Contador Harrison

Today marks the 40th wedding anniversary of a couple in Shepparton, floodplain of the Goulburn River in northern Melbourne. The two have defied the odds of modern society to successfully and faithfully stuck  together through thick and thin. Husband was my high school teacher and wife my elementary teacher, thats how I’m closely connected to them as a person in addition for them being family friends. So when they dropped me an email a fortnight ago inviting me for the occasion, I was gutted as I knew it wasn’t possible to attend but took time since then to engage them and finding out how they’ve survived all these years. While they know that not everyone who has tied the knot is successful, the wife acknowledged marriage is like a rocky road at times so a married man or woman need the appropriate mental, physical skills to be tolerance, empathy, similar moral  and ethical values and filled with lashings of kindness.They have got a lovely marriage and it is not easy at times, p...

Eclipse’s song  Makes Me Love You released twenty years ago in 1998 was playing on my stream device when a filly in the neck of the woods stopped me to check on how the nabe’s most sibylline bachelor is faring on.That  opened an opportunity to share her tribulations after being dumped by her boyfriend.Apparently its been six months since they broke up and oh boy, the filly is in miserable state. Although I have never experienced break ups of relationships in my life, I do understand that breakups are supposed to be  difficult and painful. As she narrated her ordeals, heartbreak of the break is a feeling she truly didn’t know until it happened to her. In her view, the love hurts, a well known romantic abstraction, is reality that has dawned on her after spending weeks in her crib crying.Initially, she thought that the worst days will be the immediate aftermath days, that she will feel progressively  better with time.Sadly as she has learnt thats not the case.Seeing yo...

My mom told me as a tween that life is promenade of broken dreams but she said the most important thing is to remember that failing doesn’t make someone a failure. Failing in life can put a pretty big dent in self-confidence and even though it’s a huge disappointment, it’s worth keeping it all in perspective. Recognizing that failing in relationships, marriages, education, friendships or even business has little to do with talents and abilities as an individual, is the first step in rebuilding personal confidence. She inculcated in me the culture of self-acceptance, the ability to acknowledge my flaws while appreciating my strengths. Those words accompany me day and night as I face internal and external threats to my very targets in life. To be successful in relationships whether business or personal, it’s a matter of working out how to balance it all. The key is to decide what priorities are, to manage time, and to know when to step back and say no. Recently, an organization with glob...

Crystal methamphetamine, commonly known as ice is ripping apart the life of an adulthood friend.Described as highly addictive, she has been consuming the drug that can be turned out in makeshift laboratories and which has been having a devastating effects on her.If it wasn't for her mother’s love, she would possibly still be in the grips of an ice addiction.The drug gained her a criminal record and cost her relationships and more than $500,000 worth of contract and it wasn't until her mother made the heart-breaking decision to remove her daughter from her care that she hit dead end."I was less than a daughter at the time, I was off my life,” the Brisbane naive told me.She said she felt gutted and ashamed, like a low-life, like the worst kind of daughter that could exist in this planet and was really at a  cross-roads in her life, where she could either continue to use or accept that the problem she had was bigger than herself and seek professional help.She said spending ti...

Trying  to escape the drudgeries of life in the city isn’t a cakewalk, doesn’t matter who you are, rich or poor, living in cities is cold-hearted.At times it feels unbelievably fast, at other times it is painfully slow. My time in cities around the world have been thrilling, emotional, difficult and amazing, pretty much take any emotion and chances are, I’ve experienced it.As a tween, my mom told me that cities have their own definition of poverty describing it as a clean measure of income and ability to participate in life and make choices, she insisted that my future was dependent on choices I’ll make.I shared those words with a friend when he first proposed the idea of moving to Melbourne from Pilbara.I can’t say he was thrilled about the  prospect of living in Melbourne as there are so many cities around Australia that he would have wanted to live in and Melbourne just wasn’t at the top of the list.But living in another state has been a longtime dream of his, and eventuall...

When Australian Border Police investigators noticed his crime syndicates was adopting new ways to import drugs rather than just concealing substances in shipping containers, he knew his luxurious lifestyle was coming to a juddering halt.  Born 31 years ago in Newcastle, a harbour city in the Australian state of New South Wales, his rise and fall is one hell of a story.When he was just 13, he joined a gang in Stockton and began using and dealing on the streets and he was earning around $7,000 a week before he  landed in jail at the age of 18. When he was released, he told me how meeting one of his former fellow gang member led him to slip back into the life he was in before arrest. “I was a drug dealer for five years. My best friend died when he was 15 years old. At 18, I was almost gunned down. "Things just went from bad to worse, and, by the age of 23, I had eight elementary school friends dead." His arrest case as there was a new breed of  drugs on the streets of N...

They are two gates away from my place, but a couple in the neck of the woods have got one hell of a fight on their hands. Rammy is a part of  relationships whether married or temporary. My mom told me as a teenager that when two individuals merge their lives, clashes are bound to happen. She was explaining why a female professor friend of hers was always having  a shiner every now and then. The husband was a typical 19th century male chauvinist, if he were alive today, he’d end up in jail. As neighboring couples need to learn, the key is how their existing conflicts is handled going forward. Last year, they went for a vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico and all looked rosy. Grapevine in the hood has it that the female partner does not want to have children for various reasons which according to those  close to her say is career-motivated. Others claim she lacks maternal feelings and has a concern for population growth's impact on the environment which she has carefully co...