Goodbye call center

I've spent the last 10 years or so of my life working at a call center.  It got me through school, provided medical benefits for me and my family, got me started on my 401k, paid for several surgeries, and everything else money does for you when you don't really have much of it.  I started out as a minimum wage employee earning around $7/hr and ended at $13.85/hr, more than most of the managers who were forced to work 50-60 hours a week without overtime pay.  I started as a tenor voiced infomercial order taker whom prank callers thought was a woman when they wanted to talk dirty, next was a ATT wireless tech support guru who advanced to being one of the "ICU" agents who got to do floor support in a white doctors coat, and ended off as a Comcast customer service guy who sometimes got to hide from taking phone calls by working on migrating accounts from one billing or phone platform to another.  I was employee of the month once, and won an award by racking up a large number of compliments and thank you's from other agents once.  I've spent most of the last 10 years working swing shift so that I could do classes during the day time.  Only recently did I get a day shift back again.  The first time I heard a chorus of birds singing in the morning I actually started to cry.

I wish I could say I had more to be proud of for the last 10 years other than that I provided for my family.  I tolerated taking infomercial calls and I've despised working for Comcast.  I am more or less proud of the work I did for AT&T.  Its easier to care about your work when the company acts as if doing a good job for people actually matters.

I've started a new job working in accounting and collections for a manufacturing company.  Basically staring at an excel sheet all day and emailing people to remind them to pay for their orders.  Not exactly rewarding in terms of people interactions, but on the other hand, I've never really been a people person.  But I have noticed some huge corporate culture differences.

For one, the new company publicly rewards people on a regular basis.  Drawings for gift cards are done for people who were complimented publicly or for turning in safety tokens.  A big step up from being offered $1 things of shampoo or pasta as an incentive.

For another, if a fire alarm goes off, the building is to be evacuated immediately.  Instead of waiting for permission while the managers scramble to find out if the alarm is real or not.  According to a long term employee, the call center once ordered people to remain at their desks and continue taking calls during a natural gas leak.  Its not as if they care whether we live or die, nor our customers either.  I was once directly ordered not to reach out to the police on behalf of a woman who was assaulted while on the phone with me, on the grounds that we didn't know the full story so we shouldn't get involved in a domestic dispute.

Another cultural difference is that if something is broken, I have multiple and immediate avenues I can pursue to get it fixed without someone else having to give permission first.  I saw a program break down on someone and they were able to get it fixed within a few minutes and got immediate responses from their IT support when they asked for it.  In contrast with a call center that didn't even have an on site repair guy for quite some time and even when he was around managers didn't always care to file repair tickets in a timely manner or at all.  I once had a login sit disabled for 6 months because my request to repair it was looked upon with suspicion.  A computer next to me remained disabled for more than a month because repair tickets weren't filed in a timely manner after IT broke the computer during testing and never bothered taking their own initiative to fix it until multiple repair tickets were filed.

For another thing, the building is clean.  At the call center trash thrown on the floor could easily stay there for more than a week and the place generally looked pretty dumpy.  For a long period nightly cleanings were being skipped because the night janitor was faking their cleaning records.  It was normal to be able to write in the dust on any smooth horizontal surface and all the computer air vents were clogged with dust.  The new job, well, I have yet to see any trash on the floor and the only places collecting dust are the places hard to reach for cleaning.  There might be dust due to construction in the building, but not due to lazy or dishonest cleaning staff.

I'll be glad to leave the call center behind me.  There were calls I was proud of, like the time I helped a father pick out a good phone for his son with asperger syndrome so his son could text him any time about his pokemon obsession even if he couldn't talk to anyone else about it.  Or the time I helped prove that a business man was telling the truth that a sales rep had over promised the coverage from his plan and cost him $13,000 in data roaming charges.  But in general, the call center has left me in a constant cloud of anxiety regarding whether I'll be fired for having my calls too long or not selling enough or wondering when my next screaming angry person would come on the line.  The absurd levels of dust and the employees who continuously ignored the rules forbidding applying perfumes in the building left my allergies turned up so high for so long I had to have surgery on my sinuses to make it harder for my nose to go crazy on me.  I'm just glad to be finished with call center work.

