xmas 2009: san cristobal de las casas
xmas 2009: agua azul
exit strategy?
usually love axa slides. but who aligned the text on this cube >.<
marriage & the society
2059: melting of north pole exacerbated by carbon boom/bust cycles?
February 24, 2009
Attended lunch+learn featuring Peter Levitt, Manulife's Treasurer. I expected a methodical speech. It turned out to be an extremely entertaining experience. Yes, talking about cash settlement, collateral and rating agencies can be très excitant. Vendy gotta go back to Toastmasters!
January 23, 2009
Saturday am, tried out the Pussycat Doll Workout with Mum: the first dance (don't cha) involves a lot of 'poppin'; the second a feather boa. Now that I no longer work at BCE place, Flirty Girl Fitness is a bit too far. This DVD is a great substitute.
Saturday pm, cooked miso glazed tilapia and rice cracker dusted eggplant for dinner. Mum showed me how to turn rice cracker into powder with a rolling pin.
Sallie on Forbes: When I was in school I was a good student. I assumed when I got out I would be smarter than everyone else. No, that was not the case. But I found out I could work harder than everyone else. // I don't have a great work-life balance. I have a great husband, a great babysitter, great kids. It truly takes a village. I try not to let it all fall on me. I have also "helped" my husband realize that if a kid wakes up at 3 a.m. screaming "Mom!" that means "Parent!" If he goes into the bedroom, it's not like the kid is going to say, "No, I want Mom."
January 21, 2009
Thursday am, listened to Rocco Rossi's speech at Empire Club. I nodded at a number of comments e.g. city council needs to demonstrate more efficient management before demanding a new deal from the federal/provincial governments. I grimaced at a few e.g. he compared city insiders to arsonists. Politics. Sigh.
Thursday pm, met up with Denise for dessert* @ Le Gourmand + a Waterloo event @ Banana Republic. There were so many fashionistas that I wondered whether we showed up at the right time/place. Denise discovered that she looks amazing in purple. I found a free sample of Republic of Women**.
*dark dark chocolate mousse w/ hint of safron.
**osmanthus + bergamot.
January 11, 2009
Bloomberg: CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures market, began trading a long-term "Ultra" Treasury bond future to provide traders and investors a tool to hedge and speculate on fluctuations in the yields of longer-term debt. // "Until the recent explosion of issuance in the long end of the Treasury market over the last year, we really couldn’t construct a physical delivery contract that specifically targeted a very small basket of deliverables," Ross added. "There are now enough issues and supply out there for the deliverable basket so we could narrow the deliverable window to this 25 to 30 year bucket."
January 7, 2009
Economist: Canadian ministers, it seems, are a bunch of Gerald Fords. Like the American president, who could not walk and chew gum at the same time, they cannot, apparently, cope with Parliament’s deliberations while dealing with the country’s economic troubles and the challenge of hosting the Winter Olympic games. This was the argument put forward by the spokesman for Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, after his boss on December 30th abruptly suspended, or "prorogued", Canada’s Parliament until March 3rd.
January 5, 2009
TorontoStar: Rocco Rossi was the first to formally file papers to run for mayor of Toronto on Monday morning. He was also the first to ruffle feathers at city hall, saying mayors should serve no longer than eight years.
January 4, 2009
Variable annuities and the art of marital compromise?
wsj: Though the retiree, a man in his sixties, wanted to invest for growth, his wife wanted security. "She was absolutely panicked because of the market," recalls Stephens. "She’s not a financially inclined person by nature, and she was feeling very insecure. Finally her husband said, "We need something she can live with and I can live with" — something with a floor, but also some upside in a good market. Well, the answer to that was an annuity."
December 24, 2009
Stopped by Atlanta en route to Mexico City. There are Tiger posters everywhere still. Accenture needs to file for divorce based on grounds of impotency.
But I don't blame Tiger. Society treats successful people like gods and then wonders why they suffer from hubris.
Carl forwarded me a video: life is like a cup of coffee.
December 18, 2009
Sam visited Toronto on Sunday. They are expecting a second child, a girl. Apparently, she is going to be named Avani, meaning earth. Sam named his first child, a boy, Aakash, meaning sky. I couldn't help but wonder why boys often get names that allude to freedom while girls to fertility?
Vendy: I wonder what the next big thing will be in the VA space. Is it gonna be super crazy?
