Unemployed Douchebag Seeks Personality

Have you ever had that terrible feeling that without your six-figure income you would have a hard time dating girls? How you ever wondered you'd get by without your $700 per month dating budget? I haven't and I honestly would not have believed such people existed until I read this insightful piece from the Washington Post called Market for Romance Goes from Bullish to Sheepish. Apparently, this is a widespread problem among a certain set of jackasses who made way too much money in their mid-20's.

I'm going to pick on one guy in particular. Why? Because he sounds like a douchebag. He was making a lucrative salary at a financial firm until he got laid off last year. Now he laments that unemployment is hurting his relationship with his girlfriend. I doubt it. I think being a whiny momma's boy is hurting his relationship with his girlfriend.

1. Be very overpaid financial guy in Cleveland with girlfriend in NYC. Fly frequently to NYC to visit girlfriend and take her to expensive restaurants.
2. Get laid off.
3. Move in with your parents in Alexandria. Take the Chinatown bus to NYC.
4. Whine about it in the Washington Post.

Why are we supposed to feel bad for this guy? Grow up dude. You're 27. Why didn't you use unemployment as an excuse to move to NYC and job-hunt near your girlfriend? If you cared about someone other than yourself, that's what you'd do. But instead, since you're not the super-awesome rich guy you thought you were, your ego is crushed and you slinked home to mommy.

The article gets even better on the second page, where a number of 22- (since when does 22 count as young professional, you're barely post-college!) to 27-year-old women state that they are only willing to date men who have a lot of money to throw around. Presumably these women have their own careers, but think that thinly-disguised gold-digging to totally normal.

In the end, I think that we learned a lot more about the culturally-shallow, personality-devoid, young professionals that our Washington Post staff writer hangs out with than we did about what it's like to be unemployed in your mid-20's. I was really hoping to hear some interesting stories, I know a few people in that situation and it really sucks. But the people I know have been doing their level best not to let it get in the way of their personal relationships or what they love in life. I suppose that's because they are interesting, fun people.

Honestly though, if these people can't figure out how to make a personal connection without involving a lot of money, perhaps it's best that they aren't able to date - as a society we should do our best to lower the possibility that they will ever be responsible for children.

I was particularly proud of this analogy

At my workplace we have someone who has a tendency to write very confrontation emails and try to push forward their point of view... despite the fact that there's generally not any opposition to their views. In fact, we're actually waiting for them to take some actions so that we can proceed with their plan.

Recently, I expressed my frustration in an email:

[They] are like the guy shouting "The end is nigh!" at a convention of doomsday cultists. We know! Now would you stop shouting and start helping put strychnine in the Kool-Aid already?

Don't know if that was worth a blog post... then again, is there anything too insignificant for a blog post?

It Doesn't Always Have to be Like This

In the time that I've lived in Baltimore, it's been almost true by definition that "you're never more than 3 blocks from a bad neighborhood." Tonight I was driving through the city and thought "Perhaps it doesn't always have to be like this."

When you get down to it, it's pretty incredible that I even live in this city. My parents are firmly from the generation that grew up outside the city (their parents having moved to the suburbs before they were born / from a rural area) and I think their idea of city life was cemented during the late 1970's (mid-80's at the latest). To walk after dark in an urban area is to take your life into your own hands, even at 8 PM in Mount Vernon. To me, you just have to be aware of your surroundings and in large swathes of this city you're going to be fine (although there are even larger swathes where you might want to be concerned).

So, just as my parents formed an opinion about how cities operate, I've got this picture of how cities work and I'm thinking that perhaps in a few years it will be outdated. My impression of cities (of which Baltimore is an extreme example) is that there are the "good areas" full of late-model apartments or rehabbed townhouses or warehouses converted to condos and the "bad areas" full of poverty, dilapidated housing, and crime. The transition from one to the other is very sharp (as little as a couple blocks or a bridge) and usually marked by recently rehabbed homes, construction, or real estate sale signs.

Tonight I realized that given the current financial collapse, the Baltimore real estate boom may have tailed off for good. I am still feeling slightly optimistic that Baltimore gets hurt less than the rest of the nation, so hopefully it doesn't go much the other way (I hear the B'more real estate market is holding up better than the national average). If that's true, then here's what we might see - the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, but perhaps some middle-income neighborhoods will start to exist in between.

Seems crazy, right? For the last decade or so as fast as an area became at all reasonable to live in real estate values jumped up so quickly that only rich yuppie types could afford them. Since the rich and middle-class had been steadily departing cities for the previous few decades, that meant that they started pushing back poor neighborhoods. This has sort of ended, but if we're lucky, it won't totally reverse. If the expansion slows down then it might be possible for middle-income families to start migrating to the transitional areas near the rich yuppie neighborhoods. In time, the transitional neighborhoods could become a reasonable area.

I don't know, call me crazy, but I kind of do like Baltimore and I do want to believe that urban living can be a reasonable lifestyle in the modern world. I'm not crazy enough to think we're going to have mixed-income neighborhoods, but is it too much to dream to imagine a city with less of a bimodal income distribution?

Brentwood Ave

(Clicking on the photo will let you download the full resolution version)

This is a picture I took the other day of a man walking his dog in front of the 1500 block of Brentwood Avenue.  The entire block (1504 - 1528 Brentwood Ave.) is owned by an LLC called "Station Place, LLC".  Baltimore City Tax Records show that they've been paying taxes of about ~$150 / year on each one of those abandoned structures since 2005 (as far back as the online records go).  That's the sort of thing that frustrates me.  Some developer is sitting on that property, waiting for the Station North Arts & Entertainment District to take off.  In the meantime, the city is stuck with rat-infested eye-sores.  Do owners of abandoned property have to pay any sort of special nuisance assessment?  Seems like there ought to be something to compel property owners to either provide real upkeep on a house or forfeit it to the city.