A new municipal bond issue has a total par value of $80,000,000. A member of the underwriting syndicate has sold its entire commitment of $10,000,000. If the syndicate is organized as an eastern account and there is an unsold balance of $2,000,000, what is the member’s remaining liability?

This is the kind of question that stares me in the face for eight hours every day.

My degree is in international relations. I wrote my Master’s thesis on the effect of McCarthyism on the U.S. Department of State; I focused on courses that included Middle Eastern studies, international law, human rights, and age-old political and diplomatic philosophy. At no time was I ever involved with anything having to do with economics. Yet, somehow, I was able to market myself well enough to be asked to join the Firm as a financial advisor trainee. So, for the past month and a half, I’ve been getting paid to study for my Series 7 certification exam on June 2. Quite a sweet deal, really! I’ll admit I was dubious at first - I’d always believed economics and finance stuff to be pretty, well, dry - but once I started getting a grasp of the subjects involved, I’ll go out on a limb and say that the material is keeping me interested. I’m not kidding.

In any case, though eight hours of studying a day for two months is a rather daunting prospect, it is all necessary. Failure to pass the Series 7 will result in me re-entering the job market, an event that would likely culminate with me sleeping until two every day after staying up ’til the wee hours of the morning, watching lots of crappy daytime TV, and scouring Myspace for random individuals, the job hunt put on the back burner as it was a few months ago.

I will not allow myself to go back to that. Trust me, it’s not as nice as it sounds.

So, henceforth, this will be my outlet for the pressure, the stress, and the little things that make my life somewhat more complex than it could be. It will remain public for the foreseeable future, as events of the past six months have left me with little to hide, and because, as of right now, I’m the only one reading it. And there we go.