Getting fixed…
7 minute read
October 22, 2024, 1:30 PM
On Thursday, October 17, I did something that I had wanted to do for quite some time: I got a vasectomy, i.e. I got “fixed”. That affirms my commitment to a childfree life, as this stops the little swimmers right in their tracks, more or less cutting off their path to the outside world.
It’s funny how these things happen. The first time that I had ever heard of a vasectomy was out on the road. I was out with Mom, and I spotted a car with a bumper sticker that said something to the effect of, “Against abortion? Get a vasectomy.” I didn’t know what a vasectomy was, and so the message didn’t make any sense to me. Both parents always followed a policy of answering questions from my sister and me truthfully and thoroughly, and so this was no exception. So Mom explained what it was, i.e. it was a procedure that, at the end of it, makes it where a man is unable to produce children. I already had a decent handle on female sterilization procedures, because my mother had a tubal ligation done while she was already in the operating room for my sister’s birth (we were both caesarean babies). So I already knew that such a thing could be done on women, but until that moment, I didn’t know that there was an equivalent procedure that could be done on men. Good to know. Then later on, there was an episode of Home Improvement that aired when I was in the ninth grade, where Tim Allen‘s character gets a vasectomy. It really did a good job explaining how a vasectomy works, and addressed a lot of the myths surrounding it, and it really made it feel like a normal thing that men do, and it doesn’t make them any less manly for doing it.
That said, I recognized from a fairly young age that I didn’t want to have children of my own (I really could never imagine myself as being a father), and so it made sense to get a vasectomy. I had felt this way at least as far back as my early twenties, and it’s never changed. However, I also had no relationship prospects or anything like that at that time which would make a vasectomy necessary, plus Walmart insurance was laughably bad in those pre-Obamacare days (hello, $1,000 deductible at a job that only paid $7.00 an hour). But I knew that I eventually wanted to do it in order to permanently put any possibility of future children to rest.
Categories: Personal health
“Autism acceptance” means all autistic people…
9 minute read
April 23, 2024, 10:20 AM
For those not aware, April has been designated as Autism Awareness/Acceptance Month. I tend to fall more on the “acceptance” side of things, since it’s not so much about making people aware about autism and autistic people as it is to accept us for who we are, and for them to not infantilize or otherwise behave patronizingly towards us. I also feel as though there are a lot of misconceptions about autism, and the activities that various organizations have put on in recognition of autism have not done anything to help dispel these misconceptions. The biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that the focus is often entirely on children, which makes me think that too many people seem to believe that autism is something that just affects children, and that it’s not something that adults also deal with. In other words, autistic children are all well and good and all, but they eventually grow up to become autistic adults. Autism is not something that you outgrow as you get older. You don’t just stop being autistic once you reach adulthood. Autistic people may become very adept at hiding it, also known as “masking”, as they get older, but beneath it all, they’re still autistic.
That said, I take great issue with people’s focusing solely on children when discussing autism, because it is a lifelong condition. In my case, I am very high-functioning, and so while growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, my autism went undiagnosed. That meant that I got no autism-specific support as a child and as a teen. That’s not the fault of anything specific to my situation, though, since autism wasn’t as well understood back then, and high-functioning cases like mine weren’t typically diagnosed. I admit that I have mixed feelings on that, as I’ve heard about some of the interventions and other alleged “help” for autistic people at the time. So while it might have been helpful for me to have had some autism-related support, remembering the ham-handed way that the school tried to address my toe walking when I was in kindergarten, I don’t necessarily know if I would trust them to help me out with that.
Nothing like making a weekend trip to New York and getting sick while there…
22 minute read
January 26, 2024, 11:03 PM
So as discussed previously, on January 17-19, my friend Aaron Stone and I went up to New York City for a weekend trip. We knew that it was supposed to be cold while we were there, and snow was in the forecast for the last day of our trip, but that was about it, and nothing that we couldn’t handle.
