Oh, the Things that I have Learned! – Part 3

© 2024 Rex Jaeschke. All rights reserved.

Continuing on from Part 2, here is the third set of topics!

Emigration and Citizenship

In mid-1979, I left Adelaide, Australia, for what was intended to be a 5-year trip around the world, after which I’d settle down back in Australia, in either Sydney or Melbourne. After vacationing in Asia and Europe for five weeks, I started work in the US, and 45 years later, I’m still here! [I often tell people that I came for a look around, but there was so much to see, I’m still looking!] And in 2008, I became a US citizen. (See my essay, “April 2010: The Road to US Citizenship.”)

Lessons learned:

• “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence!” Well, that might be why some of us travel or relocate, but when we go back to our previous place/country, we may well find that the grass there is quite green too! We just never noticed when we lived there. As for me, each time I go back to Australia, I spend quite a bit of my time visiting states and places I’d not been to when I lived there. [Interestingly, to this day, I have not yet visited the Aussie capital, Canberra!]

• When nationalists here in the US go on a rant about immigration, and I point out to them that I am an immigrant, they generally exclude me from that “non-preferred” bunch, because I’m white, university educated, and a native English speaker. Of course, they are descended from immigrants, but they don’t think of themselves being like “all these present-day interlopers coming to our country!”

• There are people who think one should not have more than one citizenship/passport. (I have two: Australian and American, and I know people who have three and even four!) As best as I can tell, these same people have never emigrated, so have never been faced with the option. I say, “Why not have as many choices in life as you can?”

• In all my worldly travels, I’ve never encountered people more (seemingly) patriotic than Americans, although I do see people in some other countries fly their flag on a regular basis. (That said, as was recently mentioned to me by a long-time, American-born friend, and I paraphrase, “Many Americans do not understand that patriotism is not proven by simply wearing the flag and claiming to be patriots. In nations I have visited I see many flags, but people are more reserved about their feelings toward their country and do not feel the need to loudly display and announce like Americans do.” Hmm; some food for thought.)

• While there were immigrants in my hometown in the late 60’s, and children thereof in my high school, I never thought much about immigration or indeed Australia’s one-time White Australia Policy. Then, in 2023, I watched a 6-part documentary on immigration to Australia, filmed around 1980. It was most educational and explained a lot of things I’d witnessed, but had not paid attention to at the time.

• I’ve been to more than a few third-world areas, and based on conditions there and the luxurious view of America from movies, TV, and advertising, I understand why so many people want to move to the US. However, I can’t help but feel that most of them who do come are taken advantage of by their own people already here, as well as by others, and don’t get to realize their dreams. In fact, more than a few of them are worse off!

• Fortunately, I can buy in the US, at a decent price, Vegemite and Violet Crumble bars, so occasionally I can enjoy a little piece of home! In fact, as I write this, I’m chewing a Mintie.

Food

I freely admit that I am addicted to eating, and have been doing it up to three times a day (not counting snacks) for 70 years. I used to think about the next meal, but some years ago, I started thinking about the meal after that as well. See my essay, “April 2017: Oh, the Things that I have eaten,” especially the sections, “Things Not on my Menu,” and “So, Just What do I Love to Eat?”

Lessons learned:

• I’ve learned about foreign foods while traveling abroad, and added them to my regular diet back home. (One example is nashi, an apple-like pear I discovered in Japan.)

• If it feels good, do it! And if it tastes good, eat it!

• Don’t let your meals interfere with your snacks!

• Not all red sauces are ketchup (AU: tomato sauce)!

• While the US makes pretty good nuclear weapons and handguns, they don’t know about meat pies, pasties, and sausage rolls, or about thickened cream or proper custard!

The Importance of Backing Up Your Electronic Files

I’m not talking about securing your house or your physical stuff; I’m talking about the personal stuff you’ve worked on for many hours. That is, your photos, home videos, email, and other personal files. (See the section Let's Backup a Bit in my essay, “December 2010: Technology, Unplugged – Part 2."

Lessons learned:

• If it’s worth doing, it’s worth protecting!

• After every hour (if not more often) of document editing and/or data entry, I backup my work to three different memory sticks! Yes, call me anal, but this long-time approach has served me well. See the first bullet above!

• When you make a series of snapshots of a file, don’t call each version the same name, as that means each new version will overwrite the previous one. Add an ascending numeric suffix, so you’ll have the whole history of the document’s evolution.