A Lifetime of...Supressing Laughter

Let me introduce myself and how I relate to laughter.  Not now, but maybe 25-30 years ago.  I thought the world was a hilarious place.  I laughed at tangential word associations, at slightly odd muscle movements made by my older sister when she chewed, at the slightly amusing faces made at my by strangers at church.  I laughed uncontrollably a lot of the time.  When I was very small I was almost never taken out of church for crying, but I was taken out of church routinely for laughing.  Even as I got older my sister had to not sit across from me at the table often because I found her chewing motions to be hilarious.  I was commonly sent away from the dinner table for excessive laughing since the only way I could possibly finish my meal was to be socially isolated from other people so that nobody would unintentionally make me laugh.  The world was simply hilarious.

As I got older I discovered more problems with this.  Randomly breaking into laughter around other people starts making them worry that you are making fun of them.  Most social occasions don't accept much laughter.  My parents greatly prioritized dinner conversations that were formal and structured in nature and for a time I was relentlessly criticized for being too silly during family dinners.  A lot of my laughter became tightly controlled.  Often instead of breaking into uncontrollable laughter I gave simple bursts of "HA!" that could be cut short as soon as they began.

The last time in my life where I felt secure enough to laugh like was natural to me was when I went on a canoeing trip with the boy scouts up in Minnesota and Canada.  Being with the same group of people in an nonjudgmental setting for so long stripped away a lot of the varnish shall we say.  I regained the ability to laugh uncontrollably.  The other boys might say "There he goes again" while I would burst into unstoppable laughter for minutes at a time if the slightest thing struck me as hilarious.  This once happened while I was eating the remains of a jar of peanut butter.  I laughed so hard the other boys swore I spewed chunky peanut butter out my nose.

Later on I found myself trying to prove to a religious leader that I was "normal" enough or could at least mask having Asperger Syndrome enough to be allowed to volunteer for missionary service.  It was open season for every little odd thing about me to be criticized to give me feedback and allow me to pursue my spiritual duty to be as normal as possible and someone who medically I was not.  During this time my father, searching for a morally applicable way of thinking about my abnormalities, speculated that our shared way of making puns was possibly a prideful ecocentric display of cleverness that should be suppressed.  One of things my religious leader didn't like about me, along with my stimming behaviors, was he found my short bursts of "HA!" annoying.  Stimming I couldn't really stop, but laughing was much easier to manage.  I don't laugh that way anymore.

My father's speculation about puns couldn't really stop me because one I didn't like his analysis and two, my brain processes language in a way that makes the most absurd puns as easy to come up with as listening.  When people say words, my brain often hears multiple possible meanings at once and has to sort them out.  Sometimes my brain is sorting out alternate definitions, alternate groupings of syllables, or sound alike words.  The longer I am in a situation the less often these language rearrangements occur to me since I become accustomed to the phrases and meanings of the situation.  But when I am in a new situation these alternate possibilities sparkle into existence like stars coming out at dusk.  The contradiction of meaning are sometimes enormous in the simplest of situations.  Just earlier today I heard someone talk about how they had a live feed from a camera, and my brain immediately thought how this was better than a dead zombie feeding.  Occasionally this bizzarity of my language processing is more inconvenient especially if it results in a misunderstanding regarding job performance or medical information, but mostly I just enjoy the self renewing supply of absurdities to both share and laugh at.

However, that is not to say they are not greatly suppressed.  The problem with suppressing laughter is that if you keep it up long enough things stop being funny.  As a result I have trouble perceiving my humor as having independent value that I can actually laugh at unless I can share it in a socially appropriate way.  Instead of just laughing because something is funny like I imagine most people do, I might at most creak the barest wrinkle of a smile while taking time to analyze whether the people around me are people I know and trust, whether it is a socially appropriate time to laugh?  Is the pun one likely to be socially acceptable to those around me?  Is it a subject matter upon which I can speak without immediately being considered too much of an outsider to have dared raise an opinion?  Would the pun detract from something important someone is saying that will leave them feeling devalued because I changed the subject to an irrelevancy?  I don't answer these questions by a gestalt of the situation, but by careful examination.  If the answer to any of the above is no, then probably I'll never get to laugh at all.  I once had a boss tell me that they always liked seeing me make jokes because they could use it to tell whether I was relaxed and comfortable.  If I am dealing with new people who don't know me I have to be careful introducing them to my humor because many people find it unsettlingly odd and require a break in period before they will accept it or me without judgement and criticism.  Which is unfortunate since as I said earlier, jokes are often the easiest form of communication for me to achieve.

