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Post by RangoA@live.com on Jun 30, 2008 21:42:50 GMT -5
 When I was twenty-five through twenty-seven years old, I played many sports in west, central Florida. It came from my upbringing when I played types of sports in Youngstown and the surrounding little towns/cities. I was pretty good at sports -- It seemed to run in my family that we were decent athletes. So, when I got here I found some of the people I've already mentioned and others willing to play basketball, tennis, football in the Gulf of Mexico, and I liked(still do) to workout trying to get in shape. I would never be a sore loser, nor rub it in your nose winner at sports games. In fact, if I noticed that another team or player wasn't doing that well I would play the next game, if I could, on their side. We won some, we lost some. It was the the gamesmanship that mattered to me. In other words, to get closer to people whom I played with/against, how well we played as a team, what we did before, during and after the game and how we played the game, blah, blah, blah. When, I worked as a Social Network Leader I was alerted to how I was raised like that. We would work on the same types of character traits with the our clients/consumers just in a different contexts and once in awhile in playing sports, too. We didn't have the barriers that are in place lately where working people weren't supposed to cross the line between something like a mentor and the pupil. These clients often played right along side with me and my other co-workers and with friends I had outside the workplace in sports games. I had a chance to get my wish and was offered by some co-workers at Boley to work full-time there. They said, I was an excellent 'mentor for lack of a better ways of describing what they said' with the clients and they thought I would do great at being a 'mentor, etc., etc., etc.' on a full-time basis, the problem with that was I was in a long-term relationship, had so many responsibilities outside the work environment and I couldn't juggle all these these paths I was heading down toward my goal to make something out of myself, while I was immersing myself in the Roman Catholic spiritual life as well as other types of religions. YSU was the college that opened my eyes to appreciating, understanding, worshiping and caring about others Gods, Goddesses and their holy and/or evil places of goodness and/or sinning. I liked participating in that more than anything else which appeared to be somewhat strange to some of my friends whom turned out to be more bigoted than I had perceived and expected them to become. That small group of friends were not dropped by me -- My religion didn't groom and mold me into treating them that way, in fact my religion enlightened me of how to enrich myself by knowing where, why, when, whom, and how these deep-seated feelings were instilled in some of my so-called friends and not to judge them for how they thought, felt and acted once in a awhile. My spiritual life and (by the way) most if not all the other people whom were leading other spiritual lives were similar, the most different part to me was in many cases they would just drop these people like spoiled fish being thrown into the garbage can while I stood by them and did the best I could to educate them that I didn't think, feel and act those ways towards others and they should seriously consider if I was right or wrong. I won over some of the people from other religions by bringing unbelievers, to put it mildly in a few cases, into looking at that from different dimensions. So, this sounds erratic like jumping around from topic to topic -- I agree -- At that time things were happening extremely quickly in our lives and I could spend days trying to explain them in more minutia. It was also a time when the hangover from the sixties and seventies was hitting us hard and then STD's suddenly popped out from nowhere to everyone. I mean, I was only in my mid-twenties and was just starting to really have fun making it in american life then everything seemed to come to a screeching halt because of nature and people fighting back against inequity, yada, yada, yada. My brother's favorite saying to me back then was "the party's over now." He would really tick me off when he pressured me into these illogical actions and disappointing results from following his and so many others advice and I was completely dumbfounded that I had the supposed American Dream. My father used to say to me alot when I was child, although I didn't comprehend what he was teaching me until decades later when I would experience and live a life filled with all kinds of evil, beside inequity. He would say to me, people immigrated to the USA believing they had a chance at the American Dream just like anyone else did who were citizens of our country, however the USA was just as bad, if not worse, than the old country we came from. I know what he meant by that still to do this day and will never forget one saying he said to me. He said, when I was visiting my mother and him at our restaurant when I was about eleven or twelve, he said to me that he felt sorry for me. I said, what? What do you mean you feel sorry for me? He said, when he was my age and a little older than me life was simpler, less difficult and especially less dangerous. I said, so what does that have to do with me. He said, when you're twenty or thirty years older you'll know what I'm talking about. He said, the world was going to become much more evil and my whole generation and generations after mine were going to face up to and try to survive in that kind of a world and not the one he had grown up in. I thought, you must be working too hard and didn't paying any attention to what he was saying at the time. He turned out to be right based on my past life experiences. That's why I'm guarded, pious, quiet, distrustful and careful as much as I'm able to live now that I'm over thirty years older than when my father spoke to me about such a thing. My sister was then having marital problems in 1988 and my mother had to go back to Ohio to be there for her and her immediate family and I lost the closeness and comfortness she gave me to strive onward into making her, my family and friends proud of