IMHO

Is "Paranormal" Becoming Normal?

2011-10-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

For the first time in mylife, I’m ready to talk about some of my own difficult-to-explain experiences. You'll find it all in my next book. In addition to my experiences, there will be a tiny bit about newresearch that indicates that we (actually, our brains…) may have capabilities we never dreamed werereal.

You may have heard in the past that the majority of us only use about 10% ofour brain’s actual abilities. Some people have discovered other capabilities.Many have become believers in everything from reincarnation (near-deathexperiences) to ghosts and the ability to communicate with spirits. Even ourpremonitions can be very real, according to some research findings. They can save our livessometimes.

Quantum entanglement and built-in alert systems might havesomething to do with it. I don’t know enough yet about quantum entanglement todo more than just mention it and its possible significance. I do know thattoday’s science seems to indicate that the wiring in our brains provides uswith early warning systems that have been there since modern humans first appeared on the earth. They certainly needed to know when danger was close by,just to ensure survival. I think most of us today are too distracted by thebusy, noisy world around us to be able to tap into it most of the time.

On the other side of the built-in early-warning system issomething that happened to me a couple of years ago and then, only becausesomebody told me about it. I was on my way home after a trip to California for a family event. I’llspare you the details (they’ll be in the book), but I had gotten into adiscussion with a young man on the train--the only practical and cheap way toget to the airport for my flight home. The young man and I were joined byanother person who overheard our discussion. The second man told me later thatI was absolutely radiating so much energy that it automatically drew people tome. I’d had many similar experiences, but figured it was just luck orcoincidence. Nothing supernatural, not until he said that.

I no longer believe in coincidences. Why? After so many of them, I began to notice certain patterns... stuff I really couldn't explain to myself in any commonly accepted kind of way.

My primary reason for this post? When I was outshopping a few days ago, I mentioned something about the paranormal to someoneand she started telling me about her own experiences. Yeah, I talk to a lot ofpeople when I’m out shopping. There are two reasons for that. First, I livealmost twenty miles from the nearest real civilization and I only know two ofmy neighbors. There’s a price to pay for living in a rural, fairly sparselypopulated area in the woods, especially for a “people” person!

Second, I still seem to be activelyattracting people with whom I have something in common. We’re rarely at a lossfor stuff to talk about. I frequently learn from ourconversations. And they have definitely helped me keep my sanity for the lastfour or so years of semi-isolation.

So here’s what I’d like to request from readers: if you’ve hadinteresting experiences or patterns in your lives that could be classified asparanormal, or if you’re certain you’re an Indigo or Crystal; if you’ve had(and paid attention to) a strong premonition that you heeded and that ended uphaving saved your life or kept you from getting involved in a bad situation; ifyou’ve had a palm-reading or hand-writing analysis that you thought was pureB.S. until it turned out to be true… anything along those lines… and would liketo have your stories considered for inclusion in my book, feel free to contact me about sharingthem.

I can’t guarantee I’ll accept everything that's submitted. But I’d love to know what you’ve experienced. This is strictlyvoluntary. If I use your stories, I’ll give you credit if you want it, or withholdyour name and protect your privacy if you prefer.

Leave comments and/or your stories here or on www.redgage.com. Just search for SunnyDee on the RedGage home page. Or if you’d like moreprivacy, use the Contact page on the PleasantValleyPress website. Clickon the Contact button, then select Other under Information, About Editing.Use the field at the bottom of the form to let me know why you're contacting me (e.g., paranormal or words of your choice), and please include a valid email address. I'll respond as quickly as possible

Thanks in advance to all who decide to contribute. I can’twait to hear about your experiences or even to get a good discussion going onthe subject here (on IMHO blog) oron RedGage.

The Georgia Guidestones

2011-10-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

Here’s something I heard about that falls into the“better check this out” category. I recently got into a conversation with someonewho suggested I look up “Georgia Guidestones.” I did a search and found tons ofinformation on something I never even knew existed. The only oneI’ve read so far is an article on Wikipedia. A few excerpts follow:

The Georgia Guidestonesis a large granite monument in Elbert County, Georgia, USA. A messagecomprising ten guides is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages,and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancientlanguages' scripts: Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptianhieroglyphs.

The structure is sometimesreferred to as an "American Stonehenge." The monument is almost 20feet (6.1m) tall … and made from six granite slabs weighing more than 240,000pounds (110,000 kg) in all. One slab stands in the center, with four arrangedaround it. A capstone lies on top of the five slabs, which are astronomicallyaligned. An additional stone tablet, which is set in the ground a shortdistance to the west of the structure, provides some notes on the history andpurpose of the Guidestones.

There's a lot more information about the Guidestones inthe article, including a large section dealing with the ongoing controversyabout who created and paid for the monument and more controversy about themeaning and intent of the Guidestones’ originator/creator. Here are the tenguides inscribed on the Guidestones:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetualbalance with nature.

2. Guide reproduction wisely—improving

fitness anddiversity.

3. Unite humanity with a living new language.

4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and allthings with tempered reason.

5. Protect people and nations with fair laws andjust courts.

6. Let all nations rule internally resolvingexternal disputes in a world court.

7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

8. Balance personal rights with social duties.

9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmonywith the infinite.

10. Benot a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

Before you panic, try to catch a rerun of the Brad Meltzer Decoded show on the Historychannel. I’veonly watched Decoded a few times, but think it’s as good a source as any forwhat may be behind stuff like this or, in this case, the best speculation aboutwhat it means and why it was created.

Decoded’s investigators agree that guides 2-10 arerational, logical, and—if followed—would definitely make the world a betterplace. What bothers most people is the first guide. Many evidently believe itindicates a huge genocide event that would eliminate all but five hundredmillion of the seven hundred billion people on the blue planet.

However… Most of us have heard about the event predictedfor December 21, 2012. Even scientists agree that there could be something toit, because it could indicate a catastrophic event related to unusually largesolar flare/storm activity. There was some discussion on Decoded about thepossibility of a shift in the earth’s or the sun’s axis or magnetic fields, whichmight change the earth’s position as it makes its annual orbit around the sun.That might put it in the path of something (as yet unidentified) that couldsmash into the planet and wipe out the majority of life on earth.

The Decoded investigators made a good point: the GeorgiaGuidestones are probably a plan for what we should do after such a catastrophe. Mother Nature would be the only oneresponsible for the wide-spread genocide.

If you care to make yourself really crazy, find out aboutall the possible natural catastrophes Ma Nature can inflict on us. We’ve seenplenty recently: hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and climatechange… I worry more about Yellowstone National Park blowing its top, or anincreasing amount of space junk returning to earth and not always landing inthe middle of an ocean. I worry about “the next big one” in California, as well as along the coasts of Washington and Oregon. Thepossibility of another “Ark storm” on the west coast is also a frightening possibility. I have family and friends in theplaces that would be seriously flooded should there be another such storm. Thelast one, not long after the Gold Rush started, lasted for more than forty daysand forty nights, and pretty much wiped out a large number of towns in the San Joaquin Valley, including Sacramento. The valley became an inland sea for a period.Fortunately, the population there was still relatively low. It’s not anymore!

Since the meteorologists didn’t really define “Ark”storms, I'm assuming it comes from the forty-days-and-forty-nightsbiblical flood story, implying that Californians would need at least one ark shouldanother of these monster storms happen.

One other point I think might be relevant… and this is one I heard many years ago from theminister at the only church I’ve belonged to in my adult life. He and—mostrecently—the cast of Decoded, point out how many times somebody has given aspecific date for the end of the world. Not counting the many ancient cultureswho all came up with the same date for the end of life as we’ve known it, weknow that for at least the last 2,000+ years, some of the religiously devout gave away everything they owned, donned their white robes, and went tostand on mountain tops and wait to be wafted into heaven. Just think back tothe year 2,000 when so many people went to Jerusalem to wait for thelong-awaited second coming of Jesus.

Read the Georgia Cornerstones article. Think about it.Check the first item in the list. That “500,000,000” number evidently indicatesa 90% reduction of the earth’s population, based on 1980s numbers. Currentworld population: approaching 700,000,000,000 (that’s 7.0 billion). UN numbersestimate we’ll be at about 7.7 billion in 2020; 8.3 billion by 2030, and 10.0billion in 2050. That five-hundred million maximum population goal wouldrequire that a whole lot of people be eliminated, one way or another, in thenear future.

Here’s our current situation:

· Overpopulation and not enough resourcesremaining to support all of us without fighting for what’s available

· The dumbing down of (at least parts of) America

· Political correctness that rewrites history andconstantly lies to us

· The plunge to the bottom of the economic scalefor an increasing number of people—the top one- or two percent get richer andricher, while the rest of us get poorer and poorer

· Rights we thought we had as citizens areslipping away

· The very planet that provides the food we eat,the water we drink, and the air we breathe is becoming more and more polluted;and finally,

· Whether we like it or not, we may be witnessinga rapid decline of the American and other western empires… well, you can comeup with your own theories about it.

