Of Death and Taxes

" They get away with this treatment of people because they call these men who work under them "sub-contractors," which essentially means that they need to have a CPA to understand all the wonderful tax deductions available to them.  If only those construction workers had business degrees!  "

My father was a construction worker. He measured out, cut, and lifted heavy sheetrock onto bare frames of houses, fitting things together like puzzle pieces with precision and speed. He did this manual labor in the most extreme climates from Las Vegas to Alaska to Utah to Florida. He wore flannels and had a beard, and drank whiskey to ease the pain of the dental work he needed, but couldn't afford. He passed away  too young, as a single parent: zero health insurance, no life savings, no life insurance.  He spent his life building houses for other people, but passed away in a small trailer that didn't even belong to him. Everything he'd worked for in his life: a tiny  amount of money in a savings account -- not enough for the dental work that he desperately needed, but wouldn't live to get.

It baffled me growing up, how my dad could work so hard and so long and so far away all over the place, and yet we could never make ends meet?  Not just anybody could do the work that he did;  drywall is not easy.

During the last 14 years of his life as a single parent of four children, he never accepted or even sought any kind of welfare handouts.

Are the real estate developers who fail to provide my father and other construction laborers with a decent living wage, with medical insurance for their physically exhausting work, with any means to provide even a small amount of savings for their children ... are those people ethical?  Although I'd love to make the judgment call, I won't say. In the grand scheme of things, I do know that in this world, there are good people and bad; that there is no law and nothing that society can do to "make" people behave ethically -- action (or lack of action) speaks for itself about the character of the person, and character is what defines people.  My father was perhaps the most honest and humble human being I've ever known, and he deserved so much better.

To each and every one with a functioning brain out there, considering voting for Mitt Romney "because he's Mormon" or because you think he can run America like an efficient business -- please don't. Please, don't.

Never has there been a nominee so delusional as Mitt Romney. The tragic thing is that there are people who could actually believe that "47 percent of Americans" would be "dependent upon government". Romney uttered his words at a $50,000 per-plate fundraising event in his efforts to become President of the United States.

What the GOP does not understand is that wealth obtained from the fruits of others' labors is not and never has been theirs.  They did not earn it; thy did not build it. It is just not possible to become as wealthy as they are without using people and denying them their share simply because it's LEGAL to deny people their fair share.  Somehow, somewhere along the way, the GOP has become indoctrinated with the false notion that ethics and legality are somehow linked; that "as long as it's not illegal, it's not unethical."
With platitudes for supposed "Christian" values, the GOP insists upon enforcements of laws to criminalize social problems while deregulating and un-criminalizing the very economic causes of those problems.

Truly ethical behavior does not come about from the constructs of government. Mr. Romney has been able to evade paying taxes on much of his income by keeping troves of it offshore . . . he's unashamed to declare that he pays not "a dollar" more in tax than what the IRS code mandates.  So, assuming that manipulation of tax code is legal -- maybe he's not broken any "laws" per-say -- but is this ethical behavior?

It brings up some interesting points about just how desperate the GOP is to destroy the very checks and balances that income tax provides.  Crying about taxes when there are so many less fortunate people in the world, the GOP is like a stubborn toddler whose face is covered in melted ice cream, throwing a rage of a tantrum because he can't have more.

A certain CEO of a real estate development company we once knew in Florida pays immigrants "under the table." Some of these immigrants do landscaping, others do painting and repairs and cleaning at the buildings and sites he's developing.  Once they are done with all the hard work, the Realtors flock in, snapping photos and finding charming little catch phrases to be displayed in colorful real estate brochures.   After having the properties spruced up by underpaid workers, his company is able to "flip" properties and the CEO is entirely convinced that he alone is entitled to the profits. Those workers he so "graciously" employed might not be legal yet, so no need to let the government know about them. CEO pats himself on the back for saving money in labor costs, avoiding paying income tax or health insurance for those workers, and considers that he's "done them a favor."  

