Hello, Failure

Of all the enemies of literature, success is the most insidious

Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Failure of the Day: After My Own Heart

Found this in my daily email from the Editors’ Guild, which I really should join except I don’t know what guilds do exactly. Is it like a union? Or is it just so we can get together and plan ways to torture the authors who have worked so hard to torture us? It kind of doesn’t matter because really, I just love that word, guild. It trills in my head when I think it.

The woman in the article is officially My Hero, standing in some terribly British place holding a six-inch apostrophe over a movie billboard so it would be correctly punctuated.

AndNowForSomethingCompletelyDifferent: I finally wandered in to my friendly neighborhood insurance agent’s office yesterday and met the dull dull dull man who wants to give us money for being dead in a predefined amount of time. I swear to god, adulthood requires some really wacky conversations and the trains of thought behind are a good deal worse.

I had a swell time learning about the three kinds of life insurance, Term, Whole, and Universal. The only one that is even the tiniest bit affordable to anyone except the very wealthy is Term Life. The longer the term, the more expensive the premiums. But here’s the thing—you pay your premiums every month for 30 years but if you in die 31 years, you get bubkas. Zilch, even though you’ve given the insurance company $10,000–$20,000 or more depending on all kinds of factors. Because of this, I’ve decided that it should not be called insurance, it’s should be called a “theoretical purchase.”

Do you see where the horrible train of thought leads? There’s only one way not to get ripped off by the insurance companies, and that is to die. That’s how you win. By dying. And sooner rather than later, really, for the best savings.

So yeah, there it is, adulthood. Spend all your money on something you don’t need or die. The agent did give me a free road atlas, though.

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