“And There’s Winners, And There’s Losers…

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work

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"Pink Houses" (1983), 2016 Election, American Narcissism, Bankruptcy, Comb-Over, Donald Trump, FOX News Debate, Frank Sinatra, Hypocrisy, John Mellencamp, Losers, Misogyny, Narcissism, New York, New York" (1980), Racism, RNC Debate, The Donald, Trump Supporters, Winners, Xenophobia

“But they ain’t no big deal/’Cause the simple man, baby/Pays for thrills/The bills the pills that kill” – John Mellencamp, “Pink Houses” (1983).

Donald Trump’s entire campaign might as well be called “The Ultimate Narcissist Does The Pink Houses” Tour, complete with Def Leppard, his kids, and Omarosa going to bat for him on CNN. Trump and his angry band of supporters see the world in the simplest way, like an indoctrinated twelve-year-old forced to be part of a religious cult (I can definitely relate). Trump sees himself as a “winner,” the US as a country that used to be a “winner,” and anything or anyone who doesn’t fit his narrative as “losers.” Of course there’s a contradiction here. Trump doesn’t have the courage to call many of his supporters “losers,” though there are about four decades’ worth of his actions and statements that would serve as evidence of his thoughts about his base.

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump meeting with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gillette Stadium, Foxboro, MA, October 21, 2012. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald;http://bostonhearld.com).

At the “Big Boys” RNC debate a couple of weeks ago, Trump couched everything in terms of “winners” and “losers.” President Obama was an “incompetent loser.” The US is “losing to China” economically. Mexican immigrants are turning the US into “a nation of losers.” The US has to “win” against ISIS (I prefer the term Islamic State or IS that most news agencies use outside the US, but that would make me a loser). Trump’s pronouncements at the debate and since have been about more than sound bites of “us” vs. “them,” as the more progressive media elements have said. It’s been about presenting himself as America’s winner, as the one at “the top of the heap, king of the hill, A-number-1.”

In a nation full of narcissists, this has a real appeal, even if the reality of Trump’s life contradicts both the winner image he portrays and the lives that most of his supporters actually live. The most obvious is Trump’s net worth being more like between $1.4 billion and $4 billion (Oprah Winfrey territory), and not the $10 billion he says it is. Or that he has — or, as Trump would say, “my companies” have — filed for Chapter 11 four times in the past quarter-century. Or his multiple divorces. Or his ridiculous comb-over in 20+mph winds.

I guess all of those falsities and setbacks should be more nuanced, as part of life’s long and bumpy journey. By Trump’s own definition, because his net worth — though envy-inducing — is hardly #1 (still between Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg), he should see himself as a loser. Because Trump has seen multiple business ventures crash and burn, the “loser” moniker could fit. Oh, but narcissism allows for those suffering from grandiose inflations of themselves to see their failings, their losses as mere bumps in the road, and not part of the “winners and losers” narrative.

Picture of abandoned Palma Nova mobile home park, where the last of the 900 families had been evicted in 2009, Davie, Florida, February 15, 2010. (Mike Stocker/Miami Sun-Sentinel; http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-palma-nova-davie-pg-photogallery.html).

The same goes for Trump’s supporters, most of whom couldn’t hope to be PTA president at their neighborhood elementary school, much less run for POTUS. The US is so replete with narcissism that it’s in the bloodstream of ordinary low-income Americans (the majority of the working population, by the way). And as such, their reasons for supporting Trump are as sad as they are predictable. They see him as a winner, even though he was born into wealth via his real estate magnate father (or as many New Yorkers saw him, slum lord), Fred Trump. The Donald was born halfway between third and home plate, and somehow ordinary Americans see him as a quintessential American?

Trump’s supporters also see him as someone who “tells it like it is.” Really? Ready to be fooled again, just like with so many numbskulls and wing-nuts who’ve sold Americans the magic of tax cuts for the rich and for corporations and endless prosperity in the past? Some of these narcissists are like gambling addicts, taking their last dollars to a slot machine on the hope of making it rich with crusty toenails. It both a real shame, and pitiful to watch.

Aside

Sure I’ve Raised Money, But…

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Bob Beane, Capitalism, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Exploitation, Fundraising, Grant-seeking, Maximizing Profits, Medicaid, Medicare, Mount Vernon Clinic, Partnerships for College Access and Success, PCAS, Presidential Classroom, Valerie Johnstone, Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health

Man on a hamster wheel gif, like constantly looking for money, July 26, 2015. (http://twitter.com).

