Tuesday's Post Today

You must look within for value, but must look beyond for perspective.
Denis Waitley

National AD/HD Day was on Tuesday. And of course, I forgot! Actually I knew, but couldn't focus enough to get my thoughts enough to write down anything meaningful. And, yes I DO have ADD. Not AD/HD. No H.

Therefore in honor of the day, which I forgot, and because I am still in an ADD addled, writer's-block minded funk, I am going to borrow, nay steal, the words of my blog friend Doug, who has put into words my mood so much more succinctly than I am capable of right now. (Forgive me Doug!)


"Perspective is important for anybody to enable them to survive, but for people with AD/HD it is imperative. Many of us also struggle with mood swings or depression. Some of the moodiness can be attributed to success or failure due to accidents (Yeah, I'm often accidentally successful. Don't you just hate that?), but sometimes our minds are simply out of whack. We need to remember that we are not our AD/HD. We are separate from it. There is a core YOU, and there is the other part of your mind that likes to hang a "Kick Me!" sign on your back when you're not looking. No? Well, look at it another way. Sometimes we who have AD/HD identify with our failures as being who we really are. I found long ago that whenever I do that I simply set myself up for further failure, and here I was doing it again. If ever there was a case in favor of rose colored glasses this would be it.

Back to today, when I saw on my calendar it was National ADD Awareness Day a part of me said "whoopie..." Give me a real holiday like Christmas or Halloween, but National ADD Awareness Day? Nobody hands me free candy for having ADD. In fact, don't they take away your candy on days like today? Or was that just second grade? Anyway, as I restructure my life and ramp up for a new onslaught of weekly bloggy goodness I thought it was worth mentioning what it was I was going through lately. Maybe like me you've forgotten to cut yourself a little slack or you know a loved one who has. Those of us with AD/HD sometimes need help stepping outside our lives to get a new perspective so we can see what is going awry.

We focus so much on failure sometimes we forget that our minds are working against us. That is what is important for me to realize today. We need to remember from time to time what we're up against so we can stop beating ourselves up. We also need to be determined enough to make changes in our lives, which can be difficult. However, epiphanies are meaningless unless we implement them. My epiphany helped me see that I needed to recommit to a schedule. That has been transforming to my productivity. AD/HD may account for what a mess things have been lately but only dedication and perspective are going to straighten me out again. That and a whole lot of elbow grease."

Personally, I need more than an epiphany right now. I think I also need to remember to take my meds.

This is a poor attempt to cover up my plagiarism. To see the post in its entirety visit The Splintered Mind.

My tributes: Jon Schlissel and Susan Clyne

Love is the beauty of the soul.
Saint Augustine

If you have come to my blog in remembrance of 9/11, I had the great honor of doing not one, but two tributes. Please scroll down so that you can learn about the lives of two beautiful souls.

Susan M. Clyne: A Tribute

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis

Susan M. Clyne. Wife. Mother. Daughter. Sister. Scholar. Colleague. Friend. These words, in a way, sum up her life, but do not illustrate the remarkable woman that she was, nor the profound effect that she had on the lives that she touched.

Wife. Charlie and Susan met on a blind date in 1985. Two years later, on June 6, 1987, they married. The strengthen of their bond and their love for each other is echoed in the words of Charlie himself. One can hear the pride when he described her many accomplishments, the bemusement when he spoke of her devotion to all things computer, and the anguish when he mentioned that they never got the chance to say good-bye.

Mother. Of all her many accomplishments, Susan felt that her children were her greatest achievement. She was devoted to them as they were to her. The twins Marie and Michael, Kevin, and Timothy could readily be seen smiling, laughing, and clowning from the various pictures that decorated her office. Her treasures. The older boys have inherited her love of computers, and all the children her desire to help others. In the days following the attacks, they worked diligently on their newest project, a memorial fund. It was decided that they would collect money in their mother’s name and buy computers for those in the school district who couldn’t afford them.

Scholar. Susan spent many long nights after high school attending classes to get her degrees. After graduating with a degree in finance she set her sights on Law School. She graduated Touro Law School and passed the NYS bar on the first try. She continued her education by completing her MBA in 1991, with a brief respite to focus on the birth of her twins. Her dedication and perserverence served her well. Her career at Marsh & McLennan flourished as she rose from programmer (self taught) to manager to Senior Vice President.

Friend. Susan was blessed with many. And they loved her as much as she loved them. That love has been expressed often in the tributes that followed the attacks. She was said to know "how to put a smile on somebody's face, or how to make you laugh." She would "always take time out of her busy schedule to talk to you, or to help you in any way she could." Her neighbors and friends in Lindenhurst and at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic parish and in the school system intimated their love further by donating "time, energy, money and so much food to the Clynes that some of it almost went bad." On December 9, 2001, the village co-sponsored a Susan M.Clyne memorial 5K run/walk and a number of different events dedicated to doing "everything (they) can to keep her memory alive." Her collegues from Touro held their Fourth Annual Susan M. Dietrich Clyne ’88 Memorial Golf Outing this past August.