Sam: One day, we may look back and say "VA is super crazy".
Axa unveiled a dual account platform at its Autumn Investor Seminar; dual meaning a combination of guaranteed and non-guaranteed. My left brain worries if some policyholders would game the system; my right brain worries if most policyholders can understand the rules.
Prospectus: Once a withdrawal is taken from your Guaranteed benefit account value, you cannot make additional contributions to your Guaranteed benefit account value. You can, however, continue to make transfers from your non-Guaranteed benefit account value to the Guaranteed benefit variable investment options until such time you make a subsequent contribution to your Non-Guaranteed benefit account value.
December 16, 2009
Ended rebound relationship. Of course unaware of it being a rebound relationship until the end.
Breaking up with an (over?) emotional human being makes one feel rather evil. Over the years, I have played with more than a few theories to improve my EQ. However, in practice, I simply cannot handle people whose dominant function is feeling. "Does God exist?" is a feeling question. "Do I love him?" is a feeling question. That aside, I use my head to figure out what I want.
I have read that people begin to explore their less dominant function after mid life crisis. I look forward to that. Until then, I will continue to be a (over?) rational human being.
December 14, 2009
Barrons: "On a relative basis, de Castries is a star, since he operates in an industry run by many nonentities or takers of foolish risks," says one analyst at a major hedge-fund complex.
Vendy: You gotta love major hedge-fund complexes!
December 13, 2009
Not feeling well. Spent the day in front of the TV with Jane Austen.
Wikipedia on S&S: "The ending does, however, neatly join the themes of sense and sensibility by having the sensible sister marry her true love after long, romantic obstacles to their union, while the emotional sister finds happiness with a man whom she did not initially love, but who was an eminently sensible and satisfying choice of a husband."
Wikipedia on P&P: "Elizabeth is stung by Darcy's haughty rejection of her at a local dance and decides to match his coldness with her own wit." Vendy's idea of a perfect beginning!
Two hundred years later, instead of marriage & the society, we obssess over sex & the city. The best seller, "Eat, Pray, Love", is written by a woman who travels the world to avoid marriage and kids. Or does she avoid marriage and kids to travel the world? I cannot help but wonder, can this generation jet set our way to the meaning of life?
December 9, 2009
NYTimes: Perpetually articulate and composed, Ms. Coakley, who captured the Democratic nomination Tuesday in a race with three other candidates for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy's seat, has won respect in state political and legal circles for years. // "I think in my late 30s I went through the, you know, do I want to have a child?" she told The Globe in 1999. "I thought about this very seriously, because I didn't want to suddenly be 60 and say, 'Oh, my God, I never did it.' But I think I came to a pretty clear resolution, which I am pretty happy with. Which is, you can't do everything in life."
December 6, 2009
Vendy's violets are flowering :)
December 4, 2009
Bloomberg: Michael Masters, founder of Masters Capital Management LLC, says speculators will end up controlling U.S. carbon prices, and their participation could trigger the same type of boom-and-bust cycles that have buffeted other commodities. // "Wall Street is going to sell it as an investment product to people that have nothing to do with carbon," he says. "Then suddenly investment managers are dominating the asset class, and nothing is related to actual supply and demand. We have seen this movie before."
December 1, 2009
The average couple is unhappy six years before first attending therapy, at which point, according to "The Science of Clinical Psychology," the marital therapist's job is "less like an emergency-room physician who is called upon to set a fracture that happened a few hours ago and more like a general practitioner who is asked to treat a patient who broke his or her leg several months ago and then continued to hobble around on it; we have to attend not only to the broken bone but also to the swelling and bruising, the sore hip and foot and the infection that ensued."
In "Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion," the psychologist Michael Vincent Miller describes marriage as mocking our "fondest dreams," because the institution is not the wellspring of love we imagine it to be. Instead it's an environment of scarcity, it's "a barbaric competition over whose needs get met"; it's "two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one."
I realized that my favorite books about marriage - Calvin Trillin's "About Alice" and Joan Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking" - included one spouse who was dead. // Dan said, and I mirrored to him: "Food is a truly important part of family. For you it's health and pleasure bound together, and it lets you express and pursue the life you want to live three times a day." // I loved the idea of digging out of my emotional bunker and going over to Dan's to live with him.
