on wednesday i celebrated my 10th wedding anniversary. this is the longest single relationship in my entire life and the time has flown by. it’s not been a cakewalk, there have been many ups and downs but we’ve got through them and we’re going to keep going. when i first arrived in the US; two years after our actually wedding; i talked about how as much as it seemed like, our relationship was not going to be a fairytale.
i mean that in the most positive way, society seems to set this expectation that once your significant other woos you, sweeps you off your feet and nuptials are over, you live happily ever after. you can but you have to work at it. there is no short cut. there are going to be bad days, there are going to be worse days, and there will be arguments, this is to be expected. but there will be days that are so amazing, you will wonder what you’ve done to deserve something so spectacular. the key is to remember the balance. you have to work on this amazing relationship every day. don’t go to bed angry is good, but to wake up and remember why you fell in love is better.
my 30s have been my best decade to date and i think a lot of it has to do with my relationship. i’d like to think i’ve grown and gotten better as a person, i could also be delusional. i know i am happier and i’m finally comfortable saying it out loud. i’ve enjoyed the last 10 years – through the sickness, the health, the poorer, the richer, the sadness, the happiness and i’m looking forward to continuing to remember why i love this woman every day.
After close to a decade of disenfranchisement, I have the opportunity to vote in the 2012 US Presidential election and by my thinking my choices are severely limited.
Even when I lived in Trinidad I found it difficult to vote along party lines and in the last elections I had a chance to participate in, I ‘wasted’ my ballot with none of the above pencilled in. I long for a representative system that pays more than lip service to representation. I remember reading about a prefecture somewhere that appointed representatives in a jury duty type system – you get called up, you serve for two years, at the end of the term there is someone new. limited opportunities to get entrenched and greedy.
In what is fundamentally a two party system, both sides have become entrenched and greedy. I’ve observed previously that in order to get elected nationally you require a vast amount of money and in order to get that money you’re going to have to start compromising. Either in the beginning by whose money you accept or once the election is over, what is owed to your major contributors.
Currently the Republican party is attempting to find a candidate that they believe can beat Barrack Obama. Looking at the candidates that remain I’m yet to find one that appeals to my values as a voter or doesn’t completely scare me with their beliefs.
it’s been a while since the wife and i put together a mix but based on the success of the last one, we decided to put our own spin on a holiday collection.
Track Listing:
Ice – Shelleyan Orphan
That Was the Worst Christmas Ever! – Sufjan Stevens
Christmas Card from a Hooker In Minneapolis – Neko Case
The Christians And The Pagans – Dar Williams
The Rebel Jesus - The Chieftains
Fairytale Of New York – The Pogues
Father Christmas – The Kinks
A Christmas Duel – Cyndi Lauper, The Hives
Christmas Tree’s On Fire – Holly Golightly
Outsourcin’ Christmas (The Unemplyed Little Elf Song) – The Canadian Dollars
Christmas Reindeer – The Knife
St. Stephen’s Day Murders – The Chieftains
All I Want for Christmas – Timbuk 3
Merry Christmas From The Family - Jill Sobule
click here or on the image above to download, hope you enjoy.
My boss died today. And although there are numerous more eloquent eulogies out there, I thought I’d add one more to the growing pile of accolades.
The first time I experienced Steve Jobs change the world I was covering the Macworld Expo in NY and he announced with some fanfare the floppy was dead and introduced the very first iMac. Over the years, I was fortunate to be present for quite a few keynote speeches and one of my favorite ‘One more thing moments’ was the Boss conceding that hockey puck mouse was not the greatest design and surprising everyone sitting in the keynote at the Javitz Center the brand new trackball less mouse.
Steve Jobs officially became my boss in May 2005 and in the last six years, from part-time on the sales floor to full time tech support, I’ve participated in the launch of four iPhones, two iPads, three operating systems, the transition from PowerPC to Intel. I’ve introduced people to devices that have changed their lives, I’ve helped them get back on track when their favorite device doesn’t quite do what they expected it to and showed them how make the computer they’ve had last just a little bit longer. I’ve empathized over lost papers and saved the documenting of entire first year of life.
Thank you Steve Jobs, for giving me and tens of thousands of retail employees the power to help people in whatever way we could. You didn’t hire each of us individually but your vision created the space for us to exist and I’m honored to have had you as my fearless leader.
when your daily commute is done in a 10 year old car with close to 250,000 miles on it, you have to make decisions about maintenance and usage. with this is mind, we decided that our 2002 Madza Protoge 5 would be an in town car and an road trips would involve a rental of some sort.
This weekend during trips to Cincinnati and Chattanooga we managed to put a little over 1,000 miles on a Chrysler 200. With that amount of time in the car, I thought it would be a good idea to document the experience.
I have to start of by saying I don’t like the car. There are some great features but overall I don’t think I’d rent this car again, much less purchase one. The car is marketed by Hertz as a standard vehicle, other vehicles that I’ve rented from them that fall into that class include the Nissan Altima and Madza 6. By this standard and looking at the exterior of the car, I expected a much roomier vehicle.
