Introduction:
So many posts are made on these forums by people looking to mark, or celebrate special occasions with a new watch - birth of a child, graduation, milestone birthdays. And while no one should ever be denied their justification for wanting a new watch, it got me thinking about how I have never worried about getting new watches for commemorative purposes. In fact, the only watch I have that is/was a commemorative watch is the Titan Edge my parents bought me as a token Graduation Present for high school (token in that we didn’t massively celebrate my high school graduation since it was always expected that I do so). On the other hand, I’ve always been more interested about the stories and memories that each of my watches inherit and I let what happens happen in a generally organic fashion. It’s allowed for some interesting circumstances where the most unexpected of watches in my collection generally hold the most interesting memories over just the most expensive. The below is a musing, a borderline ‘State of the Collection’ of some of the most important moments, and memories in my life, and the watches that were most associated with them.
Warning: The following read is fairly long and personal so TL;DR - lot of stuff happens, and watches went along for the ride 🙂
PART 1 of 5
1992 – First Watch, and Childhood Days
While my dad was ever the consummate lover of watches, I can’t necessarily say that he went out of his way to instill a similar passion in my early years. Most of that is likely attributable to the fact that we were a lower middle class family when he and my mom were starting out. I was actually born while he was still a student, and neither he nor my mom were American Citizens. Since my mother couldn’t work as a result, money was tight, considering the two were trying to make ends meet with a paltry student pension from my dad’s work as a Master’s Student. But they crimped where they could and lived within their means until my dad graduated. Immediately following graduation, he turned around to start working at the University as an Assistant Professor. His chosen professional field was in the doldrums at that time so working in the private sector wasn’t a great option – this is the background my sister was born into 3 years following. My dad was slowly working his way up the pay-scale, but remember – Academia. The pay was good enough to make sure my sister and I weren’t wanting for a roof above our heads, good food in our bellies, nice toys and books and clean clothes.
Nonetheless, my parents always found enough money to splurge on us and themselves on occasion. So my dad was still able to entertain his own interest in watches. Naturally, knowing I had to be careful about the things I asked for, my tastes ran towards asking for the latest video games or toys more than a watch. I mean, there was always time later in the future for grown-up things like a watch, right?
Anyone else who grew up as a child in the late 80s and 90’s knew that Nickelodeon and Nickelodeon Slime were THE BIG DEAL. Heck, we didn’t even have cable, but whenever we had a chance to go to someone’s house where there WAS cable, we had to tune in to Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, and observe the latest and greatest in contestants getting slimed for whatever reason. It goes without failing then that one day, when I was reading the back of the Froot Loops box my mom had purchased the weekend prior, my eyes boggled:
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Froot Loops. Nickelodeon. Velcro. SLIME! What more could a child want? I begged, I pleaded, I wheedled. I’m pretty sure I cajoled, even though I wouldn’t have known what the word meant at the time. All I wanted was to get the Proof of Purchases and Postage to mail everything in (no allowances for me or my sister 😉 ). My parent’s acquiesced. 4 weeks later, I had everything I needed bundled into an envelope and dropped in the mail.
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I can’t remember WHEN the watch finally arrived, but I remember that, to my 7 year old brain, disappointment was NOT even a question. I was thrilled by the way the slime squeezed around and the way the watch felt around the wrist. Never mind that the LCD was so poor that you could barely read the watch in the bright sunlight or from any angle other than straight on. And never mind that the watch probably didn’t even know what Water Resistance meant. It was mine, and it was my consummate partner through the rest of that school year, and the next couple.
1996 – The Adolescent Anguish of Leaving Your Life Behind
Growing up in the early 90s meant growing up with the constant struggle of ‘Keeping up with the Kevins’. Technology was changing fast. Toys were changing fast. Dot-Com was kicking in fast. The world was quickly beginning to move at light speed, and if you didn’t catch up fast, you were left behind fast and no one even noticed you were there anymore. 3rd grade was me begging and pleading for a Game Boy so that I could be relevant again – only to FINALLY have a brief spell at the top when I was able to announce, right after coming back from Christmas holidays that not only did I NOT get a Game Boy, I GOT A SEGA GAME GEAR! That’s right – I was not only playing portable, but in COLOR!
Sadly, that was my last foray in being the Coolest of the Cool at school again. 4th and 5th grade rolled on with me occasionally keeping up with the cool trend (POGS) only to be eschewed again when my peers moved on to the next thing (Magic: The Gathering). Even when I tried to be cool, I somehow misstepped, like when I got Rage: The Werewolf Apocalypse and NetRunner CCG instead of Magic and Magic blew up in popularity and left the others behind. A once again brief spell when everyone discovered that the kid who was always chosen last for every sport was actually the best Ultimate Disc player in the class kept me relevant, but it was only until everyone realized that I was still wearing that silly Froot Loop watch. ‘FOOL! Casio Digital Watches are where it’s at now! Get with the program!’
Unfortunately for me, I was being hit at the same time, with one of the biggest pieces of bad news (that a kid) could get – my parents decided that we were leaving the USA – the land of my birth, and moving to India. I was devastated. My life was here. My friends (what few I had) were here. Sure I had grandparents, and uncles and aunts and cousins in India, but that was the only redeeming part of being there. Having to make friends all over again? Learning new languages? No Hamburgers? Deathly heat? Forget it! The doldrums began to kick in.
I guess, in a way, my parents felt bad about the way I was taking it. Not that it mattered of course – living in a Benevolent Dictatorship means the ones under 18 get a lot less say about the direction the family goes than the ones with Graying Hair. Christmas rolled around, and I got a whole bunch of extra games and accessories for the Game Gear, and a couple of fun items I can’t remember now, but nestled under the tree was one last small box. A new watch. Not just any watch, a DIGITAL WATCH.
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Not a Casio by a long stretch, but money was tight again – my parents were liquidating their savings preparing to move an entire household overseas and start from scratch, all while trying to still keep my sister and I alive for the remaining months before the move. And in any case, $10 was $10 – for my mind in the 90’s that was still a big deal, even if it wasn’t G-Shock money. I was pleased as punch to at least have something that could compete with the Casios, even if it was quickly forgotten by my classmates. The end of the school year came up fast, and while everyone else was making plans for how to spend the summer, I was packing up and leaving 2 days before the last official day of school – those were the flight plans my parents had made. I didn’t even get the excitement of that last day that everyone else was anticipating. Just pack up and drive out to the airport.
In a way, one of the best things about that year (1996) was that I didn’t really have much time to wallow in my self-pity. We landed in India and I immediately had a meeting a week later with the school administration to take an entrance exam to get into the school my parents wanted to send me to. Wanna know the worst part? To add salt to the wound, my parents decided to hold me back a year because of language requirements, so not only was I about to start school in a new country, I was already gonna be a marked man, as the oldest in the class by far. Didn’t even get to enjoy much of a summer to speak of. School ended in the USA in mid-May, and started in Late June in India – I got like 2 weeks of actual time to just enjoy, and most of that was destroyed by my mom tutoring me daily to get me ahead of the ball before the first day. Woof…
India in the 90s was an interesting place. The markets were just opening up, having come out of something akin to socialist tendencies in the earlier decades after Independence. The kids were OBSESSED with Europe and the USA - a circumstance which somewhat worked in my favor. I was neither stand-offish like some that grew up overseas were coming to India for the first time, but I was just new and interesting enough that I was actually able to make friends pretty quickly. Funny enough, though I was made fun of constantly for my American Accent, I actually made more friends faster in India than I did at any point in my elementary school time in the USA. For once, just a bit, it felt like I actually had a place.
All too soon though, the realities kicked in. I handled my time in India well enough, but I never QUITE took to the situation in full. I still remembered the USA a lot more fondly than my sister did. And while the friends I had always kept me included, there was always something that kept me separate, I was just slightly too weird on the Cricket Pitch. I had just slightly too many cool things compared to them, or didn’t have an interest in all the same things. I spoke with just weird enough an inflection that I could still be made fun of, but it was getting harder to do, and with each day I got better, kids worked harder to find something new to make fun of. All in good fun of course - I could dish it about as hard and as fast as I could take it. And, being the tallest person in my class, and actually taller than most upper-classmen, I was able to cultivate an air of authority that I NEVER had in the USA. But at the same time, I struggled immensely with the school system - a system built around rote memorization and high test scores. My sister took to it phenomenally, but I made it very clear to my parents, later in time, that I would be returning to the USA after finishing school to go to college.
Through this, my old Sega Sports watch plodded along. When I first arrived in India, it attracted all of the attention of being a ‘cool watch’. The watch stuck out like a sore thumb - exactly the kind of thing worn by either a kid who grew up outside of India, or who had parent(s) that worked outside of India and brought all the coolest things back as presents. In my case, it was a bit of both. Though my mother was with us, our dad was still State-side working on wrapping up projects before joining us. Sadly though, the watch made it two years before it finally discovered its nemesis - humidity. At first, I noticed a minor bit of condensation inside the crystal, but I thought little of it - it would disappear by mid morning and none-the-worse. Several months later though, you could see the discoloration around the LCD crystal before finally, a few months after that, the moisture finally found the circuit board and shorted the watch into oblivion.
1998 – Wherein Watches Begin to Become an Interest
During this time in India, the banality of constant school, studying, tutors, academic pursuits, and the brief moment to catch my breath and maybe play a few rounds of cricket with the kids on the lock was broken up on occasion by a visit from my father. Living a pseudo-bachelor life with the rest of the family overseas meant he was able to save much more money than he was in the previous years. He lived as a bachelor with other bachelors, and sent money back to my mom to keep things running in India but since his needs in the States were so low, he was able to afford 1-2 visits back to India every year, whereas in years prior, we, as a family, were maybe able to visit India once every 3-4 years. Not only were the visits a chance to see him after ages, but they offered a bit of a respite - those weeks were some of the few weeks in the entire year when my mother wouldn’t have something study or academically related lined up for us to spend our time. A TRUE breath of fresh air.
It was during this time, on one of dad's visits that I noticed that he had changed his watch. It was then that I learned that dad always harbored a desire for a chronograph, and had finally indulged himself with a Seiko Alarm Chronograph.
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Up until this point I always figured watches went in one of two directions - either blah, and basic 3 hander watches for the stuffy oldies, or modern, hip digital watches for those who wanted all the bells and whistles. I never realized a non-digital watch could look so…complex. I was absolutely fascinated by all the sub-registers, and the sheer number of markings and hands everywhere - and the buttons! This watch had more crowns and buttons than my old Sega did! It was unbelievable. It was immense. It was…
It was the start of the sickness.
1999 – Time Becomes King
The very next year, I tried to make a deal with my mother - If I did well in the May Finals, I wanted a new watch for Diwali that year. Upon making my earnest request known, I got the oft disappointing response that all kids are all too used to - ‘We’ll see’. You might as well just say no, for how often that statement goes that direction… Nonetheless, I pushed and did quite well in class. I continued to drop hints in the summer, thinking, maybe mom would tell dad and, come his next visit late summer, there’d be a magic little watch box in the corner of the suitcase, but to no avail. Nothing. I gave up. The next year of school started and I stepped back into the daily rigamarole of studying, and just dragging myself through another day, another week, another month….
And just like that, Diwali rolled around and preparations began. Mom began cleaning the house, whipping up sweets and decorations and snagged a new outfit each for herself, my sister and myself. I came home one day from school, and as I threw my backpack in the corner by bed, I saw a small box sitting right on top of the folded new clothes.
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Not a chronograph, but my first official analog wrist watch. Yet, simple as it was, it was my new companion. And it was a solid one at that. Not 2 months after I got it, our teacher, in an effort to power-trip, decided to ban wristwatches in class, and threatened to confiscate any wristwatch that she found being used. Needless to say, the entire class was upset at this as, with our dull uniforms, our wristwatches were one of the few ways we could exert our individuality in class. I refused to stand for it. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, using every tool at my disposal (geometry kit, compass, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and solar tracking) I built my own rudimentary sundial and started using it to call out time in class. It infuriated the teacher who would keep rushing over to my desk demanding I present the watch I was hiding. It aggravated her further that she could never find the watch either. It took weeks before she put two-and-two together and realized that I had built the sundial template. She swiftly confiscated it, but by then, it was too late (for her) - I had been using it for long enough that I had managed to discreetly etch the necessary markings in the appropriate places on my desk. With that, any mere pencil or pen quickly became the means with which time was always at my fingertips. The teacher finally had enough and called the Principal in to demand an end to the chicanery. The principal and I were actually on quite good terms. I was widely known in school as one of the more academically gifted kids, but still just enough of a rabble rouser that it warranted always keeping one eye in my direction. And yet, I was always polite to the teachers when engaging them. She walked right in and stood at my desk and told me, ‘No games - how are you doing it?’ I gave her a crap-eating grin as I asked her to look at her wrist and see what time it was. Right as she did it, I calmly picked up my pencil, placed it in the appropriate location on my desk, and called out the time - the same time as was noted on her watch, to within just a couple of minutes. She stared at me for a few seconds before looking down at my desk where the pencil was still standing up where I was holding it. She looked for a few more moments at the shadow it cast until she noticed the small marks I had etched and started piecing them together, and then burst out laughing. And she kept on laughing as she walked towards the door, turning around to announce, ‘The ban on wrist-watches has been rescinded.’ I had the respect of the Principal for turning the tables on the teacher, and I had the respect of my classmates for getting the wristwatches back, though I must say, that particular teacher never took a shine to me after that 😀
I still have the Classic watch to this day, though I long stopped using it. A schoolyard brawl ended up with the crystal getting smashed against a rock (saved my wrist though) and my mom refused to pay to repair it. I continued to wear the watch that way until we moved back to the USA.
2001 – Growing Up, and Moving On
Remember that I promised that, after I graduated High School, I’d be returning to the USA for college? I never gave up on that promise. My parents, seeing that I was all too driven toward that direction started having a good, long conversation with one another while I was in the 9th Grade. Those that know, know that 10th Grade is effectively the most important grade in Indian Education - the direction of your life and the future choices of school are very much directed by how you do in the 10th grade, when your final exams are graded nationally against all the other 10th graders out there. At that time, even though my parents had laid the foundation for a solid life in India, including purchasing their first home there, my dad still had not managed to make the permanent move over to join us. They started talking about the possibility that, if I left, the family would be completely split up across multiple locations. Rather than that, they decided that it was better to move everyone back to the USA, and do so before I graduated high school so I had a chance to use the time to prepare for college-track classes before getting in myself. And so, we returned to the USA.
Not only did we return, but we actually ended up returning right back to the same state that we left. Plenty of people think that is crazy, but THAT was a decision my mother opted for (I take no responsibility for that, though it must be said, I am the last of the family STILL HERE
). We came back in the summer, and I was giddy with anticipation about the prospect of catching up with my friends when the school year began again.
A short lived prospect indeed - in the 4 years I had been away, most forgot who I even was. On occasion, there was the odd about-face as someone looked back in the hallways at what was a long-forgotten face reappearing. Then too, the high school class was a smorgasbord of kids from multiple elementary schools and middle schools so there were plenty of people who never knew who I was, period. In a way, it made the transition easier. Though Alaska wasn’t new to me, I was basically the new kid in Alaska again. Over time, a few more people recognized me, and I made friends again with others, but really, it was no different than the elementary school days I had left.
Oddly, High School was…boring. Having been held back a year in India, I was surprised when the administration decided to let me push up a year, so I was actually right back where I was supposed to be graduating with the people I had started school with. And school was still easy. I wasn’t challenged, and I didn’t have much in the way of homework. I was typically able to finish 90% of my homework either during the lunch break, during the 10 minutes or so remaining at the end of each class before the bell for the next class, or in my dad’s office after I walked over from school waiting until he was done and ready to go home. All that was typically left when I got home was to type up any essays or such that were assigned, and that were whipped out in the last hour between vegging in front of prime-time TV and going to bed. The one silver lining was my History Teacher - he actually realized I wasn’t being challenged so he threw out his curriculum, just for me, and told me that he wanted me to read the assigned chapter every week, and then read the concurrent chapter in Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’ In a nutshell, he wanted me to see the differences in how different people view, remember and interpret the same history. This was the first class that gave me a glimmer of hope for the future.
Christmas came around that year, and by now, I was past childhood expectations. I had hinted at nothing, and I desired for nothing. I finally had reached that age where I was just excited that there were presents under the tree, and appreciated each one for what they were. While my sister had a pretty decent little pile under there, I actually had one box that, above all else, was MY favorite.
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The Pulsar RAF Chronograph. My dad remembered. He remembered, even 3 years prior, that I had wanted a chronograph. And I finally had a chronograph of my own. It was everything I could have hoped for. And at the time, it was everything I wanted. The Pulsar was, in a way, responsible for jumpstarting my excitement again. I joined Academic Decathlon a few weeks later. I was great at it and I was one of the best contestants on our team. History went from being a blah subject to being my favorite subject. Math actually became something fun as opposed to just repetitive number exercises. Art History was joined purely for the fun of it (though a couple of cute girls MAY have had a part to play… ) I actually enjoyed my senior year more than I thought I would, and (GASP!) I actually realized, in the last weeks of school, that I was going to MISS some of these people when we all went our separate ways in life.
Part 2 of 5
2004 – Passions are Kindled, and Adult Life is Forged
Most of my peers, in our senior year, waxed poetic about the college(s) they wanted to attend. I generally kept silent through most of those conversations. Of course I was going to college - I was Indian; it was expected, and a given. The bigger shock would have been me saying I was going to go on to be a hippie. The true surprise that came to most is that when they finally would ask me what colleges I was applying to, I said I was going to the state college. They were flabbergasted that I would limit myself in such a way, but I was quick to point out that our state college (at the time), had highly accredited engineering programs, I had a tuition waiver on the Bachelors by virtue of my Dad being a professor there, and I also had three scholarships which, due to the tuition waiver, were basically extra free money. I had a full ride - why waste the opportunity. I should point out that, fastforwarding to the present day, many of the ones who mocked my choice at the time, are currently complaining about being underwater on student loans, while I graduated on time with money in the bank. I may have missed out on ‘The Full College Experience’, but I’d like to think that the dividends have paid out now.
I expected college to be a paradigm shift from High School, but realistically, I think my life circumstances set me up such that said shift was never realized. I was used to being a small fish in a big pond. I was used to most people not knowing I existed, and not caring. I was used to having little to no social life, and forcing myself to dig through piles and piles of books and academic notes every day, just trying to get to the next day. College quickly became just 4 more years in the way of adulthood.
Early in 2004, my parents went for a vacation, and when they returned, they gave me a watch they had bought in the Duty Free while they were waiting at the airport:
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While the Tommy Hilfiger is nothing fancy, it did represent a change in my thinking about watches. Prior to this, My parents had also gifted me a Seiko Kinetic, so I had started delving into the nuances of different types of watches. The TH1985 was my first encounter with a fully mechanical watch, and I have to say, I was surprised by how much it appealed to me. I found myself staring at the open heart for minutes on end at times. In fact, the watch was a fantastic coping mechanism for when classes or homework stressed me out. I’d just stop for a moment, stare at the watch movement oscillating, and then get myself built back up to jump right back into it. If any watch can/could be credited with getting me through college, it would be the TH1985.
The Tommy Hilfiger is also responsible for fanning the Horology Sickness. At the time, I was bigger on the Hi-Fi forum Head-Fi, than I was in watches, BUT, one of the threads that was started back then was about watches, and I found myself quickly descending down the rabbit-hole of watches as I read through different users’ thoughts and collections. The height for me was when another forum user started an entire thread on his journey to a Breitling Navitimer. That thread was actually responsible for me discovering the Watchuseek forum, and though I didn’t join the forum that day, I became an active lurker for the next half decade, before finally pulling the trigger and starting my own profile.
