In August and September of this year, when all the newspapers and magazines featured cover stories with photos of laid off bankers walking out of Lehman Brothers, of stock markets plummeting, and of traders freaking out, I reveled at the expense of all those greedy Wall Street bankers who, in order to make a pretty penny, approved and executed some outright ridiculous, illogical transactions. I also felt triumphant that, despite pressure from Brown’s career services (which seemed only to push us towards corporate careers), I did not sell out to all the big businesses that flooded to campus last fall.  How do you like them apples, Ivy Leaguers? Finally, they can suffer, too.

Who am I kidding, they’ll all be [financially] better off than I would ever be. I’m just jealous of their flossy flossy lives. Can I get a little monetary love here?

On a more serious note, I soon realised that in the end, sure, some i-bankers peril, but the crisis hits hardest for those who aren’t making over $100,000 a year. For example, it affects people who, because of the instability of the financial market, choose not to purchase flowers at my mother’s shop. The lack of consumer spending is eroding confidence in markets, which snowballs into wider implications for our national, and international markets. And while I wish Congress didn’t pass the $700 billion bailout plan so the companies who fucked things up in the first place could decide how to clean up this mess, that’s not how the world works.

Tom Friedman said it well:

We need a leader who can look the country in the eye and say clearly: “We have not seen this before. There are only two choices now, folks: doing everything we can to shore up banks and homeowners or risk a systemic meltdown.”

Yes, that may mean rescuing some bankers who don’t deserve rescuing, while also helping prudent bankers who were doing the right things. And, yes, that may mean rescuing reckless home buyers who never should have taken out mortgages and now can’t pay them back, while not aiding people who saved prudently and are still meeting their mortgage payments.

No, it’s not fair. But fairness is not on the menu anymore. We will deal with that later. Right now we need to throw everything we can at this problem to make sure this recession doesn’t spiral down into a depression. This is no time for half-measures.

Things got worse, and persisted through the summer, long after hayfever season. After finally visiting an allergist this summer, I found out that I had developed an allergy to dust. I took antibiotics that cleared up my nose, but I still had a phlegm issue that often left me short of breath.

It was hard to figure out what was going on, primarily because I was moving around so much. By the time I went to the doctor at Brown, I had a few months left before going to New York for the summer, then home for two weeks, and then off to China.

I went to the hospital at Harbin Institute of Technology, and getting any help from the doctors was impossible. The doctor asked what was wrong, I started to explain, but before I got into my medical history she was pretty much done listening. Instead of asking questions about my condition, she asked if I was Korean. Then before I knew it, a crowd of people were standing 6 inches behind me, waiting for me to finish so they can be seen next. The doctor gave me a prescription for some useless pills and shoo’ed me away.

I often have these “I’m going to die from a collapsed lung or phlegm-filled lung” moments. So yesterday I went to Harbin’s “best” hospital and this is what I left the hospital with:

It was assuring to have an x-ray taken and have the doctor say that nothing was wrong with my lungs. And now, if anything pops up again, I have something tangible to show the next doctor I see. And it’s also awesome when I get to keep x-rays of myself. You can’t see it too well the above photo, but I didn’t take my necklace off and you can see a little silver airplane.

Here’s hoping the mountain of pills I was prescribed work!