Trying to Run a Non-Profit With ADD

I really need to write shit more often. Well, no time like right now.

As everybody knows, I guess, I work with a small school in Tela, Honduras. I have my own non-profit organization (if you can call anything somebody with ADD runs an “organization”) to raise money so I can pay English speaking teachers to work there. For every teacher I can pay, the school has that much money freed up to put toward other things. I’ve been through this before, I know.

Anyway, running things is something I have a hard time with. Asking people for money is something I have a hard time with. Anything other than dealing with the teachers and the school is hard for me. Handling money is hard for me. And, sad to say, running things, asking for money and handling money are big parts of having a non-profit organization.

All this has kept me from getting as far as I’d like to, and the underlying problem or problems are hard to put into words. I’ll try to begin by telling about something that happened when I was in graduate school. I came to Washington when I was 30 so I could get a degree in international affairs, specifically Latin America.

I knew already I wanted to do something in Tela, but I didn’t know what, and, though I knew a lot about Honduras from having lived there two years, it was all firsthand stuff, and only about Honduras. I knew little of the history or politics or economics or the sociology of the rest of Latin America. I didn’t even know much about the other Central American countries. So I went to graduate school, and hoped that I’d work out just what my calling was while I was there, or not long after.

The summer between my two years at school, I got an unpaid internship at the Organization of American States, the O.A.S. There was a department they’d set up called the Trust for the Americas, and it was set up to do anti-corruption work, and that’s where I was going to be working. I was thrilled. I thought I could do something to help.

It wasn’t long before I found out that I was wrong. I can kind of wrap up the whole experience of my time there with one story. Most of the other interns were undergraduates. I think I was the only graduate student, at least in the Trust. We would often go next door to the World Bank cafeteria for lunch, since our badges would get us in there, and they had good, cheap food.

One day, I went with about four other interns. We were working on setting up an anti corruption conference in Ecuador at the time, and everybody was talking about it. I’d already shown that pretty much all I could do was type in names and addresses and telephone numbers and e-mails of the people who were going to the conference into a spreadsheet.

The other interns were all 20, 21, 22 year old undergraduates, and they all sat there, talking about how they were going to do things, they were setting things up, they were going to call people, and talk to people, and make things happen, and I remember sitting there, listening to them, feeling like a loser, because these kids were all so much younger than I was, and they knew how to make things happen, and I couldn’t even really understand what the hell they were talking about.

That’s what it’s like for me with this non-profit. I know what I want to do with it; I know that this is a wonderful idea, that could help any school in Honduras, and that, if I could really get this thing working well, I could do wonders for the Kawas School, for other schools in Tela, for other schools in other Honduran towns, and I could even work with and help schools in other countries.

But I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to make things happen. It takes something that my brain just lacks to understand how to get things done.

Here’s something I saw on Facebook this evening:

It’s on a page called “facebook [sic] for nonprofits”. It has about ten links like the three above, telling how to put Facebook to work for your non-profit. So I read a bunch of the links, and I’m sure they make a lot of great points, but there’s something missing in my brain, and I read them, and I just don’t get it. I don’t understand. It doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t know how to make any of the shit they’re talking about—and I know the shit they’re talking about is great shit, and it would help me immeasurably—happen.

That’s my problem kind of wrapped up in a neat little box with a lovely bow on it: I can think of great ideas. To paraphrase Donald Trump, I have ideas, I have the best ideas; but I have no fucking clue how to make them happen. I don’t know how making things happen works. I don’t know how to get the ideas out of my head and into the world where they can happen.

If you know anybody who has ADD, and this is even more important if they’re young, believe me (as Donald Trump would also say), they have wonderful ideas. They can come up with crazy, amazing, sublime shit that nobody but one of us would ever think of. But they might not know how to make them happen. Their ideas might change the world, but they’ll never be worth anything unless they happen. So, I guess what I’m telling all of you here is that it’s up to you, the normals, to help these kids get these ideas out of their heads and into the world where they can do some good. Find out what these children are thinking, and help them do it. Be patient. Be understanding. Be willing to get frustrated when they can’t always find the words to tell you what they’ve come up with. But if you help them, they’ll help all of us, in ways we can’t even—well, you can’t ’cause you non-ADDled folk are all so much less awesome than we are—dream of.

