Friday, January 30, 2009

Ahh, the sneering class speaks ....


A little warning for my gentle readers: while military families have spent almost all of the last decade at war - do you really want to know what the other ~95% of the US population has been doing? What their life concerns are? Really want to know? If so, keep going. If not, you may want to avoid the damage caused by throwing things around the house and office and head on down the page for Fullbore Friday.

Consider yourself warned; this ain't going to be pretty.

Cry me a river, 'hon.
This almost reads like it came from The Onion, but it didn't. Ponder the wives of the deployed, killed, or injured ... or heck, just the wives who have been through a half-dozen or more deployments unscathed .... then listen to these girls; and yes, girls not women.
Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a beauty writer, said the downward-trending graphs began to make sense when the man she married on Nov. 1, a 28-year-old private wealth manager, stopped playing golf, once his passion. “One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35,” Ms. Davis said. “It’s not what I signed up for.”
Talk about someone who couldn't handle married to someone in the military - it gets worse - almost like one of the circles of h3ll Skippy might design.
In addition to meeting once or twice weekly for brunch or drinks at a bar or restaurant, the group has a blog, billed as “free from the scrutiny of feminists,” that invites women to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.”
Quel horreur!
Once it was seen as a blessing in certain circles to have a wealthy, powerful partner who would leave you alone with the credit card while he was busy brokering deals. Now, many Wall Street wives, girlfriends and, increasingly, exes, are living the curse of cutbacks in nanny hours and reservations at Masa or Megu. And that credit card? Canceled.

Raoul Felder, the Manhattan divorce lawyer, said that cases involving financiers always stack up as the economy starts to slip, because layoffs and shrinking bonuses place stress on relationships — and, he said, because “there aren’t funds or time for mistresses any more.”

(One such mistress wrote on the blog that when she pouted about not having been taken on a trip lately, her married man explained that with money so tight, his wife had taken to checking up on his accounts.)
I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.
Ms. Petrus, a lawyer, and Ms. Crowell, who works for a fashion Web site, started the support group when they realized that they were facing similar problems in their relationships with bankers last fall.

“We put two and two together and figured out that it was the economy, not us,” Ms. Petrus recalled at a recent meeting in the lobby bar of the Bowery Hotel. “When guys in banking are going through this, they can’t handle a relationship.”(She and her boyfriend split up last year; he declined to discuss it.)
Good for him. At least one of those guys sounds like he doesn't shave his chest hair.
“I was like, ‘O.K. I signed up for that, it’s fine,’ “ said Ms. Cameron. “But all of a sudden,” she said, her boyfriend “couldn’t focus. If he stayed over he’d be up at some random hour checking his BlackBerry, Bloomberg and CNBC.”

Ms. Cameron said that she and her boyfriend broke up at the end of November but that they still saw each other occasionally.
Snort. Nature calls, I guess .... or bootycalls ....
One frequent topic among the group is the link between the boardroom and the bedroom. “There’s actually the type of person who has a bad day on the trading floor and they want to have sex more,” Ms. Spinner Davis offered as she sipped a vodka gimlet, declining to say how she knew.

Ms. Petrus chimed in.

“If you’re lucky you’ll get that guy,” she said, not revealing whether she considered herself lucky. “Middle-case scenario: It gets relegated to the weekends.

“Worst-case scenario,” she began, and then took another sip of her drink.
Should we tell her about a 15-month deployment? No, let her wallow in her ignorance.
Brandon Davis, Ms. Spinner Davis’s husband of almost three months, acknowledged in a recent telephone interview that his new job was “certainly more stressful and there’s certainly more pressure” because of the economy, but disagreed that such stresses had affected his home life. He did not want to talk about golf.
Brandon ... dude ... you married a chick called Dawn Spinner ... who talks like this to the entire nation - about you in the sack ... or lack of it ... or whatever. The economy is the least of your problems; or the guys stuck with these catches;
Some women in the group said the men in their lives had gone from being aloof and unattainable to unattractively needy and clinging. Others complained of being ignored — one, who called herself A.P., wrote on the blog that three weeks had passed without her boyfriend “asking a single question” about her life. Another wrote, fearfully, that her beau had told her to make a list of their favorite New York restaurants before the bad market forced a move to the Midwest.
...
Another, though, seemed chagrined, after her boyfriend told her to “grow up” and stop “complaining about vacations and dinner” since he had to “fire 20 people by the end of the week.”
...
Despite the seemingly endless stream of disparaging remarks and shaking heads, some of the appeal of dating a banker remains.

“It’s not even about a $200 dinner,” Ms. Petrus said. “It’s that he’s an alpha male, he’s aggressive, he’s a go-getter, he doesn’t take no for an answer, he’s confident, people respect him and that creates the whole mystique of who he is.”
She really has no idea, does she? Excuse me for a moment - I need to go over and give Mrs. Salamander a kiss and thank the good Lord for bringing her to me.
UPDATE: Doh. It took a month - but it was too good to be true.

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