I thought it would be fun to check out my 401K this morning and see how I was managing to weather the storm. Maybe, I thought to myself, I had somehow managed to pick investments that were outside the crater of collapse in the market. Maybe I was actually making money.

I should have been hoping for less. I should have been hoping for "breaking even."

Instead I was greeted with this cute little summation at the bottom of my YTD statement:

Personal Rate of Return from 01/01/2008 to 09/29/2008 is -23.4%.

Well, at least I'm in my twenties and not in my sixties. At least I have youth and optimism going for me. At least, as of this very moment, I still have a job in the banking industry. Nevermind what the next few moments might bring. Nevermind the stillness surrounding me like a cloud of mosquitoes ready to attack. Nevermind anything except what I'm having for lunch today. Cheese. And lots of it.

Last night, the cork crumbled into the wine bottle, and when I tentatively poured myself a glass of wine, it was full of floating bits of cork. "Just drink it," Chris said in that irritated tone of voice with which I'm beginning to grow oh-so-familiar. "A little cork never killed anybody."

I replied, "Okay, you drink first."

Pause. "That's kind of a lot of cork."

But, if anything, we're problem solvers, and we thought about the situation long and hard before finally getting out the coffee filters. Brilliant! Albeit messy. But with the dramatic and devastating meltdown of our economy this week, we have to do what we can to conserve the funds and not waste wine. It was a solid plan that yielded great, sort of sloppy, cork-free results, and somehow I think my coffee-filtered wine made me drunker than I would have been otherwise. On what may or may not be a related note, I found myself waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and clinging to a nightmare involving David Sedaris and a skeleton, and after toweling myself off with a bit of laundry from the floor, I went to the loft to sleep naked in front of an open window.

In Which John McCain Gets Caught In A Lie To Letterman, And Everybody Has A Good Laugh

Lauren had a brain tumor the size of a lemon. She had it removed last week, and I went to see her yesterday at her mom's house. I thought for sure that she would be shaved bald, but the doctors managed to cut open her head in a very thin, precise C-shaped curve that didn't require a whole lot of hair removal. I guess I imagined that they'd just shave her bald and hack her skull open with a series of jagged knife swipes. That is how much faith I have in medical professionals.

She seemed just like her old self, and we talked about restaurants and played with her baby, the seven month old Jacob who inadvertently caused the brain tumor to balloon merely by being born. I didn't know that pregnancy could aggravate otherwise hidden brain tumors. I didn't know that you could have a gigantic brain tumor removed and then manage to talk about something other than the tumor itself. I feel that if I were to have a brain tumor removed, I would never be able to concentrate on any other topic ever again. But I am weak with a narrow focus.

The now removed lemon sized tumor was the largest of quite a few tumors that Lauren has been, and is, carrying inside her head. She has another large one behind her ear that they will take out in several months and then a couple of smaller, mostly harmless tumors that they will simply "monitor." Lauren talks about the tumors and surgeries like I might talk about a splinter. Only I would be more frantic about my splinter, closer to tears as I wondered if I might EVER get the splinter out, or if it might somehow end up in my bloodstream and KILL ME. I admire Lauren for being so casual and matter-of-fact. I truly, truly admire her.

This is fantastic. What a scoop, Palin hates cats. And even her closest friends don't know if they'll vote for her and McCain. Doesn't matter, I guess. First and foremost on their minds? The upcoming ornament exchange.

It wasn’t long before they decided to close the mall. We’d been listening to the radio since we’d arrived- the little, plastic radio normally reserved for Sunday football games and FM rock. In the laboratory where we made the glasses, we all hunched around the tinny speakers, and nobody but Margie, the eighty year old part- time optician, had anything to say. We were all in shock, each of us having found out in our own separate flashbulb moments. There was talk that the terrorists might target Chicago next, and the gorgeously ethereal skyscrapers were in the midst of emergency evacuations, their well-dressed occupants running out in the streets with cell phones attached to their face. That the Metra trains had abandoned their schedules and were all running out, not in, at top capacity. “Chicago,” Margie had murmured in her shaky, old lady voice. “That’s not far from here!” And it was funny, hearing her say this about the city that was the nucleus to our suburban atom, and we all laughed a bit too loudly.