Our route up, however, was intentionally planned to be a bit unorthodox. Normally, for a trip to New York, from where I live, you would go straight up I-95 through Baltimore and then take the Delaware Memorial Bridge just before Wilmington, and follow the New Jersey Turnpike most of the rest of the way to the city. This time, we decided to be a bit more roadgeekish, taking US 15 up to Harrisburg, taking I-81 a short distance to I-78, and then taking I-78 all the way to New York. The goal here was to complete all 146 miles of Interstate 78 in one shot. It would only add about 45 minutes to the drive by going this way, and we got to complete a highway. I had previously traveled most of I-78 in the nineties and early 2000s, but I was missing a section in New Jersey, as well as the small New York portion. Aaron, to my knowledge, had never done any of I-78.
My memories of I-78 were never particularly pleasant, as I always associated it with family road trips in the nineties, where my father would drive. He was always very concerned about making good time on these family trips, and that meant some very long distances in the car along some incredibly dull stretches of highway, with nothing of any note to break up the trip. For an eight-hour trip from Stuarts Draft, Virginia to Fairfield, Connecticut, we would make maybe two stops the entire way, once around Paxtonia, and then another one somewhere in New Jersey, and those would be kept as short as possible. In other words, the journey was viewed as a chore, a necessary evil to be knocked out quickly, and not as a part of the adventure. And in those pre-Internet days, there was only so much that one could do to keep one’s self occupied. We would bring all sorts of books and such to read, but those only went so far before we got tired of reading. I-78 in Pennsylvania is largely rural, and while it does go through the Allentown area, it skirts it to the south, far enough away for there to be nothing interesting to see. It’s what led my sister and me to start calling Pennsylvania “the forever state” because it felt like it took forever to get through, and it was incredibly boring. About the only thing interesting on I-78 in Pennsylvania was the Delaware River toll plaza, and that was on the westbound side. I remember, at 12 years old, wishing that the toll plaza was on our side just to help break the monotony.
Categories: COVID-19, Friends, New York City, Personal health
It’s been ten years since I left that place…
10 minute read
November 26, 2023, 3:02 PM
This year marks an anniversary that just seems weird to think about: it has now been ten years since I left my job at Food & Water Watch. Ten years since I finally decided that enough was enough, and left an extremely toxic work environment.
The relationship started out innocently enough. Back in 2007, I was really involved with political activism, and I was also looking for a job that would enable me to get out of Walmart and move out on my own. A nonprofit organization that advocated for consumer issues seemed like a perfect fit. It was something that I could easily explain to my parents when it came to what the organization did, and the job that they were offering, office manager, was a perfect entry-level job for someone getting their first “real” job after college. I remember finding them in a search on Idealist.org while sitting at an Internet terminal at the Staunton Public Library, a few hours after Walmart fired me. I bookmarked their listing, and then, two days later, I fired off an application for them while sitting with my laptop at a coffee shop in downtown Staunton, along with a bunch of applications to other places. I got a call for an interview a few days later, and then I scored a second interview at the end of the first interview. The second interview went well, and then the following week, I got a call offering me the job. I produced this Journal entry immediately after getting it.
The job, meanwhile, was one of constant evolution. When I started, the organization was only about twenty people, with most working out of the Washington, DC headquarters. My role was something of a generalist in a small nonprofit. Then as the organization grew, my generalist role evolved with the organization. Over the years, I want to say that they created about five or six different specialized roles out of my job functions. And eventually, they evolved my role right out of existence, and made it very personal, even though there was no reason for it to be that personal. You know that it has to be bad when someone quits a job like that without something new lined up, and that’s exactly what that job was, as the toxicity was starting to consume me. But despite having to cash in my 403(b) account in order to have money to live on while I figured out my next move (and let it be known that those bastards never paid out my unused vacation time), I ultimately landed on my feet, getting a job in public transportation that I still enjoy nine years later.
Twenty years out of college…
17 minute read
July 12, 2023, 12:20 PM
This year marks twenty years since I graduated from college, and in seeing all of the people posting stuff about college graduations and such on Facebook these last few months, it’s made me realize that I have a lot to say about my college experience. It’s one of those things where I wish that I had known then what I do now, and it makes me wonder how things might have gone if I had reached the same present as today, but knowing what I know now.