Keep in mind that these are just observations, not me axe-grinding or feeling sorry for myself. My biggest observation is that raising money for others without reaping enough benefit for myself shows that even governmental and nonprofit organizations are just as prone to capitalistic exploitation as Walmart and Apple. And that I am not immune, nor have I ever been immune, to the pride and naiveté of production and exploitation.

Many times during my years in the nonprofit world as a manager or consultant, employers have asked me about my ability to raise money. I’ve done a pretty good job of that over the years. Fifteen minutes of work as an educational “closer” at Presidential Classroom led to a $25,000 grant from State Farm’s civic engagement work (a.k.a. service-learning) in 2000. I worked on a $1 million renewal grant from Lumina Foundation for Education for the college access and success initiative for which I served as deputy director during my last four years at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). I also raised $200,000 from Lumina for data collection for the initiative in 2005.

“I come here looking for money (Got to have it),” lyrics from Pet Shop Boys “What Have I Done To Deserve This” (1988), July 27, 2015. (http://nonprofitquarterly.org/).

I’ve indirectly raised funds from which I didn’t derive a benefit, either because the amount were too small for AED’s vast overhead and other direct costs (read as paying higher-ups salaries for the privilege of raising money on behalf of the now-defunct organization). Or because others used my curriculum vitae and my work for AED to garner grants that I never worked on. My last year at AED we turned down what would’ve been a $100,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation because it would’ve been too small, especially since we needed to collaborate with a sister organization on K-16 access and success work. We turned down potential smaller grants from other private foundations for similar reasons.

And after nine months of work off-and-on, the wife of a Pulitzer Prize winning-columnist for a Washington newspaper received a $250,000 grant from a corporate foundation in New York, based on my work. Because the AED higher-up in charge of the process worked with her as a personal favor — and didn’t put our proposal and implementation work into a contract — her socialite friend and head of a college fund organization received a grant with no strings attached, for AED or for me. I did get paid for my work, as I did it under the AED banner. But the fruits born from that work went outside the organization, to a person almost as duplicitous as the organization for which I once worked.

But in terms of fundraising, or at least, making money for an organization, absolutely nothing in my work history compares to what I did at nineteen. Yes, nineteen! The summer of ’89, I worked for Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, out of the Mount Vernon, New York clinic, across the bridge from the Mount Vernon East Metro-North stop. After the previous long summer of unemployment followed by five days of homelessness and two more months of living on financial fumes, I was happy, really happy, to have gained steady employment all through ’89.

So happy that I didn’t notice how productive I was being in the office. I had the rather official title of Summer Intern, and had been told by the Director of Community Mental Health Programs in Bob Beane that he was “counting on me.” I came to the Mount Vernon clinic with Beane’s charge to “get their back-billing in order.” Since 1984, the clinic had regularly had its Medicaid and Medicare billing for psychiatric and psychological services rejected by the state-level health folks in Albany, mostly due to coding errors.

Graphic on DSM editions since 1952 (DSM-V is in its “beta-testing” phase), American Psychiatric Association, 2012. (http://life-surfing.com/).

Specifically, the clinic staff were putting incorrect codes from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders — in this case, DSM-III and DSM-III-R (with the III-R standing for version number three, revised edition) — on the state billing forms. There were other errors to be sure. Doctor’s names and patients names were often misspelled. Control numbers were incorrect. The proper signature wasn’t obtained. But well over ninety percent of the errors were DSM-III or DSM-III-R codes that staff had entered into a billing form incorrectly.

This was the summer of ’89, so the form itself was printed on a line printer, and the checking of such forms had to be done manually. It would take two or three weeks to hear from Albany about an incorrect code, a month to receive payment. After five years of coding errors, red tape, and the clinic’s administrative staff badly managed by one Valerie Johnstone, my job was to rectify as many of the old billing errors as I could before the summer came to a close.

In eight weeks’ time, despite all the other menial tasks Johnstone would sometimes have me do, as well as having to share the same billing computer with Beverly (who dealt with current billing, and was probably responsible for the majority of my back-billing work), I got through three cabinets’ worth of billing issues. I left at the end of August, I left for the friendly environs of Pittsburgh and Pitt, vaguely aware of how much money I’d made for the Mount Vernon clinic and for the county.

