Friday, February 6, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Lazy Sunday and Everyday
Oompa-Loompa is not homogeneously lazy. There is a gradient shading that comes in to play when explaining his inactivity.
First of all, and this has to be said, he's a big guy. We're not talking stocky, barrel-chested or any other descriptor that takes away from the cold, clinical fact that he's fat. It's not culturally acceptable, I know, to use this word when looking at an individual but with all the generic finger pointing that is everywhere you look and listen be it in articles on obesity or the effects of shoveling garbage into your mouth the fact remains, simply, that's it's not good. It's not good to be pleasantly plump or thick or rotund if your idea of a good life is to be healthy but in this sample of 1, 2 when we get to Chubbs, I see that what's at issue with Oompa is a wholesale indifference to what he's doing to himself.
While I'm working, trying to ballast my family against the tides of everything that gets dragged under as you stave off complete financial ruin, Oompa rolls into the family owned business anywhere between 10 am and noon. He's never there by the time I get home 5:30 and no one seems to be incensed. I can't be incensed because he's my wife's father and I can't be incensed because my wife's mother is going through a tough time reeling from a collapsed marriage. The issue of why I am even talking about it is that it seems I can't talk without triggering a battle that I just don't have in me to fight.
I already blame Chubbs and Oompa for letting their daughter (and by proxy, me) get hit with this bankruptcty. Lord knows that I can't stop the bitterness that seems to grow every time, every passing day, when I see Chubbs as I have to be the one to house this woman but to know that Oompa gets to just roll through this situation without apologizing to anyone (he hasn't), gets to participate in getting the famiy business back into the black in any fashion he wants (whenever he feels like it) and is allowed to go back to his adulterous hutch every night without reproach (no one wants to administer tough love) is beyond me.
I'm helpless.
First of all, and this has to be said, he's a big guy. We're not talking stocky, barrel-chested or any other descriptor that takes away from the cold, clinical fact that he's fat. It's not culturally acceptable, I know, to use this word when looking at an individual but with all the generic finger pointing that is everywhere you look and listen be it in articles on obesity or the effects of shoveling garbage into your mouth the fact remains, simply, that's it's not good. It's not good to be pleasantly plump or thick or rotund if your idea of a good life is to be healthy but in this sample of 1, 2 when we get to Chubbs, I see that what's at issue with Oompa is a wholesale indifference to what he's doing to himself.
While I'm working, trying to ballast my family against the tides of everything that gets dragged under as you stave off complete financial ruin, Oompa rolls into the family owned business anywhere between 10 am and noon. He's never there by the time I get home 5:30 and no one seems to be incensed. I can't be incensed because he's my wife's father and I can't be incensed because my wife's mother is going through a tough time reeling from a collapsed marriage. The issue of why I am even talking about it is that it seems I can't talk without triggering a battle that I just don't have in me to fight.
I already blame Chubbs and Oompa for letting their daughter (and by proxy, me) get hit with this bankruptcty. Lord knows that I can't stop the bitterness that seems to grow every time, every passing day, when I see Chubbs as I have to be the one to house this woman but to know that Oompa gets to just roll through this situation without apologizing to anyone (he hasn't), gets to participate in getting the famiy business back into the black in any fashion he wants (whenever he feels like it) and is allowed to go back to his adulterous hutch every night without reproach (no one wants to administer tough love) is beyond me.
I'm helpless.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs
It's demeaning to be so superficial and petty.
I know that and I know, further, that to demean someone based on their physical appearance is completely abhorrent. However, but, in this case, et al, I don't think I would be where I am today if it wasn't for Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs.
To begin, it all started because I married a woman who had parents that had to declare bankruptcy. That in itself isn't really an issue; it was for them, all the heartache and recriminations, the "why us?" pleading almost anytime the subject was brought up. They had owned real estate on the east side of town, apartment dwellings that housed less than stellar tenants. And by less than stellar I am talking about people who would see their house as a hotel. A place for them to treat as a temporary residence. A transient lifestyle cordoned off by 4 walls and a roof. The "investment" that never quite was only proved to be a millstone around the necks of Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs, my in-laws. They couldn't keep up with the constant upkeep, the attention that had to be paid to it from the wear and tear that seemed accelerated based on its proximity from the epicenter of crime and shennanigans which didn't help real estate values.
I didn't pay attention to their constant harping about the conditions of the location where they had rental units to tend to on a nearly daily basis. To me, the equation seemed pretty simple: have a bad investment? Get rid of it. Don't bail out a sinking ship with a dixie cup, abandon ship with your life in tact.
They chose the dixie method.
I wish I could give a play by play about the slow financial death that Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs suffered along the way towards bankruptcy, it was a lot like that scene in Cyborg with Jean-Claude Van Damme when he's holding onto that barbed wire with his family dangling precariously over a certain death, only the muscles from Brussels making the difference which proved futile, his hands excreting thick streams of cinematic blood as he fails in the process. Oompa and Chubbs just slid as slowly as anyone could as they were pulled in by the bankrputcy tractor beam. Honestly, there was no escaping it. I was witness to every gripe and finger point about what brought them to their current state.
I tried to divest any interest in what happened to them. They made their bed, they should lie in it and I was there to be supportive in the capacity of the occasional, "Wow, I heard. Sorry about that." I didn't want to be involved, quite honestly. That was their business, not mine and, more to the point, I wasn't involved. Their investments with property, their credit card debt, their outrageously high mortgage payment and the fact that the only jobs Oompa and Chubbs had was to service their investments contributed to what was the easiest decision they could make.
