The Great Battle of BoA 2011

In a nutshell: I expected a mortgage payment to come out that didn't. I called BoA and a representative named William told me that it wasn't coming and if I didn't make that payment then I would most likely be beset with a plague of frogs or murdered in my sleep or something. So I made the payment with him.

Two mortgage payments came out the next day and thus began the great BoA Battle of 2011.

Let me explain. No, there's not enough time. Let me summarize. BoA would not return the second payment until they were absolutely sure that my bank would not return the funds since the second mortgage payment put us into overdraft. A copy of a statement showing clearly that the funds had posted and cleared was not adequate. After three days of conversation with various BoA representatives, it became clear that they were not going to give that money back until I managed to dredge up the corpse of John Pierpont Morgan himself, reanimate his long dead flesh and recorded a youtube of him in which he assured BoA that he done spent that money already and couldn't give it back.

Old dead JP's bank, it's worth mentioning, did me a solid and returned the money pretty quick once I got a hold of someone there.

That positive experience notwithstanding, the whole thing was scary and frustrating. At some point in my various conversations with Melody and Elizabeth at BoA, it became crystal clear that I was completely powerless in this situation. BoA has processes, by gum, and these processes are designed to make sure that BoA keeps as much of your money as possible. And more, these processes are set up so that it is impossible to do anything but rigorously adhere to them. To wit: I could talk to someone in the claims department. But I couldn't talk to someone in the return-the-money department. No one could. The person who'd actually do the wire transfer cannot be spoken to because there's a chance that some odious weakness like compassion might rear up thus separating BoA from some of my money.

A few people have sent me this story about a couple who was foreclosed upon by BoA despite having paid cash for their home. On the funny tip, some awesome judge and lawyer got together and allowed the couple to foreclose on BoA. On the less funny tip, BoA initiated foreclosure proceeding on a home they didn't hold a mortgage on. In a sensible world, the only thing you'd call that is attempted theft. Of someone's fucking HOUSE!

These banks are too big. And we are completely powerless against them. It'd be nice if some intrepid young congressman would start doing something about it, but they're too busy calling Elizabeth Warren a socialist.

Weiners

That was disappointing, wasn't it? Anthony Weiner was my favorite! I loved his fight and his politics. I loved how smart and funny and cool he came off. But sending unsolicited pictures of his cock to random women? That's just so creepy!

And so STUPID! Tweeting pictures of his junk to a woman he'd never met? Was he drunk? He must have been drunk.

That said, why would anyone send an unsolicited picture of their cock to a woman? Is it possible to get drunk enough to think that's a good idea? I ask you, be-penised Americans, does there come a time when you glance down and think, "Hey! Here's my penis! Isn't it pretty? I'd quick better share its magnificence, photographically, with a woman."

Because if you do, I think it's behest upon me to inform you that women are far less impressed with your junk than you are. Frankly, and I think I speak for the sisterhood-at-large, taken out of context, penises are kind of ridiculous. I think it was Elaine Benes who wisely said, "I don't know how you walk around with those things."

Context is everything. And just to be perfectly clear, Twitter is not the right context. Nor is texting. Seriously: put it away and wait for an appropriate moment.

And the right moment will NEVER arise over Twitter.

Oh, Anthony Weiner. Sigh.

Coming out of Retirement - Plus a Post on the Moral Case for Atheism

I retired this blog peremptorily. It was a mistake. I'm going to keep my baby steps blog and use it for writing posts, but I think I need a brain dump one. Especially when there's something I've been noodling on for a few days. Like my own atheism.

Atheist is a loaded, scary word isn't it? I confess that when I hear it, I still feel threatened. For a girl raised in a good, Catholic home like mine, "atheist" still feels a little like something hanging out under your bed, ready to getcha as soon as you let your guard down.

But I'm an atheist. And I've been noodling for a while on the moral case for it. Because morality is the reason why I finally gave up cowardly agnoticism and embraced (as Dan Savage calls it) principled atheism.

Here's the skinny: I didn't reject God (although god makes less and less sense to me as I go on). I rejected moral absolutism. I embraced getting along with other people. If God's out there telling you the right thing to do, there's always the chance that the right thing to do becomes the thing God says is the right thing to do. Stop. Period. I'm not a bigot: God says it's a sin to be gay. I don't hate women: God's the one who says she's a whore.

There are, of course, a whole honking lot of people who interpret the will of God thoughtfully and with an eye to getting along with the rest of us earth-walkers. I'd wager a healthy majority of the church going people of the world are tolerant, respectful people. But I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about God.

