This past weekend I was in Philly visiting Ted and Jane, and it happened to be the same weekend as the “Komen Race for the Cure” event which raises money for breast cancer research, so I joined them in registering and participating in the 5 km run. Since there were about 15,000 people, unless you were at the front of the pack, it was difficult to get any speed, so we basically jogged along at a leisurely pace for 30 minutes.

I had a good time at the Race for the Cure, and while I whole heartedly support breast cancer research, I still don’t understand why people tie this– or any cause for that matter– with a running event. The idea of associating a foot race with cancer research and having people shout stuff like, “Go, go, race for that cure!” along the street just sounds silly to me, no matter how noble or worthy the cause. To me, it’d make just as much sense to have “Game for the Cure” or “Cook for the Cure” or “Check Email for the Cure” events; or better yet, just have people donate money and not ask them to do anything else. If someone wants to go for a run after they donate money, more power to them.

For a while lately my eyes had been unclouded to the truth that blogging is vain and fruitless. That moment of clarity has passed, and now I’m back!

In all truthfulness, I do believe blogging has some value. It provides a sounding board for ideas and rants, and due to some strange psychological reason, unloading my thoughts, or at least a certain subset of them, onto a public webpage accessible by billions of people (with actual readership likely numbering in the low single digits) gives me a sense of relieved gratification. I see it as ‘talking to yourself in public’ taken into the 21st century. Add to this the fact that I’m posting this on my phone while on a train from New York to Philly, and I can almost convince myself that this is all somehow “cool.”

Anyway, what prompted this post is that I was just reading an article in the WSJ on recent job slashes in the financial sector and came across this quote

“[An attorney] filed an arbitration claim this week on behalf of a former mortgage backed securities salesman at Merrill Lynch & Co. Despite having his best year ever, the salesman’s pay plummeted to about $190,000 from $1.2 million. ‘He couldn’t make enough money to feed his family.’”

Poor guy.