Life In The Aerie

By Red Sox Steve

(continued from link: http://vagabondguru.com/LifeInTheAerieDaily/2010/12/where_am_i_im_right_here.html)

I got my walking papers before the end of January 2009, joining the millions already laid-off, and only happy to survive a previous round of layoffs at my own firm. This was my first time being laid-off, and it was just as unfamiliar as my new job had been 5 years earlier.

A severance package that included a one-time payout and temporary health benefits seemed more than generous at the time, but I had no cash flow and the health benefits would be expensive if I had to pay for them myself after my severance package expired. My problems, though, paled in comparison to the millions of families who had lost jobs, homes and benefits and had no way of finding another opportunity to replace the one that had been lost. Within a matter of months, economists and the media would label this "The Great Recession".

I had seen this coming years before, so my nest egg was more than satisfactory to weather the storm. Lo and behold, within a matter of months, federal funds had been set aside for people who needed to pay for their own health insurance AND unemployment benefits were extended further than ever before as the economy continued to hemorrhage job after job. For me, problem solved; many Americans, though, retreated to their ideological camps while the nation was forced to adjust to a whole new reality.

Starting late in 2007, I had been working on a project that would be completed before the end of 2009: I did the research and paperwork to get my Italian citizenship, and had my Italian passport in my hands by Christmas. Just as important as all that, I started writing, and learning. I would spend hours at the library, researching the columns I would later write on topics like China, Brazil, India, Europe, semiconductors, solar panels and nanotechnology. What I was attempting to do by spending hours at the library and watching C-SPAN (cannot stress enough how excellent C-SPAN is!), is understand the future - how would the global economy re-shape itself in the wake of a global economic crisis, what technologies will dominate the future, and what role will the emerging powers of Brazil, China and India play in all this? If the time leading up to the financial crisis taught me anything, it's that I do well when I understand leading indicators.

The second part of all that work is writing about what I had been learning. Matt and Mary worked together for a few years as bloggers on The Sporting News, which is how they met. Their brilliance is evident in their creativity - they work hard (of course I know you are both reading this!), and their skills complement each other beautifully which is what has drawn them to each other. I am the third piece of that puzzle - I go to far flung places alone on a tight budget with a flexible schedule, a light backpack, and a roll of toilet paper (at all times!). Furthermore, my chemistry background means I can tell you about the fundamental elements of our universe and describe how they fit together - this knowledge can be applied across a variety of areas and is all part of my writing. Matt, Mary and I started a project writing articles on a variety of topics and publishing them to the web - www.vagabondguru.com. If you're here, it's because you already know a bit of what we are all about. And so do we - we have bigger plans, but need to get things settled in our lives first. Pets and people need care, and when that's set up nicely, we will head back to our laptops, and create.

By the summer of 2009 - I was hitting the beach pretty regularly, taking life slowly as I tried to sort out the next phases of America's economic recovery. I attended my friend Gina's wedding in Minneapolis, visited Mary in Detroit and spent time with my family in Rhode Island. I spent three weeks in Brazil and Argentina. I was moving around, enjoying freedom I could only dream about back when I was in the cubicle. Sure, there were times before the layoff when I wanted to quit, but I fought those instincts. If I had quit on my own, I wouldn't be able to collect Unemployment Insurance. Because I was laid-off, I was able to file, and collect unemployment every week... for almost two years.

In the summer of 2009, I spent a week in Brazil; February of 2010, four weeks in India; October and November 2010, 6 weeks in China. That's about the equivalent of 1 college semester abroad - in a curriculum of sorts that Matt and I developed. During the weeks I spent there, I was able to take in YEARS worth of information. They were journeys for the mind first, and the soul second.

I left Brazil having seen some of the oldest and largest green energy projects in our hemisphere; I left India in awe at the way in which modern Indian society carries millennia of history forward towards a future of unprecedented prosperity; and I left China knowing that there is a nation of over 1 billion people with an unshakeable confidence and array of modern accomplishments which will benefit them for generations. I made friends in all three places, and hope to keep in touch with them for the rest of my life.

Throughout 2010, I knew I had a good plan - I wanted to make Brazil, India and China a larger part of my life, and continue my academic work and writing. At some point, I would need to seek gainful employment, but puzzlingly, the federal government continued to extend benefits without putting in place a real plan for the nation's economy. I couldn't worry about that, though - it became clear that these emerging economies would continue to grow and their people would continue to prosper. My trips to all three only confirmed that fact.