Screen shot of 100 East 1st Street and South 1st Avenue, where I toiled for Westchester County the summer of 1989 (and 1992), April 2012. (http://maps.google.com).

I found out in September that my work had made them $371,000! I was impressed, but then I quickly became depressed. My salary for Westchester County that summer was $5.90 per hour. Over eight weeks, my net income was $1,610. As an intern, I had no fringe benefits, not even a commuter allowance. In terms of ratios, for every dollar I made between June 26th and August 18th, Westchester County and the Mount Vernon clinic made $230.43!

No wonder the staff at the Mount Vernon clinic looked at me with a combination of bemusement and derision! I had shown them up, unknowingly, and allowed myself to be an exploitable resource. And though I had a guaranteed job for the next three years after that summer with Beane and Westchester County, there was no way I could ever make enough income to make up for that kind of profit-generation. So much for the idea of not-for-profit and government enterprises!

Aside

RIP Sister, Sarai Adar Washington (February 9, 1983-July 11, 2010)

11 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Brother-Sister Relationship, Death, Dread, Eri Washington, Father Figures, Growing Up, Independence, Life, Mazza Gallerie, Sarai Washington, Sickle Cell Anemia, The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Sarai Washington, circa 2009.

It’s been five years since I received my brother Eri’s call telling me what I had known and dreaded would come for nearly thirty years. That my only sister Sarai had died from complications stemming from sickle-cell anemia.

As soon as I picked up the phone five years ago, I knew. Sarai had been in and out the hospital for months since she had returned to New York at the tail end of ’09. Before then, she had lived either on her own or with two of her high school friends in Huntsville, Alabama since ’05. The skin and bone bruises, the constant blood transfusions, the always-there pain of sickled red blood cells circulating through her body. The average life expectancy for anyone with the disease is thirty-three years. That I had Sarai in my life for 82 percent of that life expectancy was still a minor miracle in the midst of what to me seemed completely unnecessary pain.

We weren’t as close in her later years, though. I mean, Sarai saw me as a bit of a father-figure when she was growing up. I had thirteen years and six weeks on her, so that’s how it goes. Between the 616 fire and homelessness for her and my other younger siblings in ’95, though — not to mention puberty — Sarai no longer treated me as her hero. That was fine by me. I already had too many people in my life who thought of me as some sort of hero or saint.

I think, though, that my sister enjoyed not really having to think about her future, about not feeling the need to grow up, since, what would be the point, really? I thought that because she knew more about her disease than anyone, it was her responsibility to grow up and find the best care possible to manage her disease, to bring some meaning to her life. That’s where our closeness became less so. I have a way of expecting more out of people than most people are willing to expect of themselves.

Sarai & Noah, November 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

When Sarai came to live with me and my wife Angelia in ’03, to help us out with our then newborn son Noah, it was obvious that my sister was doing little to take care of herself. When I finally confronted her about her poor diet and unwillingness to watch over her disease, Sarai yelled, “You’re not my father!,” right in front of Mazza Gallerie, on the DC-Chevy Chase border (we had gone to see The Matrix Revolutions, much more for her than for me). Of course she was right. But of course, I was right also.

Sarai decided the next day to pack up her stuff and move back home to 616 and Mount Vernon, “where no one told her what to do,” she wrote as part of her going away letter. She also said that I “don’t know anything about the streets” as yet another familial “Just because you have a Ph.D…” coup de grace. I thought, “If I didn’t know anything about the streets, you and the rest of the younger siblings would’ve gotten your asses kicked through the early ’90s.”

But I knew Sarai’s letter wasn’t about the streets. It was about her living her life the way she wanted, without me or anyone else telling her how to take care of herself. That’s why she went away to Alabama for nearly four years.

Luckily I did get to talk to her a couple of times after that. Though we weren’t close, I loved her, and I know she loved me. The sad truth was, though, Sarai never had enough time to take charge over her life, and I couldn’t make her take that precious little time.

