In other words, would you say that your email and texts are as unable to interpret and respond to emotional social context as a person on the autism spectrum? In what situation are they identical and thus the avatar of one is the same as the other?
Tag Archives: future
Viral Video Vini Vici Vino Vincent Vickie, via Wiki
The colonists looked everywhere but in each other’s eyes.
Despite their knowledge, their scientific curiosity and their access to the ISSA Net database, none of them was quite willing to talk about the elephant in the room:
When the only source of protein, the flesh of a recently-deceased colonist, was known to contain stage-4 cancer, was it edible?
On so many levels — emotional, ethical, practical, moral.
Back on Earth, body parts recycled for food had entered the fictional mainstream eons ago, the food made flesh (or was that the other way around?) long before Martian colonisation became a buzzword, let alone a reality.
On Mars, though, there was not the sophisticated equipment to separate healthy flesh from diseased flesh.
Malnutrition and scurvy had swept through some of the outer settlements.
Colony No. 1 was not supposed to suffer the fate of poor planning and execution.
Burying the dead was no longer an option, had been argued and regulated out of existence several generations back.
The colonists put the decision off a day.
Sure, they were rational beings but mourning the dead was still an active part of their subculture. Give themselves a day to grieve before making this important decision, they told each other without saying a word by leaving the lab where a dear friend, colleague and family member lay motionless, eternally unresponsive.
Tolerance for pain
Bai jumped across the colony’s esplanade with Shadowgrass.
“Mom told me that you’re one of the main reasons I’m here.”
“She did?”
“Something about your grandfather and a war?”
“She remembered! That’s great. Yes, my grandfather was a soldier a long time, during the period many on Earth call World War II. He was a radio operator.”
“Dad told me about those. Specialists who were responsible for sending signals between groups of people because they didn’t have a love/hate relationship with the ISSA Net yet.”
“Hmm…hahaha. True. But my grandfather is famous back home in the Philippines. He was the man who first contacted General MacArthur, an American soldier in charge of many troops.”
Shadowgrass nodded, mentally scanning the information about World War II as they skipped and hopped. “So how does that account for me?”
“Oh, yeah, it doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, you see, my grandfather was a strict soldier which led to my father’s interest in discipline but for a totally different reason. You’ve probably never heard of ‘Star Trek,’ have you?” She watched his eyes flicker slightly. “Well, I guess you know about it now?”
“Yes, Bai.”
“My father fell in love with the TV show. It was like having his grandfather and all of his grandfather’s friends and uncles live the life of space soldiers. When I was old enough, he made me watch every episode of the original TV series, all the spinoffs such as ‘Next Generation,’ up to ‘Enterprise,’ and, of course, the films as they were released. Inside of you is a little bit of Data with a little bit of Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko.”
“Mom said you were able to infuse my genetic material with the propensity for personality traits of fictional characters. How did you do it?”
Bai ran her gloved hand across her faceplate, intending to but unable to rub her eyes. “Did Guin tell you I used to date Brannon Braga?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Yes. He was the one who inspired me. I hope I inspired him some, too. His place in Melrose, not far from the film studios, was amazing. I remember one party he had, it was a food bar from front to back. You walked from his kitchen to the backyard, which opened onto an English garden, and then the pool…the pool…” She stopped and looked up at the Martian sky.
“What is it, Bai?”
“He said he put me in one of his scripts. I never asked him which one.”
Shadowgrass flipped a few times in the air, bounced up and down like a kangaroo and landed in a three-legged stance. “Did he write about me?”
“No. You are my creation. I mean, it was me who gave your parents the idea to call you their son.”
Shadowgrass flipped up in the air and landed in a standard bipedal configuration. “That’s what Mom said. But I thought you might know something else.”
Bai heard a note of disappointment in Shadowgrass’ intonation of curiosity.
“Shadowgrass, you are a part of everyone’s life, don’t you know? You are the culmination of our species’ achievements. Do you know how many kids on Earth dream of being you, able to change out body parts on a whim, with superstrength and superspeed?”
“Yeah, but…”
Bai nodded. She knew where Shadowgrass was taking his thoughts. His mother, Guin, had been a competitive boxer from an early age, trained by her father, a former member of the U.S. Marines, with assistance from his military and boxing buddies. Growing up on a farm, she had been kicked and stomped on by calves and cows, raising her pain tolerance above normal levels. She had later become a ballerina before switching to a career in rocket science.