So I've read, I've learned, I've traveled, and, lucky for me it will all continue. I found a job - I help care for an elderly homebound 85 year-old woman with memory problems named Calla Fricke. Calla has no family here in New York, and, thanks to Matt's efforts for assuming responsibility for her about a year ago (the most humane act I think I've ever seen), she has become family to Matt, our other close friend Brian, and me. She requires 24 hour, 7 day a week care and the three of us do what we have to in order to provide it; our "Band of Brothers" (others might call us "The Lost and the Damned"...) are certainly up to the task.

That's where I'm at as of December 2010.

Posted by Red Sox Steve at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Red Sox Steve

It's December 2010 - I just hit my 33rd birthday, but this space isn't where I fret over gray hairs (salt and pepper, really) or another type of age-related crisis. It is about change. What has happened to me over the last decade? A friend of mine from my college days recently contacted me and amidst his inquiries about my recent trip to China and other things he wanted to know, he asked me an interesting question - "where are you at in life?".

This is where I'm at.

I returned to the US on November 23, 2010 from six weeks in China - I went north, south, east and west while in the Middle Kingdom. I had an experience I'll never forget, and have set up a collage of sorts on my bedroom wall of all the tickets, maps, brochures, currencies and pamphlets I collected over the six weeks. I'll cherish this trip forever.

I returned to the US from Hong Kong via San Diego, where the older of my two sisters lives. Deana has been there for over three years now, ensconced in an area known as "Pacific Beach", or "PB" to the locals. She and I lived together here in New York for 3 years before she decided she needed something different. We sorted out all our affairs, and she (as any experienced triathlete like her would) hit the ground running when she got there. She's transitioned into an engineering job there (the place is brimming with engineers), and I noticed something on my most recent visit - she's calmer, more serene, less about partying and more about slowing down the pace of her life. A boyfriend always helps, and she's got a great one. She also told me that she hasn't been back to Rhode Island, our childhood home, in a year (longer than I've EVER been away from there). Put it all together and it means something: she's comfortable in San Diego, and she's adjusting to a new life in the same place.

The younger of my two sisters, Bethany, dabbled in San Diego - she lived with Deana, which provided an instant network of people who enjoyed athletic events and socializing. Bethany got to San Diego first, back in 2007, urgently needing to leave Rhode Island; while on the west coast, she pursued every goal she wanted - she found a job, a boyfriend, and jump-started her education. It wasn't for her - the guy she wanted and the lifestyle she preferred were back in Rhode Island, which is where she returned in December 2009. She wants to put her roots down close to my parents, and found the perfect partner in Jay, her fiancé as of just a few days ago.

I got to New York in the summer of 2004, after a two year stint in the Peace Corps, living in Guyana. I wanted to learn more about business and thought it wise to trade one jungle for another - I've been on the Upper East Side since then.

Luckily, I landed a job right when I got here, working in investment banking for a foreign firm right in Midtown. Not too shabby for a guy with a chemistry degree who taught math in South America for two years. This, though, wasn't all that it seemed. Luckily (again!) Deana, who had already been here for two years, happened to play softball with someone who adored her named Matt. The promise of romance was all on his side, however, and she would have none of it. What she did, however, was ask Matt to assist her brother - I was new here and wanted to learn about business. I had other goals in mind, mainly ego-driven, but hadn't yet figured out how to incorporate them into my life. Fortunately for me on both counts, I was talking to the right person.

I started talking to Matt a couple of times a week - I was working 9-5, and we lived in the same neighborhood, so we'd meet on Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. One of the best decisions I have ever made. He volunteered to spend time with me, whenever he had any free time in his schedule; my desire to learn prohibited me from saying no. He would talk to me about the stock market (where, I thought, everybody made their big score), and his professional background; from the "get-go" I found the conversation fascinating. I'll keep the details between he and I but suffice it to say, he gave me the information I needed from day one.

He thought I was bright. Actually, I was harassing him every moment of the day with question after question about this or that - I was testing him. "How smart is Matt really?" Very smart, I quickly concluded. Ultimately, I realized all I had to do was listen. I didn't have to follow his advice, and he knew that. The conversations we would have gave us the freedom to express ourselves without confining the topics to finance or work; we would blend seemingly disconnected topics together, and from there the discussions went to intellectual levels I had never previously known. I'm a science guy so if you give me the step-by-steps, and the dos and don'ts, I'll pick it right up; but I'm not a humanities guy. Matt is. My analogies are awful (making a powerful analogy is a good skill to have when communicating), but if you gave my best friend a lab coat and a beaker, you better be really far away when things start changing color!

