Orble - cyberperson

E-mail Subscription

Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:

Spotlight Posts

[ more ]

When I was 14 I went to a friend’s party and met a boy I had never seen before. His name was Lindsay. He was 16 and it was love at first sight. Within ten minutes of laying eyes on him, across the room, I was sitting on his lap and we were kissing. But I had to sneak around to meet him, taking my sister, because my parents were so strict.
It was hard to find anywhere to be alone. I was a virgin and actual sex was completely out of the question but, in his friend’s caravan, with his hands up my jumper and down my jeans, he gave me a love-bite on my neck.
I wore a collared shirt but, in the kitchen the next day, my mother saw the bruising.
She warned me … about my father. I was terrified of my father.
When Lindsay called around after work (after school for me) I had to tell him not to come around again. I was about to say “’ll meet you somewhere ” - or something like that - when he turned and walked away, to his workmate’s car. I just stood on the verandah hoping he’d come back. The older guy was talking to him and, now I think of it, was probably telling him to go back and talk to me. They stayed parked there for quite a few minutes and as they drove away the other guy looked back. But not Lindsay. I only saw him twice more, a long time later. Once at a distance and once with a group of other boys. He didn’t talk to me to and I would never have approached him. But I thought about him for a long time.

Vote

Comments (5)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

Hero to Zero

June 8th 2009 13:33

When I was 14 or 15 I was infatuated with an older boy. At 18, he seemed MUCH older. I had barely spoken a word to him, just worshipped him from afar. Pinning on him, no doubt, my romantic teenage yearnings.
Someone must have let him know that I liked him because one night in the local milk-bar he asked me, in front of his friends, if this was true.
What he actually said was “If I asked you to go with me, would you?”
I didn’t see what was coming and I said ‘Yes’.
He then said that he wasn’t asking me, he just wanted to know.
Within minutes I had passed through hurt, embarrassment and, supported by my best friend, settled on loathing.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

The Perfect Storm

June 5th 2009 12:48

I just found this Washington Post article by Steven Pearlstein which I copied and saved and then forgot about. I think I was planning to post it. I don't know why I didn't. I must have got distracted. Maybe I just thought it was too long for the limited attention span of bloggers. I first saw it in the Age - if it wasn't the Age, it was the Australian. I only came across it because one of my sons - not Jimmy - has a strange compulsion to cover surfaces in the bathroom with newspaper. I found it to be a very enjoyable to read about a subject I normally wouldn't take much interest in. The US financial crisis.

A Perfect Storm? No, a Failure of Leadership
Please spare us the "perfect storm" metaphor.

It's hackneyed, for starters. It doesn't square with the facts. And for people who fancy themselves leaders, it's downright unbecoming.

The reason the perfect storm is such an appealing metaphor for these shipwrecked captains of industry is that it appears to let them off the hook. After all, who can blame you if the ship goes down in one of those freak, once-in-a-century storms that result when three weather systems collide? It's an act of nature that nobody could have predicted -- or so the story goes.

The latest victim to offer the "perfect storm" defense is Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon who was smart enough to sell out at the top of the commercial real estate cycle, only to dive into the newspaper and broadcast business of the Tribune Co. just as circulation and advertising revenue were about to collapse.

Three weeks ago, it was the auto executives on their first visit to Washington who tried to convince us that the only reason they were running out of cash was a sharp drop in vehicle sales brought on by sky-high gas prices, a credit crunch and rising unemployment.

And in several recent interviews, Robert Rubin, the Treasury secretary turned boardroom consigliere, conjured up the perfect storm to explain how Citigroup and the rest of Wall Street nearly brought the global financial system to a grinding halt, vaporizing trillions of dollars in wealth and putting large swaths of the economy on government life support.

The first thing to understand about the perfect-storm defense is that these guys actually buy into this nonsense. The rest of us want desperately to believe that what brought us this economic crisis was some combination of greed, fraud and negligence -- and, no doubt, there was quite a bit of that. What the populist critique ignores, however, is that at the heart of any economic or financial mania is an epidemic of self-delusion that infects not only large numbers of unsophisticated investors but also many of the smartest, most experienced and sophisticated executives and bankers.

