Ramblin' with Roger

Things people should know before spending time with me

I think it’s true in all non-verbal communication that sometimes intent gets lost.

Sunday Stealing for October 30, 2011

1. One of my favorite TV shows recently changed the actors who played two characters. Have you ever been bothered by a TV show or movie series changing actors who play a character you love?

Actually, I did, but I got over it quickly. I was watching a soap opera called Another World back in the 1990s. The character Paulina was played by some waif of a woman named Cali Timmins, but then she was replaced by the far more zaftig Judi Evans. it was a shock, but Evans ended up defining the role.

2. A coworker recently shared a link to a blog listing the “five things you should know before dating a journalist.” As a journalist, I can honestly say the writer was spot-on. What are some things people should know before spending time with you?

I’m basically shy when I’m in new situations; I don’t like to talk just to talk when I haven’t anything to say; and if I’m bored, I don’t fake interest very well – best not to bring up the books/movies Twilight.

3. What is something you often do without realizing that you’re doing it?

Hum.

4. Who has the capacity to make you angrier than anyone else in your life, and what in particular does he or she do to make you so angry?

Certain relatives push your buttons more because they know you well. I have particular instances in mind, but I shall pass on that.

5. If a fairy waved a magic wand and gave you the house of your dreams, where would it be and what features would it have?

It’d be close to where I am now, maybe on a side street with less traffic. It’d have a movie viewing room, with comfy seats and real popcorn.

6. What’s a belief that you hold with which many people disagree?

That Nancy Grace should be banned from TV forever.

7. I used to talk in my sleep. In fact, I could carry on a conversation with someone when I was fully asleep, and my mom used this fact when I was a teenager to find out if I did anything wrong and was hiding it from my parents. If you were talking in your sleep tonight, what do you think you would say?

I probably do too, and they are either extensions of dreams or awake conversations.

8. Movie theaters started selling advance tickets for midnight showings months ago. Have you ever attended a midnight premiere showing of a movie?

I’ve been to premieres, and I’ve been to midnight movies, but no.

9. Tigers, lions, and bears were let loose in Zanesville, Ohio, by their owner before he committed suicide, leading to a hunt in which 49 of the animals, including 18 endangered Bengal tigers, were killed. How would you react if you saw “Caution exotic animals. Stay in your vehicle” being displayed on a road sign?

Probably wouldn’t believe it and would end up being mauled to death..

10. If a company opened a theme park aimed at adults, what would you name one of the rides?

Wonderarama. Loved that show.

11. Imagine you just moved onto Sesame Street. Which puppet would you want as your new roommate?

Kermit. We have the green thing going.

12. Have you ever had a weird crush on a famous person that didn’t make sense to you?

Yes. I’ve been fascinated by how certain people I think are attractive but sort of leave me cold (Jennifer Aniston comes to mind), yet other people who I think may be way less than perfect looking are quite fascinating.

13. If you get ten minutes to interview any celebrity of your choice, who would you like it to be?

Paul McCartney, hands down.

14. You’ve just won the complete DVD collection of all the movies starring one actor or actress. Which actor/actress would you pick?

Meryl Streep.

15. Actor George Clooney recently told People Magazine that he doesn’t use Twitter “because I will drink in the evening and I don’t want anything that I could possibly write at midnight to actually end my career.” What is something you’ve said through social media and then regretted it?

Very little if anything. Except that, and I think it’s true in all non-verbal communication, sometimes intent gets lost. But that’s happened in e-mail, especially when it was newer. Irony and sarcasm I tend to avoid in social media because it’s too easy to misconstrue.

16. VH1 has re-introduced its hit show “Pop-Up Video,” which gives behind-the-scenes facts for popular music videos. What musician would you be most interested in learning behind-the-scenes facts about?

Bruce Cockburn.

17. If you stumbled across someone’s personal written journal that was accidentally left in a public place, would you read any of the content?

Not after I had identified the owner. Might read enough to try to figure out whose it was if it weren’t labeled.

18. What is the title of a self-help book that you’d never want to see on a store bookshelf?

How Tea Partiers Can Be More Assertive.

19. Which Halloween costume do you think will be overdone this [past] year?

I would have guessed Gaga.

20. Should a marriage license have a renewal date or expiration date, like a driver’s license?

It’s a terrible idea. Functionally, they already do anyway.

Slavery by Another Name PBS documentary

When you create a class of “the other”, not just racially, but as “the criminal”, even if it were based on a vague, trumped-up charge of vagrancy, it made it easier to think of people as less than human.

My wife and I got a babysitter last Friday night so we could take the bus – MUCH easier than trying to find parking at the uptown UAlbany campus – and watch Slavery by Another Name, “a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.” Though the film will be premiering on PBS, Monday, February 13 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT (check local listings), the real draw of viewing it early on a bigger screen was to be able to see the director of the film, Shelia Curran Bernard, and the writer of the book upon which the film was based, Douglas Blackmon, who I had seen before.

Narrated by actor Laurence Fishburne, “The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality.

It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.” The movie notes the failure of the federal government, both after Reconstruction, and again in the early 20th century under Teddy Roosevelt, to stem the tide of forced labor.

As both the SBAN book and the movie made clear, the peonage system was, in many ways, far worse than the slavery before the Civil War. If one had slaves, one needed to protect one’s economic investment by providing some measure of food, clothing, and shelter. If one were a business, such as US Steel, leasing convicts, one could work someone nearly to death, or sometimes fatally, and then go lease someone else.

The speakers had no prepared comments but were just doing a question and answer period. Anyone who’s seen a Q&A knows that the quality of questions is all over the place. One person wanted to know why we never heard these stories before. Blackmon noted that the further away we are from it in history, the easier it is to look at it. In any case, there will be classroom material available to talk about this previously unknown, shameful part of the American postbellum past.

