July 2022 Newsletter
Friends,
What’s the best way to remember your wife’s birthday?
Forget it once.
Friends,
Happy 246th Independence Day everyone! Celebrating America's declaring of independence from Great Britain in 1776.
July is a big month for my family. On July 5, I mark 38 years as a licensed insurance agent in Connecticut. I’m shooting to make another 12 years at least.
On July 10, our daughter Frankie (Anna Francesca) becomes a teenager and Tuesday, July 26 is my genius wife Amy’s birthday. I can’t tell you her age but can give you an interesting number … 726. Her birthday is 7/26 and this year on that day I turn 726 months old. I was born 1/26/62. How cool is that? And the town of Trumbull does concerts at the Town Hall Gazebo on Tuesdays so we have a built-in concert we can walk to for FREE! I’ll just remember to get the cake, a mushy card, flowers and chocolate.
I hope you and your loved ones are enjoying the summer and staying healthy and safe.
Kind Regards,
Michael Antonini
What’s New
Michael’s predictions: 0-1.
In the May newsletter, I went out on a limb and predicted a $10 premium reduction of the Medicare part B premium mid year. It’s not happening.
My math was okay. CMS said the part B premium should have been $160.40 if they knew last fall what they know now.
However, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said that the 2022 premium should be adjusted downward but legal and operational hurdles prevented officials from doing that in the middle of the year. Hopefully, they lower it for 2023. Here is an article on the topic from the AP.
Ask The Expert: Melissa Kirsch
Melissa Kirsch
Melissa Kirsch is an assistant editor for Culture and Lifestyle at The New York Times. She is the author of the book “The Girl’s Guide.”
The Phone Booth of the mind
Phone booths may be obsolete, but they still offer a good model for keeping our phones from taking over our lives.
A crowd gathered in Times Square recently for the removal of what the city promoted as New York’s last public pay phone. “End of an Era,” declared the news release headline, even though the era when pay phones played any meaningful role in New Yorkers’ lives certainly ended long ago.One might be forgiven for feeling a bit nostalgic. Pay phones are vestiges of the analog world, before the “I’ll be 15 minutes late” text, when long-distance was a consideration and people on calls in public got their own private booths.
“People miss a period of time when a call meant something,” Mark Thomas of The Payphone Project told The Times. “When you planned it and you thought about it, and you took a deep breath and you put your quarter in.”I’ve been considering the familiar refrain about smartphones, that they’ve made our lives easier to navigate at the expense of our manners, our attention, our safety while driving. We may be physically present, but we’re never really there.
Pay phones were stationary monotaskers. Before cellphones, if you wanted to talk to someone, you did it at home, at work or in a booth. Your telecommunications were contained to these discrete spaces, separate from the rest of your life. Pay phones may be nearly obsolete, but there’s nothing stopping us from reinstituting some of their boundaries in a post-pay-phone world.
What might this look like for you? For me, it would mean pulling over to the side of the road to send a text rather than dictating my message to Siri. I’d step out of the pedestrian flow and into
the phone booth of the mind to listen to voice mail. I wouldn’t check social media while waiting for a friend to arrive at a bar. Long phone calls would take place at home, not while I’m on a walk or sitting on a park bench, ostensibly enjoying the outdoors.
My sentimental ideal of the phone booth — Richard Dreyfuss calling Marsha Mason from outside her apartment in the rain at the end of “The Goodbye Girl” — is a time capsule, a romantic vision of the past. But the phone booth as metaphor, as inspiration for creating boundaries between virtual and real life, still seems useful today.
Important Dates
Happy July Birthdays! Especially Amy S. Okrepkie 7/26!
Happy Independence Day
Looking forward to continuing a great summer!
All the Best,
Michael