It's a common theme in many circles that employing people in a "temp" fashion is somehow "doing them a favor".  Republicans love temporary things, which they rationalize absolves them of any moral duty: temp jobs for temp workers in temp housing. "It's not my problem" they say. Use people up and throw them away, kick 'em out if when they can't pay the rent. There are millions more where those came from, all eager to do dirty work for pennies on the dollar.

There are two main mechanisms stealing the wealth from the very people who are earning it:

• Underpayment of wages / denial of equity: "Underpaying" can qualify either "at" or "near" the minimum wage, but any worker at any pay rate can be considered underpaid when there is a significant discrepancy between the lowest-paid (even part-time employee, or contract worker) and the one at the top.  Most of the time, companies are built by groups of people working together as a team; it is not right for the person who calls himself "CEO" to keep the bulk of the economic value created by his team.  
• Overcharging housing:  My father and many of the construction workers he knew weren't able to make it to retirement from their lifelong endeavors of building of houses (and how ironic is it that men who build houses for a living cannot afford their own!)  . . . So, who gets all that money from houses that cost so much?   Real estate agents, landlords, and real estate developers --  these people have deluded themselves into thinking that they are the ones "entitled" to collect rents or commissions from the labors of other people's work. They collude and conspire, keeping rents high, robbing people of their very ability to build equity (and it really is a form of slavery).  But don't take my word for it; there's lots of proof out there that this form of modern slavery is working.

Ultimately, it's people -- not economics -- which are responsible for the theft.  Most members of the GOP are in a position to do at least one of the above items, and some are in a position to do both. When there is a political party that has so much influence over both sides of the coin, when there is a class of people whose very livelihood is actually derived from the control and manipulation of the availability of housing, democracy cannot work. People are unable to establish themselves (and thus their ability to govern in the fallout of greed) when they are continually driven out.

Although these problems are complex, can the solutions be simple?  Is it time to criminalize unethical behavior? Or is it time to economically incentivize ethical behavior? Perhaps the best solution lies in the right mix of both.

My father most certainly did pay income tax, and into Social Security.  But because he barely made $19,000 per year as a single parent, he got most of that money back at the end of the year.  I know this because I did his taxes the second-to-last full "tax" year of his life.   By the time I grew up and earned my degrees to help him figure out what was wrong, it was too late.

Not only do real estate developers fail to provide construction workers with medical insurance or any kind of health, dental, or vision benefits -- nor do they provide the men doing the backbreaking physical labor any kind of reimbursement for their tools, automobiles to drive out to the construction sites, gasoline.   They can get away with this treatment of people because they call these men who work under them "sub-contractors," (contractors who work for contractors) which essentially means that they need to have a CPA to understand all the wonderful tax deductions available to them.  If only those construction workers had business degrees!

Indeed, by the time I earned some accounting degrees and was able to do his taxes, it was too late.  My father didn't see the end of the tax year 2004; the years of physically debilitating work caught up with him, and he passed away on what should have been the celebratory day I was set to accept my Master's degree.

Not a day goes by where I don't think about my father.   Like many construction workers, he was used up and thrown away heedlessly by the mechanisms in the real estate industry, fueled by the insatiable greed of men with too much money and too few ethics.

Moon Over Dubai (Part II)

As far as airports go, there is only one word to describe DXB, AKA Dubai International Airport: Big.

Actually, scratch that.  There are two words to describe it:  big and busy.  This was my first experience in an airport outside the US, so I can't say I had any expectations upon arrival.  My initial mindset when getting off the plane was to immediately find my connecting gate. . .

But then I remembered that I would have quite a bit of time to kill.   Local time in Dubai was 7:20 PM when we landed, and my connecting flight to Bangalore wasn't scheduled to leave until 3:30 AM.   Eight full hours with change to kill:  more than enough time fully restore the blood flow through my veins, to wander around the 18.6 million square feet of floor space and become as acquainted as I could with the International Airport Scene.