It’s worth noting that with the passage of time, I have come to view my college years in an increasingly negative light. In the moment, as documented in my College Life website, which now serves as an archive of what was once a section of the main website, I was having a pretty good time and enjoying life – or at least that’s the public face that I tried to put on about it. The truth is that I never felt a sense of belonging there, my performance caused me to develop a major inferiority complex while there, and I coped with the stress of the environment in unhealthy ways. I believe that the root cause of all of my difficulties was a then-undiagnosed case of autism. However, high-functioning cases of autism like I have still weren’t really looked for and diagnosed like they are today. I was not formally diagnosed diagnosed with autism until 2022 at the age of 41, when I finally decided to put the question to rest.
First, though, when it came to my deciding whether or not to go to college, that was never really a decision. My parents had determined, practically from conception, that I would go to college, and that was that. When it’s been drilled into your head that you were going to college like it was a commandment from on high or something for your entire life, that’s just what you did, largely from not knowing any better, and that you would then get a “college job” after getting that degree. So growing up, any thoughts that I might have interest in fields that didn’t require a college education were more or less, quashed and any exploration of those fields was discouraged because that conflicted with my parents’ plan to send me to college. It was also strongly implied that any path that did not lead to a college degree was a failure, because it didn’t live up to my parents’ expectations for me. It caused me to think that the people who went down the vocational track in school were failures, because they couldn’t get into college. I understand that my parents wanted what they thought was best for me, and they considered a college education to be that thing, but the mindset that they inadvertently instilled was quite toxic, and it took many years to unlearn. I suppose that was something of a failure on their part, because with my now being the same age as they were when they were raising me, they almost definitely knew better about jobs that didn’t require a college degree, but that’s not what they instilled in me, intentionally or not.
A missed (or ignored) opportunity to really do some good…
16 minute read
May 9, 2023, 8:39 AM
I’m sure that you all are familiar with how terrible my seventh grade year was at Stuarts Draft Middle School. I’ve written about it at some length, and also discussed it a little bit more after my autism diagnosis last year. Recall that during seventh grade, I had a large problem with bullying, both from the students and from the staff. In fact, that year was unusual because of heavy bullying from fellow students as well as staff. Most of the time, the bullying largely came from the staff, and bullying from fellow students was less so (though it did happen), but in seventh grade, it came from all over pretty consistently (Michael Stonier was just the most memorable of many), and I was miserable for it.
Frank Wade, the chief bully on the staff side that year, had referred me to guidance for my alleged “problems”, and I would visit with Jan Lovell, the guidance counselor, on a weekly basis for the remainder of the year. I didn’t mind going to guidance, because while they were terrible in their own right with their continued attempts to gaslight me into thinking that I was the problem rather than the victim, it meant that I wouldn’t have to deal with my bullies for a time. In hindsight, though, this was just exchanging one bully, i.e. Mr. Wade and all of the kids that he enabled, for another bully, i.e. Mrs. Lovell the guidance counselor, but one bully was easier to handle than multiple bullies at once, though it was still crappy no matter how you sliced it.
Recently, I was thinking about one thing that I brought to Mrs. Lovell towards the end of the year, and I realized that she either missed or deliberately chose to ignore a tremendous opportunity to look into a bullying problem in the school. It really made me think that while I don’t know how much they were paying her to be the guidance counselor, whatever it was, it was probably too much. At that point in the year, I recognized that things were very bad, and I also recognized that the chances that things would improve before the end of the year were slim to none. To that end, I had already mentally written seventh grade off as irreparable. In other words, I was just doing my best to make it through it, and looked towards the future. To that end, I had prepared a list for the guidance counselor of all of the kids that I did not want to be in homeroom with the following year, with the idea’s being that since guidance was the entity that did student scheduling and such, I was submitting this request to the correct department. It was not a large list, mostly because homerooms were done alphabetically by last name. Therefore, I only had the chance of being in homeroom with people with last names starting with P through Z. So out of about 300 kids in a grade, I only had the possibility of being in homeroom with about 75 of them, and my list was limited to that subset. And considering that students were arranged in three different “teams” in middle school, each belonging to a group of teachers who all worked together with the same kids, what I was really asking was that I be on a different team than these kids in eighth grade.
