Twentieth Anniversary Year: Fill & Download for Free

I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried.I asked, begged, persuaded, demanded to get her to counselling. She stubbornly, steadfastly, persistently refused, giving no reasons at all. She refused to discuss our relationship or going to a counsellor. If I mentioned it she would walk out of the room.Eventually I started a second life. I lived with her, socialised with her, shared finances with her. Then after many years I had two affairs.She was magnificent in her consistency. No discussion, no counsellor, nothing. Her attitude was clear: “It’s my way or the highway.”It was about 15 years after the problems started that I finally chose the highway.My life has transformed in every possible way since then. Not for one second have I regretted leaving, although sometimes I regret not having done so earlier. But trying for so long had the benefit that there is absolutely nothing at all that I can say I “should have tried”.Except…The interesting thing is that on the day I told her it was over, she asked if we could go to counselling. It seems as if she had been waiting for me to threaten to leave before she would agree to counselling. But it was too late now. I had made up my mind. And I was outta there.That was 22 years ago now. They have unquestionably been the best 22 years of my life. We celebrated our twentieth anniversary last year. My second twentieth anniversary.You are at the point of giving up? Try, try, be creative, try, ask, tell, thunder, demand, beg, plead for communication. Do it for years.One day your mindset will change. Overnight. After (literally) years of trying to make it work, suddenly you won’t want to make it work.Then go. And NEVER go back. NEVER. You gave it every possible chance. You tried everything you could. Trying again will simply prove to you that you already tried everything before. Move on.Good luck.

In hindsight, I think it’s easy for us to see why Ruth Bader Ginsburg probably should have stepped down at some point between 2009 and 2014, when Barack Obama was still president and Democrats still had control of the Senate, but there were good reasons for her to remain on the court at the time.First of all, we should stress that, at the time, it was not at all clear that Justice Ginsburg was putting her seat in any danger by not stepping down. She only turned eighty in 2013 and she wasn’t having as many health problems as she later ended up having. At that time, she had no reason to foresee that Democrats would lose control of the Senate in 2014 for the next six years, she had no reason to foresee that Donald Trump would be elected president in 2016, and she certainly had no reason to foresee that she would die before the end of Trump’s first term in office.Part of the reason why she didn’t retire was because she wanted to imitate the progressive Justice Louis Brandeis, who served on the Supreme Court for nearly twenty-three years before stepping down from the court in 1939 at the age of eighty-two. By the time Ginsburg achieved the goal of serving twenty-three years on the Supreme Court in April 2016, Republicans had control of the Senate and it was not a good time for her to step down.Another reason is because she wanted to be replaced by a justice with equally progressive views as herself and she knew that, given the political climate, Obama could only realistically be expected to nominate someone more moderate than herself. In 2014, she said:“Who do you think President Obama could appoint at this very day, given the boundaries that we have? If I resign any time this year, he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court. They took off the filibuster for lower federal court appointments, but it remains for this court. So anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided.”Another possible reason why Ginsburg refused to retire during Obama’s presidency when Democrats still had control of Senate is because Justice Sonia Sotomayor (who joined the court on 8 August 2009) and Justice Elena Kagan (who joined the court on 7 August 2010) were both relatively new to the Supreme Court at the time and, as an older progressive female justice who had served on the court for years, she probably wanted to stay around as a mentor for them.We shouldn’t blame Justice Ginsburg for not being a prophet. The people who are really to blame here are Senate Republicans, especially Mitch McConnell. They are the ones who have turned Supreme Court nominations into the political circus they have become.ABOVE: Photograph from this article from Vox of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2013 celebrating her twentieth anniversary on the Supreme Court

One of my greatest hobbies is solving logical puzzles. To treat my brain with Microsoft’s classic interview puzzles I got “How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle”. That is where I came across this story about Bill Gates.“During a 1998 trip with friends, Gates and his party stopped at a small, exclusive restaurant in Carmel, California. The manager pulled Gates aside and said there was a problem with their reservation. A Colorado couple that had been married there twenty years previously had vowed to return on their twentieth anniversary. The manager had forgotten all about it. The couple showed up, and the proprietor didn't have the heart to turn them away.Gates said it was no problem. He invited the couple to share a table with his party of high-ranking executives.This turned out to be a mistake. The anniversary couple was thoroughly obnoxious. The man got drunk and asked where everyone was from. Microsoft vice president of sales and marketing Jeff Raikes said “Nebraska”.“Oh that’s where they have the convicts playing football!” the man said. He went off on how terrible Nebraska’s football coach, Tom Osborne, was. (Raikes, as it happened, idolized Osborne, who had been a surprise guest at Raikes’s fortieth party.) The executives were about ready to punch the guy when the anniversary couple dropped the pretense. They admitted they were actors, hired by Gates as a practical joke.”