Category: About Me


Wow, there is a lot that you can not do before you have a work/study visa or permanent residence. It is honestly surprising to me. The two that I discovered today is that I can not open a banking account nor can I purchase cellular service.

In consideration, the banking makes sense. Matter of fact, the general movement of money seems to be the big wall between countries. So, I should reason anything that requires a contractual financial agreement also falls into that purview.

So, to accomplish one of these two acts you need to be: A Citizen of Country, A permanent resident, or on an approved visa. Beyond that, legal photo id (a current passport from any country will do.)

This is really a short entry but it’s again mainly for my info as well as anyone else. On the flip side. Whjen I get that Visa… I have armed myself with Knolwedge and won’t be sitting around twiddling my thumbs.

It has been almost exactly a year and a quarter since I’ve posted anything to my poor little neglected blog. So much has happened, so much.

Somewhere in the last night/early this morning range, I published my first app to the Apple app store. I have to emphasis “my” because I have published no less than 10 apps to the store. They just weren’t mine. While the app isn’t really much more than a meager data viewer… It’s still something that I designed, wrote, finished, and published.

I think this is the result of finally finding a medication to treat a depression that was far more severe than I understood. Over the past month I have been far more focused than I have in years. And being as though about 3 years ago I took a rather hard swan dive into depression; this is a good reversal.

So… what’s with the Expatriate thing? Well, I am slowly making my transition to live the latter half of my life out in Canada rather than the US. This process is a LOT more difficult than I would have thought. There is so much involved and to understand that I simply had no idea what I would need to do. Also; I’ve discovered that even researching online leaves me often scratching my head. So, I’ve decided to write my experiences (as best as I write) in this blog; in the event anyone else decides to do this.

My situation is thus: I am a legally married polyamorous adult. I have a wife and a nigh-teenage child, I have one girlfriend who has grade school children, and I have one girlfriend who is the adult caretaker for a parent with cancer. The girlfriend with the children is a Canadian born European.

The plan is to get my girlfriend and her daughters settled and into life in Canada while my spouse researches returning to school for her Masters and I research getting hired as a 30 yr software engineer. Once one of those things happen, we move up with our son. Our other girlfriend is in a complicated situation but we do discuss it regularly.

So phase one is getting G1 settled. This already has been… difficult. To get a place to live you need to have Canadian or at least American rental/credit history. 90+% of landlords will not rent to you without this. We discovered this as one landlord dragged us through paperwork for 2 weeks until telling us he was going to consider someone else. It took another 2 weeks for me to be notified he’d signed a lease for someone else. The solution seems to be offering 6 months down.

So, why the house first? Well, everything depends on residency. And that means, ID card, insurance, banking, the whole lot. So today we begin checking…. what can you do without an address? Well for starters; you can pay about one months luxury rent on a hotel room. (Which we’re doing)… At least we have a roof (after living in the states for awhile)

To start this week, we need to make living out of a hotel a reasonable experience. I’ve started the process of unlocking our AT&T iPhones which should be easily old enough to be released from their network prison. Next up will be talking to someone at an electronics shop to get advise on SIM chips and other necessary comforts of home.

leuk[Friends Only] Difficult, personal, etc

For those that aren’t aware I am highly estranged from my immediate family. I have not spoken directly to my mother in decades. I interact only with my sister on occasions when she comments randomly on facebook that I should be in their lives. My mother saddled me with years of emotional and intellectual abuse as a child. She would have added physical abuse but I was too large by the time the abuse began.

My father had had a stroke at the age of 39 in 1979 and it devastated our family. I was 11, my sister 4. We lost everything; he lost more. My father had lost control of not merely have of his body but half of his brain. He had no common sense, self control, and even less ability to really do anything for himself. This is what pushed my mother over the edge. She became domineering, mentally abusive, and above all else utter paranoid that everyone was out to get her. Mentally, she was most abusive to my father. I would watch her humiliate him at home and publicly. At home he’d be often reduced to tears at her onslaughtght of his now being a ‘failure.’

College for me was an escape from the hell that home had become. I was in college I was unaware that my grandmother was supporting my education. It wouldn’t be until years later that I’d discovered that he was draining both my grandmothers financially dry. I learned this at my paternal grandmother’s funeral. One of the few times I saw my father’s side of the family. His brothers treated him like a pariah. On one level he deserved it. By this time he wasn’t working anymore. He’d lost his license under accusations of sexual harassment in the workplace. A concept that I personally thought I understood.

Alcoholism ran rampant on my father’s side of the family. I sometimes thought that maybe we’d been lucky and missed the gene. I discovered that substance abuse or reliance doesn’t always require a drug of some kind. Some times it can be the support of others. Around this time I’d learned that my mother had divorced my father for “Financial Reasons.” The belief was that she could better take care of him if her earnings weren’t at risk. In truth she was trying to make sure she wouldn’t go down with a sinking ship.