Aside

“Back In The Summer of ’85”

04 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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"Summer of '69" (1985), All-Nighter, Atlanta Braves, Back To The Future (1985), Bryan Adams, Darryl Strawberry, Davey Johnson, Dwight Gooden, Eleanor Bumpurs, Escapism, Fireworks, Gary Carter, Howard Johnson, Independence Day, It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988), Jesse Orosco. Cy Young Award, Keith Hernandez, Lenny Dystra, Michael Stewart, Mookie Wilson, New York Mets, Public Enemy, Rafael Santana, Ron Darling, Tom Gorman, Wally Backman

Dwight Gooden in 1985, 24-4, 1.53 ERA, 268Ks, Cy Young Award winner, intimidator. (Ronald C. Modra/Getty Images; http://espn.go.com).

Michael Stewart (1958-1983) and Eleanor Bumpurs (1918-1984) had me thinking about police brutality long before my first Walking While Black encounter, July 4, 2015 (via Adobe Photoshop).

Since this is Independence Day Weekend, it makes thirty years since the official release of Back To The Future. And with me beyond the forty-five-and-a-half year mark, I am officially middle-aged. Funny, though. I don’t feel that different. My knees ached when I was fifteen sometimes, and so also did my feet. We had gas-guzzling cars in ’85, and we still have plenty of them on the road in ’15. White Americans treated Black lives cheaper than manure in ’85 (e.g., Michael Stewart in ’83 and Eleanor Bumpurs in ’84), and evidence from the police shootings and acts of White terrorism — especially in South Carolina — in recent years/days show that it still “takes a nation of millions to hold” Blacks back because of their indifference in ’15.

Rafael Santana, Mets shortstop from 1984-87, 1986 World Series, Boston’s Fenway Park. (AP; http://www.newsday.com/ ).

One thing that has changed in the past three decades has been me as a fan. I loved — I mean, LOVED — the New York Metropolitans in ’85. I was a baseball fan through and through, and had become a diehard Mets fans by the time I finished my first stage of pubescent growth in the spring of ’84. I read the Daily News for box scores. I would get peeved hearing bad commentary on WABC-AM 770 — from listening to the late Art Rust, Jr.’s show — about the terrible hitting of shortstop Rafael Santana or the constant criticism of Darryl Strawberry (they were the Yankees radio station). I’d schedule my spring and summer afternoons and evenings around whomever the Mets played that day.

The summer of ’85 didn’t truly start for me until June 11, when the Mets proceeded to lose a game to the Phillies by the score of 26-7. I’d been working with my older brother Darren for my father down in the city, and was on the 2 Subway and on my way home before I learned of the news. They were down 16-0 after two innings, with Mike Schmidt, Juan Samuel, Von Hayes and company having had as many as three or four at-bats in those couple of innings. The Mets managed seven runs in the third, fourth and fifth innings but with our then weak bullpen, had no chance to hold the Phillies the rest of the way. “If only I’d been home to listen to the game from the beginning,” I thought. “Then maybe they wouldn’t have been down so many runs.” Those are the thoughts of a fan whom lived and died with his team. I’m sure my blood pressure went up to 135/80 (mind you, I was fifteen, still a teenager) on days like that day.

But as I wrote in Boy @ The Window, that was hardly the end of my second full summer of Mets, Mets, and more Mets.

After the hungry end to tenth grade and three weeks of torture with my father, I had more important things to do. Watching Dwight Gooden pitch the Mets into a pennant race they’d almost fallen out of, for starters. I either listened to or watched Gooden win sixteen straight decisions between May and the end of August. And the Mets…made the ’85 season one to remember. Despite working nights, I managed to watch a rain-delayed Independence Day game with the Mets playing the Braves in Atlanta at the old Fulton County Stadium. The Mets won in nineteen innings, 19-16. The game ended at 4:05 am on the fifth of July, and the Braves still set off their fireworks at the end of the game.

Actually, the final score was 16-13 in nineteen innings (will correct in an eventual new edition). Originally scheduled for a 7:35 pm start, the game had been delayed by thunderstorms in Atlanta for nearly an hour and a half. There were at least two other rain delays during the game. Gooden was the Mets original starter that Thursday, but after two and a third innings, had stiffness in his throwing arm, had left some runners on, and left the game. The rest of the game was a roller coaster ride, as the Mets jumped out to a 7-4 lead thanks to Keith Hernandez’s cycle, then Jesse Orosco, our shutdown closer, gave up four runs in the bottom of the eighth to yield the lead to the Braves. Then the Mets scored a run in the top of the ninth to send the game to extra innings.