• Whatever your backup strategy, you’ll need non-trivial discipline to actually put it into practice.

• Saying , “I only made a few changes now, so no need to make a backup copy” is the first step to disaster. See the first bullet above!

• Many years after I had a textbook published, I set about revising it. However, I could find no copy of one of the chapters. (I had a hard copy, but re-entering the text and formatting it would take a lot of my time.) Eventually, I found a very old 5¼” floppy disk hidden away, which contained the final text of that book. However, when I put the disk in the drive, it wouldn’t spin; it had seized up! So, I carefully cut open the vinyl case, took out the disk—which was very definitely quite floppy—put it back in, and after some moaning and groaning, it spun up and I was able to recover the file.

• My monthly computer backup involves making three copies of all active data, onto separate external drives, one of which resides in my bank’s safe-deposit box, one in my personal safe, and the other in my office. See the first bullet above!

• Quite often, I see people flipping through the thousands of photos on their mobile phone. I wonder how many of them have a backup copy on their own separate device. See the first bullet above!

• Lots of people rely on the “cloud,” whatever that is. Given how often major and minor sites get hacked, I refuse to store permanently any important personal or business data in the cloud. From time to time, however, I will share an important file on a cloud-based platform, but the receiver usually has a short time to retrieve it before I remove it.

• An all-too-frequent thing I’ve heard over the years is, “Sorry I haven’t been in touch; I lost my [electronic] contacts list!” See the first bullet above!

Record Keeping

I’ve always been a diligent keeper of various kinds of records, and once I got my own PC, most of them were stored electronically. (I’ve been using Quicken since 1993, and, frankly, I can’t imagine doing without an equivalent tool.) Now if your life requires only a simple financial structure you might be able to get away with putting all your receipts in a shoebox under your bed and sorting through them when it comes time to prepare your income tax return. However, I have never been accused of being normal. I’ve had rental properties, invoicing of clients, a large set of business expenses categories, and numerous kinds of investments. And as I have to pay estimated taxes at the end of each quarter, I need to be able to pull together information for that purpose.

Here are some simple, but useful, questions to ask yourself regarding your approach to financial record keeping. Do you have any realistic idea how much you paid for groceries last year? For gasoline for your car(s)? Automotive repairs? Various kinds of insurance? Eating out? What is your net worth? And the list goes on and on.

Lessons learned:

• It takes non-trivial effort to enter all your financial transactions—in my case, both personal and business—into some sort of financial-tracking system. However, the payback comes with the ability to report on that information. Having such an ability can be instructive. Without it, you’re only guessing, and you cannot come up with any sort off accurate budget.

• By keeping my records up to date each month, the last month in the tax year is just another month; there is nothing special to do for tax preparation.

• It takes serious discipline to enter your financial transactions. One of the main causes of potential error is having different spellings for the same entity, such as a payee name and payment purpose. Computers being exact, when you ask for a report on all transactions to do with “Acme Corporation,” it will not find those for “ACME Corporation” “Acme Corp.” or just plain old “Acme,” or some other variation that is intended to be the same. Now a good financial management tool will allow you to clone an older transaction and change its date and amount, preserving all the other data that doesn’t change, but could have if you had re-entered it using a different spelling or even transposed two adjacent letters as you typed.

In the US, one can claim a tax deduction for automobile mileage, road tolls, and parking for the following kinds of activities: business, volunteer work, and medical travel (as in driving to medical appointments). However, this requires that you also account for all personal usage, so if audited, they can detect possible cheating. For this purpose, I have a mileage log booklet in each of my cars, but their detailed information is not stored on any computer. At the end of each tax year, using a calculator, I manually add up the category totals for each car, and combine them.

As for keeping current detailed instructions for my executor as to all my records, see my essay, “October 2013: Last Writes.”

Shooting and Editing Video

See my essay, “May 2012: Shooting and Editing Home Video.”

The Fine Arts

According to Wikipedia, “Historically, the five main fine arts were painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry.”

By the time I finished high school at age 16, I’d visited maybe two or three museums and no art galleries! However, in the 50+ years since, I’ve repeatedly visited such places in an attempt to change my inherent philistine nature! (See my 4-Part series, “A Little Bit of Kulcha,” from 2013: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Simply stated, I have absolutely no background in appreciation of the arts.

Lessons learned:

• Apparently, I oftentimes have my taste in my mouth!

• What do I like? I know it when I see it, and don’t ask me to explain why I like or dislike it!