The most poignant example of the love that others had for this remarkable woman comes from her husband, Charlie, as he and the children tried to fathom what had happened.

"On the Thursday and Friday after the towers came down, (the children) asked if I thought writing letters to Mom would be a good idea, for when she came home. I said it would be a great idea. They wrote notes. They cut out hearts. They drew pictures. The ideas and thoughts came straight from their souls. By Friday of the second week, when hopes were dim, I went to bed, and when I got up, they had made this absolutely beautiful, gift-wrapped package, with all the notes inside, and they asked, ’How do we get it to her, now that she’s not coming home?’ And Kevin says, ’Balloons.’ Saturday, we went down to the beach at Robert Moses State Park with 50 or 60 helium balloons. As physics would have it, the balloons wouldn’t lift the box, so they had to modify the idea. They attached the notes and letters with their thoughts and hopes to individual balloons, and we watched those balloons fly away, and it was wonderful."

I will never be able to look at balloons drifting across the sky in the same way again.

This is just one of 2,966 tributes. To get a link to see the others visit the 2,966 Project website. Be sure to say a special thanks to Dale who has devoted an extraordinary amount of time to this wonderful campaign.

Jon S. Schlissel: A Tribute

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Jon Schlissel was a man of passion. He was passionate about his family. He was faithful to his mother, Ruth, whom he called every Saturday morning at 11 a.m. He was passionate about health and fitness. He maintained a daily exercise regimen and at the age of 51 had the abs most men his age only dream of or remember wistfully. He was passionate about his causes. He challenged the politicians and advocated for others in a variety of campaigns from civil rights for gays to his neighborhood civic association. He was passionate about antiques. He was well known as a collector and connoisseur, having owned a 14-room Victorian-style brownstone, painstakingly restored and furnished with items from the Victorian era. He was passionate about history and historical preservation. He served over a period of many years as president, vice president and chair for a historical society in Jersey City, where he lived. He was passionate about his co-workers. His brother, Laurence, said that "Jon was spry and small; he could have run down those stairs in no time. But he was a supervisor, and he had a friend and coworker who was heavyset and another who was wheelchair-bound. Together, they were the only three people who were lost from Jon's office. It's most likely that he stayed to help them." He was passionate about his friends. And from the tone of the eloquent words spoken at his memorial service and the many heartfelt messages posted on the various tribute websites, Jon's friends were passionate about him.

Many thanks to Dale who followed his own passion to create this tribute to the memory of all of those who lost their lives that fateful day.

Remembering Sept. 11

September 11 impressed upon us that life is a precious gift. Every life has a purpose. And I think we all have a duty to devote at least a small portion of our daily lives to ensuring that neither America nor the world ever forgets September 11.
Bill Frist

Although I am not a fan of Bill Frist or his politics, I do agree with his quote. I can still remember that morning with clarity. I think we all do. I believe that every generation has a defining moment, and September 11 is ours.

I have spent some time this past week discussing that day with my friends, colleagues, and students. I have discovered in some ways, those of us who lived on the West Coast had, initially, a more visible window on the events because we watched them unfold in almost entirety on the television.

The alarm had just gone off signaling me to rise for another day of teaching 3rd graders. My husband (at the time) had already been up for awhile and was almost ready to leave for his job. I had hit the snooze button as was generally my habit, looking to gain a few more precious minutes of sleep...or at least quiet. Our youngest was not quite a year old, and was a night owl. (She still is!) He raced up the stairs,and woke me from my drowsiness to tell me that there was something on the news that I just had to see. I followed him downstairs and watched with amazement the replays of the first plane hitting the Tower. Amazement turned to horror when I realized that the newest images on my screen were not replays, but the live images of the second plane.

My thoughts turned immediately, as I am sure most did, to family. I had suspicions, later well proven, that Islamic terrorists (though I hate to call them that because they sully and defile the true Meaning of Islam) were behind the attacks. And that made me think of my brother. He was (and still is) an NGO working for various aid relief organizations. He had been in the areas well known to be populated by such terrorists. At the time, he had recently evacuated to a safer country due to the charged political climate that existed BEFORE 9/11. However, the country he was in still had the potential for danger, especially considering the events that were unfolding before our eyes.

In a tearful daze, I called my parents. They were still asleep. I must have had a certain edge or sound to my voice because my mother's sleepy voice changed to a more serious tone. She and my father joined the millions of others whose eyes were glued to what was playing on every station on every TV. We discussed my brother...his whereabouts, his safety, our concerns. Although we did not hear from him until three days later, he was safe and would remain so.

I went about the normal routine of my day and headed off to work. My students' reactions were interesting. Some wanted to talk about what was going on, others had no clue what had happened. Those children are now a month into their last year of middle school. I wonder what they think now? I wonder what has changed about their lives...the obvious and the not so obvious...since that day almost 5 years ago.