A question that intrigued me was, basically, how people could be so cruel to each other. The speakers noted that when you create a class of “the other”, not just racially, but as “the criminal”, even if it were based on a vague, trumped-up charge of vagrancy, it made it easier to think of people as less than human. This tied to another question about the new Jim Crow laws, which continue to incarcerate black people in disproportionate numbers; the speakers referred to Michelle Alexander’s book and other sources for further reference.

I must admit to laughing at a recent comment from the blog of SamuraiFrog “It’s Black History Month. So if you’re one of those complete idiots going on Facebook and whining about how having a Black History Month is racism against white people, please pick up a history book. And hit yourself in the head with it. Repeatedly. Until you black out.” The fact that THIS story has largely been missing from the history books makes the continued investigation of the lost black history, a/k/a American history, still relevant.

40 Years Ago-February 2, 1972: punch

March 6 was #1 and March 7 was #2

When I was in college at SUNY New Paltz, the way one signed up for courses was to go through something called sectioning. You went to various tables representing the different departments, and you got an actual IBM punch card representing that class. Once the cards for a particular class were gone, it was closed out.

As a freshman, I was in the group that got the last choices. I could make up a tentative schedule of what I WANTED to take, but I wouldn’t know until I got into the gymnasium where this took place whether a particular class was closed out.

I recall that I got three courses I wanted right away, but the next two took forever, with my first (and second and third choices, et al.) unavailable to me. Ultimately, it took FIVE hours, and I ended up with some 8 a.m. anthropology course that I really didn’t want, though I ended up enjoying it.

I walked back to Scudder Hall, exhausted, and visited someone on the first floor (my room was in the basement). I had totally forgotten that the draft numbers were being picked that day. College student deferments had been ended by then, so it was possible that people could be drafted to go to Vietnam. I asked one friend what his draft number was – don’t recall now, but it was very high. I remember, though, that Fred the gnome’s draft number was 23, which was not good news. It was only then that it occurred to me to ask what MY number was; it was 2. As in 002. I think I was in shock, and too tired to think about it at the moment.

A few days later my oldest friend Karen wrote that, if I were going to get a low number, why not #1? As it turned out, March 6 was #1 and March 7 was #2, so I understood the source of the gallows’ humor.

The first anniversary of my mother’s death

I was there when Mom died shortly before 9 a.m.

I realized that, while my mother’s death naturally made me very sad, and especially that “adult orphan” thing weirded me out, there were some things that mitigated the pain somewhat.

To recap: my “baby” sister called me at work on Friday, January 28 to tell me our mother, Gertrude Elizabeth (Trudy) Green, had gone to the ER with a severe headache. It was latter determined that she had had a “brain bleed”; I don’t think I understood that terminology until I got down to the hospital. What Mom had was a stroke; there are two kinds, one which constricts the blood, and the other, less common, but more problematic, where there’s too much blood.

I figured that I needed to go down by train because flying was too expensive. I remember getting a “sick or bereavement rate” when I flew down to Charlotte, NC before my father died, but it was hardly helpful. Since I didn’t know when I’d return, taking the train to Charlotte seemed to be the best plan.

I was initially planning on leaving on Tuesday, but when I saw the forecast for a massive snowstorm, which did arrive, I knew I needed to leave on Monday. I called work on Monday morning from the train station to tell them I wouldn’t be in for several days.

Tuesday, my sisters and I spent the day in the hospital, and my sisters tell me that she was doing much better, giving a couple of one-word answers.

Wednesday morning, she had a Cheyne-Stokes breathing episode that sounded terribly distressing, but apparently was not, at least for her. I talked with my doctor about this last month when I was feeling unwell. She notes that hospice nurses are good at bringing comfort to the family, but that sometimes, hospital nurses forget that, when death is near, they still need to try to make the family feel OK. My doc theorized that perhaps they gave my mom a bit of morphine to control the sounds, for my benefit.

I was there when Mom died shortly before 9 a.m. I was told to call my sisters before I was told that fact; very odd. When my sisters arrived, they thought she was only sleeping before I had a chance to tell them otherwise.

I was having this electronic conversation with my blogger buddy Arthur recently about the euphemisms for death. He doesn’t much like them, and I’m inclined to agree. But, in my mom’s case, I understand why they say that someone “passed away.”

It so happened that I wrote a blog item that posted on Wednesday, though I had written it on Saturday, Take the Train to Charlotte. All the posts prior to 2:05 pm EST indicated hope for my mom’s recovery. But somewhere around 2:12, I started getting condolences. Denise, the ABC Wednesday diva, had IMed me at some point after we got home from the hospital around noon, to ask how my mom was doing, so of course, I told her. The outpouring of support I got from people I had never met was astonishing. Jaquandor and Arthur both wrote posts about my mom and me.

I was intrigued by one comment to a brief post I wrote the day after she died, describing my account as “dispassionate”. I suppose that was true; it was a coping mechanism.

So it was tough, but it was made palatable by folks from work and church, and by friends I’ve known in person, but also from a whole lot of people I have never met. My friends Jason and DeeDee placed a small obit in my mom’s hometown paper in Binghamton, NY, which was the first time some of her friends and relatives heard about her death. I read the comments from various posts I wrote during the month, and they make me (past and present tense) both weepy, but at the same time, comforted. The aforementioned Denise sent flowers to our house; it is amazing how well flowers from England held up.

Oh, some mundane stuff: got $561 from my mother’s Social Security in December, as did my sisters; not quite clear exactly why. That’ll help with paying off some of the debt I incurred for the funeral and Charlotte newspaper obit.