It took me a good year of twice weekly discussions with Matt before my adolescent naivete started to wear off, and my eyes started to connect with my mind in a whole new way. I had also been going off to my job all the while - I dressed nicely, worked in an office with other white-collar types, in an industry that had some esteem; I had benefits and a decent salary - of course, I thought this meant I was on the way to bigger things in my professional life. I wasn't a six figure guy then, but it was only a matter of time; at least that's what I thought. It would only take another half-year, however, before I thought seriously about making other plans.

Up to 2006, my knowledge of the world and my role in it were disparate; I had already lived outside the country for two years, but that was a journey for the soul, not the mind. I had a lot to learn. But this is right about when my two parallel lives - my intense intellectual discussions with Matt and my more quotidian corporate life - started to diverge. I had surmised after many hours of discussion with Matt, (a financial professional for many years) and my own investigation, that the US economy was like a ship headed for an iceberg. The only questions left, therefore, were 1) when would we hit, and 2) how severe would the damage be. In this case, because we had a looming credit crisis, the longer the problem went unaddressed, the greater the damage.

I soon realized that my job analyzing derivative contracts and putting together prime brokerage relationships with hedge funds AND (the real kicker) working on mortgage-backed securitizations AND credit default swap transactions was a part of the most vulnerable elements of our financial infrastructure at the time. In layman's terms, the work I and my coworkers were doing was part of the problem with America's economy, and when the market inevitably corrected itself, our work would irreversibly transform. Connecting the dots, I was in a jam, and so was our economy.

When I was in college, America went through the dotcom boom and it seemed like new wealth was being created by people like me - right around when I graduated (May 2000), the economy crashed and within 18 months, I quit my job, lost my girlfriend, and was headed for the jungle. When I came to Manhattan, people were already getting rich, but, again, I was too late. 2006, though, was an inflection point - I started doing a better job of separating leading indicators from lagging indicators. As the rich got richer making bad loans, my schoolteacher mother and accountant father were paying more for gas and food in Rhode Island than ever before while their earnings weren't keeping up; two debt-funded wars raged on in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and a second-term president had his foot on the gas full throttle towards less regulation and more tax cuts while his administration pushed home ownership at every turn; Everyone assumed home prices would rise forever and we would all be on the path to easy street.

Almost everyone. Matt didn't. With his guidance and my effort, I made changes as quickly and deliberately as I could. Simply put, I was convinced nearly EVERYONE else was wrong and we were right - he wasn't using demagoguery to make his arguments like the guy in the White House, he was using facts, and then challenging me: "see for yourself", he would always say and still does. He's got more experience in these areas than I do, and understands with crystal-like clarity what working in an investment bank is like even though he's been self-employed for over a decade. The hours long discussions between he and I intensified as we deliberated on the timing of the crash and its details.

Meanwhile, we spent ample time on other topics: my Patriots and Red Sox seemed to constantly be in their respective championships while his Yankees and Cowboys struggled to add to their already large trophy cases; in Europe, a particle accelerator was being constructed underground so that humanity could understand the Big Bang; and he helped me pick up the pieces after a model I was dating suddenly stopped calling (she was uber-hot - I was crushed!) - he and I like to apply our intellect to everything.

I put the needed safeguards in place so I could weather the coming economic storm, and started to wonder: "what do I do after the crisis hits?" Changes beyond my understanding as a low-level employee were taking place at work, and Matt would help me interpret events so I could get the 360 degree view my bosses weren't giving me - later, my dad would help do the same thing (dear old dad ALWAYS knows!) as I navigated an unraveling situation.

By 2007, Matt and I were in astonishment at how much fervor there was about the housing market - mortgage brokers were becoming millionaires, home prices were skyrocketing, investment banks were raking in billions in profits through "securitization" and "flip your home" shows grew in variety and popularity. It was party time in America, and around the world. But he and I were both convinced the situation wouldn't last much longer. This is also right around the time when we met Mary, someone who has heard a similar story about illusory economic growth and had seen it all come undone in person, decades before either of us - she lives in Detroit.

By 2008, the keg was tapped and nary a crumb was left on the hors d'oeuvres trays. The party was over. In March, Bear Stearns went bankrupt and long-time employees vested in the firm headed off to company bathrooms to vomit as their stock sunk to $2 (a true story I heard from an ex-Bear employee). By September, Lehman Brothers, just two blocks from my firm, was no longer as CNBC showed former employees carrying out boxes of personal belongings on a Sunday night. I had interviewed at Lehman in 2004, and was despondent when they didn't hire me...

