The Twilight Report

2008-10-10T04:27:00

30 September 2008 07:04pm: Waiting for my pizza so I can go watch daily colbert show report. Four sleeps till New York and thinking about which sweets to bring. Nice.
4 October 2008 09:35am: The line for immigration was terrible! But at least that made the security line short. Plane is full of yanks returning from vacation.
4 October 2008 10:27am: New York here I come!!!
7 October 2008 12:18pm: Today is a good day to see the ocean. Well, what passes for an ocean on the East Coast anyway...
Today at 12:04pm: You can tell who someone is for by who they complain about, as you know they are going to vote for the other. Lizards *sigh*

Dual something...

2006-12-01T02:53:00

A lot of people throw around the term “dual citizen.” I think I prefer to think of myself as a “dual expat.”

A Modest Proposal

2004-12-19T21:36:00

The Economist has no bylines, but it does have three titles for every article. With great interest, I read one article in the last issue of the year, which arrived in my mailbox yesterday, was variously titled 1. "The Servant Problem" 2. "A Modest Proposal" and 3. "How to solve the biggest issue in modern politics." The second title "A Modest proposal" is of course a reference to Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, the de facto standard in satire, so naturally I was prepared for some good satire about the downfall of politicians for employing "illegal" immigrants, but the setting up of the piece was long and winding so when it got to the satire bit

Parents are not the only people who have difficulty getting visas for workers. All employers face restrictive immigration policies which raise labour costs. Some may respond by trying to fiddle the immigration system, but most deal with the matter by exporting jobs. In the age of the global economy, the solution to the servant problem is simple: rather than importing the nanny, offshore the children.

The Economist 16 December 2004

I had forgotten to expect it. They can't be serious I thought to myself, and then I remembered that they aren't. I love to read The Economist in the Laundromat. It makes me feel so snobbish and elitist... and I am not talking 3L33T.

Shashars

2004-09-22T04:22:00

Streetlight outside my New York home. I might never have seen it?

Those of you, who know me best, may not know that I am in fact from the planet Shashars, where I was the emperor of an empire that I ruled with an Iron Fist^TM. I am actually here on Earth as part of the Emperor Exchange Program. It's a service of the Galactic Dictators of the Universe, an elite club that only the biggest and most ruthless belong. It is very very invitation-only, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'm here on Earth for vacation, to get away from it all, as it were, as an anonymous computer programmer working at The Company (real name removed to protect Corporate America).

I've been telling people this story in various forms for decades now. Not bad considering I am only approaching my third decade on this planet. In the first grade I had nearly my entire class convinced that they were also from Shashars. I even had a Queen to rule by my side (back then, I was the King instead of the Emperor - at some point I decided Empire sounded better than Kingdom).

Back then I was living in New Haven Connecticut, where my folks were employed as post docs at Yale. Later my dad would move to Chicago and my mum and I were off to Los Alamos. I was just now in my kitchen trying to think of what I wanted to snack on (finally decided on a tall glass of Chocolate Milk) and I wondered out of nowhere, how my life would have been different had I stayed in New Haven.

This is a bit embarrassing or maybe just funny... but I was theoretically engaged to a girl back then. I really wish I could remember what prompted me to do it, but I remember whispering into my Queen's ear "Do you want to marry me?" She answered in the affirmative. Now here is the embarrassing part: it has been so long and my memories of the first grade are so corrupted that I don't actually remember this girl's name. I don't know a girl I was sort of engaged to once.

If I had stayed in New Haven, might we have been friends growing up, like some of my friends in New Mexico? Would we now be old friends who occasionally sent e-mails back and forth at odd intervals? It is just so hard to say. It is hard to imagine how entirely different my life would be now, except just to know that it would have been completely different. When I think of life changing events, I usually think of two: one was moving to America with my parents (when we moved to New Haven in 1980), the other was when I put a free quotations database onto the Internet in 1995, which eventually led to a job offer at The Company and lead me to where I now live in New York State. Now that I think about it though, Moving to New Mexico from New Haven may not have been as dramatic as leaving one country to live in another one, but probably at least as causal to my effect.

rc3: another day in the life of robert cobbler

2004-08-04T04:55:00

Note: I originally wrote this early in the morning on August 4 for another site, but I am particularly pleased with it, so I am reposting it here to get total coverage. I've only made a few additional corrections.

I did this once before, almost ten years ago. Thought it was time once again to write about my old friend RC.

rc3: another day in the life of robert cobbler

3 August 2004 / August 3, 2004

By the time I got into my car to... I would say go to work... but the fact that I am going to work today seems almost incidental... but anyway, by the time I get into my car to go to work I have already been up for almost 3 hours today. I got up extra early to photograph a still life for my second assignment which was really due yesterday, but I had forgotten to take the film out of the fridge last night so I spent an hour going through my writing desk searching for the title to the Toyota so that I can get Green's Auto to haul the thing away so I don't have to spend money on it. Right now that car is costing me money just sitting in my driveway and it has to come to an end. By the time I have confirmed that I really don't have the damn title anymore and that I will have to deal with DMV, the film is ready to shoot, but I still am not. I can't think of what to shoot. The content of my writing desk is scattered across the floor neatly organized into categories. The largest pile is stuff to throw away. The batteries I found stored in the desk are lying about and I imagine the Energizers confronting the Duracells in a medieval conflict. A couple of candles become castle towers in my mind. It seems the dumbest thing I can think of, but I arrange this ten second fantasy into my still life assignment.

I finish photographing the still life on time, and this is when I get into my car to start my day which already seems to be progressing. What I have to accomplish seem to add up to something larger than 24 hours, and even so I manage to forget three somethings in a row, each time having to turn around and drive back home to get it. Each time I seem to get further, which seems like progress, although it is really more work because it's longer to drive back. First I forgot my medication. Then it was my Australian passport application. Then it was the CD I had sold on half.com and had to post today.

(read more...)

America

2004-05-26T21:52:00

Today, I found out one of my coworkers is a Cricket fan. This, in and of itself is hardly surprising. Many of my fellow software engineers are of Indian origin (as in the sub continent), which is a country which follows the sport avidly. What was strange, is that this coworker of mine is from Pensylvania, which is not known for its interest in the sport.

So they asked me how closely I follow cricket. The answer is not really at all, but what I said was: "The only thing I care is that Australia beat England." Which is sort of true. I've inherrited my mother country's sense of rivalry with the England in an amusing mock sense of the word. I also added "Indian's will tell me that I'm silly, because England sucks at Cricket, but it's still the only thing important to me." I also told them about The Ashes.

Anyway, none of this is directly related to the subject I intended to write about (and the photograph I put up there at the top), except in that all this talk about Australia and Cricket got me to thinking about Australia, America and the fact that I was only naturalized as an American citizen last October. I never thought it would, but my attitudes toward America has changed completely now that I am an American. Even when the politicians do things which I think are wrong, or unethical (I won't get into politics here), I still feel as though, at least in some small way, we are all on the same "side". We are all Americans, for better or worse, and we are all, in this together.

The Twilight Report

tweet

Dual something...

A Modest Proposal

Shashars

rc3: another day in the life of robert cobbler

America