I know some of the changes I've experienced are simply the result of a maturing social awareness.  Others I am sure are only because I chronically experienced very judgemental people and situations.  I wish I knew how much was which and could magically fix it so that I could laugh again like I used to.

The First

The first autistic I ever knew didn't speak, but loved to feel the stubble on my chin, on anyone's chin really.  He liked bread, and once bit through plastic to get a taste of bagel.  My sister babysat him sometimes.  His brother, one of my friends, was the first to recognize the similarities we had, noting how I stimmed and suggesting that I might be on the autistic spectrum as well because my nervous twitches didn't just come while talking to girls but were essentially all the time.

A few years later I was emailing his brother explaining that his playful suggestion held more weight than he may have realized.  I was indeed on the autism spectrum and the process of finding out was being both a blessing and a curse.  I suddenly understood myself and my past like never before, but knowing also involved telling, opening me to stigmatization and discrimination.  I was not allowed to perform the basic milestones that marked adulthood in my culture…  But I moved on…

Eventually autism colored many more parts of my life, if that could be said to be possible.  Autism colors virtually every perception and experience, making it a core part of personal identity.  However, more of my friends or their family members were diagnosed, my own child was diagnosed.  Some among my nieces and nephews were diagnosed.  Our lives are marked.  But I've moved on, and lived life as fully as I could...

Recently this first autistic that I knew suffocated during a seizure.  Though I don't have them, seizures are common among autistics.  It's a fate that could easily have happened to me or to my children if they had seizures.  He's moved on as I will someday as well.  Since I am verbal I have the privilege of being better understood through my life and my children will have even better.  It's sad to say farewell to one whose identity as an autistic came to be defined in the wave of understanding just before the revolutions in understanding that allowed me to be diagnosed as well.  I can only say farewell pioneer, I hope I can be part of the ongoing revolution of better understanding and care that will make the world a better place for people like you and me, and my own children.

Federal Land... its not First Gun First Serve

With the militia takeover in Oregon and a more recent protest in Utah by others sympathetic to their views I've seen a consistent theme of ranchers claiming that the Federal Government doesn't have valid rights to its lands and that as a result the land should belong to the people who work it.  As a result, these people feel justified in refusing to pay the grazing fees, ignoring environmental rules, and in the case the Oregon militia they feel entitled to seize federal property for their own use or for the use of anyone nearby they feel might naturally benefit from it.  Having grown up as an ultra conservative I think I understand a where they are coming from, but I've learned so much more since then that from my perspective now, these protesters sound like wannabe Marxist revolutionaries.

If these protesters and anti government militias were trained in the same brand of conservative thinking I was raised with, the idea goes something like this-  Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution includes the clause that congress has the power

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;

As you'll notice in the sections I bolded, the Federal Government only is described as having lands if it purchases them from the states for the intent to put buildings on them.  So the thinking goes that obviously all the land should have been state land originally and that any federal purchase of land for any use other than for building plots is unconstitutional.  So obviously by that reasoning national forests, national parks, monuments, or general multi use public lands owned by the federal government are all unconstitutional.  If you start from the assumption that the federal government has no valid property right to begin with, its pretty easy to justify not having to obey federal laws regarding that property.  But of course this doesn't answer the question of who should get to have the land if not the government.  For this, John Locke provides a very convenient answer:

Sec. 30. Thus this law of reason makes the deer that Indian's who hath killed it; it is allowed to be his goods, who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though before it was the common right of every one. ... And even amongst us, the hare that any one is hunting, is thought his who pursues her during the chase: for being a beast that is still looked upon as common, and no man's private possession; whoever has employed so much labour about any of that kind, as to find and pursue her, has thereby removed her from the state of nature, wherein she was common, and hath begun a property.
Sec. 31. It will perhaps be objected to this, that if gathering the acorns, or other fruits of the earth, &c. makes a right to them, then any one may ingross as much as he will. To which I answer, Not so.... But how far has he given it us? To enjoy. As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his Tabour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

