If you don’t know who Alexandra Penney is, you probably will soon enough: this is one of those blog stories — like the one about poor Adolf Hitler Campbell — that spreads across the news media and blogs like wildfire. Penney is a successful writer and editor who got royally screwed by Bernard Madoff. I came across her article on The Daily Beast via Princess Sparkle Pony who sarcastically asks readers to “Please Shed a Tear for Inconvenienced Rich Lady.”

Tracking back the link from that blog, I came across commentary on Gawker, which apparently thought it was a parody.

I’m all for poking fun at people with way too much money who don’t even know how many houses they own.

But I just couldn’t find it in me to mock Penney for her loss. I’ll be the first to admit that part of this reaction probably has to do with her description of life as a young-twenty-something, when she worked three jobs to support her kid, “including [a job] cashiering at the fish market, where my new style included rubber boots, overalls and a wrap-around aprons.”

Probably she should’ve been a bit more careful with whom she decided to invest her life’s savings. But this isn’t someone who was handed everything on a silver platter: she had to work for it, and as sometimes happens in this country, when you work hard, sometimes you reap financial rewards (her line of sex books probably didn’t hurt, either). So now she’s enjoying the excesses she’s won for herself, the excesses she didn’t inherit or sue for, and it’s all gone.

I’m thirty years old. I work forty hours a week in a cubicle, and while it’s a cube with a window, my view is of a parking lot in northern Bethesda. Three weeknights I take the train past my apartment and work nights at a Bookstore, I also work there on Sundays, and have been known to agree to the occasional extra shift when someone calls out or doesn’t show up. I probably work about sixty-five hours a week, and it’s honestly not much: there are people who work two or more jobs, for a hell of a lot more hours than I do, and who are scraping by with considerably less than I have. I’m grateful for both of my jobs, I’m grateful for what hours I work, but by no means do I want to be working this schedule for the rest of my life. I hope that if I work hard, and if I cover my ass, maybe, someday, many years from now, I’ll be able to afford to quit the Bookstore. Maybe, if I’m lucky, someday I’ll be financially secure enough to actually take vacations that involve traveling somewhere farther than the National Mall.

My point is, I hope for the better for myself in the future. And, when and if that future comes, to have everything I’ve worked for obliterated in such a manner, would be a completely crushing blow. It’s easy to mock her for selling her cottage, but is it really that easy to mock her for being devastated about having to fire her maid, Yolanda? I don’t mean for the problems it’ll cause Ms. Penney, I’m sure she’ll figure out how to do laundry and dust, but rather: for what it means for Yolanda?

Right now, my Bookstore part-time job is in jeopardy. It’s not in jeopardy because of anything I did. It’s in jeopardy as a result of a series of bad business decisions which resulted in a nearly forty-million dollar loan taken out as a high rate of interest and due to be paid back in three months. It’s the result of a plummeting economy that might just prove too much for the Corporate Parent to overcome. I’m contemplating jumping ship after the holidays, I’d be stupid to wait until the water is lapping the poop deck before finding a flotation device. My Office job, at a small technology start-up, is more secure: we’re still getting sales, but they’ve been slowing down. I could survive, for a short while, the loss of the Bookstore job: if the Office job goes, I’m fucked.

I know this post seems a little disjointed. We’re all vulnerable to actions that we can’t control. Losing my part-time job might not seem like much, but far too often, that paycheck covers my utility bills and my Smartrip card and my groceries. Even losing that income for a couple of weeks could be devastating to me, wiping out my meager savings account in a small fraction of the time it’s taken me to build it up.

Ms. Penney is in a far better financial position than I am, even after her loss. At the same time, her loss was far larger in scale than anything I could experience right now. I may become a victim of the economy, something far too large to blame on any one person, but she was victimized by one man on, and I find it hard to find more damming words than her own, “a sociopath” with a desire for “self aggrandizement.” I’m not going to blame her for something out of control, and I’m not going to mock what I feel is a genuine statement of remorse for Yolanda’s situation. One might be formerly-rich, and one might be a maid, but I sympathize with both of them right now, and I’m far too glad to be in either’s shoes (knock on wood).

Sometimes, you read about parents giving their kid a strange name, and you’re torn between letting them name the kid Metallica, and beating them into a bloody pile of flesh and bones for the combination of Adolf Hitler Campbell. Let’s go over those first two names again: Adolf. Hitler. Yeah, I’m looking around for a baseball bat.

Why would someone name their kid Adolf Hitler? As one woman in my office responded when I asked this rhetorical question, “Um, probably because they’re, I don’t know, Nazis?”

The father of 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child’s full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance. Heath Campbell and his wife, Deborah, are upset not only with the decision made by the Greenwich ShopRite, but with an outpouring of angry Internet postings in response to a local newspaper article over the weekend on their flare-up over frosting.

