Turning on the TV tonight, nothing seemed familiar. There were commercials for things like tissues, movie releases, degree completion programs, and toilet bowl cleaner. These commercials did not inform me who had approved this message. They did not help me figure out if I’m for or against their opponents. In fact, I’m a little unclear who their opponents even are.

How am I supposed to react to these commercials?

Things I’m thankful for:

• The internet, and the way it keeps people connected in spite of the stubbornness of physical geography.
• The usual (food, shelter, family), only this time with less taking-for-granted and more actual thankfulness.
• Polar Fleece. What on earth did people do before they invented this stuff? The couch is one big pile of polar fleece blankets right now.
• The way the cooler weather transforms P. into a cuddle-bunch.
• Text messages. Cell phones still thrill me even after all these years.
• Good friends. This could fit under “the usual,” but at the moment it really deserves its own line. I’ll stop now lest I get insufferably mushy.

Things I look forward to:

• Spring (I know, I know. It’s a long way off, yet.)
• The end of this election season. If I hear “I’m so-and-so and I approved this message” one more time, I’ll probably explode.
• Being undaunted by stairs.
• Meeting a friend for the first time IRL* in a couple of weeks.
• Having at least a few Things Of Substance to say on my other blog.
• Walking briskly. I used to love walking briskly. Especially in Fall.
• Making Macaroni & Cheese this Wednesday. Yummm… (though I’m not looking forward to the grocery shopping that will have to precede this activity)
• Not having to rely quite so heavily on the patience of a good friend. I despise being needy. (Though I am more grateful for the support than I can ever say.)
• Traveling to see my family in a few weeks (and meeting my parents’ new puppy).
• A day off of work tomorrow. Depending on how things go, it might be full of equal measures of pampering and house work. Of course, it might be full of a whole lot of Nothing At All, but hopefully not.

* translation: “in real life”

I’m a highly empathetic person. I’d go so far as to describe it as pathologically empathetic, some days, though for most of my life I’ve relied heavily on this ability. At it’s best, it lets me reach out, dip my fingers into another person’s emotions, taste them, feel them, take them into myself, and listen to people through their own perceptions. This way, I can perform the one function that makes me feel most human, most useful, and most connected to the people I care about. Contemplating the loss of that function is like contemplating life without one of my limbs, or without one of my other 5 senses.

Several years ago, I realized this empathy thing could occasionally be more dangerous than useful. I’d sit near someone and, rather than settling comfortably into their emotions, I’d find myself drowning in wave after wave of pain and hurt and sadness. I’d stand next to someone in line and, before I knew it, be nearly in tears as that person spilled stories of abandonment or confusion or loss. Good friends going through difficult times exhausted me and left me unable to be there for them as I would have liked. In other words, the empathy was effectively making the one thing it was most useful for impossible. And so I started practicing not feeling other people’s emotions quite as much, or at least keeping them at a distance, much like watching an eclipse through a pin-hole or feeling a surface through latex gloves.

Well, something somebody said to me on Friday made me realize that something’s gone a little haywire with this whole process lately. I don’t know quite how or why, but so it goes. I’d forgotten how to turn off the spiggot and gotten overwhelmed, which means I’d probably misinterpreted people and that I couldn’t trust anything I was feeling. Yet again, the mechanism is preventing it’s own usefulness. It kept me from asking one friend if he was ok early in the week, it made me misinterpret someone in the middle of the week and say things I hope didn’t sound too awful, and it exhausted me by the end of the week. I guess it’s time to work on my teflon coating (as my mom calls it) and see if I can return it to it’s former protective state.

So, apparently if you link back to a Google Finance search like I did in my last post (or maybe all you have to do is mention it?) your post gets added to that application’s “blogs” sidebar and flagged to go right along with that handy financial graph just like journalistic sources get added to the “news” section.

I normally get 2 or 3 people clicking over to this blog in a day. Today I’ve had many times that. Too bad I didn’t have anything, you know, useful to say… But that’s what they get for reading blogs, right?

Just for kicks, I decided to look up how my bank is doing today after this weekend’s … um … hiccup. You can do this too (if you can handle it) by doing a special Google search for “NYSE:[ticker code].” So for Wells Fargo I typed “NYSE:WFC” and saw this:

Gulp.

But at least they’re doing better today, right? And one of the news articles that Google associates with various points on the graph (by matching time and date, I think) says that Wells Fargo had less exposure to Lehman than others in the industry (from the Associated Press). That’s good, right?

Meanwhile, I will steadfastly not think about money, or wonder if these analysts really know anything at all.