Note: This post was written in exchange for a crappy spider drawing. Send me a crappy spider drawing along with a subject for a post and I’ll write it, no questions asked.

Now that the stock market is hitting new lows and layoffs are on the rise, it’s understandable people are getting a bit bummed out. I’m not exactly a pillar of happy happy joy joy but I’ve managed to maintain an aura of stability, partly because I went through a similarly crappy time at the tail end of the .com crash and harbor an unfortunate love for 1970 sci-fi dystopia films. Next to talking apes and a sperm extractor hooked to Kevin Costner’s nether-regions, a prolonged recession look like a walk in the park.

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So there’s this election next week. I doubt readers of this blog care how I’m going to vote, and I don’t normally write about politics, so I’ll just keep this short.

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Apologies that the blog has been sparse and on autopilot for the past week — I’ve been on vacation to where staring at a screen (my day job) has become totally unappealing.

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Reactions to the financial crisis has run the entire spectrum, from sheer panic to joy of a buying opportunity. It’s easy to categorize people as either optimists or pessimists, but as for myself, I think the distinction is a bit more nuanced.

It may seem from recent posts that I’m a pessimist, but I follow the old adage of “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.” This is not a doom-and-gloom perspective — I don’t hope the financial world collapses into chaos and we all run for the hills, gold and shotguns in hand. Rather, I find it empowering to research the worst-case scenario, and comforting to be prepared so you’re ready for anything. And then when the “best” or even the “average” happens — you can appreciate it that much more.

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Well, WaMu went under but it looks like disaster was narrowly avoided — instead of the FDIC having to take over the whole shebang like IndyMac, resulting in long, annoying lines, as Joe Average pulled money out of the bank en masse, JPMorgan Chase has swept in to acquire all the deposits, bank accounts, and customers.

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