Kevin's Weblog

This is a somewhat belated Xmas / New Years / what-have-you review. We spent 10 days back on the East Coast braving cold, crowds, holidays, and nearly-constant TV.

Our arrival was a bit of a shock as the temperatures dropped 20 degrees from when we had checked the weather reports the night before leaving. It was cold enough to snow almost all the time we were there, but the weather did not accomodate, leaving us to wonder what the point of cold weather is if you aren’t at least getting some pretty snow out of it.

We had our second annual winter solstice dinner. While it is nice that we can now safely label it a tradition, it was a bit disappointing because not so many of my old friends from the area were able to make it. Also, there was a bit of confusion all around over just what this family tradition is going to be all about. I suspect that will gradually work itself out over the next couple years though.

Christmas itself was also a bit odd this year. S and I have been thinking and talking a lot over the last year about clutter, materialism, consumerism, simplicity, happiness, and, of course, parenting. We had some discussion with our families recently about our feelings, and our desires to approach the holidays as something other than a time to give everyone a bunch of “stuff” that they don’t necessarily want or need. We had somewhat limited success. It turned out that my mother and brother actually needed some things (he a new set of tires, she some work around the house) and we were happy to give them those things. However, we ourselves ended up collecting a smallish, but still annoying, pile of stuff that we didn’t really want all that much. I sort of blame ourselves, though, for not being explicit enough about alternatives to “stuff” to give us. I intended to put a list of charities I like on my “wishlist”, but didn’t get to it in time. I also like Nathan’s idea of sort-of adopting a needy family for the holiday season, but again wasn’t organized enough to pursue it. Of course, we have, over and over, suggested “come over and see us” or “come over and babysit” as something we would like.

Speaking of which, this is the first year that the little one is old enough to start understanding this whole give-getting thing (not so sure about gift-giving, although she did bring us home a nice painted-herself candle lamp from pre-school a couple weeks ago). We tried to be pretty explicit about our guidelines, but we were still unhappy with the outcome. Of course, that’s at least partly because our guidelines were fairly frequently ignored. To be fair, she didn’t get an obscene pile of gifts (in fact, when we actually inventoried, it was significantly less than we thought), but given that she already has too many toys and too many books and enough clothes and goddammit-we-want-less-clutter, it still upset us.

It’s also probably going to take a couple weeks to recover from the television barrage of our vacation. My mother seems to have either changed her habits, or taken note of our past complaints, and at least there the television in the living room was off most of the time we were there. Upstairs in my brother’s room it seemed to run almost 24-7. And, everyone else we visited seemed to need the TV on constantly as well. In the case of S’s relatives, at extremely high volume too boot. (Ostensibly to “test out” the brand-new extremely big television that replaced, in the course of the 24 hours we were there, the merely quite big television.) End result is that we have had to put a lot of energy into re-enforcing that in our household we do not watch TV constantly.

There is probably a lot more I could say as a result of this trip, on topics related to consumerism and our attempts to find our type of happiness in our household, but this post is long enough already. Maybe I’ll dump some of those further thoughts out some time in the upcoming weeks.

I don’t think I’ve ever given a pointer to Talking Points Memo here. Well, there you go. Definitely recommended reading for the left-leaning and middle-of-the-road. Lately he’s talked a lot about the manufacture of the Social Security “crisis”, and there’s some good words today. There’s also a little bit about the (usually rhetorical) question, “Don’t you think people are smart enough to manage their own money?”. Marshall takes a pass on actually answering that question, but it does seem fairly obvious that the answer is “no”.

Depending on which study you look at, somewhere between 35 and 70% of people cash out their 401(k) when they change jobs. Most of them are only putting a couple percent of their income in in the first place. They don’t know what they are invested in, or how much they have invested, and they only time they seem to be interested is when they want to take a loan out against their retirement savings (this according to S’s aunt who works in a brokerage office).

Maybe it isn’t politic to point it out, but it seems to me that the whole point of a system like Social Security is to protect people both from the fluctuations of the market, and from their own poor savings and investment decisions.