The Best American Poetry

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Romney's Secret Jobs Potion

A bar survives as a small business because people come in and buy drinks. How does that happen? Well, it might be because people sense a hip vibe, it might be because the beer is cheap, it might be because all the Yankees fans in the neighborhood have decided to watch the tragic series against the Tigers together on one particular flat-screen TV, it might be because the bar gives out that terrific goat cheese thing at happy hour, it might be because everybody knows your name. Any of these and more might make a bar successful.

None of these have anything to do with tax policy. Or regulation. Instead, they have to do with the existence of customers—i.e., people.

So if you’re talking about “creating jobs” or “helping the middle class,” you ought to be thinking about people. Why did the rabbi and the priest walk into a bar? They both had enough money in their pockets to splurge on a cocktail or pitcher of beer or glass of Bordeaux or whatever it is clergy order when they’re in a joke. And that money came from a job, in their case, a job with an organization that pays no taxes.

The tattered idea that lowering tax rates for business will increase hiring is absurd. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia pays $0 in tax, and yet closed St. Mary of the Assumption, along with some smaller parishes and many schools, this past summer. That means not only an out-of-work pastor, but teachers, secretaries, janitors, clerks and administrators all losing their jobs. The Roman Catholic Church’s taxes couldn’t get any lower; what the enterprise lacked was parishioners—i.e., customers—i.e., people.

And regulation? Well, The Catholic Church, along with other religious institutions, is exempt from many regulations, particularly the ones that promote equality and fairness by forbidding discrimination. For example, in Iowa, a business is not allowed to hire or fire someone “on the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, national origin, religion, or disability,” unless it is "[a]ny bona fide religious institution or its educational facility, association, corporation or society.”

But most regulation exists to keep people from harm, not from injustice. Rules against serving toxic food or dumping slag in the drinking water or selling cars that don’t have functional braking systems are good for people—i.e., customers—and, indirectly, for businesses, because they keep customers—i.e., people—alive. The reason bars have to get liquor licenses is to protect those customers—i.e., people—from a substance that can be very dangerous if not properly handled. A dead customer will not boost revenues. A dead customer won’t enhance that hip vibe. A dead customer won’t bring his friends in next April, when the Yankees’ chances look pretty good again.

O burdensome regulations! O burdensome taxes! In Mitt Romney’s Bar & Grill, he’s pouring a secret jobs potion that’s going to jump-start our economy without even a sideways glance at the actual human beings behind economic transactions like ordering a Fuzzy Navel. The only people in his post-Citizens United wo rldview are corporations, who will pay less tax and follow fewer rules. To make up for that generous gift, he’ll slash “wasteful” government spending on such whatchacallems as: 

• teachers
• inspectors
• auditors
• analysts
• secretaries
• scientists
• researchers

Prepare to get fired, bureaucratic slackers, at which point, you’ll cease to be a customer—i.e., person. But don’t worry, that small business called St. Mary’s, just down the block from your out-of-work ass is sure to use its windfall tax break and freedom from regulation to hire more priests and nuns, folks who don’t need the contraception not covered in their health insurance. Ask your parents to send you to Divinity School. You’ll clean up in that libertarian dreamscape, that model of trickle-down economics, that no-tax, low-regulation utopia where the secret jobs potion flows freely through every empty pew.

 

 

 

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: You Had Your Chance, Job Creators

The feast of the wealthy upon the little guy should long be over and we should have moved on to after-dinner drinks: tax hikes in gleaming snifters for the country club set; for the rest of us, a minimum-wage hike and jobless benefits, lifted to our lips and kissed like the whipped cream on an Irish coffee. Yet the little guy, despite his morsel size, is still being battered, fried up and served with a side of frozen fear to an already obese elite. That glob of fear on the plate is that the superrich, poor fragile creatures, won’t create our jobs if we ask them to contribute to the upkeep of our country.

The Bush tax cuts, a boondoggle for those that already gots, were first enacted in 2001, over a decade ago. These senseless giveaways have not only remained in place, but been fattened up for the fattest among us, wallet-wise, all in the hope that those grotesquely wealthy people will use their tax refunds to create jobs. Ten years later, our country had roughly 3 million fewer jobs. But the superrich keep getting richer.

The “job creators” theory has been tasted, re-tasted, tasted yet again—still no jobs.