I have no argument with any of the guides. In a perfectworld, adherence to them could be asclose to a perfect—and perfectly rational—world as we could get. But I question the possibility of it ever happening or, if it did, our collective ability to sustain it.

The most obvious challenge is finding honest, rational,qualified people to create a world government, then administer it. By the looksof things… in our country, in the world, on the news, I see very few trulyrational people who are also wise, qualified, and humane enough to overcome theworst of human nature and work toward rationality, fairness, and the protectionof the only planet we currently have to live on.

It sounds too utopian to me, but only because I’ve lostfaith in our ability to learn from past mistakes and to shed our own sense ofself-importance, addiction to power and money, and other very human flaws thatseem quite impossible to eliminate, even temporarily. Hopefully, evolution willcontinue long enough to produce such people. I’m not holding my breath!

My belief: The Georgia Guidestones guides are real andreally are rational, benevolent, and perhaps exactly what’s needed to ensurethe continuation of the human race on this planet. As of this date, we're not doing too well on our own!

RESOURCES:

Georgia Guidestones article on Wikipedia

World Population article on Wikipedia

Random Thoughts & Annoyances

2011-09-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

If you've been reading IMHO, you know I can get a little verbose. To cater to those with a short attention spans, I try to correct that here. I keep collecting ideas I want to comment on, but never seem to get around it. I might do better if I simply post a few thoughts as they occur to me and as time permits. Your comments and feedback are welcome. Or add your own pet peeves and annoyances.

What's bugging me now? So very much stuff it would take a three volume book to cover it all. Here's today's short list: TV commercials and serious abuse... of my native language!

Advertising

Prescription drugs Assuming you pay any attention to these commercials at all, you may have noticed that there are about fifteen seconds of happy people--pain-free, sleeping well, leaping out of bed ready to conquer the world! The other forty-five seconds are warnings about possible side effects. Personally, I'd rather live with my stuffy nose than trade it in for nosebleeds, indigestion, constipation, and occasional thoughts of suicide or... the possibility of bleeding to death unexpectedly (not that any of us expect to suddenly and for no apparent reason, just fall down on the floor and bleed to death)!

My sister had two close-call bleeding-to-death episodes from two different NSAID drugs. If her husband hadn't been home when they happened, she would have died years earlier than she did. Think I'm gonna try those drugs? No way.

Know why those makeup ads always show beautiful women who look like they're fifteen? Think you're ever going to look like that if you use the product being advertised? Forget it! You had your chance when you were a teenager and failed to appreciate how good you really looked. Even if you were dog-ugly, and other than some zits occasionally, your skin was probably unwrinkled and smooth--just like the teenagers cosmetic and other companies use in many of their ads.

On the male side, the outcome for almost every product comes down to sex. Have you seen the ad that starts with something like "How does this seventy year old doctor have the body of a thirty-year-old?" Notice it does not ask how he transformed his typically seventy-year-old body into a hot, muscular, number. It asks how he has the body of a thirty-year-old.

My response: If he had enough money to go from fat and flabby, with the effects of gravity showing themselves, the thirty-year-old woman whose body appears in the commercial probably assumed that the dude had the tons of money necessary to pay for his transformation, and--no doubt--volunteered to be the thirty-year-old body he has! The important message here though is his libido... the desire, they both agree, is practically non-stop. Whoop-de-doo!

I can tell you from personal experience that at seventy, nothing short of a gazillion dollars worth of plastic surgery, a life devoted to intense exercise, a few hormone injections, and heaven only knows what else, are the only ways any of us can reclaim the bodies we had when we were young and hot.

I've lost about thirty pounds over the last couple of years. Easiest thing I've ever done. Because of a genetic or metabolic malfunction, I gave up drinking regular milk and eating ice cream, and otherwise ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted! I exercise regularly, including pumping some iron, keeping my body limber, and doing some aerobics. But despite my best efforts... the effects of gravity are obvious. I have some wrinkles. And I earned every damned one them!
They should start teaching English in America's schools.

I know language evolves over time, but bastardizing a languageout of ignorance is different from letting it evolve in a sensible way (if that's possible). Below are a couple of my favorite bloopers. They're all direct quotes I wrote down only seconds after hearing them, usually on cable news.

"... 6:00 A.M. in the morning." Duh! A.M. stands for ante meridian--literally, before noon or the time between midnight and noon. I think I learned thatin the second grade. If you understand what A.M. means, you could not possibly say or mean 6:00 A.M. at night! If it's six in the afternoon/evening, it's 6:00 P.M., not A.M. Postmeridian (P.M.) indicates the time period between noon and midnight.

Use one or the other, or just say, "... six o'clock last night" or "nine o'clock this morning" and not 9:00 A.M. in the morning!

"I used to be a former congressperson" [names have been omitted and gender-specific references "neutralized"] Okay, so the only way you could be a former representative in congress is if you were one to begin with. And even though you may have a new job now, you still qualify as a former representative... How do you stop being a former anything? Maybe this speaker was referring to a previous life?

"The near proximity of..." Dictionary definition of proximity: "the state or quality of being near; nearness in space, time, etc." So, if proximity means near or nearness, you could just say "... the near nearness of..." which should give you a hint about just how silly the statement sounds.

"Between..." I've heard this several times recently. Somebody said it once, then it seems a lot of others picked up on it. The definition for between is too long to quote and anyhow, its meaning should be clear to just about every native speaker of American English.

Say you're showing a friend where your car is parked. Would you tell her it's the white car between the red and silver cars? Or would you say its between the red car and between the silver car. How on earth could your car be between another car? Maybe it's a toy car and it's on the floor between the front seat and the back seat. But your non-toy car sure ain't between another non-toy car and nothing else!

If you're trying to decide which dress to buy, you might have to choose whether to buy the purple velvet one or the gold chiffon one... you have to choose between two options. One or the other, not both. How much sense does it make to say you have to choose between the purple dress and between the gold dress? Truth is, it makes no sense whatsoever. It does make you sound like you're anything but a native speaker, and weren't paying attention in your 'English as a Second Language' class!

I'll stop for now, but only after a reminder that there are dozens of Web sites with free dictionaries you can use to look up words you're not sure about. If you can't give an accurate and reasonably concise definition off the top of your head, freakin look it up! Please!! Yeah, I mess up too, but not as often as a few who seem to think they have infallible dictionaries and grammar texts embedded in their brains!

And don't forget Web sites like Ask.com, which has a great section on American English grammar and lots of good (and often funny) articles in its newsletter. Even if you're dumber than dirt (not that I think any of you are, of course), you can sound smarter with a just little effort.

The Dark Side of Political Correctness

2011-09-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

What follows is basically a lead-in orpreface to my next article, a rant about my efforts tounderstand what’s happening in the world and how we got where we are today. Some stuff I’ve learned has either led me to some(possibly) weird or hair-brained conspiracy theories. As a consequence, I’mtrying to be rational and base my information onnot-easily-verified but interesting information from outside sources.

The article below was first published on Helium.com on May24, 2008 under my Helium pen name.

PoliticalCorrectness Gone Wrong

by Sondra Deuber, May 2008 [lightly edited in 2011]

Here's a purely rhetorical questions: how can something thatwas wrong from the start go wrong? Political correctness was never a good idea,but the ramifications are either worse than its creators ever dreamed or(heaven forbid!) it's exactly what they had in mind from the beginning.

According to Philip Atkinson, "Political Correctness(PC) is the communal tyranny that erupted in the 1980s. It was a spontaneousdeclaration that particular ideas, expressions and behavior, which were thenlegal, should be forbidden by law, and people who transgressed should bepunished."

Mr. Atkinson points out that freedom of choice and freedomof speech are the community's safeguards against tyranny and states
that the rationalebehind political correctness was to keep people from being offended.

Writing about incidents in Australia, his homeland, he talksabout the barbaric reaction to a politician's very truthful comments and theattacks that ensued when listeners heard unpopular truths. He also citesCommunist Russia and the severe penalties for expressing any opinion thatvaried from the official truth. So this is not a new phenomenon nor is itrestricted to the U.S.

In an Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind, Mr. Lindstates, "For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearfulof what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to beafraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive,or racist, sexist, or homophobic."

He goes on to say, "The name originated as something ofa joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as onlyhalf-serious. In fact, it's deadly serious. It is the great disease of ourcentury, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe,in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PCis not funny. PC is deadly serious."

Mr. Lind's comparison of Political Correctness withclassical Marxism applied to cultural issues is definitely worth reading,addresses the subject in depth, and is terrifying. Lind asserts that both PCand classical Marxism are totalitarian ideologies.