Shadowgrass wished he had his mother’s natural abilities, and didn’t have his enhanced abilities that made him so much more capable than his parents.
At age two, he had completed his space exploration vehicle. When his parents were two, they were barely walking and talking.
That’s why Bai had asked to spend the afternoon with him. He needed encouragement to take Martian society to places he couldn’t believe possible when he’ll look back in a few marsyears.
She couldn’t believe she was with him herself, remembering the nights decades earlier, alone with her thoughts when she was at her lowest, torn between her French lover and being near her children on the North American continent.
She wanted to teach Shadowgrass to embrace his emotional side and use the energy he generated to plant seeds in his thoughts that would sprout into giant oaks in no time.
She had done that for so many other people. She knew she could get Shadowgrass to, too.
A new character enters the picture
Eoj was hired by the Mars Tourist Bureau to train travelers who would spend a few weeks in a space capsule, their bodies confined to not much more than a water closet there-and-back on their Moon-to-Mars holiday.
Eoj, half-Greek, half-Egyptian, had survived wars and skirmishes his whole childhood and jumped at the chance to serve aboard the ISS Dionysius, the flagship vessel that traveled from the Moon to Mars, packed full of tourists and their supplies needed to feed and care for them during their whole time traveling through space, in acclimation facilities orbiting Mars and on the Red Planet itself.
During the offseason, when Earth and Mars alignment made the trip prohibitively expensive, Eoj took martial arts and dance lessons which he in turn was able to share with tourists during their spaceflight, using a small corridor between their living quarters to exercise tourists in small groups of two or three.
Before his Mars Tourist Bureau job, Eoj had met Guin at an Earth dance studio when Guin was first brought in for physical therapy. They had become dance partners because they shared the love of dance over many of their other hobbies and interests.
As Guin was finishing her PhD in rocket propulsion, she accepted the assignment to become an integral part of the ISSA Net, allowing her body to be monitored in realtime, accelerating her physical conditioning, with a bonus network interface that gave her the ability to simply think her thoughts to members of the ISSA Net without talking or using archaic input devices like phones or computers.
Eoj had opted not to accept full ISSA Net interfacing, believing that a “real” man kept himself in reserve.
Eoj and Guin excelled in their dance training and soon become part-time instructors at the studio, each taking on a small number of students, sometimes passing one student to the other when their regular work schedules conflicted with the students’ availability for lessons.
From this perspective, Eoj was able to observe more about Guin.
Eoj saw that he was not the only one who wanted to dance with her.
He had taken on Lee and Lee’s wife, Karen, as dance students early in Eoj’s dance instructor days so the three of them were guinea pigs for the dance studio owner, Disdry, a veteran of the World Peasant War, a set of military skirmishes that spread around Earth, wiping out whole sections of the peasant population desperate for food and a meaning for their miserable existence, including jobs or positive views of them in the mainstream press.
Thus, Disdry, although a smooth dancer, was a stern taskmaster with his instructors, a little rough around the edges.
Vulnerable during their first few months on the job, Eoj trying to get back on his feet after a tough job loss and Guin during the mental recovery associated with her physical therapy, Eoj and Guin gave Disdry more leeway to control them than had they been stronger socioeconomically.
Eoj worked with Lee and Karen under Disdry’s watchful eye. Sometimes, after a particular tough time getting Lee or Karen to learn what should have been a simple dance move, Eoj would sigh and plop down in Disdry’s office. Disdry would frequently offer constructive criticism but sometimes he would lash out, using cold, cruel humour to knock Eoj’s ego to the ground, which didn’t help Eoj at all for the next lesson with Lee and Karen, conditioned to expect verbal abuse from Disdry if Eoj was unable to show progress with a couple who sometimes just didn’t get it, regardless of Eoj’s instructing ability.
One day, Eoj was out of town and asked Guin to teach Lee and Karen.
Although Lee and Guin already knew each other, they walked into the dance lesson as newbies.
Guin had her own problems with Disdry’s treatment of her but had not yet received beratement in relation to training Lee and Karen so she was able to look at them without fear or trepidation.
