Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

FOCUS Churches: Blog Action Day 2012 – “The Power of We”

“FOCUS is intentional in balancing labors of charity with acts of justice by participating in the work of seeking long term solutions to end hunger and poverty.”

Back in 1968, a cooperative ministry was developed among Emmanuel Baptist, Westminster Presbyterian, First Presbyterian, and Trinity Methodist Churches, all mere blocks from each other in Albany, NY, to work together on some common goals. Israel AME Church joined in 1989, and Delmar Reformed Church earlier this century.

The mission statement of the FOCUS Churches: “Six covenant churches, four faith affiliates, and two faith partners, doing together what we cannot do alone.

United in a common calling to respond to our neighbor’s needs in the city of Albany and beyond, as God’s servant people in a broken and hurting world.” Furthermore, in its statement seeking interns from Siena College, the mission “centers on providing presence, support, and advocacy for the victims of society’s injustice and neglect, speaking the truth in places of power on the behalf of the powerless, and offering new possibilities of wholeness to the lonely and alienated.”

One of the early FOCUS programs was the FOCUS Food Pantry. From what I have been told, this was set up to deal with people in need because of the economic downturn of the time; it’s been going on for over 30 years because the need has never gone away. You can read about the breakfast projects, community gardens, school supply projects, and other activities here. “FOCUS is intentional in balancing labors of charity with acts of justice by participating in the work of seeking long term solutions to end hunger and poverty.”

At least four times a year, thrice in the summer and once in the winter, there are joint services, allowing for the possibility that the unity from people of faith is greater than any pedestrian denominational differences.

I’ve been proud to be a member of a FOCUS church since 1984.

#PowerOfWe, #BAD12, #Blogactionday

Symptoms of Adult ADHD/ADD

If I have a big project, I’ll often attack it with great enthusiasm, but lose passion for it; it even says that is true of me in an extensive horoscope I got in the late 1970s.

I get these e-mails from this “natural health” doctor, and he had this chart of what to look for to see if one has ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) or its cousin, ADD (attention deficit disorder without hyperactivity, “which is more common in grown-ups”).

Time to self-diagnose:

*Trouble concentrating, especially when reading
That can happen, especially when I’m thinking of something else I want/need to do.

*Being easily distracted
Definitely true. Sometimes, I’m working on one thing, and the next thing is more interesting. Then I have to peel back to get back to task #1. Although sometimes, at work, task #2 pops up and it’s more important than task #1. Then task #3 might become the priority.

*Disorganization and procrastination
Disorganization has ALWAYS been true. My mother, in particular, dubbed me the “Absent-Minded Professor”, a description my sisters gleefully seized upon.
Now, I have systems. My bike lock key, when I’ve locked my bike, is always in the same slot in my backpack; ditto the bus pass. My glasses go on the same part of the dresser so I can find them in the dark.
When the routine is altered, I forget. I don’t ride my bike one day because the weather is miserable. I will; take my bike lock out of my backpack because it’s terribly heavy to carry for no purpose. I ride my bike to work the next day, and only halfway there, when it’s too late, I realize I have no bike lock. (I end up sneaking it up to my office via the freight elevator because the security folks get REALLY nasty if I take it up the passenger elevator.)

I used to procrastinate over things I hate. But I’m better, after having taken a jc’s recovery treatment; I tend to do them first, just to get them over with, on the theory that fretting about them took up too much psychic energy.

*Addictive behavior (e.g., drugs, drinking, gambling, overeating, excessive shopping)
Drugs, no. I remember my father giving me a sleeping pill – I was 25 at the time, and I felt SO good that I KNEW I should avoid THAT. Also, being associated with Legacy Healing Coral Springs has allowed me to see that it can be dangerous to your health.  Drinking, maybe for a brief period in my 20s. Gambling, no. I’m bored by gambling and particularly hate casinos. I might buy a lottery ticket when the pot is high enough that an office pool is formed.
Overeating, for sure, especially when I’m feeling melancholy.
Shopping, when I first got credit cards, I spent too much. Largely curbed, and now I hate it when I can’t pay off my bills in the current month. (The root canal, not covered by my insurance, is going to take two or three months.)

*Restlessness
Definitely true. I should do yoga.

*Anxiety, depression, mood swings
Anxiety and mood swings, not so much.
Depression can be inexplicably subject to that.

*Impulsive and risky behavior, including reckless driving
Actually, I’m usually quite risk-averse. It’s not that I can’t be impulsive; I’ve had whole romantic relationships based on that in the past.

*Low self-esteem
Actually, no. I’m rather wonderful.