My primary disappointment with the car in the interior space. I spent the first 10 minutes in the car adjusting the seat and steering wheel finding a comfortable position far enough away from the looming dashboard. It seemed no matter how far back or how high or low I adjusted the steering column I could not find an ideal position that didn’t feel like the steering wheel was in your lap or uncomfortably on my knees. Eventually I settled for the seat about 80% of the way back. This presented another problem, with the seat that far back there was almost no room for an average height adult to fit behind me. The problem was the same on the passenger side. After three days of multiple hour trips and constant adjustment to the seat, I still found myself getting out the car with hip and ankle discomfort. Sadly, this is not a family road trip car.
If I could ever get comfortable, I would have really enjoyed the minimal car noise, the quality of the sound system, the clever placement of the volume, mode and channel buttons behind the steering wheel and the voluminous trunk space. There were two other things that were mildly disappointing in this experience. First, the lack of indication when the cruise control was engaged. The word ‘cruise’ lights up on the dash when you enable it but there is no other indication when you’ve set a speed and the ‘manual’ gear shift is sluggish and almost useless on any kind of elevation change.
In terms of fuel efficiency, I managed to do 1069 miles of interstate and stop and go driving on 35 gallons of gas which works out to be approximately 31 mpg. The pickup on the car is not bad on the flat but on inclines it’s best to remain in the slow lane.
Overall the car, looks OK from the outside but requires some fundamental changes to the interior, like trimming about six inches off the dash and back seat bench, to compete in the family sedan market.
As an expat, I was trying to avoid making a public comment on the state of emergency in Trinidad. I’m not there, haven’t been there for a while, so I have no real concept of what’s going on a daily basis.
And here comes the ‘but’
One of the things I’ve always been proud of is good or ill you can say your piece and they’re always people who would. You don’t have to like them or what they were saying but they could and often times did.
In 2003 Trinidad was tied for 5th with Denmark in the World Press Freedom index and it was moment of true pride for me. Since then we’ve consistently slid down the ladder and in the 2010 index, we lay sandwiched between Latvia and Poland in 30th.
To compile this index, Reporters Without Borders prepared a questionnaire with 43 criteria that assess the state of press freedom in each country. It includes every kind of violation directly affecting journalists (such as murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of newspaper issues, searches and harassment). And it includes the degree of impunity enjoyed by those responsible for these press freedom violations.
Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2010
How the index was compiled
I thought I would be content to keep my mouth closed and let the state of emergency pass and for the government to realise what an abject failure that particular exercise was until this showed up in my news feed. Really, we’re keeping company with Egypt and China? For all the wrong reasons no less? Drafting legislation to deal with the regulation and monitoring of social media? Have these people been paying attention? What kind of backward, ignorant, clueless thinking is that? Oh wait, it’s the same kind of thinking that brought the state of emergency into play in the first place.
I recently had an opportunity to spend a couple of days in DC and visit the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art museums. As a designer I have a hateful relationship with modern art. I believe a lot of it horrendous and benefits from inflammatory press releases, gallery/museum curators looking to make a name for themselves and slow news cycles.
i don’t need three paragraphs to tell what i should see in a piece of art. it should be able to stand on it’s own, make me pause and think. maybe it’s an underlying societal problem, everything has to be given to us, we can no longer think for ourselves and art as a reflection of society is heading down that path.
Hockey intro at American Art Museum
Someone pointed out to me that I should say I dislike museums/galleries as opposed to modern art itself because they choose what is presented. But conversely if all they have to present is crap then what are they supposed to do?
But based on my experience I think a lot of what passes for modern art is lazy. There’s a lot of slap this together and get it out the door and make it controversial, make attract attention and we’ll be rich/famous in our lifetime. While at the museum, I came across a sign. Now aside from the video installations none of the other pieces in the museum had this kind of preamble associated with it and unsurprisingly it was by far the worst piece in the place.
I’ve had an opportunity to experience both the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern. The former left me with a feeling of awe and inspiration, while I departed the latter before I was removed for running commentary. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve been to either and while I can’t tell you about any of the trite shit that Tate should have just kept in storage, I do remember coming around the corner to see Joseph Wright’s The Blacksmith. I’d post a photo but you can’t get the feeling of warmth that almost emanates off the original painting. That painting didn’t a press release or explanation, it stops you and draws you in.
As the old adage goes, I may not know art, but I know what I like. I’ve included a gallery of stuff that I saw and liked at the American Art Museum.