The morning that would scorch itself into all of our memories started, for me, with dismissal. I had awoken to an alarm clock that rang with news of a plane having hit a building in New York, and as I climbed into the shower and thought about the things that I would do that day, this news slipped away from me like the water on my skin. Accidents happened all the time, and, after work today, I would maybe see if Gail wanted to go grab a drink at the bar. Classes were starting up again soon at my college; I only had precious few days of freedom left.

After stepping out of the tub and lazily brushing my teeth, I’d turned on the living room television for company. There it was, the hiss and sizzle of a burn. I stood in the living room in a grey towel, holding a comb to my tangled, rapidly drying hair, and I couldn’t walk away or sit down or breathe. I watched as the towers crumbled into ground, a mighty ocean of grey smoke rolling into the sky. The news reporter was at a loss for words, and for what seemed like an eternity, there was only silence. And then he managed to choke out something about not knowing what to say. There go the towers. That’s it, gone.

What a beautiful, sunny morning it was- a solitary vision of perfection if not for the deserted streets and the deathly quiet and the cop cars perched on corners, their lights flashing a helpless red and blue. I drove to the mall in a daze, wondering why I was bothering and what was going to happen next. The country suddenly seemed so small to me as I made the usual turns and stops. New York, DC, Chicago, LA, Seattle- I could be in any of those places in under a minute, if I really tried. I could be there right now if I just swerved right instead of left; I could be standing in New York covered with the remains of buildings and bodies and fire if I just closed my eyes and opened the door.

Our only customer of the day walked in just as we’d received the instructions to shut down and close. Businesses and lives and high finance had all screeched to a halt. Airplanes were grounded, doors were being locked, and anyone who could go home was already on their way. Nobody was thinking about acting normal or going about their business or whether or not they would make their appointments or have a pot roast for dinner in the evening. I will never forget the one customer who walked into our optical at eleven o’clock on that Tuesday in September, the one and only non-employee any of us had seen at the mall during our hour of remaining open. She wore a blue T-shirt, jeans, white sneakers, and gold-rimmed glasses. She had dull red hair cut into a bob, with wispy bangs. She was in her early forties, with rough skin and a thin, pale mouth, and she had a voice that might have been comforting during any other moment, a voice that I might have otherwise liked.

“I’m here for my appointment,” she told me, checking her watch. She was here to see the eye doctor, to sit in the doctor’s chair and choose between lenses one and two for clarity and crispness. To discuss the differences between bifocal and progressive multi-focals, to pick out new frames and have her glasses delivered and fitted within an hour, as promised. She was here to do this perfectly normal, everyday activity right now while the world was ending and while thousands of people lay dead underneath so much rubble and ash. She was going to speak calmly of not being able to read street signs in the same morning that desperate office workers had chosen to jump to their death rather than go down with a fiery building. After four planes full of people had been violently wrecked by terrorists , after everything we thought we knew was turned upside down and emptied out, she might decide to purchase sun glasses, just for fun.

The news reporters were saying that America was under attack, and this lady had driven here for her eleven o’clock appointment, checking her watch to make sure that she wasn’t late.

But that wasn’t what did it for me. I might have been able to forget this woman had she simply turned around and left after I managed to tell her that, due to what had happened today, and due to what might happen, we were being instructed to close up and go home. I might never have involuntarily memorized her face and her body and her clothes and her voice if she had just turned around and left while murmuring that she understood. Instead, she spat a reply into my face, throwing her arms up in the air in a gesture of great frustration. She said to me, “I can’t believe this. Every time I try to get stuff down, something like THIS happens.” Her day was ruined. She was pissed. And not because her husband had been in the World Trade Center or her daughter had been on a plane that crashed into the Pentagon or that no one knew what still lay ahead for the day. But because she’d have to reschedule her eye appointment. And, clearly, that was going to be a gigantic, almost unbearable, pain in the ass for this horrible woman.