Almost as quickly as college began, it came to an end. I had the unique experience of actually graduating with my dad. He had continued to climb up the ranks at the University and the final rank ahead of him, of full professor, required that he finally complete his PhD. Though he had AMPLE years/decades of research and experience under his belt, the administration told him that he still needed to formally complete the degree to get the position. So, he rolled up his sleeves, and put in the work, and got that sheet of vellum. It so happened that he would walk the same time I did, which meant my mom now had her in for effectively ‘forcing me to walk as well (I was underwhelmed by the pageantry of the High School Graduation experience, and thought to just avoid the same at college and accept my diploma in the mail.) He wore his favorite Seiko Kinetic and I wore my Tommy Hilfiger that day
I entered high school knowing I wanted to be a computer engineer. I learned quickly during one of the summer classes my dad signed me up for that, while I understood computer programming, I wasn’t particularly effective at it. It took me longer to debug code than I felt comfortable with, so as I entered into my final summer before college, I decided to stay on the computer engineering track, but opt for the Electrical Engineering side, so I could focus the majority of my time on the physical aspect. As it would turn out, I was a decent enough Electrical Engineer, but I was actually a better Mechanical Engineer - a realization I came too far too late into the start of my senior year. Committed that I was, I knew I had to stay the course and finish the degree I was in, but it was becoming apparent that, if I decided to pursue Electrical Engineering, I wasn’t going to be working on the high tech cutting edge side - I’d more than likely be relegated to doing day-to-day soldering working for a small local company built out of someone’s garage. The realization came most apparently during our senior project. Every year, for the Computer Engineering Senior Project, the professor gave us all the same standard computer board, and the same basic chassis for a simple robot. Those two things aside, we were given free reign to build a robot in any fashion we liked, that would track a course along a table with obstacles on it, pick up a payload and return it to the starting point. The goal was to program the robot so it wouldn’t fall off the table, wouldn’t crash into walls, wouldn’t get lost on the table, and would perform the base task as quickly as possible. I signed up with the best programmer in our class, thinking I was coming out ahead since I knew I’d be struggling with the program aspect of the board, but little did I realize that he angled to sign up with ME for a similar reason - he could barely tell a Flathead from a Phillips and wanted me as his partner for the MECHANICALS. Surprisingly, I was one of the ONLY Non-Mechanical Engineers that year that had relatively free access to the Mechanical Shops down in the building basement. I had found myself down there a couple of years prior when I was looking for some help acquiring some scrap materials in some certain shapes - while they didn’t have anything in the specific shapes I needed, the manager of the shop had some spare time that day, and he started showing me how I could cut and shape what I needed on the various tools. He was duly impressed by how quickly I picked up the machinery and, after a few sessions, told me that I was free to use the shop as long as it was unlocked, and I didn’t need supervision. This meant that, between my propensity to still horde erector set bits for giggles, and my know-how with the shop tools and metals, my partner and I were actually able to build an exceedingly compact robot because I was able to mill, drill and cut necessary metal parts, while most of the other teams were stuck working with plastic and the smaller saw and drill in the electrical shop that didn’t require any supervision. People actually started to take notice of our robot and would come to me asking for help building certain key parts for their own.
I think my dad noticed this disconnect between what I was working on and what I really liked late in my Junior Year, because he asked if I knew what I wanted to do after college. I figured I’d get a job, work a couple of years and find out if Graduate School was appropriate for me. While my mom was angling me to drop Electrical and switch to Petroleum Engineering (my dad’s field), I was too far committed, and not particularly interested in basically starting from scratch and delaying graduation. My dad suggested I consider working as a field engineer for Oil and Gas companies, and at the time, I figured there was no harm in tossing my resume in that direction and seeing what it might stick to. I never imagined, or expected that it would actually stick, and garner interest, but it did, and that’s how I found myself sitting at my graduation the next year with a job offer already in hand to work in the Alaskan Oil Field.
2010 – First Steps Into the Future
It’s curious how, sometimes, life brings you full circle without even trying. As a child, whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, peppered between the standard Little-Boy answers of ‘Firefighter’, ‘Police Officer’, and ‘Astronaut’, I’d oft state that I wanted to be a Petroleum Engineer just like my dad was. That statement disappeared into the ether as I got older - what a boring profession, spending your life drilling holes in the ground and waiting to see if Texas Tea was going to come spraying to the surface. It didn’t help that the general political climate I returned to the USA to in High School had plethora of my fellow students arguing against drilling and against oil (though MORE than happy to reap the benefits that were provided by the industry to the state we lived in) I remember being admonished one day in my Senior AP Econ class by a fellow student who borrowed a pen from me, only to be revulsed by the fact that I handed him a pen that had ‘Halliburton’ printed on it. According to most of my peers, I should have admonished my father for having the audacity to rub shoulders with such nefarious companies. Wanting to fit in, and feeling somewhat uncomfortable with this undesired spotlight, I fell into thinking that the Oil and Gas Industry was NOT the path forward for me.
Said proclivities towards Mechanical Engineering won out in the end and I found myself reaping my first professional career paycheck from Petroleum. Truly a unique and interesting experience for me in more ways than one. Growing up in an Indian community, I never expected to find myself working on an Oil Rig, much less getting dirty with my hands every day. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for more. It was wholly refreshing to toss the books on the shelf and actually APPLY what I knew to real-world encounters, and have to solve problems on the fly by using quick logic and intuition to find a solution. And my day-in-day-out was working alongside crews where many of the other men and women had decades of life experience to offer in lieu of any sort of college degree, but their experience offered solid counterpoints, or fast knowledge - I watched a floorhand and a driller once look at two gauges and quickly estimate the weight needed of a drilling fluid faster than the mud engineer with his calculator. By the time the engineer had confirmed the weight needed, he found that the floor hands were already laying out the correct amount of additive as their rough math had been off by barely 1/10th.
This is when I truly started to find myself, slaving away in -50 Degree F temperatures with wind chills that could get that temperature down to close to kissing -90. Working two weeks of that, and coming home to a balmy -40 Degree F was far different than what I had pictured for my future. Though many watches were my partner on my wrist during those 5 years, the one that held up the best, and the longest through that time was the Pulsar RAF. No way I was subjecting the Tommy Hilfiger to that!
This was also when I found myself in an excellent capacity to start actively pursuing hobbies. Prior to college, geology and stamps were my main hobbies - funded by the occasional dollar in change I was able to scrimp together here or there. College put a damper on hobbies - though I was never short on money, thanks to scholarships and part time work, I learned enough about saving and finances from my parents to know better than to blow it all, cause I had it all. But now! Now I was making ADULT MONEY! And saving well! Living two weeks at home with my parents and then living two weeks on the slope where all expenses were covered meant my savings account was growing faster than I had ever seen it grow. It was in this backdrop that I switched from HiFi to WATCHES as an active pursuit of interest. Many who have seen me post here in the past know that my grail through High School and college was the Omega Speedmaster Professional. I was finally in a position to buy one, but first, I wanted to test the waters with some other watches that interested me. Among many at the time, my collection increased with Parnis, Marina Militare, Invicta, Fossil, Marathon, HMT, and several other brands - nothing of major note/interest, but different styles nonetheless, and a cheap, but quantity heavy way to test out what I really liked before jumping into the big guns of REAL watches.
It was a time that, sadly, had to be delayed. My parents had convinced me recently that it was time for me to test the waters of buying my own first car, and I had just done so earlier in the year, as the proud owner of a new Jeep Wrangler - and the monthly payments that came with it. This was a mere delay to my plans to get that Speedmaster - Other life circumstances had delayed me in the past and this was no different - I’d have the watch before the next year was too long in the tooth.
While I was house-sitting for my parents while they and my sister were visiting India, I got a call from my mom the day before they were scheduled to fly out. Dad was in the hospital having suffered a massive heart attack. His heart was operating at 11% and he needed to have bypass surgery relatively immediately, and he was not stable enough to fly back to the USA - it had to happen THERE. She needed me to come as soon as possible. At that moment, nothing else mattered as I grabbed the first available flight ticket out to India, called my office to let them know I needed to extend my time off and get alternative pet-sitting for the family puppers.
Dad ended up alright - surgery was a success, but he had a road to recovery - doctors estimated that he would be 3 months in recovery before they’d release him to fly back to the USA. My sister had never traveled internationally on her own, so I had to chaperone her back home, and then immediate get as much set up for her as possible (she was a student in college, and didn’t have her license yet) to set up a daily ride for her to college and food/groceries for the two weeks (now three) that I’d be gone for work. The immediate focus became making sure she and the dog were fine while I was at work, and keeping the house running while I was on days off as my mom tended to my father in India. Fortunately, he was recovering at a better rate than the doctors had expected and they cleared him to return to the USA before his next birthday.
Through all of that, I didn’t have a chance to think too much about getting myself a Speedmaster, and quickly, other things took precedence. When I’d be at work, my dad would shovel the driveway himself, but he couldn’t do that anymore with the heart attack, and their driveway was treacherous to deal with in the winter when not cleared. I bought them an ATV and plow to make the clearing easier when I wasn’t around. Likewise, I had to get some other things squared around the house to make things easier for my mom when my dad wasn’t able to do said strenuous chores. As the year rolled to a close and the next year began, it seemed like indulging myself was a prospect that was back on the radar.
The next year was also the year of my father’s 50th Birthday, and considering the heart attack the previous year, my mom wanted to truly make it special with a special present. She enlisted me to help figure out a perfect watch to give him on the day and asked if I’d be willing to go 50/50 on one to get a better watch. I thought about the options, I weighed the pros and cons of each one, and I thought long and hard about what Dad would truly like most. The answer was obvious - it HAD to be a Rolex!
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I knew he’d like the Submariner, and I knew he’d like it in black, but what I wasn’t sure of was whether to go all steel, or two-tone. My mom was the deciding factor confirming that we had to go with the two-tone option.
Choosing the watch was easy - getting it was a much harder proposition. The only close AD was 330 miles away, but fortunately, was in the city I had to transit through to get to and from work. I had to coordinate it right. I had to coordinate just right with the AD to special order the watch from one of their sister locations, get it in, and hold it until I could snag it coming back from work. It also timed out JUST perfectly, that I’d be coming home just the day before my Dad’s birthday with the watch in hand.
For those who have been in the same situation, you know: there is no memory quite as close to the heart as seeing your father’s reaction to a gift like that. The current servicing that I sent the watch in for this year is the longest he’s ever been without that watch since we gave it to him.
2010 might go down as one of the few years that has core memories associated with more than just one watch. My time working in the Oil Field was marked with memories of the Pulsar Chronograph, and my Dad’s 50th Birthday with the Rolex is one of the prime core memories, but a third came for me later in the year, towards Christmas when I came home after the holidays to find a rather large, and rather heavy box sitting on my desk. It was no surprise that I was going to miss Christmas that year - I typically gave up my holidays in favor of making sure my coworkers could be home for them as they had younger children and I didn’t. Typically, any presents I had remained under the tree for me to break into when I’d get back, but apparently, this time, Mom and Dad couldn’t wait for me to come home and wake up the next morning.
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Until this point in time, I’d never had the pleasure of owning a Swiss Watch. And now I finally did .
2012 – Boldly Going Where I’d Never Been Before
2011 and 2012 marked the start of a major turning point in my life. Many who have read my posts over the years know I reference my ex-wife and her family a lot. That would be because the years they were involved in my life were extremely pivotal, and impactful, and not necessarily in a way anyone would necessarily wish for. That story starts here.
Having graduated college, and started working, I decided, with the 2 & 2 rotation I was working, that I had the time to go back to school and get a Masters on my days off, so I decided to pursue a Masters in Engineering and Project Management. When I finished that degree in 2010, my parents sat down for a conversation, pointing out that I was 25 now, and by the time my Dad was 25, he was already married and had a child. I should point out, before going any further, that my parents’ was an arranged marriage in the traditional Indian sense, as were all of my aunts, uncles and grandparents. Still not out of the norm in India, and not a conversation that was coming out of left field for me. If anything, I was surprised that it had taken my parents so long to broach the subject 😀
Dating when you work in the Alaskan Oilfield is an interesting challenge in its own right. On the one hand, I was no stud muffin in High School, so I had no High School or College Sweetheart that was still by my side post graduation. Oilfield workers stick out like a sore thumb around here. And people know that, in general, they are paid very well. And are gone from the house for extended periods of time. Divorce rates are high in Alaska, and I didn’t want to find myself in a situation of regret so I was trying to be very careful about who I dated during that time, as I was navigating the early adult years of getting things like retirement accounts set up and building a foundation for future life. It was no surprise then, that at the time my parents brought up arranged marriages, I wasn’t involved in any meaningful relationship.
We came to an agreement - I was open to my parents pursuing possible matches through an arranged marriage route, as long as they accepted that I would continue to try my hand at the dating pool. If I found myself in a long term relationship, my parents needed to step back from their search, but If I wasn’t dating, I would entertain the prospect of a potential match they may have found. For those who have never been involved in the process, while it was more rigid in my parents time, these days, the process is more of a matchmaking than anything else - the prospective couple engages an extended ‘dating period’ where they may yet still determine that they aren’t a match and break off to go their separate ways. I felt comfortable with this, and didn’t think too much of it.
A couple more years passed - I had no real luck from my side, and there were a couple of girls that my parents introduced me to, but it never went anywhere. There was a temporary lull from both of our sides while my dad was recovering from his heart attack, until one day, he returned from an international trip while I was on days off, and announced he had the perfect prospective match - the girl who would turn out to become my Dreaded Evil Ex.
Context is definitely necessary at this time to understand future events. (For the record, even though they didn’t become my Ex and Ex In-Laws until later, I’ll just refer to them as such from this point on to make things easier.) My father was the first from his direct family to come to the USA for continuing education. While he was on the East Coast (where his aunt had moved years prior), he came to befriend several other Indians on campus working on graduate degrees at the time. Of note were two other men who were good childhood friends prior to their arrival in the USA. One went on to be the father of my best friend in India. The other went on to become my future father in law. At the time, he was working on a PhD while my father was wrapping a Masters. When my father moved to Alaska to pursue his second Masters, ExFIL moved to the same department and started as a professor. He got married shortly after my Father did, and shortly after I was born, he had a first son. Then my sister arrived, followed by his daughter. In short, within 7 years, both men were married and had 2 children apiece with a 6 year age gap between the oldest (me) and the youngest (my Ex).
We grew up together as basically a family. With our extended families all overseas, it was a close relationship, where I basically treated them like my own second set of parents. Their parents were akin to my own grandparents, and the four of us children grew up together with other Indian kids in town. Even when both families moved to India, we were close and continued to grow together. Ex BIL even came back to Alaska to pursue college and for a brief period of time, we were roommates before I graduated and moved out. Heck, in India, the families had condominiums/houses that were borderline next-door to one another.
The previous year, I had even been to India for a visit and ran into the Ex at a mutual friend’s house. She was waxing poetic about getting into Educational Reform and how that was her passion, though it wasn’t her degree work she was working on, but she seemed to have a vision and a plan forward for her life, and of course, I wished her well. I wasn’t sure if my dad had spoken with her parents and grandparents before speaking to me, and if maybe he knew something I didn’t about her plans changing. That said, the question at hand was what MY thoughts on a prospective arrangement were. I thought about it for nearly a week, and came to the conclusion that, given that I had known her her entire life, I knew her about as well as I could possibly hope to know any girl I started dating, and the fact that we already knew we get along and our families get along could ONLY save on future strife, right? Well, I said yes to my parents, contingent on her agreement. I still wasn’t sure if her future plans had changed and if they hadn’t, I was fully prepared to expect that she would say no.
I guess this would be a relatively short(er) story and not a particularly interesting point if my Ex had said no at the time, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit surprised to get a yes answer back from her. The truth behind that moment revealed itself later in the future, but for the time-being it wasn’t the most important thing on my mind - I had just taken one of the next big steps into adulthood, and it was coming fast.
Over the course of the coming weeks, plans were drawn up, astrologers were consulted (yes, both her father and my mother believed heavily in astrology and wanted ‘The Opportune Time’ to be predicted for the day of the wedding. Said date was rapidly approaching toward the halfway point of the year. plethora trips by my parents and myself had to be made back to India to get things ready, while, at the same time, I was working on trying to find a house so I could move out of my parents place and looks for a new job - the Ex In-Laws weren’t thrilled about the idea of a 2x2 rotation and me not being home every day so I had to look around to see if anyone was interested in picking me up for an office job. Through all of this, both my ex and I reiterated our commitment to being married but both of us had one major stipulation. From her side, the stipulation was that I wouldn’t force the subject of children right away, as she wanted to pursue graduate school, and maybe even a doctorate before considering becoming a mother. That was easy enough to agree to, but mine, I knew would be a bit harder, as I had told my parents very clearly that ANY family they spoke to, and ANY girl they entertained HAD to all accept my single stipulation - that I would never permanently move back to India. I knew from my 4 past years there that I would never thrive in the country and I wanted nothing to do with trying again.
The Ex, her parents and her grandparents all surprisingly accepted said terms, and wedding preparation continued to progress. During that time, came an interesting surprise, after my parents returned from India on one of their trips. Ex’s Grandma, while digging around in her safe looking for stuff, had come across an old, forgotten family heirloom. Rather than hand it down to her male grandson’s she opted to give it to me instead as a token of my official entry into the family:
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While the watch may be nothing particularly valuable, or fancy, the history that it holds more than makes up - it belonged to Grandma’s Grandpa and had been passed on through multiple male generations through close to a century. At one point, before it was about to be thrown out, Grandma rescued it, had it repaired and serviced and put it aside until she finally decided that my penchant for wristwatches was a clear indicator that I should be the next one to hold it.
Looking back at the following 4-5 years, that may have been the only truly heartfelt moment encountered over the course of the entire marriage and subsequent divorce. And, because of the greed with which my Ex later enacted the actions that led to our divorce, I suspect she forgot about the fact that I ever had this watch - and I never reminded her.
As the date rapidly approached, changes all started to fall in place. I finished paying off my car, so I had no outstanding debt to my name. I got a new job, and in a new city, so I moved out of my parents’ place and quickly whipped up an apartment for us to set up after we returned from the wedding. The job started, and I did everything to situate myself and prepare myself to dive in full time right after I returned from the wedding.
The wedding itself was a long and drawn out process, and anyone familiar with the pageantry of an Indian Wedding is all too aware. Less than 12 hours after I landed, there was an engagement ceremony where rings were exchanged, and that evening, a big dance party. Over the subsequent week, there were ceremonies, pujas, and lunches/dinners thrown by friends. The Wedding Day itself was a day-long affair - starting at 4:30 AM and ending with my Ex and I passing out in a hotel room around 2:00 AM the next morning. And even THEN, things weren’t over, there were still more ceremonies and pujas for the next two days, before we went on a close to 4 day long ‘pilgrimage’ to visit temples (my Ex In-Laws’ choice of a ‘Honeymoon’...) Through all of this, the only watch that I carried with me was my Raymond Weil, as it was the best watch I owned at that time. We returned to the USA and there was ANOTHER big party in our home-town that my parents threw for all of our friends who otherwise couldn’t, or weren’t able to attend the ceremonies in India. It was probably a whole month before I could finally catch my breath, but only just barely, as my job was still waiting for me to get involved in plenty of tasks that were on hold while I was out.
One key consideration was missed by everybody involved in the wedding - myself, my Ex, her parents and my parents: the ceremony in India, while acceptable as documentation of a legal marriage in India, was NOT acceptable as legal proof in the USA. We stepped foot on American Soil as a still technically unmarried couple. I only realized this when I started pulling together paperwork for her documentation changes, and realized that we didn’t have the necessary papers to demonstrate an actual marriage. In working out the timeline for how long it would take to get a marriage license, it became evident that the fastest route was going to be getting someone temporarily ordained to serve as officiant on behalf of the court and perform a small ceremony. Quick as a whip, we got my sister sworn in, and my parents took the opportunity to throw yet another big party at their place as we got married AGAIN in their front yard. Fortunately, my Ex In-Laws were able to fly in and attend as well. Though, on such short notice, her father could only stay for a few days, while her mother decided to stay for a few weeks.
If not for this slight twist in events, I may have never discovered the first crack in the foundation of the marriage. In the early days of our return to the USA, one of the first things I wanted to be clear about with my new wife was where the finances stood and how I had things set up. It was during these early attempts to explain things that I discovered that, in her 21 years of existence, her parents had NEVER allowed her to control her own finances, have her own bank accounts - NOTHING. A circumstance that further exacerbated the background check that the land-lord of the apartments we were staying at was running before I could add her to the lease - she showed up with such minimal background history that that on its own was triggering a flag. Regardless, I endeavored to do my best to try to give her a basic financial education as quickly as I could.
