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In which a nice girl is lured to New Jersey

2007 has arrived with an exciting new twist... coming at the perfect time.  I moved to Hamilton, Ontario (after spending 4 years in London, UK) and moved into my little house exactly 5 years ago this month.  The goal at the time was to spend 5 years here, living near my family and developing a stable career. 

Last month I had a job interview for a consulting position in the United States.   After the interview, I realized that I really did not want to leave Canada permanently.  So the company agreed to transfer me back to Canada after six months employment with them.   The offer letter finally arrived today, and they have made me an offer I can't refuse - a senior consulting position and the opportunity to be the first consultant based in Canada.

Its a growing, dynamic, ambitious company... and an excellent career move for me. 

So in one month for now I will be living in a little flat in New Jersey, flying to consulting gigs across the US.  I promise to gather lots of blog material on the road -- there's a plethora of interesting people out there.

This is the last time I'll discuss my work, though - blogging about employers is a quick route to unemployment.

Stories of random American strangers are much more entertaining regardless. 

On the joys of knowing everything - example 2

I have a work colleague who is particularly cynical and witty.  I was becoming concerned that he might be out-witting me.

But things re-balanced nicely yesterday.

We were having a chat about our favourite names when he suddenly volunteered that he was considering the name "Onan" for his future son. 

Which presented me with the perfect opportunity for pointing out to him the rather colourful Onan of the Bible...

I think he actually blushed.

On the joys of knowing everything -example 1

I was in Cuba in November.  I was heading out for a night of dancing with a group of Canadians from my hotel when we were joined by a couple of European guys.  One of them started chatting with me, so I asked him where he was from. 

"Estonia", he replied, and then rather sullenly added, "I bet you don't even know where that is."

"You mean the Baltic Republic bordering Russia?  Capital city Tallinn?" I answered.

At which point we reached the doors of the club and I sailed through on a wave of self-satisfaction.

In Remembrance: Martin Luther King Jr.

Today is a national holiday in the United States to commemorate the life and work of a truly great man -- one of my heroes -- Martin Luther King Jr. 

The work that Martin Luther King Jr. was doing in the last few years of his life was prophetic.  From 1961 onward he was closely observed by the FBI as his views became increasingly socialist.  He questioned the role of the US in international affairs, asking why the US was suppressing the revolutions of "the shirtless and the barefoot people of the Third World", instead supporting them.  He critized US support of the "landed gentry" of Latin America over the peasants.

On April 4, 1967 in Beyond Vietnam: A time to break silence he said, "A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.  With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say 'This is not just'." 

And yet, here we are 40 years later, on the birthday of Marin Luther King Jr. with the United States involved in another quagmire.   An unjust and unprovoked war that was an attempt to protect the American way of life by securing US interests in the oil-rich Middle East.   Proof that those who don't learn from their past are indeed doomed to repeat it. 

I sometimes get so depressed when I think of the many people who claim to be Christians and yet support the unjust war in Iraq.  But then I remember people like Martin Luther King Jr. who demonstrated the love of  Jesus by advocating for the voiceless - the poor and the downtrodden. 

Martin Luther King died at only 39.  Much too soon.  I would love to hear his opinions about the world of today.

"Little Mosque on the Prarie" -- the Verdict

The new  CBC comedy "Little Mosque on the Prarie" has been widely-hyped for weeks, both in Canadian and international media.  In fact, I've been looking forward to watching it since reading about it on one of my favourite blogs, Rantings of a Sandmonkey, back in December. 

The pilot episode aired tonight and it was a tragic attempt at comedy.   (Has the CBC ever produced a funny show)? 

The CBC is claiming that they are risk-taking by even producing "Little Mosque on the Prarie".  Now that is a joke.   The show was a politically-correct lecture to Canadians.   The CBC was acting the part of the cop on South Park, "Nothing to see here folks.  There's no problem in the Muslim community....", while at the same time portraying the rural west as a bunch of idiotic yokels.   

