Am I Blog Enough For You?

I can’t decide whether to call our new town Shallow Alto or Elysium. I suppose the later is more Greco-Roman-y, so I’ll go with that. D. suggested Utopia, which is properly spelled Eutopia and actually means no place, according to my boyfriend, Jacques Barzun. I found another mythical place called Cockaigne, pronounced cocaine, which I don’t think I can remember how to spell and therefore is disqualified.

So why go to the trouble of hiding the name of our new town? It frees me up to write about stuff like in the next paragraph.

I am starting to become obsessed with the Elysium Mothers Club. I believe it to be one of the most powerful consumer groups on the planet. It is a group of several hundred well-educated, type-A, well-informed consumers who want nothing less than the best for their children. The mailing list generates about 50 emails a day.

In my favorite thread a local restaurant that opened recently has been deemed to be kid-unfriendly by several active members of the mailing list. The first few messages about the restaurant said that the food was pretty good, but leave the kids at home. By the end of the thread, the food and the decore were being trashed. Then someone chimed in saying that they heard from a friend that the hostess is really nasty to her staff. I expect they’ll be out of business within two months.

The sheer volume and length of the messages leads me to believe that most members of the club have some household help. At least one has a website dedicated to her opinions on how children should be raised, complete with manifesto.

Members who express their political opinions tend to lean toward the left and are slightly less confident than the Catholic church. I also detect a strange form of austerity in the parenting style. A typical message goes like this: “I need a way to amuse my 2-year-old on a flight to London. Of course, we don’t allow Skylar to watch videos.” It must really suck to have multi-millionaire parents and not be allowed to watch Finding Nemo.

Oh well. I now pay my property taxes (due in a few weeks) to Santa Clara County. But where does it go?

Speaking of obsessions, this site is — in the words of punchme — the next Hot or Not in terms of time-wasters. It’s just people posting their random confessions. I could read this site for hours and hours and not get bored. I wish that the posts were moderated better to take out the obviously fakey ones, but it is still great. I believe that someone or some program is correcting the spelling. It seems that a site like this would have more misspelled words on it.

If that site is not enough and one is still really, really bored, one can go to the Department of Justice website and calculate how much one’s family would have gotten if one would have died in the 9-11 attacks. The PDF file with the tables is right here. The statistical information in this file is fascinating.

Table 4 is my favorite because it lists the percentage of income that a person spends on himself or herself. So a guy making $100,000 a year spends 48% of that on personal stuff, but someone with a wife and two kids only spends 6.7% on himself. Damn! This makes me want to go to Fry’s right now. But if a guy makes $10,000 at least he gets to spend %13.6 on himself.

Fortunately, I have my Social Security Statement right in front of me. For some reason the calculations are based on average salary from 1999 to 2001. This is fine by me because this is the last few years of the Internet boom.

So according to the table with two kids, I calculated that my family would have gotten around $4M if I died in a 9/11 attack. But then I realized that baby Van wouldn’t have been born, and this whole exercise got even more creepy. Without baby Van my life would have been only worth around $3.7M.

Table 4. is a sad table. It lists the number of expected remaining years of workforce participation according to age. This sad table says that I have to work about 24 more years. It’s interesting to me that this table doesn’t reflect the baby boomers who didn’t save enough to retire.

Now, what if I don’t die. According to my Social Security Statement (which contains an eerie amount of information about me, by the way) if I work until 62 I will get about $1,300/month. Until 67, $1,888 a month. Until 70, $2,342. What a bunch of hell ass crap! That’s probably about what DSL will cost in the year 2047. Will they forward my checks to the USA’s proposed moon base, because that’s where I’m going to retire.

I’ll proofread this and add some jokes later.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2004 at 12:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.