Month: April 2008 (Page 2 of 2)

Last week I attended a fundraising luncheon for Girls, Inc. of Lynn. Joyce is a Board Member there and Kronos a sponsor. I was amazed at the stories of disadvantaged women and girls who had overcome much adversity to become “strong, smart and bold” women. Gisell De La Cruz came to the US two years ago, and with the help of Girls, Inc., she learned English and will attend Wentworth Institute of Technology in the Fall to study Architecture. Ms. Del La Cruz was a 2008 “Girl Hero” Award winner.

On the sixty minutes home, a Jason Isbell soundtrack drove with my dreams about my own “Girl Hero.” Megan is a wonderful mom to her Madison, and she’s also doing a fine job with her niece Mackenzie, who at six is craving the attention and love of a “mom.” Megan’s not her mom, but the love and attention Kenzie gets from Megan and Andrew is like sun warming a flower. Little Kenz just got her Q3 report card and “E”xcellent was the dominant letter. She is overcoming adversity on her way to becoming “strong, smart and bold.” Oh, and Auntie Megan showed some boldness and initiated a return to school. “A” was her letter of the quarter with a “Plus” thrown in as exclamation in Biology II. Each grade is paired with a numeric for “Attitude and Effort.” Those were 1’s across the board, but they don’t even begin to measure what she’s accomplishing.

After seeing the authors interviewed about the Federal budget on the Bill Moyers Journal, I picked up, “Where Does the Money Go?” More on that after I finish reading it… The sub-title is “Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis.” As part of my 2007 tax planning, I discovered my own budget crisis, namely the spending habits of a drunken Congressman.

I don’t recall where I got this list, but I owe attribution to someone… As you scrimp for change to fill the Hummer, here are some areas to cut costs. Oh, here it is, It’s Bankrate.com’s “Top 10 money drains:”

1. Coffee – Quicken estimates about $150 for me in 2007.
2. Cigarettes – Uh, no, but I did spend over $20 on a cigar down at Dad’s recently.
3. Alcohol – $250.72 just at Kappy’s.
4. Bottled water – None at home since I bought the PUR dispenser.
5. Manicures – None on the toes either.
6. Car washes – Only $29 last year and it’s kinda dirty…
7. Weekday lunches out – $836.47 in the inexpensive company café.
8. Vending machines snacks – $0
9. Interest charges on credit cards – $273.82, but all that debt is so last year.
10. Unused memberships – Saved $660 by canceling gym membership… Spent $672.50 on a used StairMaster that’s still being used.

Quicken calculates my top ten damage at a meager $1,560.01. Not bad, but if you add in my big number one with a bullet, things get crazy: $8,081.39 on “Dining” in 2007! Now that’s not “Groceries” ($7,415.92), it’s everything from the “Bagel Blace” ($1,230.09) to “Fenway Park” ($84.00) to “Some Mexican Place in Tampa” ($11.00). Now most of these included Kyle or Megan or both, but how can I bitch about the price of gasoline ($2,600.05) when I burned over $8K on food and drink? I also spent $1,645.00 on “electronic toys” like a new camera, camcorder and iPod.

The news isn’t all bad. I was able to retire all credit card debt in 2007, some of which dated back to the Tar Hut years. Eliminating that debt allowed me to re-fi down to a 15 year mortgage that I hope to pay off in less than 10.

So far in 2008, dining is down, but still on pace to exceed $5K for the year, and there have been no toy purchases, hence the recession. Sorry.

