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On the Phone for Obama

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I spent an instructive couple of hours this evening making phone calls on behalf of the Obama campaign. Yes, I am one of those annoying people who interrupts your dinner to ask who you’ll be voting for. (I’m in Colorado, one of the few states where the answer actually matters.)

I’ve had a fear of cold-calling ever since a short-lived, traumatic (and rather funny) attempt at phone sales during my college years, but this wasn’t so bad. Somehow I got the nice people list to call: all women over 60 (some well over), all of them polite. Although the two times I got (presumably) their husbands on the line first, they were rather abrupt.

For the few who were willing to say that they are undecided, I offered to try to answer any questions or concerns they might have, but no one took me up on that. The only woman I spoke to at any length said: “I’m just not sure. He seems so young, though that’s not an issue.” She wasn’t really happy with McCain or Obama, and is disgusted with the recent behavior of both: “They’re fighting like a couple of high schoolers.” I could only glumly agree with that.

“We’re in a rut, and I’m not sure there’s anyone in the whole history of the country who can get us out of it,” she continued. And she wasn’t just talking about the economy.

I empathize, truly I do. You haven’t heard much about Obama from me before, because I would have preferred Hillary. I like her experience and I like her balls, and I would love to see the ultimate glass ceiling  broken.

But John McCain won no points from me for selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate. In fact, that move utterly canceled the respect I used to have for him. He thinks I’d vote for Palin simply because she lacks a penis? The utter cynicism of that shows just how little respect he and the Republican party actually have for women. Palin is the polar opposite of Hillary in everything except her chromosomes, and, most worrisome, lacks almost any useful experience. By reason of her sheer lack of competence, the idea of her being McCain’s faltering heartbeat away from the presidency is frightening.

Her religious and social beliefs scare the proverbial bejesus out of me. Bristol Palin is pregnant at 17 as a direct result of her parents’ conservative ideology. You can’t stop teenagers having sex, but, if you’re a sensible and caring parent, you can at least provide them with the knowledge and birth control to prevent them getting pregnant. The failure of abstinence-only sex “education” is starkly illustrated in Palin’s own family, and I’m disgusted (though not surprised) that no one is even mentioning this as an issue. Family privacy be damned: Palin would try to impose this on every teenager in America. We have every right to discuss this – loudly.

Sarah Palin has propelled me hard into the Obama camp, and is the main reason I expect to spend quite a bit of time campaigning for him. But there are things I definitely like about Obama, too. For one, he’s a third-culture kid. Like me, he has a multicultural family and has experienced other countries and cultures by living in them. McCain’s experience of other countries, at least during his young and impressionable years, was of going to war and then being a prisoner of war in Vietnam. I don’t have a window into either man’s psyche, but human intuition tells me which one is likely to have a broader, more nuanced view of the world outside US borders.

And that’s something we desperately need now. The world is too small and too tightly interwoven nowadays for US exceptionalism to be the answer to every international question. We have to think about our role as world citizens, not just American citizens. And I think Barack Obama is far better equipped to do that than John McCain.

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bio, living in the USA

Folsom Street Fair 2008

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I was in the Bay Area for some conferences, and decided I might as well combine pleasure with business, and take advantage of my last opportunity to stay with Gianluca and Brian in San Francisco before they move to New York. By coincidence, that Sunday was the 25th anniversary of the Folsom Street Fair, which I had attended with Gianluca years ago. The photo at the top is of Out of the Closet, flying the leather community’s black-and-blue flag

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The Bi-Professional Couple: A Conundrum Close to the Bone

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My life is lived in multiples.

I’ve read books, articles, and blogs about multicultural marriage, living, and child-raising. I have written about being a third-culture kid, raising a bilingual child, and living and trying to work in a foreign country.

But this is the big question, more difficult than any of the above: how can a marriage survive being made up of two people whose careers are equally important to each?

If you have ever been part of a two-career couple, you know how hard it can be to find jobs that make both of you happy in the same location, especially (but not only) when that location is far from home for one or both of you. When a couple expatriates for one member’s job, the “following” spouse may not even be allowed to work, depending on the working spouse’s visa in the foreign country.

When you follow a foreign spouse to settle in his or her country, there probably won’t be legal obstacles to your working (you may take on the citizenship of your spouse, or you can usually get a work visa), but there are many other hurdles: language, culture, job market, and your own feelings about who you are and what you want to do with your life.

