To achieve the American Dream, you must be successful. But our current definition of success is unattainable for most of us. Just when you think you have everything covered, the rates go up or you are fired or disqualified. Or you have a birthday. And then you become a “loser”. According to the current groupthink, the vast majority of us are losers.

To be considered successful, you must first and foremost make tons of cash. You must have a fantastic, exciting job. You must be CEO or at the very least, Senior VP. You must own a four-bedroom house, a family sedan, a motorcycle and/or a boat, and a two-seater sports car. You must decorate the house with new draperies and furnishings every two years. The house has to be kept spotless and smelling fresh, the latter hopefully through a little plug-in gizmo that spews artificial lemon verbena scent throughout your travertine tile-floored manse.

Your children must be stellar scholars, captains of the football team, chess champions and violin prodigies. You must have good health insurance, belong to a gym, and have a Bowflex in your heated garage. You must send your children to Ivy League schools. You must buy every new gadget on the market within 24 hours of its release. You must take expensive vacations and have a second home in the country—or at the very least, take cruises and own a timeshare in Tahoe or Hawaii.

For women there are a few extra things you need to be successful. Number One, you can’t age. Number Two, you must be a size one. You have to wear the absolute current fashion: nothing with more than a two-month shelf life. High heels are a must. Don’t forget the foundation, stylish make-up, perfectly coiffed and dyed hair, and polished fingernails. You must be tanned, gym-toned, get Botox injections and look perfect at all times. And don’t get caught driving the minivan. So embarrassing!

These out-of-reach goals are even more ridiculous considering that basic survival is hardly achievable anymore. My generation has been spending what’s left of their devastated 401Ks taking care of their elderly parents, putting their kids through college and trying to pay down an underwater mortgage. Health care is unaffordable for the majority. How the hell are we supposed to pay for the new roof or sewer line repairs or the dog’s hip operation?

But the worst component of the devastation of the middle class is that our culture considers us all failures. No matter how hard you worked, no matter if you went to graduate school, no matter if you followed all the rules, if you still came up short, you are a loser.

So where do we go from here? First, we need to realize that we are not losers. We’re experiencing a global shift in wealth distribution, and corporate greed on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the 1920s. The skyrocketing cost of health care is busting the budgets of the self-employed and making it too expensive for businesses to hire people over 50. Jobs are becoming obsolete at record pace. None of this is our fault. All of these factors are beyond our control. But how we deal with these changes is within our control. We need to become much more flexible in the ways we earn our living and how we spend our money. We need to save more. But more importantly, we need to redefine success.

We need to realize that society’s “markers of success” are made up, mostly by advertisers. And that the goals focus on the external. Whatever you do to your body will not bring you deep, lasting satisfaction. You will still age and therefore “fail”. That new Mercedes is used the moment you drive it off the lot. Spending hours of time distracting yourself with TV, smart phones and iPods will only make you feel more isolated. You actually must interact with people face-to-face to satisfy your basic, human need to connect with others. Two-word text messages do not promote bonding. They promote ADD.

Happiness comes from our interior lives, not our outside shell. Happiness comes from finding meaning in our lives. Beyond our basic survival, happiness can’t be bought.

The new definition of success should start with some questions: What will put food on my table and bring meaning to my life? Do I really need to own a house? What do I really need? What do I like? Not what you think you should like, but what you actually like. Work on widening your choices. Due to the current economic upheaval, you may need to change careers or move. Consider everything and everywhere that interests you, no matter what anyone else thinks. Stretch. Try something you never thought you could do. And if you’re broke, don’t be too picky. Do what it takes to survive and forget how you look. People who think lesser of you because you took a food server job after you lost your corporate position aren’t your friends. Besides, you never know where any job will lead. You never know where your next opportunity may come from.

Palliative care specialist Bronnie Ware interviewed many people on their deathbeds. She asked them what their regrets were. The number one response? I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

When you’re dying and reviewing your life, what will you be thinking? Will you be proud of your McMansion, Gucci slippers and plasma screen TV? Or the hours you spent in a tanning bed? Or the years you spent staring at the tiny screen on your smart phone instead of experiencing the world around you?

The American Dream has been co-opted by our corporate-profit-driven culture and has become the American Nightmare. We deserve better. Our dreams should emphasize emotional fulfillment, not isolate us and make us feel like failures.

©2011, Janet Periat

Word meanings are fluid. Some change and some stay the same depending on what’s going on in the world. Since we are in a huge state of flux right now, I thought it would be good to clarify some current terms.