This Accursed Name

This is going to be a long post, and it has little to do with ADD, so few of you may want to read it. That’s all right; I’ll be writing this as much for myself as for anyone else. As I said publicly for the first time not too long ago, I hate my name. I’ve always hated it, though until lately, I never admitted that, not even to myself. There are many reasons behind this, and I feel like it’s time to lay it all out; as I said, this is for me as much as for anybody else.

I know that there are people in the world who go through the day without food, and people living in the middle of wars, people living in fear of their own governments, or of organized bands of psychopaths who want to be the government. People living on the street. People on the edge of losing their housing and ending up on the street. People dying of all kinds of sicknesses or living with the pain of chronic sicknesses. And here I am, warm, happy, well fed, and bitching about a name. I know things could be worse. And yet, as trivial as this might be, standing next to what millions of others in the world deal with, it has dogged me as long as I can recall, so, what the hell, I’m going to write about it. I hope it doesn’t come off as too whiny or self pitying, but if it does, all I can do is ask you to let that slide.

So. The Name. I think the roots of this go back to 1899, when my grandfather was born. He grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, in a family that had been important in Virginia for almost 300 years by that time. Virginia was, and still is in many ways, an odd place. I’m not going to go into all the ways it’s out of step with much of what we think of as being definitively American; anybody who wants to know more would do well to take a look at Colin Woodard’s American Nations, and read the chapters about Tidewater.

Well, my grandfather grew up in a family that held itself in the highest esteem. It had taken a hand in running the state for two hundred years or more. A some-number-of-greats uncle had been the Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of State. Other forebears had been admirals almost since the Revolution. One of them had been the Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy. Somebody in each generation had gone into the Navy, which they saw almost as a family business. My grandfather was the one in his generation to go.

He went to Annapolis and graduated, but when he was about 35 or 40, Navy doctors found some abnormality in his heart, apparently from a bout of scarlet fever when he was a child. He had to resign his commission, which was a blow to him, as it cost him his shot at commanding a ship someday, and kept him out of World War II. It was an irony, too, since, whatever might have been wrong with his heart, it didn’t keep him from living until 94.

By this time, he had two children, my mother and her brother. I think--and most of this is guesswork, patched together from a lifetime of listening to my family talk about a great many things; nobody ever explicitly laid any of this out for me--that he hoped his son would follow him into the Navy. That was a lost cause. My uncle had a rebellious streak, and he and my grandfather never really got along. I suspect my uncle chafed as his father tried to steer him into a life he didn’t want.

In the background was my mother. She was the older sister, and the good child. She never talked back, never rebelled, always did what was asked of her--and often more than was asked. If my grandfather had asked her to go to Annapolis, she would have done it without balking, even if she didn’t want to. Of course, she was a girl, so the Navy was shut off to her. It must have frustrated my grandfather beyond words: A girl who would have willingly done anything asked of her, but who couldn’t go into the family business; and a boy who could have, but wouldn’t do as he was asked.

This brings me now to my mother. I think she spent her whole life seeking her parents’ approval and love. Of course, the did love her, but my grandfather, at least, would have been happier if she had been born a boy. She never said anything like that to me, and she idolized, and idealized, her mother and father to such a degree that I don’t think she ever could have even thought such a thing; but I suspect that somehow, deep inside, she knew this was so.

But she always did what they asked of her. Well, almost always. The one time I know of when she went against what my grandfather, at least, would have asked of her was when she married my father. My father was as far from what my grandfather would have thought of as an ideal son in law as I can think. For one thing, he was from Pennsylvania, and my grandfather had grown up hearing tales of the unjust War of Northern Aggression. He was mild mannered and bookish. He was a liberal, and outspokenly so, in a mild, low-key kind of way, if that makes any sense.