When Enrico and I married in 1989, I gave up an interesting job just then getting off the ground (doing technical training in far-flung countries) in order to be with him in New Haven and give birth to our daughter. In retrospect, my “accidental” pregnancy was probably subconsciously designed to resolve our increasing conflict over my exotic (and from Enrico’s point of view, dangerous) travels: a baby was a reason we could both agree on for me to stay home.

And stay home I did: I was mostly a full-time mom for 18 months. I did not resent or regret this; indeed, one reason that I never had another child was that I would have wanted (and felt it fair) to do the same for any other child of mine, but, once I had got my career off the ground again, there was never a “right” time to take off 12-15 months.

Moving to Italy was, for many reasons, the obvious thing to do when we did it. Though Enrico, fresh out of a Yale PhD, could have landed a university position somewhere in the US, it would have been the usual long start to an American academic career: post-doc here, assistant position there, teach a lot, and pray for tenure.

The situation is very different in Italian universities: a ricercatore (researcher, the entry-level position) can stay in the same place as long as he or she desires, although (ideally) you eventually move up the ladder to become professore associato (associate professor) and then ordinario (full professor). Positions are few and promotion takes decades (and political savvy), but in the meantime you are guaranteed a stable, reasonably well-paid job in a single location. The teaching load is light, and Enrico can direct his own research as he pleases. Nice work if you can get it…

As for me, I didn’t have a strong desire to remain in the US, my putative homeland – I’d lived out of it as much as in it. I didn’t have a job to leave right then, nor was I established in any field. There was no strong reason for me not to move to Italy, and plenty in favor of doing so.

Enrico sought and won a university position in Italy, and to Milan we came.

I had no idea what work I might be able to do there (aside from the far-too-obvious: teach English), but I figured I’d figure something out, as I always had. In 26 years of being moved around the world mostly by others’ decisions, it had never occurred to me to express or even to have strong desires about the parameters of my own life. I simply responded as best I could to the situations in which I found myself.

It was mostly luck that I found a job in Milan; it took hard work and talent to develope that job into a career. But I was still in reactive mode: taking advantage of opportunities as they came my way, but not making any effort to create my own opportunities. It simply didn’t occur to me that I could.

The first proactive thing I did to influence my own future was the MBA (from the Open University, the world’s oldest distance-learning institution) that I began in 1999 and completed (with interruptions) in 2004. I had realized that I wanted a career in which I could really make a difference, and that an MBA was a basic requirement to thrive in the corporate world.

But it’s unlikely that I could have an important career in Italy. I work in high tech, and there’s not much original going on in high tech in Italy – not because there are no technical or entrepreneurial Italians, but because it’s so damned hard to do the American-style startup thing in Italy (which could be the topic of a long article in itself, but it would depress me too much to write it).

Many of the world’s large high-tech companies have Italian offices, but these usually concentrate on regional sales and support engineering. The things I’m good at are run mostly from US headquarters.

Twice during the Internet boom I tried to persuade Enrico that we should move to the US to let me pursue my career. The second time he agreed, reluctantly, to come with me for a year or two while I helped to launch Roxio, the software group being spun off from Adaptec in 2000-2001. For a number of reasons, that move was aborted, and I returned to Italy, beaten and frustrated, to the same distance-working situation in which I had previously felt so alienated and vulnerable. I quit after a few months, and would have been laid off soon thereafter in any case, as the bubble burst and the economic downturn began.

Fabrizio Caffarelli, my former boss at Incat Systems, is a rare example of a successful Italian high tech entrepreneur, and I was happy to join his new startup a few years later (as the consulting/tech writing gigs I’d had after leaving Roxio also dried up). I had high hopes for TVBLOB when it began, but four years in startup mode at a salary I could have equalled as a supermarket cashier… well, that got old, and personal circumstances conspired to force a change.

I began working for Sun Microsystems as a contractor in March of 2007; they hired me as a regular employee a year later, on the condition that I move to the US and work from an office.

I was ready to go. I had initially loved Sun’s willingness to let me, and many other employees, work from home. I still believe that this works very well for many people, especially those who have kids at home: workplace flexibility is a huge help in achieving the much-prized “work-life balance.”