Categories: Autism, Middle school, Schumin Web meta
Thinking about mental math for a moment…
8 minute read
April 19, 2023, 4:55 PM
I’ve mentioned before that working on the train allows me a lot of time alone with my thoughts. Sometimes that leads to my working through some of my problems and coming up with some solutions, sometimes I am mentally writing out Journal entries, sometimes it just replays traumatic experiences over and over again (though writing that letter and then mailing it to the other driver really helped me make peace with things, i.e. mentally, I think I’m going to be okay), but sometimes, I’m just doing things in my head like figuring out how many presidents have unique first names as far as the list of presidents goes, or doing math of some sort.
Funny thing about math. Growing up, I always thought that I was bad at math. I always tended to struggle in math in school, and looking back, I don’t quite understand why, because as an adult, I’m pretty sharp with math. Give me a calculator, and I can solve just about anything. I’m inclined to blame the various teaching methods used for my math struggles growing up, since it wasn’t until college, when I had Dr. Ed Parker at JMU in a summer math class to satisfy my degree requirements, when he taught us algebra in a way that made things finally fall into place. In other words, the way that we teach math kind of sucks. I also realized that I just plain don’t like division. I find it overly complicated. Flip it around and express it as multiplication, though, and I’m fine – then it all makes sense to me. Similarly, I am never doing long division by hand ever again. It’s too complicated, and besides, it’s not like I don’t always have a device with a calculator on it with me all the time these days. This, of course, is contrary to what the teachers always said growing up, i.e. that we wouldn’t have a calculator with us all the time. Clearly, these teachers never anticipated smartphones in the nineties. It’s an even stranger statement considering that calculator watches already existed at that time, even if they were not the most common of things, meaning that some people already did have a calculator on them at all times, strapped to their wrist.
It both impresses me and amuses me…
28 minute read
March 10, 2023, 4:21 PM
You all have probably heard about the artificial intelligence tools that can write articles and such that have been taking the Internet by storm lately. One such service is ChatGPT, which is a chatbot by a company called OpenAI, which can answer your questions about various subjects. I asked the service about myself and about Schumin Web, because (A) my name is unique, and (B) Schumin Web is also unique, and (C) I’ve been around on the Internet long enough that I figure that it should know who I am. Additionally, giving it inquiries about myself and my website, I was able to do a good check of accuracy because I know me really well, and I know my own website really well.
So on March 1, I ran the inquiry five times for each, and collected five different responses for each. In evaluating what it spewed out for each one, I found that the accuracy was a bit questionable, and varied quite a bit. It got some things right, and it got some things very wrong to the point of being comical. In its discussion about Schumin Web, it was actually quite insightful, making points that even I hadn’t thought much about, doing way more than I would have otherwise expected from an AI chatbot. I was also a bit flattered, because in running other people who I feel should be far more notable than me, it didn’t know who they were, even with some additional prodding, while it knew who I was right out of the gate without any additional clarification or questioning, and it knew what Schumin Web was without even blinking.
In judging the accuracy of each output, I scored them by factual claims. A claim that was accurate got a point. A claim that was inaccurate got no points. A claim that was a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information got half a point. Divide by total number of claims to get an accuracy percentage, which would be the final score. I don’t know if experts in this sort of thing would score it this way, but it’s the best that I could come up with, and for purposes of this discussion, we’ll go with it. 
Continue reading…
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Myself, Schumin Web meta
A fun and memorable day…
24 minute read
February 8, 2023, 9:00 AM
Today marks twenty years since I made one of my favorite early DC adventures. On that day, February 8, 2003, I drove up from Harrisonburg and headed up to the DC area on a Saturday for a day of fun, photographing the area in the snow and checking out parts of the Metro system that I’d never been to before. It was my senior year of college, and was one of three trips to DC that I made from my dorm that year. I also feel like I shot a number of my “classic” DC area photos on this trip, since a lot of photos from this trip have made their way all over the Internet (i.e. you’ve probably seen some of them in the wild, and never realized that they were my work).