Dan and I had been following a de facto acceptance strategy. He even convinced me that the best response to his lecturing me, again, about conjugate-periodization strength training was for me to say, "Oh, you lovable, obsessive man, you!" and walk away. // This is another major complaint about marital therapy: mental-health professionals find mental-health problems. All of a sudden you're married to a narcissistic personality disorder; who wants to stick around for that? // But by now I noticed a pattern: improving my marriage in one area often caused problems in another. More intimacy meant less autonomy. More passion meant less stability.
November 29, 2009
Saw Million Dollar Baby with K. Reignited my gratitude for being able to breathe, to run, to live each moment and to remember each moment lived.
November 15, 2009
My favorite hooker is a neurotoxicologist.
October 15, 2009
Just finished kimi wa petto. Really like Koyuki's interpretation of Sumire. Really feel for her forced smiles. Usually adverse to boys that are cuter than me. But Matsujun's acting skills are pretty decent. Gonna go talk to my violets now :)
October 13, 2009
CALVIN TRILLIN: "College was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they'd have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they'd wanted to be in the first place. That's when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That's when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds."
I found myself contemplating the sort of havoc a horde of smart guys could wreak in other industries. I saw those industries falling one by one, done in by superior intelligence.
Vendy: Need to rewrite Atlas Shrugged.
October 10, 2009
Currently Admiring:
Sallie @ CNBC because she is back!
HANNELI @ vogue because blue sky is state of mind.
September 26, 2009
Wednesday, heard Julie Dickson from OSFI speak at Actuaries Club of Toronto. She's pretty hilarious e.g. "Our mandate is to do it, not to do it if we can."
Thursday, practiced hatha at yoga lounge. Feel so happy :)
Friday early evening, met up with Stephen for dinner. Shared the explosive ending of my latest relationship in an entertaining format. It is very important to be entertaining because I am so tired of this story. As we strolled towards Union, an unexpected laser light lit up a cloud. Maybe UFO's do exist. Maybe a girl can never be sure that she knows a guy.
Friday late evening, met up with coworkers at Caren's. Jason's take on marriage of quanti person with non-quanti person: My wife says that I need to communicate better; I tell her that she needs to be more specific.
Saturday, soccer with Steven and Albert.
September 20, 2009
Saturday, saw "Once Upon a Proletarian" and "Nanjing Nanjing" with Steven and Albert.
TIFF's description of the former: "As the director's scarcely concealed sadness, anger and disenchantment seep through beautifully composed frames, we glimpse the revolutionary greatness and heroism of the past, especially as compared to today's reality. It's almost impossible to imagine what the future holds for the disoriented children of China's liberal economy."
Which is simply hilarious. I cannot begin to imagine being born thirty years earlier, in my mother's childhood, when rights and wrongs seemed so absolute. Disorientation makes it possible to discover the unexpected. Which is true of the children of China's semi-liberal economy, as well as China's economy itself.
As for the latter, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke: "Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us."
Sunday, salmon jumping in Port Hope. Try, try, try again.
September 17, 2009
Wednesday, lunch and learn with Manulife's Canadian equity portfolio manager.
Thursday, Tushar is celebrating his one year anniversary at Manulife. I found myself at a table surrounded by MMF's. Me thinks it stands for Master of Mathematical Finance.
September 12, 2009
Sunday, biked/walked to Yonge and Lawrence with dad. We are trying to hit all the discovery trails.
Friday, tennis with Wei.
Saturday, refreshed my asymmetric short look at Alan Parss. I hope they offer hair styling services in a massage chair in heaven.
September 8, 2009
Milliman ranked #7 by Consulting Mag: Milliman, a firm more than 1,000 consultants strong, prides itself, Smith says, on being a place where a consultant can stay throughout his or her career. "We're not an up or out firm. We allow people to integrate their personal lives with their business lives and understand that in any lifecycle there are times when one is more important than the other and there has to be a balance."
September 1, 2009
Feeling very Chungking Express today. No time to re-view the film so re-reading a review: Cop #223, a hurting soul nursing a recent breakup with a never-seen ex-girlfriend, May. Taking into account the date of their breakup (April 1st), Cop #223 wants to hope the end of their affair was intended as a joke, and begins to obsess over the fragility of human relationships. He starts collecting cans of pineapple (May's favorite fruit), all with the exact same expiration date -- May 1st (which also happens to be Cop #233's birthday) -- and begins to muse in voiceover about the inevitable "expiration" of most good things in life.