It was only when they were clear through their own bankruptcy and asked my wife to help co-sign on a new American Express card that my own downfall was immenient.
I know that and I know, further, that to demean someone based on their physical appearance is completely abhorrent. However, but, in this case, et al, I don't think I would be where I am today if it wasn't for Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs.
To begin, it all started because I married a woman who had parents that had to declare bankruptcy. That in itself isn't really an issue; it was for them, all the heartache and recriminations, the "why us?" pleading almost anytime the subject was brought up. They had owned real estate on the east side of town, apartment dwellings that housed less than stellar tenants. And by less than stellar I am talking about people who would see their house as a hotel. A place for them to treat as a temporary residence. A transient lifestyle cordoned off by 4 walls and a roof. The "investment" that never quite was only proved to be a millstone around the necks of Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs, my in-laws. They couldn't keep up with the constant upkeep, the attention that had to be paid to it from the wear and tear that seemed accelerated based on its proximity from the epicenter of crime and shennanigans which didn't help real estate values.
I didn't pay attention to their constant harping about the conditions of the location where they had rental units to tend to on a nearly daily basis. To me, the equation seemed pretty simple: have a bad investment? Get rid of it. Don't bail out a sinking ship with a dixie cup, abandon ship with your life in tact.
They chose the dixie method.
I wish I could give a play by play about the slow financial death that Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs suffered along the way towards bankruptcy, it was a lot like that scene in Cyborg with Jean-Claude Van Damme when he's holding onto that barbed wire with his family dangling precariously over a certain death, only the muscles from Brussels making the difference which proved futile, his hands excreting thick streams of cinematic blood as he fails in the process. Oompa and Chubbs just slid as slowly as anyone could as they were pulled in by the bankrputcy tractor beam. Honestly, there was no escaping it. I was witness to every gripe and finger point about what brought them to their current state.
I tried to divest any interest in what happened to them. They made their bed, they should lie in it and I was there to be supportive in the capacity of the occasional, "Wow, I heard. Sorry about that." I didn't want to be involved, quite honestly. That was their business, not mine and, more to the point, I wasn't involved. Their investments with property, their credit card debt, their outrageously high mortgage payment and the fact that the only jobs Oompa and Chubbs had was to service their investments contributed to what was the easiest decision they could make.
It was only when they were clear through their own bankruptcy and asked my wife to help co-sign on a new American Express card that my own downfall was immenient.
Monday, December 15, 2008
T-Minus
Pop. Pop. Pop.
My 2 year-old daughter was sitting in my lap as I leaned down to pop puffs of air into her ears. The room was quiet and so was I as I went back and forth, left ear to right ear, as he shrugged with a "Stop..." and "Do it again..."
My wife sat next to me as we both looked at the stack of white paper in front of us. Punctuated with labels that stuck out like fringes, X marking the exact spot where we were supposed to sign, being instructed to initial every page (I ended up initializing completely blank pages in the rage to push this process as fast as I could to its end) and at one point I just laughed to myself. It wasn't a real laugh if we're comparing laughs I give to a comedian versus the kind of laugh that you see in the movies, the Dark Knight has a good example, when someone who has been caught up in tomfoolery is caught but can't help but to let out a few feel good titters. I wasn't a bad guy but I sure felt like one. Our entire lives, everything that we owned, was inventoried, accounted for, written down, budgeted, marked, notated and reflected back to us in black and white honesty. Some people talk about the fragility of life and how weird that the contents of your life could fit inside a truck but it's an entirely different thing to think how your entire life could fit even easier on a pile of 8.5"x 11" squares. The mound of paperwork, on which I would later reflect, reminded me of when I had to sign a similar mountain of white goodness when I refinanced my "second" home in 2006.
It'll take a little while for me to explain why it will always be the "second" home but here is the point: I need an outlet, a semi-permeable, quasi-private forum in which to talk about where me and my family went wrong. This is a story of how we found ourselves in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Where we're, literally, headed, what I've learned and what it's like to say, "I can't afford to be in my life anymore."
My 2 year-old daughter was sitting in my lap as I leaned down to pop puffs of air into her ears. The room was quiet and so was I as I went back and forth, left ear to right ear, as he shrugged with a "Stop..." and "Do it again..."
My wife sat next to me as we both looked at the stack of white paper in front of us. Punctuated with labels that stuck out like fringes, X marking the exact spot where we were supposed to sign, being instructed to initial every page (I ended up initializing completely blank pages in the rage to push this process as fast as I could to its end) and at one point I just laughed to myself. It wasn't a real laugh if we're comparing laughs I give to a comedian versus the kind of laugh that you see in the movies, the Dark Knight has a good example, when someone who has been caught up in tomfoolery is caught but can't help but to let out a few feel good titters. I wasn't a bad guy but I sure felt like one. Our entire lives, everything that we owned, was inventoried, accounted for, written down, budgeted, marked, notated and reflected back to us in black and white honesty. Some people talk about the fragility of life and how weird that the contents of your life could fit inside a truck but it's an entirely different thing to think how your entire life could fit even easier on a pile of 8.5"x 11" squares. The mound of paperwork, on which I would later reflect, reminded me of when I had to sign a similar mountain of white goodness when I refinanced my "second" home in 2006.
It'll take a little while for me to explain why it will always be the "second" home but here is the point: I need an outlet, a semi-permeable, quasi-private forum in which to talk about where me and my family went wrong. This is a story of how we found ourselves in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Where we're, literally, headed, what I've learned and what it's like to say, "I can't afford to be in my life anymore."
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)