Congress: 1. The opposite of progress*. 2. A group of rich people with bad hair who take advantage of loopholes in the law to give themselves raises and nicer offices. 3. Government-sanctioned prostitutes. (See Senators and Lobbyists)

Senators: 1. A group of rich people who attended Ivy League schools to forge superficial relationships with people they don’t like in order to run for office to increase their family fortunes. 2. A group of ugly rich people in Washington DC who wear suits and blow through all the tax money extorted from the middle class while pretending to care about  “the people” but who are too self-centered to care about anyone but themselves.

Health Plan: 1. A hodgepodge of laws constructed by insurance companies to confuse patients and deny them care. 2. Legal extortion of the healthy middle class. 3. A bill that is paid supposedly to avoid bigger bills in case of emergency, but doesn’t really work that way. 4. A legal Ponzi scheme involving the health care industry, the insurance industry and an army of lawyers.

Republicans: 1. A group of rich old white men with bad hair who want to go back to the 1950s when women and minorities “knew their places”.  2. A political party whose sole purpose is to not let any other political party get anything accomplished. 3. A group of hypocrites who profess to be moral until they’re caught with their mistress in Argentina.

Democrats: 1. A spineless group of people who drive Priuses, do yoga, drink protein shakes and enjoy drumming circles and trips to Tibet. 2. A resident of Berkeley, San Francisco or Santa Cruz, California. 3. Someone who is politically correct to the point of disingenuousness. 4. Crazed pot-smoking hippies who put the lives of newts over the prosperity of chemical plants.

Minority: 1. Anyone who isn’t white, rich and heterosexual.  2. A group of people the Republicans fear and hate and legislate against until three months before the election when they pretend to like them.  3. A group of people who are blamed for everything that goes wrong in America.

Public Education System: 1. A day prison for children designed to destroy their natural curiosity and prepare them for a life of sitting at desks and following orders. 2. An underfunded institution that promotes a lifelong aversion to learning.  3. A brainwashing facility that strips participants of their innate talents, limits their choices and ensures their dependence on the system. 4. A Walmart training facility.

Lobbyists: 1. Corporate prostitutes who sell themselves to politicians in exchange for passing laws that will hurt the environment and the poor. 2. People without morals who try to convince other people without morals to continue committing immoral acts. 3. Soul-eating zombies with a political agenda. (See Congress and Senators)

Fast Food: 1. A food-shaped substance that imitates real food and has no nutritional value. 2. A delicious combination of salt, sugar, fat and preservatives that shortens the human life span.

Television: 1. A box that displays a lifestyle you will never be able to afford. 2. A mind-control device that makes the user feel fat, smelly, stupid and lazy. 3. A machine that eats time. 4. A device that facilitates and promotes depression.

Computer: 1. A data processing device that rarely does what you want it to and randomly destroys data. 2. A box that sucks in money and spits out porn.

Internet: 1. A place where bad news gets endlessly recycled far past its relevance. 2. A place to connect with freaks like you. 3. A place to farm virtual land and grow virtual crops and have virtual wars without really accomplishing anything at all. (See Television and Computer)

Marriage: 1. An institution involving two deluded people who actually think that by saying a bunch of magic words their significant other won’t cheat on them or abuse them or take out all their savings to invest in a pyramid scheme. 2. A sacred bond between a man and a woman that gay people have adopted and are now kicking themselves for it. 3. An extortion scheme designed by the bridal industry to get money out of stupid people who think that if they spend a lot on the ceremony it might actually translate into a lasting relationship. 4. A financial agreement between two people who like to sleep with each other and think that by getting financially involved it might promote some sort of bond between them.

Medical Marijuana: Marijuana that is obtained at a dispensary with a fake doctor’s note so stoners don’t have to pretend to be interested in their drug dealer’s boring lives.

Tea-Partiers: (syn: Tea-Baggers) 1. A group of disenfranchised white people who like to yell the n-word. 2. A group of stupid people who think that stupid people should run the world.

The Religious Right: 1. People who use God and the Bible as reasons to persecute people they don’t like. 2. Fearful people who say “they shouldn’t let them do that” a lot. 3. People who send money to men on television with bad hair who preach about morals until they get caught on video with a roomful of prostitutes. (See Congress, Senators, Lobbyists)

The Media: A conglomerate of organizations that twist and distort reality in order to force their users to watch or read paid advertisements.

Liberals: 1. A group of open-minded people who are easily influenced and can’t make decisions. 2. People who miss the Summer of Love. 3. People who think Al Gore is cool.

Conservatives: 1. Fat, bald white guys who hate and fear everything. 2. People with anger issues who love to shout at liberals. 3. Closeted gay people who like having sex in public restrooms.