It’s easy to see why. Imagine earning $22 Million in 365 days. (Almost half of all Americans make less than $25,000 per year.) That comes to $60,274.00 per day. How would you spend over $60,000 in one day, then wake up and do it again the next day, day after day, including holidays and weekends, for a whole year? Sure, you could buy some big ticket items, a Maserati here, a home in La Jolla there, but you’re probably not going to buy hundreds of Maseratis or resort get-aways. Nor will you necessarily create a lot of jobs if you do. For consumption to drive an economy—and ours is consumer-driven—you need masses of people buying masses of Fords and Chryslers, not the 1% buying a handful of fancy imports. At $16,000, the 2012 Dodge Dart, a modest compact, is out of reach for that 48.1% of Americans earning less than $25,000 per year.

“No,” say the defenders of the rich getting richer. Wealthy people create jobs by investing in new companies or in the expansion of old ones, not by consuming stuff themselves. Unfortunately, neither the behavior of so-called investors nor that of the businesses they allegedly invest in fits with this argument. Wealthy people spend less than 2% of their money investing in new companies. Moreover, companies themselves don’t want to expand, even though they already have the cash to do so, without any investors. The reason they are not hiring, if we are to believe them, is that there’s no one to buy the extra stuff they’d produce. Remember, almost half of us are making less than $25,000 per year. We can’t afford more stuff. We can’t afford the stuff we already have, which is why our standard of living has been going down.

So Job Creators, you had your chance. Yes, you. And who is this “you”?  This “you” who makes $22 Million? Gee, looks like Mitt Romney made that much in 2010, most of it from Bain Capital, which he “retired” from 10 years earlier. What if, instead of paying him, Bain Capital had hired two people every day of the year at a salary of $30,000? They’d have created 730 jobs. But they didn’t do that. Like our tax system, Bain gave the money to a rich guy, who promptly stashed it overseas in “blind” trusts that invested in his own kid’s start-up business, or in the hedge fund of one of his campaign supporters. True, 2 jobs were created, but they were hardly the kind of jobs that would fuel a national recovery.

Job Creators, you had your chance. Now give us the money, in the form of higher wages and a federally mandated jobs program, and we’ll give recovery a try. We’ll check back with you in 10 years, to make sure you, your son and your billionaire campaign contributor are still okay.

 

APOLLONIA: Greetings from Sifnos by John Hennessy

 

 SIFNOS (c) IAN MacLELLAN

Greetings from Sifnos, Greece, an island in the Western Cyclades, quiet sibling to the flashier and better known Santorini and Mykonos.  Before I arrived this summer for my tenth return trip, like everyone else I was worried about the economy. How were my friends and acquaintances here handling the Draconian austerity measures Germany insists on imposing? Would Greece quit the Eurozone, default on its loans, return to the drachma? Part of me certainly hoped so: to this outside observer, the currency switch in 2002 had always seemed much better for the rich, worse for the middle and working class, another way for the wealthy to loot the country—as their American fellows do. (Don’t tell me about Greeks evading taxes until Mitt Romney, who may be our next president, releases his tax records.)  In 2002, prices of everyday goods and services soared to fit the Euro, but wages for workers stayed low, still tied to drachma rates.

The tourism industry took a hit then, too, as fewer middle class Europeans could afford the hotel rates and meal costs, the hikes in airfares and airport security fees. Athens and the islands were quieter. Even the backpackers from the Antipodes and North America stopped coming in their high-spirited droves, seeking out cheaper beach spots in Turkey and Vietnam.

While international tourism had begun to pick up again in the last ten years, Sifnos is close enough to Piraeus—three hours by high speed ferry—to be popular with Greeks, especially wealthy Athenians. Last summer you noticed their absence, despite the many French (more posey swan-dives from the rocks, less bouzouki-driven pop music, no p.d.a.) who seem to be trying to take their place. Clearly it wasn’t this clan of French who coined the phrase joie de vivre. Although I felt positive about sticking to my plan to return to Greece, no matter what happened in the election on June 17th and its aftermath, part of me worried I’d fill with self-reproach: What kind of opportunist takes a vacation in a country on the brink of fiscal collapse?