He was successful, but not in a way my grandfather would have typically thought of the word. My father had almost graduated from medical school, but a fear of speaking in public had kept him from fulfilling one requirement: giving a speech before a class of students. I don’t know what the subject was to have been. But this was 1942, and back then, schools were less willing to accommodate things like my father’s awful stage fright. He didn’t get his M.D., but he got three M.A.s, and by the time he and my mother wed, he was the assistant librarian at the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins. He would soon become the head librarian at the dental school library at the University of Pennsylvania. But this wasn’t the kind of guy my grandfather would have chosen for his daughter to marry.

And then I came along. I suspect that, for my grandfather, I was a last hope, a shot at having the kind of son he’d always wanted, but had never gotten. Only I didn’t have the family name. My uncle was married, but utterly uninterested in children, so my grandfather saw his line dying out. And there I was, only without the name.

Again, I’m guessing here, but I think my mother named me for my grandfather so the name would carry on. I think it was her almost desperate way to curry the favor with him that she had never quite gotten, as a daughter. My father was, if not appalled, most assuredly dubious. He did his best to head her off, but in the end, he couldn’t sway her, and I got saddled with what has been, all my life, this mild curse. I know it isn’t the same as growing up in a war zone, but it’s been my own kind of hell, even if it’s a low-key one.

You might have picked up on the fact that I haven’t yet written my name once throughout this post. That isn’t an accident. I avoid saying, or even writing, my name whenever I can. I’ve said that I feel like a little part of my soul shrivels and dies every time I speak it aloud. Early on, I learned the trick of spelling my name when asked for it. It works, since I end up having to spell it out anyway, as often as not. It only backfires when somebody asks me how I pronounce it.

All my life, my name has set me apart. Often it’s the first thing anybody knows about me, before they meet me, or even see me. And it marks me as a weirdo. As a child, I fantasized about having a name like everybody else. It was a big legacy for a little kid to tote around on small shoulders.

Early on, other kids began to make fun of my name. My parents had always told me that the best thing to do when people are making fun of you is to ignore them. So I did. When somebody twisted my name into some epithet, I’d sit there, not acknowledging it, seething inside. Most likely my lack of reaction just made me seem even weirder, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I stuck with it. This passivity had another effect, one I only lately came to see and understand, and I’ll get to that forthwith.

So, doubtless, many of you are asking, “Well, if you hate it so much, why don’t you change it?” And that is the other problem I have with my name: It isn’t really my name at all. I never felt, and still don’t feel, like I have any choice about it. As odd as that sounds, that’s how it feels to me, for many reasons. One reason is that it comes from my mother’s family, and was clearly important to her and to her father. It was a name given to me to honor my family, which seems to make it something bigger than I am. It isn’t only a name, it’s a legacy, a responsibility. I couldn’t change it without metaphorically spitting in their faces.

Beyond that, I name isn’t something that people choose themselves; it’s something bestowed upon them. We’re passively given our names. We’re at the mercy of other people as babies, sitting helplessly as somebody else chooses for us the name that we will bear all our lives. In essence, I don’t feel like I have any right to change my name. It would be wrong, immoral to arrogate to myself this power that I have no claim to. Some of this sounds irrational. A lot of it is, I know that. I don’t know how to overcome this in my own mind, though.

I think I wrote once on this blog that one of the ways I learned to deal with ADD, before I ever knew I had is, was to never be in control. I learned to be passive. As long as I wasn’t running things, that cut down the likelihood that I’d screw something up. But maybe I got too good at this. Being passive was natural for me already, since I’m fairly low-key and mild by nature. But it can get out of hand, and in my case, it did. So understanding this, feeling like I don’t even have any choice over my own name fits right in.

A few times I tried. When I was in about 6th grade, I wished I had a normal name. I even chose one I wanted to have. But I never did anything about it, since I felt like I had to come up with an excuse to use it, I had to have a defense if anybody asked me what the deal was. And I couldn’t come up with a good enough one that sounded believable. “I hate my name and want a new one,” never even crossed my mind. I had to find a way to claim that this new name was my name, that it was my middle name, or something. I even thought of saying that the new name was my real name, but that I had somehow never known it. That sounds crazy, but then, I was only 11 or 12 years old or so.