Guin spent most of the lesson showing Lee the leader part of the waltz and foxtrot moves he had learned the week before, the two of them moving more easily as one than Lee had been dancing with his wife. Karen spent most of the lesson watching and feeling ignored, not wanting another lesson with Guin because she felt that all Guin had done was teach Lee had to dance with her rather than with his wife.
The next week, Eoj noticed a change in Karen, sensing that she was more interested in him as an instructor and devoted his time to teaching them, getting more progress in that lesson than in the previous two months, even showing them a few fun moves that were not part of their official curriculum. Although they had fun, Eoj was scolded by Disdry for going outside of the syllabus, dampening any enthusiasm Eoj had for seeing Lee and Karen the next week.
Because of this up-and-down treatment at the studio, Eoj built up expectations for the weekly social dance on Fridays when the students had the opportunity to try out their newly-learned moves in an actual social setting, the instructors available for advice and social dancing. Eoj anticipated dancing with Guin and she with him, so they could practice moves they wanted to perfect for other venues.
As much as Eoj liked dancing with Guin, and noticed she did, too, he also observed that he was not the only one.
There seemed to be a virtual line of guys waiting to dance with Guin, including single and married men willing to leave their women alone in order to get a dance with Guin.
Added to that, Disdry informed Eoj that one of the students, a single women in her early 40s named Eternia, desired to dance with Eoj but Eoj always seemed to dance with Guin just when Eternia got up the nerve to ask Eoj to dance with her, or just felt outright ignored by him altogether, complaining that Eoj and Guin spent the whole Friday night dancing with each other rather than with their students.
Eoj accepted his “punishment” and reduced his dancing time with Guin, asking students, both his and those taught by Guin or Disdry, for individual dances.
Guin followed Eoj’s example and danced with students, including her boyfriend, Kirby, who showed up occasionally but had a problem with large crowds so he tended to avoid coming unless he had to. Guin found herself dancing more often with Jersey, a shy man who had started social dancing lessons in order to look and feel more comfortable when he ventured out to nightclubs.
Guin was an encouraging instructor and boosted Jersey’s confidence, taking him with her to a dance competition in New Orleans. Even though they didn’t win, it gave Jersey the impetus he needed to try other things, such as volunteering at the local youth symphony and competing in mountain bike races, eventually leaving Guin without a competitive dance partner once again.
When, with guidance from her new friend, Bai, Guin got the assignment to go to Mars, Eoj began questioning why he was stuck at the dance studio “alone” with Disdry. Guin wanted to help Bai so she convinced him to get a job working with Kirby transporting blood products to hospitals and clinics in the area.
Eoj enjoyed his transportation job as the “Blood Man,” every now and then running into a former student or someone who knew who he had to be because of his unique rugged look as a GrecoEgyptian, shorter than average but built like a football player — broad shoulders, large chest and muscular arms — able to lift and throw a woman like Guin, several inches taller than him, with ease and grace.
A member of the board of directors for the Mars Tourist Bureau, Minten Kyun, badly injured in a helicopter crash and in critical need of blood transfusions, later heard, during excruciating recovery, that the well-thought-out, timely-but-safe driving by Eoj of blood from one hospital to the one where Minten was being pieced together, saved Minten’s life.
As soon as he could, Minten sent the word to Eoj to see him.
Eoj had never heard of the Mars Tourist Bureau so he was surprised that a complete stranger would offer him a job in such a specialised field as space travel.
“Welcome, Eoj Cappernopolus. I’m Minten Kyun. Please have a seat.”
Eoj plopped down into a plush red leather chair beside Minten, whose eyes flicked back-and-forth every now and then, a sign that he was communicating over the ISSA Net using the visual neurons of his brain.
“Thanks for asking me here. So, your voicemail said you want to hire me for the Mars Tourist Bureau? You know I don’t have any astronaut training, I assume.”
“Yes, Eoj, I do. But not every job at the MTB requires a specialised pilot’s license.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you knew nothing else about the job, would you take it?”
“Umm…”
“I mean, how would you describe what you think about a job like this?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know what the job is.”
“Good point. What have you heard about the MTB?”
“Not much, frankly. I’m sure I’ve heard of it in the news but I haven’t been focused on it, if you know what I mean, my financial situation not geared toward exotic space travel.”
“Of course. So you’re not a fanboy of space exploration? You don’t fantasize about a life on the Moon or Mars?”