I made the difficult decision to tell him to find help from a social worker. I was living in California. I was between jobs having been laid off myself. I didn’t have the means to get out East let alone offer any help. I told him how much I loved him but how he couldn’t just live off his mother-in-law. Amazingly and painfully, he took my advice. At first he was in a shelter. But they cared for him. Then they moved him to a Jewish Sr. Centre and his V.A. benefits paid for him.

But he was no longer capable of caring for himself. And heavens knows his wife and daughter who were local didn’t. He got an infection in his leg and had to be taken to a hospital. It was determined that he’d have to lose his leg. I was called by my girlfriend’s mother that my mother needed me back in town because my father was in critical condition. My mother needed me back in town because as an ex-wife, the doctor’s wouldn’t listen to her and she realized that she could order me to do what she wanted.

That visit was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. It was obvious that her statement my entire life was going to be the one she’s stand on. “You are not my equal, you are my child and will do what I tell you.” She wanted more tests run, I disagreed and signed off on the amputation. In the waiting room she told me how horrible a person I was. How I never did anything for the family. How I was the one responsible for my father’s health and condition. How his death would be on my head.

I lost it. I’ve posted about this in the past. I used language on this horrible person that should have had me committed. Decades of resentment and abuse. I just wanted to let her know how much I hated everything about her. I used words that I don’t use even at my angriest. The line had been crossed. I didn’t have a mother. I had an angry and disgusting person who I had to symbolically and biologically acknowledge an attachment to.

Six months later I found out from a great Aunt that my sister had informed her that my father had died. I was cold. I was hurt. It didn’t hit home for a very long time. A week later I contacted one of my father’s brothers to deliver the news. He told me that he’d chatted with my father a few days earlier. My sister had lied about our father’s death. A few months later he actually passed. This time it didn’t effect me.

My sister made unnecessary arrangements for my father and explained that his VA benefits would pay for them. I should have recognized that as one of the stories my mother and father would tell me about how things would be paid for. A month later I had the funeral home calling me as kin that I was financially responsible. I explained that they had no contract with me or any signatures from me and that my sister was the one wholly responsible. I did explain that I would attempt to reach her though I was not in touch.

For the next 2 months though the power of the internet my sister tried to convince me that she was being held against her will in a hospital by her mother for an attempted suicide. This whole story was a lie to distract from the fact that she was avoiding telling me that the Funeral wasn’t going to be paid for. I won’t even start with the other lies I’ve had from her in the past. But with this one. I’d be fairly publicly humiliated by trying to show that I did care. I was done.

Within a few years I was married and then with my own child. I was going to try to get right at least some of what my parents got wrong. Heaven knows I spend more than one day, evening, night, convinced that I am as big if not a bigger failure. That I’m ruining his upbringing. Time and time again I see my own problems buried in him and try to figure out how to help him with them before they become to defining.

I moved back to Pittsburgh. For a while I was 3 miles to the tenth from the house where my sister and her mother live. I haven’t seen them since I have moved back to the city 7 years ago. There are times when it is hard. I remember my mother always keeping me away from my father’s side of the family. She never had a nice word for any of them. I’ve always wished I was closer. I’m not. I barely know them. Facebook helps a little. I find myself wondering if I am doing the same disservice to Aiden giving him only one grandmother.

My sister routinely comments on my public facebook posts. Usually it’s not relevant but more a demand or plea that I just forgive and move on. How I’m horrible for not responding to family. How much dad would have wanted us to move on. I don’t know if I’m waiting to see if she’s actually apologize for anything she’s done (there has never been one) or if I’m just so numb to it all living in the fear that getting close will only open wounds that will hurt me again.

So why now. Why am I reposting this for friends.

About 2 weeks ago she made yet another one of the unrelated comments. This one was a notification that her mother has been diagnosed with Leukemia.

Everyone who’s already thought, “Well, she’s still your mother” has obviously gotten to this point by the TL;DR method. Those that have read and still don’t know why this situation isn’t anything beyond a no brainer haven’t realized that the above is only a snapshot of 50 years.

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. All I know is that I can still believe that I am a terrible person who is no better than his father. I don’t know if this is a true report or not. All I know is that every fiber in my system is fighting against having my strings pulled. And it feels wrong no matter what.

3D Character and Thinking , He is standing with question mark

3D Character and Thinking , He is standing with question mark

At the time of the writing my son is 9 1/2 years old. Like other children his age, he has certain infatuations. In his case things like Lego, Minecraft, and some TV shows and movies. It is the style of infatuation where we have to talk him down out of every toy and every piece of software and add-on that could be bought for his addiction. (We do not believe in “spoiling” the child)

Things are currently financially tight in the household; so gifts and the like are much further apart and cheaper than we’d like. So to remedy this, gifts are done with proper buildup to make the end gift more valuable. Mutating a gift for someone is great fun.

As a child my mother loved Bailey’s. In college I got her a birthday gift. There was no way I could afford a huge tin of Bailey’s for her. So I got a tin, bought a mini, and packed it in there. I presented it wrapped with the statement “I can’t really afford a great gift as a college student, but I saved up what I got for at least a little something I know you’d like.” She unwrapped the tin and was agog. “You said something little!” She opened the tin and saw the mini. I said “Yup.” My dad lost it. My mom… not so entertained.