But the year I had spent as a mostly long-distance contractor reminded me of all the problems I had experienced before, as a very long-distance employee of Adaptec. It’s hard to schedule meetings when you’re eight or nine time zones away from most of your colleagues; you end up having them late at night in Europe – not my best time of day, I’m a morning person. And when you can be neither seen nor heard by your colleagues… well, out of sight, out of mind, out of the decision-making loop – and, eventually, out of a job.

Conclusion: if I want a challenging job, I need to be in the US (or, at least, not in Italy). So here I am, with a job that I enjoy very much both for its current realities and its future possibilities.

But my life here so far is mostly about my job. So much for work-life balance (said she ruefully). It appears that I can have work or have a life, but not both. At any rate, I can’t have a regular home life with my husband, because his job is there, and mine is here, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to make the two meet.

And I don’t have an answer to that one.

Update, 2014: Enrico and I never did find a solution. We separated in 2009 and are now divorced.

Update, 2017: I have since found someone with whom I happily share both the personal and professional sides of me.

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The Twitter Diaries – July, 2008

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Okay, let’s just call this a cop-out right up front. I simply haven’t had the confluence of time and mental energy to write anything substantive in the last few months. To keep some reasonable flow of new content into this site, I’ve resorted to photo galleries (some from trips I never got around to writing up before, so actually all-new material), song translations, and a story I wrote ages ago for another purpose but had never published.

It would have easier to do a diary-type blog, simply telling you what I’m doing day by day, but that hasn’t really been my style up to now, and I don’t expect most of you to be that fascinated with me as a person(ality), or my life, however weird and unusual it is.

For those who are that fascinated, there’s Twitter, where I’ve been “micro-blogging” for some time now – jotting down little snatches of my life at random times and frequencies, for the edification and occasional amusement of those who “follow” me. When I first joined Twitter (it’s been a while), I had heard about it from my videoblogging friends, so my first followers/ followees were videobloggers.

Now there are also Italian friends and Sun colleagues. I mostly follow people whose lives and thoughts I’m actually interested in hearing about, with a few informational/marketing entities such as Amazon and Comedy Central’s Indecision 2008 blog. I mostly don’t follow people who don’t follow me, with a handful of big-name exceptions (who, if they follow proper Twitiquette, follow me back even if I’m only one among thousands of their fans and followers).

It’s interesting (and, given Twitter’s poor UI for it, irritating) to go back and see what I wrote two months ago. My days are moving so fast that they’re becoming a blur, but I can refer back to my tweets (as updates via Twitter are called) to try to recapture what I was thinking and feeling a month or two ago. (Apparently I can’t go any further back than that. I hope that Twitter kept all our tweets from the beginning and will manage to make them available to us some day, in some sort of searchable/saveable format.)

So here’s the first installment of the Twitter diaries. The original tweets (limited to 140 characters) are in bold below; I’ve added some explanatory commentary.

July 1, 2008: back in the USofA, jetlagged and awake at 4 am. hoping to avoid planes for at least 6 weeks. The insanity begins again in September.

Ross and I flew back together from Italy to Denver. I was expecting a mostly travel-free summer. Turned out I was wrong.

maybe someday, or at least in some other lifetime, I will manage to go a whole entire month without experiencing jet lag.

Ross spent a couple of days lounging and shopping while I caught up at work, then…

3: enough blog stats – it’s time to blow this popsicle stand and head for New Mexico. With a box of beer and wine…

We drove to Las Vegas, New Mexico, together to spend the (American) Independence Day holiday with a bunch of Woodstock friends. Hmm, that’s a photo gallery I haven’t done yet.

I’m glad we spent the “patriotic” holiday in the unique culture of New Mexico. Everything was red, white, and blue – but in Spanish. I don’t think I could have taken a more typical American celebration – overweening patriotism gets right up my nose.

Sharon Seto and Rossella Laeng at a July 4 celebration in Las Vegas, NM

Shilpin (in the orange shirt), Deepu, [Tara, Dorien], Ross, Sharon – listening to one of many great bands that played throughout the weekend in Las Vegas’ town square.

7: back in the office, 10 hours on the road yesterday. Need more coffee…

The long road trip was my diabolical plan to force Ross to spend some serious mother-daughter time. As anticipated, I had barely seen her during the three weeks we were in Italy together – she was too busy catching up with her friends in Lecco.