Although Political Correctness did not become a major issuein the U.S. until the 1980s (according to Atkinson), it has invaded our societyand our interactions with each other. The results are becoming far too obvious.Its history goes back much farther and includes many countries where aparticular ideology has become the official truth and those who express adifferent version of the truth are subject to punishment. Lind puts itsbeginnings with Marx in the early 20th century and traces its development, whichwas not spontaneous or accidental, but quite deliberate, it seems.

Both cited authors discuss the ideological aspects of PC,the thought control. It seems to me, from personal observation, thatin addition to accepting the "truthiness" (thank you, StephenColbert) of the official ideology in our speech and studies, it extends fartherinto our lives and contributes to the chaos of our current society.

For example, if you accept the word of the experts' andabide by the law, you will not punish your children in any significant way, notin a way that will teach them that there are consequences to their actions. Ilearned right from wrong because my mother punished me the old fashioned way,long before there was any local awareness of PC. I hated it, but it did me nolasting damage. Rather, it taught me that there would be a price to pay if Iwas dishonest, disrespectful, or stole something. If she had been limited tomaking me take a time out and sit on the couch for half an hour, I would havebeen up to my old tricks in no time.

When I was in school, people who didn't earn good gradesweren't given good grades just so that they would feel good about themselves. We got to feel good about ourselves when we accomplished something of value,like studying, learning, and passing tests on what we were supposed to havelearned.

How do you raise children to be responsible,caring, and resilient adults if merely existing in the world is all they haveto do because PC will protect them from ever being told the truth aboutthemselves? Will the real world think that each and every one of them is themost special person ever? Will they reap all the rewards of hard work if theynever produce anything of value? If they learn in their 20s that everythingthey've been taught was a lie, and the world is definitely not their oyster,will they explode with rage? Go on a rampage with automatic weapons to punishthose who refuse to recognize their superiority or understand that they are entitled tohave whatever they want—at no cost or inconvenience to them?

Certain kinds of touching is not politically correct. If a childfalls down and skins a knee on the playground, a reassuring hug from a caringteacher can help dry the tears and make it better. I know: I had some very kindand caring teachers. My little friends and I used to skip around the playgroundholding hands, bonding and having some perfectly innocent physical contact with other human beings. That's no longer okay in some places either and can get achild expelled from school and sometimes, get a teacher fired.

We played cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers a lot. We aimedand shot at each other, using our index fingers as guns and making silly soundsto indicate that we'd pulled the trigger. I've never killed anyone as a resultof my childhood play.

As an adult at work, I hadmany friends. Sometimes one or the other of us is away, travelingon business or on vacation. There were always hugs when we saw each otherafter an absence, with both male and female friends; friendly hugs, humancontact with people we care about and who care about us. Physical contact issupremely important to us as human beings. It is an expression of caring. It'sthe human thing to do. It's no longer acceptable and could get you fired.

I was proud at my retirement party when a good friend of morethan eleven years didn't hesitate to give me a hug to celebrate my retirementand wish me luck. Others in the room were shocked, especially considering thatI was an employee and he was an executive vice president. But we were work friends, andhad a great deal of respect for one another.

There are times when you have to risk your freedom, riskpunishment, risk the consequences to say, "I've really enjoyed workingwith and for you, and I'll miss our friendship." When it becomes illegalto do that, or to greet an old friend, or offer a hug to someone who seriouslyneeds one, I'll risk whatever I need to in order to retain my humanity.

I've always been a rebellious brat, a seeker and speaker oftruth. And now, officially a senior citizen, that isn't about to change. Let the consequences ofignoring the official ideology be damned. I hope that I'm notsusceptible to mind control without the use of drugs or torture. It hasn't beenput to the test, but nothing would surprise me anymore. Sometimes being "mature" is pretty good: there's much less to lose, especially if you've decided thatif the current trends continue, you might decide you'd rather not be around towitness the results.

If you doubt Political Correctness is a problem, justthink back over the last several years, when it has reached its worst level,with the official truth proclaimed in the face of contradictory evidence. Goback ten or twenty years; it was there. Go back as far as you'd like in theU.S. in the 20th century and you'll find evidence of the development of theofficial truth that, at times, has made us doubt our own sanity or ability tointerpret truth as the government and media tell us we should.

This should be an area of concern for writers. How wouldyour passion to write be affected if you knew that every word would be undergovernment scrutiny and if expressing anything other than the government'sofficial versions of the truth might cause you to lose your job, land you injail, or worse. I recommend reading Bill Lind's article as it provides a good,brief history of the origins of Political Correctness and its implications forall of us. Perhaps in this case, knowledge is power: you can't fight what you don'trecognize or understand.

RESOURCES

PoliticalCorrectness by Philip Atkinson: http://www.ourcivilisation.com/pc.htm
The Origins of Political Correctness

An Accuracy inAcademia Address by Bill Lind (2000) http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html