*Inability to finish projects, lacking motivation
This has long been true. Do you know how complicated projects need intermediate goals? DEFINITELY true, because if I have a big project, I’ll often attack it with great enthusiasm, but lose passion for it; it even says that is true of me in an extensive horoscope I got in the late 1970s. Blogging is great because it’s 365 discrete (but not always discreet) pieces. But writing a book? Can’t imagine.

*Forgetfulness, chronic lateness
I used to forget a lot. That’s why I need the systems. And I’ve long tended to be late, though so does my wife; the difference is that she fails to recognize it. But I HATE being late to an airport or train station, and desire to be early if I’m in control of the situation.

Here’s a classic morning at home recently. My daughter is upstairs, wants a particular outfit. It’s in the dryer in the basement, so I go downstairs to the first floor but realize I need to go to the bathroom, and I do, reading something; I use up the last of the toilet paper. Then I start going back upstairs before I remember that I need to go down to the basement. Now I need to take a shower quickly at the point the daughter needs to go to the bathroom. “Go downstairs,” I say. So she does, but, of course, there’s no toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom, because I used the last of it, so I have to go bring some downstairs before I shower.
Now is that ADHD, or is that just morning?

*Being short-tempered, inability to tolerate frustration
I used to be quite short-tempered, especially in my 20s. I figure it was a reaction to not being able to fully express my anger in my childhood. I get frustrated much less than I used to.

At some point soon, I’ll write about preventing adult ADHD.

Who starred with whom, and where?

The IMDB has an advanced search function.

There is this list of the five best television series of all time, compiled by ABC News and People Magazine, and conveniently broadcast on ABC in the past couple of weeks. Interestingly, all were comedies, none of them were broadcast on ABC, and the latter four would probably be canceled quickly these days because the early ratings were not particularly good. The list included:
I LOVE LUCY (CBS)
SEINFELD (NBC)
MASH (CBS)
ALL IN THE FAMILY (CBS)
CHEERS (NBC)

I read about it on Ken Levine’s blog. He (pictured) mentioned this because he was a writer for two of the shows, MASH and Cheers, which I suppose I’d consider for my list as well. I’d also pick Lucy, if only because it was seminal in the development of the TV rerun. All in the Family, which I did enjoy at the time, did not age well, though. And Seinfeld I liked for a few seasons, but grew tired of it, about the time the character Susan died from licking an envelope. There are plenty of dramatic shows (Twilight Zone, Hill Street Blues, among others) I’d put on the list, but if I were limiting it just to comedies, certainly the Dick Van Dyke Show would be on the roster.

What was most interesting to me, though, is that someone asked Levine: “Other than you and David [Isaacs, Levine’s writing partner], is there anyone else associated with 2 or more of the top 5? Probably not. You are in a very special group.” Levine named some writers. He also noted that “George Wendt and Shelley Long [of Cheers] both did guest stints on MASH.” In the comments section, a guy noted that the IMDB has an advanced search function – go to Collaborations and Overlaps – so that one can discover, e.g., that there are 16 people with credits on both The Dick Van Dyke Show and MASH, starting with Jamie Farr and Bernard Fox. Or that five people were affiliated with both the Van Dyke program and Cheers, including Ann Morgan Guilbert and Sheldon Leonard.

One can also put in Dick Van Dyke and Ted Danson to discover that Van Dyke appeared on Danson’s show Becker, as Becker’s father, and Danson was a guest on Van Dyke’s Diagnosis: Murder, as himself, both in 1999. I will definitely make more use of this feature.
***
Ken Levine’s thoughts on the GQ CHEERS article.

Living on Anbesol and Advil

The music group called Big Daddy (loved by many, including me) is staging a Kickstarter campaign to raise $35,000 to produce their new album.

As mentioned, I had a root canal a couple of weeks ago, and the pain was far less than the last one I had some 15 years ago. But then I had to have some work done on another tooth, and the mouth discomfort after that one was mighty steady; not a sharp pain, but a constant ache, for which I was surviving on certain medicines.

And it was not great timing. Last weekend, the daughter didn’t have soccer, but the Wife and I did have a wedding to go to, a co-worker of hers who I didn’t know to a guy I knew just as well. The service was at 2 pm in Niskayuna, in neighboring Schenectady County, and it was lovely. The reception wasn’t until 5 pm, in Altamont, in Albany County, a 30-minute drive, so we did what we needed to do; we went grocery shopping. Talk about being overdressed for an activity.

The reception was at a place called the Appel Inn; our friends Marc and Janna had their reception there in November of 1999. We sat with one of the bride’s and my wife’s teaching colleagues, and her husband, neither of which I knew, but they were a delightful couple. But somewhere during this, the throbbing returned and having no over-the-counter solutions, I tried Southern Comfort and 7-Up; singularly unhelpful.