This trip had an interesting set of circumstances that led up to it, though. As I recall, snow had been predicted for Thursday night and Friday morning. That prediction ultimately came to pass, as it snowed enough to cancel classes for Friday. This was not unanticipated, so, the night before, as part of my duties as a resident advisor in Potomac Hall, I had posted signs on my floor advising people to check the JMU website for information on class status. In other words, make sure that you have to go out before you go out, because you might not have to go out if the university cancels classes. The sign was posted with the intent of putting the responsibility for checking the status onto my residents, so that I would not have to get up early to check the status and post signs to that effect, since I didn’t have classes until later in the day, and would not wake up before the first classes of the day would have started. So with the signs posted, I went to bed. Good. Now fast forward to around 6 AM or so. I vaguely remembered hearing the phone ring a few times while I was trying to sleep, but I never answered it, because I was trying to sleep. Then I’m awakened by a very loud banging on my door. Having just been rudely awakened like that, my first response was to shout, “WHAT?!?” It was Mecca Marsh, our hall director, i.e. the boss, so it must be important. I went to get up, and in my haste in getting up, I lost my balance and fell back onto my bed, landing on my left elbow. When I landed, I heard a series of four or five popping sounds, and I remember thinking, “That can’t be good.” Apparently, that popping had come from something in my left shoulder, and it now hurt very much.
So what was the big, important reason that Mecca came up and woke me up out of a dead sleep? Make a sign and put it on the outside door stating that classes were cancelled. Believe me, she was lucky that my arm was sore from the injury that I had just suffered, because I probably would have hit her otherwise. I was absolutely seeing red following all of that. For the amount of effort that she went to, making multiple phone calls and then coming up to my floor and waking me up, just to order me to make a single sign, she could have done it herself. And when I mentioned that I had just injured my shoulder in the process of getting up, and that it now hurt very much, she responded with a dismissive, “You’ll be fine.” Yeah, way to show some compassion after an injury that you played a part in causing. I expected no less from Mecca, though, because she had her favorites on the staff and I was not one of them, and therefore I was treated accordingly. In any case, I made the sign, and tried to go back to sleep, but I was now pretty mad about what had just happened, plus I was in a good bit of pain. You understand why I consider Mecca Marsh to be one of the worst bosses that I’ve ever had. I probably should have seen a doctor on a worker’s comp claim, and I also can’t imagine that the management would have taken too kindly to the whole situation had I reported it like I probably should have, and it wouldn’t have reflected well on Mecca considering that she precipitated the whole thing. She would have hated that, considering how big she was on propping up her own image (she had some major inadequacy issues of her own). But I was only 21 and didn’t know any better, so I just suffered through it.
Categories: Alexandria, Arlington, DC trips, JMU, Northern Virginia, Personal health, Washington DC
Coming into 2023 with optimism…
5 minute read
January 6, 2023, 10:12 PM
First of all, I hope everyone had a good new year. I’m looking at 2023 with much optimism. 2022 was a pretty good year as well, though I did have that car accident in October that totaled my HR-V. On the whole, though, things are going well in my life, and I hope that it continues throughout the year.