Sunday, July 6th, we drove straight from Las Vegas to Denver airport, where Ross was not allowed to carry on board the cow skull she had bought in Santa Fe – it was considered a dangerous weapon. She took off for Austin without Bob; I had to mail him later (which cost more than it had to buy him).

Rossella with a pink suitcase

9: I suspect I’m heading for collapse. Maybe I can make it through Friday and then sleep all weekend.

I was getting sick, the sinus infection I’d been trying to fight off for months was demanding attention.

to my multicultural friends: Jim @jimgris poses an interesting question (and don’t miss the comments!)

Sometimes I (and many others) use Twitter to alert people to things I find interesting.

our turtles will have a new home at a wildlife park near Bergamo. We simply travel too much to take care of them. Kinda sad.

@Boh yeah, I’ll miss them.

[She asked: can’t your husband take care of them?]

@Boh not when he’s in Colorado twice a year visiting me!

[She wondered how the whole situation was working out.]

@Boh I’m very happy in my job and everything else. Remains to be seen what will happen in the long term with our long-distance marriage.

I think I’m going to invest in art by people I know like Rick Mobbs

I had just met him through our friends in Las Vegas, LOVE his work.

By my colleague Dwayne Wolff, whose work I look forward to seeing in person. I had seen this painting on his site before, but understood it a lot better as I had my first up-close experience of Sun’s periodic layoffs. Even when you’re pretty sure your own job is safe, not knowing where the axe will fall is discomforting. Finding out later that it fell on people you know and like (and I have yet to meet anyone at Sun whom I don’t like) is… well, the painting expresses it perfectly.

11: it is frighteningly easy to increase one’s credit limit

I thought I was going to pay Ross’ tuition with a credit card, and wasn’t sure, with all the other spending I’d been doing, that I had enough credit left that month to cover it. A two-minute phone call, in which I made a statement about my salary that they could not have substantiated so quickly (though it was true) was all it took to increase my credit limit quite a bit. Given the state of American credit… well, that’s how American credit got where it is!

Ross published a series of very amusing essays (in Italian) on her fotolog, but I am no longer allowed to translate them.

12: would be very quiet around here if not for neighbors mowing their lawns. Which make no sense in Colorado. Xeriscape, people!

The homeowners’ association has all sorts of requirements about what your yard can and must contain, which many in this neighborhood interpret as a need for lots of green lawn. Which is completely out of place, wasteful, and expensive in this semi-desert environment. One neighbor seems to mow his lawn twice a week, which, in one of Colorado’s driest years ever, implied a hell of a lot of watering.

13: still sleepy, dunno if it’s allergies, cold, or just sheer exhaustion.

just finished watching Rang de Basanti – in tears

Great movie, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so heavy. One of many DVDs I bought in India, most of which I haven’t had time to watch yet.

a little nostalgic fangirl indulgence: Elfquest prints, get ’em before Warner Bros. takes it all

An old favorite comic of mine will finally get made into a movie, but that means the creators/publishers can no longer sell their own schwag. Still available as of this writing, though, so get it while you can.

15: how did this Yahoo shit get into my Firefox and how do I get rid of it?

A toolbar mysteriously appeared, I have no idea what I installed that did that.

I only see TV news in the gym. Thankfully. I miss out on most of the utter rubbish they try to make into “issues” and “big stories.”

Don’t remember what “big story” got on my nerves that day, but every time I see the TV on in the gym, the stories seem about equally stupid, and the media opinions about them even stupider. And this is on CNN, which I used to think was an intelligent news organization.

@firefox_answers thanks, I did figure that out. Really annoying that they can sneak in like that!

What was interesting about the toolbar incident was that someone is clearly covering Twitter for Firefox and answering questions like mine as they arise – a clever use of the technology to reach out to customers (and Firefox is free – I’m not paying anyone for this service). Very good example of service-as-marketing. If I were still doing frontline support for Incat/Adaptec/Roxio, I’d be doing the same.

bought Season 1 of The Tudors. Sounds like the TV equivalent of an epic costume romance novel – about what my mushy brain can take today

Haven’t got around to watching much of this yet, but what I have seen has lived up to expectations.

Dr. Horrible part 1 was fun. Nathan Fillion does a good Elvis imitation.

As did this.

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