I suspect that these decisions by her parents are what led them to assume, or presume that my parents had handled me in much the same way. Surely, since I had still lived with them up until I moved out, they must have controlled my paychecks, etc. So I was quite surprised when, one day, while her mother was with us, she suggested that she had on good account, the details of a broker in India who had a mutual fund package that guaranteed a 25% rate of return year over year. Met with skepticism on my part, she pushed further to suggest that I liquidate my savings and investment holdings that I currently had, consolidate them and invest them in this fund. On its own, that was sketchy, but I don’t believe my Ex-MIL realized that I was fully aware of the implication of what she was asking - to invest in India, and set up the necessary accounts, I’d have to show residency in India, which I didn’t actually have, so I’d have to channel said investments through someone WITH residency… like my Ex In-Laws. She was literally all but telling me that I should hand control of my future over to her and her husband. I suggested I’d think about it and brushed it off as a ‘Not Happening’.
Comic trials of marriage ensued through the following year. My Ex didn’t want to consider buying a house…until our friends all revealed that they were working with realtors already looking for houses of their own, and then of course, it was my fault that we were behind. My ex-BIL would show up frequently and spend the weekend with us while hanging out with friends in Anchorage, but I wasn’t allowed to show affection to my Ex while he was around, because ‘it made him uncomfortable’. One time, my Ex-FIL was in town and his wife revealed that the friend of the doctor of her mother was visiting Alaska at the time, and my Ex demanded I go through hoops and hurdles to figure out where they were, and contact them to visit, only to become irate when I told her that I wasn’t wasting time on someone who had no direct relation, and who she didn’t even know the names of. If they reached out, it was one story, but I refused to waste my time otherwise.
Buying a house became its own headache. It was natural to expect that a girl who didn’t know/understand the difference between a checking account and savings account or a credit card and debit card to not know what a mortgage is or how it works, but I was flabbergasted that myself, her dad, my dad, our realtor, our lender and even a personal banker were all unable to get the concept through to her. Especially concerning when I was the one explaining the ins-and-outs to our fellow friends in spite of this being a first time purchase for ALL of US. During all of this, the Ex decided she was homesick, and wanted to return to India for an extended visit, so I had to book her a set of flights for a two month trip, and also explain to her that I was NOT paying tuition for a semester that she was all but going to miss because there was no way she was going to be able to convince her professors to allow her to take that long of an absence while trying to maintain attendance (how surprised she was to discover that I was right…)
Part 3 of 5
2013 – The Speedmaster Has Landed, But Not Without Strife
Over the last few years, while I was never in the red financially, and I was never struggling with saving money, the Omega Speedmaster Professional remained an elusive fish that I was chasing. For nearly 6 years now, I was out of college and I had the money to buy the watch, but every time I was close, I ended up spending the money on something else of greater importance. Emergency Flight to get to India when Dad had a heart attack; buying stuff for the parents to make their lives easier post his return; buying myself a new car; buying all the untold things my Ex needed; paying for my Ex’s college tuition and expenses; and the big one - putting down the down payment for the house, and now paying the ongoing mortgage. By Mid-2013, I had pretty much relegated myself to the fact that the Speedy was just on the horizon and never going to be quite close enough to grab.
I had little insight to the fact that my parents and my sister were planning something special for my birthday this year. My parents had been over to the east coast to visit my sister over the summer and make sure she was situating herself well, preparing for her PhD, and they happened across an Omega AD. Between the three of them, and some help from an SA, they were able to discern that the watch I was lusting after was the Speedy Pro, and unbeknownst to me, they bought one there for my birthday.
The big mistake they made later would probably have been contacting the Ex to let her know about the surprise and clue her in. Dad’s phone made a simple autocorrect (as I later discovered) when he sent a message to my Ex with photos of the watch to tell her it was a surprise for me, and then telling her ‘DON’T tell Appophylite’. Unfortunately, the phone autocorrected that message to ‘DO tell Appophylite’, and my Ex demonstrated her profound abilities as a journalist by NOT using even a brief critical analysis of the message before flipping around her phone to reveal the surprise to me. Needless to say, Mom and Dad were a bit miffed that the surprise was ruined, but at least they were happy that I still appreciated the gesture.
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To this day, I don’t fully understand why, but it seems like that Speedmaster was the lynch-pin in my Ex and her mother’s crusade to get me to stop collecting wristwatches. Over the sole year of marriage, I hadn’t bought any new watches, so they couldn’t complain about how much money I was spending on watches, and this was given to me by my parents who were just as generous with her and my sister as they were with me. From previous conversations with them, I knew that they viewed mechanical wristwatches as antiquated technology, so I presume they believed that they must be cheap, and were flabbergasted by the price of the watch, when they no-doubt Googled it. This was confirmed a few months later when I asked my Ex not to grab the watch with her rings on her hand for fear of gouging the hesalite crystal, and she acted like I was playing her for a fool trying to convince her that ‘an expensive watch would have a plastic crystal like that!’ Her father even got involved at one point to suggest that I give up past-times like watch collecting, or running that didn’t serve to improve my financial situation and or work situation. Like, what does that even mean? Nonetheless, I was able to take a breath and relax for 2 months as I sent her on her way back to India to enjoy herself, while I settled into unpacking the house, and going through the rigamarole of day-to-day work.
2014 – The Strife Strikes Back
When I look back at the past, I realize that that trip back to India in late 2013, and events that took place in 2015 formed the real basis for the implosion of my marriage. Prior to her trip, the Ex was extremely reluctant to get a part time job. It was a suggestion I made, not because we needed the money, but because I wanted her to take the opportunity she had to build out a resume before finishing graduate school. Suddenly, after returning, getting a job was the biggest priority. Short-lived though as the BIGGEST priority because all of a sudden, the girl who said she didn’t want kids immediately had decided that we had to have our first kid THAT year. it was the biggest 180, but it wasn’t a completely unexpected change. I was able to point out though that it might not be the wisest move to begin trying for a kid when there was a good chance that she might be going into labor around the same time she was trying to write and defend a Master's Thesis. Yet still the pressure increased.
Respite was earned in the form of my ex-BIL dropping a bombshell of sorts early that year - he had found true love and had told his parents - he was getting married that year. The revelation that my ex-BIL was dating and in a long-term relationship with anyone came as something of a shocking surprise to my ex In-Laws and my Ex, but I suspect the BIGGEST shock was that I was not surprised in the least. Remember he’d come to town over weekends to visit friends? It was really just the one ‘friend’ who happened to have a job in the city. Basically, the entire community where we used to live knew about his relationship, and though many also knew his parents, we all established that it wasn’t our place to reveal the relationship until he was good and ready to do so.
So the secret was no longer a secret, and though my Ex was miffed at me for not revealing it to her, she couldn’t be that upset considering that even her best friend and her husband knew and neither had revealed the information themselves. A summer wedding was planned, and though summers were particularly busy seasons for me, I was told in no small terms that I HAD to attend the wedding. Actually, so were my parents and sister. In the end though, the only one who realistically could go was my dad, so he actually booked matching tickets for the two of us to fly out and back, since my Ex would not be traveling with us. It seemed she had it in her mind that she needed to be present for wedding planning as her mother and grandmother would not be able to handle it all alone, and even though she had just come off of a 2 month visit, another 2 - 3 month visit was more crucially important than her own graduate degree.
To this day, I am very glad that my dad was there with me when we arrived at their house. I have no doubt that, were he not, I would have said many things that I would have come to regret. At first, it seemed like nothing was amiss - though we arrived late in the night, pleasantries were swapped, a brief amount of sleep was acquired and everyone was relatively washed and fed in the morning and rearing for the day to go.
My Ex’s grandfather asked us all to come to the master bedroom for a meeting - himself, his wife, my Ex In-Laws, my Ex, my Dad and I. Once inside, the fireworks started. In no small part, he and my Ex In-Laws started tearing into me from every which way possible. They claimed I was denying my Ex financial autonomy, though I was the one who gave her financial education, helped her start her own personal accounts that were in her name only, and even seeded them with my own money before she started a job. They accused me of holding her back from starting a career, though I was the one who had suggested she try her hand at part-time work, and SHE was the one who decided graduate school before employment was the path she wanted. They argued that I was at fault for not having children already, when THEY were the ones, along with my Ex who told me before marriage NOT to pressure her into having kids early so she could focus on graduate school. I was accused of not allowing her to make basic decisions about things like groceries, though I had to do the groceries myself as she was always ‘too tired’ to come with, or ‘didn’t have the time’ to do them herself. Or that I pressured her into committing to a house when she was the one who started sweating about Keeping Up With the Jones’. Through all of this, my Dad silently sat by, saying nothing, while I sat by fuming, and waiting for a break in the diatribes so that I could get my piece in and defend myself.
It’s exceedingly rare that I have ever seen my father enter ‘Papa Bear’ mode, and most would be forgiven for not realizing that he has done so in any case, for how quietly he can speak, and how long he can hold his anger. And such was the case here. He knew of many of the issues that were being brought up now from my own conversations with my parents over the past two years, and he knew where there was an exceedingly high level of bunk in the statements being delivered - he was methodically able to tear many of the arguments apart by pointing to my ex In-Laws’ own involvement and statements in many of the issues, and his and my mother’s own observances of statements and actions my Ex had taken over the two years. But the one that hit hardest was when my Ex’s grandfather said that, in no small terms, ‘Appophylite HAS to put Ex’s name on ALL financial accounts, including retirements and investments and allow her complete control and independence over financial decisions’ He stood up and told them that he would never force my hand on any financial decisions, and he would stand by any and every decision I made regarding finance, as he had seen over 11 years how I was capable of handling money, and then flipped the script to ask them how they could presume that anyone with NO financial education be capable of handling finances they couldn’t even understand. In any case, he pointed out that she was named on my main financial checking account, and savings account, and had unfettered access to my financial advisor, and company 401Ks only had the ability to name a beneficiary, not a co-name. He told them the conversation could end right there as I wasn’t keeping Ex in the dark on anything, and, provided she had justification for an investment decision, I wasn’t ignoring suggestions she had - she just didn’t HAVE any.
He and I both realized at that moment what the implication of that conversation was - like the conversation I had had with my Ex MIL 2 years prior, there was a clear indication that my Ex In-Laws wanted to use my savings as a means of control over me that they didn’t otherwise have. He told me I was doing fine, and not to bow to pressure and continue to navigate the course.
The dust having settled in the aftermath of that attempted intervention, my father disappeared briefly for unrelated business in a different city, and the subject didn’t come back up. Instead, the subject turned to the coming wedding ceremony. My Ex, having been in India for the past month, had no idea what I had brought along as clothes for the wedding. I pointed out that I did not bring a suit, instead, opting for traditional Indian garb, which I don’t care for myself. She and her mother were nodding approvingly over the clothes I had brought until she asked, ‘And you brought your good watch, right?’ (The previously maligned Speedmaster) I looked on in surprise, as I stated, ‘Well I brought my Sona with me, because I thought it would match well with the outfit I chose.’
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The reality was that I didn’t want to bring my Speedmaster overseas for fear of anything happening to it - by far, it was my best, and most expensive watch, and had the most sentimental meaning attached to it. In addition, having dealt with CONSTANT harping about my watch collecting, I hadn’t wanted to create another pointless diatribe about that if anyone had noticed, and distract from the Ex BIL’s wedding ceremony, so I had chosen the HMT Sona because:
Clearly, my Ex couldn’t get it in her head that I wasn’t just going to roll over and kow-tow to her seemingly random financial decisions. The next day, during lunch, she pointed out she hadn’t yet chosen a wedding present for her brother (something I had been asking her to do since the announcement at the beginning of the year). I commented that, with such short notice as we were on now, with the wedding looming 3 days away, we’d have to probably unceremoniously cut a check, which she agreed to. I was expecting a pretty significant sized check to be recommended, like $500, but I about blew my top when the suggestion from her side was that WE (aka ME) should give them a check for $10000, because ‘they were starting out’. I called BS right then. They were both engineers working in Oil and Gas so I KNEW the kind of salaries they were commanding, and I KNEW that both had had their educations completely funded by their parents so they didn’t have student loans to deal with either - they were in a fantastic place and certainly didn’t NEED $10K. I told her where I stood and that I could even be made to agree to $1K at the most but I would NOT get anywhere near the amount she was suggesting. Whether her foot stomping led to a conversation with her parents in the background after that is something I will never know, and really, don’t care about anymore.
The Wedding came, the ceremony happened - no one commented in the negative or positive about my choice of watch. All eyes were on the bride and groom, as one would have expected. I went home with my father, and my Ex returned a month later, just in time for yet another revelation in the story.
Later that summer, my father had several of his Childhood friends, their spouses and children (all young adults in college) up to visit Alaska as a group. As part of the adventure, he asked us to meet them for a glacier cruise. The day before, while the older adult-folk were taking a pre-dinner nap, the younger folks were aimlessly meandering around on the boardwalk chattering about random stuff. My Ex was up ahead with one of the other girls who happened to ask about the story of how we agreed to get married. I wasn’t far enough back that I couldn’t hear the conversation, and I admit I was curious enough to be more than willing to quietly eavesdrop as my Ex started into the story:
“So, when I turned 19, my parents and grandparents decided to talk to me about the prospects of getting married after I finished my degree and turned 21. I didn’t want to get married so early, but I didn’t know how I could tell them no. They were so insistent on thinking of this that I figured the easiest thing I could do was make up the most extreme requirements I would have for a husband so they would NEVER be able to find someone who would meet the requirements. They were just happy that I was saying yes so they told me to tell them my requirements.”
“I told them:
The signs of true love right there - obligation. I’m not sure she ever realized that I could hear the entire story. My Ex was notorious for not paying attention to any conversation around her unless it was directed at her and engaging her, and I suspect that she always believed that the same held true for everyone. I just continued with that evening, as if I hadn’t heard a word. Actually, I pretty much continued through the remainder of 2014 as if that conversation was something that never took place.
2015 – Return of the Strife
2015 started about as unceremoniously as 2014 did, but it certainly wouldn’t end that way. As usual, the start of the new year shut off the ever running harping about how we had a Christmas Tree when neither of us were Christian (god forbid my family celebrated Christmas in a purely secular fashion), but it did start with a highlight by way of my Ex getting a new job that brought in more money and moved her from working student jobs to working in the professional sector. In a way, I think this led to the decision she made that year to actually buy me an expensive Valentine’s Day present. In years prior, we usually just exchanged small tokens - nothing overly lavish to speak of, so when I saw a jewelry box being pulled out, I was surprised. The surprise disappeared somewhat when the box was opened to reveal a new gold ring.
The ring, like so much else, requires context. Traditionally, in Indian Wedding Ceremonies, the bands are exchanged at the Engagement, so the bride and groom are already wearing them on the Wedding Day. Also, the bride’s family typically makes the groom’s ring. When I had visited the Ex In-Laws before our wedding, they took me to a jeweler to get sized for a ring, and I asked them to please make sure to make it loose enough that I could take it off - since I worked in an industrial setting, I had to be able to remove it when I was on the rig. I also asked for them to please not be lavish and just get something extremely understated. After much hemming and hawing about the looseness they chose a monstrosity of a ring with a 3x3 grid of diamonds inlaid in lieu of a signet. It was everything I hate with a passion, and I was stuck with it…until 3 months later when it refused to stay on my finger. In the aftermath of my father’s heart attack, I had become much more aware of my own health, and vowing to make sure I wouldn’t become a statistic, I had begun to exercise more regularly. Daily 10K runs were starting to yield dividends and I was losing unhealthy weight at a fantastic rate. The unfortunate side effect was that my fingers were much thinner too. My Ex and my Ex In-Laws refused to allow me to cut and resize the ring, so I opted to replace it with a simple tungsten carbide ring - a ring which MUCH better suited my personality.
Of course, god forbid that the ring I wear suits ME. Having harbored animosity towards that ring, apparently from day one, my Ex had opted for the gold band to force me back toward wearing gold. I sat her down and told her that, in all honesty, gold just wasn’t something I cared about, nor was jewelry, and while I appreciated the gesture, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to wear a gold ring, when I already had one sitting around collecting dust. I asked her if she would be terribly angry if I exchanged it instead for a watch. After some thought, she decided that would be fine, and I grabbed a watch that I had had my eye on for some time leading up to that:
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Things seemed like they might be on the upturn after that. No major arguments or issues to speak of, and we even had a fairly happy vacation during the Spring Break. Sadly, that highlight was short-lived. All the talk around town that year was around the price of oil collapsing to the point where oil and gas companies were talking about serious layoffs. Having been in the industry for 8 years at that point, I myself had gone through 2 previous layoff rounds and survived both. My luck finally caught up with me this year though. The work I was doing in my new position was purely experimental, incurring costs without revenue, and as such, it was hard for our division to justify the cost during the downspell. Since they also knew that more layoffs were likely, there wasn’t necessarily scope for absorbing me in a new role elsewhere - I was officially laid off and out of a job for the first time in my life.
After the initial impact set it, it was all-ahead from my side to try to land a new job. Once again, my doing my due diligence in preparing for the future meant that we weren’t in a massive pinch. I had a comfortable lay-off/severance package that would help us get by for a bit, and I had enough in Savings to keep up going for a bit further before things started to get bleak. The one ask I did have of my Ex was to see if she could go Full Time for work starting in the summer, seeing as she was going to be graduating in a month or two. With her being full time, we’d both be covered on Health Insurance, and I could continue to focus on finding a new job as quickly as I could, which I knew was not going to be THAT fast, considering everyone in my industry was hunkering down.
This is where the rope started to unravel - the first thread to pull away was when my Ex revealed that she would NOT be graduating in the spring, but that her advisor had told her she needed to revise her thesis to possibly graduate by the end of Summer. She claimed her advisor was permitting her to stay enrolled without having to pay tuition for the summer which immediately raised my antennae - growing up as the son of a university professor, I knew an academic lie when I heard one I just couldn’t prove anything, so I accepted it (for now) at face value.
The second thread and third threads unraveled quickly with changes in behavior that were not easily accounted for. My Ex did go full time, but then, she’d be gone for long periods of the day, claiming that her work needed her to work lots of overtime. On more occasions than one, she’d agree to meet up with friends only to never appear, and leave me flailing to offer suggestions as to where she may be since she wouldn’t tell me either. When she would be home, she wouldn’t hang out in the living room anymore - only in the spare bedroom, and with the door closed.
Do these tell-tale signs seem familiar to anyone? Don’t worry, they did to me too. Ignorant as I can often be about emotional tells (my current wife likes to point to this shortcoming often), I can occasionally recognize them. I suspected that she was either cheating on me, or attempting to present the ruse that she was, but I never had the evidence to confront it, and so I just let her go about her business as she planned and continued to push on finding a new job.
Through the summer and late fall of that year, two family tragedies required me to go up to my parents’ city to house-sit or just be present for emotional support: my Dad’s brother passing away in the Summer, and my Mom’s Aunt/Cousin passing away in the fall. In both cases, my Ex claimed she was too busy to come along, and I didn’t press in either case. But throughout the summer, I kept asking her for updates on her Thesis and graduation, and she kept giving extremely vague and indifferent answers about finishing the degree. I was beginning to grow increasingly concerned about what may be happening in the background.
Everything came to a head in the fall. My Ex unexpectedly announced that we should visit her brother for a week or so around the Indian Festival of Diwali. I told her that, while I would love to, we didn’t necessarily have the money to spare for the flights with my savings account being burned for all the monthly expenses or mortgage, utilities, her tuition, her car loan, etc. I even suggested that, to staunch the bleeding of my account just a bit, we transfer the car loan payments to her name as we had originally agreed to do the year prior. I told her it would give my account a bit of breathing room. She angrily exclaimed that we could talk about that later, but if I wasn’t going to buy tickets to visit her brother, then she’d be going alone. I sadly told her that there wasn’t much I could do to stop her from choosing to use HER own money that way.
