The Pastoral Council situation I've mentioned a couple of times here was resolved this past week: we had a tie-breaker vote, and I won! I'm super excited to get started, and have already sent some preliminary ideas. I'd been praying to God to make my career a smaller portion of my life, and how He answered that prayer was by making the Church a bigger part. My wife has also been getting really involved: she has totally "busted out" of her social shell, has joined the "Saint Anne Sodality" group, and is exploring Montessori techniques for Catholic teaching.
In other news, I enjoyed reading this interview with Patric. He talks about how he would have panic attacks, one time he was so ill he "couldn't see the ball", so-to-speak-- but, he just put his foot on it, passed it to the nearest teammate, and got over it. I also remember a picture of him in a gun range when he visited the United States-- he seems like a really cool guy, and it's helpful to hear that even someone at the world class level of what they're doing, suffers from intense nervousness.
Unrelated: we're in this weird position where everything corporate is simultaneously growing, yet on the verge of collapse. As Steinbeck observed, corporations always need to grow; they can't just say, "Ok, we're serving ten million customers, let's just keep doing that." The reason is because investors, especially the institutional kind, are always trying to get the highest rate of return for their clients-- which includes you and your 401k of course, so none of this "shareholders are evil" talk.
It's not that any of this is "good" or "evil"-- it's just mechanically the way things work. And because they work that way, there are certain ramifications. One of them is that corporations often chew off their own arm as a weight loss program, to meet tomorrow's fitness exam. Take the Xbox division's ongoing implosion-- something I discussed and predicted less than six months ago. They closed "Tango Gameworks", then the very next day talked about how they need more creative, smaller-budget games. Gee, if only they had a studio which made those... oh well.
The real issue is that back in the 80s, the world shifted full-fledged into a debt-based model, where instead of adding real value, financialization and shell games became the "growth". That kind of phony "growth" can only go on for so long. It's like a football club which is barely winning matches. Once they start to lose matches, any underlying cracks and fissures become really noticeable, because the club has an incessant need to win matches-- winning is the whole point of playing the game!
To corporations, "growth" is "winning". Standing still is "losing". But because the lemon just can't be squeezed anymore, corporations are and have been doing ridiculous things, like selling productive, talented, profitable game studios. Or throwing their own countrymen under the bus to save a few bucks hiring foreigners. Otherwise, investors will sell the stock and buy some other one which has a five percent rate of return versus four percent, or whatever it may be. The end result is that the ordinary people suffer big time: because we're in End Game Financialization, the banking cartel is inflating "growth", which means prices are rapidly rising, at a time people are simultaneously becoming unemployed due to layoffs.
Thank the Lord I have not been impacted by this. I've recently been fortunate enough to be able to purchase two new vehicles, and I just ordered my kids new iPads-- totally awesome, mid-90s esque commercial, by the way. Specifically, my daughter "saved up" basically two Christmases and a Birthday to get the brand new iPad Pro, complete with the new keyboard and stylus. But back to the topic-at-hand, I'm always prepared for the notion that one day I may lose my job, if the economy continues going the way it's going.