Other gifts have been boxes that I have pretended that were heavy to give my wife and iPad. A box with holes cut out to give my girlfriend a stuffed grumpy cat. And a box wrapped like Matrushka dolls to give a nice gift card.

So, I found an inexpensive gift online that I knew my son would loooooove. (< $15 with shipping)

But I didn’t want to just give it to him (and it was going to take about a week to get there. So I decided I would do it as a quest. A series of steps along the way where he’d need to complete one to get to the next one. At the end he’d get the gift as a prize and a really awesome feeling (at least… that’s the plan)

Study the past“Never Again!”

These words have been used in the past 70 years since World War II ended. During that time, millions of Jews, Gays, “Gypsies”¹, and their supporters were put to death. Most were killed for their beliefs, some by association, many simply because of who they were.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of Godwin’s Law (of the internet):

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”

The invocation of Godwin is used to prevent one side or another to equate evilness or incorrectness with the “Ultimate representation” of ‘Evil’ and/or ‘Wrong’ which for the lifetime of the Internet has been Hitler and the Nazi regime.

The problem with Godwin is two-fold. First on a direct level, secondly on a meta-level.

Directly, the use of “Hitler” and “Nazi” by equating them to “Evil” divorces us from the reason. In general this empowers the words “Evil and Wrong” and trivializes Nazism and the acts of Hitler as merely the natural or unnatural ‘limits’ of the definition of evil. We could just as easily say that anything good would inevitably equate out to Firefly. Eventually the context is lost beyond, Firefly was ultimately good.

I am a 47-year-old Jew. WWI did not affect my immediate family (at least without being removed by 2-3 degrees of cousin-hood). They only had the Russian Pogroms to deal with, and even then this is distanced by 2 generations from me. However, despite a lack of direct contact with these atrocities, I still have personal context as to the horrors done to my race, just as readily as even the most affluent person of color has to the horror of Watts, segregation, or slavery.

But there is a frightening and even more dangerous side to misusing the idea of Godwin’s Law. There is a tangible danger in the invocation of Godwin as a means to diffuse or worse avoid a needed conversation. This is especially the case when that conversation is in true comparison to what Hitler and Nazism represented.

There are many well-defined terms for the actions of the Nazi regime as created and directed by Hitler. All of which are put as off limits by misusing Godwin’s law if the comparisons strike to closely.

Genocide, Eugenics, Racial Superiority, Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, Fascism, Radicalized Nationalism.

As a result of misusing Godwin’s law… there is a growing fear to confront these topics. Godwin gives a safe blanket to prevent us to from ever believing that we’re heading down the same road as has occurred in the past. Hitler… It could never be as bad as Hitler.

We forget that in 1938 Hitler was viewed in Time magazine as “Man of the Year” Consider at that time, that discussions concerning the most “Evil man in history” might have referred to Pizarro, Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Nero, Rasputin, Torquemada, or Vlad the Impaler. Does the legacy of making Hitler the “ultimate evil” reduce the crimes of Pot Pol, Idi Amin, or Osama bin Laden?

By wrapping society in the safe blanket that we have seen the ultimate evil and it could never be worse condemns us in an instant to be granted the wish of being wrong. Even in the movies we know better than to posit “At least it couldn’t be any worse”

In 1938 people were singing the praises of Hitler. At least the media was. Hitler was a sense of nationalism to a very battered country. And nobody disagreed with him or his burgeoning government. Granted, by 1938 Hitler had given more power to the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the people that opposed him and his government were evaporating quickly. By 1938, Hitler had already been in power as Chancellor for 5 years. His popularity started building as early as 1927 from his policies and beliefs on a unification of all German speaking lands, the distrust of all Jews and any governing that gave the people any power. Any policy he didn’t approve of, was inevitably dismissed as part of a Jewish Agenda/Conspiracy. After 10 years of this… The US still said he was “Man of the Year.” After 3 years of bloody war, the US hadn’t entered. Not because of isolationism… but because we hadn’t decided which side we were on. Hitler was courting the US as an ally, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor made the decision easy.

Evil… is a relative and flexible term. In ‘entertainment’ we have moved from black and white into shades of grey. In life we talk about all of one ethnic group as evil, while a person who kills 10-15 people as potentially misunderstood.

Terrorism isn’t the act of destroying our bodies. It’s the act of destroying our souls and our wills.

It’s time to stop using Godwin as a crutch. It hides facing a potentially terrifying future which as a path that we’ve travelled down in the past. Stop using Godwin’s Law to excuse debate. Godwin didn’t want it.²

Words aren’t meant to be thrown around. Words are meant to represent something and to be as used as tools, shields, and weapons of truth for what they mean.

“Never again!”

 

 


1: A racial slur unto itself

2: “I Seem To Be A Verb: 18 Years of Godwin’s Law” – Mike Godwin; http://jewcy.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/i_seem_be_verb_18_years_godwins_law