For a solid month, before she was flying out, I kept reminding her nearly every day that we needed to talk about the car loan and what was going on with her degree. And every time I called or texted, she had some reason she couldn’t talk, or couldn’t commit to a day. Finally, it was the day before she was leaving and 4 hours AFTER we had agreed to meet at the bank, and she still hadn’t come home. In fact, by the time she DID arrive home, I suspect she was expecting me to be asleep but I was awake just to confront her. That was probably the biggest argument of our lives, that night - an argument in which she even threatened to call the cops and tell them that I was physically assaulting her (I wasn’t - a circumstance that would have been clear as day to any police officer, were they actually called). An argument in which, for once, and truthfully, she acknowledged that there was no love in the relationship. I knew there was nothing more to be said that night, and went upstairs to go to bed. And as I laid down, the last sound I heard that night was her car rolling back out of the garage…
I’d love to say I was man enough that I didn’t cry. That would be a lie. I’d love to say I was bravely prepared to face what the coming months would bring, but that would be just as big of a lie. The dread and trepidation rolled toward me like a freight train over the coming days and months, but regardless, I knew one thing as a fact - divorce was inevitable.
Part 4 of 5
2016 – The Darkest Hours Are Just Before Dawn
I have many friends that have been through a divorce (some that have even been through more than one). It's not a brag - considering that nearly 50% of marriages in the USA end in divorce, I’d say more of you are in the same boat as I, than otherwise. I will say though, that in most cases, I am exceedingly jealous of how quickly, and easily they and their estranged spouses were able to come to agreeable terms and move on with their lives.
Such was never meant to be the case for me. My Ex couldn’t even be bothered to have a face-to-face conversation about our relationship, or what the divorce would entail after she returned from her vacation. Nay, she actually had the gall, and the audacity, to send dissolution paperwork, with a list of her demands WHILE SHE WAS STILL WITH HER BROTHER. And she had the sheer cheek to do so on Thanksgiving Weekend. It was a great wonder that I was even able to find a single Lawyer available the day before Thanksgiving who was willing to give me a single hour of consultation to figure out my path forward. The one that did, listened to my story, and gave me a simple piece of advice - do the math on the dissolution demands and then do a comparative analysis on how much better or worse it might be than a 50/50 split of all assets to figure out if I was better off just accepting them. She warned me that it was unlikely that court proceedings were going to be exceptionally in my favor, but if that was the direction I wanted to go, she’d be more than happy to take me on as a client.
I spent Thanksgiving Weekend working out the math, and realized that, even though the demands were high, they weren’t as high as they could be, and at the very least, I could be done with this process fast. I also realized that, while my Ex had made it very clear that she wanted 50% of certain assets, she wasn’t sure what those asset values were, or was grossly mistaken about asset values. For example, she had a massively exaggerated equity declared in the house which I came to realize she had derived from the presumption that the entirety of a monthly mortgage check went exclusively to principle payoff. So much for multiple people trying to ‘educate her.
I also wasn’t going to let her exclusively get off with a win when some of her demands were entirely lopsided. I didn’t care that she demanded a 50/50 split of my savings and checking accounts, while hers remained exclusively with her, or that she demanded 50% of the equity in the house, even though the down payment was paid exclusively out of my own savings, and every mortgage payment came out of my pocketbook. But when she demanded to keep her car and leave me to pay off the outstanding loan, or argued that ALL marital jewelry stayed with her (jewelry her parents made for her, and jewelry MY parents made for her), I decided pushback was necessary. I all but accepted her dissolution demands with a few modifications to try to save me some money, and the demand that the jewelry my parents made be returned to them. I updated all the paperwork with the correct dollar values associated, attached the appropriate statements as proof and sent it back for her review.
One of the marks of insanity is pushing your luck when you are winning. My Ex was never going to lose anything with a divorce other than maybe a little bit of social face. Heck, before the dissolution paperwork, if she had even bothered to talk and just agree that the marriage was over and she wanted to go back to her parents, I’d have happily paid a premium flight set to send her home and paid for her stuff to be shipped. But the true colors were starting to appear. This wasn’t JUST about getting divorced now, it was about coming out financially ahead. Why should I be allowed to keep all that I had worked to achieve and save, when, by virtue of a simple piece of paper, she could claim her pound of flesh? She returned the dissolution, this time, claiming that my numbers (even though they were backed with official statements) were wrong, and that I was attempting to cheat her, and now, because of that, she was going to demand 50% of EVERYTHING, and in additional, 5 years of alimony (more than the total time we were married). Her final jab in the email where she explained this was:
“Do remember that I am entitled to each of the things I am asking for. In court, every single thing I am asking for will stand and I am prepared to fight for it if you plan on making it difficult. ”
Two days later, on the 2nd day of 2016, I officially retained my lawyer and filed for divorce.
My current wife told me once that it annoys her how wishy-washy I can get about inconsequential decisions or issues (like what takeout we should get for dinner), but apparently, it’s equally horrifying how ruthless I can be when a decision actually matters. I guess, in a way she’s right. Immediately after my Ex drove out of the house, I tried to call her parents to at least make sure she was alright when she’d inevitably call them. All I got back was an hour long diatribe about how everything was unilaterally my fault, and that everything was on me. I called her brother to say nothing more than to just text me to let me know that she arrived at his place safely. I was left ignored. And through all of that, she never called once and just emailed dissolution paperwork without so much as a conversation. You bet the gloves were officially off.
I told my lawyer that I knew I was going to be paying SOMETHING to get out of the marriage, but I wanted her to do everything in her power to make sure that number was as small as possible. She agreed, and when we got started, we got STARTED:
My Ex claimed emotional trauma from being served divorce papers at work. My lawyer and I pointed out that either of us could have filed - I merely did it first - and that the ONLY two addresses I had for her were our house, where she clearly wasn’t, and her place of work.
My Ex then filed to demand that I cover her legal fees, on the pretense that I made more money than her, and that she couldn’t afford her legal fees in a protracted court case. I argued with my lawyer, that there was no indication yet of a long duration court case, and regardless, in my current capacity as a contractor, there was no guarantee to my monthly salary. In any case, she CHOSE her lawyer who happened to charge a higher hourly rate than mine.
My personal favorite was when she demanded spousal support payments for the same reason as above, I suspect, after her lawyer pointed out that we lived in a No-Fault Divorce State with No Alimony. By the time she filed this motion, we had both gone through discovery and presented one another with financial statements and documents supporting our personal claims so I had her finances for the last 6 months in my hands. And they were gold - I pointed out to my lawyer that she was spending close to 60% of her monthly take home on eating out every month, and that she was also spending close to 50% of everything that WASN’T going to rent and utilities on frivolous purchases as evidenced by HER OWN documents. Needless to say, my lawyer more than happily took advantage of my legwork to file counters and get both motions dismissed.
Through all of this, for some reason, I didn’t rotate watches. It felt poetically right to keep the Hamilton Khaki Field as my primary watch as I navigated through the rapids of the divorce process. In the entire time I have had a significant collection of watches, it might have actually been the longest period of time I kept a single watch, and ONLY the one watch in use.
Even though I never spoke another word directly to her during this process, I could tell my Ex was starting to get increasingly frustrated. I’m not sure who she spoke with leading up to all of this, or who put what types of ideas in her mind about how easy the process was going to be, or how she was going to win in the end, but she definitely wasn’t happy that I was playing the game. I suspect part of her frustration was that I was even willing to spend the money in the first place. She always got off on accusing me of being cheap because I didn’t like to spend money on luxury travel, or luxury cars, or luxury clothes. My guess is that she thought that I wouldn’t be willing to pay a lawyer so she’d be able to make any and all demands she wanted of me as she wanted. OR she thought I might beg, grovel and plead and accept ANY demands on her part not to have to part with my savings.
The longer I was left with my own thoughts through the process, and the longer I had to reflect back on memories from the last four years, the more I realized that it was probably that latter thought. I remembered:
Evidently, when the plan fell completely apart, I guess they figured that, if a divorce is going through, might as well reap as much money out of it as possible. Said grim realization set my resolve even further to make sure that my ex was NOT going to have a simple time getting what SHE wanted.
Through this entire ordeal, I was also working on helping my parents pack up their house as they prepared to leave Alaska for the next chapter of their lives. It was an equally sad time for me, since that meant that I was the last of the family still in the state - my sister had left years prior for Grad School and was never going to return. I was also still trying to find full time employment, hopping between professional contracts and making a few dollars here or there. Just enough to keep myself afloat with my bills, but the pinch was real, and hard, as the legal fees kept racking up.
A shining star of momentary distraction came that fall by way of a package that I had been waiting for nearly the entire course of my marriage. During that first year, a project was started here on Watchuseek, being run by a fellow HMT enthusiast, to try to convince HMT to work with us to build a 40mm handwinding watch for the first time. Much like my marriage, the project had gone through trials and tribulations, but unlike my marriage, it continued to stay the course. And the final product was now sitting in front of me:
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The HMT Airavata. It wasn’t much, but it was a welcome temporary distraction from everything else happening in my life. And even though I didn’t immediately start wearing it at that moment, the temporary joy it brought me was enough to keep me from falling apart in a moment where I was now separated from my family, and still fighting for my own personal value against an Ex and a family that had seemingly never seen me as an independent individual from the first day of the union.
Two more months of fighting back and forth - my Ex sent an offer through her lawyer that she would drop all demands for a 50/50 split of all assets if I just paid her off with a single lump sum. I’d be lying if I told you my lawyer reached out to me to suggest that her terms were reasonable - even she could barely contain her mirth at the ridiculous amount. A fact that was further quantified when she had a chat with the Ex’s lawyer who also agreed that the amount was stupid, but that it was the amount that the Ex and her family had come to, and he was just passing it on. We stood firm and came up only slightly from a previous agreeable amount from our side. An amount we justified with about an entire ream of paper’s worth of evidence. (A note to anyone getting divorced: the more records you have going back further in time, the easier it is for you to prove a point regarding finances). They were finally forced to acquiesce and accept I wasn’t about to roll over, and they were running out of justification to demand anything more than I was willing to give up.
Late that year, I was sitting in front of a Judge as they reviewed the paperwork and acknowledged that both sides were agreeable to the terms. The gavel fell; the papers were signed and stamped - I was free. 4 years of toxic marriage were done, and I was through with my Ex, and her family, seemingly for good.
‘Seemingly’ was the acting phrase. The final divorce decree had 14 stipulations associated - and we had 30 days to make good on all 14 stipulations. 9 of them were in my control, and the remaining 5 were my Ex’s responsibility. The final stipulation would actually end of taking 6 TOTAL YEARS and become its own comedy of errors, in no small part due to ineptitude, and total apathy from my Ex. Part of the running joke with my current wife that my divorce actually took more time to finalize than my first marriage actually lasted.
Actually, it is due to meeting my wife, that I was able to discover the secret truth that I was never able to prove - a secret that I am still positive that, to this day, my Ex has likely never revealed to even her own parents. I met my wife at a Thanksgiving Dinner hosted by a common friend that year who knew that we both had nowhere else to be for Thanksgiving that year (she had just moved to the city that year with her boyfriend, and I had no family to celebrate with as they were all in other parts of the world). The following year, after her break-up with her own boyfriend, the two of us started dating and were an item the next year.
That year, one of my dad’s friends’ oldest son was getting married, and was going to be getting married in Alaska. Remember the story from a few years back of the folks that came to visit for the Glacier Cruise? Same group coming up a second time. This time, they were meeting my new girlfriend (current wife) for the first time. The wedding was a blast, and I had invited her along as my Plus One. She got along great with everyone in attendance, and even made new friends with several of the other guests. Once again, the HMT Sona made its presence know (if only to me ) as my watch of choice for an Indian Wedding 😀
The following week, while I was at work, my phone started going ballistic, as my wife was reaching out to me and flagging her messages as important. When I was able to respond, I asked her what was up - to which I was greeted with a screenshot of a profile photo, followed by an All-Caps question: “IS THIS YOUR EX?”
Oh great… “Yeah, that’s her. What’s going on?”
“Someone kept Liking, Unliking, and Liking a couple of photos from that wedding last week that I was tagged in with you and me. I went in to figure out who the hell was doing it and saw this profile picture!”
“I don’t know what to tell you…”
“How does she know the bride and groom?”
“Well, the groom and her brother were both in college together and were decent enough friends - she met him a couple of times herself while we were married so she probably added him on Facebook way back, and saw that he got married.”
“Hmm… I’m curious why she kept liking my photos? What do you think I should do? I think she’s trying to get my attention”
“I honestly don’t care. Ignore her, block her, respond to her - do whatever you want to do honey.”
“I’ll think about it”
5 minutes later….
“MY COWORKER IS HER MUTUAL FRIEND! What the hell?”
“News to me honey - not sure what to tell you there”
“That rat! I’mma confront him and find out what he knows about her!”
5 minutes later…
“I asked Co-worker what the deal was and he just looked at me shocked like, ‘Oh crap, YOUR Appophylite is HER former Appophylite?’ I’m getting details from him now.
Oh ****… Appophylite, I’ve got tea when we get home!”
Well, my interest was surely piqued.
Wife got home later that evening, and over dinner, the story was laid out and revealed further. Apparently, her co-worker’s wife had worked at the same student newspaper for a year as my Ex when they were both in grad school, which is how he had come to meet her himself. Over the course of two years, they became part of a friend group composed of folks that knew each other through the paper, and their spouses/partners at the time. The year our marriage had finally fallen apart, my Ex had gotten really close with one of the photo-journalists and as one thing led to another, they had become an item.
“I never knew the truth,’ co-worker had told my wife. “She told us that she was trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t get out. We always told her we were in full support of her, and her husband had to be a rat-bastard. I never would have presumed that her ex is YOUR boy-friend! I can’t believe she lied to us like that!”
Turns out, he was still in contact with the man who my ex had cheated on me with, and he had gotten him in touch with my wife. He corroborated to her that they had had a relationship and that he didn’t know the real truth of the matter. Apparently, months after the divorce was finalized, she followed him to a new state to try to keep a relationship with him, and he broke it off because she was too clingy, needy and demanding. He told my wife that he’d understand if she relayed the details to me and I was angry at him.
There wasn’t any point in being mad at the poor fool. Unlike me, he seemed to have realized what he was probably getting into and cut it before he’d be sucked into a similar quagmire as me. In any case, I was just glad to finally have closure on a chapter of my life. I realized that there was never really love in the marriage. I had proof I was cheated on, and now I had proof that she had tried to save face by claiming I was an abusive a-hole. I could officially wash her out of my life ... .once she’d just resolve this final gorram issue in the divorce!
Part 5 of 5
2020 – First Rays of New Light
I think, one of the hardest things for my current wife, was dealing with the unknowns in the early days of our relationship together. Both of us formed a bond over the fact that we had both been through troubled first marriages that ended in contentious divorces. Fortunately for her, her’s was less financially damaging and was more of a case of vindictiveness against one another. That aside, mine was scarring enough for me, that I was extremely gun shy about getting into another relationship easily. It was scarring enough for my parents that they actually stepped away from trying to consider an arranged marriage for my sister and have since left her to her own devices to attempt to forge her own path. Even once we were a committed couple, I couldn’t bring myself to propose to her because I was STILL on minor contracts without a permanent job. For the early duration of our relationship, I was actually the ‘more broke’ individual just because my monthly take-home was still barely covering the bills and expenses.
When I finally got the current job I am working in, in late 2020, I knew it was finally time to prepare to propose. Though I had already been married once, my first marriage was through the traditional arranged marriage channel, and I was once again, filled with trepidation regarding doing things wrong with this, the more conventionally understood marriage process in the USA. I chose the ring, I spoke with her dad, I figured out, what I assumed, was a romantic, but somewhat relaxed couples photo session, where I could surprise her toward the end.
The irony of everything I planned for that moment, is that I chose to wear my Dad’s Omega AquaTerra on the day that I actually proposed. My dad had purchased the watch 5 years prior when his younger brother passed away. Having lived in the USA for his entire adult life, he had watched as his parents, and his younger sister passed away before him. When his brother was critical in the hospital, he rushed overseas to be by his side. We got the call from my aunt, after my dad had taken off from India that my uncle had shortly passed away.
Knowing my dad would likely not see the messages until he landed State-side, my mother asked me to drive up so that I could be a shoulder for my dad to lean on when he got home. He was indeed, a bit of a wreck when he arrived home that day, but the next day, he revealed that he had come to terms with the fact that the last time he said Goodbye to his brother was likely the last time he was ever going to see him. So while he was saddened by the loss, it wasn’t hitting him as unexpected.
While he was waiting for his flight in Mumbai, he had decided on a whim, to buy a watch to remember his brother by. Not sure why the AquaTerra is what struck his interest, but that was what it was. Unfortunately, he could never bring himself to wear it, so when he and my mom left the States the next year, they left the watch with me, still unworn.
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The fact that it remained unworn to that point in time finally caught up with me, and, for one of the few times in my life, I intentionally decided to wear a specific watch so that it would be associated with a specific memory.
2021 – A New Path Forged Ahead
Getting married in the height of the COVID pandemic brought about its own set of challenges to mark a new chapter in life. On the one hand, neither of us wanted an extravagant wedding the second time around. Seeing as all of our parental units were immunocompromised in some way or form, it also made little sense to try to force anyone to travel, so we opted to quietly elope. Only the ‘Quiet’ portion quickly gave way to my wife’s desires to be Extra just once. She decided that, if we were eloping, that she wanted to do so on a glacier - that’s right: A Glacier Wedding. She still wanted the Dress, and me in a Suit, but she wanted us to get married smack dab in the middle of a field of ice.
Alrighty then! Gotta prepare for this shindig! Actually, very little prep on our side - my wife convinced me to opt for a wedding planner to do all the logistics coordination and leave us to just get ready for the day. Smart choice, that…
The day of the wedding, I decided to give some actual thought to the watch I was going to wear. This wasn’t like the first wedding, where I merely selected the most expensive watch I owned, and once again, I’m not big on the belief that I need to buy a new watch to commemorate any event. The choice became imminently obvious when I realized that the color palette of the day warranted a splash of color, even if it would be next to invisible to anyone but me. And seeing as the only watch I have that is a genuinely different color from Black or White is the following:
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The choice was obvious. Nearly 5 years after I finally got the Airavata, it was making its mark in my life and starting to tell its own stories 🙂
2022 – Life Finds a Way
In surprising fashion, almost immediately after we got married, when I came inside from a snow shoveling session, my wife came down the stairs and placed something in my hand. It was a pregnancy test. We had only just started trying, and almost immediately, she had a positive test in her hands.
Telling our parents and our siblings next was one of the happiest days. For my family, this was the first grandchild/nephew, and for my wife, while her sister, step-father and stepmother had several grandchildren/nephews/nieces by way of her step siblings on that side, this was a first biological for the mother and sister, and for her father and step-mother in general. Many tears were shed, as were promises and demands to be the first to visit the new baby.
The days, weeks and months of preparing for his imminent arrival disappeared quickly, and nearly as fast as we discovered my wife was pregnant, we found ourselves in the hospital with her in labor. Labor was agonizing - going for nearly 2 days, before the doctors finally called it and told her she was getting an emergency C-section, whether she wanted it or not.
45 minutes later, I was holding close to 10 lbs of screaming, purple squish that I could only have imagined nearly 16 years prior. I had my first born in my hands - a little mini-me that was unique in every way, and yet, part me, and part my wife.
As my wife attempted to relax and recover from the C-section and the rigors of labor, I found myself on constant watch taking care of the baby’s diapers, feedings, and baths, and keeping an eye on his fussing. I don’t actually think I got a chance to properly sleep until 2 days later.
It was only then, as I was grabbing a quick nap, that I looked at the time on my wrist and realized which watch I had ended up grabbing and slapping on as we ran out the door 4 days prior:
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Over 6 years after first getting it, and through 6 years of use the Nth Scorpene finally got its first major memories associated with it 🙂
2024 and On - One Step At A Time
As I look ahead to 2024 and the future, I have no idea what the future will hold. Watching my son grow up, waiting to confirm if wife is pregnant with kiddo number 2. Watching the two of them learn to interact with one another and torture the poor cat to no end. Seeing my wife graduate with her new degree. Watching the kiddos go through school and get ready for college or whatever the future holds for them. And waiting to see what watches play what parts in the stories to come 🙂
So many posts are made on these forums by people looking to mark, or celebrate special occasions with a new watch - birth of a child, graduation, milestone birthdays. And while no one should ever be denied their justification for wanting a new watch, it got me thinking about how I have never worried about getting new watches for commemorative purposes. In fact, the only watch I have that is/was a commemorative watch is the Titan Edge my parents bought me as a token Graduation Present for high school (token in that we didn’t massively celebrate my high school graduation since it was always expected that I do so). On the other hand, I’ve always been more interested about the stories and memories that each of my watches inherit and I let what happens happen in a generally organic fashion. It’s allowed for some interesting circumstances where the most unexpected of watches in my collection generally hold the most interesting memories over just the most expensive. The below is a musing, a borderline ‘State of the Collection’ of some of the most important moments, and memories in my life, and the watches that were most associated with them.