me. Needless to say, I didn't stay in Florida much longer after she left and was already married when I decided to follow my mother and help them too and my partner/best friend at the time agreed that it was important for me to do and moved with me to Ohio. She was from Ohio herself and was looking forward to getting to know the small town Ohioan life, again. I was too but it was not the highest priority to me. We go an apartment right in the same neighborhood as my mother and my sister. They co-signed on the lease for the two of us. I had just graduated from PVTI (PTEC) and my second priority was being ready, willing and anxious to get started on a new career with the skill I had just learned. I applied for jobs all over the place, 'beat the streets' so to speak like I had been brainwashed into believing that I should in taking the first step toward accomplishing that goal since it was the american way of doing things. I got a job working at a warehouse, which was manual labor, blue collar and hard work which had nothing to do with Data Processing Operation. I didn't last longer than a week at it because the co-workers whom were supposed to be training me how to operate these heavy types of machinery to lift, drive and store away inventory shipped into that warehouse didn't train me in a manner that I could succeed at that job. I couldn't learn the way I was taught (although many others were fast learners and very good at it, don't get me wrong) and I personally thought I was going to hurt myself or someone else on that job. Beside the fact, I was pretty sure I was going to mess up my responsibilities as an employee there and make things worse for that warehouse branch of the company. So back to the drawing board I went pursuing work that was what I was trained to do with my Data Processing Operation skill. Finally, Kelly Services found me a job at a local bank in one of its branches. I was already familiar with working in banks, in 1981 I worked for Manufacturer's Hanover Trust and Chase Manhattan banks, so I went to work full-time for them. I was doing much better and I'll never forget my love and my mother would meet me after work to be supportive of me in holding down the job. I worked full-time, at the risk of sounding redundant, there just like I did at the warehouse job I had before which I just touched upon above. I was taking a lunch break one day after about one month on the bank job and was driving either from the bank to lunch or vice-versa when I made a left turn and out of nowhere came a guy on a motorcycle, he hit me on my passenger side, fortunately no one else was in the car with me, and flipped right over the top of my car. He was rushed by ambulance to a hospital and I was charged with a serious traffic violation that I ended up going to court in Warren, Ohio (right outside of Youngstown) and also was the city where the bank was that I was working at in 1988, 1989 or 1990 (I don't remember which year.) My sister and mother lived in Warren, Ohio so when we moved from Clearwater we lived close to them and had an apartment in Warren. Warren is about an half an hour drive from Youngstown if one was to take the highways.
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When I was twenty-five through twenty-seven years old, I played many sports in west, central Florida. It came from my upbringing when I played types of sports in Youngstown and the surrounding little towns/cities. I was pretty good at sports -- It seemed to run in my family that we were decent athletes. So, when I got here I found some of the people I've already mentioned and others willing to play basketball, tennis, football in the Gulf of Mexico, and I liked(still do) to workout trying to get in shape. I would never be a sore loser, nor rub it in your nose winner at sports games. In fact, if I noticed that another team or player wasn't doing that well I would play the next game, if I could, on their side. We won some, we lost some. It was the the gamesmanship that mattered to me. In other words, to get closer to people whom I played with/against, how well we played as a team, what we did before, during and after the game and how we played the game, blah, blah, blah. When, I worked as a Social Network Leader I was alerted to how I was raised like that. We would work on the same types of character traits with the our clients/consumers just in a different contexts and once in awhile in playing sports, too. We didn't have the barriers that are in place lately where working people weren't supposed to cross the line between something like a mentor and the pupil. These clients often played right along side with me and my other co-workers and with friends I had outside the workplace in sports games. I had a chance to get my wish and was offered by some co-workers at Boley to work full-time there. They said, I was an excellent 'mentor for lack of a better ways of describing what they said' with the clients and they thought I would do great at being a 'mentor, etc., etc., etc.' on a full-time basis, the problem with that was I was in a long-term relationship, had so many responsibilities outside the work environment and I couldn't juggle all these these paths I was heading down toward my goal to make something out of myself, while I was immersing myself in the Roman Catholic spiritual life as well as other types of religions. YSU was the college that opened my eyes to appreciating, understanding, worshiping and caring about others Gods, Goddesses and their holy and/or evil places of goodness and/or sinning. I liked participating in that more than anything else which appeared to be somewhat strange to some of my friends whom turned out to be more bigoted than I had perceived and expected them to become. That small group of friends were not dropped by me -- My religion didn't groom and mold me into treating them that way, in fact my religion enlightened me of how to enrich myself by knowing where, why, when, whom, and how these deep-seated feelings were instilled in some of my so-called friends and not to judge them for how they thought, felt and acted once in a awhile. My spiritual life and (by the way) most if not all the other people whom were leading other spiritual lives were similar, the most different part to me was in many