It's not that they don't see the excesses and dangers in front of them -- how could they not? But somehow they convince themselves that the world has changed, that the old rules no longer apply or that, because of competitive pressure, they had no choice but to run with the herd.

In recent months, I've had a chance to talk with half a dozen top business leaders whose companies have fallen into the soup and read published interviews with many more. And almost to a person, they say that they've been replaying the tape over and over in their minds and, even now, they still can't figure out what they might have done differently, given what they knew at the time and the various pressures they were under. Or put another way, they continue to think of themselves as victims of a perfect storm.

The second thing to understand is that, fundamentally, they're wrong.

It is useful to remember that in Sebastian Junger's gripping account of a shipwreck that popularized the notion of the perfect storm, Billy Tyne, the skipper of the Andrea Gail, received urgent and repeated warnings that he was heading into what could be a monster storm off the Grand Banks -- warnings that Tyne and his crew chose to ignore. After all, the weather immediately around them had been relatively calm, and the swordfish had been tantalizingly plentiful. And there were always worrywarts warning not to do this and not to do that. If Tyne had listened to them, the Andrea Gail would never have left port, let alone become one of the most successful sword boats in Gloucester, Mass.
It was no different for Sam Zell. By last year, when he was negotiating for Tribune, was there anyone in America who didn't know that the Internet was stealing readers and advertisers from the mainstream media, eating away at profit margins and calling into question the business model on which the entire industry was based? Did he wonder why nobody else in the industry seemed anxious to bid for some of the country's best newspapers and broadcast stations? Had he not seen the flurry of articles in the financial press warning of ridiculously loose lending and over-leveraged deals?

The only perfect storm to hit the Tribune was the one that resulted from the collision of Zell's ego, his arrogance and his utter ineptitude in running a media empire, along with a total disregard for the financial well-being of thousands of employees whose retirement assets he commandeered for a financing scheme that gave him control of the company while putting in very little of his own money.

I suppose we can have a bit more sympathy for the car guys, who might not have understood that the reason Americans were buying record numbers of foreign vehicles in recent years had nothing to do with cheap credit or mortgage cash-outs and everything to do with the superior styling and quality of the products. But are we really supposed to believe that when giant century-old companies hit a sudden downturn in sales, the reason they run out of cash in a matter of months has nothing to do with the billions upon billions of dollars they spend on reckless promises of job security and lavish health benefits for workers and retirees?

When it comes to self-delusion, however, Wall Street's top bankers and financiers take the prize.

The most common rationalization is that because housing prices had not fallen nationwide since the Great Depression, nobody could have anticipated the current meltdown in the housing and mortgage markets. Oh, really? Had they somehow missed all those discussions back in 2005 about whether there was a housing bubble? Or had they considered that something unusual might be in the works when housing prices nationally were rising two and three times the rate of inflation, year after year, which was also without recent precedent?

In fact, as we were reminded again yesterday at the congressional hearings on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, everyone understood that housing prices and mortgage lending were out of control. What they didn't know was what to do about it. Any company that dared pull back on lending and sell off mortgage-backed securities would almost surely have lost market share and seen its profitability and share price fall behind the competition. Before long, analysts, investors and the press would agitate for a management shake-up. So they convinced themselves that the safer strategy was to keep running with the herd.

What capsized the economy was not a perfect storm but a widespread failure of business leadership -- a failure that is only compounded when executives refuse to take responsibility for their misjudgments and apologize. General Motors took an important step this week with a full-page mea culpa in an industry publication. But until many bankers and dealmakers come clean, my guess is that the growing anger and resentment of ordinary Americans is likely to hamper any government effort to deal with the crisis.

http://washingtonpost.com
pearlsteins@washpost.com.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

David I Love You

June 3rd 2009 15:46

Vote

Comments (6)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

David, I Miss You Already

June 3rd 2009 14:02

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

I Didn't Mean to be Mean

June 3rd 2009 09:55

I think that sometimes people need to be shocked into doing things.
Talk is cheap. Now who said that?
But I didn’t mean to be mean.
Mum told me I should tell David I’m sorry if I upset him.
So, David, I’m sorry if my being completely indifferent to your feelings (and looking forward to getting my house back) made me express myself so bluntly.
Okay, maybe I exaggerated a tiny bit.
I hope this makes Mum happy.
She says she will write a post.

