When visiting our previous house on Gantenbein, in N. Portland, a goodly percentage of visitors would remark upon our security or safety. There were lots of suggestions of us getting an alarm. There was lots of uncomfortable giggling about the drug deals going down in front of the house. Yet I never felt that my safety was in danger.

There’s a difference, you see, between the types of crimes I witnessed at my old place versus what has happened in the first few weeks of living in our austere Victorian giant in a very established neighborhood in SE Portland.

On Gantenbein, most crimes fell into two categories:
1) Directed. This especially applied to violent crimes. I was never concerned about getting shot, particularly, though shootings did happen in our neighborhood. Thing is, they weren’t random. The perps were aiming.
2) Crimes of extreme convenience. Yeah, if you left your $1000 bike on the sidewalk, it might disappear. Put the same bike behind a fence and it stays there. At least for us, for the time we were there. For example, I did have a keg stolen from the back of my house, where it sat, visible from the street, after a party. But we also had a Schwinn in our backyard, unlocked, for a good year or so.
3) Drugged-out jerks. Fortunately, we escaped this. But our next-door neighbors were burglarized, their house ripped up, mere days before we moved to SE.

What the Buckman neighborhood has brought us is a kind of crime that pisses me off more than any: vandalism and crimes of no use to the criminal except to make you really mad.

David parks his BMW motorcycle outside by the curb. In the first week we lived in our house, a group of punks knocked it and our neighbor’s scooter (parked next to it) over. For the hell of it, as far as we can tell. Our neighbor said she heard the crash and ran to the door to the sounds of a group of rowdy idiots laughing down the street. It did so much damage to her scooter that it’s still in the shop. David’s turn signal and windshield were both broken to the point of requiring replacement.

A few days ago, some jerk yanked on the sparkplugs of David’s motorcycle, managing to rip a wire in half that is going to cost $85 bucks to replace, not to mention the pain-in-the-ass factor. If the perpetrator had actually stolen any sparkplugs, I might assume it was a drug-paraphenalia-related crime, but they didn’t.

Now David parks his motorcycle in the garage, but really, what gene or conditioning or gender or upbringing brings out vandalism in people? What force drives this? It’s so foreign and despicable to me.

I have to say I feel pretty good in one regard: I believe I have walked and run more miles this month than I have driven. Granted, I’m hardly driving at all in the new house, but still. As of today I’ve walked or otherwise foot-propelled myself about 55 miles since the 1st. I’ve been keeping track. The fact that work is about .65 mile from home gives me a nearly “free” 1.3 miles per day alone.

Now my minor rant. I was out for a long walk the other day after dark and was crossing the street at a quiet, uncontrolled*, neighborhood intersection when a bicyclist came zipping up out of nowhere and took a right turn into my path. He looked back and gave me that “I’m-on-a-bike-fuck-you” glare that I just bloody hate. I understand that bicyclists are doing the right thing, saving the earth, reducing congestion, etc., etc., but aren’t I, on foot, as well? This guy totally had the attitude like I was cutting him off, even though he was turning and I was going straight. What is with certain bikers and their holier-than-thou idiocy? OK, done!

Cheerful again!

* Having grown up in PDX I had no idea that uncontrolled intersections were unusual. In our quiet neighborhood areas, it is common for an intersection not to have any traffic control–stop or yield signs, whatever. You just have to approach carefully (I believe neighborhood speed limits are usually 15MPH) and pay attention to see if anyone’s coming. This tends to freak non-Portlanders out. Do they really not have this in other cities?

I’ve been walking around a lot lately, and a lot of that walking around has me looking dreamy and thoughtful and that is because I’m listening to a series of 48 lectures on the history of western civilization (up to 1600) on my iPod. Lots of stuff has struck me, but today I nearly fell in front of a bus during one of the lectures on the Protestant Reformations of the 16th century. That is, when Professor Noble started talking about Calvinism, I actually said, out loud: “This is a horrible idea.” I mean, I have never seen a religious outlook that is so bleak and damning of human nature, so futile and so joyless.

The following is stolen from Wikipedia and is an outline of “TULIP” (my comments are additional), a mnemonic device used to remember Calvinism’s main tenets.