cases they would just drop these people like spoiled fish being thrown into the garbage can while I stood by them and did the best I could to educate them that I didn't think, feel and act those ways towards others and they should seriously consider if I was right or wrong. I won over some of the people from other religions by bringing unbelievers, to put it mildly in a few cases, into looking at that from different dimensions. So, this sounds erratic like jumping around from topic to topic -- I agree -- At that time things were happening extremely quickly in our lives and I could spend days trying to explain them in more minutia. It was also a time when the hangover from the sixties and seventies was hitting us hard and then STD's suddenly popped out from nowhere to everyone. I mean, I was only in my mid-twenties and was just starting to really have fun making it in american life then everything seemed to come to a screeching halt because of nature and people fighting back against inequity, yada, yada, yada. My brother's favorite saying to me back then was "the party's over now." He would really tick me off when he pressured me into these illogical actions and disappointing results from following his and so many others advice and I was completely dumbfounded that I had the supposed American Dream. My father used to say to me alot when I was child, although I didn't comprehend what he was teaching me until decades later when I would experience and live a life filled with all kinds of evil, beside inequity. He would say to me, people immigrated to the USA believing they had a chance at the American Dream just like anyone else did who were citizens of our country, however the USA was just as bad, if not worse, than the old country we came from. I know what he meant by that still to do this day and will never forget one saying he said to me. He said, when I was visiting my mother and him at our restaurant when I was about eleven or twelve, he said to me that he felt sorry for me. I said, what? What do you mean you feel sorry for me? He said, when he was my age and a little older than me life was simpler, less difficult and especially less dangerous. I said, so what does that have to do with me. He said, when you're twenty or thirty years older you'll know what I'm talking about. He said, the world was going to become much more evil and my whole generation and generations after mine were going to face up to and try to survive in that kind of a world and not the one he had grown up in. I thought, you must be working too hard and didn't paying any attention to what he was saying at the time. He turned out to be right based on my past life experiences. That's why I'm guarded, pious, quiet, distrustful and careful as much as I'm able to live now that I'm over thirty years older than when my father spoke to me about such a thing. My sister was then having marital problems in 1988 and my mother had to go back to Ohio to be there for her and her immediate family and I lost the closeness and comfortness she gave me to strive onward into making her, my family and friends proud of me. Needless to say, I didn't stay in Florida much longer after she left and was already married when I decided to follow my mother and help them too and my partner/best friend at the time agreed that it was important for me to do and moved with me to Ohio. She was from Ohio herself and was looking forward to getting to know the small town Ohioan life, again. I was too but it was not the highest priority to me. We go an apartment right in the same neighborhood as my mother and my sister. They co-signed on the lease for the two of us. I had just graduated from PVTI (PTEC) and my second priority was being ready, willing and anxious to get started on a new career with the skill I had just learned. I applied for jobs all over the place, 'beat the streets' so to speak like I had been brainwashed into believing that I should in taking the first step toward accomplishing that goal since it was the american way of doing things. I got a job working at a warehouse, which was manual labor, blue collar and hard work which had nothing to do with Data Processing Operation. I didn't last longer than a week at it because the co-workers whom were supposed to be training me how to operate these heavy types of machinery to lift, drive and store away inventory shipped into that warehouse didn't train me in a manner that I could succeed at that job. I couldn't learn the way I was taught (although many others were fast learners and very good at it, don't get me wrong) and I personally thought I was going to hurt myself or someone else on that job. Beside the fact, I was pretty sure I was going to mess up my responsibilities as an employee there and make things worse for that warehouse branch of the company. So back to the drawing board I went pursuing work that was what I was trained to do with my Data Processing Operation skill. Finally, Kelly Services found me a job at a local bank in one of its branches. I was already familiar with working in banks, in 1981 I worked for Manufacturer's Hanover Trust and Chase Manhattan banks, so I went to work full-time for them. I was doing much better and I'll never forget my love and my mother would meet me after work to be supportive of me in holding down the job. I worked full-time, at the risk of sounding redundant, there just like I did at the warehouse job I had before which I just touched upon above. I was taking a lunch break one day after about one month on the bank job and was driving either from the bank to lunch or vice-versa when I made a left turn and out of nowhere came a guy on a motorcycle, he hit me on my passenger side, fortunately no one else was in the car with me, and flipped right over the top of my car. He was rushed by ambulance to a hospital and I was charged with a serious traffic violation that I ended up going to court in Warren, Ohio (right outside of Youngstown) and also was the city where the bank was that I was working at in 1988, 1989 or 1990 (I don't remember which year.) My sister and mother lived in Warren, Ohio so when we moved from Clearwater we lived close to them and had an apartment in Warren. Warren is about an half an hour drive from Youngstown if one was to take the highways.