So in essence, the public lands should be redistributed to anyone who has and can use them without wasting any of it as a result of having too much.  So grazing land should belong to ranchers, mining land should belong to mining companies, and nothing should belong to land users who don't do something productive with the land- such as owners who might use land for scenic or conservation values since they would only hold land to allow its productive values go to waste.

Before I go on to discuss why this argument actually feels downright marxist, lets take a few moments to take apart these arguments.  First off, the constitution is actually no where near as narrow regarding land use as section 8 makes it sound.  Article 4 section 3 states:

The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States, or of any particular state.

Or in other words, Congress can do whatever it so pleases with federal land and the Constitution can't be read to automatically judge property claims.  So the argument that Federal Land other than for buildings is automatically invalid is absurd on its face and I'm embarrassed to say this was the interpretation I grew up believing was true and the interpretation believed by many of my former associates.  At the most narrow reading I can imagine as a lay person, the federal government might be restricted in what it can do with lands it purchases from states, but those restrictions wouldn't apply to land that had always belonged to the Federal government in the first place.  And that is making an extremely narrow reading of the text.  I believe some would accept that reading, but argue that all federal lands originally belonged to the states originally anyways so how could there be any valid federal land from any other source?  Well, there is a lot of complicated legal history that would go into answering that fully, but the biggest part of the answer is actually from Article 2, section 2 which includes that the President

...shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur...

Most of the territory of the United States was obtained by treaty, either by outright purchase and/or as the conclusion of a war.  Such lands weren't state lands to begin with, they were federal.  Later states were created and state lands were granted to the states according to whatever deal was written into the enabling act allowing the creation of that state and according to whatever legislation congress passed to dispose of or keep federal lands in that state.  Early in history the attitude was to give away lands as much as possible.  Later congress and the country changed their minds and the default position was to keep federal lands federal.  Due to many factors including the relative fertility of the land and absurd assumptions about how rainwater worked this meant that the western United States is mostly made up of federal land.  While this might feel unfair, it isn't unconstitutional and it isn't a land grab conspiracy.  As much as anything, its an accident of history.

As long as I'm tearing apart the constitutional theory about why Federal land is supposedly unconstitutional, I might as well give a side note regarding John Locke's property theories.  The anti government militia in Oregon provide an excellent example as to why John Locke's theory might sound nice on paper but have less to say about real life.  The ability to use property throughout history has not been limited by the possibility that excess property would go to waste.  Instead the ability to use property is largely determined by your or your ancestors ability to use force to capture and defend that land.  Thus, American Indians don't have many land rights even though in a perfect world most of the USA might still belong to them.  So while the Oregon militia might have been thinking in terms of high flying theories, in practice they claimed the ability to use the land by force of arms and have lost that ability because they don't have the political or military power to keep what they seized.  A labor theory of property ignores the messy history and by default awards property to whoever had more guns in the past.

In any case, why does it feel like to me as if these protesters are wannabe Marxists?  Well, lets trade roles for a moment and see what would happen if I tried to make similar claims about situations in my own life.  Lets just say that I decide that the property of my employer should be jointly owned by the sum total of the employees to have made the business productive over the years.  So I grab all my weapons and a group of friends and coordinate attacks to seize control of the buildings and property.  Because don't you know, the means of production should be owned by the workers not some fat capitalist whose money comes from an unjust system of taxation designed to benefit the rich at the expense of normal people (which is just about as twisted of a half truth as the idea that federal lands are unconstitutional).  Then I put out claims on social media asking all of my friends to take over all the local businesses in their area to do the same.  Then I start threatening the lives of any local government officer whose official duties might involve disagreeing with me.  You wouldn't call me a freedom fighter, you'd call me a communist rebel.  But somehow because these protesters talk about the constitution a lot and are scared about how their ranching livelihoods might disappear in a changing economy they portray themselves as freedom fighters fighting for the right to seize government property.  Even though I understand a lot of where they are probably coming from, they still sound like wannabe Marxists to me, trying to force ownership of the means of production into the hands of the working class.  If they care so much about the constitution, then they need to follow the constitutional process for how changes in government land management are done, that is, through congress.  If congress so wishes to gift or sell these lands to them, so be it the Constitution was followed.  Refusing to obey the laws regarding your grazing lease, seizing property with guns while wandering around town threatening to burn down the homes of BLM employees, threatening the life of the sheriff's wife and parents, or threatening that all your militia buddies are going to come mow down anyone who opposes you just doesn't count as pro-constitution freedom fighting.  It's domestic terrorism.