Dear Donald Duc.... uh, Trump

2011-05-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

PLEASE NOTE: This was written a day or two before the news broke about the death of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Trump has been quite silent since the President's announcement, but I decided to publish this anyhow. Who knows when Clown-in-Chief Trump might want to start mouthing off again!

~~~~~

Mr. Trump, sir: Every time you open your blow hole to crow about how brilliant you are; every time you interrupt an interviewer ten times during every statement he or she tries to make or question he or she tries to ask you… Well, sir, just the fact that you are totally unable to listen to anybody on any subject proves that you cannot possibly be the smartest person on the planet.

One important thing that most intelligent people have in common is that we know how to listen to others and learn from them. If you cannot listen, you cannot learn. You can’t learn that other people have valuable knowledge that might actually reinforce your opinion. Or, of course, you might have to face the fact that you at least appear to others to be a monumental ignoramus with a special talent for making himself look like the modern version of a court jester. In other words, you have become the laughing stock of the country and, possibly, the world.

Recent polls show that should you, by some serious voting machine malfunction, get the nomination for president (if you were actually serious about running), you might get a few votes against President Obama. The polls I’ve seen in the last few weeks indicate that an overwhelming majority of republican, independent, and democrat voters would not vote for you in a million years. A few might, but probably wouldn’t. I am happy to know that you don’t stand a snowball’s chance…

Now on to the larger issue, since you don’t seem to care that you are now the official clown for a large majority of the planet’s population. That larger issue has to do with the president’s intellectual abilities.

I can only tell you about my own experience as a student, but I suspect it’s similar in some respects to Obama’s experience. The main differences are that I am a white female and he “isn’t one of us”. Oh yeah… on my mother’s side of the family, I am a second generation Russian-American Jew. Never mind that my English/Irish father’s side of the family have been citizens of the U.S. since before the revolution. I’m sure you’d cross me off the list of possibly intelligent people just because I am a female who is legally Jewish, despite my own choice of religion. Nobody likes a smart broad, and anti-Semitism is about as hard to overcome as racism is.

So here’s my story. I was a lousy student for the first twelve years of my education. I was just bored out of my mind. I did very well in subjects that interested me and ignored the others. The principal of my grammar school felt it was critical that I be advanced a couple of grades, just for intellectual stimulation to get me interested and help me learn to study. Mom, misguided as she was, felt it was more important that I remain with my ‘little friends.’ She was raised to believe that a girl couldn’t be a good and obedient wife and mother if she thought she was smart.

By the time I was in high school, my family was convinced that I must be mentally retarded. They had the school administer an IQ test. No one would tell me my score. My mother wouldn’t tell me because, she said, she didn’t want me to think I was smart. It would make me too vain.

I almost flunked out of high school because I never learned to study. I did flunk out of my first try in college. I didn’t know how to study, or even that it was necessary. Besides, I was having too much fun to bother. I failed on my second attempt too. I was learning to study at the same time I was learning that I couldn’t work a full-time night job and carry a full load in college during the day. That was more a burn-out than an intellectual failure.

When I was in my 30s, I discovered employer tuition reimbursement programs. For the most part, I had to study what my employer was willing to pay for. If I got grades below a C, I wouldn’t get a penny of reimbursement. To get all my money back, I had to ace all my classes. No problem, once I got serious.

By the time my ex and I moved to Colorado and I went to work for a major oil company, I had been on the Dean’s List every quarter or semester of my employer-funded education. The lowest GPA I got may have been as low as 3.5. It was usually closer to 3.8.

My first geology instructor suggested I take the Mensa test. The very idea terrified me, but he finally convinced me. I took it and learned that my IQ is in the 99th percentile—one percentage point higher than required for Mensa membership.

Sometime later, I learned that IQ is not a measure of intelligence per se, but rather a measure of one’s potential. The intelligence part is determined by what you do with that potential. Some of the smartest and wisest people I have known have above-average IQs that are well below genius level. Some of the highest IQ people I have known are dumber than dirt, never bothered by a serious thought beyond partying and (in their words) getting laid. I know because I asked them what made them join Mensa or Intertel, an organization exclusively for people with IQs in the top one percent.

President Obama and I had some common childhood situations. My father died when I was just over a year old, so I was raised by a single mother, as was Obama. His mother went to school and got a doctorate. My mother didn’t finish high school, but passed the California civil service exam on her first try and went on to a highly successful career with the state. All things considered, her success was quite amazing. She was at the right place at the right time: World War II was underway and the men had gone off to fight for their country. Women (including my mother) entered the workplace in a serious way for the first time.

My mother’s job was a good one. She earned enough to keep a roof over our heads, to feed us well, and had enough left over for plenty of good times too. The rest of the family on her side were what qualified as solidly upper middle class, or higher. They spoiled me rotten. I may have had cultural advantages unavailable to Obama. First, I was white. Secondly, my family was part of the higher end of ‘society’ in our small city.

After a layoff in Colorado, I returned to school to complete a degree. No employer tuition reimbursement this time! Just a full scholarship, an old dorm room in what had become a faculty apartment building, a Pell Grant, and student loans to take care of books, groceries, etc.

Shortly before the end of my senior year, I received a letter at my sister and brother-in-law’s home, my official residence while I was in the private and exclusive college I attended. It was from the school, and it was sent to notify me that I was to be awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key. At the time, I had no idea what that was, but my family certainly knew! My sister, who was seventeen when I was born, and her husband rejoiced like very proud parents. I was actually ready to blow the whole thing off. They wouldn’t allow that and, once they told me what it signified, I didn’t have to be convinced to RSVP for the presentation ceremony and dinner and order my key.

The PBK award is presented to those with a demonstrated lifetime of academic excellence. I graduated cum laude, not magna cum laude--having been too busy with work-study jobs to take the honors classes available to me. My final cumulative GPA was 3.75. It’s probably higher now, since I took the required classes for a work-related certificate in Graphics and Multimedia and earned a cumulative GPA of 4.0 for that course of study.

As much as this “late bloomer” achieved, my achievements are not even close—even academically—to those achieved by the president. I don’t usually like to talk about this stuff. I really prefer to keep it private, unless I’m highly motivated. I prefer the real people who have comprised most of my friends for most of my life. When they are co-workers, they have always been aware that I’m very good at my job. But most of them are as good at their jobs as I am at mine and there is enough mutual respect to go around without mouthing off about it.

Besides, the anti-intellectualism that is so common these days tends to scare people off. There are a few who hate you if they even suspect you have a high IQ (without really understanding that it’s only an indicator of potential). Smart people are not threatened by other smart people. No point in bragging about it.

Mr. Trump, you recently made some horribly racist remarks regarding the president’s intellectual abilities. The fact that your uber-rich friends’ kids didn’t get into Ivy League colleges is probably because they were not high achievers. No amount of money can motivate ho-hum students who believe they’ll succeed simply because of the balance in their family’s bank accounts or the square footage of the mansions in which they live.

The college from which I graduated was filled with kids from very rich families, kids who attended the most prestigious prep schools and simply didn’t make the grade. Instead, they ended up in some very excellent private colleges that offered the opportunity for top-notch learning. Far too many of them had no interest in learning anything. They partied, traveled to exotic places during breaks, and spent what could have been study time in AA meetings (we had our own AA branch right on campus). Fortunately, the school has lost its party-school label and has regained its former reputation of being a top-notch academic institution, a label it has worn proudly since its founding in 1831.

If you were nearly as intelligent as you like to make yourself out to be, you might understand that sometimes having less lights a fire in some of us, a fire that makes us passionate about doing more. Maybe we would like to have an opportunity to earn a little more in a better job. Some of us are just passionate about learning.

Thanks to some of my more recent learning, I understand that the only difference between you and a brilliant African-American is (genetically) so minute that it doesn’t really count at all. The visible differences (skin color, etc.) are partially the result of physical adaptations that made survival possible in a variety of environments. When our common African ancestors left Africa and migrated to different parts of the world, their skin color, size and shape of noses, etc. changed to accommodate their new environments. Northern Europeans became lighter-skinned, for example, since they no longer had to compensate for the harsh African conditions.

Those who remained in Africa and the Middle East didn’t suddenly get stupid because they didn’t migrate to other parts of the world. Their brains and yours? I have studied and worked with brilliantly intelligent South African scholars and incredibly stupid and bigoted pure white, spoiled rich kids. And vice versa.

And I might add that the most self-confident and intelligent people almost never are so egocentric to need to constantly tell everyone how special they are. People notice. Only the insecure, the biggest a-holes and clowns amongst us feel the need to constantly boast about what they know is not true about themselves, in an attempt to cover up their own inadequacies. The rest of us sit back quietly and just laugh at the clowns who have no idea what fools they are making of themselves.

How Much Sense Does This Make?

2011-04-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

Picture this: a family is sitting around the dining room table, discussing their options for getting out of debt. Dad has a plan.

“Okay, guys, we currently have more debt than we’ve ever had as a family. I’ve come up with a great plan for paying off all the bills and getting out of this mess. After all, our bills and credit card debt are higher than they’ve ever been before and we have to get it back to what it was when there was just mom and me… before we decided to have ten kids.”

“But honey,” responds mom, “there were only two of us back then. We lived in a small, cheap apartment. Now we’re making payments on a $175,000 house and three cars. We didn’t have all these bills for health care for twelve of us instead of two. The only college loans we had to pay off were our own. Of course our expenses are higher. There are a lot more of us than there were back then.”

The kids all nod in agreement.

“Absolutely correct, sweetheart. So here’s what I want to do. I want to use the debt-reduction plan proposed by Paul Ryan. The guy’s a genius and he’s dealing with a much bigger problem than we have. After all, if we can’t trust our politicians, who can we trust?”

Nobody nods in agreement… not even the four-year-old twins.

“Here’s my plan. We’ve been trying to keep up with the Jones family down the block. Even though Mr. Jones makes $500 million a year, their expenses are much higher than ours. They need more money to maintain their lifestyle. So… the best way to get ourselves out of debt is to adopt the republican proposal ourselves. Listen to this: we can get out of debt—first of all—by cutting the money we have coming in each month and giving the extra to the Joneses. Then we drop our health and homeowners insurance, go on food stamps and/or start hitting the free food pantries. We’ll be out of debt in no time… and the Jones family won’t have to sacrifice an iota of their lifestyle.”

Mom and the kids look at each other, then at dad. In unison, they respond: “YOU IDIOT!” Then, again in unison, they stand up and head for the front door… never to be seen again. Dad, of course is sad that his family is gone but—on the other hand—he’s kinda happy: eleven fewer mouths to feed!

In today’s (April 11, 2011) New York Times:

Mr. Ryan said it would cut $6 trillion in the coming decade, though budget analysts questioned some of the claimed savings. The plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program for future generations and slash spending for the need-based Medicaid program and other domestic initiatives, while largely sparing the Pentagon and cutting $4 trillion more in corporate and high-income taxes.

This is the plan that the head of our imaginary family just proposed, for all intents and purposes. Another $4 TRILLION in tax cuts so the rich can continue to get richer. Turning Medicare into a “voucher program” will—as I understand it—give the poorest among us a few bucks to buy their own insurance at the going market rate. That’s definitely going to cut a huge number of people from the insurance company's lists of subscribers.

The really desperately poor will have their Medicaid slashed (remember those people on their way to the operating room when Arizona’s governor announced that Medicaid would no longer pay for their transplants, since the state needs the money for prisons?) Ryan’s plan will also slash unspecified “other domestic initiatives,” which may add money to the government’s income but will, or should, hugely increase government expenses: more handouts to the un- or under-employed; more food banks and homeless shelters. They’ll probably have to pay a lot more for medical services, since many millions of people will no longer have health care or the money to pay for emergency medical care.

Keep this in mind: more huge tax cuts for the richest among us REDUCES THE GOVERNMENT’S INCOME BY TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS while increasing the wealth of the top one percent. The more you cut taxes, the less money the government collects to pay its bills. Yes, it’s lovely for the rich to get richer. But… the less money the government has, the less they can spend on trivial stuff like health programs; food programs; police and fire protection; and a huge number of other services that the government currently provides for the country and for the 99% of us at the bottom of the food chain.

According to the 2010 census, there are now about 310 million people in the U.S. Of course the stupid debt is higher than it has ever been in the history of our country: there are at least ten million more of us than there were in 2000 (the last time the Federal budget was balanced). And there are probably about 308 or 309 million more than there were when this country became a country.

