Porn

It's probably a very narcissistic thing to do but every once in a while I google myself. Usually the results are disappointing. I just don't seem to have a web presence. There is another Charles A. Rubin who does and he is also in some kind of Information Technology. You have to look very hard to find something about me.

The other day I googled my sometimes Internet handle shaiwest. I came to this moniker out of a combination of my Hebrew name Yeshiah and Westfield, the town where I live. I thought it was clever, cute, and unique. My Google search the other day also revealed it as a pornography site (you mus be 18 or older to enter).

I am in no way related to that site.

I'm not sure what to think about this or if I should do anything about it. I suppose not.

College

My daughter is in her senior year of high school and in the midst of the college application process. Tonight her school sponsored a "Senior Parents Night" where the guidance counselors went over the college admissions process. It was mostly stuff that we knew already but we did get a couple of keen insights which I'll list below so that I can remind myself in the months to come:

1. This is their process not ours
2. Our college experience is so old that it is irrelevant
3. We should not be making this the major topic of conversation in our house or with other parents that are going through the same thing
4. We need to guide them but not make decisions for them

This is hard for me since from where I sit it seems like so much fun. I'm just finishing a book called "The Gatekeepers" by Jaques Steinberg a New York Times reporter who I happen to know. He follows a year in the life of an admissions office as Wesleyan College in Connecticut. It's really fascinating but shows you how twisted the whole process is. Maybe I'm glad that I really didn't participate when I was a teen. I've found that where you go to school doesn't really matter except perhaps for the first job. I think that I boast more of my humble Brooklyn College education than others boast of their Ivy credentials. In the end the cliche holds true, I believe, it is what you make of it.

Finance

It would be a lie to say that I understood what was going on in the financial markets. From the outside it looks like a lot of very smart people made some very stupid decisions. Maybe they just acted smart and they thought that they were untouchable. In case you've been completely out of touch for the past few weeks, the stock market dropped over 500 points yesterday on the news that 2 of the major brokerage houses on Wall Street were in trouble. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and Merril Lynch sold itself to Bank of America. All of this seems to relate back somehow to the mortgage crisis that has been in the news for the past year.

Different rules must apply to me. When I went for a mortgage I had to produce reams of paper; tax returns, pay stubs, letters from my employer, a note from my rabbi, birth certificates, passports, whatever. Now I hear that people that were unemployed were getting mortgages and at better rates than I got. Huh?

It's hard to know what to do in times like this. The investment advice that I've been following goes something like this; diversify, buy, and hold. Most of my investments are in index funds. I have 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds. One is always doing bad while the other is doing well and, so far, I have been coming out ahead. I'm not going to be rich but I'm not becoming poor either.

Simple Pleasures

I’ve always been a little late coming to certain of life’s pleasures. I didn't learn to ride a bicycle until I was 11 years old, didn’t really have a serious girlfriend until well into my college years, and didn’t learn to drive a car until I was in my thirties (although I gave that up when I realized I was way too blind and a public safety hazard). My newest found pleasure is my bird feeder. Earlier this summer we got a real spiffy model from LL Bean from several gift certificates that we had earned from our credit card company. We used these to buy a supposedly squirrel proof design that we put up outside our dining room window.

I now realize that squirrel proof is an impossibility but they are really just part of the fun. The variety of birds and other beasts that visit make it hard for me to leave for work in the morning and I find myself constantly drifting back to the window to see what’s going on out there on days when I’m home. Granted, the majority of the birds that stop by are common house sparrows but we get crows, blue birds, a pair of cardinals, pigeons, and even a chipmunk who picks up the stuff the others drop. We’re going through a lot of bird seed but it’s an investment that I’m thoroughly enjoying.

An Outbreak of Management

Where I work everyone is either a manager, a director, a managing director, a group director, or a senior something or other. There are almost no junior anythings. As a result, everyone is busy managing and no one actually makes a decision or does any of the real work. I think that my fondest days at this job were when I was the lowest grade of professional at the company. I used to joke that I was the bottom of the food chain so everyone should feel free to boss me around. The truth is that I was left alone much of the time and I got a lot done and was rewarded for it.

Now I'm a manager but with so many management types no one has any real authority. So we have lots of meetings where no one decides anything and we wait for things to come to a crisis before we actually get around to doing anything and then we have some vice president (I didn't mention them above) who really isn't qualified to be making technical decisions making technical decisions. Frustrating. I'm trying to find tasks for myself that no one else wants. I'm trying to find my way back to my roots.