafolo was really really beautiful!

As a Gen-Xer myself: I believe I’m right on the cutoff line for Gen-Xism-the attitudes in this movie have not aged well for me. Still, the movie was entertaining and funny (esp. Janeane Garafolo) and I’d say that it has aged a lot better than Heathers.

I love when my parents try to have “serious” discussions with me about things they’ve read about in the newspaper. Doubly so if it involves any sort of newfangled technology.

First, any time a desi parent confronts you on the evils of modern living, it always becomes “the” something-or-the-other.

THE smoking

THE beers (as opposed to the BEARS)

THE Face-booking

The second principal is that if the application/product has a brand name, my parents are sure to mess it up. This often leads to me spending the first 20 minutes of their lecture trying to figure out what they’re referencing while they regale me with stories of how This One Girl got involved in The Pacebooking and then she ended up dead in a ditch with her panties on her head.

All of my parents’ stories end up with people in ditches, in spite of the fact that we haven’t seen a roadside ditch since our now near thirty year tenure in the First World. Also of note, whenever my mother “curses” someone she basically prays that they fall into a ditch. Somewhere in a parallel universe of wish fullfilment there is a ditch full of my mother’s enemies.

So of course now that my father is retired he has nothing to do except 1) Daytrade 2) Write his book, where he basically lampoons me, Bunsen, Mother and bougeois Indians (hmm, I wonder where I got it?) 3) Become very concerned about alarmist reports on CNBC. I suspect this is why he picked me up at work yesterday with his brows furrowed and his beetle black eyes brimming over with paternal concern.

[Monkey], he started, I want to talk to you about something and I do not want you to get mad at me.

Of course I was concerned. My immediate thoughts were 1) My parents figured out that I smoked for the entirety of my 20s 2) My parents want to ask me where my boyfriends slept when they visited 3) My parents don’t think I’m saving enough money and now I’m going to be in financial ruin, in a ditch and 4) My parents want me to get involved in a green card marriage.

Sure Baba, I responded warily.

It is about The Tweetle, he continued.

The Tweetle?

Yes. The Tweetle. All the kids are doing it nowadays. There is much to be concerned about…

Baba, you know I’ve never done drugs in my life. Why do we have to have this conversation everytime Mother sees a particularly tabloid episode of 20/20?

It is not a drug. It is an Apple Software.

Well, you know I don’ t own an Apple anything so why should you be concerned about my tweetling habits? You know I don’t play any videogames.

*here he grows frustrated*

Not a videogame. Tweetling is a way to tell everyone what you are doing…like while you are on the toilet. It is leading to people losing their jobs, much like The Facebook or The Pieplace.

Wait…are you on about Twitter? Not tweetle. Twitter. And not PiePlace. MYSPACE.

Tweetle, twitter, patter…I don’t care. Of course now you are 30 and consider yourself very wise, but you should listen to your old father. Tweetle is a bad idea. A very bad idea.

Well you should know that I am not Tweetling. I don’t even have a tweetle account (not true readers, I signed up a year ago and never sent a single tweetle).   

Ah, excellent news.

Have I avoided the Ditch of Doom, then?

For now at least. But listen, I want to talk to you about something else. It’s called…The Craiging List….

Yesterday I compiled an example of a mailing (chock full of documents I’ve been working on for the last several months) under the watchful eyes of my secretary and paralegal. I say example because this was just the “training” package I put together for the team that will be putting together the real mailer. And by “watchful” I don’t mean “helping watching” or “doing their jobs watching” but more like “watching a hippo whilst on Safari” type watching. I’m surprised my paralegal didn’t bust out with a cor, will yeh look at it go as I ruined ream after ream of coloured paper. Choo Know, my secretary, eventually wandered away to work on the very tiring task of compiling her Barack Obama scrapbook but my paralegal stayed until the end, occasionally seeing fit to interject something along the lines of it really doesn’t look like you’re very good at this stuff. Point taken P-leg. Maybe I’d be better at it if it were my job to put together legal mailers but it isn’t. So the Feds are out eleventyjiggity reams of paper as I systematically crocked up matching the specific colour to the docs, made a zillion niggling and unnecessary amendments to the docs on behalf a person who can’t see the forest for the trees (requiring multiple reprintings), and otherwise mucked up the copier by accidentally jamming it 4000 times.

In the end I never got around to assessing my transaction because it took me so long to put together the mailer.    

 I remember when I was young and impressionable and far more Powrah to the People than I am now, I’d shake my head in disgust along with all the people who complained about how lawyers can’t do their administrative tasks. Really, I don’t call over to my secretary or paralegal to have them press “Print” on my computer every time I write a memorandum but I’m growing increasingly frustrated with the fact that I basically do all my legal administrative work to the detriment of completing my legal assignment load. On the other hand, I’m also not-young-anymore enough to know that complaining  or agitating about it will only result in being Hated and there is nothing more dangerous than being Hated by your admins because they will find a way to make you miserable in other ways if you cut into their scrapbooking time.

Did someone link to my blog from Facebook?

One of the things I’ve learned about the Blandana Republican is that you need to constantly shark around the site because some of the sizes sell out fast, especially if the dress has been mentioned in Lucky or once it goes on sale. I’m not a HUGE Blandana fan but I really love the fact that they use vibrant colours, we don’ t have a suit required dress code but I like to dress nicely for my closings so a cute dress comes in hand and it seems b-school appropriate. For going out I still enjoy the trashiness of Bebe but in school I want to play it all classy, if you know what I mean. 

So I’ve been tracking this dress closely and I had calculated that since there were only 2 sizes left in Petites in 4 & 10, there would be another price drop coming, at which point I’d zoom in and snatch one up for myself. Except…this morning all the size 4s sold out-whores!!!! It was a bit disappointing but perhaps the print would have been too much on someone as elfin as me, anway. I tend to do better in jewel toned solids.

Also being monitored:

I wanna be mellow in yellow

‘raffe print (I’m keeping my eye very close on this one because they have a lot of petites sizes left…what do you guys think?)

A lovely drink of pink (sold out): DAMN that one went fast. Very flattering silhouette, so it’s pretty obvious why.

All wrapped up