Read these words

I am so amped right now. I just got done giving a compliance and ethics training thing to the new trainees. 9 guys, 10 including the instructor. It was cool. I was a little nervous, but not debilitatingly nervous. It went really well. They were so receptive and asked questions. They gave me the respect a man of my stature deserves. That feels good. I guess I had it set up in kind of a fun engaging way. The whole purpose of the thing was just to encourage them to seek help from compliance or their team lead if they ever get into a grey area with regard to their trading. I had 4 case studies and I laid them out, one by one, in as unbiased a manner as possible. Then I went around the room and asked if they thought the scenario was acceptable or unacceptable. It was funny. Some of the guys thought the acceptable stuff was unacceptable and vice versa. The first scenario was layering and I took it from a recent case against Trillium where they got dinged for 2.3 million. You can read about it online. They all got that one as being unacceptable. The last one was an Oil scenario where Conagra got fined for 12 million because a trader wanted to be the first one to trade oil at 100. He said in e-mails and other places: “If it gets near 100, I’m going to be a madman to get the first print up there.” He also said, “Some people collect art, we collect prints.” Pretty stupid. They just wanted to be the first ones to trade there. Well the premeditation made it manipulation. They were dinged for executing a trade at a non bona fide price, for non bona fide purposes. Expensive print, 12 million, they probably could’ve gotten a Picasso for that price if they just collected art. So I left and I got called back for an encore, they had more questions. Good times. They’re good kids.

I decided not to contact the girl. (And there was much rejoicing.) Thanks to everyone for their opinions on this thing. I seriously considered contacting her, and in so doing, it really helped me figure things out. My best case scenario was that I take her to see the National and get back on her “pay no mind” list. It sucked being there. It sucked wondering if she was interested, if she was ever going to get back to me, it sucked waiting. I’m basically through most of the hard part of moving on (I’m sure you would all disagree.) But I’ve come a long way in forgetting and I feel like I’m better off just moving on, rather than going back to being unhappy. I thought I had a bunch more to say about it. Well last night when I came to the realization that she wasn’t what I wanted, that I didn’t want to go back to that, and I don’t want to contact her, I felt such a relief. I felt so good, it had to be the right thing, because it felt right. I guess I’m just more naïve than most people on this stuff. I always think of things in the best possible way for my own purposes. It’s like most people would say, “she doesn’t get back to you, she’s not interested.” Well she said she was busy, she did get back to me eventually. I would spin the thing in my mind to make it work. I wanted it to work and I’m really not sure why.

Last night was the first Religion class. The way our ccd works is that you go as a family. Which means I take all the kids. It’s my day, the importance of religion is my thing, so I take them. My daughter had an audition last night, so I took the boys. The ccd is once a month for two hours. The first hour is everyone together, and the second hour is in classrooms separated. We got there a little late and they had some kind of revival thing going. A woman was playing guitar and singing about Jesus and people were dancing around. They’d say, “Jesus to the north” and turn north, south, east, and west. It was kinda weird. I didn’t learn the Jesus macarena, so I felt ok just hanging out. The thing is that everyeone was doing it. Including the adults. I was thinking, “what did they say to everyone to get them to do this? Did they threaten them?” It was weird how everyone was dancing, I felt a little self conscious about not dancing, which is also weird. My daughter arrived a little after that and eventually we went to our classrooms. My boys were on their own because they are in Jr. High, but my daughter is still in the family class, so I had to attend that with her. Don’t get me wrong, I like our teacher, she is very dedicated and religious, that’s to be commended. She is a bit quirky though. At one point she said to the kid sitting near us, “I see your name is Andrew, I like that name, do you know why? It’s the name of my guardian angel.” Immediately I’m thinking “When do they tell us the name of our guardian angel? Did I miss that? Was that at confirmation?” A second later I got my answer. She said, “Do you want to know how I found out the name of my guardian angel?” I nodded my head emphatically. “Well, I was at a retreat and the priest there said, ‘if you want to find out the name of your guardian angel, just ask.’” She continued, “so that night, I got in bed and cleared my mind of all the clutter and I asked my guardian angel, ‘what’s your name?’ and the first name that popped into my head was Andrew.” I was pretty skeptical at this point. I didn’t right away ask my guardian angel what his/her name was, but I started thinking about it. I tried to focus, but I was being bombarded with names. Finally it came to me. I’m pretty sure my guardian angel’s name is…Kent.