Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
July
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/01/2011 - 06:39Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Happy Canada Day, and for those who closed the books on their fiscal year last night, happy fiscal new year. I have ancestors, and for that matter, distant relatives from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and it is interesting think about their lives when they settle their hundreds of years ago, as well as their lives today. There are farms in New Brunswick that have been in the family for generations.
For the Fiscal New Year, despite difficulties, Connecticut has not shut down, but it appears as if Minnesota has. I’ll save thoughts on that for later.
Another thing that starts today is the Farmer’s Market in Middletown which CHC helps sponsor. I guess at lunch time, I need to go do some research on CHC supported Farmer’s Market. I hear the Cheese Truck will be there, another rough work assignment.
Looking forward, Falcon Ridge Folk Festival happens this month and already there are plenty of discussions about when people will arrive, where they will camp, what they’ll buy from the midway, and who the performers will be. I’m ready.
Beside the White Chickens
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 20:04Recently, I’ve been writing a bit about living the great American Novel, yet sometimes, it seems that the events of the day might be closer to living a short story destined for a collection of Great American Short Stories. Perhaps last weekend’s adventure was a short story like that. There was no profound character development or conflict overcome. There were no profound moments of poignancy or great mirth, simply a snapshot in the lives of the people that make up this country.
My regular readers will know that last weekend, I set off to meet a friend that I knew from social media whom I had never met face to face. It was a pleasant day for a drive. We drove local roads to get up to the Interstate, passed the farm that sells home made ice cream. Not a lot of stories there. Likewise, the interstate seemed a bit like just about any other road. It was a section of highway I’ve travelled many times before, and there wasn’t any great feeling of a road trip.
As we got off the Interstate and started to drive the final portion of the trip, it started to feel a little different. There were signs for firemen’s carnivals along the way and Fiona lobbied to stop at them. We passed placid looking lakes, all the time driving through this land between suburbia and exurbia, with the pull of New York City in the distance.
We pulled into the little neighborhood where the party was. Unfortunately, the GPS didn’t have the exact location. It placed us on a side street along which many cars were parked. But they weren’t for the barbeque we were going to. No, it was for a graduation party. There was a yard full of people. Kids were splashing in the swimming pool. Others were talking or eating. We walked down the street in search of our party. At the end of the street, to high school boys approached a third. They gathered around a motorcycle in what appeared to be a discussion about whether one of the boys would by the bike for another.
Soon, we found the barbeque. There were several cars in the driveway and voices coming from the backyard. Should we walk to the front door, or poke our heads around the back. I’m not particularly a front door sort of person, so I looked towards the back. Out on a deck, my friend was at the grill, and shouted down a greeting.
It is probably fair to say that a majority of my friends online are either activists or technologists, and my friend fit nicely into both categories. I was expecting that others would have similar geeky tendencies, but instead, the gathering had more of a feeling of a bunch of friends from junior high school, with artistic inclinations.
There were some interesting discussions about music, particularly as we found others that enjoyed the same festivals we go to, but there wasn’t a lot of geeky discourse. Instead, it was the fabric of life. The broken marriage, the career difficulties and new jobs, the hopes and aspirations of kids heading off to college, the traffic death of a high school student, and the reuniting of friends from many years ago.
The drive home was also uneventful; again, passing by placid lakes a long commute from New York City. As I sit at write this a few days later, I wonder, am I any different as a result of the trip? Did the trip make any difference? No, it made no difference, and it made all the difference, sort of like a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
Writing in the Lap Lane
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 21:05For me, writing can be like swimming. There are times that writing is like being in a crisp clear lake. You have lots of energy, and you feel compelled to leisurely go a great distance. Other times it can be like swimming in the ocean, a fun challenge as waves hit you from one direction or another. It is harder work, but it is still joyful. Then, there are times that writing is like doing laps in the local pool. You just put your head down and do it. It may not be as much fun as open water swimming. It may not be as interesting. Yet it is part of staying in shape.
For the competitive swimmer, which I am not, I imagine that the audience may also play a role. For me, swimming is more solitary, even when done in a crowded pool. Yet when I write, I often have the audience at least partially in mind.
Today is another day where I am tired. I’ve written a bit already today for work. I have more to write tomorrow. So, as the day ends, I do a couple laps on the keyboard and churn out at least a few paragraphs. I struggle to make it someone interesting, but I know that I am just doing laps and look forward to a day when I’m better rested and can explore one of the more interesting writing themes waiting for me.