Warning: The following read is fairly long and personal so TL;DR - lot of stuff happens, and watches went along for the ride 🙂
PART 1 of 5
1992 – First Watch, and Childhood Days
While my dad was ever the consummate lover of watches, I can’t necessarily say that he went out of his way to instill a similar passion in my early years. Most of that is likely attributable to the fact that we were a lower middle class family when he and my mom were starting out. I was actually born while he was still a student, and neither he nor my mom were American Citizens. Since my mother couldn’t work as a result, money was tight, considering the two were trying to make ends meet with a paltry student pension from my dad’s work as a Master’s Student. But they crimped where they could and lived within their means until my dad graduated. Immediately following graduation, he turned around to start working at the University as an Assistant Professor. His chosen professional field was in the doldrums at that time so working in the private sector wasn’t a great option – this is the background my sister was born into 3 years following. My dad was slowly working his way up the pay-scale, but remember – Academia. The pay was good enough to make sure my sister and I weren’t wanting for a roof above our heads, good food in our bellies, nice toys and books and clean clothes.
Nonetheless, my parents always found enough money to splurge on us and themselves on occasion. So my dad was still able to entertain his own interest in watches. Naturally, knowing I had to be careful about the things I asked for, my tastes ran towards asking for the latest video games or toys more than a watch. I mean, there was always time later in the future for grown-up things like a watch, right?
Anyone else who grew up as a child in the late 80s and 90’s knew that Nickelodeon and Nickelodeon Slime were THE BIG DEAL. Heck, we didn’t even have cable, but whenever we had a chance to go to someone’s house where there WAS cable, we had to tune in to Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, and observe the latest and greatest in contestants getting slimed for whatever reason. It goes without failing then that one day, when I was reading the back of the Froot Loops box my mom had purchased the weekend prior, my eyes boggled:
Froot Loops. Nickelodeon. Velcro. SLIME! What more could a child want? I begged, I pleaded, I wheedled. I’m pretty sure I cajoled, even though I wouldn’t have known what the word meant at the time. All I wanted was to get the Proof of Purchases and Postage to mail everything in (no allowances for me or my sister 😉 ). My parent’s acquiesced. 4 weeks later, I had everything I needed bundled into an envelope and dropped in the mail.
I can’t remember WHEN the watch finally arrived, but I remember that, to my 7 year old brain, disappointment was NOT even a question. I was thrilled by the way the slime squeezed around and the way the watch felt around the wrist. Never mind that the LCD was so poor that you could barely read the watch in the bright sunlight or from any angle other than straight on. And never mind that the watch probably didn’t even know what Water Resistance meant. It was mine, and it was my consummate partner through the rest of that school year, and the next couple.
1996 – The Adolescent Anguish of Leaving Your Life Behind
Growing up in the early 90s meant growing up with the constant struggle of ‘Keeping up with the Kevins’. Technology was changing fast. Toys were changing fast. Dot-Com was kicking in fast. The world was quickly beginning to move at light speed, and if you didn’t catch up fast, you were left behind fast and no one even noticed you were there anymore. 3rd grade was me begging and pleading for a Game Boy so that I could be relevant again – only to FINALLY have a brief spell at the top when I was able to announce, right after coming back from Christmas holidays that not only did I NOT get a Game Boy, I GOT A SEGA GAME GEAR! That’s right – I was not only playing portable, but in COLOR!
Sadly, that was my last foray in being the Coolest of the Cool at school again. 4th and 5th grade rolled on with me occasionally keeping up with the cool trend (POGS) only to be eschewed again when my peers moved on to the next thing (Magic: The Gathering). Even when I tried to be cool, I somehow misstepped, like when I got Rage: The Werewolf Apocalypse and NetRunner CCG instead of Magic and Magic blew up in popularity and left the others behind. A once again brief spell when everyone discovered that the kid who was always chosen last for every sport was actually the best Ultimate Disc player in the class kept me relevant, but it was only until everyone realized that I was still wearing that silly Froot Loop watch. ‘FOOL! Casio Digital Watches are where it’s at now! Get with the program!’
Unfortunately for me, I was being hit at the same time, with one of the biggest pieces of bad news (that a kid) could get – my parents decided that we were leaving the USA – the land of my birth, and moving to India. I was devastated. My life was here. My friends (what few I had) were here. Sure I had grandparents, and uncles and aunts and cousins in India, but that was the only redeeming part of being there. Having to make friends all over again? Learning new languages? No Hamburgers? Deathly heat? Forget it! The doldrums began to kick in.
I guess, in a way, my parents felt bad about the way I was taking it. Not that it mattered of course – living in a Benevolent Dictatorship means the ones under 18 get a lot less say about the direction the family goes than the ones with Graying Hair. Christmas rolled around, and I got a whole bunch of extra games and accessories for the Game Gear, and a couple of fun items I can’t remember now, but nestled under the tree was one last small box. A new watch. Not just any watch, a DIGITAL WATCH.
Not a Casio by a long stretch, but money was tight again – my parents were liquidating their savings preparing to move an entire household overseas and start from scratch, all while trying to still keep my sister and I alive for the remaining months before the move. And in any case, $10 was $10 – for my mind in the 90’s that was still a big deal, even if it wasn’t G-Shock money. I was pleased as punch to at least have something that could compete with the Casios, even if it was quickly forgotten by my classmates. The end of the school year came up fast, and while everyone else was making plans for how to spend the summer, I was packing up and leaving 2 days before the last official day of school – those were the flight plans my parents had made. I didn’t even get the excitement of that last day that everyone else was anticipating. Just pack up and drive out to the airport.
In a way, one of the best things about that year (1996) was that I didn’t really have much time to wallow in my self-pity. We landed in India and I immediately had a meeting a week later with the school administration to take an entrance exam to get into the school my parents wanted to send me to. Wanna know the worst part? To add salt to the wound, my parents decided to hold me back a year because of language requirements, so not only was I about to start school in a new country, I was already gonna be a marked man, as the oldest in the class by far. Didn’t even get to enjoy much of a summer to speak of. School ended in the USA in mid-May, and started in Late June in India – I got like 2 weeks of actual time to just enjoy, and most of that was destroyed by my mom tutoring me daily to get me ahead of the ball before the first day. Woof…
India in the 90s was an interesting place. The markets were just opening up, having come out of something akin to socialist tendencies in the earlier decades after Independence. The kids were OBSESSED with Europe and the USA - a circumstance which somewhat worked in my favor. I was neither stand-offish like some that grew up overseas were coming to India for the first time, but I was just new and interesting enough that I was actually able to make friends pretty quickly. Funny enough, though I was made fun of constantly for my American Accent, I actually made more friends faster in India than I did at any point in my elementary school time in the USA. For once, just a bit, it felt like I actually had a place.
All too soon though, the realities kicked in. I handled my time in India well enough, but I never QUITE took to the situation in full. I still remembered the USA a lot more fondly than my sister did. And while the friends I had always kept me included, there was always something that kept me separate, I was just slightly too weird on the Cricket Pitch. I had just slightly too many cool things compared to them, or didn’t have an interest in all the same things. I spoke with just weird enough an inflection that I could still be made fun of, but it was getting harder to do, and with each day I got better, kids worked harder to find something new to make fun of. All in good fun of course - I could dish it about as hard and as fast as I could take it. And, being the tallest person in my class, and actually taller than most upper-classmen, I was able to cultivate an air of authority that I NEVER had in the USA. But at the same time, I struggled immensely with the school system - a system built around rote memorization and high test scores. My sister took to it phenomenally, but I made it very clear to my parents, later in time, that I would be returning to the USA after finishing school to go to college.
Through this, my old Sega Sports watch plodded along. When I first arrived in India, it attracted all of the attention of being a ‘cool watch’. The watch stuck out like a sore thumb - exactly the kind of thing worn by either a kid who grew up outside of India, or who had parent(s) that worked outside of India and brought all the coolest things back as presents. In my case, it was a bit of both. Though my mother was with us, our dad was still State-side working on wrapping up projects before joining us. Sadly though, the watch made it two years before it finally discovered its nemesis - humidity. At first, I noticed a minor bit of condensation inside the crystal, but I thought little of it - it would disappear by mid morning and none-the-worse. Several months later though, you could see the discoloration around the LCD crystal before finally, a few months after that, the moisture finally found the circuit board and shorted the watch into oblivion.
1998 – Wherein Watches Begin to Become an Interest
During this time in India, the banality of constant school, studying, tutors, academic pursuits, and the brief moment to catch my breath and maybe play a few rounds of cricket with the kids on the lock was broken up on occasion by a visit from my father. Living a pseudo-bachelor life with the rest of the family overseas meant he was able to save much more money than he was in the previous years. He lived as a bachelor with other bachelors, and sent money back to my mom to keep things running in India but since his needs in the States were so low, he was able to afford 1-2 visits back to India every year, whereas in years prior, we, as a family, were maybe able to visit India once every 3-4 years. Not only were the visits a chance to see him after ages, but they offered a bit of a respite - those weeks were some of the few weeks in the entire year when my mother wouldn’t have something study or academically related lined up for us to spend our time. A TRUE breath of fresh air.
It was during this time, on one of dad's visits that I noticed that he had changed his watch. It was then that I learned that dad always harbored a desire for a chronograph, and had finally indulged himself with a Seiko Alarm Chronograph.
Up until this point I always figured watches went in one of two directions - either blah, and basic 3 hander watches for the stuffy oldies, or modern, hip digital watches for those who wanted all the bells and whistles. I never realized a non-digital watch could look so…complex. I was absolutely fascinated by all the sub-registers, and the sheer number of markings and hands everywhere - and the buttons! This watch had more crowns and buttons than my old Sega did! It was unbelievable. It was immense. It was…
It was the start of the sickness.
1999 – Time Becomes King
The very next year, I tried to make a deal with my mother - If I did well in the May Finals, I wanted a new watch for Diwali that year. Upon making my earnest request known, I got the oft disappointing response that all kids are all too used to - ‘We’ll see’. You might as well just say no, for how often that statement goes that direction… Nonetheless, I pushed and did quite well in class. I continued to drop hints in the summer, thinking, maybe mom would tell dad and, come his next visit late summer, there’d be a magic little watch box in the corner of the suitcase, but to no avail. Nothing. I gave up. The next year of school started and I stepped back into the daily rigamarole of studying, and just dragging myself through another day, another week, another month….
And just like that, Diwali rolled around and preparations began. Mom began cleaning the house, whipping up sweets and decorations and snagged a new outfit each for herself, my sister and myself. I came home one day from school, and as I threw my backpack in the corner by bed, I saw a small box sitting right on top of the folded new clothes.
Not a chronograph, but my first official analog wrist watch. Yet, simple as it was, it was my new companion. And it was a solid one at that. Not 2 months after I got it, our teacher, in an effort to power-trip, decided to ban wristwatches in class, and threatened to confiscate any wristwatch that she found being used. Needless to say, the entire class was upset at this as, with our dull uniforms, our wristwatches were one of the few ways we could exert our individuality in class. I refused to stand for it. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, using every tool at my disposal (geometry kit, compass, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and solar tracking) I built my own rudimentary sundial and started using it to call out time in class. It infuriated the teacher who would keep rushing over to my desk demanding I present the watch I was hiding. It aggravated her further that she could never find the watch either. It took weeks before she put two-and-two together and realized that I had built the sundial template. She swiftly confiscated it, but by then, it was too late (for her) - I had been using it for long enough that I had managed to discreetly etch the necessary markings in the appropriate places on my desk. With that, any mere pencil or pen quickly became the means with which time was always at my fingertips. The teacher finally had enough and called the Principal in to demand an end to the chicanery. The principal and I were actually on quite good terms. I was widely known in school as one of the more academically gifted kids, but still just enough of a rabble rouser that it warranted always keeping one eye in my direction. And yet, I was always polite to the teachers when engaging them. She walked right in and stood at my desk and told me, ‘No games - how are you doing it?’ I gave her a crap-eating grin as I asked her to look at her wrist and see what time it was. Right as she did it, I calmly picked up my pencil, placed it in the appropriate location on my desk, and called out the time - the same time as was noted on her watch, to within just a couple of minutes. She stared at me for a few seconds before looking down at my desk where the pencil was still standing up where I was holding it. She looked for a few more moments at the shadow it cast until she noticed the small marks I had etched and started piecing them together, and then burst out laughing. And she kept on laughing as she walked towards the door, turning around to announce, ‘The ban on wrist-watches has been rescinded.’ I had the respect of the Principal for turning the tables on the teacher, and I had the respect of my classmates for getting the wristwatches back, though I must say, that particular teacher never took a shine to me after that 😀
I still have the Classic watch to this day, though I long stopped using it. A schoolyard brawl ended up with the crystal getting smashed against a rock (saved my wrist though) and my mom refused to pay to repair it. I continued to wear the watch that way until we moved back to the USA.
2001 – Growing Up, and Moving On
Remember that I promised that, after I graduated High School, I’d be returning to the USA for college? I never gave up on that promise. My parents, seeing that I was all too driven toward that direction started having a good, long conversation with one another while I was in the 9th Grade. Those that know, know that 10th Grade is effectively the most important grade in Indian Education - the direction of your life and the future choices of school are very much directed by how you do in the 10th grade, when your final exams are graded nationally against all the other 10th graders out there. At that time, even though my parents had laid the foundation for a solid life in India, including purchasing their first home there, my dad still had not managed to make the permanent move over to join us. They started talking about the possibility that, if I left, the family would be completely split up across multiple locations. Rather than that, they decided that it was better to move everyone back to the USA, and do so before I graduated high school so I had a chance to use the time to prepare for college-track classes before getting in myself. And so, we returned to the USA.
Not only did we return, but we actually ended up returning right back to the same state that we left. Plenty of people think that is crazy, but THAT was a decision my mother opted for (I take no responsibility for that, though it must be said, I am the last of the family STILL HERE
). We came back in the summer, and I was giddy with anticipation about the prospect of catching up with my friends when the school year began again.A short lived prospect indeed - in the 4 years I had been away, most forgot who I even was. On occasion, there was the odd about-face as someone looked back in the hallways at what was a long-forgotten face reappearing. Then too, the high school class was a smorgasbord of kids from multiple elementary schools and middle schools so there were plenty of people who never knew who I was, period. In a way, it made the transition easier. Though Alaska wasn’t new to me, I was basically the new kid in Alaska again. Over time, a few more people recognized me, and I made friends again with others, but really, it was no different than the elementary school days I had left.
Oddly, High School was…boring. Having been held back a year in India, I was surprised when the administration decided to let me push up a year, so I was actually right back where I was supposed to be graduating with the people I had started school with. And school was still easy. I wasn’t challenged, and I didn’t have much in the way of homework. I was typically able to finish 90% of my homework either during the lunch break, during the 10 minutes or so remaining at the end of each class before the bell for the next class, or in my dad’s office after I walked over from school waiting until he was done and ready to go home. All that was typically left when I got home was to type up any essays or such that were assigned, and that were whipped out in the last hour between vegging in front of prime-time TV and going to bed. The one silver lining was my History Teacher - he actually realized I wasn’t being challenged so he threw out his curriculum, just for me, and told me that he wanted me to read the assigned chapter every week, and then read the concurrent chapter in Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’ In a nutshell, he wanted me to see the differences in how different people view, remember and interpret the same history. This was the first class that gave me a glimmer of hope for the future.
Christmas came around that year, and by now, I was past childhood expectations. I had hinted at nothing, and I desired for nothing. I finally had reached that age where I was just excited that there were presents under the tree, and appreciated each one for what they were. While my sister had a pretty decent little pile under there, I actually had one box that, above all else, was MY favorite.
The Pulsar RAF Chronograph. My dad remembered. He remembered, even 3 years prior, that I had wanted a chronograph. And I finally had a chronograph of my own. It was everything I could have hoped for. And at the time, it was everything I wanted. The Pulsar was, in a way, responsible for jumpstarting my excitement again. I joined Academic Decathlon a few weeks later. I was great at it and I was one of the best contestants on our team. History went from being a blah subject to being my favorite subject. Math actually became something fun as opposed to just repetitive number exercises. Art History was joined purely for the fun of it (though a couple of cute girls MAY have had a part to play…
) I actually enjoyed my senior year more than I thought I would, and (GASP!) I actually realized, in the last weeks of school, that I was going to MISS some of these people when we all went our separate ways in life.Part 2 of 5
2004 – Passions are Kindled, and Adult Life is Forged
Most of my peers, in our senior year, waxed poetic about the college(s) they wanted to attend. I generally kept silent through most of those conversations. Of course I was going to college - I was Indian; it was expected, and a given. The bigger shock would have been me saying I was going to go on to be a hippie. The true surprise that came to most is that when they finally would ask me what colleges I was applying to, I said I was going to the state college. They were flabbergasted that I would limit myself in such a way, but I was quick to point out that our state college (at the time), had highly accredited engineering programs, I had a tuition waiver on the Bachelors by virtue of my Dad being a professor there, and I also had three scholarships which, due to the tuition waiver, were basically extra free money. I had a full ride - why waste the opportunity. I should point out that, fastforwarding to the present day, many of the ones who mocked my choice at the time, are currently complaining about being underwater on student loans, while I graduated on time with money in the bank. I may have missed out on ‘The Full College Experience’, but I’d like to think that the dividends have paid out now.
I expected college to be a paradigm shift from High School, but realistically, I think my life circumstances set me up such that said shift was never realized. I was used to being a small fish in a big pond. I was used to most people not knowing I existed, and not caring. I was used to having little to no social life, and forcing myself to dig through piles and piles of books and academic notes every day, just trying to get to the next day. College quickly became just 4 more years in the way of adulthood.
Early in 2004, my parents went for a vacation, and when they returned, they gave me a watch they had bought in the Duty Free while they were waiting at the airport:
While the Tommy Hilfiger is nothing fancy, it did represent a change in my thinking about watches. Prior to this, My parents had also gifted me a Seiko Kinetic, so I had started delving into the nuances of different types of watches. The TH1985 was my first encounter with a fully mechanical watch, and I have to say, I was surprised by how much it appealed to me. I found myself staring at the open heart for minutes on end at times. In fact, the watch was a fantastic coping mechanism for when classes or homework stressed me out. I’d just stop for a moment, stare at the watch movement oscillating, and then get myself built back up to jump right back into it. If any watch can/could be credited with getting me through college, it would be the TH1985.
The Tommy Hilfiger is also responsible for fanning the Horology Sickness. At the time, I was bigger on the Hi-Fi forum Head-Fi, than I was in watches, BUT, one of the threads that was started back then was about watches, and I found myself quickly descending down the rabbit-hole of watches as I read through different users’ thoughts and collections. The height for me was when another forum user started an entire thread on his journey to a Breitling Navitimer. That thread was actually responsible for me discovering the Watchuseek forum, and though I didn’t join the forum that day, I became an active lurker for the next half decade, before finally pulling the trigger and starting my own profile.