After she left, we left, turning the locks behind us and mumbling that we’d probably see each other tomorrow. Our manager gave Margie a ride home; the old optician normally took the bus, but today was no day for sitting on a bench, waiting and craning a neck down the street. Everybody was so nice to each other that month. For the rest of September, and maybe part of October, we were all so kind and giving. We loved and wanted to protect our neighbors. We wrote checks and donated blood and waved American flags and volunteered and sent our fire fighters up east. We called everybody we knew. We hugged and kissed and held hands.

The following weekend, I drove into Chicago with two friends, Rob and Gail. I was thinking about my father as we headed up I-94 into the city that popped up like a cardboard cut-out. My father and I had gone for a walk around our sleepy suburban neighborhood on Tuesday night, and I’d told him how I was afraid for the future, how I couldn’t comprehend why this had happened. I looked up at the sky as we walked, and I had never seen it that way before- cloudless and blue and incomprehensively still. Word for word, I couldn’t remember exactly what my father had said to me as we cut through an empty park, but I found myself wearing the sentiment like a gown. Tragedies and attacks and disasters and secondhand losses and heartaches- these events that truly affected us only in the most peripheral of ways were the events that could change our lives, if we let them. For better, for worse, for simply taking and moving ahead.

Rob drove the car into a city that could be destroyed seemingly on a whim, that night or any other night. Gail and I were still talking about Tuesday. There was a good chance that we'd talk about Tuesday forever, about what we had seen and heard on the news. There was the newly minted widow in her twenties whose husband had sweetly looked at her on Monday night and told her that he loved her, less than twelve hours before he was gone forever. There were the images fed into unsteady, handheld camcorders, the screams in the background, the running, the wreckage, and the hazardous dust that refused to settle. And while Gail and I talked, Rob issued a harrumph, the first casually apathetic noise I’d heard in days. “Stuff like this happens all the time in other countries,” Rob had said, rolling his eyes as he pressed on the pedal. “And people think about it for about a minute and then just finish what they were doing. It’s not a big deal. Shit happens all the time.”

We drank in the city, holding our beers and staring out the windows at the buildings dressed in red, white, and blue. Gail and I were on high alert, ready to jump up and run at the first visible threat. We knew we were likely being absurd, but we’d been shaken all week, and aside from Rob and a few other blissfully unencumbered patrons, the other drinkers seemed apprehensive as well. And so much nicer than usual. There were so many more smiles and handshakes and lingering touches on shoulders and arms, and I wondered when things would get back to normal and people would start being assholes again. It wouldn’t take long, of course. Rob belched when he was ready to go, and instead of fiddling with the radio on the ride home, he slid in a CD and asked if we wanted to stop for hamburgers.

It’s been seven years. I didn’t remember that today was the day until the radio announcer on my ride to work accidentally talked through what was to be a moment of silence, of remembrance. I found myself thinking of how the path of my life didn’t really change after that day seven years ago, how my experiences and memories of the attacks are completely internal and so physically removed from my personal reality that it might very well have been a movie for me. I still did everything I would likely have done anyway- finished college, got a job, married, moved, furnished a house. I didn’t lose anything, and in the events and years that followed, I haven’t been close to anyone who went to Iraq or had an anthrax scare or had known somebody who had died that day. It was all just news and talk and fear and pictures; it was all just other people.

And yet, I couldn’t sleep that Tuesday night, or the nights that followed. I looked up at the sky for no good reason on too many beautiful blue days afterward, and sometimes when I saw a recycled image of the towers on television, I looked down thinking I might be in a towel holding a comb, my skin grown cold and my legs made of stone. I visited Ground Zero a year after the attacks, and it was terrible and actually real and made me feel ashamed because my connection to the spot was so thinly tenuous that it was, in all practicality, nonexistent. A few times in these past seven years, I thought I saw that lady whose eye appointment was frustratingly canceled due to what Rob might have called “some bad shit happening out east.” And every time I thought I saw her- two years later, four years later, six years later- I wanted to slap her across the face and say, “How could you be so awful?”

But then she might reply, “How could you?”

I might tell her that my dad was right, and that it is the events that we aren’t actually a part of that have an unimaginable power to quietly change us. A bridge collapsing in Minneapolis, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, a mass shooting at a Virginia Tech. They are absorbed by the observers, and we hold them and hide them somewhere inside us for reference and for feeling human and for better or for worse, for taking and moving ahead.

