Hey, look! I got a postcard from Sarah Palin:

Governed from the center, eh? Let’s see what the other side of the card says:

Whu-? Stem-cell research? Climate change? Bill Ayers for the proles, stem-cell research for the college-educated suburbs? Whatever works, I guess. My zip code is telling the world too much about me.

I turned off “Marketplace” last night when they got to the news of GM and Ford’s stock price ($4.76 and $2.08, respectively). There’s a downside to living in a company town, and this is it. I’m thinking I’m going to restrict myself to the digest items for a while, lest I fall down hyperventilating. I took the dog for a meander — “walk” doesn’t really describe our excursions these days — and thought about other scary times in history. I was Kate’s age in 1968, a year that must have seemed at least as perilous as this one, and I don’t recall my parents doing anything more than discussing current events calmly. I was driving with my mother one night in May 1970 when the radio broadcast was interrupted by an emergency bulletin directing all off-duty Columbus police officers to report to their local station house immediately. The student riots that followed the invasion of Cambodia had begun, and while Ohio saw blood spilled and lives lost by the end of it, all my mother said about the muster of police was, “It must be something on campus.”

So that’s the role model, right there: Calm acknowledgment, sans freak-out. I made a mental list of everything I could do to get through this, and came up with:

1) Make soup.

2) Exercise.

3) Drink lots of water.

4) Keep the house looking nice.

5) Take good notes.

So we had a curried butternut squash/apple soup — recipe in the Junior League cookbook, which gives the lie to the old myth about WASPs not appreciating non-salt-and-pepper flavors — and got our vitamin A.

It’s probably just as well I’m concentrating on soup, because I no longer understand the world of finance (if I ever did). Ford and GM have plants all over the world, production lines, product that’s still selling (badly, but still selling). I don’t understand how the market could value them at a fraction of what you could get even if you pulled the plug on the whole business and parted out each and every factory.

This is what a lack of liquidity does, I guess. Can’t get a loan, can’t get a car. Even Toyota sales are down by a third. How this shakes out remains to be seen — that’s a phrase they teach you on the first day of j-school — but I don’t imagine it’ll be pretty.

It’s hard to believe I’m going to spend the next two weekends making a no-budget zombie movie. On the other hand, why not make a zombie movie? What else should I do? Start cutting firewood for supplemental heating?

Speaking of which, my co-executive producer sent out the all-hands e-mail yesterday. Because we’re no-budget, we require the cast to wear their own clothes for costumes. With some caveats, of course:

Julie, business casual as well, but please wear clothes that you don’t have to wear again. A wooden stake is going into the front of your blouse and coming out the back.

As our makeup guy said, “Let the good times roll.” Have a good weekend.