Scoring runs in the 13th and 18th innings didn’t help, as the Braves matched the Mets run for run, thanks in part to a pitcher with a .060 career batting average who hit a home run. When I saw Ron Darling (whom had started two nights earlier) warming up in the bullpen around 3:30 am, I knew this game had been on too long. I stayed up just long enough to watch the Mets score five more runs in the 19th inning, then dozed up until the fireworks went off at the end of the game.

(Note: just watch the first four minutes, including Marv Albert’s ’80s hair while still doing sports anchor work for WNBC-4 in New York)

Bryan Adams, “Summer of ’69” (1985), December 6, 2006. (Purdy via Wikipedia, originally A&M Records). Qualifies as fair use, as image is low-resolution and for illustrative purposes only.

I’d never been up that late into the next day before. Since no one at 616 was up with me, I’d been able to do for once what I’ve done most nights as an adult in the nearly three decades since. I thought about the future, and laid down some plans to ensure it. In this case, I planned to keep working for my father so that I could escape more into the world of the diehard Mets fan. I hoped that Bryan Adams was wrong, that the days of my Mom’s second trimester with me, the “Summer of ’69,” (a bit hit in the summer of ’85) weren’t “the best days of my life.”

But, as I correctly wrote in the memoir

Yeah, you could say that my summer was going better than expected, having worked and watched my Mets play quality baseball in July and into August. I had my usual set of chores to be sure, runs to the store, weekly washings of clothes and watching after the kids. I took Maurice and Yiscoc out for walks, would sometimes respond to the occasional bill collector on Mom’s behalf, would check the mail and give Sarai and Eri baths. I’d cook weekend brunches of fried beef bologna, scrambled eggs and grits and occasional spaghetti and broccoli dinners for my siblings. I’d long since known that I’d become the first-born of the family, in that I was filling Darren’s role on so many levels.

Hence, the welcome relief of Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, Howard Johnson, Gooden, Strawberry, Fernandez, and the rest of the ’85 Mets crew. While I may not like everything going on in my life and world now, I don’t need to escape it through baseball — or any other form of entertainment, really — to deal these days. At least there’s that.

Didn’t We Never Have It All

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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"Why Women Still Can't Have It All", Anne-Marie Slaughter, Arkansas, Black Migration, Bradley Arkansas, Conservatism, Evangelical Christianity, Hats, Judah ben Israel, Maurice Eugene Washington, Melissa Harris-Perry, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon Hospital, MSNBC, Perfectionism, Self-Awareness, Self-Loathing, Self-Sufficiency, Self-Worth, Strikebreaker, Tenant Farming, Vanity, Wear and Tear, Welfare, Welfare Poverty, Xenophobia

Whitney Houston, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” (released August 1987) Single 45rpm, from 2nd Whitney album (not exactly a favorite), June 4, 2015. (combined/cropped by Donald Earl Collins; http://musicstack.com and http://rapgenius.com).

I’ve been thinking about this for nearly a year. It started for me last August. Melissa Harris-Perry had a segment on her MSNBC show regarding the multiple hats women of color have worn over the years in taking care of their families, immediate, extended and non-biological. In response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s July/August 2012 piece in The Atlantic about “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Harris-Perry and her guests made the point that feminism for women of color has been about far more than having a successful, sexist-free career. That throughout American history, women of color have found themselves wearing multiple hats as primary breadwinners, primary caretakers and primary childrearers, often in ways that traditional feminists don’t discuss or recognize. All without fanfare and with many setback along the way.

What I’ve witnessed and been a part of in my own life reflects much of the conversation that Harris-Perry led on her show. The physical, mental and psychological scars from caring for family, friends and children, while struggling financially and dealing with racism and misogyny often manifests in disease and depression for so many women of color. There’s so much more, though, in terms of how my own mother’s multiple hats and habits led me to so many of my own. All initially to help her, but in the end, helping myself become self-sufficient. Not to mention making myself more understanding of where all the wear, tear and lack of care that wearing so much for so long can lead.

My Mom’s Hats and Habits:

The Anne-Marie Slaughter image of multitasking/wearing multiple hats (just think what this is like for poor, low-income, women of color), February 4, 2015. (ALAMY; http://telegraph.co.uk).