The main story right now on the Chicago Tribune's website is called "City of Champions?" with a full descriptive excerpt:

Last week was not a good one. We know this. But a new day dawns. The Cubs are back at it. So are the Sox, hoping to carry on without their excellent left fielder. We're just a good Bears team away from being Sports City, U.S.

Off to the side, three stories down, is a story entitled "Why The Earth Could End When New Collider Fires Up." It details how it there is a slight possibility that the world could be swallowed by a black hole on Tuesday when they turn on a particle collider in Europe. There is no descriptive excerpt, however. You have to click the link to find out how the world might end. On Tuesday. This Tuesday. And yet, the main story is about Chicago's loser sports team.

Somebody do something.

Because we are good Americans, Chris and I went out today and bought a relatively expensive item that we realistically do not need. This after a mini-nervous breakdown this week when I paid the bills and realized that, after all of our "fixed expenses," we have roughly $15 available for fun. But, as an American, we have access to countless credit cards with ridiculous limits. I mean, really, Citi-Card, $20,000 is not only completely unnecessary, it's also a tad bit irresponsible on your part.

Anyway, we went out and bought a lap top so that we can compute not only upstairs on our two separate computers but also *downstairs* during moments when we are too lazy to run upstairs and Google things during arguments and smart TV shows and games of Scrabble when Chris tries to convince me that "poopwear" is a word. I don't even know if "lazy" is a strong enough word to describe us in this situation. Chris, what's a non-existent word for "super lazy"? Pooplazy?

Anyhow, now we have 1.5 computers in this house per occupant, and while this fact kind of disgusts me, I would be a big fat liar if I didn't also admit that... this is nice. Computing at the "breakfast bar" while I have one eye on the roasted potatoes and one eye on the TV. Which leaves no eyes for the computer. I'm a killer typist. Also, I will soon be fatter than you've ever seen me before - maybe I'll hit 120?- because running up and down the stairs to Google the occasional recipe or large vocabulary word in an arty Netflix movie was the only exercise that I was getting. I suppose now I'll have to take up pilates.

I've been trying to watch the RNC, since I so faithfully watched the DNC last week. Thought I'd do a little compare and contrast. I don't think I can do it tonight, though- it makes my mouth taste sour, my stomach churn, my skin grow hot with indignation. Also, have you seen the lunatics packed into the stadium? I've never seen so many ugly hats, American flag themed shirts, and big rowdy buttons in my entire life. I don't seem to remember these kinds of people at the DNC....

I do think Sarah Palin did a good job delivering the speech "they" gave her. MSN today called it "electrifying." I wouldn't go that far, but she did hold her own, even despite that dopey accent that people in the ultra cold states always seem to have. That doesn't mean that she should be Vice President, though. Or President, should they get elected and Oldy McOld kicks it. Sigh. Stupid two party system....

As long as we're talking about Palin, I'll leave you with an excerpt from an article entitled "Palin's True North" in the Opinion section of the New York Times:

She is, though, a very recognizable Alaskan.

Among Alaskans, drunken driving, teenage pregnancy, shooting wildlife out of season and courting an independent political party whose founder once said, “the fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” are not disqualifying issues. They’re dinner-table stories.

Every home seems to have a freezer in the garage stuffed with moose meat and 10 pounds of alder-smoked chinook. Owning a small amount of marijuana is protected by the privacy clause of the Alaska constitution, the courts have ruled.

A bush pilot, flying low over a glacier in a wicked snowstorm, once asked me to reach into his glove compartment for a map. A flask of whiskey fell out, and he took a swig – without missing a beat.

But what many of us find, um, memorable, the rest of America may see as alarming, or at least strange. The CBS news survey on Tuesday, taking into account the Palin nomination, showed Obama with a 14-point lead among women. And a fresh Gallup poll suggests that the Palin pick has not helped McCain with Democratic or independent women, to date. It’s hurt.

Shooting wolves out of airplanes is something Palin backs with zest. But most Americans have never seen a wolf, let alone considered shooting one from a Piper Cub.

Never start a sentence like this when speaking to your boss:

I don't want to tell you how to do your job, but...