“Not really. Does that mean you aren’t interested in me, then?”
“Quite the contrary! I want someone for this job who wants a challenge but doesn’t go into it with starry eyes wearing rose-coloured glasses, or who holds high hopes for a job and makes a mistake because he was so disappointed by reality he lost focus.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s the other thing about you. You follow orders from others without letting your questioning authority get in the way of the whole organisation achieving its goals. Do you know how hard it is to get someone who thinks independently outside the box but knows there are larger issues at stake? I believe you are the man for this job.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t you want to know when you’re going to start?”
“Haha. Isn’t there paperwork I’m supposed to fill out, a personality profile and physical fitness test I’m supposed to take or something?”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll put you through the formal wringer but I’m assured you’ve already passed.”
“So, when do I start?”
“That’s what I wanted to hear! You start right now. Welcome aboard, Eoj!”
“Thank you, Mister? Misses?”
“Ah, I appreciate you not assuming anything about me. Just call me Minten. If you don’t mind, I’m going to hand you over to my assistant, Naad, who will get you started on a career that only two other people have been offered and accepted. Eoj, you are an exclusive club member now. I hope you know that.”
“Thanks. I’m sure if you say it’s as good as it sounds, it probably is, being who you are and all that, a megabillionaire they say.”
“Don’t let money fool you, Eoj. Wealth does not make you wise. I hope I’m richer in wisdom than the rest. But let’s get you on the road to your own riches, shall we? Once you’re part of the MTB, you get shares in the corporation just like me and everyone else. Here’s Naad. Best wishes, my friend. I’ll see you soon, perhaps on a trip to the Moon or Mars, if not sooner!”
Months passed before Eoj saw Guin again, his training schedule filling his days, simulating the space trip several times in a row so that Eoj was fully capable of handling both calculated emergencies and unanticipated calamities as well as integrating his personality traits into the ISSA Net for processing and compatibility training for the other crew members as they were hired and put through the simulator training.
Entering the simulator phase of the MTB “boot camp,” Eoj had resisted being wholly integrated into the ISSA Net so his trainers had offered him a track of gradual sensory input connectivity enhancements, showing him how his body became more alive and alert with the aid of ISSA Net body monitoring, holding off on full mental connectivity until Eoj convinced himself it was for not just the betterment of society but also his personal gain.
Before I say goodnight…
Before I say goodnight, a toast: to 13399 days to go!
Dragging the people along for a ride
Ever looked at our planet?
Lots of blue with some greens, browns and whites thrown in for contrast, is’nt it?
What about the pyramids of little creatures who tend to bond into tribes?
Imaginary pyramids that intersect, a few so much larger than the others that they dominate many, many pyramids all at once (freely use your imagination here).
They blend, in other words.
The people at the top of the pyramid are constantly communicating pyramid-to-pyramid by the blended actions and opinions of their minions mixed into multiple pyramid intersections.
We may say that Obama, Hollande, Cameron and Putin are not talking to each other but there’s plenty of communication between their organisations, officially outside the public view.
That is why Mars decided to eliminate the pyramids and implement a peer-to-peer network, a meshing of independent nodes having full access to competitive data to reduce communication issues.
We’ll get back to that history lesson later. Let’s show you what used to happen on the old home planet, via a demonstration. Case in point: the proposed international military action in the geographical region of Earth called Syria.
Decisions were made months in advance at lower echelon levels of the pyramids but official announcements are designed to make it look like decisions are made in realtime news.
Watch and learn!
Scrum with rum on the run in the rain
Tonight I will sleep.
How much can two (or more) people synchronise their states of energy?
Bai floated across the room, feeling ill, tired from her travels across the planet’s surface, to-and-from the Orbiter Entertainment Conference Centre circling Mars.
An ancient, well-preserved copy of the Oxford Multilingual Dictionary suspended in a stationary position above Lee’s desk.
“Are you okay?”
Bai shrugged. “I didn’t sleep well last night, got maybe 2 marshours’ sleep, same the night before.”
“Do you want to practice our dance?”
Bai attempted a weak smile. “That’s why I’m here. Let’s do it.”
As they stepped through the first 40 marsecs of their routine repeatedly, they stopped occasionally for a break.
Bai stopped and looked Lee in the eyes. “Look at this.”