The subject matter was perfect.  We're a nation of immigrants.  We could have empathized with the struggles of Muslim immigrants trying to fit into a homogenous rural community - the very idea makes me giggle inside.   

But the show portrayed the Muslims as sophisticated and tolerant and the rural residents as ignorant and bigoted.  I was raised in rural Canada.  The people I grew up with sometimes (and certainly not always) lack the veneer of social sophistication that urban Canadians sometimes affect.  But they have a backbone.  They are often surprisingly wise and almost always amazingly resilient.  I like talking to farm people - they have stories and they have opinions.  Not the type of people to run screaming from a group of praying Muslims and report them to the authorities. 

I think laughing together bonds people like nothing else - I feel bad for the lost opportunity.  I feel angry that rural westerners were insulted by the Toronto media once again.

Margaret Wente wrote an excellent review of "Little Mosque on the Prarie" in today's Globe and Mail.

"Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order." ~Friedrich Nietzsche

My Saturday nights mean Latin dancing.  Dancing until I get shaky, stumbling to the nearest kebab shop for sustenance, and burrowing into bed until almost Sunday noon.   Its the poetry that punctuates my prosiac life.

I am a whirling salsa dervish, fast and abandoned to the delicious rhythms.  And -- oh -- the bachata.  Heart-haunting Dominican blues danced intimately in melanchology so beautiful that it becomes ecstatic.

Give me a partner who knows how to meld with music over any of the technically-gifted Toronto salsa dancers.  Oh yes, frigid Toronto is full of tropical rhythms most nights of the week.  The skill level is high, too.  They study patterns and twists and turns to perfected polish, and dance intently with each other -- with such flourish but often without a smile.   But these virtuosos look wonderful nonetheless, and women swoon at the chance to be led by them.  I used to watch and wait; meanwhile dancing non-stop with Latino "street style" dancers.  I've been dancing for a year and a half now, and trained leads have deigned to dance with me.  And I've discovered it was all an illusion. 

It's the street dancers who make my pulses throb, the ones who laugh equally at mistakes and triumphs.  In a shared moment of music, of forgetting the body that weighs us all down so, is an inexplicable transcendent joy. 

"Dancers are the athletes of God" (Albert Einstein)

"Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery" ~Jack Paar

Canada lets in a lot of immigrants, with an average of 220,000 annually since 2000.  We try to lure the best and brightest through out points system, but too often they then languish when their qualifications aren't recognized.  I think that Canada has some of the world's best-educated dishwashers and taxi drivers.  There's even a website full of horror stories called www.notcanada.com (I do not endorse this website, but its an interesting read nonetheless).

But over the Christmas holidays I was enthralled by the story of Atnas Maeko.  An African orphan at 7 when his parents were murdered in Mozambique, he somehow made his way to Canada, was adopted by a Canadian family, and has just gotten the chance to play professional football in the Canadian Football League.  Oh... and he spent his Christmas holidays volunteering at an orphanage in Kenya because his passion in life is to give back to his home continent of Africa.  I'm Atnas Maeko's newest fan.  He's already a star.

Dedicated to my future readers

Write not what you want to say, but rather what your readers need to hear -- a good adage for an aspiring author.  My audience has yet to assemble.  What I write now will determine who visits later.  I am hoping for curious readers; for to be interested is usually to be interesting.   People in all their array of passions and cultures and languages and beliefs are endlessly fascinating.   As Alexander Pope said in 1733, "the proper study of mankind is man"...

Time's person of the year for 2006 was not a global celebrity or a  a great humanitarian or a powerful politician - no, it was all of us, all of humanity.  Because we are apparently expected to use new internet technologies like blogs and podcasts and YouTube to change the world.  As Time put it, "...millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy." 

With all the foolishness that we have seen from those that have traditionally owned the "global intellectual economy" - our politicians and our religious leaders and our professors and our mainstream media - its refreshing to think that we might have some new investors.   Time to expand the economy.

Here's to a revolutionary 2007 for all of us.