One of my first challenges was refueling.  While the airplanes in the 90 degree heat outside were sucking down on what was probably the cheapest gas in the world, I was actually cold in the blasted air-conditioning, thanking the heavens that I'd brought a light jacket.  Cold and tired, I decided to seek out some warmth and refueling of my own.  

Perfect weather for hot chocolate.

I spotted a Starbucks, but berated myself for even considering it.  No, I told myself.  I will not be one of those silly Americans standing in line at Starbucks in a foreign country!   I cemented this decision and made a secret vow to myself to not dine or drink in or patronize any American franchise the remainder of my trip.  

The next promising place I happened across was called Costa.  It   But the prices were all in Dirhams (imagine that!).  So this is where I ended up paying $7 USD for a cup of hot chocolate with giant pink marshmallows.

It wasn't the best hot chocolate, nor was it the worst.  But it did give me enough short-term energy to locate my connecting terminal (it was only approximately 10 miles away), and to find a seat and catch a few winks of sleep.

By the time 2:40 AM rolled around, I was so over sleeping in airports.  I'd actually conked out pretty hard for a brief period of time, with my face smooshed up against the arm rest of my seat, and my face had a lovely red impression the shape and texture of the arm rest carved into it.

But they were announcing boarding, so I didn't have time to be vain.  When I finally stepped onto that Airbus A340, I was thrilled to discover that I had a window seat!

The plane took off, and as we climbed up and up in elevation, a sense of overwhelming excitement took over.  In about 4 hours, I'd be on solid ground for over two weeks (longer than I'd stayed on solid ground during the past month!) in the country that I was pretty sure was my home in a previous life.

My ears popped, and the landmarks of Dubai became smaller and smaller below me.  The moon was huge, and I took it as a good sign.  Part of me wanted to hold my tablet up to the window and snap a picture of the view of the giant yellow moon above the city of Dubai like a kid might.  But then the adult part of myself took over, and convinced me that if I were to do that, I'd become a source of amusement and laughter of my fellow passengers.  I was already in the minority:  being a non-Indian, fair-skinned, and female.  Not to mention lacking a head dress or Bindi.  Not to mention travelling alone.

So I never did get the picture of the Perigee Moon of May 4, 2012.  But I have the snapshot of memory, and its placeholder in the timeline of my adventure.

Moon Over Dubai (Part I)

"Ice is way too dangerous for airplanes . . ."  The conversation with my little brother seemed a distant memory as I sat shivering in my airplane seat with nothing more than a thin blanket to cover my lap.  I'd been carefully following the route on the screen in front of me, and we were just southeast of the dot that represented the Northernmost place on the planet.

Although my seat in this Boeing 777 was an aisle seat, it was toward the rear of the airplane.  So only the aisle and two seats separated me from that little window which offered a real-world peek of the Arctic.

The people occuping those two seats were a couple -- tall, blond, Nordic-looking.  They wore matching white sweaters and khaki pants.  They did everything in a strange kind of synchronization, including consuming massive quantities of red wine.  I lost track of the number of mini-bottles they'd consumed, but luckily for me, they also visited the lavatory simultaneously.  When they were away, I surreptuously scooted over and peeked out their window.

And there it was: a real, live Arctic view.  Jagged white islands dotting white water with a vein or two of icy blue.  It looked exactly like the beginning of one of those Discovery channel specials featuring polar bears, only instead of being way up there at the North Pole like I'd always imagined it, it was merely miles underneath my feet.

A short while later, the Nordic pair returned to their seats to refuel on wine.  When they started gushing to the stewardesses, I wished my seat had come equipped with earplugs.  

No earplugs, but headphones.   It was time to start making use of those in-flight distractions.  

