Remembering friends on this World AIDS Day...

Robert Genjin Savage, composer of 'Sudden Sunsets', title piece in a Lincoln Center commemoration, loved to bird in South America.

                                

Remembering a living friend on this Human Rights Day...

Yodon Thonden, a brilliant young lawyer with Human Rights Watch, who was among the first to call world attention to the extent of the plight of child soldiers in west Africa. 

Just a few days ago the U.S. Senate passed the Human Trafficking and Child Soldiers Bill. 

Grateful to Yo and all who worked to secure that important political step I want to include here one of the awareness raising videos produced by Human Rights Watch and Yo's colleague, Jo Becker.

Tens years ago, the week I asked my first wife out on a date, I'd also thought of asking Yo out. I trust that our respective roads-less-traveled (which have made all the difference) have been best for the world too.

Here's to the steps we each take in all the directions of common advancement!

This time I've been tagged by Laura.



Seven (additional) weird or random things about me:

1. I died. Sort of. Twice. Both times were after swimming in too cold water for too long. I'd pass out, stop breathing, and come to after several minutes. It seemed that these episodes were more traumatic for bystanders than for myself. I hear that I've stopped breathing for somewhere between ten and twenty (thankfully not consecutive) minutes.

2. I dislocated my left shoulder eleven times in the course of a year and a half. The first two times, in the same football game, most of the rest were while swimming.

3. I didn't get a driver's license until in my mid twenties. I didn't own a car until my mid thirties.
However, I did most of my traveling before having a license.

4. About two years ago, for the first time, I bought a television set.

5. Last year, for the first time, I bought a computer and got online.

6. This year, for the first time, I bought a CD and a DVD player.

7. I was surprised to hear (in my mid twenties) of a study which concluded that the vast majority of adults do most of their waking thinking in language, forming sentences and phrases...    This was not so in my case. 

I remember mentioning this to a friend who had known me for a few years (who had recommended me for the librarian position at the biomedical ethics center where she was the only MD on staff). She said that I was one of the few people for which she could believe that to be true. Thinking in language seemed an inefficiant, indirect way to process experience. My surprise was that we would mediate most of our conceptualizing by description and discursive explanation. For me language seemed to be convenient conventions for the social layers of relating. Thinking seemed more like perceiving and an arranging of perceptions than a sequencing of signifiers. 


My tagger's still busted. Can't get behind it. Can't pick it up. Don't know what it is. 3for5 is par for me.