Almost as quickly as college began, it came to an end. I had the unique experience of actually graduating with my dad. He had continued to climb up the ranks at the University and the final rank ahead of him, of full professor, required that he finally complete his PhD. Though he had AMPLE years/decades of research and experience under his belt, the administration told him that he still needed to formally complete the degree to get the position. So, he rolled up his sleeves, and put in the work, and got that sheet of vellum. It so happened that he would walk the same time I did, which meant my mom now had her in for effectively ‘forcing me to walk as well (I was underwhelmed by the pageantry of the High School Graduation experience, and thought to just avoid the same at college and accept my diploma in the mail.) He wore his favorite Seiko Kinetic and I wore my Tommy Hilfiger that day
I entered high school knowing I wanted to be a computer engineer. I learned quickly during one of the summer classes my dad signed me up for that, while I understood computer programming, I wasn’t particularly effective at it. It took me longer to debug code than I felt comfortable with, so as I entered into my final summer before college, I decided to stay on the computer engineering track, but opt for the Electrical Engineering side, so I could focus the majority of my time on the physical aspect. As it would turn out, I was a decent enough Electrical Engineer, but I was actually a better Mechanical Engineer - a realization I came too far too late into the start of my senior year. Committed that I was, I knew I had to stay the course and finish the degree I was in, but it was becoming apparent that, if I decided to pursue Electrical Engineering, I wasn’t going to be working on the high tech cutting edge side - I’d more than likely be relegated to doing day-to-day soldering working for a small local company built out of someone’s garage. The realization came most apparently during our senior project. Every year, for the Computer Engineering Senior Project, the professor gave us all the same standard computer board, and the same basic chassis for a simple robot. Those two things aside, we were given free reign to build a robot in any fashion we liked, that would track a course along a table with obstacles on it, pick up a payload and return it to the starting point. The goal was to program the robot so it wouldn’t fall off the table, wouldn’t crash into walls, wouldn’t get lost on the table, and would perform the base task as quickly as possible. I signed up with the best programmer in our class, thinking I was coming out ahead since I knew I’d be struggling with the program aspect of the board, but little did I realize that he angled to sign up with ME for a similar reason - he could barely tell a Flathead from a Phillips and wanted me as his partner for the MECHANICALS. Surprisingly, I was one of the ONLY Non-Mechanical Engineers that year that had relatively free access to the Mechanical Shops down in the building basement. I had found myself down there a couple of years prior when I was looking for some help acquiring some scrap materials in some certain shapes - while they didn’t have anything in the specific shapes I needed, the manager of the shop had some spare time that day, and he started showing me how I could cut and shape what I needed on the various tools. He was duly impressed by how quickly I picked up the machinery and, after a few sessions, told me that I was free to use the shop as long as it was unlocked, and I didn’t need supervision. This meant that, between my propensity to still horde erector set bits for giggles, and my know-how with the shop tools and metals, my partner and I were actually able to build an exceedingly compact robot because I was able to mill, drill and cut necessary metal parts, while most of the other teams were stuck working with plastic and the smaller saw and drill in the electrical shop that didn’t require any supervision. People actually started to take notice of our robot and would come to me asking for help building certain key parts for their own.
I think my dad noticed this disconnect between what I was working on and what I really liked late in my Junior Year, because he asked if I knew what I wanted to do after college. I figured I’d get a job, work a couple of years and find out if Graduate School was appropriate for me. While my mom was angling me to drop Electrical and switch to Petroleum Engineering (my dad’s field), I was too far committed, and not particularly interested in basically starting from scratch and delaying graduation. My dad suggested I consider working as a field engineer for Oil and Gas companies, and at the time, I figured there was no harm in tossing my resume in that direction and seeing what it might stick to. I never imagined, or expected that it would actually stick, and garner interest, but it did, and that’s how I found myself sitting at my graduation the next year with a job offer already in hand to work in the Alaskan Oil Field.
2010 – First Steps Into the Future
It’s curious how, sometimes, life brings you full circle without even trying. As a child, whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, peppered between the standard Little-Boy answers of ‘Firefighter’, ‘Police Officer’, and ‘Astronaut’, I’d oft state that I wanted to be a Petroleum Engineer just like my dad was. That statement disappeared into the ether as I got older - what a boring profession, spending your life drilling holes in the ground and waiting to see if Texas Tea was going to come spraying to the surface. It didn’t help that the general political climate I returned to the USA to in High School had plethora of my fellow students arguing against drilling and against oil (though MORE than happy to reap the benefits that were provided by the industry to the state we lived in) I remember being admonished one day in my Senior AP Econ class by a fellow student who borrowed a pen from me, only to be revulsed by the fact that I handed him a pen that had ‘Halliburton’ printed on it. According to most of my peers, I should have admonished my father for having the audacity to rub shoulders with such nefarious companies. Wanting to fit in, and feeling somewhat uncomfortable with this undesired spotlight, I fell into thinking that the Oil and Gas Industry was NOT the path forward for me.
Said proclivities towards Mechanical Engineering won out in the end and I found myself reaping my first professional career paycheck from Petroleum. Truly a unique and interesting experience for me in more ways than one. Growing up in an Indian community, I never expected to find myself working on an Oil Rig, much less getting dirty with my hands every day. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for more. It was wholly refreshing to toss the books on the shelf and actually APPLY what I knew to real-world encounters, and have to solve problems on the fly by using quick logic and intuition to find a solution. And my day-in-day-out was working alongside crews where many of the other men and women had decades of life experience to offer in lieu of any sort of college degree, but their experience offered solid counterpoints, or fast knowledge - I watched a floorhand and a driller once look at two gauges and quickly estimate the weight needed of a drilling fluid faster than the mud engineer with his calculator. By the time the engineer had confirmed the weight needed, he found that the floor hands were already laying out the correct amount of additive as their rough math had been off by barely 1/10th.
This is when I truly started to find myself, slaving away in -50 Degree F temperatures with wind chills that could get that temperature down to close to kissing -90. Working two weeks of that, and coming home to a balmy -40 Degree F was far different than what I had pictured for my future. Though many watches were my partner on my wrist during those 5 years, the one that held up the best, and the longest through that time was the Pulsar RAF. No way I was subjecting the Tommy Hilfiger to that!
This was also when I found myself in an excellent capacity to start actively pursuing hobbies. Prior to college, geology and stamps were my main hobbies - funded by the occasional dollar in change I was able to scrimp together here or there. College put a damper on hobbies - though I was never short on money, thanks to scholarships and part time work, I learned enough about saving and finances from my parents to know better than to blow it all, cause I had it all. But now! Now I was making ADULT MONEY! And saving well! Living two weeks at home with my parents and then living two weeks on the slope where all expenses were covered meant my savings account was growing faster than I had ever seen it grow. It was in this backdrop that I switched from HiFi to WATCHES as an active pursuit of interest. Many who have seen me post here in the past know that my grail through High School and college was the Omega Speedmaster Professional. I was finally in a position to buy one, but first, I wanted to test the waters with some other watches that interested me. Among many at the time, my collection increased with Parnis, Marina Militare, Invicta, Fossil, Marathon, HMT, and several other brands - nothing of major note/interest, but different styles nonetheless, and a cheap, but quantity heavy way to test out what I really liked before jumping into the big guns of REAL watches.
It was a time that, sadly, had to be delayed. My parents had convinced me recently that it was time for me to test the waters of buying my own first car, and I had just done so earlier in the year, as the proud owner of a new Jeep Wrangler - and the monthly payments that came with it. This was a mere delay to my plans to get that Speedmaster - Other life circumstances had delayed me in the past and this was no different - I’d have the watch before the next year was too long in the tooth.
While I was house-sitting for my parents while they and my sister were visiting India, I got a call from my mom the day before they were scheduled to fly out. Dad was in the hospital having suffered a massive heart attack. His heart was operating at 11% and he needed to have bypass surgery relatively immediately, and he was not stable enough to fly back to the USA - it had to happen THERE. She needed me to come as soon as possible. At that moment, nothing else mattered as I grabbed the first available flight ticket out to India, called my office to let them know I needed to extend my time off and get alternative pet-sitting for the family puppers.
Dad ended up alright - surgery was a success, but he had a road to recovery - doctors estimated that he would be 3 months in recovery before they’d release him to fly back to the USA. My sister had never traveled internationally on her own, so I had to chaperone her back home, and then immediate get as much set up for her as possible (she was a student in college, and didn’t have her license yet) to set up a daily ride for her to college and food/groceries for the two weeks (now three) that I’d be gone for work. The immediate focus became making sure she and the dog were fine while I was at work, and keeping the house running while I was on days off as my mom tended to my father in India. Fortunately, he was recovering at a better rate than the doctors had expected and they cleared him to return to the USA before his next birthday.
Through all of that, I didn’t have a chance to think too much about getting myself a Speedmaster, and quickly, other things took precedence. When I’d be at work, my dad would shovel the driveway himself, but he couldn’t do that anymore with the heart attack, and their driveway was treacherous to deal with in the winter when not cleared. I bought them an ATV and plow to make the clearing easier when I wasn’t around. Likewise, I had to get some other things squared around the house to make things easier for my mom when my dad wasn’t able to do said strenuous chores. As the year rolled to a close and the next year began, it seemed like indulging myself was a prospect that was back on the radar.
The next year was also the year of my father’s 50th Birthday, and considering the heart attack the previous year, my mom wanted to truly make it special with a special present. She enlisted me to help figure out a perfect watch to give him on the day and asked if I’d be willing to go 50/50 on one to get a better watch. I thought about the options, I weighed the pros and cons of each one, and I thought long and hard about what Dad would truly like most. The answer was obvious - it HAD to be a Rolex!
I knew he’d like the Submariner, and I knew he’d like it in black, but what I wasn’t sure of was whether to go all steel, or two-tone. My mom was the deciding factor confirming that we had to go with the two-tone option.
Choosing the watch was easy - getting it was a much harder proposition. The only close AD was 330 miles away, but fortunately, was in the city I had to transit through to get to and from work. I had to coordinate it right. I had to coordinate just right with the AD to special order the watch from one of their sister locations, get it in, and hold it until I could snag it coming back from work. It also timed out JUST perfectly, that I’d be coming home just the day before my Dad’s birthday with the watch in hand.
For those who have been in the same situation, you know: there is no memory quite as close to the heart as seeing your father’s reaction to a gift like that. The current servicing that I sent the watch in for this year is the longest he’s ever been without that watch since we gave it to him.
2010 might go down as one of the few years that has core memories associated with more than just one watch. My time working in the Oil Field was marked with memories of the Pulsar Chronograph, and my Dad’s 50th Birthday with the Rolex is one of the prime core memories, but a third came for me later in the year, towards Christmas when I came home after the holidays to find a rather large, and rather heavy box sitting on my desk. It was no surprise that I was going to miss Christmas that year - I typically gave up my holidays in favor of making sure my coworkers could be home for them as they had younger children and I didn’t. Typically, any presents I had remained under the tree for me to break into when I’d get back, but apparently, this time, Mom and Dad couldn’t wait for me to come home and wake up the next morning.
Until this point in time, I’d never had the pleasure of owning a Swiss Watch. And now I finally did
.2012 – Boldly Going Where I’d Never Been Before
2011 and 2012 marked the start of a major turning point in my life. Many who have read my posts over the years know I reference my ex-wife and her family a lot. That would be because the years they were involved in my life were extremely pivotal, and impactful, and not necessarily in a way anyone would necessarily wish for. That story starts here.
Having graduated college, and started working, I decided, with the 2 & 2 rotation I was working, that I had the time to go back to school and get a Masters on my days off, so I decided to pursue a Masters in Engineering and Project Management. When I finished that degree in 2010, my parents sat down for a conversation, pointing out that I was 25 now, and by the time my Dad was 25, he was already married and had a child. I should point out, before going any further, that my parents’ was an arranged marriage in the traditional Indian sense, as were all of my aunts, uncles and grandparents. Still not out of the norm in India, and not a conversation that was coming out of left field for me. If anything, I was surprised that it had taken my parents so long to broach the subject 😀
Dating when you work in the Alaskan Oilfield is an interesting challenge in its own right. On the one hand, I was no stud muffin in High School, so I had no High School or College Sweetheart that was still by my side post graduation. Oilfield workers stick out like a sore thumb around here. And people know that, in general, they are paid very well. And are gone from the house for extended periods of time. Divorce rates are high in Alaska, and I didn’t want to find myself in a situation of regret so I was trying to be very careful about who I dated during that time, as I was navigating the early adult years of getting things like retirement accounts set up and building a foundation for future life. It was no surprise then, that at the time my parents brought up arranged marriages, I wasn’t involved in any meaningful relationship.
We came to an agreement - I was open to my parents pursuing possible matches through an arranged marriage route, as long as they accepted that I would continue to try my hand at the dating pool. If I found myself in a long term relationship, my parents needed to step back from their search, but If I wasn’t dating, I would entertain the prospect of a potential match they may have found. For those who have never been involved in the process, while it was more rigid in my parents time, these days, the process is more of a matchmaking than anything else - the prospective couple engages an extended ‘dating period’ where they may yet still determine that they aren’t a match and break off to go their separate ways. I felt comfortable with this, and didn’t think too much of it.
A couple more years passed - I had no real luck from my side, and there were a couple of girls that my parents introduced me to, but it never went anywhere. There was a temporary lull from both of our sides while my dad was recovering from his heart attack, until one day, he returned from an international trip while I was on days off, and announced he had the perfect prospective match - the girl who would turn out to become my Dreaded Evil Ex.
Context is definitely necessary at this time to understand future events. (For the record, even though they didn’t become my Ex and Ex In-Laws until later, I’ll just refer to them as such from this point on to make things easier.) My father was the first from his direct family to come to the USA for continuing education. While he was on the East Coast (where his aunt had moved years prior), he came to befriend several other Indians on campus working on graduate degrees at the time. Of note were two other men who were good childhood friends prior to their arrival in the USA. One went on to be the father of my best friend in India. The other went on to become my future father in law. At the time, he was working on a PhD while my father was wrapping a Masters. When my father moved to Alaska to pursue his second Masters, ExFIL moved to the same department and started as a professor. He got married shortly after my Father did, and shortly after I was born, he had a first son. Then my sister arrived, followed by his daughter. In short, within 7 years, both men were married and had 2 children apiece with a 6 year age gap between the oldest (me) and the youngest (my Ex).
We grew up together as basically a family. With our extended families all overseas, it was a close relationship, where I basically treated them like my own second set of parents. Their parents were akin to my own grandparents, and the four of us children grew up together with other Indian kids in town. Even when both families moved to India, we were close and continued to grow together. Ex BIL even came back to Alaska to pursue college and for a brief period of time, we were roommates before I graduated and moved out. Heck, in India, the families had condominiums/houses that were borderline next-door to one another.
The previous year, I had even been to India for a visit and ran into the Ex at a mutual friend’s house. She was waxing poetic about getting into Educational Reform and how that was her passion, though it wasn’t her degree work she was working on, but she seemed to have a vision and a plan forward for her life, and of course, I wished her well. I wasn’t sure if my dad had spoken with her parents and grandparents before speaking to me, and if maybe he knew something I didn’t about her plans changing. That said, the question at hand was what MY thoughts on a prospective arrangement were. I thought about it for nearly a week, and came to the conclusion that, given that I had known her her entire life, I knew her about as well as I could possibly hope to know any girl I started dating, and the fact that we already knew we get along and our families get along could ONLY save on future strife, right? Well, I said yes to my parents, contingent on her agreement. I still wasn’t sure if her future plans had changed and if they hadn’t, I was fully prepared to expect that she would say no.
I guess this would be a relatively short(er) story and not a particularly interesting point if my Ex had said no at the time, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit surprised to get a yes answer back from her. The truth behind that moment revealed itself later in the future, but for the time-being it wasn’t the most important thing on my mind - I had just taken one of the next big steps into adulthood, and it was coming fast.
Over the course of the coming weeks, plans were drawn up, astrologers were consulted (yes, both her father and my mother believed heavily in astrology and wanted ‘The Opportune Time’ to be predicted for the day of the wedding. Said date was rapidly approaching toward the halfway point of the year. plethora trips by my parents and myself had to be made back to India to get things ready, while, at the same time, I was working on trying to find a house so I could move out of my parents place and looks for a new job - the Ex In-Laws weren’t thrilled about the idea of a 2x2 rotation and me not being home every day so I had to look around to see if anyone was interested in picking me up for an office job. Through all of this, both my ex and I reiterated our commitment to being married but both of us had one major stipulation. From her side, the stipulation was that I wouldn’t force the subject of children right away, as she wanted to pursue graduate school, and maybe even a doctorate before considering becoming a mother. That was easy enough to agree to, but mine, I knew would be a bit harder, as I had told my parents very clearly that ANY family they spoke to, and ANY girl they entertained HAD to all accept my single stipulation - that I would never permanently move back to India. I knew from my 4 past years there that I would never thrive in the country and I wanted nothing to do with trying again.
The Ex, her parents and her grandparents all surprisingly accepted said terms, and wedding preparation continued to progress. During that time, came an interesting surprise, after my parents returned from India on one of their trips. Ex’s Grandma, while digging around in her safe looking for stuff, had come across an old, forgotten family heirloom. Rather than hand it down to her male grandson’s she opted to give it to me instead as a token of my official entry into the family:
While the watch may be nothing particularly valuable, or fancy, the history that it holds more than makes up - it belonged to Grandma’s Grandpa and had been passed on through multiple male generations through close to a century. At one point, before it was about to be thrown out, Grandma rescued it, had it repaired and serviced and put it aside until she finally decided that my penchant for wristwatches was a clear indicator that I should be the next one to hold it.
Looking back at the following 4-5 years, that may have been the only truly heartfelt moment encountered over the course of the entire marriage and subsequent divorce. And, because of the greed with which my Ex later enacted the actions that led to our divorce, I suspect she forgot about the fact that I ever had this watch - and I never reminded her.
As the date rapidly approached, changes all started to fall in place. I finished paying off my car, so I had no outstanding debt to my name. I got a new job, and in a new city, so I moved out of my parents’ place and quickly whipped up an apartment for us to set up after we returned from the wedding. The job started, and I did everything to situate myself and prepare myself to dive in full time right after I returned from the wedding.
The wedding itself was a long and drawn out process, and anyone familiar with the pageantry of an Indian Wedding is all too aware. Less than 12 hours after I landed, there was an engagement ceremony where rings were exchanged, and that evening, a big dance party. Over the subsequent week, there were ceremonies, pujas, and lunches/dinners thrown by friends. The Wedding Day itself was a day-long affair - starting at 4:30 AM and ending with my Ex and I passing out in a hotel room around 2:00 AM the next morning. And even THEN, things weren’t over, there were still more ceremonies and pujas for the next two days, before we went on a close to 4 day long ‘pilgrimage’ to visit temples (my Ex In-Laws’ choice of a ‘Honeymoon’...) Through all of this, the only watch that I carried with me was my Raymond Weil, as it was the best watch I owned at that time. We returned to the USA and there was ANOTHER big party in our home-town that my parents threw for all of our friends who otherwise couldn’t, or weren’t able to attend the ceremonies in India. It was probably a whole month before I could finally catch my breath, but only just barely, as my job was still waiting for me to get involved in plenty of tasks that were on hold while I was out.
One key consideration was missed by everybody involved in the wedding - myself, my Ex, her parents and my parents: the ceremony in India, while acceptable as documentation of a legal marriage in India, was NOT acceptable as legal proof in the USA. We stepped foot on American Soil as a still technically unmarried couple. I only realized this when I started pulling together paperwork for her documentation changes, and realized that we didn’t have the necessary papers to demonstrate an actual marriage. In working out the timeline for how long it would take to get a marriage license, it became evident that the fastest route was going to be getting someone temporarily ordained to serve as officiant on behalf of the court and perform a small ceremony. Quick as a whip, we got my sister sworn in, and my parents took the opportunity to throw yet another big party at their place as we got married AGAIN in their front yard. Fortunately, my Ex In-Laws were able to fly in and attend as well. Though, on such short notice, her father could only stay for a few days, while her mother decided to stay for a few weeks.
If not for this slight twist in events, I may have never discovered the first crack in the foundation of the marriage. In the early days of our return to the USA, one of the first things I wanted to be clear about with my new wife was where the finances stood and how I had things set up. It was during these early attempts to explain things that I discovered that, in her 21 years of existence, her parents had NEVER allowed her to control her own finances, have her own bank accounts - NOTHING. A circumstance that further exacerbated the background check that the land-lord of the apartments we were staying at was running before I could add her to the lease - she showed up with such minimal background history that that on its own was triggering a flag. Regardless, I endeavored to do my best to try to give her a basic financial education as quickly as I could.
I suspect that these decisions by her parents are what led them to assume, or presume that my parents had handled me in much the same way. Surely, since I had still lived with them up until I moved out, they must have controlled my paychecks, etc. So I was quite surprised when, one day, while her mother was with us, she suggested that she had on good account, the details of a broker in India who had a mutual fund package that guaranteed a 25% rate of return year over year. Met with skepticism on my part, she pushed further to suggest that I liquidate my savings and investment holdings that I currently had, consolidate them and invest them in this fund. On its own, that was sketchy, but I don’t believe my Ex-MIL realized that I was fully aware of the implication of what she was asking - to invest in India, and set up the necessary accounts, I’d have to show residency in India, which I didn’t actually have, so I’d have to channel said investments through someone WITH residency… like my Ex In-Laws. She was literally all but telling me that I should hand control of my future over to her and her husband. I suggested I’d think about it and brushed it off as a ‘Not Happening’.
