Well, my hopes for a long-ass entry today went out the window upon receiving an email from the mortgage company requiring more information and more documents from us. This time it actually came with something called a "Mortgage Loan Commitment" letter, but the commitment, of course, is conditional, making the letter almost meaningless. When do we get the loan? That's all I care about. Until then, you can keep all your pre-qualifications and conditional commitments to yourself.
It's getting pretty frustrating. The worst part is that they ask us for the same documents again and again and have trouble with anything requiring a modicum of critical thinking. For example, they wanted to know about a transfer from one of our accounts to another. The transfer was made from Bank A on the 15th of the month and received by Bank B on the 16th of the month. As it so happens, the statement for Bank A showing this transfer ended on the 15th (meaning it showed all transactions on the 15th but not the 16th). So, the underwriter of the loan saw the transfer into Bank B on the 16th, saw that the statement for Bank A didn't include the 16th, and then complained that they couldn't source the transfer! If they would have just scanned the debits of the Bank A statement they would have seen it in 30 seconds max. And this after I sent an email in which I explicitly stated the transfer was made from Bank A on the 15th! Ugh... And sadly, I'm the calm one, S had to lock herself into our bedroom and decompress she was so frustrated tonight.
On the plus side, I'm leaving for the south Puget Sound region tomorrow. (Yay!) The first time in a year and a half. I get to see my nephews and all my other family and friends. Pretty stoked. In fact, I have to go pack, so I need to wrap this up.
But I leave you with a great song I randomly heard on the radio today. The "Heart of Rock & Roll" by Huey Lewis and the News. And when I say great, I mean "great", not great. I mean vapid, cheesy, formulaic, 80s, rock song great. For these types of ditties, it's hard to beat Huey.
A few things I love about this song. The heartbeat at the beginning right before it kicks in, nice touch. The non-swear word pause, "They like it with a lot of flash, but it's still that same old back beat rhythm. That really really kicks 'em in the ..." (See you think he's going to say "ass", but he doesn't.) Also, the sax solo is pretty sweet (80s staple), and the call out of all the cities around the country. That's nice because you hear your city get a shout out, and who doesn't like that? "DC, San Antone, and the Liberty Town, Boston and Baton Rouge. Tulsa, Austin, Oklahoma City, Seattle, San Francisco too." He got both of mine.
Aah... Finally getting a chance to sit down and write this entry. I've been doing things all day. And by that, I mean I spent the entire morning and most the afternoon playing Scrabble online. It wasn't a good session. My rating dropped nearly 100 points. I just wasn't getting good tiles and got beat by a couple much lower-ranked opponents. Oh well, it happens. I did have one pretty sweet play. I had EIMORT and a blank in my rack, so a few bingos there (using all seven tiles on one play is called a bingo), MOISTER is probably the most obvious, but there was no place to play any of them. The only spot on the board for a bingo would require it to end in 'C'. So I looked for a few seconds and then laid down METEORIC... Bam! Not too shabby, if I say so myself.
I had a guy repeatedly call me a "douche bag" after a game. I was losing near the end of the game, and his clock was low (I play fast games, only four minutes total for all moves per side), so I, in a move of desperation, just put the rest of my tiles down and made a bunch of crazy, nonsensical words in the process (for a huge score), hoping that he (I'm guessing it was a dude, chicks usually don't do crap like call people names after an online Scrabble game) would be too time-panicked to challenge. But it didn't work. He challenged it, the tiles came off the board, I lost my turn, and he won.
Despite winning, he apparently took exception to my tactics (which I stand by, if you don't have time to challenge, it's your own fault for letting your clock get so low), and he started bragging and berating me. I think he used five different forms of the word "douche": douche, douche bag, douchyness, douchery, and my personal favorite, douche cock. I thought it was funny at first, so I played along for a few minutes, but it got old quick, so I just ignored him, and he went away. I find this type of behavior really weird. What do you possibly hope to accomplish? Even if you get the reaction you want, you aren't around to see it.
After my Scrabble spree, S and I went for a run, and then we helped S's friend E, who lives in the unit above us, put up some curtain rods. Now, I'm not exactly Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor, but I'm the only dude of the three of us, so by default I had to do all the "toolsy" things like work the drill and put the screws in. It went OK. S and E measured one of the windows incorrectly, which resulted in me having to "rescrew" everything (and it gave E some nice little wholes in her wall that will need to be patched), but other than that no real issues. We got them up, safe and secure. It's probably the type of thing that would've laughably easy for a halfway decent handyman, but sadly I'm nothing close to a halfway decent handyman. An online Scrabble player I am, a factotum I am not. (I added that last statement entirely, because I wanted to use the word "factotum" in a sentence.)