Before I turned thirteen years old, my mother had been far more than my Mom. She’d been a dietary supervisor at Mount Vernon Hospital, just outside New York City, since 1968, the year before I was born. She had been a high school basketball player, a caregiver to her eleven brothers and sisters, and a cotton-picking breadwinner for her family in segregated southwestern Arkansas, an area located in the Red River Valley, part of the larger Mississippi Delta region. She had become our family’s primary breadwinner in the years after she gave birth to my older brother and me. Not to mention a married young woman now living a thirty-minute train ride from Midtown Manhattan, between the Hudson and Hutchinson Rivers, on the border between affluent Westchester County and the Bronx.

Life didn’t treat my Mom too kindly once she married my alcoholic father in 1971. And it actually went from bad to worse as she divorced him for my stepfather in 1978. By then, she had become a cigarette smoker, a one-time adulterer, and an abuse survivor. My Mom did everything she could to shield my older brother and me from her habits and the realities of our tough life in Mount Vernon in the 1970s and early 1980s. But by the end 1982, as I turned thirteen, all the hats my Mom had worn began to fall to the ground. In taking on the role of a strikebreaker, all of our lives would change forever.

In response to concessions made to the union, who left her unprotected, Mount Vernon Hospital cut her from full-time to part-time. My Mom became the besieged one. She was the old woman in the shoe, with six kids — including four under the age of five — and a cheating, abusive, unemployed, sometimes-at-home husband. It was my Mom’s job to take care of us all. Yet no longer was she a breadwinner. My Mom had become one of Reagan’s alleged welfare queens, pulling in $16,600 in AFDC payments per year from April 1983 until I left for college in August 1987. With all of that, I became a hat juggler myself.

Once Her Hats Became My Own:

For a while during my teenage years, my Mom had been my friend, one in which I could usually confide, albeit out of anger and frustration. All while taking on more and more of what had been her duties, including the brunt of her second husband’s rage and fists. I’d become an everyday grocery shopper, a frequent family cook, and a sometimes provider, the last mostly through tracking down my own father for a few extra dollars every Friday or Saturday at one of his favorite bars. Or, by the time I was sixteen, through working part-time. I provided childcare on afternoons, evenings and weekends. I washed clothes with my older brother on Saturdays or Sundays every week without fail from October 1982 on.

Hat stall at a Sunday fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 31, 2008. (Jorgeroyan via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC BY-SA 3.0.

By the end of high school, I realized too who my Mom wasn’t, maybe for the first time. She wasn’t an encourager, a person who pushed her kids to pursue their dreams. With so many “Are you sure…?” questions my last two years of high school, it’s a wonder I applied to any colleges at all. Mom wasn’t a nurturer either, especially after I became a teenager. My Mom had only said “I love you” to me two times between my twelfth and nineteenth birthdays, including at my high school graduation ceremony in June 1987. She also wasn’t easygoing. Any mistake with money or my time would get a “Serves you right…” sermon about never screwing up.

The Toll Caring For Others Can Take:

All of this has made my Mom a conservatively cautious perfectionist, one living with depression and in constant denial about our shared past. I guess that it was all too much for her, like reaching the Jordan River, but not being allowed to cross it. Our shared experiences had also made me cautious and perfectionistic in my dealings with myself and the world, as I had to wear so many of my Mom’s hats and cross so many of those rivers with her. My mother tried to be all things to me and my older brother especially, and failed more than she succeeded in the process. For that and so many other reasons, despite her mistakes, I love her very much.

It’s been more than twenty-seven years since I moved away for the greener pastures of the University of Pittsburgh. Yet it’s only been in the past decade that I’ve learned to stop striving for perfection in all the things I say and do. It ultimately takes a lifetime to unlearn all the bad habits and prejudices and give up on juggling all the ideas and roles that our parents have put on us. My journey with and without my Mom has been no different. Now that my Mom’s in her late sixties, I just hope that the only hat she tries to wear these days is one to keep her head warm on the coldest of days.