By September and October of 2008, AIG, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, the "bailout", and a presidential election pitting a very old Republican against a very young Democrat consumed the headlines. If there was ever a time for the stock market, the housing market, and the financial industry to cycle back down from all-time highs, this was it. I'll spare you the well-known details, save one: after the corporate and political dust started to settle in December of 2008, there was one last "gift" left under the tree - Mr. Bernie Madoff of Lexington Avenue and 64th St. on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. My company lost an amount in the hundreds of millions of dollars as ol' Bernie's Ponzi scheme unraveled - for the first time since I'd joined the firm, the company holiday party was cancelled.

If you've ever had a job, or been laid off, you know that around this time, you don't want to be asked to go to a conference room on a floor you've never been to by an upper-level manager you never talk to. When you get there, you certainly don't want to hear a pre-packaged speech from said manager and have the HR person there with him pull a red folder with your name on it out of a stack of red folders labelled with the names of your coworkers and hand you its contents. You don't want to be escorted all the way downstairs by the friends you've made who work in corporate security and asked to return your ID.

That's what happened to me on my last day - on the Wednesday just prior to Ben Roethlisberger's game-winning pass to lead the Steelers over the Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII.

(to be continued...)

Posted by Red Sox Steve at 08:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In talking to a few people, I've learned that there is an interest in my pursuit of Dual Citizenship - Americans with Italian heritage MAY be eligible to become Italian citizens, which is effectively a gateway to the rest of the EU. I'm going to write what I know so far here, in the hopes that others will take up their own efforts if they are so inclined. My own appointment at the Italian Consulate (the LAST step in the process) is in October 2009, so even I am not an Italian citizen yet.

I am Italian-American, 3rd generation born here in the US, which means that it was my great-grandparents that came over here, back in 1920.

I first learned that I may be eligible through a former coworker - he simply stated the possibility that I could apply for Italian citizenship, so with the help of google, I confirmed this to be the case. Essentially, the "right to citizenship" is passed down through the paternal line, from the last of your ancestors to be born there. My great grandfather, Francesco, was born in Italy in 1892, married in a small town there, and, before having any children there, immigrated here with his wife and his parents.

What the Italian government calls this is "Italian Citizenship jure sanguinis", which means Italian citizenship, through blood relations.

The application process can be quite long, and, since I was unsure if I was actually eligible, I took it upon myself to obtain all the needed documents - birth, marriage and death certificates going back to my great grandparents. Even with all that (took about 6 months), there was still one key piece of information missing, which is essentially the lynchpin to eligibility:

If the person who came over here was naturalized as a US citizen before giving birth to his or her progeny, then no one down the line is eligible through that person. I don't want to give wrong information here, so I urge you to check out your own situation based on the documentation available at the website for the Italian Consulate. Here is the link to the Consulate in New York (where I live), but you must use the consulate that covers the state that you live in: http://www.consnewyork.esteri.it/Consolato_NewYork

To give you a bigger picture of the process, you have to 1) prove, through the marriage, birth and death certificates of your ancestors, that you are related to the person born in Italy, 2) prove that the first generation born here was born BEFORE the immigrant parents were naturalized, 3) obtain birth and, if applicable, marriage certificates from Italy (may take a while) for the folks who immigrated here, and 4) translate all the english documents into Italian using an official translation service.

There are notaries and apostilles and such which are part of the process, but the key is obtaining all the documentation which proves you are eligible. Currently, I have all needed birth, marriage and death certificates (even the ones from Italy!), AND the naturalization papers issued by the court system in 1925 (my grandmother was born in 1921, so this proves her father was naturalized AFTER she was born, passing down the eligibility for citizenship). What I am waiting for at this point is the USCIS (part of the Department of Homeland Security) to send documentation also related to the naturalization. It should only take another few weeks to get them, but I sent the request just before Christmas; obviously, I wish I sent it sooner.

Oh, and then, I made my appointment at the Italian Consulate here in December 2008... the earliest available appointment was October 2009! Like I said, the process takes a little while...

Furthermore, I highly recommend using a business/consulting service that will assist you in the process - there are businesses that are set up solely to assist individuals in obtaining their Dual/Italian citizenship. In total, the process is going to take me 2 years and probably cost almost $1500. That being said, because the consulting services have experience with the process, they are in a good position to guide you, and help you work as efficiently as possible. I did not start using a consulting service until I was about 10 months into the process, and highly regret not employing them earlier. I recommend this one: http://www.italiandualcitizenship.com/index.htm. You do have to pay them through paypal before they will assist you, however. So far the people I've been working with have been extremely helpful, and, without them, I wouldn't have figured out how to obtain the naturalization documents.

All in all, I'm happy to answer any specific questions, am not an authority on this process, and highly recommend that you do your own investigations within your own family or on the internet, and, if you are serious about getting your citizenship, enlisting a consulting business to help you with the process.

Posted by Red Sox Steve at 06:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)