Talking to Strangers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/25/2011 - 08:55Don’t talk to strangers. It has been the advice passed on from parent to child for generations. Now, it has morphed with the internet with warnings about not revealing any personal information to people you don’t know online. Yes, there are bad people out there and everyone needs to be careful what they say. On the other hand, life is made up of taking risks. At one point, my wife was a stranger to me, yet we met online and later met face to face. In this case, talking with a stranger was one of the best things I ever did.
One of the stereotypical complaints of geeks is that they live in their parents’ basement and have no friends. Either that, or they have thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook; friends that are little more than strangers, gathered as some sort of score keeping in a social media game. A recent Pew Study: Facebook Users Have More, Closer Friends, dispels this myth, but comes as no surprise to many of us who have established many friendships that started online.
people who use Facebook several times a day average 9 percent more "close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other internet users."…
How do we reconcile all of this? To me, life is about taking risks. There is a risk to meeting new people, whether it be online, face-to-face, or starting online and moving to face-to-face. There are also rewards. Instead of a ‘just say no’ approach to meeting new people, we need to talk about how we establish trust in the people around us. Not everything that a person tells us, online, or face-to-face will be true. Nor, will all of it be false. We need to work on critical skills to determine if what we are reading, what we are hearing, or what we are watching is true. Some of that, we learn by experience.
My earliest memory of meeting someone face-to-face that I had only known on the Internet is from Halloween, 1982. My roommates and I had a party and I posted an invitation out on the Usenet. Several people that I knew only online, attended and it was great to meet them. Today, I am talking about going to a barbeque with a friend that I’ve only met online. We have over forty friends in common, mostly folks interested in some intersection of progressive politics, journalism, social media, technology, non-profits and health organizations. There is a risk that the barbeque might be a flop, but if my skills at getting a sense of people online are any good, then I suspect it will be a good gathering. The reward outweighs the risk. If I’m wrong, it will give me more information in helping me make better choices next time.
So, what do you think? How do you determine if the reward of building friendships outweighs the risk of talking with strangers? What strategies do you adopt in mitigating some of the risks or maximizing some of the potential reweards?
Reflections about AIDS
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 19:33On June 5, 1981, the Center for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report had an article entitled, Pneumocystis Pneumonia --- Los Angeles. It talked about “5 young men, all active homosexuals, [who] were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis cariniipneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California”. It was the first report of what turned out to be HIV. I was living in New York City at the time and soon enough heard about AIDS. Two years later, I hitchhiked across the country, including a stop in San Francisco. I stayed with a friend of a friend, who took me down to Castro Street. He told me about how things had changed there since the AIDS epidemic started.
A few years later, I stayed at the house of a friend in the Catskills. The room I stayed in had been the bedroom of a man who had died of AIDS a few months earlier. By then, AIDS was much better understood, enough so that rationally, I knew that I couldn’t get AIDS from staying in a room where a person had died of AIDS a few months earlier, but still, it kind of freaked me out.
A few years after that, I was on the vestry of a church where the Rector was in a long term same sex relationship. It wasn’t common knowledge to the congregation, and when the Rector announced to the vestry that his partner had AIDS, there were long meetings about how to talk about this with the congregation. I remember one Sunday when we had an ad hoc service of Morning Prayer as our Rector rushed to the hospital with his partner in his final days.
My daughters, even the eldest at age 21, has lived in a world where there has always been AIDS. As treatments have improved, people in the United States forget what a horrible disease AIDS is and may not realize how bad it is in poor countries.
All of this formed the background of my thinking when I received an email from the Clinical Director of the health center I work at. It included the line
I was commenting to Daren earlier today that I have a crystal clear memory of Carl Lecce and I reading the report and saying “Wow, what is this!”. What “it” was, was the harbinger of the AIDS epidemic
The email went on to describe CHC’s history in the battle against AIDS. I have posted the email on the CHC Blog, Pneumocystis Pneumonia – A Community Response.
It made me stop and think. Thirty years seems like a lifetime ago, yet there is a core of people that have been working at the health center for over thirty years and were there when AIDS was first described.
Now, the battles are different. Besides antiretroviral drugs that give greater hope to those with HIV, there is social media to spread the word, and encourage people to get tested. The government has set up AIDS.gov as a website in the battle against AIDS and next Monday is National HIV Testing day.
Someday, hopefully, people will look back on the HIV the way they now look back at Smallpox. Until then, we need to keep working towards a day when HIV is eradicated.
