is red a good color on me?

I got my quarterly report from my 403 (b) retirement fund yesterday. That sound you hear? A thousand bucks being flushed down the toilet in the 3rd quarter alone (not to mention the $1,000 loss from the first two quarters of the year). It pains me to think that balance doesn't even include the implosion which started at the beginning of this month. I'm not entirely sure why I even bothered to open the statement because I knew only horror was to be found there. I suppose it's like a car wreck that I couldn't look away from.

But what you see is me not panicking. When the money is listed as balances on a piece of paper, it hardly seems real to me. I mean, if I had had a pile of cash sitting at home and suddenly %15 percent of that pile went away, I'd be upset by that loss. But when it's just a sea of red on my quarterly statement, it hardly seems like a real loss - I wasn't planning on actually doing anything with that money for another thirty years, anyway.

I'm going to cling to articles such as this one from the New York Times to assure me that I don't need to panic and pull my money out of the market. I wasn't going to, but now I'm really not going to do so (we'll just pretend that I'm not just too lazy to maybe find a better way to distribute how my money is allocated within my retirement portfolio). Then I'm going to try to cut through the haze of my undergraduate education where I learned about investing. In other words, buy low, sell high. Boy, am I ever buying low now!