Of course it will never happen to you. Until it does
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Friday, September 25, 2009 18:07
VIEWED: 375
PAGE 1 of 1
Morford again, making what I think is one of the biggest arguments for the healthcare debate:Quote:
This is a Difficult Letter to Write
Mark Morford, SF Chronicle
Stiff joints. Inexplicable pain. Kidney stones. Increased squinting at the tiny type on the bottle of lubricant. Crow's feet. Too many gray follicular protrusions. Acute increase in recovery time required following three glasses of wine, a Martini and perhaps some rather aerobic sexual escapades the night before. Heavier sighing.
Oh yes, also: dramatic upswing in complexity of personal relationships, loves, emotional entanglements involving baggage and exes and cash flow and who's going to sacrifice what for the sake of a future you're not even sure is the best way to proceed because no one ever told you it would be like this.
Sound familiar? If not, trust me: it will. Because all of these worldly delights fall under one category; let's call them the "unexpected expected" things, those sticky 'n' wicked life happenstances where you get to say, "You know, I never thought this would happen to me, not like this, even though I knew it might happen, eventually. It all used to seem so far off, so comfortably distant, and now, well, here it all is. What the hell."
Easy enough, right? Just life, just the way it unfolds, same as it ever was.
Ah, but there's a catch: All the sighing delights I describe above? Turns out those are the easy ones, the life circumstances you just have to face down and shrug about before moving on. Because it turns out there are far stranger, more difficult, more gnarled and snarled unfoldings waiting for you, prickly life entanglements that fall under a different category entirely.
Let's call these divine hellbeasts the unexpected unexpected things, those wicked slaps to the face of your world you truly never saw coming, mostly because you fully believed you were immune, well protected, absolutely safe from the slings and arrows of certain outrageous misfortune because, well, that's the way you designed it. You thought you had at least a few things under control, planned out, relatively settled. Right? How cute you are.
Examples? Plenty. Here's just two:
I recently helped a beautiful friend write a very unexpected "hardship letter" to our very own U.S. government, pleading with the murky PTB in charge of one of the Obama administration's new, complicated assistance programs to please, please, please help her figure out a way to stay in her tiny San Francisco home, lest she sink far underwater and be foreclosed upon and have nowhere left to turn.
Turns out my friend is but one of thousands about to be blown to economic smithereens by what this very SF Chronicle just deemed the "$30 billion time bomb" set to go off in just a handful of months. In a nutshell, it involves a certain kind of adjustable-rate mortgage, one that was set at a comfortably low rate for many years and which is now set to increase dramatically, and should it come to pass, will make it absolutely impossible to afford.
Let me be clear: This is no snickering, "serves you right for buying a home you couldn't afford" situation. This is not the typical sub-prime, prey-upon-the-weak-and-the-stupid story. My friend was not duped, she was not naive and she was not an idiot. All was well-planned and mapped out, and there was more than enough income to cover the rate for many years, at which time the plan was to sell the home before the rate exploded -- a plan which, even in a soft SF housing market, should've been a relative snap. The danger was almost nil.
You know what happens next. Implosion, economic meltdown, housing market collapse, a perfect storm of upheaval and economic shock we've all been reading about for two years straight. What was once a safe and well-directed path turned dark and treacherous.
Hence, my friend now finds herself in the bizarre, unwelcome position of being forced to plead with faceless members of the government for a bit of help from an obscure program tha
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