Dear Karma Cleanser:
I am newly married and we are looking to buy a home. My husband is interested in possibly buying a house that has been foreclosed on. I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to benefit from someone else’s misfortune. However, we are on a limited budget and foreclosed homes tend to be much cheaper. What advice can you give a young couple? Thanks for your help.
—Not cheap, just frugal
You’ve been watching those scary movies again, haven’t you? Hopeful young couple, naively middle class, finds a steal on a decrepit old fixer-upper. They spend the first hour or so goofing off while we munch our popcorn and wait for the hatchet to fall. Soon there’s blood pouring down walls, strange voices in the attic and a swarm of malicious flies in the nursery. Lucky for you, this kind of thing only happens in bad movies. You and your husband have nothing to worry over. Go for the foreclosure. Just don’t rent any horror flicks for a while.
Dear Karma Cleanser:
Is there such as thing as “techno karma”? I was on a call on my cell phone the other night to a man who wanted to hire me to revamp his company’s website. Our call kept getting interrupted, though, because my phone was breaking up. I eventually had to hang up and call him back on a friend’s phone. Later, when he sent me the proposal for the job, the files that he sent were corrupt. My computer froze up as I was trying to open them. Then, the link that I sent him to see my design work suddenly stopped working. I don’t think I’m going to be getting paid by this guy anytime soon. I’m not sure what kind of karma is at work here, but obviously this job is cursed from the start.
—Ruby on Thin Ice
Techno Karma — ah, yes. We vaguely remember hitting that party, circa 1998, in some unmarked warehouse space out in the ghetto part of town. Lots of kids with glowsticks and lollypops? Wasn’t Sasha the DJ? Just kidding. We’re not sure about karma targeting technology, but it does sound like the universe is sending you clues that you should skip this particular assignment. Ask yourself if you’re creating the interference that’s jamming the communication itself.
Been bad? karmacleanser@gmail.com.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2005.