Total depravity (or total inability): As a consequence of the Fall of man, every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin. According to the view, people are not by nature inclined to love God with their whole heart, mind, or strength, but rather all are inclined to serve their own interests over those of their neighbor and to reject the rule of God. Thus, all people by their own faculties are morally unable to choose to follow God and be saved because they are unwilling to do so out of the necessity of their own natures. Editor’s Translation: Everyone is evil. Great.

Unconditional election: God’s choice from eternity of those whom he will bring to himself is not based on foreseen virtue, merit, or faith in those people. Rather, it is unconditionally grounded in God’s mercy. Translation: Nothing you do in your life means anything because God has already decided whether you get saved or not. So don’t bother to live a good life or help folks out because if you’re meant to go to hell, you’re screwed.

Limited atonement (or particular redemption or definite atonement): The death of Christ actually takes away the penalty of sins of those on whom God has chosen to have mercy. It is “limited” to taking away the sins of the elect, not of all humanity, and it is “definite” and “particular” because atonement is certain for those particular persons. Translation: Christ’s whole cross thing wasn’t good enough to save everyone, so God picks and chooses those folks in advance for whom it applies.

Irresistible grace (or efficacious grace): The saving grace of God is effectually applied to those whom he has determined to save (the elect) and, in God’s timing, overcomes their resistance to obeying the call of the gospel, bringing them to a saving faith in Christ. Translation: If you’re special and chosen and whatever, you’ll eventually come over to God’s side.

Perseverance of the saints (or preservation of the saints): Any person who has once been truly saved from damnation must necessarily persevere and cannot later be condemned. The word saints is used in the sense in which it is used in the Bible to refer to all who are set apart by God, not in the technical sense of one who is exceptionally holy, canonized, or in heaven (see Saint).Translation: Again, nothing you do matters. If you’re awesome and predestined to be one of the lucky guys, you’re a shoo-in.

Other neat things were that Calvin imposed this shit on the entirety of Geneva, wherein you could be arrested for not going to church or for, I dunno, enjoying life and singing or dancing. Glad I didn’t live there then. Sheesh. Fun times.

I hate it when I’m almost too mad to write clearly.

Basically, as far as I am concerned, Standard Insurance has stolen more than $6300 from me and refuses to give it back or give me appropriate customer service.

In late October, I initiated a rollover from my 401k at Fidelity, the provider of 401ks at my last job. Fidelity issued a check to me (their policy; they won’t directly mail a check to another provider) and I forwarded it on to Standard.

A couple of weeks later I noticed it still hadn’t posted to my account.

I called Standard and they gave me some vague blow-off about it not being received, no record of it, all while sounding annoyed at me. After this conversation, I presumed I’d screwed up the paperwork somehow and the check had been lost.

Standard advised me to wait a while and see if it surfaced.

As of last week, it still hadn’t posted and I hadn’t heard anything. I called back. They gave me the same runaround, but this time suggested I contact Fidelity and get a check re-issued, as it had been lost.

I called Fidelity (who has great customer service, so far, by the way), who said they’d love to re-issue a check, but they couldn’t, as the check they wrote in October had been cashed November 6th.

I called Standard back (this was last Thursday or so) and presented them with this information. At this point I got a little less nice. My not-niceness was very much ignored as the gentleman rushed to get me off the phone. The insinuation was still that somehow I’d done something wrong. No apologies. No explanations. Just a “we marked this as urgent” (with no sense of urgency) and “someone will call you back on Monday or Tuesday.”

It’s Wednesday. I can’t say I’m surprised no one called me yet, but I called them again this a.m. No further information (urgent my ass) and the same lackluster phone experience with the guy not particularly helpful or nice. Could I talk to the department researching this? No, apparently, he claimed they’re in the “back office” and can’t talk to people. Finally I demanded his supervisor, and ended up at voice mail. I wonder if this person will return my call.

For now, I’m sitting back, trying not to be too angry, waiting for a copy of Fidelity’s check to arrive in the mail (see–Fidelity even suggested this themselves…there is such thing as proactive customer service) and wondering if I should call a lawyer.

Thoughts?

Note to daft drivers on Hwy 99E at rush hour, in the traffic, fog, damp and dark: hang the fuck up. Then you won’t almost hit me so often. I realize I’m a lowly pedestrian, but I’d like to live and not have my last image be of your distracted ass with your cell phone glued to your ear by the hand that should be, I dunno, controlling your car. That includes you, glib pixie-ish early-20-something girl in Honda Civic.