Comic trials of marriage ensued through the following year. My Ex didn’t want to consider buying a house…until our friends all revealed that they were working with realtors already looking for houses of their own, and then of course, it was my fault that we were behind. My ex-BIL would show up frequently and spend the weekend with us while hanging out with friends in Anchorage, but I wasn’t allowed to show affection to my Ex while he was around, because ‘it made him uncomfortable’. One time, my Ex-FIL was in town and his wife revealed that the friend of the doctor of her mother was visiting Alaska at the time, and my Ex demanded I go through hoops and hurdles to figure out where they were, and contact them to visit, only to become irate when I told her that I wasn’t wasting time on someone who had no direct relation, and who she didn’t even know the names of. If they reached out, it was one story, but I refused to waste my time otherwise.
Buying a house became its own headache. It was natural to expect that a girl who didn’t know/understand the difference between a checking account and savings account or a credit card and debit card to not know what a mortgage is or how it works, but I was flabbergasted that myself, her dad, my dad, our realtor, our lender and even a personal banker were all unable to get the concept through to her. Especially concerning when I was the one explaining the ins-and-outs to our fellow friends in spite of this being a first time purchase for ALL of US. During all of this, the Ex decided she was homesick, and wanted to return to India for an extended visit, so I had to book her a set of flights for a two month trip, and also explain to her that I was NOT paying tuition for a semester that she was all but going to miss because there was no way she was going to be able to convince her professors to allow her to take that long of an absence while trying to maintain attendance (how surprised she was to discover that I was right…)
Part 3 of 5
2013 – The Speedmaster Has Landed, But Not Without Strife
Over the last few years, while I was never in the red financially, and I was never struggling with saving money, the Omega Speedmaster Professional remained an elusive fish that I was chasing. For nearly 6 years now, I was out of college and I had the money to buy the watch, but every time I was close, I ended up spending the money on something else of greater importance. Emergency Flight to get to India when Dad had a heart attack; buying stuff for the parents to make their lives easier post his return; buying myself a new car; buying all the untold things my Ex needed; paying for my Ex’s college tuition and expenses; and the big one - putting down the down payment for the house, and now paying the ongoing mortgage. By Mid-2013, I had pretty much relegated myself to the fact that the Speedy was just on the horizon and never going to be quite close enough to grab.
I had little insight to the fact that my parents and my sister were planning something special for my birthday this year. My parents had been over to the east coast to visit my sister over the summer and make sure she was situating herself well, preparing for her PhD, and they happened across an Omega AD. Between the three of them, and some help from an SA, they were able to discern that the watch I was lusting after was the Speedy Pro, and unbeknownst to me, they bought one there for my birthday.
The big mistake they made later would probably have been contacting the Ex to let her know about the surprise and clue her in. Dad’s phone made a simple autocorrect (as I later discovered) when he sent a message to my Ex with photos of the watch to tell her it was a surprise for me, and then telling her ‘DON’T tell Appophylite’. Unfortunately, the phone autocorrected that message to ‘DO tell Appophylite’, and my Ex demonstrated her profound abilities as a journalist by NOT using even a brief critical analysis of the message before flipping around her phone to reveal the surprise to me. Needless to say, Mom and Dad were a bit miffed that the surprise was ruined, but at least they were happy that I still appreciated the gesture.
To this day, I don’t fully understand why, but it seems like that Speedmaster was the lynch-pin in my Ex and her mother’s crusade to get me to stop collecting wristwatches. Over the sole year of marriage, I hadn’t bought any new watches, so they couldn’t complain about how much money I was spending on watches, and this was given to me by my parents who were just as generous with her and my sister as they were with me. From previous conversations with them, I knew that they viewed mechanical wristwatches as antiquated technology, so I presume they believed that they must be cheap, and were flabbergasted by the price of the watch, when they no-doubt Googled it. This was confirmed a few months later when I asked my Ex not to grab the watch with her rings on her hand for fear of gouging the hesalite crystal, and she acted like I was playing her for a fool trying to convince her that ‘an expensive watch would have a plastic crystal like that!’ Her father even got involved at one point to suggest that I give up past-times like watch collecting, or running that didn’t serve to improve my financial situation and or work situation. Like, what does that even mean? Nonetheless, I was able to take a breath and relax for 2 months as I sent her on her way back to India to enjoy herself, while I settled into unpacking the house, and going through the rigamarole of day-to-day work.
2014 – The Strife Strikes Back
When I look back at the past, I realize that that trip back to India in late 2013, and events that took place in 2015 formed the real basis for the implosion of my marriage. Prior to her trip, the Ex was extremely reluctant to get a part time job. It was a suggestion I made, not because we needed the money, but because I wanted her to take the opportunity she had to build out a resume before finishing graduate school. Suddenly, after returning, getting a job was the biggest priority. Short-lived though as the BIGGEST priority because all of a sudden, the girl who said she didn’t want kids immediately had decided that we had to have our first kid THAT year. it was the biggest 180, but it wasn’t a completely unexpected change. I was able to point out though that it might not be the wisest move to begin trying for a kid when there was a good chance that she might be going into labor around the same time she was trying to write and defend a Master's Thesis. Yet still the pressure increased.
Respite was earned in the form of my ex-BIL dropping a bombshell of sorts early that year - he had found true love and had told his parents - he was getting married that year. The revelation that my ex-BIL was dating and in a long-term relationship with anyone came as something of a shocking surprise to my ex In-Laws and my Ex, but I suspect the BIGGEST shock was that I was not surprised in the least. Remember he’d come to town over weekends to visit friends? It was really just the one ‘friend’ who happened to have a job in the city. Basically, the entire community where we used to live knew about his relationship, and though many also knew his parents, we all established that it wasn’t our place to reveal the relationship until he was good and ready to do so.
So the secret was no longer a secret, and though my Ex was miffed at me for not revealing it to her, she couldn’t be that upset considering that even her best friend and her husband knew and neither had revealed the information themselves. A summer wedding was planned, and though summers were particularly busy seasons for me, I was told in no small terms that I HAD to attend the wedding. Actually, so were my parents and sister. In the end though, the only one who realistically could go was my dad, so he actually booked matching tickets for the two of us to fly out and back, since my Ex would not be traveling with us. It seemed she had it in her mind that she needed to be present for wedding planning as her mother and grandmother would not be able to handle it all alone, and even though she had just come off of a 2 month visit, another 2 - 3 month visit was more crucially important than her own graduate degree.
To this day, I am very glad that my dad was there with me when we arrived at their house. I have no doubt that, were he not, I would have said many things that I would have come to regret. At first, it seemed like nothing was amiss - though we arrived late in the night, pleasantries were swapped, a brief amount of sleep was acquired and everyone was relatively washed and fed in the morning and rearing for the day to go.
My Ex’s grandfather asked us all to come to the master bedroom for a meeting - himself, his wife, my Ex In-Laws, my Ex, my Dad and I. Once inside, the fireworks started. In no small part, he and my Ex In-Laws started tearing into me from every which way possible. They claimed I was denying my Ex financial autonomy, though I was the one who gave her financial education, helped her start her own personal accounts that were in her name only, and even seeded them with my own money before she started a job. They accused me of holding her back from starting a career, though I was the one who had suggested she try her hand at part-time work, and SHE was the one who decided graduate school before employment was the path she wanted. They argued that I was at fault for not having children already, when THEY were the ones, along with my Ex who told me before marriage NOT to pressure her into having kids early so she could focus on graduate school. I was accused of not allowing her to make basic decisions about things like groceries, though I had to do the groceries myself as she was always ‘too tired’ to come with, or ‘didn’t have the time’ to do them herself. Or that I pressured her into committing to a house when she was the one who started sweating about Keeping Up With the Jones’. Through all of this, my Dad silently sat by, saying nothing, while I sat by fuming, and waiting for a break in the diatribes so that I could get my piece in and defend myself.
It’s exceedingly rare that I have ever seen my father enter ‘Papa Bear’ mode, and most would be forgiven for not realizing that he has done so in any case, for how quietly he can speak, and how long he can hold his anger. And such was the case here. He knew of many of the issues that were being brought up now from my own conversations with my parents over the past two years, and he knew where there was an exceedingly high level of bunk in the statements being delivered - he was methodically able to tear many of the arguments apart by pointing to my ex In-Laws’ own involvement and statements in many of the issues, and his and my mother’s own observances of statements and actions my Ex had taken over the two years. But the one that hit hardest was when my Ex’s grandfather said that, in no small terms, ‘Appophylite HAS to put Ex’s name on ALL financial accounts, including retirements and investments and allow her complete control and independence over financial decisions’ He stood up and told them that he would never force my hand on any financial decisions, and he would stand by any and every decision I made regarding finance, as he had seen over 11 years how I was capable of handling money, and then flipped the script to ask them how they could presume that anyone with NO financial education be capable of handling finances they couldn’t even understand. In any case, he pointed out that she was named on my main financial checking account, and savings account, and had unfettered access to my financial advisor, and company 401Ks only had the ability to name a beneficiary, not a co-name. He told them the conversation could end right there as I wasn’t keeping Ex in the dark on anything, and, provided she had justification for an investment decision, I wasn’t ignoring suggestions she had - she just didn’t HAVE any.
He and I both realized at that moment what the implication of that conversation was - like the conversation I had had with my Ex MIL 2 years prior, there was a clear indication that my Ex In-Laws wanted to use my savings as a means of control over me that they didn’t otherwise have. He told me I was doing fine, and not to bow to pressure and continue to navigate the course.
The dust having settled in the aftermath of that attempted intervention, my father disappeared briefly for unrelated business in a different city, and the subject didn’t come back up. Instead, the subject turned to the coming wedding ceremony. My Ex, having been in India for the past month, had no idea what I had brought along as clothes for the wedding. I pointed out that I did not bring a suit, instead, opting for traditional Indian garb, which I don’t care for myself. She and her mother were nodding approvingly over the clothes I had brought until she asked, ‘And you brought your good watch, right?’ (The previously maligned Speedmaster) I looked on in surprise, as I stated, ‘Well I brought my Sona with me, because I thought it would match well with the outfit I chose.’
The reality was that I didn’t want to bring my Speedmaster overseas for fear of anything happening to it - by far, it was my best, and most expensive watch, and had the most sentimental meaning attached to it. In addition, having dealt with CONSTANT harping about my watch collecting, I hadn’t wanted to create another pointless diatribe about that if anyone had noticed, and distract from the Ex BIL’s wedding ceremony, so I had chosen the HMT Sona because:
- It genuinely was a good match with the outfit I had chosen
- It was not going to be a distraction
- It was an understated, but good looking watch, and the Indian Heritage was a nod to the traditional ceremony
Clearly, my Ex couldn’t get it in her head that I wasn’t just going to roll over and kow-tow to her seemingly random financial decisions. The next day, during lunch, she pointed out she hadn’t yet chosen a wedding present for her brother (something I had been asking her to do since the announcement at the beginning of the year). I commented that, with such short notice as we were on now, with the wedding looming 3 days away, we’d have to probably unceremoniously cut a check, which she agreed to. I was expecting a pretty significant sized check to be recommended, like $500, but I about blew my top when the suggestion from her side was that WE (aka ME) should give them a check for $10000, because ‘they were starting out’. I called BS right then. They were both engineers working in Oil and Gas so I KNEW the kind of salaries they were commanding, and I KNEW that both had had their educations completely funded by their parents so they didn’t have student loans to deal with either - they were in a fantastic place and certainly didn’t NEED $10K. I told her where I stood and that I could even be made to agree to $1K at the most but I would NOT get anywhere near the amount she was suggesting. Whether her foot stomping led to a conversation with her parents in the background after that is something I will never know, and really, don’t care about anymore.
The Wedding came, the ceremony happened - no one commented in the negative or positive about my choice of watch. All eyes were on the bride and groom, as one would have expected. I went home with my father, and my Ex returned a month later, just in time for yet another revelation in the story.
Later that summer, my father had several of his Childhood friends, their spouses and children (all young adults in college) up to visit Alaska as a group. As part of the adventure, he asked us to meet them for a glacier cruise. The day before, while the older adult-folk were taking a pre-dinner nap, the younger folks were aimlessly meandering around on the boardwalk chattering about random stuff. My Ex was up ahead with one of the other girls who happened to ask about the story of how we agreed to get married. I wasn’t far enough back that I couldn’t hear the conversation, and I admit I was curious enough to be more than willing to quietly eavesdrop as my Ex started into the story:
“So, when I turned 19, my parents and grandparents decided to talk to me about the prospects of getting married after I finished my degree and turned 21. I didn’t want to get married so early, but I didn’t know how I could tell them no. They were so insistent on thinking of this that I figured the easiest thing I could do was make up the most extreme requirements I would have for a husband so they would NEVER be able to find someone who would meet the requirements. They were just happy that I was saying yes so they told me to tell them my requirements.”
“I told them:
- He HAS to be from a family we know. I won’t consider someone from a family I have no relation with.
- He HAS to be Indian. He doesn’t have to live in India - NRI (Non Resident Indian), is fine.”
- He HAS to be taller than me (for the record, my Ex was taller than the average Indian girl, and actually about as tall as the average Indian boy)
- HE has to be independent - i.e. not depending on his parents to survive and should have a good job.
- He has to have at least a Masters Degree. A PhD is better, but if he is at least considering the PhD or working on one, that is fine”
The signs of true love right there - obligation. I’m not sure she ever realized that I could hear the entire story. My Ex was notorious for not paying attention to any conversation around her unless it was directed at her and engaging her, and I suspect that she always believed that the same held true for everyone. I just continued with that evening, as if I hadn’t heard a word. Actually, I pretty much continued through the remainder of 2014 as if that conversation was something that never took place.
2015 – Return of the Strife
2015 started about as unceremoniously as 2014 did, but it certainly wouldn’t end that way. As usual, the start of the new year shut off the ever running harping about how we had a Christmas Tree when neither of us were Christian (god forbid my family celebrated Christmas in a purely secular fashion), but it did start with a highlight by way of my Ex getting a new job that brought in more money and moved her from working student jobs to working in the professional sector. In a way, I think this led to the decision she made that year to actually buy me an expensive Valentine’s Day present. In years prior, we usually just exchanged small tokens - nothing overly lavish to speak of, so when I saw a jewelry box being pulled out, I was surprised. The surprise disappeared somewhat when the box was opened to reveal a new gold ring.
The ring, like so much else, requires context. Traditionally, in Indian Wedding Ceremonies, the bands are exchanged at the Engagement, so the bride and groom are already wearing them on the Wedding Day. Also, the bride’s family typically makes the groom’s ring. When I had visited the Ex In-Laws before our wedding, they took me to a jeweler to get sized for a ring, and I asked them to please make sure to make it loose enough that I could take it off - since I worked in an industrial setting, I had to be able to remove it when I was on the rig. I also asked for them to please not be lavish and just get something extremely understated. After much hemming and hawing about the looseness they chose a monstrosity of a ring with a 3x3 grid of diamonds inlaid in lieu of a signet. It was everything I hate with a passion, and I was stuck with it…until 3 months later when it refused to stay on my finger. In the aftermath of my father’s heart attack, I had become much more aware of my own health, and vowing to make sure I wouldn’t become a statistic, I had begun to exercise more regularly. Daily 10K runs were starting to yield dividends and I was losing unhealthy weight at a fantastic rate. The unfortunate side effect was that my fingers were much thinner too. My Ex and my Ex In-Laws refused to allow me to cut and resize the ring, so I opted to replace it with a simple tungsten carbide ring - a ring which MUCH better suited my personality.
Of course, god forbid that the ring I wear suits ME. Having harbored animosity towards that ring, apparently from day one, my Ex had opted for the gold band to force me back toward wearing gold. I sat her down and told her that, in all honesty, gold just wasn’t something I cared about, nor was jewelry, and while I appreciated the gesture, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to wear a gold ring, when I already had one sitting around collecting dust. I asked her if she would be terribly angry if I exchanged it instead for a watch. After some thought, she decided that would be fine, and I grabbed a watch that I had had my eye on for some time leading up to that:
Things seemed like they might be on the upturn after that. No major arguments or issues to speak of, and we even had a fairly happy vacation during the Spring Break. Sadly, that highlight was short-lived. All the talk around town that year was around the price of oil collapsing to the point where oil and gas companies were talking about serious layoffs. Having been in the industry for 8 years at that point, I myself had gone through 2 previous layoff rounds and survived both. My luck finally caught up with me this year though. The work I was doing in my new position was purely experimental, incurring costs without revenue, and as such, it was hard for our division to justify the cost during the downspell. Since they also knew that more layoffs were likely, there wasn’t necessarily scope for absorbing me in a new role elsewhere - I was officially laid off and out of a job for the first time in my life.
After the initial impact set it, it was all-ahead from my side to try to land a new job. Once again, my doing my due diligence in preparing for the future meant that we weren’t in a massive pinch. I had a comfortable lay-off/severance package that would help us get by for a bit, and I had enough in Savings to keep up going for a bit further before things started to get bleak. The one ask I did have of my Ex was to see if she could go Full Time for work starting in the summer, seeing as she was going to be graduating in a month or two. With her being full time, we’d both be covered on Health Insurance, and I could continue to focus on finding a new job as quickly as I could, which I knew was not going to be THAT fast, considering everyone in my industry was hunkering down.
This is where the rope started to unravel - the first thread to pull away was when my Ex revealed that she would NOT be graduating in the spring, but that her advisor had told her she needed to revise her thesis to possibly graduate by the end of Summer. She claimed her advisor was permitting her to stay enrolled without having to pay tuition for the summer which immediately raised my antennae - growing up as the son of a university professor, I knew an academic lie when I heard one I just couldn’t prove anything, so I accepted it (for now) at face value.
The second thread and third threads unraveled quickly with changes in behavior that were not easily accounted for. My Ex did go full time, but then, she’d be gone for long periods of the day, claiming that her work needed her to work lots of overtime. On more occasions than one, she’d agree to meet up with friends only to never appear, and leave me flailing to offer suggestions as to where she may be since she wouldn’t tell me either. When she would be home, she wouldn’t hang out in the living room anymore - only in the spare bedroom, and with the door closed.
Do these tell-tale signs seem familiar to anyone? Don’t worry, they did to me too. Ignorant as I can often be about emotional tells (my current wife likes to point to this shortcoming often), I can occasionally recognize them. I suspected that she was either cheating on me, or attempting to present the ruse that she was, but I never had the evidence to confront it, and so I just let her go about her business as she planned and continued to push on finding a new job.
Through the summer and late fall of that year, two family tragedies required me to go up to my parents’ city to house-sit or just be present for emotional support: my Dad’s brother passing away in the Summer, and my Mom’s Aunt/Cousin passing away in the fall. In both cases, my Ex claimed she was too busy to come along, and I didn’t press in either case. But throughout the summer, I kept asking her for updates on her Thesis and graduation, and she kept giving extremely vague and indifferent answers about finishing the degree. I was beginning to grow increasingly concerned about what may be happening in the background.
Everything came to a head in the fall. My Ex unexpectedly announced that we should visit her brother for a week or so around the Indian Festival of Diwali. I told her that, while I would love to, we didn’t necessarily have the money to spare for the flights with my savings account being burned for all the monthly expenses or mortgage, utilities, her tuition, her car loan, etc. I even suggested that, to staunch the bleeding of my account just a bit, we transfer the car loan payments to her name as we had originally agreed to do the year prior. I told her it would give my account a bit of breathing room. She angrily exclaimed that we could talk about that later, but if I wasn’t going to buy tickets to visit her brother, then she’d be going alone. I sadly told her that there wasn’t much I could do to stop her from choosing to use HER own money that way.
