One of those days

The Dow fell over 400 points today and I am not hysterical. I've been worrying about the stock market for years and always felt that we were headed for some serious shit - and here it is and I'm just watching it and not hyperventilating. I don't know why. For some reason, I felt happy today. It's odd how certain days you can feel like Chicken Little, "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" and other days, even under really difficult circumstances, you can feel okay.

I think it's because I had a day of connecting with different people all along the way. I got a phone call from a lovely young woman who is going to grad school and we had a nice chat about Brooklyn and her life here. I rode my bike to Park Slope and went to a meeting and heard a really brilliant speaker and then talked to another young woman who is looking for a job. I worked for a few hours and met some of my colleagues at an apartment and they said what everyone is saying, the market is very slow. And then I took a long walk in my neighborhood and met Zoe and we sat together in Fort Greene Park.

Oh - the best part of the day was hearing from my writing partner about a project we are working on and he had a brilliant idea - that really started my day off well. I made an appointment to go to a school on Friday and do some research on a subject we are interested in.

I signed up to take a workshop called "Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts" - which I thought was kind of crazy, but then I found out that Dr. Christiane Northrup, the Maine gynecologist, is speaking there and she highly recommends it. I respect her - so I signed up. Pretty soon you may see me wearing high heels and a little cleavage. (Which would shock me.) And I will be going to Miami Beach for a weekend with the course - and that sounds like fun. And fun is something I don't have much of in my life and I think that has to change.

(I often don't know what to do for fun. When I was a kid I loved riding my bike...still do, dancing, singing, going to movies, reading, swimming, hiking, being with friends. Zoe and I used to have fun when she was younger - we'd go on adventures together. We don't do that so much anymore.)

Okay, financially things look bleak. I have no idea where we're headed and I can't do anything about it. My mother says when her family went through the Depression they didn't suffer too much because her father was a baker and he always brought home bread for their family and all their neighbors.

The election looks terrifying. In one poll today Obama finally has a slight lead. Maybe the fact that the economy is in such disastrous shape and McCain actually said that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" will show people just how ill-informed he is. And that the policies of the Republicans have gotten us into this mess. Donald Trump just announced that he is supporting McCain. I can't stand Donald Trump.

Maybe the timing of all of this is good. Maybe the 9% of undecided voters (in the CNN poll today) will decide that four more years of Republicans in office is more than any of us can afford.