Of course the government’s debt is higher! If you keep slashing its income to benefit the multimillionaires and billionaires, it gets less money. When the income is slashed that much, social services and more have to be cut. For the ultra-conservatives, the best place to slash the budget is to take away services that help the poorest citizens. It’s beginning to seem like it’s deliberate: quit providing health care, food stamps, and other services and sooner or later, many will die… from starvation, freezing, or from stuff as easily treatable or preventable as a bad case of the flu. However… somebody would have to dispose of all the dead bodies. Hope they include that little social service in the new deficit reduction plan!

A program called “Greed” aired last week on one of the History channels. It was very interesting and pointed out how, when greed continues to increase, countries and even great empires fall. The U.S. has, by definition, been an empire from the time when we first took possession of places like the Philippines and Cuba, early in the 20th century. What you get when a country turns its focus from taking care of its own people and spends its money and human resources on people in countries it has conquered; when it has military outposts all over the world… well, that’s part of what you can track to see if your country is an empire. Just like the Roman Empire, this one we live in is in decline. There’s always another country to support, or invade, or to go to war with.

Meanwhile, our highways and bridges are crumbling around us. Our coastal waters and our fresh water supply are more and more polluted. We seem to be hell-bent on destroying our environment and our planet. That’s much easier, I guess, than asking the richest of businesses to behave responsibly and clean up the messes they create. Somehow, the top 1% seem to think that they’ll be immune to the consequences of neglecting their own country. If there’s no clean air to breathe or clean water left to drink anywhere, do they really believe that their money will be able to buy them some?

On the “Greed” show, they did a moderately comprehensive bit on what led to the Great Depression. I wondered how close our current situation is to what was happening back then. I got out my favorite American history book, A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and started reading the relevant chapters. Chapter 10, “The Other Civil War,” discusses the demonstrations and riots of the bottom 99% against the top 1%. We seem to be doing a lot more of that these days although—at least on the protestors’ part—it hasn’t gotten as violent as the protests and riots did in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Chapter 11, “Robber Barons and Rebels” (which I’m still reading), I learned that before the stock market crash, the rich were getting enormously richer and the poor were getting more and more desperate. In my first political science class many years ago, one of the “required reading” textbooks said that the only reason FDR and his administration started Social Security in the first place was to forestall what the president believed could lead to an overthrown of the government--the author’s take on the situation.

“They” say that if we forget our history (or never learn it because a whole heck of a lot of it isn’t included in our K-12 history books)… if we forget our history, we are sure to repeat it. I sincerely believe that if Mr. Ryan and the far right get their way, we are in for much worse than anything we’ve seen in many decades.

You don’t have to be a history expert. You don’t have to really do much of anything beyond having a quick look at the math: if you slash the income of the government to give more money to the richest people… something has to give. Remember, those are our tax dollars being contributed to the “haves” and leaving little or nothing for the rest of us.

MSNBC’s newest motto is “Lean Forward”. Catchy, huh! I’m not sure exactly what they’re trying to tell us… maybe something like ‘move ahead’ or ‘it will all get better if we look to the future’ or…? You can interpret it for yourself. My significantly less optimistic take: if somebody doesn’t pay attention to all those Pulitzer Prize winning economists, world history, and just plain, old-fashioned good sense and basic math, we indeed could be in for very lean (and possibly violent) times as we move forward.

Maybe I should write a well-researched book on the Rise and Fall of the American Empire. Never mind. Good history books require some time to put things in perspective. I’ll leave that for a future generation of writers.

No Blue Monday for this writer...

2011-03-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

During a typical evening in my humble little abode, and after I knock off work, I amuse myself by watching some fav cable shows, usually science, history, or news… geeky stuff mostly, I guess. Or I read… or watch TV and read during commercials… or snooze in the recliner. I occasionally interrupt this rigorous schedule to check my email. I had forgotten the recent message reminding me that the winners of the eLit Book Awards would be announced yesterday. I read the competition details before checking the list of winners.

Finally, I scrolled down the page to the Autobiography/Memoir awards and was blissfully happy to see my memoir, Living on the Sunny Side, next to Gold! I entered on a lark (never hurts to try, right?), figuring that even a bronze award would help with the never-ending promotion all writers must endure… or watch their books die a slow and painful death! I didn’t dare hope for Gold!

Living on the Sunny Side has received two 5-star reviews (one on Amazon for the original print version, one on Smashwords for the more recently updated ebook) and four 4-star reviews on Amazon. Maybe, I thought, it has a chance.

From the Web page:

The first-annual eLit Awards are global awards program committed to illuminating and honoring the very best of English language digital publishing entertainment.

The 2010 eLit Awards were created as industry wide, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the electronic publishing industry.

The contest is presented by Jenkins Group Inc., a Michigan-based book publishing and marketing services company that has operated the popular Independent Publisher Book Awards contest since 1996.

The eLit Awards celebrate the ever growing market of electronic publishing in the wide variety of reader formats. Hail the revolutionary world of e-books and join the awards program that’s highlighting the best in electronic reading entertainment!

When I became (evidently) permanently unemployed in late 2007, I devoted most of my time to learning to be a freelance writer, taking an online class in proofreading to help me become a better editor, writing my memoir, and last (and in this case, least instead of ‘but not least’) a POD publisher. The publishing business was mostly to publish my own books and perhaps an occasional book for a friend or two. Of necessity, I also learned how to design and format manuscripts as required for submissions/queries to publishers; for print versions; and eventually for ebooks.

There were small successes along the way, mostly from freelance writing, editing, and design. Promoting my memoir took a back seat to earning some cold, hard cash when I started to get some steady work. The other books I wanted to write remained at the very bottom of the to-do list.

Now, the recognition this award could bring has motivated me, big time, to get back to work on the real story of my father’s side of the family. I’ve thought about this book for a while, first deciding to create a novel based on the actual history. But it just didn’t feel right. I was uncomfortable describing Grandma Jenny’s life—it would need to be a bit more erotic than I’m comfortable writing, which wouldn’t bother me as much if it wasn’t about actual relatives—described in detail in more than sixteen single-spaced pages of notes and two completed first-draft chapters my parents wrote when they learned my father was dying. I felt somewhat guilty putting words in the mouths of people I never knew, words from my own mind/fantasies, and describing the corresponding actions. Did the research. Traced the family tree back as far as I could. Put it aside.

Just recently, I nixed the fact-based novel genre and have come up with a possibly viable approach, using my parents notes and adding the results of my research and my own insights. (I’m almost convinced I’m grandma’s reincarnated self, or am at least channeling her. The similarities are amazing. I just have been significantly better behaved.) We’ll see how that works out. But at least I’m motivated now to see what I can come up with so I can finally complete The Notorious Mrs. Dauber.

And if I get stuck… I’m much more motivated to work on the other bottom-of-the-list projects, especially now that I understand they may work best as ebooks.

It has taken me close to four years to see anything ahead in this long dark tunnel, anything but pitch black. Little by little, another speck of light appears in the distance. Then another. And another…

I’m convinced that the keys to success in anything include learning the trade/craft you want to practice; having some basic abilities and a strong drive to learn to improve them; and allowing yourself to ‘march to a different drummer’ when necessary. But most important, as a writer, is probably to develop a thick skin, a lot of patience, and the tenacity to keep trying for as long as it takes!

Oh, yeah! And it’s helpful if you can talk yourself out of the occasional depression when you believe the “muse” has abandoned you!

Secrets? Our Government? You Bet!

2011-03-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

Whether you voted for the first time in 2008 or 2010, or have voted in every election in the last fifty years, you’ve probably noticed that there can be a huge disparity between what the candidates say when they’re campaigning and what they actually do if they’re unfortunate enough to get elected. I finally decided that they’re all just liars, and (as Aristotle or one of the Greek philosophers asserted) will say whatever it is they believe you want to hear to get you to vote for them.

Something else I’ve wondered about is exactly how much candidates really understand about the job… like what really goes on in the inner sanctums of government, who really runs things, how are decisions really made and who, ultimately, makes them. Is this democracy business really what we believe it to be, or is it just the ‘public face’ of our government? What are the secrets, if there are any, that newly elected presidents don’t find out about until after they are sworn in?

On March 15, a program on History International addressed some of those questions, but didn’t necessarily answer them. They are, after all, government secrets. The title of the show? The President’s Book of Secrets.

It never actually verified that there is a physical book of secrets, but did reveal that there are many things the candidates we love to love… or to hate… only find out about after they take the oath of office. There were, however, examples or hints throughout the program. For example, I learned that when George W. Bush, our 43rd president, left office and Barack Obama entered the Oval Office for the first time as the president, the only thing on the desk was a sealed envelope addressed only to “44”. The contents of the letter from “43” to “44” were not revealed, nor was whether it was “Eyes Only” for “44”. Unless you happen to be one of the very few who will ever be elected to the office of President of the United States, you’ll never find out. For the other 300 million+ of us, it will likely remain a secret forever.

The narrator pondered as to whether or not the letter included information regarding the location of The President’s Book of Secrets or if there actually is such a book.

Here’s one that is relevant right now, with the battle to slash the budget to almost nothing or finance anything that will help the nation’s recovery. There evidently is (or at least, might be) something called the Black Budget, which is the part of the President’s budget that congress never gets to see. It’s used for secret projects, research facilities, secret experiments. There are lots of code names. Some of them even the President doesn’t know about until the last moment or only when it becomes absolutely necessary. According to the program, it’s approximately $30-$40 billion annually!

I took as many notes as I could, but as you may have noticed in school, when you’re writing notes, you’re quite likely to miss the bit that will definitely be on the next exam. So here’s a question I did write down, although I didn’t manage to get the answer, assuming there was one: Is there a hidden/secret group of people who function independent of the President and others in the government? That’s something else I’ve wondered about over the years: Who is really pulling the strings? Who’s really in charge, if push comes to shove? Alas, no answer was forthcoming.

Evidently, the president (and perhaps others) can never say that there is a secret book. It should always be “If there is a book of secrets…” The president, we were told, must never trust anyone. If he wants to trust someone, he should get a dog. That explains why so many of our presidents appeared to be animal lovers!

Another question raised was whether or not there are hidden requirements for the office of president… like college friendships, especially those at Yale. Memberships in organizations like the Masons, or Yale’s Skull & Bones… all of which can provide access to power, money, people all because of the associations. There is probably not a conspiracy, according to the program, but a lot of Skull & Bones members are picked by presidents for important government positions.

There was a lot of stuff about the Secret Service. Evidently the only time the president and his family are ever alone is when they go to the bathroom or when they’re in their private quarters. Even then, they are guarded from outside the White House. We heard a lot about the preparations for even a casual visit in a close friend’s home. Past presidents and “44” have said they felt like they were locked in a ‘golden cage’ in the White House.

I worked at the airport for quite a while and watched many presidential arrivals. Preparations started a couple of days before the president arrived. If anyone had missed the news about our chief executive’s visit, one only had to drive past the airport and see the huge, gray transport plane sitting on the tarmac. The Secret Service and FBI spent their time checking everything and everyone within the airport perimeters. On the day Air Force One arrived, traffic was completely stopped in every direction, on every road of the president’s main route and a few surrounding routes, just in case there was an emergency that required a quick change in plans.

If you happened to be heading for work and were unable to arrive on time because all the roads were blocked… well, be thankful for your cell phone! Fortunately, the managers knew where you were and why you weren’t at work. Once, I just barely made it on time. When I arrived, the gates to our facility were locked down and an armed guard was reluctant to let me in until I showed him my ID and he confirmed my identity and legitimacy.

Fortunately, a lot of the people I worked with were ex-military who had knowledge of these things. When the president’s plane landed… well, it was awesome! We could only look through the glass wall that faced the runway and the official “parking space” of this display of American power.

When I watched the whole thing the first time, I was standing next to an ex-Marine friend, who explained to me all the vehicles that were disgorged from the belly of the huge transport. There were several buses for the press corps, and a long line of what appeared to be ordinary black SUVs. Of course, the whole thing was guarded by probably every policeman or state trooper who wasn’t home sick (and no, I don’t remember all the details).

What I learned was that among those heavily-armored black SUVs were “war wagons” ready to take on just about any attack one could imagine, just like Air Force One. What I learned from the program was that there is what amounts to a mini-hospital too, equipped to deal with almost any presidential emergency. Another friend who had worked for the Secret Service told me about how they go about the business of protecting the president when he travels.

Presidential travel is a very big deal, made even bigger when something like the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers happens. We learned how many secure bunkers there are all over the country but, of course, nothing about where they are. They did use a graphic to show the location of the bunker in D.C. where the vice president hangs out when there’s a threat.