By high school, I worked up the guts to try it, and in 11th grade, I did. But I couldn’t stick with it. I told people it was my first name, and that my first name was my middle name. I gave up after a few months, feeling like a liar and a fraud. I never even told my parents what I was doing, either. After all, it was really their name, not mine. They had given it to me, and here I was, committing fraud behind their backs. I felt ashamed at the thought of changing my name, even as I dreamt of having one like other kids’ names.

In college, I tried it again. Here, after all, was a whole new life, with new people who didn’t know me as “the kid with the weird name.” But, again, I gave up after a few months, since I felt like a cheat and a fraud and a liar.

Oddly, even when other kids at school made fun of my name, I never just asked them to stop. I guess I never felt like it was up to me. It wasn’t my name, after all. It identified me, but somehow, it was the property of everybody else but me.

Maybe this sounds crazy. And maybe it is. But crazy or not, that’s how it feels to me. I can’t change my name. It isn’t really mine to change. I can’t even ask people not to make fun of me for it. It isn’t even really mine to do that. It belongs to all of you, to the world, to do with what you will. This seems fatalistic, and it is. I know that. But, right or wrong, that’s how things stand in my mind.

All this means I get to choose between three things. One of them is to change it, but I don’t foresee me ever feeling like I have any authority to do that. The next is to learn to like it, but, come on, if I haven’t yet learned to do that, it isn’t going to happen. That means I get to go with the last choice, which is to deal with this fucking thing and live with the unhappiness it brings. Not a happy ending, but, then, if this is the worst thing I have to deal with in life, I guess I should be fairly happy. And, well, not every tale has a happy ending anyway.

Have You Ever Wondered What Horrors Lurk Deep Within an ADDled Mind [sic]? Look No Further:

I know that I owe something more to you, my loyal reader. I know you come here looking for something deeper and with more meaning than the lighthearted rantings of an embittered crank with degenerative brain disease and low social skills. I humbly ask your forgiveness.

It’s time to give something back to society. And so, here I shall do my part, such as it is. I know how hard it is to come up with a really good alias to evade capture by law enforcement when committing petty fraud, grand larceny, scams, arson, murders, assaults and batteries, housebreakings, terrorism, home invasions, kidnappings and embezzlement. There just aren’t enough good, reliable aliases in the public domain. And who wants to pay royalties for a good alias? Nobody.

And so, to “pay it forward,” as it were, I hereby bequeath to humanity my trove of aliases for all & sundry to put to ill use. These aliases have been tested, time and again, and have proven themselves to be consistently ranked among the best in the business. Furthermore, all aliases named herein are free of all encumbrances, liens and mortgages, and all are free to use them for any purpose, so long as it is unethical, and, whenever feasible, unlawful. The list begins forthwith:

• MacBlunch D.G. Awltchbawmon
• Balfred Azzle
• Bibbelsnæð Bibbelsnæðsson
• Bibbelsnaga Bibbelsnæðsdottir
• Fordney McCumber Bilmfimble
• L. Çrampogne Bilmfimble
• Hon. Gorman Y. Binge
• Girtford Bleaves
• Henry Harrison Cleepstraw
• Morbidia Deathpuffs
• Duncan Dönitz
• Bowdler Figgles
• Shumway Fleeby
• Yosbert Yinklington Flinsterbolm
• Rynald K. Garbonzostein
• Wagbert Glöggnitz
• Wilber Hemphill Goke
• Archibald Greex
• Hamilton Groaker
• Isaac Lillington Hefflewhimp
• Waldorf Imvergampps
• Floyd P. Jamboree, Jr.
• Fast Eddie Krakatoa
• Hinton Dumberthon Kigg
• Philippa Knäkkerschnattz
• Dr. Ernst Lorp
• Zapruder F. Mashtots
• Gustav Ignatz Nalgas
• Dingwall Nodge
• Elmer Pitman Opuaper
• Otto, Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy
• Zachary Pottle
• Clambert Prunebanks
• Clambertine Prunebanks
• Smedley Darlington Prunebanks
• Vitort K. Puttna
• Olaf Qvality
• Edgar Lamb Scumblefield (For use in German-speaking jurisdictions, substitute: Ehdgardt Lömbe Zschgümbelfeld)
• Horrendo C. Slapp
• Glympia O. Smeech
• Nestor Smyrba
• Aurelio Snitball
• Habersham Snooting
• Vescoe P. Spurnwick
• Vomica Spurnwick
• Renfrew Squeevil
• Dixterton Twiggs
• Caerulia Valc
• Agnew Harrison Vampersand
• Josephus Vile
• Elburn Vinchpotts
• Purdy Jackson Weedflax
• Milledge B. Wreaxheaver
• Lathrop Sewell Yamm
• Mumphrey Oddison Yamm
• Shipstead Wilton Yamm
• Coronel Juan Lindo Domingo Pacífica Benedicto Trinidad de las Planetas Zefirino Bonifacio Santiago Vespasiano Zefrádio Sinibaldo Güibellino Septizoño Zerón y Omonita
• Jimperson Zibb
• Pope Zosimus, XI