Neurotribes

I've been reading the book Neurotribes.  I haven't finished it yet, but I've enjoyed it.  Or maybe enjoyed isn't quite the word.  I've been haunted by it.  I've been frightened by it.  I've been powerfully reminded of everything about myself that I grew up being ashamed of.  I've been reminded of my strengths.  To explain why this book has so much power to me, lets imagine you are reading a choose your own adventure book, where you choose when and where to go in a time machine and learn what kind of life you would have lived in a different time and place.

Imagine for just a moment, that you choose the time machine  switch to learn how it would have been like to have lived several hundred years ago in Colonial America.  You step off the time machine, and discover the alternate you who lives in this time line invariably ends up being imprisoned and tortured on the presumption of being demonically possessed.  Wow, that ending is scary.  Flip back a few pages and now instead turn the dial and try out about 75 years ago in many places in the United States.  That should be safer right?  Well, instead of being tortured to drive out demons, instead you are imprisoned in a home for the feeble minded and are forcibly castrated to prevent you from spreading mental degeneracy through your presumed sexual perversion which would presumably lead you to father more degenerate perverts like you.  Wait, who is defining perversion here?  Ok, 75 years can't be all that crazy maybe lets try Europe this time.  Oops, landed in Germany.  One day your mom drops you off at the local hospital because you're sick and the doctor determines you are life not worthy of life and human ballast to be thrown off the ship of state to allow the noble Aryan workers to have a higher average standard of living.  You die of starvation and exposure outside the back of the clinic, are secretly cremated along with hundreds of other "defectives" and then a note is sent home to your parents explaining you died of natural causes and a bill is given to them for your cremation.  Ok, so this time machine trip is getting kind of scary.  Try again and again and again.  Over and over, you are institutionalized, forced to endure absurd medical treatments like an experimental rat, and are abandoned by parents who presume somehow its all their fault and they need to let you go to move on with their lives.  Had enough with the choose your own adventure story?  Lets zoom back to the present.

But, you ask, how could that possibly happen to someone as bright and as accomplished as you?  Easy.  I was a very late talker.  Apparently I had such a need for perfection that I practiced talking in normal phrases in what I thought was secret and managed to keep the secret so well that I shocked my parents by moving from speaking no more than one or two words at a time to speaking in full sentences all at once.  I was a late reader, not independently reading much of any of the normal children's literature until the 3rd grade, when I immediately picked up the Hobbit, Asimov's Foundation Series, Lloyd Alexander, and C. S. Lewis.  I read compulsively from then on.  I had strong sensory needs, throwing tantrums if my clothes still had the tags attached, unable to eat foods with mixed textures, or pay attention in class if anything was wrong about my sensory environment such as being too hot or cold or too loud.  My special ed instructors and school counselors knew there was something wrong that made it almost impossible for me to hold normal conversations and that my ability to instinctively see things from other points of view was limited.  I was the little kid who sat in the same exact spot in the lunchroom every day even if the table was completely empty, which it often was, because I had few or no friends and changing my routine to sit somewhere else would break my established routine.  So yeah, the insane asylums with their unique loving brands of torture, castration, experimentation, or, in the case of Germany, euthanasia would have been waiting for me if I had been born in most of the past.