Kiss From A Rose – 20 Years On

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Movies, music, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"Kiss From A Rose" (1994/1995), 71B, Angelia, Angelia N. Levy, Batman Forever (1995), Bruce Willis, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, CMU, Dating, Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995), Friendships, PAT Transit, Romance, Samuel L. Jackson, Spencer Fellowship, Val Kilmer

Twenty years ago on this date, I re-met the woman who’s now my wife of fifteen years, Angelia on a PAT-Transit bus in Pittsburgh, the old 71B-Highland Park into Oakland. It was an eighty-five degree Saturday afternoon in the ‘Burgh. I decided to treat myself to a movie, Batman Forever (1995), mostly because I knew Val Kilmer was in it. After seeing him act as well as he did in Tombstone, I figured I needed to give it a try. I needed a break, between the euphoria of the Spencer Fellowship and the depression from the fire at 616 that had rendered my family homeless.

So here it was, 3:15 in the afternoon, with me dressed in a blue t-shirt with blue basketball shorts and sneaks. I was standing at the corner of Highland Avenue and Penn Circle South, across from my apartment building, waiting for a bus. The 71B showed up first. I jumped on, sat down on the right-hand side in a front-facing seat. As soon as I sat down, I saw her, sitting right in front of me. It was “Angela with an ‘i’,” Angelia, like that Richard Marx song from ’90.

Seal’s second album/CD, Seal (1994): “Kiss From A Rose” re-released as part of Batman Forever (1995) soundtrack in June/July 1995. (http://www.allmusic.com).

The thing was, I had a dream that she showed up in the Saturday before this one. I hadn’t seen Angelia in more than two years, hadn’t given her any thought. But it seemed weird that she would just show up a week later in the flesh.

So I said, “Hi Angelia!,” excitedly, wondering what she was doing on the bus. She paused, said “Hi” with the heaviest, stop-bothering-me sigh I’d heard since my high school days. That didn’t deter me. I coaxed out of her the fact that she was pissed off with Carnegie Library because a book she was looking for at the East Liberty branch wasn’t there, even though the catalog said it was. It was a conversation that was one-sided, with Angelia doing most of the complaining.

I listened, and thought, “Yep, same Angelia, same weird Angelia.” But since I was weird also, I kept listening. Finally, she asked me what I was up to. I told her about school, my Spencer Fellowship, my family’s homelessness situation. I kept it brief. I mean, I hadn’t seen her in two years.

By the time we reached Oakland — me to catch one of the 61s to Squirrel Hill to catch the movie, Angelia to walk over to the main branch of Carnegie Library — we exchanged numbers, with Angelia saying, “It was really good talking to you.” I wasn’t so sure about that myself, but at least, she didn’t seem as weird as the woman she was five years earlier.

Screen with Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis from Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995), posted February 28, 2013. (http://chud.com).

I went to see the movie, but it turned out that it wasn’t out yet. It wasn’t due out for another month! I ended up seeing Die Hard With a Vengeance with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. Though much better than Die Hard 2 (1990; one shouldn’t really watch any feature film with John Amos taking up significant screen time, it still sucked, because Willis and Jackson spent half the movie yelling, and Jeremy Irons’ performance didn’t have Alan Rickman’s sense of social irony. I walked home, got together some grub, and through all preconceptions out the window. I gave her a call to tell her about the film mix-up. We ended up talking for more than three hours! It was the first time in a long time I had talked to a woman who wanted to hear what I thought about, well, anything, at least anything outside of sex. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

A month later, we went to see Batman Forever, and it sucked, just like Angelia said it would. But Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose” didn’t. I bought his CD, though, and not the movie soundtrack!

The Long Road Home

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"Thriving as a Freelance Academic", Academia, Academic Writing, Bruce Anthony Jones, Career, Career Decisions, Career Development, Career Options, CMU, Disillusionment, Joe William Trotter Jr., Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Peter Stearns, Politics of Academia, Politics of the Foundation World, Self-Awareness, Self-Determination, Self-Discovery, Social Justice, Teaching and Learning, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Troublemaker, Writing

My stressed-out PhD walk photo, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Angelia N. Levy).

It’s been eighteen years and nearly a day since I had to shake then Carnegie Mellon Dean Peter Stearns’ hand on stage as part of the PhD portion of the 100th commencement ceremony for graduates, that third sweltering Sunday in May ’97. I’ve talked about the ceremony, my Mom’s jealousy and issues about my degree, Peter Stearns, Joe Trotter, Bruce Anthony Jones, and what happened before and after the degree ceremonies on that fateful day.

