Last night Jamie and I were discussing how I came to be here, and one of the questions/comments made was about whether i expected i would stay here. My answer was quite honest, I really don't know. This July I will have been here 5 years and that's the mid point in my green card validity. After 4 july I can apply for citizenship as harry has done however I am not sure that that is exactly what i want to do. Once you are a citizen you are a slave to the IRS for life. I am not sure I like that.... That said, as long as you have a green card you are a slave to the IRS also...

At any rate citizenship is not the foremost thing on my mind. Jamie is currently going through a divorce and of course the issues of child custody come up. They didnt come up with my older kids, I believe that children should be with their mothers unless their mothers don't want them - that presents a different set of circumstances. The presence of children in the relationship marital or meretricious presents interesting challenges. When children are older of course it is less important because there is already an almost unerasable connection there but as small people grow up into children they need to have an active involvement by both parents to know that they have both parents failing which it becomes very easy for them to grow as single parented children.  All this is but a mere distraction from my topic though which was, would I stay. 

Certainly after ten years, the expectation from the feds would be, is this guy going to become a citizen? What are the real benefits? I had a heated argument with a friend about the ability to vote and said it was all pish, after that we never spoke again.  My former colleague at SSA has been in the US and renewed his GC three times, has no intention of taking citizenship, so I may consider that as an option. The passport in and of itself gives me no advantages over what i have.

Anyway, I then ranted on to Jaimie about work ethic and the fact that I didnt like the fact that people tackled their work in such a blinkered way and refused to take on any more responsibility/understanding of their role in the grand scheme of things than absolutely necessary. Funnily enough the same topic came up for discussion in the office with Phil this afternoon and he even has a label for it, what he calls - Inchmen, folks who don't give an inch and have no understand of the context of their inch in the yard!