In the grand scheme of history, the science of autism is only more recently emerging from being a speculative endeavor filled with fads promoted by over sized personalities.  It is still semi normal for advocacy organizations supposedly working in my interest to spend time talking about how much better the world would be without people like me because I'm supposedly such a heavy a burden on everyone around me.  It's still semi normal to hear of religious leaders trying exorcise the autism out kids  It's only recently that I could receive a diagnosis that was terribly specific to my situation at all.  It's only recently that technology allowed robust communities to be formed for people like me.  It's only recently that those communities have fostered support networks that make it easier to develop any kind of positive self image.

As I'm getting further into Neruotribes the story keeps becoming more and more positive, with more emphasis of now society has improved.  But if a story like what I've ready read through doesn't leave you haunted and at least a little emotionally exhausted, you might not have read it the first time.

Alma Mater

People who only knew more recently just would know of me as a student and graduate of Utah State University.  Those who know me longer or more closely know I am also a graduate of George Wythe University.  It is with mixed sadness and a sense of good riddance that I saw the announcement today in the paper that George Wythe University is closing.  George Wythe was an amazing experience engaging with big ideas, big ideals, and big dreams.  It was a deep dive immersion in Clean Skousen branded Mormonism, as much Christian Kabbalah mysticism as the DeMille's could push on everyone, and many good books.  It is also well described by Connor Boyack in the article above as "in essence, a glorified book club."  I might also describe it as almost a survivalist cult that focused on politics instead of on camping and food storage- building leaders not for today, but for after the coming global collapse of the current political order.

Attending George Wythe University for a time in my life represented the best way I could imagine to pursue the idealism I formed as a teenager.  Studying a broad range of subjects including history allowed me to challenge the political and social radicalism I had formed at home.  The thoroughness of how ideas were pursued gave me a foundation to re evaluate other beliefs later on in life as well.  Although I understand the school often moderated people's political opinions, mine swung from radical conservative to moderate liberal.  Truly I can call George Wythe my Alma Mater, or my nourishing mother.

But in a sense, George Wythe was an abusive mother to my soul as well.  If I had known how much they were lying when they claimed accreditation was close I would probably never have attended.  My freshman year they claimed all they needed for accreditation was a bigger endowment and that supposedly they had all the donors lined up but the money simply evaporated when the financial crisis hit the nation.  Later I found out they weren't even fundraising and hadn't been actively fundraising for quite a long time.  I also discovered that the math, science, and language programs were nowhere near the standards for accreditation.  The math and science lectures I attended were generally not allowed to even assign homework so as to avoid distracting from other coursework and the language classes, while very intense, even in several years of study didn't make it past what would be considered first semester material in a normal college course.  Dr. DeMille once said he didn't even care if we learned the languages we studied, expecting us to become smarter just from trying to learn them.  I also discovered they didn't even bother applying for accreditation until my senior year and after applying, failed to continue pursuing the application.

George Wythe also was abusive in misrepresenting the credentials of their professors and graduates.  Oliver DeMille only ever received a bachelors degree that wasn't a life experience or diploma mill degree, despite claiming to have a masters, JD, and PhD.  While I was there he represented those credentials as being valid.  The school also represented a notable politician as being their graduate when in reality he took no course work from them whatsoever and paid for a diploma mill degree from George Wythe as part of an agreement to promote the school.

The school was also abusive by engaging in a culture of extreme academic irresponsibility- both in sloppiness and dishonesty on their own part and in failing to teach me the basic academic expectations by which one avoids plagiarism.  One of my first experiences with Oliver DeMille was a taped lecture he gave at a homeschooling convention wherein he promoted his concepts of numerology and Kabbalic mysticism.  To avoid the embarrassment of saying such things on his own authority he attributed them all to Einstein.  As a naive teenager I assumed he was telling the truth; now I know he was telling absurd lies to promote his numerology.  Other professors occasionally incorrectly attributed their own ideas to other authors.  Once a professor even claimed a book was mistranslated when the text contradicted the professor's beliefs about an idea.  Some of these incidents I believe were intentional "white lies" meant to bolster the authority of the professor.  Some I think were simply mistakes that are easy to make when there is no expectation to cite your sources in any kind of rigorous manner.  When I presented my senior thesis for defense it was one of the only papers I bothered to cite sources because it had never been required of me before.  I didn't even know which style guide to use.  When I was before the board and I apologized for unintentional sloppiness in my many citations the President of the school told me he wouldn't have bothered with citing sources so much if it were his own paper.