In his thoughts, Lee watched a conversation between Bai and a man whose identity was left blank.
The man walked up to Bai in the conference centre bar. “I know everything about you.”
“You do.”
“Yeah. You got that tattoo within the last few weeks, didn’t you?”
“Nope. Had it for over two years.”
“No you didn’t. I said I know you. You just got it.”
“Sorry, but you’re wrong.”
“I missed you. Where have you been the last two weeks?”
“I was out of town.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was working.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I thought you knew everything about me.”
[The sound of crickets chirping had been inserted from Bai’s longterm memory.]
Bai stopped showing her memory to Lee. “What do you think of that?”
“That guy…he…”
“He’s the chief of police, that’s who he is. Thinks his orbiter privileges give him some sort of special abilities.”
“Did you give him that look of yours?”
Bai made a face that said ‘Are you talking to me?’
Lee smiled. He responded to everyone differently, some making him laugh uncontrollably. Bai gave him a warm feeling inside just by being herself, cracking her jokes that were so funny to Lee he was embarrassed to let himself let his boyish guffaw snort out loud. “Did that turn him off?”
“I wish. He even said he had a special friendship with my boyfriend, said that my boyfriend, being military, was going to leave me. I told his he was wrong. My boyfriend is French — French boyfriends have to go on to the next woman — it’s in their DNA.”
Bai sat down, exhausted. She took a few sips of energy water and a few drops of baby food formula. “This is the best stuff, no matter what they say.”
Lee nodded.
After their dance showcase practice, they worked on a few moves from a historic dance form called Lindy Hop.
Bai described the best she could how the dance moves should appear in engineering terms, which Lee quickly absorbed.
They cut their practice short because Bai was feeling too weak to go on.
Later that day, Guin met Lee for more dance practice. They reviewed their previous dance lesson stored on the ISSA Net, seeing where they needed improvement and went from there.
Lee’s empathetic neuron net was extra sensitive to people who triggered his proximity sensor array, most notably Bai and Guin in the last few days. His brain circuitry surged with pulsating neurochemical signals, flooding his thoughts with old, broken memories, incomplete images and uncategorised emotions, all at the same time.
After the lesson review, Lee allowed his thoughts to relax, leaving unanswered questions from earlier in the week to fade into the background.
However, as they warmed up, Guin sensed Lee’s tense shoulders and arms. She told him to relax, let their arms connected to their hands form a smiley face.
Lee’s conscious thoughts understood the word “relax” but after a terrible car smashup on Earth when he was a teenager, Lee had forgotten how to translate the word into action for the nerves, muscles, ligaments and tendons of his left arm and shoulder.
He did not have the knowledge to ask Guin what “relax” meant. He wanted to learn but his thoughts were still disconnected from the past few days of rewiring habitual pathways.
Guin kept working on the dance steps with Lee, slowly working with him to forget what he was doing, no longer thinking but dancing the steps, closing the gap between them and fading Lee’s personal space into nothingness.
Lee could have let the ISSA Net get rid of the annoying brain-muscle connection problems but he was “old skoowuhl” as Shadowgrass called him and liked the challenge of the personal struggle of his current self forming around and against the previous versions of himself left in deadends and byways of his central nervous system.
They knocked out the steps.
Next on Lee’s list was working through the unexplored feelings he had for Guin and Bai, decades old, just as Bai could recall an old man named Marcus she remembered training when the man was a teenager.
There was so much more to learn about them and their shared connections.
But what’s a lifetime for if one can’t return to Earth in one’s thoughts and go wakeboarding every now and then?
Guin and Lee checked in on Shadowgrass to see how his homework was coming along. Shadowgrass was studying the history of the extinct social system called politics, trying to understand the need for hierarchical bureaucratic layers of society once called government. “Dad, did we really used to waste so much energy on superfluous levels of managing our species’ resource needs?”
“Yes, son, we did. That’s why Earth’s climate changed so drastically over a short period of time. Mismanaged priorities.”
“I’m glad we’re not like that.”
Me, too, son. Me, too.”
Guin turned to go. “Sorry, guys, but I’ve got a rover’s load of work to do at the lab. Lee, please practice the apache move we went over. I want you to have it down to a science when I get back next sol.”
“Sure thing. Don’t work too hard.”
“‘Work’? You mean, don’t have too much fun!”
