Online personal information

I've found out that a website purporting to give background information on people posts a photo of someone that isn't me and lists "associates" that I've never heard of. There are other mistakes from mixing me up with others with my name, such as my father and grandfather. I was already aware of that problem.

I'm worried this kind of thing could hurt me.

Anne Frank's 90th birthday

This afternoon while I was reading parts of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, I surprised myself that I started to cry in the middle of her July 15, 1944, entry. The first tears came from the sadness of what was done to her, especially because the secret annex was discovered the following month, but a lot also came from the pain I felt on how she was writing about her inner self and opening up to others. For me, it's a lot from wishing someone in particular would be willing to open up to me. 

On a more positive note, I liked being reminded that she kept a Book of Beautiful Sentences, which was made up of passages she liked from what she was reading. I sometimes do that but want to be more organized and regular about it. 

One of the people I follow on Facebook,  Rebecca Solnit, posted today about research indicating that using paper maps can be better for our minds. She quoted T.S. Eliot:

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time." 

From "Little Gidding," last of the Four Quartets (short interpretation of those poems: "Four Quartets: TS Eliot’s struggle to make the real world right in a spiritual realm" by  Roz Kaveney in The Guardian, May 19, 2014) These lines remind me of my post about labyrinths in Baltimore.

According to the Poetry Foundation biography of T.S.Eliot, "He himself thought Four Quartets his greatest achievement and Little Gidding his best poem."

It goes on: "Whereas his early poems had been centered on the isolated individual, Four Quartets is centered on the isolated moment, the fragment of time that takes its meaning from and gives its meaning to a pattern, a pattern at once in time, continuously changing until the supreme moment of death completes it, and also out of time. Since the individual lives and exists only in fragments, he can never quite know the whole pattern; but in certain moments, he can experience the pattern in miniature."

Starting last night, I was re-reading Anne Frank because today, June 12, would have been her 90th birthday.

Some interesting links to explore:

1. Anne Frank House in Amsterdam: 

https://www.annefrank.org/en/

A. "The complete works of Anne Frank" (about them--not the full actual texts)

This page has a lot of interesting information, such as on her "Book of Beautiful Sentences" (passages she liked from what she was reading) and her starting to write "The Secret Annex" (a book that drew from her diary and she intended for people to read after the war)

https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/complete-works-anne-frank/

B. Visual tour of the secret annex

https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/secret-annex/

2. US Holocaust Memorial Museum

A. Anne Frank biography in the Holocaust Encyclopedia

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anne-frank-biography

B. "Anne Frank: The Writer"

(exhibit hosted by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/anne-frank/htmlsite/index.html

Spring breezes

From about the middle of May into around the middle of June is one of my favorite times of the year. The skies are often blue with puffy clouds drifting across. I think that I accidentally deleted a picture I took of the curtain blown by a nice breeze entering my bedroom where I lived in Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood in part of 2017. I wanted to include that picture in this entry. That moment was so relaxing and reminded me of how my bedroom curtains moved on a June morning where I grew up in Kansas.

I took the picture above in Madison's Rennebohm Park, near my apartment. This scene and the weather make me wish that I could wash clothes in the morning and hang them to dry on the line, as I did at my grandmother's in Gettysburg. I loved the feeling of the whole atmosphere. As a way of keeping touch with that time, I wish that I could have gotten my grandmother's grey bag in which she kept her clothespins. The bag had a large hook that could be hung on the line so that it was more convenient to fetch a clothespin. I sometimes had to replenish the clothespins because my grandmother liked to use them to clip together things. Another reason I loved this is because of the smell of the clothes after they'd dried and knowing that I'd not used the drier, which consumes a great deal of electricity.

I've stayed longer in Madison so that I could take some training classes for faculty and staff. On Thursday, for instance, I took a workshop on what to do if someone feels suicidal. I asked the instructors about the ideas of that workshop's approach--QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer)--versus ALGEE in Mental Health First Aid. My impression is that ALGEE focuses more on taking the time to talk, but I'll need to look into the research.

For the time being, it has been better for me to keep my position in Madison as I also live in the DMV area.