Various things…
Ok. it’s been a while since my last post, so I’ll be covering various things in this one…
First, my wife’s friend knew this girl who’s basically a train wreck…and an idiot. The thing is, she has a freakin’ masters degree, and yet she makes these rambling blog posts riddled with a consistent flow of misspellings. For example, she spells the word excellent “excallant” and the word response “responce”. She’s also constantly misusing the word “then” in place of the word “than”.
The thing that irritates me the most about this is that she has a masters degree. She has a piece of paper saying that she’s smart! The sad thing is, I actually am smart, but I don’t have a piece of paper saying that, so I can’t get jobs that are as good or as lucrative as she can. How is that right? What kind of a world do we live in where a piece of paper is the be all and end all of a representation of a person’s intelligence? I know lots of morons who have degrees, and lots of really smart people who don’t. It’s not about the paper, it’s about what you know and how you utilize what you know and adapt to various problems and situations. That’s real intelligence, and it’s the foundation of common sense. Being able to memorize enough to pass a test once in a while, only to forget most of it by the time the next test comes around doesn’t make you smart, it just means you’re good at taking tests. How the hell she ever got a master’s degree spelling like that though, I have no idea. It really says a lot about the current state of our educational systems.
Ok, now on to something else…
I’ve been hearing and seeing these commercials about investing in gold for years now. They keep saying how the value of the dollar keeps dropping, but the value of gold keeps going up. Well that sounds good now doesn’t it? Hey I’ll use my worthless money to go buy this hunk of metal to secure my financial security in the future…
Now, as I see it, and I’m no financial wizard mind you, in fact, I have very little knowledge about finance and how all of that stuff works, but…
Ok, you buy gold with money. The value of the money goes down, so it’s not surprising that it would increase the amount of money it takes to buy gold. The value of the gold hasn’t really gone up all that much, if at all. It’s just that the money’s worth less, so it takes more of it to buy the same amount of gold later on.
Now, if you buy gold and suddenly it’s worth more money that has less value, what have you really gained from it? If the money is worth less but you have more of it, then you’re no better off than you were before. Add to that the fact that if the financial system fails completely, all you’re really left with are some hunks of metal that aren’t really good for much of anything except to be used to melt down for jewelry or to coat electronic parts and connectors. To the average person though, it would be worthless. Who’s going to trade food or services or anything else for a little hunk of metal when they have a family to feed? Gold in and of itself has no real value other than the value people place on it. So if the financial system collapses, you basically just bought yourself a paperweight. Even if you sell it to other countries for their currency that does actually have value, unless you’re going to move there you still have to convert it back to dollars, which will leave you in the same boat you were before.
Honestly, the best way to protect your assets is to vote out politicians who have destroyed the economy with their policies and bailouts and who’ve run the deficit through the roof to pay for pork and social programs we don’t need while pandering to unions and special interests in order to buy votes, all the while taxing us to death in every possible way they can think of. We have to elect people who are financially intelligent and who are able to make a budget and actually stick to it, like the rest of us have to, and have that budget include a good amount of money for paying down the national debt. Until we have that, the dollar will continue to devalue and we’ll all pretty much be screwed.
Next thing…
We’re going to see Def Leppard on October 24th, which pretty much drained the last of our credit but is about the only thing that’s come along in a long time now that would actually make us happy. Normally I’d be really excited about this, but something really annoying happened to me when I went to buy the tickets. We were actually able to buy them pre-sale because we’re registered on the IC tickets website. So when they came on sale I jumped on them. Section F1 is right at the front of the stage, and F2 is behind F1. So I went to buy tickets for F1, and 30 seconds after the link went live, they were sold out and all it would offer me was F2. Now this was just pre-sale, and not all the seats in the section were offered during pre-sale, but I’d like to know how someone bought up all the F1 pre-sale tickets that fast? Now, here’s the part that really pissed me off. My wife Sharon found a bunch of F1 tickets for that show available on Ebay later that morning. So basically, we couldn’t get the seats we really wanted because some ass hole scalper bought up all the good tickets and sold them at a profit on Ebay. I know scalping is illegal in some places, but it’s not here, and it really pisses me off that people do this. So I had to wait till Saturday to get the tickets, and I ended up getting them in F1 about 7 rows back from where we were last time, all because of the god damn scalpers. If I could get my hands on those bastards, I’d show them what scalping really means. I’m still really excited about seeing Def Leppard again, but this whole situation has really left a bad taste in my mouth. If the Idaho Center had any decency, they’d cancel all the tickets available on Ebay and make them available to people who really want them for themselves. Unfortunately, that would mean they’d have to actually care, which obviously they don’t.
Lastly…
I’ve been going through a lot of depression again lately. Three years of our lives have really been stolen from us and our lives have been diminished in ways I can’t even begin to explain. I’m not going to go into detail about it, but basically it’s taken a heavy, heavy toll on both of us and made everything really miserable, and it’s my fault for trusting someone and putting us in a huge financial debt I shouldn’t have. It’s really taken all the joy out of life for me, and just lately it’s really been hitting both of us hard, but especially me, because it’s really my fault for getting us into it. I really just don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried to think of ways to make money, but can’t come up with anything. My skills as a tech have waned and I can’t afford to build myself a new computer to get my skills back up to speed. My writing has gotten me nothing, and I’m not really qualified for any other kind of work, even if there were jobs available for me to go after, which there isn’t. Hell, Winco just had 250 jobs at their new distribution center open up and over five thousand people applied for them. That’s how bad the job market is. So I really just don’t know what to do. That’s why I haven’t really made any new posts in a while. It’s hard to think of stuff to talk about when I feel like this. Will things ever change? I really wonder sometimes. I’d like to think they can’t stay like this forever, but for three years now, nothing’s changed. I don’t know if it will, but I’d like to think so. Hoping for something to change and believing that it can’t stay like this forever are about the only things I have left to hold on to, but even that hope is waning. I feel horrible because my depression is causing my wife to have depression too, but I’m really just at a loss as to what to do to fix our situation, and it’s really killing me. 
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