when emigrating

Monday night, on the way home from BWI there was a story on the radio,

• Your Machu Picchu Tinder photo makes me angry. But I'll get over it.

that we listened to all about being a foreigner in your own land. Being that both of us are immigrants the details are different, but the emotions are immediately recognizable in this story. I have maybe a forced and weird relationship with place. When people ask me where I am “from” I always carefully answer that I live in Maryland. Usually I don't mention that I am from equal parts New Mexico and Sydney. (It takes too long to explain). The funny thing is though, having dinner with Becky and Perry last weekend gave me this slightly uncomfortable feeling as though I was a fake New Mexican, since they have been in NM for the last 20 years and much more knowledgeable. When I moved back to Sydney (about ten years ago now!) I had a similar feeling. My high school German teacher (also an immigrant) mused to me once that “you can never go back”, because of course even if you do... as I did... you've changed so much. (Not that I didn't enjoy my years in Sydney — I did). (It is just different). And of course before I even went to Australia I already felt like an outsider here in the states, even though I can totally pas for American. (I can barely pass for anything else, if truth be known). I identify equally with Vegemite and green chile. In the car, after listening to the story, we both agreed that there is something you lose when you emigrate, but there is also some wonderful benefits to the experiences we've had immigrating here. Still I will always feel from New Mexico and Sydney, no matter where I live.

On a totally unrelated note, right as I was leaving for vacation, someone from one of the major Linux vendors (Debian if it means anything to you) opened a bug on my Platypus project with a patch that fixed a number of spelling errors. If you ever see anything that I have written on-line that happens to be mistakenly spelled right it is entirely thanks to technology. (spell checkers). I am a terrible speller. Anyway, the Debian guys have this mildly passive-aggressive policy of patching code comments that no end user is ever going to see for spelling fixes, and then submitting the patches to the original author. I find it mildly amusing, and hey it doesn't hurt. The interesting thing is that this has happened a couple of times to me, and it signals that they are adding the package to their operating system. I have been trying to get a major Linux vendor to include Platypus, so this is a major victory! I am hoping the package gets promoted before the next major version freezes, which would mean that users can install it using their tools as soon as next year!