One thing’s for sure: I enter the year quite grateful to be alive. At the time that the accident with the HR-V happened, I was mad that this idiot had run a light and destroyed my car. I was quite shaken, but I was walking around, and only suffered a few minor scrapes. As such, I refused medical care at the time other than the medics’ bandaging up the cut on my head. In other words, all considered, I came out of it pretty well, and Elyse and I still did the trip to Tennessee that we had previously planned, but in a rental car rather than in my own car. I was lucky, because things could have been much worse. Not long after my accident, a friend from college lost their mother to a car accident in Texas. I don’t know the circumstances surrounding the other accident, but considering my own accident right around the same time, their accident really hit home. It made me wonder why I managed to survive my accident largely without injury, while my friend’s mother perished. It was a reminder that life is short, and life is precious, and it could be over in an instant due to circumstances completely outside of your control. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that the airbag knocked me unconscious for about a minute during the accident, because I remember the collision, and then the next thing I remember, the car was at rest and a bystander was calling for me to get my attention. I have no recollection of the car’s traveling about 150 feet and coming to rest. So it was definitely lights out for a minute, but it’s a scary realization that it could have very easily been lights out permanently. Glad that wasn’t the case.
Otherwise, though, things are looking up. The new HR-V is coming in March, and Mom’s Scion now feels routine (though I am looking forward to bringing it back to my parents). I also did some significant upgrades to the house over the course of the year, getting new doors in March, and a new heat pump system just before Christmas. The new heat pump system is something that I was particularly excited about, because my old system was reaching end of life, and this is new one is a more efficient system. It also runs a lot more quietly than the old one, which I found a tad disturbing at first, but now I’m used to it. It also uses the Nest thermostat, which is something that I had wanted to a while, but the old system was not compatible with it. Now, I can control the temperature of my house from anywhere via my phone, and can also say, “OK Google, set the temperature at [whatever],” and the system will respond. I dig it. It’s very smart, and Elyse and I are still learning how to best use it. We have not yet been on any overnight trips since we got the new system, but we’ll see how that goes when we set vacation mode and such for the Nest. That or we’ll just turn the system off before leaving and then fire it up by remote a few hours before we’re supposed to return. I know that we did have an interesting moment on the first day after we got the system, where a setting that detects whether or not we’re home was on and then I went to work. Elyse wasn’t set up with it yet, so when I left, the heat went off and the house dropped like ten degrees. We have since disabled that setting, at least for now.
Categories: Myself, New Year's
When I learned the answer, I was not at all surprised…
15 minute read
October 10, 2022, 9:20 AM
Recently, a question that I had been wondering about for a long time was answered definitively. For many years, I had suspected that I had some form of autism spectrum disorder, and over the summer, I took myself in to be evaluated in order to finally get an answer to that question. And the answer is yes, I have Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1, which was formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome. I kind of knew this all along, but I really didn’t want to self-diagnose and then act based on a self-diagnosis. I’m not an expert here, after all, and for something like this, I wanted to do it the right way. I never really discussed it much on here, but just about all of my friends who are autistic had suspected that I was autistic as well. They knew what they were looking at, and they saw it in me.
It certainly took me long enough to get around to getting diagnosed, though. I had wondered if I was on the autism spectrum for quite a number of years, and I had found Dr. Kara Goobic, a doctor who diagnosed autism in adults, about three years ago. I then kind of mentally filed it away for a while, as I had other things going on, though I did ask about other people’s experiences with Dr. Goobic on Reddit one time in a comment and got no response. Then this past spring, my curiosity about the autism question finally got the best of me, and I began communication with Dr. Goobic via email. We discussed what the process would entail, we determined that her practice was able to take my insurance, and we scheduled appointments around my work schedule. The first two sessions discussed my history growing up and as an adult, I completed some questionnaires (Elyse also completed one questionnaire asking about her experience with me), and then the third session was feedback and discussion. The appointments were great. Dr. Goobic and I got along quite well, and the various sessions went smoothly. And in the end, on the third session, which was feedback, I got a lot of different resources and such to check out, and overall, it was a very positive experience. I went into the sessions with Dr. Goobic with the assumption that I was doing this primarily for my own edification, and that from a functional/practical standpoint, having a diagnosis would change nothing for me other than making me a more informed person, and therefore, I had nothing to lose from it, and everything to gain.
The diagnosis confirmed what a lot of us had already suspected, so my reaction was something along the lines of, “Well, there you go.” That was exactly the diagnosis that I was expecting, so I was not surprised at all. A surprise would have been if the process had completed and it had turned out that I wasn’t autistic in some way. Regardless, it’s good to know what the name of the thing is, because when you know what it’s called, then you can do some research on the thing based on its name, and get a better understanding of what it is.