This has nothing to do with ADD, but, what the hell...

I withhold the right to write about, or link to, any damned thing I want to. If you don’t like it, tough noogies to you.

Here’s a great piece about one of my hobby horses, namely, how and why SEPTA sucks so badly. This guy understands that an agency whose responsibilities--or one of them, anyway--is to run passenger trains in and around a big city ought to run the damned things, not cut back on branches for the hell of it, and even, though SEPTA seems not to grasp this bit here, to broaden the system. Philadelphia and its outlying counties have hundreds of miles of tracks that once had passenger trains running along them, some up until as lately as 1986. SEPTA needs to get off its collective ass and get trains running beyond where they’re doing it now.

What got me on this tangent was that we went up to Philadelphia this weekend to see my mother, and we stayed at one of those hotels out near the airport. To get from it to where she is, and back, we had to go through Essington, which lies along the old Chester Branch of the Reading Railroad. This is the branch that SEPTA, in a fit of atypical behavior, started running trains along to get to the airport, but the last bit, the fishhook to the airport, is a spur off the main branch. Anyway, the branch is still there, running along through Essington, through Eddystone, and into Chester, all the way to Marcus Hook.

Those of you who never lived in or near Philadelphia won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but that’s all right. Feel free to bail out here.

Well, so, back to the topic at hand. The tracks run out beyond the airport, by a whole slew of airport hotels, right by a big Boeing plant, by all kinds of other industries, and by a casino. Think how great it would be if people could fly into the airport, and just hop on a train and be at their hotel in 15 minutes, or how great it would be if some of the hundreds of people who work at Boeing could take the train to work. I happen to think that the last thing a blighted city trying to come back (like Chester) needs is a fucking casino; but the damned thing is there now, and it isn’t going to be going anywhere, so as long as people are going to it, it would be nice if they all didn’t have to drive through Chester and clog all the streets up.

So, that’s my intemperate, and irrelevant screed for tonight. If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry, but, come on, you have nobody to blame for that but yourself. You didn’t have to read it. I even told you as much.

The Who Sell Out

O.K., yeah, so I’m not the Who.* But I am selling out. I saw a little thing on the page where I write my meandering musings, and it said if I let ads show up here, I could make some money. So, I’m selling out. I hope you’re still willing to read my screeds, even though I’m viciously exploiting you in the process. But, bear in mind, if you’d be so kind, that whatever I earn will go to my non profit, with which I work with the Blanca Jeanette Kawas Bilingual School in good ol’ Tela, Atlántida, Honduras, C.A., Western Hemisphere, Earth, Milky Way.

*All in all, I’m glad not to be the Who. If I were, I’d have a 25% chance of being deaf and a 50% chance of being dead.

I Lied

Yeah, I said I was going to spare you for a few days, but I changed my mind. Sue me. And I feel like writing some more about Tela. I know that Tela doesn’t, strictly speaking, have a whole hell of a lot to do with ADD, but, what the hell, as Mitch “Muscle Man” Sorrenstein once said, it’s my party, and I’ll fry if I want to. I also know what I’m writing about has nothing to do with frying anything, either. But, hey, as I said, this is my party. And, as I also said, sue me.

