The Way We Live Now: in perfect balance. For every positive economic development, there is a negative one. Foreclosures down? Loan delinquencies up. Higher pay? Higher risk. Good job? Bad job. Smile? Hit a banker with an acid bomb.

You can't have it all. You have your fun, and then you take your medicine. Yes, the number of ongoing foreclosures fell for the first time since 2006; but the most optimistic thing any "expert" can say is, ""It's more of a hope than anything at this point."

Hope for this, experts: universal law. Everything that goeth up must cometh down. Elizabeth Millien is a trained opera singer who's toured worldwide. Pretty "cool," right? She works at Fairway, assisting customers. Nothing wrong with that, but if you think assisting customers at Fairway is as "cool" as singing opera in Brazil, then brother, you never hit that high note just right.

The economy is the same as this. Jobless claims fell last week. Good! But "the labor market remains impaired." Bad! The hardest thing is finding anything unequivocally good or bad. The majority of babies born into poverty have mothers who show signs of depression. Hard to find the bright side of that. And these same mothers go largely untreated. That's not good either. So their parenting skills suffer, thereby perpetuation the cycle of poverty. Hmmm, not seeing the beneficial things there, either. But: these babies were born here in the USA—the greatest country in the world. Celebrate!

Oh, we give up. There's always a bright side. And a dark side. Every time you feel a sense of rage against bankers building up inside you, you remember that there's always somebody sending bankers acid bombs, and you feel momentarily better. And then you feel worse, because that's horrible, and you're a horrible person, and maybe you don't deserve a banker's salary for what you do, which is to make bracelets with beads and sell them at craft fairs. And then you just smile, because man, what a world!

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