There was a mini-tour of the briefing room, which started out many years ago as a small but secured office and has now grown to a very large and high-tech facility, where it is staffed 24/7/365 by people monitoring… stuff.

The physical and mental health of the president is top secret, totally hidden from the public, and especially from enemies that might take advantage of the situation. The president has a private armored suite in Bethesda.

Another question raised but not answered: Are there records about UFOs sightings and/or landings? Aliens that are already amongst us? Sorry folks, that’s top secret too, I guess!

The “nuclear football” always goes everywhere the president goes. During the transition from one president to another, there are two of them—one for the departing president and one for the incoming one… just in case we have to nuke somebody during the inaugural parade or festivities.

Is there really a book of secrets? The program points out that only five living people know for sure—our current president and the four living past presidents.

I wish I’d had a DVR, but the DVD is available in the History Channel Store for $19.95 which I plan to order on payday. I did get my questions answered (and more) despite my scanty notes.

The narrator pointed out that during their campaigns, presidential candidates may actually be expressing what they really feel is the right thing to do for the country. Sometimes, they might be lying because they know that if they told you their actual agendas, no one would ever vote for them. Either way, it isn’t until after the inauguration that he learns the secrets about the government and how it works, everything he did not know until he stepped into the Oval Office shortly after becoming president.

Try as he might to make good on his promises, the secret hidden government evidently quickly lets him know that they could not, would not, simply will not allow it—for reasons they will never share with us.

My advice? Cut ‘em a little slack in the future. Understand that while the president might be “the most powerful leader in the world,” even his strings are very possibly being pulled by parties unknown, and are likely to remain that way.

No wonder the gray hair starts to show up so soon after they are sworn in. Presumably, they had an idea of what they were getting into when they made the decision to run for office. But they didn’t learn about the secrets until it was too late!

Geology, Nuclear Power, & Politics

2011-03-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

Here’s my true confession: I went through a great many years as uninformed about really important stuff as most of us are. It took me a long time to acquire a basic understanding of the planet we live on.

Born in Hollywood, California (which didn’t really exist until 2005, when Los Angeles officially recognized it as a distinct neighborhood), my widowed mother and I lived in Burbank. In our frequent trips to the beach or, more often, to the orthodontist’s office in Beverly Hills, I looked longingly at the beautiful houses perched on or near the tops of the hills along our route. One day, after a particularly rainy “monsoon season,” I noticed that most of the houses on one hill were gone, and the ground upon which they had stood was bare of not just the houses, but all vegetation as well.

Over time, I began to notice that new homes were being built on the same ground that had collapsed. I asked mom if the new houses would slide down the hill too. “Probably, sooner or later,” she told me.

“Why,” I asked, “do they do that if they know the houses will slide down the hill again?”

Beyond some mildly rude comments about the intelligence of the builders' decisions, she had no answer for me. This precocious kid pondered the weighty question for many years. Mom’s answer would have to suffice for a while.

Earthquakes were just part of life in southern California. At the time of the Arvin-Tehachapi earthquake [magnitude 7.7] in 1952, mom and I were sharing a bedroom—twin beds; wheels on the bed frame resting on the polished wood floor. It was close enough to Los Angeles that we certainly felt it. I wasn’t afraid. But I was startled when, in the middle of the night, both beds started rolling around in what I remember as circles on the wood floor. Actually, I thought it was a kind of fun ride! Mom stayed calm and told me to stay in bed until the shaking stopped.

Smaller earthquakes and barely detectable tremors were not unusual. The Arvin-Tehachapi quake was just more spectacular. Of course, we had regular earthquake drills in school so I was aware of the possibility. Over the years, I became quite good at predicting earthquakes. I know scientists have studied why animals and some people know when an earthquake is imminent, but have no idea whether they’ve ever been able to fully explain it. There’s just something about the air… animals behave strangely, it seems to be quieter, more still, thicker, heavier than usual…

In the mid-1970s, I worked for a non-profit company that published scientific journals. My only job was transcribing tapes dictated by scientists, who usually had thick foreign accents. Some tapes were index entries of chemicals compounds; others were abstracts of studies and papers on a variety of subjects, including nuclear power plants. That was more than thirty years ago, and what I learned was shocking and terrifying. There were articles about the cracks in the buildings containing the nuclear reactors; malfunctioning equipment; human errors; etc. I don’t remember all the problems the abstracts addressed or whether remedies were proposed. My takeaway: using nuclear power to generate electricity was scary and possibly had been undertaken prematurely, before anybody actually knew what they were doing, or understood the consequences of not getting it right the first time.

In the late 1970s, my husband applied for and got a job in Denver as a music teacher. In 1980, I applied for and got a clerical job in a division office of a major oil company. I would be working with geologists and geophysicists, about whom I knew a little less than nothing. I couldn’t imagine what they did or, for that matter, what I would be doing. I found out very quickly.

I worked in the Western Division, where the primary mission was to identify possible oil reserves, propose drilling the most promising ones, buy land leases, and track the day-to-day details of the drilling. My first assignment was to retype an edited manual for newly hired, fresh out of college geoscientists. They came to the job knowledgeable about geology, but with no idea about how to explore for oil then get it out of the ground, despite their masters or doctorate degrees. The manual I retyped was a review of some basic geology concepts, and a lot about how to apply what they learned in school to the work the company expected of them.

Something I’ve always really enjoyed about typing or editing other people’s stuff is that I learn a lot from it. Typing that manual taught me about something I had never thought about: how dynamic our little corner of the universe, our ‘blue’ planet, really is. I was off and running. And I was in love. With geology.

As quickly as I could find a school to attend and get my request for tuition reimbursement approved, I enrolled. The only boring required class I took was statistical analysis. Otherwise… well, let’s just say that my love affair with the subject has never diminished. Within three months in my new job, I was promoted to geological technician.

In school, I learned about paleogeography; about plate tectonics and how the original land mass split apart and drifted around the planet to form continents familiar to us today; and how some plates collided into others to form mountain ranges like the Himalayas. We studied volcanoes and how eruptions and shifting plates formed the Hawaiian islands. In other words, I learned how dynamic and ever-changing this little planet is.

Because the school was located at the foot of the eastern slope of the Front Range of the Rocky mountains, just east of the Hogback, we were only minutes and a short bus ride away from mini-field trips where we could see and touch much of what we had read about in class. We went on longer field trips, and hiked to the top of a few mountains to see stromatolites up-close and personal. We traveled the state to see the sand dunes, search for fossils, explore marble quarries. We panned for gold and peeked into a tiny hole where we could see rubies ‘growing.’ It was one of the most exciting learning experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a few!

One unanticipated payoff: now, whether I’m flying or driving cross-country, I have an infinitely better understanding of what I’m looking at and what earth forces made it look that way. And recently, our little planet has been an excellent reminder of how dynamic it can be.

I’ve watched the events in Japan with horror about the magnitude of the damage from the main shock and the aftershocks and, of course, the unbelievable power of the tsunami. Unlike people in other recent natural disasters, the Japanese people understand that help is on the way, but are surprised and grateful when teams from the U.S. and around the world actually show up to help them. They have suffered horribly, but wait patiently—the pain of missing loved ones obvious in their faces. There does not seem to be much, if any, looting or violence. They are desperate but quiet in their desperation. They have my utmost respect.

But always in a tiny corner in the back of my mind is my limited knowledge of geology and first-hand knowledge of geoscientists, and I share some of what their reactions must be. They are as horrified by the events as anyone, and I would bet money that the nuclear physicists and nuclear reactor designers are significantly less calm than they appear to be during the endless appearances on our 24-hour news broadcasts. They may have ideas of how to do something about the four possible meltdowns and increasing levels of radiation released into the atmosphere, but they don’t really know what to do about it. It’s a learning experience for them too.

For the earth scientists, at least, there is a bit of a conflict too. I saw it first-hand when Mount St. Helens blew exactly eighteen days after I started my job. I, innocent that I was, was horrified—both by the eruption and by the reaction of the scientists with whom I worked. They love to see this stuff when it actually happens. Until then, they can only theorize about it, and examine the results of similar events that happened eons ago. If they can’t see it in person, they can watch it from all angles, on video, analyze what happened and, with luck, eventually understand enough to predict future events. They may be as horrified by the event, but they’re thrilled with the new knowledge it makes possible

No one understands enough about earthquakes yet to predict when they might happen. The best they can do is estimate the probably of one along a certain known fault within x number of years, based on studies of core samples taken from known active faults and the time intervals between earthquakes in the past. The San Andreas Fault in California might experience a major quake in the next thirty years, for example.

The recent events in New Zealand, in Chile, in Haiti remind me of the consequences of some of our actions, things like building homes over and over again on hills that collapse over and over again. Or building nuclear power plants directly over identified major faults, or in Japan—one of the most active, earthquake-prone, heavily populated places on earth.

When we do things like forgetting our history (or, in this case, our planet’s history), the nuclear power experts build the highest concentration of nuclear facilities in the U.S. within five to six or seven hundred miles of a major earthquake fault in the heartland, the New Madrid fault, that produced several powerful earthquakes in 1811 and 1812. The largest of them rang church bells on the east coast!

Something else I pay attention to are expert opinions. In everything from technology to the food we eat to religious beliefs, there are experts that believe they have the final word on… pick your topic. They believed that the earth was flat; that the sun circled the earth; that plagues and epidemics were God’s punishment for evil. In the time of Columbus, they believed that they could reach China by sailing directly west out of Spain. They believed that Earth was the only planet in the heavens and the moon and stars were there for navigation; to signal monsoon and planting seasons; and to light the night skies.

Whether we’re talking about geosciences, prescription drugs, earthquakes, or nuclear power plants, I simply do not believe that we know everything there is to know about much of anything. And even if we did, we live in a society that is reactive, not proactive. That means that here in the U.S., with our current political mess, we will wait until after a major earthquake or other catastrophic event kills hundreds or thousands of people, or causes meltdowns in our own nuclear power plants, before we seriously consider fixing infrastructure that could have prevented horrendous problems if done in a timely manner.

But politics is politics and politicians’ priorities have little or nothing to do with keeping our country, its economy, or its people safe. Don’t be looking for anything proactive unless or until the conditions in our country become more important than the self-interests of elected officials.

As of this morning, I learned about the steps taken in other countries to shut down some nuclear power plants, or at least take preventative measures before problems arise. In the U.S., our elected officials don’t want us to make snap judgments about their desire to build more nuclear power plants… You can almost hear them assuring us that “it could never happen here.” They seem to have forgotten Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and will no doubt forget Japan just as quickly. After all, the big power companies that seem to own so many of them want it that way. Personal power and money trump all.

Fighting Back, Part II

2011-03-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

That was only the beginning [see Part I]. Even after I dumbed down my résumé and reduced a lifetime of experience to a few bullet points, hiring managers read between the lines and immediately branded me with the overqualified word. When I told them I had a steady income from SS and would not need medical coverage… even when I told them I would be perfectly willing to work for significantly less than my last salary, I got the same answer: “I’m sure you could do the work very well, but you’d probably leave as soon as something better came along.”

“No, sir/ma’am, I probably wouldn’t. I want something long-term, preferably part-time, to supplement the income I already have so I can work on being a freelance writer.”

“Well, of course, that’s what everyone says and it would just cost us too much to hire and train you, then have you turn around and leave. I just can’t take the chance.”

One employer gave me the same story, then offered me a consulting gig to redesign a restaurant chain’s training manuals and cookbooks. I grabbed that one! It lasted for more than a year, off and on, and paid pretty well (including a seemingly endless supply of guest cards for free meals at any of their steakhouses). It wasn’t enough to fatten up my bank account in a significant way, but I saved a bundle on groceries and ate very, very well! (I recommend getting the family-size carryout meals… you can eat well for a week!)

I finally got a part-time job in aviation because of my experience with (and almost a dozen recommendations from former coworkers at) my most recent job. Unfortunately, the guy left some important details out of the job description… like that he was hiring me to replace his wife in her favorite part of her job so she could work full time as the company treasurer. She did everything she could (subtly, of course) to make it impossible for me to do what I was hired to do. We parted company (by mutual consent). Poor guy had no clue that his wife did not want to be the treasurer. She definitely wanted my job though.

He laid me off so I could collect unemployment… then we signed a contract (and he gave me a hefty advance) to edit a training manual he had been trying to write for twenty years. When I sent him the first batch of edits, he decided he hated his own writing and was going to either ditch the project or start over. I haven’t heard from him since! Used the advance to get new brakes on the car. It was worth the hassle. Almost.