“I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they’ve been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past,” Heath Campbell said Tuesday in an interview conducted in Easton, on the other side of the Delaware River from where the family lives in Hunterdon County, N.J.

“There’s a new president and he says it’s time for a change; well, then it’s time for a change,” the 35-year-old continued. “They need to accept a name. A name’s a name. The kid isn’t going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did.”

Karen Meleta, a spokeswoman for ShopRite, said the Campbells had similar requests denied at the same store the last two years and said Heath Campbell previously had asked for a swastika to be included in the decoration.

“We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate,” Meleta said. “We considered this inappropriate.”

The Campbells ultimately got their cake decorated at a Wal-Mart in Pennsylvania, Deborah Campbell said. About 12 people attended the birthday party on Sunday, including several children who were of mixed race, according to Heath Campbell.

I don’t know if Wal-Mart decorating the cake with the kid’s full name should have me feeling the triumph of freedom in America, or wondering at the education level of the average Wal-Mart employee who apparently doesn’t know who Adolf Hitler was.

The Campbells’ other two children also have unusual names: JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell turns 2 in a few months and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell will be 1 in April.

Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because “no one else in the world would have that name.” He sounded surprised by all the controversy the dispute had generated.

He said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently.

“Say he grows up and hangs out with black people. That’s fine, I don’t really care,” he said. “That’s his choice.”

I think I can draw three conclusions:

1. If the parents aren’t Nazis, they’re certainly Nazi sympathizers. They probably think all that stuff about the holocaust is, if not made up completely, at least certainly exaggerated. In other words, they’re bat-shit crazy. And that’s fine in the sense that, in America, the practice of free speech has to include letting people be bat-shit crazy.

2. They’ve scarred their kids for life. When that Swedish kid tells people his parents named him “Metallica”, people will say, “Hey, that’s awesome!” When this kid tells people his parents named him Adolf Hitler, he’s eventually going to have to admit he’s been in therapy for most of his life.

3. The first thing their kids are going to do when they turn 18 is going to be to get their names changed.

In short: lots of sympathy for the poor kids, not so much sympathy for the adults. And why do I get the feeling a lot of the parents of the “mixed-race”* children (assuming Mr. Campbell was being accurate) who attended the birthday party did it knowing that the Campbells were bat-shit crazy but not wanting their child to be stigmatized for a choice not of his making? That takes balls. (Either that, or they were just dip-shit stupid).

Mark my words: Adolf Hitler Campbell is either going to grow up to be an extreme-right wing wacko politician, or a gay lobbyist for pro-Israeli causes. I don’t see much middle ground for the guy.

*And … when he’s saying “mixed-race”, does he actually mean there were black kids and Latino kids? Or does he mean “Oh, there was a French kid, and a British kid, and an Irish kid… and that kid’s mom is Dutch, but her husband is Swiss.”

I am not a girl.

Despite the fact that I cry at certain sappy and not so sappy movies, I am, in fact, not a girl. Despite the fact that I enjoy curling up on the couch and listening to a Josh Groban Christmas CD while being kneaded by a purring cat, I am not a girl. Okay, maybe mint chocolate chip ice cream and buttery nipples are my comfort food and drink of choice: I am not a girl.

This is particularly evidenced by my shoes.

At the moment, I have four pairs of shoes. Two of these pairs I bought on Monday, to replace the older pairs, which I’d worn to such an extent that after only a few hours of a standing shift at the Bookstore was enough to reduce my right foot (particularly my heel) to a screaming ember of pain which caused me to limp everywhere.

Finally, I gave in and treated myself. Here’s a true story: my right foot was in so much pain on Monday morning, from all the walking I’d done on Sunday, I asked my Office “wife”* to give me a ride to the DSW around the corner. She didn’t want too, at first, but when I told her I needed shoes I knew she’d eventually cave, after I bow beat into her acquiesing her position by the force of my personality (and my winces of pain when I walked).

I buy two types of shoes: my non-girlish fashion style prefers Skecher’s Harvard work boots. They’re sturdy, comfortable, with the bonus of being slip-resistant (isn’t that what the treads are for?) and looking quasi-acceptable in place of dress shoes. Particularly in the winter, it’s rare on any day that I’ll leave my apartment with anything else on my feet (er, ‘cepting socks, of course). This is my fourth pair of Harvards, and I tend to run them into the ground every year and a half to two years or so.

Second are sneakers. I don’t wear sneakers much, my non-girly fashion sense generally thinks they don’t fit too well with my “work style” (i.e., jeans, button-up shirt with a tie, possibly a sweater vest). They’re usually reserved for trips to the laundry room, or days when my feet are still aching from the previous night. I picked up an off-brand pair for $30 — they’re off-white (grayish-brown, sort of), and very comfortable.

Okay, I might be a little vain. That’s not girlish or boyish: that’s DCish.

*Seriously, she’s so far out of my league it really isn’t funny.