Trends

Yesterday was a very bad stock market day. So was last Friday, and so was last Thursday.

Yesterday started to feel like October all over again.....down 200 points one day, down another 200 points the next. A third day of down is a sucker punch. Except that it feels crunchier because the Dow Jones Index itself is worth 4000 points less than October. 200 points is now a much larger percentage of the whole.

My office is not in a panic, so much as a state of confused optimism. That is the mood an investment management firm works to project: Something will eventually, again, go up instead of down. Because something will. I admire this. Although I'm relieved I'm pushing paper, not trying to figure out what companies (if any) have northward momentum in the near future.

The online dating world seems immune to economic turmoil. This morning as I checked my OKC inbox and responded to a couple messages, 3 different men sent IM chat requests. So you might see how OKC can be an ADD addiction during the workday if I let it. Often I am faced with this choice of keeping busy:

a) creating new-account-paperwork flow spreadsheets for the marketing department;

b) clicking refresh every 10 seconds on the Yahoo! Finance screen to see just how quickly the Dow is falling, and yelling at the screen when it does;

c) responding to the invitation of a 25-year-old man, who has the day off from work, whose opening line is "you are very, very hot!"

Of course, yes, I know. Technically I am only getting paid for a).

But what can I say? If the # of hits on my OKC profile is trending upwards....shouldn't I be riding it?

(Setting a good example for my company, in theory, say.....?)

Update, 1:31 p.m. As of this hour the Dow has gained back 153 points today. It might be Ben Bernanke talking and raising confidence. Or it might be that analysts have started checking me out on OKC.

Stay tuned.