*Heard this from the comedian Gallagher.

©2010, Janet Periat

It has come to my attention that our country is in the grip of a giant Stupid Attack. Truths, lies and myths have all mixed into one big confusing Internet story. So I will be your great Bringer of Truth. (Or Bringer of More BS, depending on your point of view.)

Myth Number One: The government is there to help you. This is actually true IF any or all of the following criteria are met: 1) You are an elected official. 2) You are a multi-national corporation. 3) You are richer than God. 4) You are a country that has oil. Then the red carpet rolls out and supplicants are willing to meet your every need. Owe money to the IRS? No problem. We’ll just postpone your billing and not charge you any penalties. Which brings up a question: how do congressmen owe back taxes without accruing penalties? They pay interest on their back taxes, but no penalties. We peons can’t owe back taxes without being put on an IRS black ops hit list. For this reason alone, I’ve decided to run for public office.

Myth Number Two: The pharmaceutical companies are working hard to cure your illnesses. Actually, they are working hard to “maintain” your illnesses with pills for life. Drug companies don’t make any money off of curing people. They only make money off of “controlling” illnesses. I have a friend who works at one of these wonderful drug companies. His lab produced a great drug that helped counter the effects of diabetes with amazing results. While this was another maintenance drug, his parent company shelved it because they couldn’t “maximize enough profits” from its production. My friend believed in this drug so much, he wanted to start his own company to produce it. The parent company refused his request to buy the patent. And we wonder why health care costs are spiraling out of control.

Myth Number Three: The Internet increases productivity and saves time by allowing us rapid access to information. Farmville, Worlds of Warcraft, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, My Space, You Tube. I envision millions of people in their cubicles, typing away on their keyboards in corporate offices. Their bosses look on, pleased their minions are so diligent. Yes, diligently comparing prices on Clinique lipstick, growing crops on Farmville and exchanging stupid chain emails involving angels and fairies. Remember, if you don’t send the Happy Angel to seven of your friends within ten minutes, your computer will die and your genitalia will fall off.

Myth Number Four: Global warming is a hoax. For all of your Flat Earth Society people who think that global warming is a plot by Al Gore to sell books and movies and get him the kind of cred he never had as Vice-President (mainly because of his spastic white-guy dancing at the Inaugural Ball), I invite you to buy coastal property. Then, when some big waves take out your home, you can go to the government for a bailout. And they’ll be right there for you. Just ask the people of New Orleans.

Myth Number Five: Schools are preparing our children for the future. All graduating students are now prepared for a future of sitting at desks and taking tests. When I think about how many jobs entail sitting and taking tests, I envision a beautiful future for America. “911, what’s your emergency?” “Help! My house is on fire! Send someone fast! How long before they get here?” “Let me see. If your house is on fire and has eleven minutes to burn to the ground and the fire station is five miles away and the fire engine is capable of speeds of twenty-five to thirty-miles an hour, I’d say the answer is ‘B’.” “’B’? I’ll lose my house by then. Why not ‘A’ or ‘D’?” “Sorry, sir, budget cutbacks.”

Myth Number Six: Banks are honest institutions. Right before she died, my aunt was sold an annuity by Bank of America. She never received copies of the documents she signed. Seventy-five thousand bucks vanished somewhere between my aunt signing and the payout after she died. Our lawyer sent five letters and made several phone calls requesting copies of the original documents. He was ignored. He finally told us it would cost more than seventy grand to force B of A to relinquish the documents. I’m so glad we taxpayers bailed them out. I was worried about B of A. I mean, how many victims can they fleece before people wise up and withdraw all their money?

Myth Number Seven: Outsourcing to India saves big corporations lots of money. And they get what they pay for. My husband just got a job which required a background check. The corporation hired to do his background check outsourced their work to India. So on Christmas Eve, Frank got a call from the background check people in India. They couldn’t verify his diploma from UC Santa Cruz because “no one is answering the phones.” Because it was CHRISTMAS EVE. Then the kicker. The person requested that Frank send a copy of his diploma to them so they could verify his degree. Frank was all for this. Because he just remembered that he got a Ph.D. from Stanford, was a Rhodes scholar and got an MBA from Harvard. I wonder if Homeland Security hired the same company to do the background check on that airline bomber.

Myth Number Eight: There is a middle class in America. Obama keeps talking about boosting the middle class, but I only know one class of people. Poor people. After putting the kids through college and taking care of our parents, we’ve already gone through all our retirement and savings. Here’s the new mantra for my generation: “Hello and welcome to Walmart!”

I’d move to my own island if I could get cable, high-speed Internet access and a reliable supply of Heineken.