Another peculiarly: my body clock estimated the time to be well after midnight, but morning sunshine poured through the airplane.  According to the flight tracker, we were scheduled to land in Dubai slightly after 7 PM in only 6 hours or so -- but the sunshine out the window was clearly early morning sunshine.  It just had that quality.  I tried to do the math in my head, but when I remembered I'd been up since 3 AM PST, everything just kinda blurred together like a strange nightless dream.  

As it turns out, I wasn't completely crazy.   Airlines have only recently been granted "permission" to fly over the North Pole.    

For the next few hours, I attempted napping, but nothing like sleep was had.  I watched as the computer airplane icon flew over Svalbard, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Volgograd, the Caspian Sea, Tehran.  A full day elapsed during those 6 hours, and it was indeed dusk when we eventually arrived in Dubai.  The last minute of the flight was the most surprising; the airplane touched down with gentleness.   

Bench-Pressing Gravity (International Version)

Why hello, India.  Barely 12 hours on your soil, and already do I know that this will be a beautiful and enduring friendship.      

Please forgive me; my body clock is still completely whacked after spending most of the last two days in transit.  On Thursday afternoon, I stepped onto a massive people-transporting machine.  This thing was somehow able to not only comfortably hold more than 300 other people and their 300 pounds each of luggage, but also to lift everybody and their stuff 35,000 feet into the sky with no cables, and to achieve 0.8x Mach, and to maintain these and other baffling altitudes and velocities for nearly 13 hours straight.  I am not making this up.  More remarkably still, after ~13 hours and 8,600 miles of bench-pressing gravity, this people and luggage-moving miracle was to pop out some tires and land everybody and everything safely on the ground in Dubai.  

At least, that was the plan.  ( As a disclaimer, I'm a pretty seasoned flyer.  But this was to be my first overseas voyage so of course it was a little different . . . )

I knew we'd be flying into the future, but I did not know the exact vector when I stepped onto the plane.  So I'm sure you can understand that given everything I knew about this mass conveyance and time-travelling procedure, I was slightly alarmed to learn that the machine from which we already expected so many miracles would be going over the North Pole.  Yes, the North Pole where, when you go there, there is nowhere to go but South.

Of course, they waited until I and my 300 fellow passengers were buckled in "safely" 32,000 feet above solid land to tell us.  Of course they waited until we'd been coddled with a hot towel and cold drink by stewardesses with too much makeup.  Of course, they told us without "telling" us; the forecasted route map was cleverly one screen among a plethora of touch-screen entertainment options:  movies, podcasts, games.  And only part of the forecasted route is shown at a time.  But a diligent traveler can keep an eye on the map the whole time.

The last time I visited him, my brother showed me something he'd found at a thrift store: one of those old fashioned globes that stands very tall, the kind that allows us as humans to understand how our world is round when it can, at least from ground level, appear flat.  I told him about my upcoming trip to India (knowing of the stop in Dubai), and we mused on possible routes.  We even remarked that going over the North Pole seemed like the shortest route.

"But I don't think they fly airplanes over the North Pole," I laughed, as the idea seemed absurd to me at the time.  "Ice is way too dangerous for airplanes."

(To be continued . . . )

Big. News.

Big news. My visa application cleared . . . the very first entry in my passport book is for (drumroll, please) . . . India! As it turns out, the little bit of हिन्दी (Hindi) I know won't be quite *as* useful where I'm going, so am going to try to learn some ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) expediently.     It's not necessary to learn, but will be fun; many (most) Indians also know English.

Why India? Why now? Don't I already have enough fodder and adventure for the Great American Novel? And when the heck am I going to post the next chapters?

Patience, my friends. Yes and no. Basically what the beans boil down to* is that I'm at at a place in life where I just know this is the right thing for me to do right now.







*this is a rather nuanced joke; it's OK to not get it. But if you do get it, I will love you even more ;)

Ash

It is either the scent of a memory, or the memory of a scent that prods me to keep poking through the charred, black rubble. The December sky was always gray, and it was so odd to be standing in what used to be our cozy, dark living room underneath that gray sky. Inside outside. The outside all burned up, some of the inside left, if singed, around the edges.