Categories: Autism, Childhood, Elementary school, JMU, Middle school, Myself, Work
Thirty years ago, we arrived…
18 minute read
September 5, 2022, 6:10 PM
August 31, 2022 marked 30 years from the day that my family came to Virginia, after having lived in Arkansas for the previous seven and a half years. Thirty years is a little less than three quarters of my life thus far. It just seems so weird to think about it that way. But it really does mark the beginning of an era in my life, because unlike more recent moves, the move from Arkansas to Virginia was a clean separation, leaving a lot of elements of my life behind and starting new in Virginia, especially in those pre-Internet days, when there was no social media to keep in contact with everyone. Additionally, having no family out there, I have not been back since we left. The moves since then were not quite as clean of a break as the move from Arkansas was. My 2007 move to Maryland was only me, and my parents stayed where they were. Plus, as it’s only a few hours away, I can go down there almost any time I want, including down and back in the same day. Then my 2017 move was local, so nothing else changed in my life other than the location of my house, and my commute to work. I just upgraded my living situation, and that was it.
The move to Virginia was the culmination of something that was a long time coming. My parents never really wanted to live in Arkansas to begin with, but it was a good career move for Dad with Scott Nonwovens, so they begrudgingly did it, and so we left New Jersey for Arkansas in February 1985. I remember Mom’s mentioning a number of times early on about wanting to move back to New Jersey. And in all fairness, that was understandable. Dad had something to do in Rogers, as he was the one with the job. Mom didn’t know anyone, and her primary role at that time was to take care of a newborn and a preschooler. She had left everyone she knew when we left New Jersey, and it took a while to meet people and form new relationships, though that improved once Mom got a job at the Walton Life Fitness Center in Bentonville. We also didn’t get along with our next door neighbors on one side, as their kids were out of control. That ultimately led to something of a falling out. We put slats in our existing fence on that side so that we wouldn’t have to see them when we were in the backyard, and they built an entirely new spite fence on their side so that they wouldn’t have to see us. The neighbors on the other side were a retired couple, and they were awesome.
Meanwhile, the education situation in Rogers had really come to a head. I had just completed fifth grade, which was my worst year from kindergarten through high school, without question, and that had followed third and fourth grade years that were pretty rough as well. My parents had gone about as far as they could with the school system, and no one was looking forward to another year at Bonnie Grimes Elementary. I was also hearing all kinds of rumblings at the time from my parents about changes afoot. One was that we would not be returning to Grimes Elementary again, and I was also hearing things about moving, which made me think that something big and life-changing was coming, but nothing concrete as of yet. It had been rumored that Scott had wanted to transfer my father to their corporate office in Philadelphia, and so it seemed like we would probably be moving back to New Jersey, as Mom had wanted all along. I didn’t want to move, because unlike my parents, Rogers was pretty much all that I knew, and I was used to it.
Categories: Arkansas, Childhood, Middle school, Stuarts Draft
Yes, I really did meet Andre the Giant back in 1991…
4 minute read
July 26, 2022, 7:42 PM
Back in the summer of 1991, my life was quite different than it is now. We lived in Rogers, Arkansas back then, and I had just completed fourth grade. My father worked as a quality manager for Scott Nonwovens (now part of Berry Global following a series of acquisitions over the years). My mother worked as a fitness instructor at the Walton Life Fitness Center (WLFC) in Bentonville, i.e. Walmart’s corporate fitness center. That job of Mom’s provided a lot of benefits for the entire family, as we all got access to the fitness center facility, of which we made good use. We were there so much that the fitness center almost felt like a second home at times, what with my taking swimming and Taekwondo classes there, as well as a little fitness camp called “Kids Kamp” during the summers.