For a solid month, before she was flying out, I kept reminding her nearly every day that we needed to talk about the car loan and what was going on with her degree. And every time I called or texted, she had some reason she couldn’t talk, or couldn’t commit to a day. Finally, it was the day before she was leaving and 4 hours AFTER we had agreed to meet at the bank, and she still hadn’t come home. In fact, by the time she DID arrive home, I suspect she was expecting me to be asleep but I was awake just to confront her. That was probably the biggest argument of our lives, that night - an argument in which she even threatened to call the cops and tell them that I was physically assaulting her (I wasn’t - a circumstance that would have been clear as day to any police officer, were they actually called). An argument in which, for once, and truthfully, she acknowledged that there was no love in the relationship. I knew there was nothing more to be said that night, and went upstairs to go to bed. And as I laid down, the last sound I heard that night was her car rolling back out of the garage…
I’d love to say I was man enough that I didn’t cry. That would be a lie. I’d love to say I was bravely prepared to face what the coming months would bring, but that would be just as big of a lie. The dread and trepidation rolled toward me like a freight train over the coming days and months, but regardless, I knew one thing as a fact - divorce was inevitable.
Part 4 of 5
2016 – The Darkest Hours Are Just Before Dawn
I have many friends that have been through a divorce (some that have even been through more than one). It's not a brag - considering that nearly 50% of marriages in the USA end in divorce, I’d say more of you are in the same boat as I, than otherwise. I will say though, that in most cases, I am exceedingly jealous of how quickly, and easily they and their estranged spouses were able to come to agreeable terms and move on with their lives.
Such was never meant to be the case for me. My Ex couldn’t even be bothered to have a face-to-face conversation about our relationship, or what the divorce would entail after she returned from her vacation. Nay, she actually had the gall, and the audacity, to send dissolution paperwork, with a list of her demands WHILE SHE WAS STILL WITH HER BROTHER. And she had the sheer cheek to do so on Thanksgiving Weekend. It was a great wonder that I was even able to find a single Lawyer available the day before Thanksgiving who was willing to give me a single hour of consultation to figure out my path forward. The one that did, listened to my story, and gave me a simple piece of advice - do the math on the dissolution demands and then do a comparative analysis on how much better or worse it might be than a 50/50 split of all assets to figure out if I was better off just accepting them. She warned me that it was unlikely that court proceedings were going to be exceptionally in my favor, but if that was the direction I wanted to go, she’d be more than happy to take me on as a client.
I spent Thanksgiving Weekend working out the math, and realized that, even though the demands were high, they weren’t as high as they could be, and at the very least, I could be done with this process fast. I also realized that, while my Ex had made it very clear that she wanted 50% of certain assets, she wasn’t sure what those asset values were, or was grossly mistaken about asset values. For example, she had a massively exaggerated equity declared in the house which I came to realize she had derived from the presumption that the entirety of a monthly mortgage check went exclusively to principle payoff. So much for multiple people trying to ‘educate her.
I also wasn’t going to let her exclusively get off with a win when some of her demands were entirely lopsided. I didn’t care that she demanded a 50/50 split of my savings and checking accounts, while hers remained exclusively with her, or that she demanded 50% of the equity in the house, even though the down payment was paid exclusively out of my own savings, and every mortgage payment came out of my pocketbook. But when she demanded to keep her car and leave me to pay off the outstanding loan, or argued that ALL marital jewelry stayed with her (jewelry her parents made for her, and jewelry MY parents made for her), I decided pushback was necessary. I all but accepted her dissolution demands with a few modifications to try to save me some money, and the demand that the jewelry my parents made be returned to them. I updated all the paperwork with the correct dollar values associated, attached the appropriate statements as proof and sent it back for her review.
One of the marks of insanity is pushing your luck when you are winning. My Ex was never going to lose anything with a divorce other than maybe a little bit of social face. Heck, before the dissolution paperwork, if she had even bothered to talk and just agree that the marriage was over and she wanted to go back to her parents, I’d have happily paid a premium flight set to send her home and paid for her stuff to be shipped. But the true colors were starting to appear. This wasn’t JUST about getting divorced now, it was about coming out financially ahead. Why should I be allowed to keep all that I had worked to achieve and save, when, by virtue of a simple piece of paper, she could claim her pound of flesh? She returned the dissolution, this time, claiming that my numbers (even though they were backed with official statements) were wrong, and that I was attempting to cheat her, and now, because of that, she was going to demand 50% of EVERYTHING, and in additional, 5 years of alimony (more than the total time we were married). Her final jab in the email where she explained this was:
“Do remember that I am entitled to each of the things I am asking for. In court, every single thing I am asking for will stand and I am prepared to fight for it if you plan on making it difficult. ”
Two days later, on the 2nd day of 2016, I officially retained my lawyer and filed for divorce.
My current wife told me once that it annoys her how wishy-washy I can get about inconsequential decisions or issues (like what takeout we should get for dinner), but apparently, it’s equally horrifying how ruthless I can be when a decision actually matters. I guess, in a way she’s right. Immediately after my Ex drove out of the house, I tried to call her parents to at least make sure she was alright when she’d inevitably call them. All I got back was an hour long diatribe about how everything was unilaterally my fault, and that everything was on me. I called her brother to say nothing more than to just text me to let me know that she arrived at his place safely. I was left ignored. And through all of that, she never called once and just emailed dissolution paperwork without so much as a conversation. You bet the gloves were officially off.
I told my lawyer that I knew I was going to be paying SOMETHING to get out of the marriage, but I wanted her to do everything in her power to make sure that number was as small as possible. She agreed, and when we got started, we got STARTED:
My Ex claimed emotional trauma from being served divorce papers at work. My lawyer and I pointed out that either of us could have filed - I merely did it first - and that the ONLY two addresses I had for her were our house, where she clearly wasn’t, and her place of work.
My Ex then filed to demand that I cover her legal fees, on the pretense that I made more money than her, and that she couldn’t afford her legal fees in a protracted court case. I argued with my lawyer, that there was no indication yet of a long duration court case, and regardless, in my current capacity as a contractor, there was no guarantee to my monthly salary. In any case, she CHOSE her lawyer who happened to charge a higher hourly rate than mine.
My personal favorite was when she demanded spousal support payments for the same reason as above, I suspect, after her lawyer pointed out that we lived in a No-Fault Divorce State with No Alimony. By the time she filed this motion, we had both gone through discovery and presented one another with financial statements and documents supporting our personal claims so I had her finances for the last 6 months in my hands. And they were gold - I pointed out to my lawyer that she was spending close to 60% of her monthly take home on eating out every month, and that she was also spending close to 50% of everything that WASN’T going to rent and utilities on frivolous purchases as evidenced by HER OWN documents. Needless to say, my lawyer more than happily took advantage of my legwork to file counters and get both motions dismissed.
Through all of this, for some reason, I didn’t rotate watches. It felt poetically right to keep the Hamilton Khaki Field as my primary watch as I navigated through the rapids of the divorce process. In the entire time I have had a significant collection of watches, it might have actually been the longest period of time I kept a single watch, and ONLY the one watch in use.
Even though I never spoke another word directly to her during this process, I could tell my Ex was starting to get increasingly frustrated. I’m not sure who she spoke with leading up to all of this, or who put what types of ideas in her mind about how easy the process was going to be, or how she was going to win in the end, but she definitely wasn’t happy that I was playing the game. I suspect part of her frustration was that I was even willing to spend the money in the first place. She always got off on accusing me of being cheap because I didn’t like to spend money on luxury travel, or luxury cars, or luxury clothes. My guess is that she thought that I wouldn’t be willing to pay a lawyer so she’d be able to make any and all demands she wanted of me as she wanted. OR she thought I might beg, grovel and plead and accept ANY demands on her part not to have to part with my savings.
The longer I was left with my own thoughts through the process, and the longer I had to reflect back on memories from the last four years, the more I realized that it was probably that latter thought. I remembered:
- The insistence that I reinvest my savings and investments in India through my Ex In-Laws
- The pushback on investing in a house until everyone else was purchasing one, and she didn’t want to feel left behind.
- The demand from her Grandfather that I transfer all assets into HER name for her to manage.
- The sudden 180 on having children from not wanting to worry about it, to suddenly becoming the most crucial thing.
Evidently, when the plan fell completely apart, I guess they figured that, if a divorce is going through, might as well reap as much money out of it as possible. Said grim realization set my resolve even further to make sure that my ex was NOT going to have a simple time getting what SHE wanted.
Through this entire ordeal, I was also working on helping my parents pack up their house as they prepared to leave Alaska for the next chapter of their lives. It was an equally sad time for me, since that meant that I was the last of the family still in the state - my sister had left years prior for Grad School and was never going to return. I was also still trying to find full time employment, hopping between professional contracts and making a few dollars here or there. Just enough to keep myself afloat with my bills, but the pinch was real, and hard, as the legal fees kept racking up.
A shining star of momentary distraction came that fall by way of a package that I had been waiting for nearly the entire course of my marriage. During that first year, a project was started here on Watchuseek, being run by a fellow HMT enthusiast, to try to convince HMT to work with us to build a 40mm handwinding watch for the first time. Much like my marriage, the project had gone through trials and tribulations, but unlike my marriage, it continued to stay the course. And the final product was now sitting in front of me:
The HMT Airavata. It wasn’t much, but it was a welcome temporary distraction from everything else happening in my life. And even though I didn’t immediately start wearing it at that moment, the temporary joy it brought me was enough to keep me from falling apart in a moment where I was now separated from my family, and still fighting for my own personal value against an Ex and a family that had seemingly never seen me as an independent individual from the first day of the union.
Two more months of fighting back and forth - my Ex sent an offer through her lawyer that she would drop all demands for a 50/50 split of all assets if I just paid her off with a single lump sum. I’d be lying if I told you my lawyer reached out to me to suggest that her terms were reasonable - even she could barely contain her mirth at the ridiculous amount. A fact that was further quantified when she had a chat with the Ex’s lawyer who also agreed that the amount was stupid, but that it was the amount that the Ex and her family had come to, and he was just passing it on. We stood firm and came up only slightly from a previous agreeable amount from our side. An amount we justified with about an entire ream of paper’s worth of evidence. (A note to anyone getting divorced: the more records you have going back further in time, the easier it is for you to prove a point regarding finances). They were finally forced to acquiesce and accept I wasn’t about to roll over, and they were running out of justification to demand anything more than I was willing to give up.
Late that year, I was sitting in front of a Judge as they reviewed the paperwork and acknowledged that both sides were agreeable to the terms. The gavel fell; the papers were signed and stamped - I was free. 4 years of toxic marriage were done, and I was through with my Ex, and her family, seemingly for good.
‘Seemingly’ was the acting phrase. The final divorce decree had 14 stipulations associated - and we had 30 days to make good on all 14 stipulations. 9 of them were in my control, and the remaining 5 were my Ex’s responsibility. The final stipulation would actually end of taking 6 TOTAL YEARS and become its own comedy of errors, in no small part due to ineptitude, and total apathy from my Ex. Part of the running joke with my current wife that my divorce actually took more time to finalize than my first marriage actually lasted.
Actually, it is due to meeting my wife, that I was able to discover the secret truth that I was never able to prove - a secret that I am still positive that, to this day, my Ex has likely never revealed to even her own parents. I met my wife at a Thanksgiving Dinner hosted by a common friend that year who knew that we both had nowhere else to be for Thanksgiving that year (she had just moved to the city that year with her boyfriend, and I had no family to celebrate with as they were all in other parts of the world). The following year, after her break-up with her own boyfriend, the two of us started dating and were an item the next year.
That year, one of my dad’s friends’ oldest son was getting married, and was going to be getting married in Alaska. Remember the story from a few years back of the folks that came to visit for the Glacier Cruise? Same group coming up a second time. This time, they were meeting my new girlfriend (current wife) for the first time. The wedding was a blast, and I had invited her along as my Plus One. She got along great with everyone in attendance, and even made new friends with several of the other guests. Once again, the HMT Sona made its presence know (if only to me
) as my watch of choice for an Indian Wedding 😀The following week, while I was at work, my phone started going ballistic, as my wife was reaching out to me and flagging her messages as important. When I was able to respond, I asked her what was up - to which I was greeted with a screenshot of a profile photo, followed by an All-Caps question: “IS THIS YOUR EX?”
Oh great… “Yeah, that’s her. What’s going on?”
“Someone kept Liking, Unliking, and Liking a couple of photos from that wedding last week that I was tagged in with you and me. I went in to figure out who the hell was doing it and saw this profile picture!”
“I don’t know what to tell you…”
“How does she know the bride and groom?”
“Well, the groom and her brother were both in college together and were decent enough friends - she met him a couple of times herself while we were married so she probably added him on Facebook way back, and saw that he got married.”
“Hmm… I’m curious why she kept liking my photos? What do you think I should do? I think she’s trying to get my attention”
“I honestly don’t care. Ignore her, block her, respond to her - do whatever you want to do honey.”
“I’ll think about it”
5 minutes later….
“MY COWORKER IS HER MUTUAL FRIEND! What the hell?”
“News to me honey - not sure what to tell you there
”“That rat! I’mma confront him and find out what he knows about her!”
5 minutes later…
“I asked Co-worker what the deal was and he just looked at me shocked like, ‘Oh crap, YOUR Appophylite is HER former Appophylite?’ I’m getting details from him now.
Oh ****… Appophylite, I’ve got tea when we get home!”
Well, my interest was surely piqued.
Wife got home later that evening, and over dinner, the story was laid out and revealed further. Apparently, her co-worker’s wife had worked at the same student newspaper for a year as my Ex when they were both in grad school, which is how he had come to meet her himself. Over the course of two years, they became part of a friend group composed of folks that knew each other through the paper, and their spouses/partners at the time. The year our marriage had finally fallen apart, my Ex had gotten really close with one of the photo-journalists and as one thing led to another, they had become an item.
“I never knew the truth,’ co-worker had told my wife. “She told us that she was trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t get out. We always told her we were in full support of her, and her husband had to be a rat-bastard. I never would have presumed that her ex is YOUR boy-friend! I can’t believe she lied to us like that!”
Turns out, he was still in contact with the man who my ex had cheated on me with, and he had gotten him in touch with my wife. He corroborated to her that they had had a relationship and that he didn’t know the real truth of the matter. Apparently, months after the divorce was finalized, she followed him to a new state to try to keep a relationship with him, and he broke it off because she was too clingy, needy and demanding. He told my wife that he’d understand if she relayed the details to me and I was angry at him.
There wasn’t any point in being mad at the poor fool. Unlike me, he seemed to have realized what he was probably getting into and cut it before he’d be sucked into a similar quagmire as me. In any case, I was just glad to finally have closure on a chapter of my life. I realized that there was never really love in the marriage. I had proof I was cheated on, and now I had proof that she had tried to save face by claiming I was an abusive a-hole. I could officially wash her out of my life ... .once she’d just resolve this final gorram issue in the divorce!
Part 5 of 5
2020 – First Rays of New Light
I think, one of the hardest things for my current wife, was dealing with the unknowns in the early days of our relationship together. Both of us formed a bond over the fact that we had both been through troubled first marriages that ended in contentious divorces. Fortunately for her, her’s was less financially damaging and was more of a case of vindictiveness against one another. That aside, mine was scarring enough for me, that I was extremely gun shy about getting into another relationship easily. It was scarring enough for my parents that they actually stepped away from trying to consider an arranged marriage for my sister and have since left her to her own devices to attempt to forge her own path. Even once we were a committed couple, I couldn’t bring myself to propose to her because I was STILL on minor contracts without a permanent job. For the early duration of our relationship, I was actually the ‘more broke’ individual just because my monthly take-home was still barely covering the bills and expenses.
When I finally got the current job I am working in, in late 2020, I knew it was finally time to prepare to propose. Though I had already been married once, my first marriage was through the traditional arranged marriage channel, and I was once again, filled with trepidation regarding doing things wrong with this, the more conventionally understood marriage process in the USA. I chose the ring, I spoke with her dad, I figured out, what I assumed, was a romantic, but somewhat relaxed couples photo session, where I could surprise her toward the end.
The irony of everything I planned for that moment, is that I chose to wear my Dad’s Omega AquaTerra on the day that I actually proposed. My dad had purchased the watch 5 years prior when his younger brother passed away. Having lived in the USA for his entire adult life, he had watched as his parents, and his younger sister passed away before him. When his brother was critical in the hospital, he rushed overseas to be by his side. We got the call from my aunt, after my dad had taken off from India that my uncle had shortly passed away.
Knowing my dad would likely not see the messages until he landed State-side, my mother asked me to drive up so that I could be a shoulder for my dad to lean on when he got home. He was indeed, a bit of a wreck when he arrived home that day, but the next day, he revealed that he had come to terms with the fact that the last time he said Goodbye to his brother was likely the last time he was ever going to see him. So while he was saddened by the loss, it wasn’t hitting him as unexpected.
While he was waiting for his flight in Mumbai, he had decided on a whim, to buy a watch to remember his brother by. Not sure why the AquaTerra is what struck his interest, but that was what it was. Unfortunately, he could never bring himself to wear it, so when he and my mom left the States the next year, they left the watch with me, still unworn.
The fact that it remained unworn to that point in time finally caught up with me, and, for one of the few times in my life, I intentionally decided to wear a specific watch so that it would be associated with a specific memory.
2021 – A New Path Forged Ahead
Getting married in the height of the COVID pandemic brought about its own set of challenges to mark a new chapter in life. On the one hand, neither of us wanted an extravagant wedding the second time around. Seeing as all of our parental units were immunocompromised in some way or form, it also made little sense to try to force anyone to travel, so we opted to quietly elope. Only the ‘Quiet’ portion quickly gave way to my wife’s desires to be Extra just once. She decided that, if we were eloping, that she wanted to do so on a glacier - that’s right: A Glacier Wedding. She still wanted the Dress, and me in a Suit, but she wanted us to get married smack dab in the middle of a field of ice.
Alrighty then! Gotta prepare for this shindig! Actually, very little prep on our side - my wife convinced me to opt for a wedding planner to do all the logistics coordination and leave us to just get ready for the day. Smart choice, that…
The day of the wedding, I decided to give some actual thought to the watch I was going to wear. This wasn’t like the first wedding, where I merely selected the most expensive watch I owned, and once again, I’m not big on the belief that I need to buy a new watch to commemorate any event. The choice became imminently obvious when I realized that the color palette of the day warranted a splash of color, even if it would be next to invisible to anyone but me. And seeing as the only watch I have that is a genuinely different color from Black or White is the following:
The choice was obvious. Nearly 5 years after I finally got the Airavata, it was making its mark in my life and starting to tell its own stories 🙂
2022 – Life Finds a Way
In surprising fashion, almost immediately after we got married, when I came inside from a snow shoveling session, my wife came down the stairs and placed something in my hand. It was a pregnancy test. We had only just started trying, and almost immediately, she had a positive test in her hands.
Telling our parents and our siblings next was one of the happiest days. For my family, this was the first grandchild/nephew, and for my wife, while her sister, step-father and stepmother had several grandchildren/nephews/nieces by way of her step siblings on that side, this was a first biological for the mother and sister, and for her father and step-mother in general. Many tears were shed, as were promises and demands to be the first to visit the new baby.
The days, weeks and months of preparing for his imminent arrival disappeared quickly, and nearly as fast as we discovered my wife was pregnant, we found ourselves in the hospital with her in labor. Labor was agonizing - going for nearly 2 days, before the doctors finally called it and told her she was getting an emergency C-section, whether she wanted it or not.
45 minutes later, I was holding close to 10 lbs of screaming, purple squish that I could only have imagined nearly 16 years prior. I had my first born in my hands - a little mini-me that was unique in every way, and yet, part me, and part my wife.
As my wife attempted to relax and recover from the C-section and the rigors of labor, I found myself on constant watch taking care of the baby’s diapers, feedings, and baths, and keeping an eye on his fussing. I don’t actually think I got a chance to properly sleep until 2 days later.
It was only then, as I was grabbing a quick nap, that I looked at the time on my wrist and realized which watch I had ended up grabbing and slapping on as we ran out the door 4 days prior:
Over 6 years after first getting it, and through 6 years of use the Nth Scorpene finally got its first major memories associated with it 🙂
2024 and On - One Step At A Time
As I look ahead to 2024 and the future, I have no idea what the future will hold. Watching my son grow up, waiting to confirm if wife is pregnant with kiddo number 2. Watching the two of them learn to interact with one another and torture the poor cat to no end. Seeing my wife graduate with her new degree. Watching the kiddos go through school and get ready for college or whatever the future holds for them. And waiting to see what watches play what parts in the stories to come 🙂
