Self torture

Today is a holiday for me: Presidents' Day. I could work, but I'm not going to, aside from working on my taxes a little. And I'll do some reading, indeed, have already done so, about the new economic zone on the border of Kazakhstan and Xinjiang and how the politics of China's Belt and Road Initiative are complicating things there, even as BRI itself breathes life into an otherwise sleepy place.

So it would have been nice to have had a restful night of sleep. But no, my brain's not gonna let that just happen. Instead, somewhere around 5 in the morning, it starts obsessing about the 4 main things that go into underwriting a mortgage. I only know about this from a project I did back in the summer of 2003 doing a time and motion study of mortgage underwriting for a private mortgage insurer.

I could think of 3 of the 4 (the borrower's credit rating, income, and assets), but not the 4th. Somewhere around 630 or so I realized the fourth might be the appraisal of the property being bought (it is). Mostly my brain just tortured itself.

But why, we may ask. Why would it do that? Maybe because Mary was pregnant with Graham then, indeed, it was during that project that I was in Albany in August 2003 when the power went out all up and down the East Coast, scaring the shit out of me, since I initially assumed it must be September 11 redux. Then yesterday I'm out teaching Graham to drive.

Or maybe it's because it was on that mortgage underwriting project that, while visiting with our client down in Raleigh, I found myself across the table from an African-American woman from my high school class that I had never heard of and could have sworn I had never laid eyes on, but she was our homecoming queen. And tonight we have a 35th reunion meeting at which there will be a couple of African-American women, and I can't begin to put faces to names.

It is a very odd thing. I was in almost all honors and AP classes as high school wore on, and there weren't many black people in them. I knew all the black guys because I played basketball with them -- like any NC male, I played ball, but there were few black women out there (Pam Clarke), and few in classes with me, so I largely don't know them.