But I find instead that as you move away from Athens, particularly Syntagma Square, ground zero for the protests against the austerity measures, people are reluctant to talk to visitors about the suffering. Even my good friend Helena, who is sorting out her mother’s finances, came home from a meeting with the tax officer mostly keeping mum. She did say that she’ll try to sell some property, that the real-estate tax hikes are ridiculous, impossible to meet. But what’s really killing everyone right now is the fee schedule for electric service, which takes a page from the loan shark’s book: every six months everyone—no matter how little electricity one consumes—has to pay a “connection fee”; collecting revenues through utilities is yet another way to make the working and middle class pay, another way to avoid the graduated income tax—which puts the burden on the rich. Helena mostly hinted at this with a series of small jokes and ironic nods, and I filled in the gaps. Hardly what we’d call in New Jersey, where I grew up, complaint.

Greece will survive. Chin up. The sense I get in the Cyclades is that after more than four thousand years of negotiation, of colonizing and being colonized, withstanding attacks from within and without by Ionians, Samians, Minoans, Romans, Venetians, Ottomans, Nazis, bankers and every other form of pirate, they must be right to be if not optimistic then stoic. That hasn’t stopped me from asking questions, of course.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MacLELLAN

     From all of the news articles I’ve read lately, three documents have helped me understand the political/economic situation in Greece these days, and here they are:

 

Arianna Huffington’s New York Times editorial from May 13, 2012, “Greek Tragedy”:

(Huffington makes clear that the Greeks refuse to mortgage the future of their children, so the austerity measures will never be acceptable to most of them. Read this article and then consider our willingness, in the United States, to allow our children, our young people, our college students, to go fifty, one hundred, even two hundred thousand dollars into debt before they receive their degrees.)

John Lanchester’s New Yorker Comment from June 18, 2012, “Greece vs. the Rest”

The third document is an email I received from an old friend who, among other things, is a Hellenic Studies professor:

“The situation in Greece is unbelievable and I avoid Athens at all costs.  I just moved back to the US after living in France for four years, during which time I went to Greece often -- but for most trips I flew direct from Paris to Crete and didn't stop in Athens at all; I gave a lecture at the U of Athens a year ago and the only people on the streets after 10pm were junkies and homeless immigrants (many whole families).  Nothing really good is being written on "the crisis" in English, partly since it's breaking news and partly since the English press is just reporting from afar (and mainly just replicating the AP wire version of events).  One of the grimmest aspects for me is the rise of the Golden Dawn, the fascist right wing party that used to exist mainly in the Diaspora (it was really strong among Greek Americans in Astoria) but now is popular in Greece, too.  There is a strong xenophobic thread in all Greek society and it isn't at its best right now.   In my view (which is the minority one) they should get out of the Euro, exit the EU, and figure out how to be less dependent on tourism.  But I don't think any of that is going to happen.”

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender, faces uncertainty

In last night’s anxiety dream, I was suddenly tending bar at an unfamiliar restaurant, a wine bar with a sprawling, open floor plan of tables and a sleek, steel and glass bar. It wasn’t busy, but nonetheless I fumbled around trying to locate even the most basic items, like ice, an order pad and lime wedges. My apron lacked pockets—it was, in fact, an Amish-looking calico thing out of keeping with the clean aesthetic of the joint. As the dream wore on, the place got steadily busier, so that the 15 minutes it was taking me to find a gin called Target Red (never heard of it, took a while to figure out it was a gin) multiplied exponentially into a hopeless, 2 hour wait for even the simplest glass of house wine. I woke  up, as one does, upon point of death: a waiter had just put in an order for a Bubblegum Glider.

What on earth goes into a Bubblegum Glider? Only your butt, it turns out. There is no such drink, but in an anxiety dream, no-win situations are the point. As a veteran of these recurring things—in addition to tending bar at a surprising variety of unfamiliar restaurants, I have also been pushed onto a Met-sized stage in an 18^th-century ballgown to find myself in an unfamiliar opera, and I have chased down lost wallets, tickets or luggage in the world’s most bewildering airport or train station minutes before final boarding—I can claim intimacy with and proud obsessiveness about uncertainty.

At least, that’s what I call it, to be performing a task in a climate of unpredictability, without the tools and knowledge to do it properly, or at all. The word “uncertainty” has gotten a lot of circulation lately, not always in sentences I understand. I am especially suspicious when the sentences come out of the mouths of right-wing political operatives, like Karl Rove and his buddies at the superpac, American Crossroads:  “Former President Bill Clinton and now even Warren Buffett don’t agree with Obama’s policies, which are adding uncertainty and instability to the economy and making it worse.”  Really? Last time I looked, it was big banks and a real estate bubble, both private sector activities, that caused our economic uncertainty.