[Did you know Tim Allen once simultaneously had the number one selling comedy movie, book, and TV show? Did you also know that people are fucking idiots?]
Oddly enough, however, I did work construction for a summer (1999) and managed to do a good job. The trick was to a) show up on time everyday halfway sober, and b) do all the easy and lame tasks nobody else wanted to do. See, my crew was mostly delusional deadbeats and drunks who thought they had Bob Villa-esque skills, so nobody ever wanted to do the grunt work -- picking up nails or pushing a broom, etc. This type of work was beneath them. (They preferred to smoke and complain about their lots in life, instead.) So, I just did all the easy stuff that required little to no skill, took my $10/hour (which was a mini-fortune for me at that time) and went home. And by home, of course, I mean the camping pad on the floor of the friend's bedroom I was staying with.
That was a great summer actually. It was the first summer my friends and I were 21, so we used to go down to Dad Watson's in Freemont, fill up a bunch of growlers with beer, go back to the apartment and play Foosball and RBI Baseball until the wee hours of the morning. My friend JY and I literally played a 90-game season of RBI that summer. We kept stats, by hand. I still have them on my computer somewhere. Strangely, I don't recall there ever being any woman around that summer, huh, weird.
[RBI Baseball: possibly the greatest Nintendo game of all time.]
OK, that's all for this entry. I have more to talk about, but I have to go soon. Maybe I'll put up a midweek entry. I would like to start having two shorter entries per week, instead of one long one, but it seems like Saturday is the only day I have the time and energy to really sit down and crank something out.
Still waiting for the funding to come through for this damn house. Maybe the mortgage company stumbled onto my blog, saw the mean things I was saying about them in my last entry and decided to be extra slow. Or more likely they are just slow, period. Supposedly our papers are with the underwriter, and it's all just formalities at this point, but I'll believe it when I see it. Stall, stall, stall, that's all we've heard for the last three weeks. I'm not too worried, because a) everybody involved -- buyer, seller, lender, and agents -- has a vested interests in the deal going through, which means it will probably go through, and b) all the people I've talked to who have bought a house since the bubble burst have told me they had an experience very similar to ours (everybody wants to cover their ass). But, at some point we do need the actual commitment letter.
The biggest joke of this whole thing is the fact that we were "pre-approved". What the hell does that mean? If we were pre-approved, then why is it taking so damn long to approve us? Shouldn't we have received the commitment letter immediately if we were pre-approved? In fact, if we were truly PRE-approved we should have received the letter before we even applied! I hate this type of advertising BS -- meaningless labels and enticements. The sad part is that it actually works. How else do you explain that the Green Bay Packers sold $440,000 worth of their "stock" in the first 11 minutes after it went on sale, even though the stock entitles you to nothing more than the piece of paper it's printed on? Basically, if you give the Packers $275 you can say you're a partial owner. You don't get any of the powers or compensation of a real owner, but you get to say you're an owner. And people are buying it! Nearly half a million dollars in 11 minutes! That's an unbelievable amount of money spent on something I figured out how to do free. Here's how you do it. Read carefully. "I'm a partial owner of the Green Bay Packers." See, it didn't cost me a thing. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
[Please send money. We could only afford to pay our field goal kicker 2.75 million this year!]
Speaking of stupidity, the Republican primary is maintaining it's high level of entertaining farcicality. I thought we might see a bit of a dip with Herman Clown out of the running, but nope, it's still going strong. Newt Gingrich has surged to the top of many polls, mainly because many Reps just don't like Mitt Romney. I'm not sure whom to root for in this. On one hand, Romney would be far preferable as a president than any of the other GOP hopefuls (which isn't saying much) if only because there's a 50-50 chance he'll be in agreement with you on an issue on any given day (as illustrated in the funny ad below). On the other hand, he probably would be the stiffest challenger to Obama, so I don't know whom to root for. I guess, I'll root for nobody and just watch, watch and laugh. If I don't laugh, I get depressed.
[I'm sure the counter to this from the Romney camp will be that it's a series of soundbites taken out of context. To which, I would say, "Please, by all means, look into the context behind these statements. That would be far more damning to Mitt than this 4.5 minute ad could ever be."]