• I don’t want to be told how to interpret something. I have no time for art or music critics and their generally pompous manner. “Was he off his meds when he painted/wrote this?” I don’t know, and I don’t care!

• Apparently, lines of poetry don’t have to rhyme; really!

• I do like a good limerick. Try this on for size! “There was a young man from the sticks, who took to writing limericks. But he gave up the sport, ‘cos he wrote them too short.”

• I can appreciate certain pieces of art that I have seen in person; for example, one of van Gough’s self-portraits made up of dots, the Mona Lisa (small as it is!), and Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

• I’ve admired more than a few buildings and pieces of sculpture.

• There is a lot of music I like/love, and probably just as much that I don’t. (See my essay from November 2021, “A Little Bit of Music .”)

• In general, opera, ballet, and modern dance don’t interest me; however, I’ve enjoyed my share of Gilbert and Sullivan.

• Once I learned of its existence, I eagerly sought out Hundertwasserhaus, an apartment building in Vienna, Austria.

• During a stay in Florence, I did enjoy looking at Michelangelo’s very much larger-than-life David.

Theater

I attended some quite small schools in rural South Australia. One had only 28 students in seven grades. As such, everyone participated in a school play, sometimes taking on multiple roles. Although my high school staged a play each year, this was not part of the curriculum; rather, it was an after-school activity, and as I rode a bus home and there were no “late buses,” I was not able to participate. In my rural hometown area, I attended no more than one public concert per year. (A perennial favorite traveling show was one headed by Harold Raymond, a blind violinist.)

Once I moved to my state’s capital, Adelaide, and had some discretionary income, I bought season tickets to the Festival Center Playhouse (now called the Dunstan Playhouse). This gave me the chance to see performances that I likely would not have attended otherwise, although some were quite uninteresting. (During one performance, a group of so-called hijackers stormed the theater claiming they were taking command of the jumbo jet in which we were all supposedly flying.)

Lessons learned:

• Apparently, I sometimes have my taste in my mouth!

• What do I like? I know it when I see it, and don’t ask me to explain why I like or dislike it!

• Never pass through London, England, without attending at least two or three performances. And during intermission and at the end, do take a good look around the often beautifully restored interior. I have had the distinct pleasure of seeing well-known actors “treading the boards”: Vanessa Redgrave, Dianna Rigg, Edward Fox, David Suchet, and Dawn French are examples. Buy your tickets at the Leicester Square Half-Price Ticket booth.

• After 9/11, many people did not want to fly, so airline ticket prices plummeted. As a result, I found that I could fly from Washington DC to London, stay some days, and go to the theater there, cheaper than if I took the train to New York City for theater there.

• I very much enjoy live theater, be it amateur or professional, especially in small, intimate settings.

Exercise and Health

During my late teens, I played Australian Rules Football at a state-wide level (see my essay from January 2020, “Football, Aussie Style.”) While exercise for that was necessary, it was never enjoyable.

For the next fifty years, my exercise came through physical labor or walking, but never through any sort of training program. And I’ve never really tried to follow any sort of diet. In recent years, I started going to my local indoor swimming pool where I performed various water-aerobics moves and a bit of swimming. Only on very rare occasions did I feel better afterwards than before. However, one day (around age 68), I felt like I was “in the zone.” That is, I had reached the magical place about which many athletes speak. However, it only ever happened that one time, although on several other occasions I got close to repeating the sensation.

When I see someone running, I ask if anyone is chasing them. If not, will they end up where they started? If so, why not just stay there?

Lessons learned:

• Exercising is highly overrated; you can hurt yourself. Better that you stay in bed, or at least, at home, inside!

• When I see someone running, I ask them to run a little extra for me, as there is no point in the both of us getting all sweaty.

• When I discovered a small pool in a neighboring town, I started going once a week, then two, and finally, three. However, while pretty much everyone else swims for an hour, I limit myself to 30 minutes. Less is too little; more is too much. I do six laps (six times up and back, that is). I can see the end right from the start. After 1 lap, I’m one-sixth done, then one-third, one-half, two-thirds, five-sixths, and done! More than that feels like work, and who wants to do that!

• When I hiked the 187 miles of the Thames Path with a backpack (see my essay from July 2011, “A Walk along the River”), I found that that path doesn’t always run downhill like the river it follows!

• Why do they call it “practicing” medicine? Haven’t they already mastered it? Hearing the doctor say, “Let’s try this and see if it works,” does not give me confidence.

