Feeling Kinda' Down

I've been feeling kinda' down lately. Now that I think about it, maybe I'm a little depressed.

My life is filled with disappointments. My wife. My kids. My dog. My job.

Man, things were going so great! A couple of Stanford buddies recruited me into this venture capital firm in Palo Alto. With my grades, I was lucky to scrape through business school. So I thought, "What the hell?" Besides, it beat playing video games.

Anyway, I started making pretty good money, not as much as the other guys but it was alright. I had enough to buy a funky Victorian in San Francisco. And the Carrera made the commute a lot easier. The looks I got sitting on the freeway made me feel really good, you know?

In fact, that how I met my wife. The morning commute was getting nowhere so I thought I'd check my voicemail. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice this woman driving a cranberry Lexus who seemed to be doing the same thing. The first thing I noticed was her phone. It was one of those compact jobs that flips open at the bottom. It had this really cool plastic case that looked like wood.

She finishes her conversation, tosses the phone onto the seat and starts checking her make-up in the rear view mirror. What could I do? It took a couple of miles but I finally got her to roll down her window and give me her phone number. The rest, as they say, is history.

We had a pretty good life. Between the money she pulled in from her law firm, and the cash I was pulling in from the Internet firm my buddies started, we were able to move into a nice place in Woodside. I wasn't as big as my place in the City but we thought it'd be better for the kids. The schools were a lot more user friendly and we didn't have to worry so much about who they were running into.

Things turned sour last year.

It seemed like the right time to leverage my contacts. So I took the three-quarter-million I'd squirreled away and started day trading. I figured, if some 23-year-old, minimum wage schmuck in Missouri could do it, I could. We had a contractor set up a home office in the garage, which we never used. I filled it with some last generation computer equipment that my next door neighbor, Steve, had been playing around with.

The first day out of the blocks, I made ten thousand dollars. By the end of the week, I was up forty-five thousand. Four weeks later, I broke a hundred thousand. The best part was the wife and kids.

It was like we were honeymooners again. She'd call from work and tell me what she was going to do when she got home. Our housekeeper, Trini, was cranking out my favorites. And they kids. Every day after school, they'd dash through the front door, throw their backpacks onto the kitchen table, barge into the office and ask, "How much have you made today, dad?"

It was sweet.

After about eight months, I hit a dry patch. Not too bad a first. Ten grand one week. Fifteen the next. Twenty. Fifty. Seventy-five. I didn't panic. After six months, I was ahead of where I'd started. It was a lesson I needed to learn. You've got to be able to take the bad with the good. The kids seemed okay with it. I can't say the same for the wife, though. It may be her parents more than anything.

Three months ago, I got a tip from another buddy and went for a margin play. He was really apologetic afterward. He told me some of his clients were really pissed off. I was stunned. Ten years of savings down the drain.

I don't feel like I have anyone to turn to.

I'm sure the guys at the firm would be glad to bring me back on board but I'm not sure I could handle the looks, especially after the big send-off they gave me. The wife's been talking about quitting the firm to start a consulting business. I just haven't had the heart to burst her bubble and I'm not sure the kids can handle public school.

Kinda' down lately, ya' know. Now that I've opened up about it, I'm sure it's just depression. Think I'll shoot me somebody.

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