The very notion of Divinity means that there is an absolute right, and absolute right leads to absolute authority. I'm a godless democrat and a wannabe socialist. I want to live in a world where the will of the majority and the rights of the minority are privileged equally and above all. There's no room for absolute authority there.

My philosophy in a nutshell: If you let go of God, all you're left with is people. And that's the point when people, including people outside your tribe, start to matter more.

I wish that John Lennon song hadn't gotten somehow to be so hokey. Because it's a radical notion. Imagine (ugh...still hokey... I wish I knew who to blame for that. Is it OK if I blame Sharon Stone?)

Blog Retirement

I'm retiring this here blog. You've been a swell 7 readers. Please join me over at the new spot.

The problem with democrats is....

I went out to dinner on my birthday with some good friends to my favorite restaurant. As we scooped up various delicious comestibles with oddly spongy read the talk turned, as it will, to politics.

Midway through the conversation, a couple of the people I was dining with were explaining to me why Barack Obama was sure to lose the 2012 election.

We live in an America where the G.O.P led House just passed a budget killing Medicare. We live in an America where the Republican senator from New York held actual hearings because of his racist perception of some nebulous threat of Islam in America. Speaking of Islam, Republicans from Oklahoma recently passed a law banning Shari'a law because Oklahoma was thisclose to electing an Imam as governor and mandating burquas. We live in an America where women's reproductive freedom is under attack. We live in an America where Republican fiscal responsibility means taking money away from poor and middle-class people and giving it over to corporations.

And all my progressive friends ever want to talk about is why Barack Obama, who has had the most legislatively successful first two years in modern presidential history, who has advanced a genuinely progressive agenda, is such a disappointment.

I'm willing to throw some good money down that Barack Obama not only wins in 2012, but wins easily. The only legitimate candidate that the GOP can seem to find is Mitt Romney and he seems shockingly willing to run against his own record in order to pander to the loud and reactionary Tea Party wing of this party.

But, in the meantime, it would be nice if we on the left could invest some real energy exposing the madness of the modern GOP - their rank and file commitment to racist and sexist politicking while reaching their hands into the back pocket of every American who isn't G.E. or Viacom instead of whining about how disappointed we are in the president who actually PASSED healthcare reform and is willing to use the word "abortion" as something women have a right to.

Laney Gets Her History a Little Confused... But, Unlike Glenn Beck She Accepts Corrections

In the car on the way home after dinner, out of the clear blue sky, Laney says... no, she pronounces as though she's speechifying in front of a classroom:

Martin Luther King, back in slave times, told black people to stop riding the bus.

Don't worry - I clarified and explained where she'd gotten her facts a little mixed up. We talked about how Martin Luther King didn't live in slave times and what Jim Crow laws were and how deeply messed up the rules were back then. It was, as the Prez would say, a teachable moment.

Still, I thought the way she strung those words together was kind of hilarious.

Statues and Marriage

I love statues. I wish we still lived in a world where people built statues of great leaders. The problem is that we seem to have lost our ability to see leadership since we can't look without the lens of politics. But that's depressing and not really what I wanted to write about.

This here is a statue I love. I pass it every morning, and Laney and I say "Good morning, General Grant."



One morning recently, Don was driving in with us. And it was winter and snowy and when we passed (and greeted) General Grant, I remarked to Don how lonely and sad I thought he looked up there. I told him that I thought that statues of great men like that underscore how lonely it must have been to be General Grant.

Don replied that he didn't see anything sad at all; that, instead, he thought it looked like General Grant was up there protecting us and looking out for us. He finds statues like that really comforting.

You know, I think that might sum up a lot about how we work as a married couple. We have a lot in common. We agree a lot about how we want to raise our daughter. We have remarkably similar political proclivities (y'all, if anything, Don is even more liberal than me... I swear). We like baseball but not as much as we used to. And we both find ourselves re-developing a passion for the Bulls. But we often see the world in strikingly different ways.

I think this works well for us, because we each help the other one to see the world in a slightly different way. It keeps us on our toes. And, you know, one of our vows was to stay interested in each other. It helps that we see things differently.

Other times, though, it's annoying. Like when we get into bed at night and decide we want to watch TV. Don likes to put horrifying war documentaries from the military channel on because he finds the boring voices of the people talking about whatever atrocity is being discussed soothing. I, on other hand, prefer mindless TV shows about vampires or forensic anthropologists. It all comes down to tone vs. content for late night TV for us.

We should probably just read books before bed instead.