~~~~~

This was all going on in central California, after fulfilling a long-time dream to move home again. When I started meeting people, I learned I wasn’t alone in my overqualified classification. In 2006-2007, I met dozens of people who had followed all the rules for being successful—college degrees, experience in their professions, good work records. Some were working, but instead of well-paid professional jobs, they had a friend who had an inside contact who got them in for an interview. They got jobs… as cashiers in hardware or drug stores. One was working in a rubber stamp company, and not in the office! The temporary manager of my apartment complex had been looking for a full-time permanent job for three or four years.

What do you do when you get kicked into the gutter, discarded because of your qualifications; when you lose hope and reach the point of desperation? There are millions of us today in the same situation.

Here’s what I did. At my lowest point, I logged in to my alma mater’s networking site, shot off an email to a guy in the publishing business, who referred me to a friend of his who could probably help me better than he could, he said.

His friend did help. He delivered a swift (if virtual) kick in the backside. I deserved it; my email had made my fear, feelings of desperation, and… admittedly… self-pity, pretty obvious. I deserved his harsh reminder that feeling sorry for myself would not solve my problems. In a nutshell, he told me to figure out my strengths then get busy figuring out how to put them to good use to earn some money. Be a consultant, be a freelance writer, design Web sites… search the internet for ways to find work. Just keep moving forward and believing in myself.

Some of you have already figured that out. But too many don’t know how to begin, or don’t yet realize how many skills and abilities they've acquired in their lifetimes. Time to find out!