I also marvel when overpaid CEOs conjure its specter. Why has “uncertainty” become the lament of the 1%, who would seem better equipped to handle it than your average bartender? What do they mean by this word?

The Oxford English Dictionary gives us this first definition: “The quality of being uncertain in respect of duration, continuance, occurrence, etc.; liability to chance or accident.”

The idea here is that uncertainty is an absence where measurable or knowable data should be. My anxiety dreams have this quality: in a bar where I’d worked before or an opera in which I’d been cast and rehearsed, I’d be fine. Instead, I know I’m in trouble the moment the dream starts, and the evidence only mounts as it goes on. Uncertainty is itself a kind of data, in that you can tell what’s not there. The OED offers up a wonderful early usage (1382) in this sense from Wycliff’s translation of the Bible, in which Timothy urges us not “to hope in vncerteynte of richessis, but in quyk God.”  He’s arguing that blind faith is a surer bet than making money.

But CEOs and Karl Rove don’t mean to suggest that they ought to turn away from riches if they want to avoid uncertainty. Here’s one contemporary usage, from a guy whose business you’d think would profit from it:

“There are so many uncertainties,” said Jeffrey Joerres, CEO of Manpower, the Milwaukee-based provider of temporary workers. “If these uncertainties keep stacking up and none get resolved, we’ll see a hiring pause rather than the current slowdown.”

Stacks of uncertainty (instead of dollar bills?) prompted Joerres to give himself a raise, from $6,950,000.00 (not enough!) for working all of last year to $10,450,000.00, for working this. That a $3.5 million pay raise only moved him from #199 to #163 in Forbes’ ranking of CEO compensation gives you some idea of his fellow CEOs’ compensations. His free-floating “uncertainties,” devoid of any clarifying prepositional phrase, fits with a 1691 use of the word in the Andros Tracts, “a collection of pamphlets and official papers issued between the overthrow of the Andros Government and the establishment of the second Charter of Massachusetts (1688–1701),” foreshadowing Mitt Romney’s case for his candidacy: “Most of the Persons in our Government understand little or nothing of Trade, and so they leave it always at uncertainties.”

Now we’re getting somewhere, though not without resistance from skeptics, as in the 1653 citation right before the anti-Government one: “We love to toyl for uncertainties, and in this are worse then [sic] children.” That suggests Trade might not be as Almighty as it Thinks Itself.

Economists use the word “uncertainty” in a particular sense, to mean “a business risk which cannot be measured and whose outcome cannot be predicted or insured against.” This usage arose in the 20^th century, with F. H. Knight, in his 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. He argued that “A measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all. We shall accordingly restrict the term ‘uncertainty’ to cases of the non-quantitative type. It is this ‘true’ uncertainty‥which forms the basis of a valid theory of profit.” Until Knight rode in, I thought risk, whether proper or not, involved facing the unpredictable, but in Knight’s thinking, risk is “not in effect an uncertainty at all.” No, risk is safe, because you can insure against it. It’s uncertainty that’s risky.

Thus CEOs, who frequently argue that they should be handsomely compensated for taking risks, try to stick to the sure bets for making money, like giving themselves pay raises. They want nothing to do with unpredictable outcomes, the stuff that supposedly creates jobs, the stuff that capitalism supposedly rewards, as in the next citation in the OED, from another economist in 1929: “The assumption of uncertainty is therefore a disutility and must be rewarded.” If taking risks means doing nothing that isn’t insured against failure, and the “assumption of uncertainty” is anathema to our corporate executives, why their ten million dollar price tag? Why reward caution, hardly what “job creators” tout as their own virtue? Caution is supposed to be what Ordinary Joes have when they put up with Ordinary Salaries.

CEOs these days “toyl for uncertainties,” but what makes them make them “worse then children” is their complaining, amid stacks of executive pay, about how tough it is out there. Since children can’t drink in wine bars, let’s leave dealing with uncertainty to the grown ups, like President Obama. His salary is $400,000. Where’s his reward for “the assumption of uncertainty”?