We poked among the snow-dusted rubble. Any salvageable item would be carefully plucked from the charred black, placed in a pile. The scent of the memory was heady, almost sticky. Every salvageable item we'd find would have this cloying scent, the scent of a fireplace, almost sweet. The most impressionable image burned into my five-year old mind: the melted gaping maw of the glass and plastic television.

We moved across town, where I had to start finishing Kindergarten, attending a new school.

My memories of the days and months that followed were, in a word, weepy.

In hindsight, it seems kind of silly, but still do I remember weeping. I remember my weeping mother, boxes of tissues, weeping about the house plants and the kitties and the books and her crochet work and the pictures: the life we'd had in our small yellow house. She especially mourned the house plants: the spider plants she'd lovingly nursed from shoots.

Some time between the time I completed kindergarten and started first grade, we left Alaska. It was another change: back into the red Toyota Corolla station wagon and on the road again, back to the lower 48.

Intuitive Ink

Intuitive Ink is my newest foray into the continually-edited compilation.

There have been many . . . many pages, snippets, blogs, journals, notes, posts, streams, tweets, comments and even full-fledged websites dedicated to my pursuit of this craft. Over the years I've kept pretty strict separation controls on this writing, keeping certain things here, and other things there, and some things entirely to myself, as the sheer act of writing is theraputic. And for the first time ever, as I have had some clear-headed time to reflect on the journey, it doesn't need to hide or be hidden. So it's all coming together here.

Although I could definitely use one, I don't have an editor. All I have on my side it time: time to let the words rest. Time to look away and let the kinetic energy of my busy mind wear itself out on something else. Time to breathe and rest and only then to look again fresh at the words, to gently shape them into life as the incredulous stories unfold.

G+

Still am I trying to figure out what to make of G+. Yet another white box beckoning an unassuming user "stream" something . . . anything linky, shiny, doodlebobbers. Googlebots hungry, this time for social food.

Real social food, not the illusion of "social" that anonymity allows. Not the romantic notion of being, say. . . ejroundtheworld, flitting from Paris to NYC to Jamaica whilst licking her silver spoon.  And let's not forget that her silver spoon has grown a significant order of magnitude, courtesy of Airbnb's hefty investment to quell her whining. EJ's talent to create and feed manufactured drama is obviously very keen. Talent like that must be handsomely rewarded. After all, being "violated" by a barely legal 19-year old teenage girl who busted a lock, made off with her laptop, and left some dirty dishes in her loft. . . that is traumatic. Robbery is the most rare kind of crime in San Francisco, and nobody knows what that feels like to be robbed.

Not sure why this incident invoked such annoyance in me, but it did. We're talking the kind of annoyance that makes ashamed, ashamed that she represents herself as a "solo female American traveler" abroad. From her blog:

"I was in Dubai for 5 days longer than planned, with access to all the creature comforts I could possibly need: a bed, a hot shower, a treadmill, lip balm, peanut butter... All this, and I couldn't handle it. After only 5 days, I snapped."

Such a shame.

In any case, I can take a deep breath and know that as annoyed as I am, EJ is just living her truth. She has a right to do that, after all. And whatever rewards society bestows upon an over-privileged treadmill-wielding jetsetter are hers for one reason or another.

On Nomadic

Recently did I have the most fascinating conversation with someone at SFO during a flight back there for the Hacker Fair 0. She had just arrived. I was leaving.

Arriving about three hours before my flight was scheduled to board, I chose to linger outside the security checkpoint, at a place with edamame and a beverage to kill the time.

As someone who made up her mind to study Anthropology (and inadvertently Sociology) when she was a mere Freshman in University, I truly believe it. Perspective differs radically between narrow-minded city people (who have never lived in anything but city) and rural folks (who have never lived in anything but small town). In small communities, everybody knows everybody else. The pace is slow, and people linger to make small talk; family and community are more important than personal "fame" or status. There's not any particular hurry or need to get anywhere particularly, or to gather a bunch of fans or "followers".