©2010, Janet Periat

On June 10, my sister went into surgery to remove a golf-ball-sized tumor in her head. On June 11, she had a stroke. These past weeks have been the hardest of my life (and obviously, Judy’s) so far. I’m Judy’s primary caregiver and have never dealt with anything like this before. I’ve been flailing my way through, doing my best. I’ve learned many things in this short time. Below are some of my first thoughts that might help others who find themselves in the same situation.

Number One: The Caregiver must take care of themselves and build a caregiving team. Be honest about what you can and can’t do. Don’t run yourself into the ground (like I did). You can’t be by your loved one’s side 24/7. Yes, you have to take care of them, but that does not mean exhausting yourself. If you get sick or falter, your loved one will suffer even more. But be careful about your team. There are many idiots disguised as helpers out there. Be brutal in your evaluations of the offers that come your way. You don’t want to add more work to your already over-filled plate.

Number Two: If you are the main caregiver, your only responsibility is to your loved one. Not to the four hundred people who freak out that something bad happened and want you to console them. I can’t believe some of the knuckleheads that have been plaguing me. Many have come up with more things for me to do. “You should start a Yahoo group and blog everyday about what’s going on with your sister.” WHAT???? When would I do that? I’m either paying Judy’s bills or driving to the hospital or filling out paperwork or going through scary what-if scenarios with nursing home administrators or trying to devote a few spare minutes to handle the four thousand details of my own life. Which brings me to Number Three.

Number Three: To the friends and extended family of the patient and main caregiver: be a help, not a hindrance. If you are coming from out-of-town, don’t expect to be put up at the main caregiver’s house. Stay with friends or rent a motel room. Don’t burden the caregivers with your needs. Don’t let your kids run all over the house and saddle the caregiver with more work. Ask how you can help. Clean, cook, water the yard, take the patient to a therapy appointment. In other words: DON’T BE AN IDIOT. The Main Caregiver is overwhelmed and is probably on the verge of losing their minds. I know I am. Which brings us to Number Four.

Number Four: Be nice to the Main Caregiver. You’d think this would be obvious, but I have endured more second-guessing and abuse by idiots than you can imagine. Think before you criticize the caregiver. Make sure the information you received is accurate before you call up and rant at someone who is doing their best and is already at the end of their rope. Or they may bite you.

Number Five: Don’t treat the patient like an idiot. Assume they can understand you. Assume they are in there. Treat them with respect. And please don’t shout at them. Just because someone can’t speak doesn’t mean they can’t hear. Keep your visits short. The wounded have very little energy, be careful with it.

Number Six: Beg, borrow or steal some health insurance if you don’t already have it. Get long-term health care insurance when you’re 65. You don’t want to know what happens to people without it. There are many fates worse than death. And yes, I’ve heard all the excuses. “Oh, that won’t happen to me. Strokes and accidents happen to other people.” Well, guess what? You are the “other people.” Another one I’ve heard from friends: “I can’t afford it.” Well, you can’t afford NOT to have health insurance. Most of my friends who’ve said they can’t afford insurance still manage to take vacations, buy concert tickets, iPods and new clothes. Skip the freakin’ extras, get the insurance. At least get catastrophic insurance. The money is not wasted. Without insurance, navigating our broken health care system is a nightmare and a potentially fatal experience. Even with insurance, it’s a nightmare. Basically, our health care system is a nightmare. Best to protect yourself with as much insurance as you can afford.

Number Seven: Eat right and exercise. If you are overweight, get on a freakin’ diet, NOW. This will prevent 70 percent of cancers and most illnesses. And if you do get sick, you’ll recover faster. My husband Frank works on medical magnetic imaging devices and sees the insides of people all the time. Basically, if you’re fat and unhealthy, your insides look just as bad as the outside. And sorry, but candy is not a food group.

The Most Important Thing I’ve Learned: Tragedies bring out the worst, but also the best in people. A core group of people has come through for me in extraordinary ways during this event. My life is completely changed because of it; my heart feels fifty times bigger. Sometimes your greatest lessons come from life’s most painful events. Be open to the lessons and the love, even when you’re in the middle of what seems to be the worst days of your life. You’ll be amazed at what’s there for you, if you only have the eyes to see it.

Author’s Note: When Judy had her stroke, the doctors told us it was so massive that she would be institutionalized for life. Lucky for us, Judy proved them wrong. She’s making a miraculous recovery and eventually she will regain what she has lost. By the time you read this, she will be living with me and healing. I’ve never felt more blessed.

P.S. A special thanks to the team watching Judy’s house and cats. You guys are the best!

©2008, Janet Periat