The three of them laughed at Lee’s slip. ‘Work’ had almost completely left the common language of Mars, replaced by Martian society’s ability to shift colonisation needs according to the abilities and desires of the nonrobotic inhabitants such as humans.
As Lee rolled into bed alone, he found himself crying, a memory of his father passing through his thoughts. He still loved his father after all these years, having forgiven his father for unknowingly mistreating his son in his attempt to raise his son the best way he knew how in the moment and based on his personality shaped by his own father’s mistreatment of him.
Living longer didn’t make old memories go away, just more memories to choose from, the earliest ones gaining or fading in strength as memories accumulated and cross-referenced themselves.
His mother didn’t raise a fool, just watched him often make a fool of himself as he grew up.
The Amish Pirate Clan
Shadowgrass scratched the middle of his back using one of his new appendages.
“Mom, tell me about our family.”
“Well, son, we’re descended from a secret branch of the Amish — the Amish Pirate Clan.”
“Really? That’s sounds cool.”
“Let me tell you a story about them…”
Archie and Veronica Mars, where’s Betty?
What is the consensual consensus about the perceived and perpetuated personality of the public popular culture in your area?
For me, it is a mix of science, technology, and military development supported by agriculture, arts, retail sales and financial backing that sets the Heart of Dixie, Deep South progressive religious moral persuasion of headline news.
In one day, the satirical talk of a singer’s performance on a single TV channel, repeated ad repeatum across the virtual news/gossip system known as the Internet, accented by related “news” stories about infidelity shows the level of normal behaviour we tolerate in the local/national psyche.
We are not independent from our bodies even if cave drawings and ebooks give us that sensation.
Why do our bodies’ cycles influence us individually and collectively?
How well do we see that our chemical composition ratios redirect our thought patterns and thus the flow of our society into the future?
On Mars, we have a word for this nostalgic look at your antiquated society: Scheißcorn.
Meaning that the Zeitgeist is a wind never seen and quickly forgotten, just like the flow of cholesterol through your veins that used to kill so many of you with a scary word, Atherosclerosis!
Controversy is a measurement of a type of mob mentality.
Our talk about what is controversial to us is a measurement of our set of states of energy in transition.
It tells us what we consider important in the perceived past, present and future for ourselves and our children.
Is your life tragic? Macabre? Grotesque? Victorian? Bland? Grand? Your best life now?
What in your life is clogging your thoughts like cholesterol clogs veins?
What is a healthy thought set that unites you to your body to your friends/family/colleagues and the rest of the natural environment of the universe?
One answer is here on Mars. It was once in orbit around Earth, on the Moon. It will be somewhere else one day.
See you there soon!
God’s School of Medicine — “Change for a change”
I walk this planet as if I’m a visitor from outer space, surrounded by the nicest people who treat me as if I’m one of them so either I am or I am not. We certainly seem to be from the same universe and share almost all of the same symbol sets (i.e., memories of similar social/mass media training).
I as this set of states of energy exchange energy states with other people in the form of body movements such as voiced symbol sets, facial expressions, torso/limb placement and electrochemical/heat interaction via handshakes, hugs and kisses.
Also via this blog.
When a feeling of familiarity seems to pull out of my core being, I cannot distinguish the difference between whether I am meeting someone for the first time, neither one of us having heard of or encountered the other, or whether we have heard through hearsay, second opinion, reputation or written/spoken fact about the other.
This afternoon, my wife and I attended a local “home improvement” fall home & garden show in the south exhibit hall at the Von Braun [Civic] Center.
We met a lot of the exhibitors and engaged in both humorous and informative conversations, starting with a guy who joked I must be the father of one of his fellow exhibitors and ending with the guys who plan to look at our roof for much-needed repair work.
In between were numerous insights and observations.
Toward the end of our tour of the show, we stopped at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System booth which advertised and sold home radon testing kits.
The person we met and talked with most was a woman named Patricia “Pastor Doc Pat” W. Smith.
Pat looked at my wife and me as if she knew who we were. She felt something special about us that went beyond the need for a radon test kit.
If I didn’t know better, I would say that she had read my blog and knew something about me or had heard from someone who had read my blog; that or the fact I live my life the same way I write my blog so that I am truly the multifaceted crystal ball that takes light in, reflects/refracts it back in new patterns but all in accordance with who I am through-and-through.