Conversely, almost everybody within a large city is on a deadline. Bright lights allure, schmooze-fests appeal to the vanity people, egos stomp on other egos galore. Becoming a "known" is of utmost importance. Old names and old faces wield their narrow-minded power in every community large and small. After all, who does the media gravitate toward but those who've managed to attract a crowd?

Twitter could never have "taken off" anywhere else but in a big city. Where is the "big event" tonight? What's the pulse of the city chattering about tonight?

In the city, people seem to live a more sterile existence. Because the frequency of conversation with unique individuals is reduced, exponentially, by the population base, people become more hardened to their interactions. It's all a big competition.

This fascinating conversation, had with a gal ~ my age and of Indian ethnicity who hailed from London, really re-ignited my spark of fascination with cultural Anthropology from so long ago. She was on a trip around the world, having recently (intentionally cutting her trip there short) flown in from LA, and having already visited parts of Asia, Fiji and Hawaii. We both mused on how odd it was for us to be having the conversation; to be looking outward and individually at a place where people are typically herded and treated as cows.

Within the couple hours we spoke, I developed a great admiration for her. We share the same sentiments on media conglomerate white America's self-obsession, as they live in "the bubble". My family was always nomadic, and as a result of this, I truly and need to be in a place where there is a lot of diversity.

Swamps and Snakes and Alligators, Oh My

I will never forget the first time we stepped out of the cool, air-conditioned airport and into that heady and muggy summer noonday: Miami, Florida.

It seems like a lifetime ago. Even the lens here gets a bit thick.

I'd never experienced a sauna, and it was not until later in life that I was able to grasp and wrap my mind around this most perfect analogy: stepping out of the airport and into Miami for the first time was like literally walking into a sauna. Of course, at the time, my 9-year old body had never experienced such an assault. Accustomed to the dry, desiccating heat and alpine altitudes of the rockies and Northwest, it just didn't know what to make of this sudden sea-level elevation and humidity. My body did the only thing it knew how to do: attach an extremely vivid association to the moment.

When first learning that we were moving to Florida, I remember thinking that I didn't know what to think. I pictured a literal jungle: a thick, dense jungle of overgrown vines and tall trees. . . swamps and snakes everywhere. Alligators in waiting. I pictured living all camped out, next to a riverbed, hammocks swinging in the breeze. . . I thought for all practical purposes, that my siblings and I might actually be attending school in an open-aired straw hut.

Stepping out of the airport building and into that noonday, Miami was heavy. It was nothing like I'd expected, my soon-to-be fourth grade eyes were wide with wonder. This was a city. It was a giant, living and breathing city.

The summer that followed was whirlwind: once over sky, then over trains and automobiles, my family and I became very well acquainted with the Sunshine State.

After stepping out of the airport into that Miami noonday, I remember noticing the sky. The palm trees. The birds. The scent of salt and sky. The giant, sweating city of Miami. And everything was so green.

We stayed in a motel that was fairly near the airport for a couple of days. There was a swimming pool, which my siblings and I enjoyed. Since we carried almost no baggage, travel was easy, and later that week, after taking a variety of transportation methods (the most memorable of them being a train), we ended up in Homosassa Springs.

Although I am not certain, I'm pretty sure we visited this wildlife preserve. It was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on a manatee. Being the curious child that I was, I had many questions. What did it eat? Why did it have whiskers, like a cat? Why was it so fat?

After a couple of weeks, my parents bought a van. Room for six. This was a van with curtains and nice seats, one where I wasn't practically sitting on my siblings' laps during transportation. It was a nice change.

As the summer neared an end, we somehow ended up in Jensen Beach, where we finally settled into a small white stucco house. This house was on a hill, and I remember thinking that if there were ever a hurricane with floodwaters that my house would be a good place to be.