It’s sort of a trick question. First of all, a colostomy is an operation that routes your colon to a hole in your side so that you can…well you know. There’s a bag and all that.

Anyway, according to this really interesting New York Times article, people are happier when they know the worst has already happened than when they’re not sure if things are going to get better. In other words if you know your colostomy is permanent, you’re happier than if you think it might not be.

Did that make sense? The point is this. We’re so miserable right now not necessarily because of what is happening (we can adjust to that), but because of what we fear might happen.

We don’t know where it’s going to end and that’s killing us.

My suggestions is this. Accept that things are only going to get worse and deal with it. In other words adjust to a level of misery that you haven’t experienced yet, and if it happens, you’ll be prepared. If it doesn’t, you’ll be shocked and elated, sort of like I was when the Phillies won the World Series last year.

In other words, find joy in the fact that your life is going to get much worse.

That’s how I’d put it.

Okay, I’m editing this post because I referred to the writer as a she and he didn’t like it. Also, I included something in here about dentists, but I’m giving that a post of its own.

It’s in color, it’s worldwide, and it’s grim. Work your way through these pictures. It’s your duty as an informed human. Be happy if you have a house and a job and an Internet connection.

In Las Vegas, you can actually take a free weekly bus tour of foreclosed homes. That must be fun.

Bummer. Business at the landfills is way down now that we don’t have as much stuff to throw away.

But Good News for the Environment

You gotta take your good news where you can get it.

Finally, said Ben Boxer, spokesman for Fairfax County’s solid waste management program, the economy is forcing people to heed the environmentalists’ mantra: Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! Repair! “A lot of these things that people throw away do have a valuable second life,” he said, “especially for those who, now more than ever, are going to be facing difficult times.”

In better times, Boxer has seen perfectly usable sofas crammed into dumpsters. But now, instead of ending up at the dump, stuff is being repaired and kept or traded on Web sites such as Freecycle.org, where as many as 70,000 people a week have been registering to swap stuff since the recession officially began in the fall.

Try Freecycle. It’s very cool.

This really serious looking fellow named Jack Cafferty at CNN.com asked his readers if they were worried about a full-blown depression. Here’s a quote.

There’s a 20 percent chance the U.S. will sink into a full-blown depression according to a professor of economics at Harvard University who has studied the economic cycles of the last 139 years. Robert Barro writes in the Wall Street Journal that the most serious concern these days is that our economic downturn will become something worse than the largest recession since World War II. And he comes to the conclusion that there’s a one-in-five chance that America’s GDP and consumption will fall by 10 percent or more — something we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

There are some interesting comments on the article, including this one by some clown who thinks we dare not speak the truth.

Keep posting questions like this and we will have one. A consumer economy is one based on consumer confidence and if consumers perceive and/or are worried about a depression, they will save rather than spend. If that is the case, we will inevitably have a depression. It’s effectively a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Brilliant thinking. Let’s all pretend everything is great, go out and blow all our money, and indeed everything will be great. The people who’ve lost their houses can pretend they didn’t. The people who’ve lost their jobs can pretend they didn’t. We’ll all just smile, keep quiet about our troubles, spend everything we earn, and the recession will just float away.

Okay, according to ESPN, Manny Ramirez signed with the Dodgers for two years at $45 million dollars, but don’t freak out, that’s not per year, that’s for the whole long two years.

And this was after months of negotiations. I guess it took awhile for Scott Boras, his agent, to get the Dodgers up to 45. They were probably only offering 40 or something low like that before, and that would have been a real hardship for Manny. Imagine playing 162 three-hour baseball games a year for only $20 million a year?

ESPN’s site has a cool tool that will tell you how many years it’ll take you to make what Manny makes in a year. For instance, you can find out that if you make $80,000 a year, it will take you 281.25 years to make a Manny year. Unfortunately, if you only make $40,000 a year, it’s going to take you 562.5 years.

Or, if my math’s not mistaken, Manny’s making enough in one year to pay 562 people $40,000. Or did I get that wrong? And would it also follow that if he got 500 at bats, he would make over $40,000 each time he batted? Can that be right? I mean, does Manny Ramirez make more in two or three at bats than I’ve ever made in a year my entire life?

Either my math is bad, or I need a better agent. Hey, Boras. Oh nevermind.

Gee, job fairs are packed to the gills. Here’s a couple quotes from an article on the NPR site.

For the past four years, the Chamber of Commerce in Kernersville, N.C., has held a late winter job fair. This is the first year the town needed a team of police officers to direct traffic outside.

The job fair in Kernersville, a bedroom community between Winston-Salem and Greensboro, attracted about 1,000 people — more than double last year’s attendance.

They began lining up outside before the fair started. Some worked in construction until the housing market tanked. Others had high-tech jobs, until their companies downsized. And several — such as Tim Wiley — worked in North Carolina’s once-vibrant manufacturing sector, before their jobs moved overseas.

Of course, if you’re 58 like Drexel High, things can be a lot worse.

“I understand that at my age, I’m not the desired type,” he says. “So I’ll take anything as far as even entry level. I’m not afraid to clean the toilets either. All I want is a chance to compete.”

Meanwhile, in his annual quest to buy the Super Bowl, Daniel Snyder and the  Washington Redskins recently signed Albert Haynesworth to a one hundred million dollar contract because he’s so damn good at knocking quarterbacks on their butts. Hell, he did it eight times alone, just last year, and that’s a skill you cannot live without, depression, recession, or boom time.

Now that he got his man, I wonder if Daniel Snyder has enough money left to give Drexel High a job cleaning toilets.

Or how about the Yankees? Their projected payroll for next season is actually going to be less than last year’s, so even though they spent $423.5 million on long-term contracts for Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, they freed up some money and ought to be able to give Drexel High a job cleaning toilets.

There’s a lot of money out there, but you’re not going to get it at a job fair. Sorry, Drexel. Can you hit?