I'll always remember George Wythe fondly and also with regret.  It was the place where I grew incredibly in a very broad but shallow study of an incredible array of subjects and became a much more well balanced person.  It was also a school that ate about ten years of my life which I was willing to give them based on extremely misleading claims about who they were and how likely it was that they would have finished the accreditation process by the time I graduated.  With how much dishonesty and illegality were commonplace at the institution I believe the school deserved to end this way.  But on the other hand, I don't regret the growth I experienced and wish it had truly been the school of statesmen it claimed.

What is hardest about being down to one good leg?

My recent leg surgery is the first time in my life that I've gone for a prolonged period without being able to walk normally.  Before that the longest I'd ever gone was about 3 days- once after my first 10 mile hike and once after my first 20 mile hike.  So I'd never had a reason to use crutches or wheelchairs or anything of that sort before.  Around the house I've had to use crutches, though while out and about I might use the courtesy provided powered wheelchair at Walmart or a knee scooter.  I thought I'd record some of what were the hardest things for me.

First- clearing my own walkways.  With kids at home- there are always toys and childrens books strewn everywhere.  At first I felt I spent about as much time using the crutches to push things out of my way as I did walking anywhere with them.

Second- getting up in the middle of the night.  If I turned on the light, I'd wake up my wife.  If I didn't- you don't know what on obstacle course is until you try to hobble to the bathroom in the dark past a variety of laundry baskets, children's toys and books, fallen pillows, dropped or folded clothing, power cords,  etc...  It might be a small miracle I didn't injure myself trying to go to the bathroom.  Looking back I should have just turned on a light- I just didn't want to be a burden in one more way if I could do it myself.

Third- carrying anything.  If your arms are busy holding onto the crutches, carrying anything while walking becomes difficult and depending on the object, impossible.  Just the simple act of making a peanut butter sandwich requires getting up from the table, fetching a plate and a knife (if I'm confident enough to carry them both at once), then going back to the counter and getting the peanut butter which I grab carefully with all fingers of one hand except the thumb which is hooked around the crutches handle.  Then I repeat the process even more carefully with the jelly jar.  Hopefully either the trip for the peanut butter or the jelly also involved grabbing the bread, which I can dangle from the other hand that isn't holding a jar.  By then I've hobbled the distance between the table and the cupboard 6 times and it will require another 6 times to put all the items back away again afterwards on my own.  By that time I'd just as soon sit down and wait for help.

Forth- exhaustion.  Walking with crutches is very difficult work when your muscles aren't used to it.  The twelve trips between the table and the cupboard are exhausting. Much of what I couldn't easily do on my own wasn't I couldn't do it, but because the amount of effort involved was so high.  Of course, being tired and dizzy from taking prescription pain medications probably didn't help in this regard.

Fifth- little boy pounces.  My kids feel that a daddy lying down is an open invitation to pounce and play.  So all that time I tried to spend lying down to elevate my leg or to recover from walking around the room was largely eaten up being jumped on by little boys.  Given how difficult it was to stand up or to move to a new location, it was difficult to make them stop by just getting up and going away like I might normally do if they were being unmanageable.  So often I just had to put up with their antics, even if it meant I got very little rest compared to the amount of time I tried to spend resting.

Sixth- anything that requires standing.  Any optional standing becomes easy to throw out the window.  Taking a shower?  No, too much work if not impossible.  How about shaving?  Again too much work.  Brushing teeth?  When I get around to it.  When all you really want to do is lie down and elevate your leg, basic hygiene is a lot harder to maintain.

There were a host of other issues as well.  How do you go shopping on your own?  Can you fit as much groceries in a powered wheel chair as in a normal shopping cart?  How do you drive when every bump in the road causes a sharp pain in the leg?  How to make the children hold still in church if they just want to play with the knee scooter in the aisle?  But those six issues are probably the worst.  Even though I'm still very restricted, I'm glad I have a walking cast now that I can use to move around.  The end is in sight.