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Greenspan's Own Oops Punch

Entertaining as Rick Perry’s November 9, 2011 “Oops” moment was—you know, the one when in his frenzy  to take a hatchet to government, he forgot which heads he was chopping off—the more significant and now completely repressed “oops” moment for the American right occurred three years earlier, on October 23, 2008, when Alan Greenspan confessed his “state of shocked disbelief” that markets don’t regulate themselves.

Without rules, the free market is kind of like the punch you might have served at parties in your college dorm. Who knows what toxic assets were swimming around in there? Fermented Hi-C? Grain alcohol? Nail polish? Why not, when punch itself was invented by desperate sailors who had run out of beer and turned to the locals for a stimulus package. One of the oldest recipes calls for arrack, which tastes a bit like a credit default swap and is made from palm trees. Any punch worth its floating lemon wheels is meant to creep up on guests, unleashing a voracious appetite for risk. In dormitories, that means regrettable sex. Greenspan’s deregulatory punch unleashed a voracious appetite for paper profits, what he called “euphoria” and the rest of us call greed.

Beyond chopping off regulatory heads wherever they might be, Chairman Greenspan left another insidious legacy. He handed off a historically low 4.25% interest rate to his successor, Ben Bernanke, who then had very little room to cut it. Fiddling with the Federal Funds rate is one of the few tools the Fed has. Roughly put, the idea is to crank the rate up when the economy’s “euphoric.” Paul Volcker raised it to 20% in 1981, and was duly vilified. Nobody likes a spoiler, but ever since the Depression, the Federal Reserve’s job was supposed to be to take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going. And part of why you take the punch bowl away is so that you can bring it back, by lowering rates in a crisis like the one we have now. That’s hard to do when rates are already low.

Greenspan not only failed to take away the punch bowl, he spiked it with 80-proof easy money, in the form of both low interest rates and deregulation. No wonder the speculators got drunk. His tenure fit right in with the larger recklessness of the Bush years, the blind appetite for risk, the unwillingness to weigh long-term consequences against immediate gain--in the case of the invasion of Iraq, the neglect to think even one week ahead into a post-Saddam future. The attitude was to take the easy profit in the short term and let the future fend for itself. Thus so-called fiscal conservatives and budget hawks gave away a budget surplus to the 1%, rather than saving it for a rainy day. Meanwhile, the rest of us journeymen got punch drunk, battered in the early rounds of what turned out to be an economic TKO to the middle and working class.

At his 2008 hour of reckoning, Greenspan predicted a “restrained” market “for an indefinite future”:

"The financial landscape that will greet the end of the crisis will be far different from the one that entered it little more than a year ago. Investors, chastened, will be exceptionally cautious. Structured investment vehicles, Alt-A mortgages, and a myriad of other exotic financial instruments are not now, and are unlikely to ever find willing investors."

Chastened, my ladle. Not only did investment banks and hedge funds quickly return to that “myriad of other exotic financial instruments,” Greenspan himself renounced caution a few years later, criticizing the meek regulations of the Dodd-Frank Act for their attempts to impose order on financial markets.

Have a cup of Greenspan's Oops. You’re going to need it when you get rabbit punched by those party animals again.

Exile On Main Street [by Michael Schiavo]

Anything scares me, anything scares anyone but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.

Gertrude Stein

Exile On Main Street [by Michael Schiavo]

 

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

 

Backwater Blues (by Laura Orem)

The post-Irene footage from New Jersey, New York, and Vermont is sobering and sad. Our hearts go out to those who have lost so much.

New Jersey

New York

Vermont

In 1927, Bessie Smith was scheduled to perform in Mississippi when the area was hit by torrential downpours. The Mississippi River flooded, innundating the area, and Smith was taken to the venue via row boat. The audience, many of whom had lost everything in the storm, asked Smith to sing a blues about the flood. She told them that she was sorry, she didn't know one, but she would write one for them. She wrote "Backwater Blues" that evening. This recording features Smith accompanied by the great stride piano master, James P. Johnson.

 

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Tastes Like Capitulation

Sitting in a bar with a guy’s guy, a man so manly he not only writes crime novels, but also solves actual crimes, I lost control of the debate and joined him in ordering a Sambuca. To illustrate how far from sophistication I’d slid,Sambuca does not rate an entry in Alexis Lichene’s Encyclopedia of Wine and Spirits. Ouzo gets an entry. Pernod. Pastis. Absinthe. But not Sambuca, refuge of ex-cops and the Common Man, especially the Italian-American, went-to-community-college, Tea Party version of the Common Man.