But time and enlightenment — especially the latter — has allowed me to take a step back from the events leading to a new wave of disillusionment in my life. If I really think about it, my struggles with where I wanted to go with my career go as far back as ’81, in the months after my first accolades as a writer, to the time when at eleven, I already had an encyclopedic knowledge of history, basic science, and technology. Heck, I already knew some of the historiography around World War II, the Cold War, American slavery and civil rights, long before I ever knew the definition for historiography. Not to mention, I was already living what we now call migration studies, thanks to my Mom and dad.

But my Boy @ The Window years did their damage to me. By the time I turned twenty at the end of the ’80s, I wasn’t fully clear of the array of choices I had for a career or set of careers. I knew I could write, and often write well. Yet I had stopped seeing myself as a writer by the time I went through my summer of abuse in ’82. I knew that I was a historian, because I asked the kinds of questions about history that only trained historians would. Yet I hated the idea that I was supposed to write only one way, using words like synergistic and interstitial (at an esoteric minimum) along the way. I toyed with the idea of going to law school in ’90, even going so far as to take the LSAT, scoring a then-50th percentile 31 on the exam in my one-and-only try.

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), The Long Road–Argilla Road, Ipswich, circa 1898, April 28, 2010. (BrooklynMuseumBot via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I struggled for years with my fundamental question: “Am I an academic historian who’s also a writer? Am I a writer who’s also a historian? Can I be both?” I realized about a decade ago the question was moot. I am both. The real question really has been, will the working world allow me to operate as both without giving me grief and a hard way to go? (By the way, if I ever were to do a second, post-Boy @ The Window memoir, this would be one of that book’s big themes.)

I can safely say as a mildly successful freelance writer that the answer for many in this world of singularities is no. The working world puts up a fight, has and will continue to try to force me and others with multiple talents to choose one path, to do one thing, and one thing only, ideally for all time.

Academicians only think about each other via teaching duties or well-placed articles and books in scholarly journals and scholarly publishing houses. Higher education administrators believe that the only way to understand their work is through the lens of their specific university, as if universities and colleges aren’t similar from a management standpoint. Nonprofit organizations

A male mallard duck, a bird’s triple threat (can walk, swim under water and fly), Saint-Eustache, Quebec, Canada, November 19, 2007. (Acarpentier via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

discount teaching and higher education administrator positions because finding money or managing students isn’t exactly the same as managing staff. Foundations who use your salary history instead of your scope of programs developed, people reached, and money raised as a barometer for even granting you an interview. All would prefer that you be quiet about injustices, especially ones in which their institution, organization, or foundation might well be complicit.

For me in the past couple of decades, though, I’ve worked in and with academicians, higher education administrators, nonprofit organizations, and private foundations. I’ve helped raise $3 million over the years, managed as many as twenty-five staff members, organized four-day conferences with a couple hundred attendees, worked with as many as 500 students at any given time, and taught undergraduate and graduate courses. I’ve written scholarly articles, published in scholarly journals, presented at a couple dozen conferences, and consulted for nonprofit organizations and foundations. To think of myself as only one thing is beyond ridiculous given my by-necessity-and-neglect careers so far.

Yesterday, The Chronicle of Higher Education posted the article “Thriving as a Freelance Academic” by Katie Rose Guest Pryal. In it, Pryal interviewed three White women about their experiences freelancing in the academic world. The women interviewed found a singular niche, found steady work through that niche, and otherwise didn’t question the idea of freelancing in a world in which freelancing is a rare career choice.

A square peg hammered into a round hole, May 2014. (http://joshbrahm.com/).

All that is fine. Except there was little soul-searching in Pryal’s piece. The women interviewed might as well have decided to go on a global trek or rock climbing, given their lack of ambivalence about academia or deliberate lack of specifics and dryness about the work they actually do. I don’t doubt that one can freelance in academia. I doubt, though, that one can do it without personal relationships with a specific university or alma mater, or with a specific higher education administrator or prominent professor. Why pick on this piece? Because there are far more people like me in and out of academia, who’ve consulted and freelanced and worked and stitched together a career, then there are the people represented in Pryal’s boutique article.

There is a lesson here besides the reality that life is a journey, and to get it right, we need to understand that it can and will be a roller-coaster-ride of a journey. The lesson, for me at least, is that while being true to myself has sometimes had consequences in terms of immediate victories and easy financial gains, it does mean I get to have success, and sometimes, even lasting success.