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- Hockey intro at American Art Museum
today is my ninth wedding anniversary and there’s something that i wrote when i was just getting ready to move in with vic that has remained true almost seven years later:
vic and i are not living in a fairy tale and we know that. things are not going to be peachy and perfect all the time. we both have our off days, luckily we seem to have them when we can provide the most support to each other.
we’re both strong willed people and we’re both accustomed to doing things a certain way, we’re sure it’s going to take some getting used to.
what we have going for us, is our ability to talk about anything without discomfort or contention. we expect there will be problems, but we also think we can sit and talk about them and work them out. there are going to be external forces to deal with as well, but we will try and work those out in the safest possible manner for us.
we’re going to try and deal with each day as it comes. we have shared long term goals that we’ll be working towards when i get settled. in the interim, it’s about learning to live with each other and getting comfortable sharing a physical space.
i know it’s not going to be perfect all the time but i think if we abide the rule to not go to bed angry, i think we can face whatever challenges come up, together.
we’ve had our ups and downs in the time since i wrote this. and i would say the last year has probably been one of our most trying but we made it through and here’s looking forward to our 10th anniversary and beyond.
it’s taken a while to commit this to paper,so to speak. not because i had an really vested emotional baggage, i just wanted to have some clarity about what i was going to say. the easiest place to start is the beginning – we lost our house. there, that’s said, four simple words, in retrospect not all that simple. we joined millions of other families that could no longer afford their homes and were foreclosed by the bank.
before we lost our house, i lost my job. well one of them at least. and it was the one that counted – the primary one, the full time one with the benefits. the one the mortgage payment came out of.
it’s funny how you alway seem to spend as much as you have. this is not a tirade on how I got screwed by the mortgage companies or how the global economic meltdown screwed up my life, honestly i’m not sure what this is about.
looking back now, I guess our house purchase could be summed up with the following words – it seemed like a good idea at the time – probably the most damning words in any language. we went to our original mortgage company we told them what we were paying in rent and utilities and the price bracket we were trying to stay in and they told us what we would could afford. we thought we were being clever, nothing exotic – we got a simple fixed interest 30 year mortgage and found a house in our price range and bought into the myth that our house would appreciate in value and by the time the kids were off to college we could sell and move on. never quite worked out that way.
i think the moral of this story and so many other like it is there seems even in this age of instant messages, email and calls being recorded for customer satisfaction, we’re missing some fundamental communication skills. it took us six months to get enrolled into the HAMP program and honestly if someone had told us in december when we realised that we were over our heads what our options really were we would have walked away then.
for those of you that don’t know, the government partnered with the banks and mortgage lenders to create HAMP – home affordable modification program. the concept being that a lot of people we in trouble but wanted to keep their houses. should be a win/win for everyone right? not so much.
first of all the modification is based primarily on your previous years tax returns and you current income statements. if you lose your job close to end of the year and apply early in the new year, it looks like everything is kind of ok and your adjustment tends to be tiny and not all that helpful.
secondly there are some terms in the paperwork that people tend to overlook eg, if your payment is late, everything that you owe comes due. at the end of the trial period at the bank’s discretion if they feel you’re no longer eligible, everything you owe comes due. if you’ve saved too much (per their instructions) and appear to be ineligible because of said savings, everything you owe comes due. if they’ve screwed up your paperwork and claim you’re not actually in the program even though you’ve been pay regularly for two years, everything you owe comes due. and when i say everything you owe, that means the difference between the adjusted amount and the original amount on your mortgage, plus whatever late fees and interest that accrued -which in most cases will amount to tens of thousands of dollars. which if you’re unable to afford results in a foreclosure notice and the people at the bank that you spoke to previously suddenly becoming unavailable. only one of those situations was ours, if you look around you can find examples daily of people who have had the same experiences and either chose to stand and fight or like us, decide it might not be worth it in the long run.
my fundamental problem with this whole experience is the inconsistent message, i think in the 10 months i spent dealing with the bank i spoke to 15-20 different people and they all told me something different. it was if the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing. honestly if the first person i’d spoken to had said, “you need to be making at least another $600 a month to keep your house” we’d have started the short sale in december. as it turned out, contrary to what i’d been told a short sale does not stop the clock when your house is in foreclosure.
the other moral of this story is that homeownership like college is not for everyone. we loved our little house and great big yard and we had plans for the future however we knew in december 2009 that it was untenable but we believed that with a little help we could keep at the dream. now it’s time for a new dream – we unlike so many others have found somewhere to live, we are not without opportunities and have the support and understanding of our friends and family, so onward to the new chapter.
i am surprised that i would ever have to use the immigration tag on a post again. i thought after two, three, four, i honestly lost track, years of dealing with the multiple name changes bureaucracy that is the INS i was done and i would have to mention them again. not so lucky.
the story is a follows, all those eons ago when victoria and i were filling out form after form after form, they all required you put in the names of your children. no problem, right? well it shouldn’t be, except lo and behold yesterday my younger daughter presented herself at the us embassy in trinidad to get her student visa so she could take advantage of a scholarship and the consular officer declared that there is an immigrant visa application associated with her name so he’s denying her application on those grounds.
i don’t even know where to begin with this. actually i do. one of the cornerstones of my job is to assume positive intent. i tried, for about 30 seconds i tried and then i realised that if this particular consular officer had taken the same 30 seconds that i gave him to do his job right i wouldn’t be typing this post.
in 30 seconds he might have seen that it was an 8 year old application for her parent that was processed and approved. in another 30 seconds that the child had a visitor visa issued within that 8 year period and had travelled to the us and returned, twice.
so here we are with two weeks before the child is due to report and we have little recourse. our congressional consular liaison sent a request for the embassy in trinidad to reconsider and approve the application and the school is also attempting to get them to reconsider. barring that we can throw more money at the embassy, reapply and hope for a different officer and a more sensible response.