I recall back around 1984 or so predicting Madonna was a fad and she’d never last. I’m not sure of the official length of a fad, but I do believe she’s eclipsed it by, oh, 20 years or so. When I saw this new promo shot of her yesterday, I was amazed how this almost 50 year old woman now looks like a woman I dated a few years ago. Well, minus the heavy eyeliner…

Yesterday I faced and survived my annual tax burden, a full ten days before I had to. There must be something wrong with I, Procrastinator. Anyway, I fired off my digits to our friends at the IRS and the MA DOR with a painless upload courtesy of both H and R Block. Before I stroked the AMT-enhanced $1.5G spot, the scoreboard read mostly red:

After I sent millions of microscopic little digital swimmers up into the mothership, I experimented to see how I might have lightened my load. A few keywords and clicks later, I found statistics indicating people in my general tax bracket give 3.65% of their Adjusted Gross Income to charity. I think that’s bullshit for most people. (Although I do believe someone “tithes” away enough of my money for the both of us…) Just to be charitable, I entered the 3.65% number into the program and discovered I would have received hundreds of dollars in a refund had I, um, been more charitable with myself…

An IRS and Economic Policy Institute study done after the 2000 tax season estimated $353B in taxes was owed, but not paid. That’s equal to about 15% of total taxes owed, or for those of you playing at home, a substantial piece of our mounting national debt.

Regardless of politics or position on how government spends our money, there are rules and many are breaking them, resulting in a weakening of our country.

Do you cheat on your taxes?

My grandmother Lillian was at our house and she was sad and scared. The heartsong of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been silenced in a city of music at 39. There was fear in many American households that night.

Real fear. Not the FauxFear peddled on Fox with endless loops of Barack Obama’s minister. Thirty years of ministry reduced to repeated 60 second clips of angry venting sandwiched between commercials for Cialis. This week it was reported that prior to New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Senator Obama, Senator Hillary Clinton, hoping to prevent it told Richardson flatly, “He cannot win, Bill. He cannot win.” Sen. Clinton figures if she can’t hang Sen. Obama with the robes of Rev. Wright, the Republicans surely will. Anyone who believes that should read this.

It’s a story of four 60’s contemporaries, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jeremiah Wright. Faced with fear, three of the men used deferments and family connections to avoid military service. One, ‘after hearing President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.’

Can you guess which one?

“the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not the words that are imperfect or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms; it is in vain to say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendor is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax.”

“This Is Not a Pipe” – Michael Foucault
p.9 Translators Introduction

Yeah. Where to grow with this one? The book is inspired by a René Magritte painting that mixes media in French irony. I’m off work today and just back from taking my son to see one of his favorite thin…, uh, artists, Julie Andrews. We had hoped to meet her as she signed her new autobiography at Borders – Downtown Crossing, but British protocol had other plans. Still carrying the weather and navigating ourselves and a parrot-handled umbrella through a turnstile door, we heard, “all the tickets are gone for Julie Andrews.” Huh? Tickets? Sadly, we trailed the real fans who arrived at 7:00am to score free tix to meet the woman who embodied two of the most enduring characters in film. I was concerned for Kyle, but he’s so understanding. Truly, he has both song and love in his heart, and Ms. Andrews is a big reason why. Thoughts of a payoff raced through my head. A couple hundred would buy a position in queue, right? It didn’t happen, but we were able to get a spot about 8 yards of high traffic carpet from the table where pen would grace paper.

Grace doesn’t walk, it floats, balancing on its head a legacy that will never fall. On air, she glided through polite applause and took her seat as a solitary press photographer documented the moment from within an empty area of red velvet past. Amateur photography was not allowed, but many of the 400 attendees showed the Brits how rules don’t apply to us and flashed away, in spite of the gentle pleadings of the Borders staff. I stored some respect with my camera in its bag. At 72, Dame Julie Elizabeth Andrews is an enduring, now backlit beauty. Kyle was awed, but ready to leave after a few minutes. Book signing is not a compelling spectator sport.

My intention today was to blog the Ansel Adams episode on “American Experience,” but I don’t need to. Its start provides my end. It features the late photographer John Szarkowski poignantly describing the infinite relation: “He found some way to put together those little fragments of the world in a way that transformed them into a picture in the same way a poet uses the same dictionaries the rest of us do. All the words are in there. All the words in the poem are in there in alphabetical order so you can find them. And it’s just a matter of taking a few of them and putting them in the right order. That’s all there is to it. So why is it that some lines of poetry, some sentences, grasp us, grip us, and we think that’s right, that’s true! I don’t know what it means, but it’s true! A good picture does something like that.”