Well, here I am. Today I start my blog. I've been thinking about it for a long time but I thought that since it was the first day of a month, I'd start something new. I almost put it off, but then I had an experience that made me want to get some feelings out so I decided to go ahead and start. Maybe it's a good thing that I write about it. Maybe it's not. One way or the other, though, I will get some feelings out and maybe I will feel better.

I thank you for stopping your rushing world a little to worry about people on the other side. This senseless tragedy scarred the Mumbaikar permanently. The warm camaraderie and gregariousness that was a aprt of this bustling city is no more. No more too the faceless disregard of its teeming crowds - we are suspicious and touchy now.

Personally, its bleeding tentacles touched all three of us in our family. I had three of the victims come to our hospital for treatment. Two were walking wounded, but the third was a brave man who lost his life in the course of duty. My daughter worked for one of the hotel chains affected, those who perished were known to her, one was even a young boy who had trained with her. My son had a good friend whose father was staying in that hotel, after three days of agony they knew that he was one of those dead.

Life does go on though, even the survivors have perforce to try and put that behind them, but community or country specific distrust and suspicion cannot be erased. We end up, each isolated, in our paranoid cocoons.

I agree with you whole-heatedly - I mean whole-heartedly! However I have found one breed of beings that is more irritating than robots or machines. I am talking of the automated parrots that they use at call centers now, that spout phrases like "May I put you on hold" - that one is good for 25 minutes of your call spent listening to a reedy snatch of music played over and over and over. Or "sorry for the inconvenience" - you so are not sorry at all, you ... dummy parrot, you. If you were, you would try to find a solution beyond the system being conveniently 'down'. How is it 'down' anytime I call? I told one of them that I wondered why they felt it necessary to have humans spout the same mechanical excuses - would not a voice recording do? Punch 1 for regrets, 2 for excuses, and 3 to be put on interminable hold!

Hello,

I am in the 31 Day Challenge too and I thought I would stop by and give your blog a read.

I love the way you closed this entry, "We are more than the sum of our parts; we are the sum of our hearts." Very nice!


Read later...

ALice

Thank you, Deb.
Thanks for your email, too ...
- Sonali

Oh, Deborah! What a thing to go through! An accident is bad enough, but at the same intersection ... I'm so sorry. I've been reading through your blog backwards and see you're still struggling with recovery.

My prayers are with you and your daughter. Poor baby. Does she drive still?

Ah, I had that problem with a rental that clearly had a sticker on the windshield saying NO SMOKING. People do it anyway, and not everyone notices. Only we allergic notice. Really, they have a right to smoke but only if it doesn't interfere with our rights not to smoke or smell it.

CONGRATS!

Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving!

Glad she landed okay. Hope things go well from here on in. To hear tell, flying within the U.S. can more often than not, turn into a nightmare very quickly. Connections are terribly mis-managed-even international ones.

This is a mystery to me, as well. That really would have irked me, as a non-smoker, and a public health researcher into the bargain. In New Zealand, they have designated rentals that are non-smoking, and you have to pay a bond-refunded if the vehicle is returned 'smokefree' because of the huge cleaning cost involved in eliminating the tobacco smell from the air-conditioning system.

My other question is, was the same woman smoker responsible for the smoky vehicles, or was that just a co-incidence. If so, she's doing her clients no favors...

I'll take $200k. I could get a house with that kinda cash.

And I dunno. I mean, on the one hand, I don't want to be like "sorry, you didn't read the fine print/didn't know what you were getting into/didn't do your research, go live out on the streets now" but...these people made bad decisions too. People want stuff all the time that they can't afford, but want doesn't equal need. This is as much a cultural problem as it is anything else. The sense of entitlement needs to go.

Victims? Without knowing each individual story, I have a hard time considering them victims. While we all make poor financial decisions at some point in our lives, buying a house shouldn't be an endeavor you take on lightly and/or without some measure of research. I think everyone is at fault here. I mean, just because some dude came to our apartment door one day and said "I can get you a house" doesn't mean we jumped on the idea (and that did happen).

The information is there if you look. The banks and lenders assumed no one knew what they were doing, but we can't point fingers at them entirely. We need to know what we're doing, too. It took me a day to do some research on predatory lending not too long ago when I was preparing to write an article. It's at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/973446/10_signs_of_a_predatory_lender.h...



But yeah, I'll take $200,000. That would definitely put my confidence back into things, and you do make sense.