The most depressing part is that whoever emerges from the mire could realistically be our next president. The economy sucks, many are out of work, and most people don't understand the nature of the recession well enough to realize that Obama has been kinda sorta not terrible on the economy, while the Republicans' economic plans are downright dreadful. Right now, most oddsmakers are leaning a little toward Obama being reelected (around 55-45), but it's probably going to be really close, which is scary. Actually, a small part of me hopes a Republican is elected president in 2012. And then I hope the GOP sweeps both houses of congress and puts all their awesome policies into place. This way everybody could see just what it would be like under their governance. It would be a great experiment. Of course, it's an experiment that would probably result in some pretty severe hardships for a lot of people, and one that would put our country on the complete wrong track, but I bet it would successfully prove my point that although things are bad now, the Republican vision is most certainly not the solution. (If only we could temporarily follow an alternate branch of the time-space continuum -- a la Marty McFly in Back to the Future II -- and then return to present day, and not elect a Republican, that would be ideal. Maybe we can get Warren Buffett to invest in R and D of the flux capacitor.)
[This is a scene from a hilarious episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer runs for sanitation commissioner. His opponent, Ray Patterson, is voiced by Steve Martin. It's slightly less farcical than a Republican primary. (The quality of the recording isn't great, but the clip is funny.)]
[After Springfield is overrun with trash on Homer's watch, the city tries to get Ray Patterson to come back.]
In sporting news, it's a good time to be an NBA hater. (Ever since the Sonics were stolen from Seattle, I've followed the NBA only to root for its demise.) The end of the lockout was rough for me. I was really hoping the entire season would be lost, but what can you do? Recently, however, the NBA powers-that-be oddly nixed a pretty fair trade that would have sent Chris Paul to the Lakers. Many people are up in arms about this, some are even implying that NBA commissioner David Stern should resign. I think ultimately this whole thing will blow over, and the NBA will continue as usual (If a scandal involving game-fixing couldn't turn the fans away, what will?), but it's nice to enjoy the chaos and disgruntlement while it lasts.
In other, non-sporting news, I see this woman in my office building every now and then who has a mustache -- a thick one. I mean, not Lech Walesa thick,
but Adam Morrison thick,
which is very prominent for a woman. It got me thinking. Is there a bigger I-don't-care statement than a mustache on a woman? It seems like it would be a relatively easy thing to get rid of. From what I gather, electrolysis is not too expensive nor very painful these days (although supposedly it can discolor your skin, which doesn't sound too great). Also, there is waxing and creams and even just taking a razor to it. All of these have drawbacks, I understand, but it seems like you could come up with a system that would keep your upper lip hairless and wouldn't be very time consuming or intrusive. There's a big stigma attached to a woman having facial hair (I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm just saying it is), so if a woman is rocking a 'stache, she must have some serious I-don't-give-shit-what-you-think in her (either that or she has an uncontrollable medical reason for it, in which case I'm an asshole for bringing this up). I certainly couldn't have one. I mean, I couldn't have the male equivalent of a female mustache (whatever that would be). I'm way too vain. And it would definitely bother me if S had a mustache. So I guess I'm vain and superficial. What can I say? Do I get points for being honest?
In my previous entry I indicated that there were 14 total people at my in-laws for Thanksgiving, but I mistakenly under-counted. There were actually 16 people there. It was madness. Good madness, but madness nonetheless.
Somehow S and I got the master bedroom to ourselves while many others slept on the floor. I'm not quite sure how things worked out this way, I certainly didn't push for it, and it didn't make sense to me, but I've learned with S's family just to go with the flow. It seems like there is some always sort of heated discussion over things like accommodations. I generally don't get involved (for one thing I usually can't understand what everybody is saying, because I don't speak Kannada or Telugu -- blissful ignorance), and then I just do what they tell me. If it means I sleep on the floor, fine. If it means I get the master bed, well, that's fine too.
[We watched this movie, "Hugo", over Thanksgiving weekend. It was OK. Not tremendous, a little slow, too artificially arty, but interesting. ]
It's also this way when it comes to paying for things -- always a struggle over who gets to pay the bill. I once witnessed S and her cousin argue for a solid 20 minutes over this. It only ended because her cousin threatened the server with physical violence if she took S's credit card. The server was a 95-pound Chinese chick, so the threat seemed credible even though S's uncle is a 5' 5" middle-aged accountant. (OK, maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the picture.) S's old childhood friends, two brothers N1 and N2, are the craftiest when it comes to paying. They'll do things like pretend they're going to the restroom and then find the server and pay the bill -- very sneaky.