One of the benefits that came with the fitness center as far as Mom was concerned was the Walmart employee stock purchase program. I participated in it when I worked for Walmart in the mid 2000s, and as far as I know, the company still has this program. Basically, you elected to set aside a certain amount of money per paycheck, which was then used to purchase shares of Walmart stock in your name. As such, you were afforded all of the rights and privileges that came with being a shareholder, such as voting on issues presented to the shareholders, as well as attending the annual shareholders’ meeting. Back then, Walmart was a much smaller company than it is now, so much of the annual shareholders’ meeting occurred at their corporate headquarters in Bentonville.
One part of the Walmart shareholders’ meeting, at least at that time, was a trade show. A bunch of companies that you’ve probably heard of if you’ve ever shopped at Walmart had booths set up and they were showing off all of their new offerings. In 1991, this was held at the Walmart corporate office (in 1992, it was held in a former Walmart store nearby that they had recently vacated following a relocation). Among various things that we saw there, I got to take a Super Nintendo for a spin and play Super Mario World for the first time at the Nintendo booth, about two and a half months before it was released to the public. I remember being surprised to see so many different buttons on the controller (six compared to two on the original Nintendo), and seeing Mario do two different kinds of jumps, i.e. the spin jump and the regular jump.
It’s kind of like being in the shower for eight hours a day…
6 minute read
May 16, 2022, 8:16 PM
It’s interesting how jobs work sometimes. As many of you know, I work as a train operator, operating a subway train in passenger service. This is a job that I had imagined myself doing for a long time, and it still amazes me that I actually get to do it. But no one ever tells you what the experience is like when you’re in the train cab all by yourself in a tunnel underneath the city.
When I was in class learning how to be a train operator, our instructor told us that it was an easy job, but that it was also a boring job. However, all throughout training, an experienced operator is always in the cab with you, and as such, you’re never alone with your thoughts. There is always someone nearby to interact with, plus, since you’re just learning the job, you’re thinking about the mechanics of the job a lot because it has not yet become second nature. So that “boring” aspect never really comes into play. Even in my case, where one of my instructors said that I was a natural in regards to my ability to operate the train, I still had to think a lot about what I was doing because I had not yet internalized it all. It wasn’t just a matter of sitting down and going to town like it is for me now, six years later. The mechanics of the job are pretty simple: fire up the train, move the master controller to control your speed, monitor the radio, scan the tracks for any hazards, make good announcements to the passengers, and open and close the doors at the stations. It’s really not a hard job by any means.
Once you get comfortable in the job, and the movements come more naturally, that’s when you really get to experience what it’s like to operate a subway train. And it’s also when you learn what your mind is capable of doing when it is left alone for long periods of time with minimal distractions. It’s kind of like being in the shower, in that you are alone with a task to accomplish, and that task is all that there is to do while you’re in there.
Categories: Myself, Schumin Web meta, Work
I never thought that I would actually look forward to spring…
4 minute read
March 20, 2022, 3:24 PM
Let’s be honest: this winter was brutal for me. This was the first winter in a very long time where I truly felt cold. After going from the upper 300s to the lower 200s in weight, with a goal weight of 185 (we’ll get there!), this winter made the weight loss feel very real. I suppose that this is to be expected when you shed most of your insulation, but expecting it didn’t make me feel any warmer for it. This is even more so when you consider that I work in a job where I spend a decent amount of time out in the elements, and therefore have plenty of exposure to the cold. I suspect that I understand why they don’t tell you about this part of losing weight when you are going through the pre-work for weight loss surgery, because the prospect of being cold all winter long might scare some folks off. All I know is that I certainly miss the days when I could go out and do some very long photography sessions at night in the dead of winter, and be just fine with a coat, a hat, and a pair of gloves. Nowadays, to go out in winter, I feel like I need eight hundred layers of clothing and heated everything. I remember my efforts at doing some night photography in Atlantic City back in January. Sub-freezing temperatures coupled with wind chilled me to the bone. I lasted long enough to get a few photos of Resorts before tapping out. I was just too cold.
I think that this screencap from when my cousin Mike was on the TV news a few years ago talking about a polar vortex event sums it up quite nicely:
Mike Schumin: Hates the cold.
Categories: Weight loss