Mitch “Muscle Man” Sorrenstein

~~~

Some random & variegated thoughts about living in Tela, Atlántida, Honduras, C.A.

~~~

I once came home after a night out drinking beer with friends, stopped in the bathroom to tap a kidney, and was greeted by what I thought was a rat in the toilet. When I got a better look, it turned out it was a bat. Flailing, flopping, struggling fruitlessly, it looked like it was in pretty bad shape. So I went to the closet next to the bathroom, in which we kept tools and random junk, grabbed a ceiling fan blade, scooped the bat out, and laid it outside on the grass. I leaned in to see how it was doing, and it hissed at me. So I thought it was doing all right, and I left it. The next morning it was gone. So, either it was all right and flew off, or something came by and ate it. Either way, I like to think I did my part. I later went on to patent the Bat Extricator 4000™.

The Bat Extricator 4000: It Might Look Like an Old Ceiling Fan Blade, But It Does So Much More!®

~~~

Once a month, we had to get our passports stamped at the migración office in town. It was an upstairs office on a side street. I don’t think it was over the coffin shop, but I think it was on the same street. Anyway, the immigration guy must have worked out some kind of deal with the mayor, because I think he lived there. More than once I showed up when the office, went in, and had to knock on the guy’s private room door to wake him so he could stamp my passport.

Well, one afternoon, another teacher and I were reading in the front room in the teacher house, when another teacher came in. He had an odd, bewildered look on his face, like he’d seen something, and was still trying to work out what it was. We asked him what was going on, and he told us he’d been to get his passport stamped, and then said, “I’ve been to a lot of government offices in a lot of countries, but this is the first time I ever went into one on official business, and been served by a guy in his underwear!”

And it wasn’t until a long time later, years later, that I was telling somebody about this, and something I’d never thought of before popped into my head, and I said, “You know, now that I think of it, that guy stamped my passport more than once while he was in his underwear, but I never thought anything of it.” I guess it was just so typically Teleño that it never even registered. I mean, hey, if you wake up a guy from his nap to stamp your passport, why wouldn’t he be in his underwear?

~~~

One time I was riding the train, and a drunk guy fell right out of the mail car, the car right ahead of ours. A friend was riding with me, and I said, “Shit, did you see that guy fall off the train?” he didn’t believe me, but we were going slowly, since we were coming to a stop, so I just pointed out the door as we went by, and there he was, lying in the weeds on his back, looking dazed. When the train stopped, we jumped off and ran to the back to see what was going on, and the conductor and another guy who was riding the train were helping the drunk guy up onto the back platform. And he went up the stairs, and kept right on going across the platform and started down the stairs to the other side. The conductor grabbed him and steered him into the last car, and that’s the last we saw of him, since we weren’t going any farther.

~~~

One time I accidentally boiled a rat to death. I was brushing my teeth in the kitchen before bed, as I always did, since that’s where the jug of clean water was, and something ran over my foot. I jumped, and I saw a rat run under the refrigerator, which, for some reason, sat on a wooden pallet. The pallet had beams along each edge, so the only way in was between the slats on the top. I knew the rat wasn’t going to come out willingly, so I thought that if I boiled some water while I brushed my teeth, and then poured a little into the pallet, it would scare the rat, and it would come back out and I could shoo it out the door with a broom.

So I put a pot of water on, and by the time I was done brushing my teeth, it was boiling. I poured just a little under there, and nothing happened. So I poured a little more, and still nothing happened. I began to wonder if the rat had somehow snuck out, even though I’d been trying to keep an eye on the pallet, so I thought, what the hell, and poured the whole pot in. Still nothing happened, so I figured the rat must have indeed gotten out, and I gave up and went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, the other teachers who lived in the house were milling around the refrigerator, which seemed to have somehow defrosted in the night. I though it would be wisest to just hang back and keep my mouth shut, so that’s what I did, as two of the others lifted the refrigerator off the pallet and lifted the pallet off the floor, revealing a stewed rat. While they were recoiling and swearing, I thought it best to be off, since I was taking a trip that day to El Salvador anyway. I never did tell them anything about the rat...

~~~

I guess that’s about enough for today. Sweet dreams.