Anyway, overall it was a great weekend. I must admit, I did miss the standard Thanksgiving fare -- it wasn't turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, it was roti, dosas, and chutney -- but it was delicious and I'm sure I'll have the more traditional holiday dishes over Xmas, anyway. Plus, Indians do it up right. Their food is delicious, well, except for the desserts. I have yet to have an authentic Indian dessert that I really like. S's mom made this thing that was like tortillas in sweet chutney, and I tried some, but couldn't get into it. Thankfully, there was pie, cheesecake, and chocolate to be had as well, so I didn't go unsated.
Changing the subject, we're zeroing in on buying a great house. Everything is squared away for it except our loan, which should be finalized next week. I said "should be" instead of "will be", because the mortgage company is really dragging their feet and starting to annoy us. To fair, it's more just one woman than the whole company, but she's annoying enough for everybody. It just amazes me sometimes how stupid people are. Well, she might not be stupid, she might just be lazy and apathetic. Either way, it's like, 7 million people are unemployed and you have a job. Wow.
Here are some reasons I say that. She's asked us for the same documents three times, which we've sent her three times, and then she can't understand them when she gets them. (And by the way, understanding them means being able to add three numbers. It took me 30 seconds and a calculator to figure things out.) She never uses "reply all" despite being asked repeatedly to include both S and I on all emails, and then she claimed yesterday to not have my email address at all, which is absolutely absurd being that I have 10 emails in my inbox on which we were both copied (literally, I'm looking at my Gmail now), and I sent her an email directly three days ago! Also, she sends messages like this
"Also on your 2010 W2’s that you had supply to us Mrs. [S's last name] it is showing [non-existent company] when did you work for this company need date and number if you have it."
I would be slightly embarrassed to send this to a friend, let alone a client. First, I would have pulled up the W2 to which she is referring and written the name of the company exactly as stated on the W2. As it is, she botched the name so badly that we literally didn't know what she was talking about, and S had to call her to get it straightened out. Second, and this illustrates my point perfectly, either she's stupid and doesn't know how to use basic punctuation (she really needs another period and a question mark, at least), or she's lazy and apathetic and didn't want to take the extra half minute it would have taken to proof read her message. Which is it?
And by the way, it's not like I'm expecting her emails to conform perfectly to the rules of the MLA handbook, or picking nits because of a typo (you could probably find dozens of small mistakes in every entry I've ever posted on this blog), I'm just asking for something that we understand, and that instills the smallest bit of confidence that we're in good hands. Is that too much to ask? We are essentially her customers after all. (Sadly, the guy at the other mortgage company we were considering was worse!) Well, at least her partner seems to be good.
Changing the subject again, I read an interesting article about a venture capitalist named Peter Thiel (you can find the piece here, but I think you need a New Yorker subscription to read the entire thing). He was a key guy at PayPal, an investor in Facebook and a bunch of other things, and now he's like a bazillionaire (although he recently lost a large percentage of worth by betting on a quick rebound in the stock market after the housing bubble burst -- he should've been heeding the words of my man Paul Krugman). He sounds like an interesting dude. He fairly young (44), super smart (a chess whiz), gay (a supporter of GOProud), and a hard-core libertarian, so he invests in some pretty out-there causes like the Methuselah Foundation, whose goal is basically to prevent dying, and seasteading -- building actual floating colonies in the sea that, I presume, are free from government tyranny.
[I wanted to put up the interview of Bruno with Ron Paul to tie into the whole libertarian thing, but I couldn't find an embeddable version on youtube, so instead you get this in which Bruno interviews a libertarian (certainly not a gay one). It's the second interview in the clip, but they're both pretty funny.]
It's all really interesting, and I'm down with exploring fantastical concepts like reversing aging and floating cities. (We need a health dose of investment into nutty sci-fi shit like this.) But, I can't get behind the avid libertarianism. Basically, libertarians are Republicans who can think. Like if Paul Ryan was smarter he'd be a libertarian. So the problem I have with libertarians is the same problem I've mentioned before that I have with many Republicans, they put their ideology ahead of reality. They see the world as they wish it was, not as it is. Yeah, it would be awesome if everybody was strong and smart and responsible and hard-working and made rational decisions. And it would be awesome if other people's bad decisions and mistakes and sicknesses didn't effect me. But, that's not the truth. We can either accept this, and try to forge a working society that isn't completely philosophically pure or fair, or we can go down the path of the laissez-faire ideologue. I'm not saying I know for sure where this path would take us, but I wouldn't bet much money on it being anything close to the great place libertarians think it would be.
Well, that does it for this entry. Until next week...