Sambuca is an angry liquor. If you don’t believe me, set it on fire. Watch it burn. Let the whole goddam Federal budget go down in flames. See if I care.

Well, I do care, but as I mentioned, I lost control of the debate. Sometimes Sambuca comes to your table flaring up against government interference and high taxes. A licorice-based apertif like pastis might have noted that from 1932 to 1986 the tax rate on rich people never dipped below 50%, while now it is 35%, pretty low by historical standards. Only taxes on poor people  have plateaued at a higher level—10%—than in 1932, when a person earning $2,000 would owe 4% of his wealth to the guvmint. Samuca, flavored with star anis (so close to anus!), could care less about such pointy-headed facts and figures.

Other times, like this one with the ex-cop, Sambuca arrives in a calmer mood, with its three little coffee beans floating in clear resolve to take back our country, take it way back, back to the late 19^th century, when violent boom-and-bust cycles were a commonplace of a deregulated market, the gap between rich and poor yawned, and a cabal of super-wealthy industrialists had the politicians in their pockets. Sound familiar? Never mind, says Sambuca. And never mind that the 1890s kicked off the Progressive Era, named for the pinko policies that came out of such extremes—child labor laws, women’s right to vote, restrictions on how much arsenic manufacturers could put in wallpaper. (Seriously, arsenic gave wallpaper a vivid green tint you could admire until you got poisoned and died.) Never mind. Obama’s a socialist and let’s get rid of the EPA, Department of Education and collective bargaining, which fought for the pension check that Mr. Sambuca used to paid for his drink.

Sambuca’s inability or refusal to grasp complexity is born out by what happens when you add a splash of water. It becomes cloudy, confused, opaque. So do Pernod, pastis, ouzo and absinthe, all of which are frequently taken with water as a matter of taste. In the writing program where I teach, we value such complexity, but because Sambuca hates the taste of compromise and never reaches across the aisle, its tendency to cloud up when assimilated with other substances is so little known it’s practically classified. Also a state secret is why Sambuca is served with those three beans. One conspiracy theory contends that the beans represent health, happiness and prosperity, three qualities that were not widely shared in the 1890s.

 The Sambuca arrived. We raised our snifters to health, happiness and prosperity. He tasted uncompromising principles of small government and individual liberty to fire the union organizers in the arsenic factory, replacing them with 11 year olds. I tasted capitulation. 

Oprah, Mood, Swings, Set, Go, (Dis)order [by Neil de la Flor]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My name is Neil de la Flor and I am (probably) (moderately) bipolar. Thank you, Oprah.com.

Last night I took the “Mood Disorder Questionnaire” at www.oprah.com because I believe in Oprah, polar bears and the accuracy of self-diagnosis on the Internet at the witching hour while moderately depressed.

In other words, I had nothing better to do.

I was listening to Ladytron's “Soft Power” in bed and that's when I decided it was time to learn my psychological truth. I wanted answers from the dark side of my baboon head—answers from the part of me that swings back and forth between seas of entangled and unentangled states for no apparent reason.

According to the questionnaire, which I assume is totally legit and vetted by professional psychiatrists or, at the very least, one competent veterinarian, I am moderately bipolar. The diagnosis came with a disclaimer that read something like, we're not 100% sure you're crazy, so if you really really want to know, seek professional help.

I was pissed. I felt scammed and distraught to discover that I am almost officially probably moderately bipolar and that I would have to seek out more advice. Why can't Oprah.com just sell pills direct and bypass the middleman-woman?

FYI #1: I went to a therapist two years ago and I told her that I thought I was crazy. She told me that I'm not crazy because crazy people don't know they're crazy. I thought that was crazy and left disappointed that she didn't diagnose me with anything except being normal, which is the worst diagnosis of all. In my opinion.

FYI #2: My cousin's girlfriend just posted on Facebook that she is cancer free. They haven't been together too long.

FYI #3: A close friend, who is a writer and Wonder Woman's step-sister, just told me he has cancer. He is almost bald.

FYI #4: I am in love with a Cancer.

FYI #5: I am also in love with Jupiter.