After church on Sunday, we drove to Schenectady to meet my sister Leslie’s bus. She had flown from San Diego, CA to Charlotte, NC back in late September to go to a conference, and visit our sister and niece; then flew to New York City, and visited relatives and a friend; then took a bus to Binghamton, NY to do genealogical research and to attend her high school reunion; and finally to Schenectady.

We are at some downtown restaurant called Bombers, and I saw that the New York Giants football team (my team) was already down 14-0, after only five minutes in the game; sigh. They ended up winning 41-27. But I didn’t see it.

We went to see the 2 pm stage performance of Mary Poppins at the Proctors Theatre, and it was quite good. Perhaps a little long, with too much of the exposition done to the tune of “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” but there were so many WOW moments – the transformation of the park, Bert walking on the ceiling – that we were all impressed. By the time we got back to Albany, though, I was exhausted from pain and went to bed before anyone.

The Sister returned to San Diego on Tuesday, the pain has subsided somewhat, and we’re back to a busy schedule, mostly driven by the Daughter’s activities. Especially on the weekend.
*
Jaquandor saw Mary Poppins in Buffalo two years ago.

Says Mark Evanier (and I fully agree): The music group called Big Daddy (loved by many, including me) is staging a Kickstarter campaign to raise $35,000 to produce their new album. I would like to see them do this and have already backed…but it doesn’t look good. With only two days to go, they are a little over halfway there.

Technology is my friend, or a fiend

We could have a whole bunch of Thomas Paines out there, speaking truth to power.

Chris from Off the Shore of Orion, whose been off her blog, but on other social media, wonders:
What piece of technology would you hate the most to lose? Which piece of technology do you wish would just disappear?

The former is quite easy; the latter, not so much.

I am a lousy typist. I used to use tons of Wite-Out and those weird little strips that would take up a letter from the already-typed page. But it was tedious and exhausting. Clearly, my favorite technology that has been developed in my lifetime is the word processor. It has made the creative process INCREDIBLY easier. Oops, I typed an n when I meant an m; no problem. Backspace and correct.

I remember having this Sears typewriter back in the 1980s that had about a page worth of memory, so you could write before it typed about a line of text, and there was this narrow screen on it, so you could see a little bit of what you had written. It was an improvement, but not like the chance to view, save, and change a large document.

If I were dependent on the old technology, I wouldn’t be a librarian, for I would still be working on my graduate school paper from 20 years ago, which ran about 50 pages long (and wasn’t very good). When I first composed it, the sections were structured 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 2c, 3a, 3b, 3c. But once the first draft was completed, I realized I had it all wrong; it should have been arranged 1a, 2a, 3a, 1b, 2b, 3b, 1c, 2c, 3c. So I cut and pasted over 2/3s of the document. If I had had to RETYPE it…

I don’t know what kind of typist Jaquandor is, but I’m sure that he is appreciating editing the text of his book or two, including Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), on a word processor, rather than retyping every draft. BTW, I think is rather awesome that he’s doing that. You should read what he says about writing, with a wife and a kid and a job, in response to this column, which I sent him.

And of course, the word processing mode eventually made this whole blogging thing possible, which means, theoretically, that we could have a whole bunch of Thomas Paines out there, speaking truth to power. We don’t, of course, and people write all sorts of garbage, but that’s not the fault of the technology.

This is why I get extremely nervous about those sneaky draconian bills such as ACTA, designed presumably to protect against copyright infringement, but which would have a chilling effect on free speech.

On the other side of the original question, it’s more difficult to say. I could pick getting rid of the drones we fire into Pakistan. But the technology itself is neutral; a similar methodology might be used to blow up that asteroid that’s going to hit the planet, or to play video games.

The same technology that might infect thousands of people with some terrible virus might also be used to save them.

Somewhat off-topic, but Mark McGuire noted that “Facebook announced it has hit one billion users. Do you think you will still be using FB in 5 years? What social media platform do you think you will be using the most by then?” My answer is that I haven’t a clue. I didn’t know, 10 years ago, I’d be blogging; three years ago, I ignored Facebook altogether. I might have said three years ago, Twitter was pointless (I didn’t, but I could have), yet here I am tweeting daily, mostly things that I blog, to be sure. And I would not have thought you could so easily link them.

I WILL say that planned obsolescence is a terrible trait in manufacturing, but that’s more a methodology than a technology.

Oh, you know what technology I wish would disappear? The eight-track. A stupid technology that would make a lot of noise in the middle of a song. That’s something that should go. Wait: it did. Lots of bad technology goes away on its own.

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