Four and a half years later, I’ve gained new skills and most importantly, have learned how to begin earning some money from them. I ain’t getting rich yet, but I have some steady income other than a Social Security check and modest pension. When I knew I couldn’t make it any longer in California without going on welfare, I returned to Ohio to do some serious work.

I joined free Web sites and writers’ forums where I could post articles and have them critiqued by other writers. Other than journals, creative letters and emails to friends, and my own ramblings, my primary writing experience was in designing and developing computer and software instructional stuff. Figured that wouldn’t sell too well to the general public. The writers’ Web sites and forums helped me learn what else not to write!

And I signed up on several freelance sites and worked with clients all over the planet, until the world-wide recession made fair pay a thing of the past. Clients stopped caring about (and being willing to pay for) quality and settled for the lowest bid. They were, I heard from a few of them, usually disappointed… but still weren’t willing to pay for higher quality work. I moved on.

I learned to be a print-on-demand publisher and set up my virtual shop. I took a proofreading course online—I love to edit, though I have no desire to be a proofreader, as traditional publishers define the job! Then, not having anything better to do, I developed my skills in designing and formatting book interiors. Wrote and published my memoir. Solicited editing and formatting work from everyone I ran into.

It takes time and tenacity to see results. Now, into my fourth year of freelancing, it’s beginning to pay off. And my first new steady client is the same guy that gave me the swift kick in the butt that got me started. He has also been my writing mentor and good friend. Dr. Woody Sears is an expatriate expert in Human Resource Development, and lives in Lithuania. We’ve never met in person and maybe never will. I love the world-wide contact today's technology gives me!

In conclusion…

If you’re still struggling to find a place in our broken economy…
If you haven’t been able to get a job because you’re too skilled…
If no one will hire you because you’re now considered too old (a year or two ago, most employers set the age limit at forty for most jobs)…
And if you aren’t already working (the newest twist: many employers won’t hire anyone who doesn’t already have a job. You have to be changing jobs, not trying to get back to work again. How awful is that, with so many highly qualified unemployed people trying so hard to find work?)

allow me to help you out with my own swift kick in the back side, and these suggestions. Assess your skills and experience. Write ‘em down. And write down the gaps… the “if I only knew how to..” stuff. Use the resources available online or in the local library to learn whatever you think will close the gaps. Some of it might cost you, but before you pay, see what you can find for free.

Read and learn. If you don’t have an ebook reader, go to the Kindle Store on Amazon and download their free “Kindle for PC” software. Then you can buy as many books as you want, at low prices, on any subject that will help.

Write down every idea you get about how to put your skills to work. Then get back on the internet and look for opportunities—real ones, not stuffing envelopes or getting paid to shop at your favorite stores. Don’t get trapped in those “earn money while you sleep” scams. It will cost you to find out how it works, learn new skills you never wanted, then use them to do stuff you hate, and you may never earn a dime for your efforts! I know somebody who actually tried it… and lost! She’s finally given up (I hope) on the too-good-to-be true “jobs” and works part-time in an office instead.

Is there something you’re passionate about, something you already know how to do and love doing, or maybe something you’ve always wanted to learn to do. Go with your passions and, if you have no passions, go with your interests and learn how to put them to work.

Success is not guaranteed? Hardly! With luck, determination, and lots of work, you will begin to succeed. Some things you try will fail. Just forget about it and keep working at finding your niche. Learn to be patient. Starting anything new takes a while, so don’t expect instant results. Just stick with it.

One big payoff: if and when you succeed, nobody will be able to fire you or lay you off if you own the company! Another payoff, possibly the most important: you will slowly become aware that, having made it past the inevitable hurdles, your self-esteem is returning and the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are slowly fading into the past. Because you’ve taken your fate and your future into your own hands and are working toward something important: surviving and thriving.

Am I thriving? Not really, not yet. But every day brings me a few steps closer, brings me a few more dollars to stash away or spend. Every new client, every new project, encourages me to keep on keepin on! Don’t give up on me, not while my heart is still beating.

And please! Never give up on yourself.

Fighting Back, Part I

2011-03-12T10:39:00.000-08:00

Phew! Thank goodness that’s over. I sweated my way through the three written tests. The first: alphabetize a list of names. I struggled, but persevered. Next, circle the misspelled words in a long list of word pairs. Again, it wasn’t easy, but it can be done if you stay cool and focused. The third test? Well, it had been a long time since my last math class and I was worried. I took a few deep breaths, relaxed as much as I could… went through the long list of number pairs, marking the ones where the two numbers were not identical. And I was finished.

My rep at the temporary job agency led me to the room where my computer skills would be tested. They couldn’t take my word for it, despite the fact that I’d spent the last sixteen years of my working life teaching people to use computers—in two short-lived jobs and eleven and a half years as a corporate trainer and training developer. And forget the fact that I took my first computer class in 1977, when it was all about punch cards and primitive stuff. No… I had to prove it!

So I sat at the computer and changed the font face, size, style, and/or color according to the instructions; corrected some typos; rearranged paragraphs; maybe did a numbered list or two and created some tabs—I really don’t remember, other than that it was all pretty basic. Did some entries (again, following the instructions) in an Excel spreadsheet, and then logged off.

When she finished evaluating my tests, the rep came to the computer room to get me. Her eyes were as big as saucers when she told me that I had the highest scores on all the tests of everyone they had tested in their office. I wish I’d thought to ask how long the office had been there. Ten years would have made me feel extremely… well, superior to almost everyone in the world. If, however, the office had only been open a week, I would just have been a bit more humble… just glad to hear I had passed.

After watching a required OSHA video (which, I swear, lasted for about seven hours!), I felt I understood how to use the safety equipment, and thoroughly understood how it could save my life… especially if I happened to get a desk job on the top story of a skyscraper under construction. Yup, those safety harnesses could save my life if I scooted my chair the wrong way, and found myself in freefall toward the street fifty stories below, had I not remembered to wear my harness! At my age, however, I doubt I would accept an assignment that required me to learn to be a ‘skywalker’ and actually need a safety harness to work on a computer, or that presented any serious threats to my health, well-being, or my very life!

The rep provided me with everything I would need for my first assignment: time slips, envelopes, handbooks, her business card, etc. She told me that she had to verify my past employment before I officially was ‘hired,’ and sent me on my way.

I waited for her call. After a week or ten days, I called and asked if she had anything for me. She told me I wasn’t official yet: she had been unable to verify my employment. Oh my gosh! In the three or four months since I left, a very successful company had gone belly-up! (I always suspected they wouldn’t know what to do without me!) I made sure she had the correct phone number, explained that it was a fairly small and very busy HR office, asked her to leave a voice mail with her name and number, and assured her that she would receive a callback very soon.

The next day, I called again and got the same answer: “When I try to call, nobody answers.” This time, I explained what voice mail was and how to use it (I was, I admit, a bit sarcastic). She said she would try again.

The second I hung up the phone, I called my former employer’s office and asked to be put through to HR regarding an employment verification problem. I left a voice mail. I got a call back within fifteen minutes. The company was still open, all was well, everybody either answered the phone by the third ring or returned calls promptly. They had never received a call from the agency.

I gave up, having decided that I certainly didn’t want to depend on a representative who, by 2007, hadn't learned to use voice mail (or maybe even make a long distance call). Maybe she just didn’t like me and didn’t have the nerve to tell me so. Maybe she had suddenly lost whatever communication and/or technology skills she might have had before my appearance in her life. I decided it was either personal or she was the dumbest temp agency employee on Planet Earth. Maybe a neurologist or psychiatrist should examine her to see if there was a working brain in her head at all!

~~~~~

It took me a while to figure out what was going on. I called another agency, a local one, and tried to schedule an appointment. They told me they weren’t taking on any new temps, since there wasn’t enough work locally to keep their existing ones busy. Hmmmm…

Then I called a private employment agency and scheduled an appointment. Did the whole battery of tests again… minus the safety equipment video for construction jobs, of course. They loved my résumé, and had a couple of possible opportunities for me, right off the bat. I turned one down: it was for a position in a church, and would require that I become a practicing member of that particular denomination--the prime qualification to even be considered. No thanks. I’d like a job, preferably a part-time job, but not enough to change my religion for it!

But they had another possibility: the owner of a local company needed an executive secretary, a mature one with lots of experience and skill. It had been a few years since I’d been an executive secretary, but I had been twice in the past, and hadn’t lost any of the skills required to do it again. No question that I was mature: the government wouldn’t be sending me those monthly Social Security checks if I was twenty-something and looking for my first job. The agency sent the guy my résumé and test results. No-go. It was the first time in a very long time I’d heard the word “overqualified”, which simply means that when someone looks at your skills and experience, they decide they’re not willing to pay what you’re worth—however much they might like to have what you could bring to their businesses.

To be continued...