She told us the following story about her life that she wants to share with the world, being a “retired” pastor of the AME Christian denomination and a PhD in cell biology:
- Born in 1944 and raised in Jackson, Tennessee
- Her father, a stockboy at a Kroger-type grocery store, sent all five of his kids to college, including Patricia
- Patricia was sent by bus by her father to attend Knoxville College in 1962
- Patricia graduated in 1967 and went to work at Oak Ridge National Labs testing the effects of chemicals on rodents, including the famous test that proved the white sweetener in the pink packages is carcinogenic and states so.
- While she worked in Oak Ridge, she lived in an efficiency apartment in one of the old barracks where the original Oak Ridge nuclear bomb development employees lived.
- Patricia often processed film slides in a darkroom where her boss, a Japanese man, would sneak in and scare her so she decided she couldn’t stay in that job, leaving in 1969 to get her master’s degree.
- I can’t remember but she said she either got her master’s degree at Virginia Tech, where she stayed at Fox Ridge Apartment, or she got her PhD there.
- Anyway, she moved to Florence in 1971 and worked for TVA, studying the effect of the hot nuclear plant effluent water on local wildlife, including a salamander.
- She later attended seminary school and became an AME pastor, preaching for 17-1/2 years.
- Her son was born in Blacksburg, Virginia, the first black/African-American baby born in the county hospital in over 25 years; he lives in Atlanta and is CEO of some aviation group associated with an Atlanta airport.
- Her adopted son, from Cameroon, who still calls her Pastor Doc Mama, graduated from the University of North Alabama, lives in California and works in the computer industry.
- Her daughter is married to a computer animator, also in California.
- Patricia is working with her adopted son to launch a website dedicated to roving ministry she calls God’s School of Medicine, started in 1994, the website slated to go public next month. The ministry is basically a place where people get to tell their life stories, sharing how they overcame adversity to get where they are so those who are in a dark place in their lives can see no matter how bad you’ve got it, you’ve got hope that someone like you has made it.
- As part of her ministry, Patricia is going to share her own life story, where God told her simply “Change for a change.” What does that mean? Well, if you give a twenty-dollar bill for a three-dollar purchase, you roll the seventeen dollars you received as change into the receipt and put it into a container — bucket, jar, box, whatever. You keep accumulating that change until you’re ready for change. Get it? She can tell you more about it on her website.
- Meanwhile, she misses her church ministry. A bishop told her that she has put enough effort into God’s School of Medicine that God may be giving her the message it’s time to go back to serving a church; in fact, the bishop has three churches, at least one in Walker County, that need her more than she knows.
Until tonight, I didn’t even know someone like Patricia existed, a seventy-year young woman whose father was a humble produce stocker at a grocery store, a black man in the upper South of the United States of America, put his daughter through college, who majored in cytology and got a job at ORNL in 1967 as an African-American research associate, going on to get her master’s degree and then her PhD.
Amazingly, her story almost parallels that of my father, whose father was an illiterate day labourer and grandfather a tin smith for the railroad, making sure my father stayed focused on completing his college degree and going to greater social heights than them. My mother’s story is similar, graduated as valedictorian and got her master’s degree as daughter of a factory worker/farmer with a sixth-grade education. The story of two women and one man, two white and one black/African-American.
Patricia asked for our prayers as she launches her website, twitter feed, and PayPal donation tithe system, meeting with the board of directors as they finalise plans to lease a building to house their God’s School of Ministry in all legal respects to “do as the Romans do” here on Earth, and then, after the website is live and the ministry growing, going back to preach in Walker County.
She told us there’s one message she wants to get out to everyone she knows, including the man who lives down the county road from her outside Florence, Alabama, a prominent Caucasian farmer in the community — he asked for her healing for his blood sickness (leukemia?) and she gave him some verses of the Bible to repeat as medicine, thanking Jesus for taking care of any side effects of the prescribed medication he takes three or four times a day:
No matter who you are or how old you are, DO SOMETHING! Don’t just sit there, feeling hopeless. She’s living proof that no matter where you come from, you have hope to go somewhere else, if you just choose to do something, anything, about it, just as she has and she continues to do at almost 70 years of age, come next year. And by doing something, you make changes that influence other people to get out of their hopelessness, changing themselves and so on.
treetrunkdings 