It's 1am.  I really should be asleep, sore and exhausted after a long day of packing up our pathetic worldly belongings. Well, I was in bed, but then I made the mistake of reading my twitterfeed on the iPad before I turned out the lights. I came across an article about stupid teachers who use restraints on autistic children, which lead to flashbacks about much smaller injustices done on my children. I gave up on sleep and came into the office to catch up on the reading that I've missed over the past week. 

I read David Brooks' touching opinion piece about the unsung heros working abroad. But altruism doesn't have to mean a plane ticket to Kenya or Korea. There's commonplace altuism and heroics even here in a boring New Jersey suburb, if you know where to look. There's the group of senior citizens running a food bank, or the mom working full time to support her five children. 

I'm rather stunned that moving this time is so much harder than it was seven years ago. I didn't think that we had amassed that much more stuff, but we had. Kids' clothes in bins marked by age, books by bushel, lecture notes, beach shovels from Point Pleasant, dishes from aunties. There's also all the paperwork required for changing schools, and repairs demands from the inspectors. 

I never wanted to be this person. This person weighed down by stuff, who needs weeks to go some place else. I always wanted to be that James Spader character in Sex, Lies, and Videotape who has one key and can put all his possessions in the trunk of car. But here I am. Ha. 

But then we're lucky that we can move at all, as everyone reminds me. "You sold your house?," people continually ask. "In this market?" It's extremely hard to find people with enough money to buy that starter home in the starter community, because that's the group that has been hurt the most.

Yes, we're really lucky. We're also really lucky, because we can move.

Probably 3/4 of my town bought their home when it was worth a fraction of its current price. This would seem like a good thing. They would make a nice profit if they sold today. But their salaries have not risen much at all. Some don't even have a job anymore. So, if they sold their house, they wouldn't have any place to go. What percentage of Americans would be homeowners, if they had to buy for the first time today? 

Steve's been talking about the Atlantic article on the middle class all week. 

It’s hard to miss just how unevenly the Great Recession has affected different classes of people in different places. From 2009 to 2010, wages were essentially flat nationwide—but they grew by 11.9 percent in Manhattan and 8.7 percent in Silicon Valley. In the Washington, D.C., and San Jose (Silicon Valley) metro areas—both primary habitats for America’s meritocratic winners—job postings in February of this year were almost as numerous as job candidates. In Miami and Detroit, by contrast, for every job posting, six people were unemployed. In March, the national unemployment rate was 12 percent for people with only a high-school diploma, 4.5 percent for college grads, and 2 percent for those with a professional degree.