Vote

Comments (5)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

Goodbye David. Don't Forget to Write.

June 2nd 2009 01:10

David is leaving today. So he says. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Or don’t see it.
I told Mum to just stop driving him to the bottleshop.
Stop buying tobacco. Stop buying food. That should get him moving.
Of course she wouldn’t listen to me.
Things have a way of working out, she said.
How did she think it was going to work out here?

But I think she must at least have thought about what I said because now David is leaving and there’s no way he’d be doing that unless she’s said something. He’s a sloth.
The one time he did manage to get himself out of the house he went to the pub. Left a note to say he was going for a walk and disappeared for ten hours. Or maybe it was eleven - I forget.
Mum was starting to panic and was talking about calling the police. I had to get her to just calm down. Then he came back and I heard them arguing. That jogged a few memories but it was good to know that rational thought hadn’t left her completely.

I asked her what she saw in him and she said that it was too hard to explain and I would understand when I was older - something like that. More of the usual.
But it’s a mystery to me.
Yesterday Mum decided she would cook. She said she wanted to prepare a nice meal but her enthusiasm could only extend to soup. So she made potato and leek soup - my second favourite (my favourite is chicken noodle) and it was very nice. I hope she can keep this up when he’s gone.
So, it’s goodbye to David and don’t forget to send us a postcard.
And David - a suggestion before you go. Have a shower.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

DAVID'S PROGRESS (Beer, Beer & More Beer)

May 14th 2009 14:26

I asked Mum how much longer David would be here. She says he'll be gone in 3 weeks. Got some work, apparently. About time! This house just isn't big enough to contain his degenerate ways.
Our recycling bin is crammed with beer cans. Beer, beer and more beer! I've seen him getting a can from the fridge first thing in the morning. More than once. I mean, I like a beer, don't get me wrong. But for breakfast?
He says that beer contains all the breakfast nutrients because it's made from grain. He calls it 'liquid muesli'. Whatever.
Dinner's a bit late tonight. I'm starving. He really is an excellent cook. I'm going to miss the meals. Mum says she's over cooking ...
Well, that was last night. But I couldn't post. Some problem with passwords ...
David wasn't here tonight so Mum managed to boil some water and cook pasta. Maybe next time she'll get enthusiastic enough to make a sauce to go with it.
Even though he drinks a lot, at least you can have a conversation with David. Mum just passes out.

Vote

Comments (6)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

WHO IS DAVID?

May 9th 2009 12:22

Who is this David anyway?
He's been hanging around my house for weeks.
Four days ago he left and I thought, "Thank Christ, he's gone" but then he re-appears, as grotty as ever (have a shower, man) and Mum says he's just having a holiday. He spends all his time in my mum's room doing who knows what. All I know is that her time seems to be completely taken up by this guy. When she's out he spends his time on the computer - in his undies. He cooks, I'll give him that, but does he have to do it in his underwear? Like everything else? I mean - Put some pants on, will you? I live here.
My mum has had her Orble blog blocked because she let this man use it. And now she wants to use my blog to post. Well, she's my mother - what can I say?
I've read some of his comments and sometimes he he sounds seriously deranged. Is he bi-polar or something? I mean, he seems nice enough - he's pretty friendly. But maybe that's just a front. I keep wondering, Could he really be a psycho making plans?

Vote

Comments (17)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

VERY POLITE PEOPLE

May 2nd 2009 22:15

My Mother insisted on good manners. We even had to ask 'please may I be excused' from the dinner table.
One night a visitor to our home asked me if I would go out to the car with him to collect presents that he and his wife had brought. When we reached the front door I had a sudden change of mind and gripped the doorframe. The visitor, a strong and burly builder, tried to pull me away but I hung on. Everyone in the room thought this was funny and began to laugh - so I laughed too.
The visitor's car was parked in our driveway. It was dark.
He grasped between my legs and lifted me into the car, his body pressed hard against mine, breathing heavily in my ear. I felt around for the presents while he roughly massaged my buttocks. Then he pinched my nipple so hard that tears came into my eyes. I was not yet nine.
We went back to the house.
Apperances.
Back to normal.
We were polite.

Vote

Comments (13)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: jimmy - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

June 2009

7 Posts

May 2009

3 Posts

February 2009

4 Posts