• It’s best not to ride one’s brand new motorcycle when one has an arm in a sling and a bunch of deep stitches in one’s forearm.

• I don’t care for injection needles at all, and that probably started at age 16 when I had 20 teeth extracted in three sittings. There is nothing like a needle in the roof of your mouth to remind you that you are alive! I’m reminded of the male dentist smiling and hovering over his patient, who grabs the dentist in his groin and says, “Now, we’re not going to hurt each other, are we?”

• Lifetime protection by a vaccination does not necessarily refer to your life! Several years after I had a (very expensive) lifetime shingles shot, I had to have another one, as a new version of that virus has evolved.

• It’s best to ask your surgical team, in advance, if they have watched the YouTube video of the procedure.

• I really hate using contact lenses! To use an Aussie phrase, “I’d rather get poked in the eye with a blunt stick!” During the nine weeks between having cataract surgery on each eye, I had to wear one contact lens. Sometime I couldn’t get it in, while other times I couldn’t get it out.

• There I was walking on a path halfway up a mountain in Maine with my 3-year-old son, who was riding in a frame on my back, when he told me that he liked hiking. I had to explain to him that he was riding; I was the one hiking!

• When someone tells you that so-and-so died, with a straight face say, “I’m not surprised, as there is a long history of death in their family.” If they reply, “I didn’t know that,” you know for sure that they were not listening/paying attention.

Sayings: Borrowed and Original

Over the years, I’ve come across some memorable sayings that others have uttered; here are some of them (with attributions where I could find them):

• “Nothing is a complete waste; it can always serve as a bad example!”

• Lily Tomlin once said, “I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific!” 

• “Trust, but verify.”

• “Just because I don’t know where I am doesn’t mean I’m lost.”

• “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” [Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland]

• “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” [George Santayana] “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” [Winston Churchill] I’ve found that after they fail (or succeed), many (most?) people do not do a realistic analysis of why. Learn from the past!

• On my work desk, I have a postcard that states in German, “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker,” made famous by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated, it is, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.”

• And finally, one of my absolute all-time favorites: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” [Benjamin Franklin] (See below with respect to planning for success.)

And here are some I‘ve coined (although it’s likely that others have come up with versions of them as well):

• “It is relatively easy to get ahead in this world, as the competition just isn’t that strong!” Most people are competing without knowing the rules or are just following the masses.

• “Learning what not to do can be just as important as what to do!”

• “Opportunities are all around (most of) us; we just need to recognize them and act on them.”

• “Contrary to popular belief, you can create your own opportunities, and you can plan for success.” (See my essay, “May 2011: Planning for Success.”)

• “Separate the romantic from the logical.” (See my essay, “February 2011: Talk is Cheap. Write it Down.”)

• “Principles belong to those who can afford them.” Sometimes we do things against our wishes, just to “get along” or perhaps to survive.

• “Invest in yourself. If you don’t care about yourself, why should anyone else care about you?”

• Albert Einstein wrote that, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another.” I say the same about problems; we might appear to solve one with a particular solution, but it often produces one or more (unintended) side-effects. That is, the net number of problems stays the same!

• “Don’t tell me what you can’t do, show me what you can do!”

• “Blaming others for your own shortcomings and mistakes is a complete waste of time and energy!”

• Although Julius Caesar famously said, “Veni, vidi, vici! (I came; I saw; I conquered),” my version is, “I came, I saw, I was not impressed!” This should not be confused with, “Veni, vidi, Visa! (I came, I saw, I shopped!)”

• Long ago, I decided that nothing in life is really important, except perhaps music! (I’ve since added to that the preparation and eating of food.)

• Ever since I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea, and had to use a machine with a mask to sleep, I’ve stated that, “It is not my preferred sleeping companion!”

• If you want to be noticed, take on a central role! For example, when you join a new committee, becoming an officer, secretary, or volunteer puts you “front and center” in the group.

Conclusion

I know for certain that I am not done learning. And I often ask myself at the end of a day, “What did you learn today?” If the answer is, “Nothing,” then was that a wasted day? Not necessarily, but it’s quite possible we can and should aim to learn something—small or large—on a very regular basis.

I’ll leave you with the following challenge: What were the three most recent things you set out to learn, and how long ago did those efforts happen? How many of them were successful, and whether you succeeded or failed, did you do a post-mortem on them as to why they succeeded or failed?