User:PaulSank

In August 2015, I got a little job editing Wikidelphia. Wikidelphia was in need of someone to pay attention to the whole project in a sustained, overseeing way and help expand it more than its busy progenitor Stan Pokras can do by himself.

One experience that qualifies me: I started and have been gradually expanding another reference source. It's called Study Love, and it's a place to learn about or meditate upon the most important force in the universe: spiritual love (agape, as opposed to eros or philia). The site is large, detailed, well-organized, and easy to use.

I'm also building a glossary of linguistics. When I see a term I don't know, I look it up and make an entry from what I find.

Something else I do on my personal time, since 2009, is to provide five daily Twitter news-and-views services where I find and share headlines and links relevant to various topics including poverty, malaria, the fruit of the Spirit, linguistics. My fifth Twitter service is too politically "incorrect" to mention here.

I also volunteer at various events, fundraisers, festivals. Most often in 2015: the African American Museum in Philadelphia's Macy's Family Fun Days.

A larger part of any bio of me would have to describe Life-Net News & Radio:

Life-Net News was a newsletter, sometimes monthly, sometimes weekly, sometimes printed. I selected stories from the press and elsewhere about poverty, without regard to political angle, because if we always attack poverty from the same political vantage point--left, right, or whatever--we'll never win. I compressed the stories down much smaller than the original, making them more quickly readable yet just as informative. Life-Net News ran for 14 annual volumes.

Along with Life-Net News, from 1998 to 2010, I made a radio show, Life-Net Radio, a densely packed, fully layered, professional-sounding production. Again, the idea was to find guests from as many vantage points as possible in order to gain real understanding that transcends any political, religious, or philosophical angle. I started the show with the belief that I had received a call from God, and I did the show "in the name of Jesus" on radio station WTMR-AM in Camden. Guests included atheists, Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, charity CEOs, activists, Communists, Greens, Socialists, etc. Welcoming all views, I noticed that a few were relatively absent, for example, Republicans and gay-ists. All told, I produced over 540 new episodes.

In 2008, I received the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of many thousands of hours of volunteer service. Note to nonprofits: The Presidential Service Awards are something you can easily use to formally recognize and reward volunteers.

From 2007 to 2014, I held the "chief clerk" job doing website maintenance, flier creation, operations reports, and various other clerical tasks at Nonprofit Technology Resources, which was founded by Stan.

I've been married to Vicky since 1988, never to anyone else. My advice for marital longevity is to rule out divorce as an option, for example, by reading and heeding 1 Corinthians 7 and reminding yourself of the part in Malachi where God says it bluntly: "I hate divorce".

We have a beautiful Eskimo-Chihuahua dog, Pixie. We have lots of squirrel and bird friends because we feed them premium seed, suet, and peanuts.

My wife likes to follow what goes on at NASA, and I enjoy tagging along. They have lots of missions and experiments happening all the time. The Pluto mission is just a major highlight.

Sometime in the early 1980s, I first met Stan, who was engaging people in "The Networking Game" at the Learning Annex. I then volunteered in his Public Interest Media office, organizing, filing the influx (and backlog) of paper, much of which I found fascinating. I remember "multilogues", Winged Mercury, the Hamaker-Weaver Hypothesis, the Whole Earth Catalog, Action Linkage. I'm still involved with something I encountered there: The Glass Plate Game (GPG), invented by Dunbar Aitkens of Corvallis, Oregon. A game of multi-threaded conversation and creativity, the GPG is a playable attempt to realize the fictional Glass Bead Game from Hermann Hesse's Nobel Prize-winning novel Magister Ludi. Over the next few years, I got more involved with Stan's Other Networks newsletter or magazine, the final issue (pdf) of which I was allowed to get creative with.

In my teenage years, I hitchhiked through all 48 states. I started by thumbing with friend Yvonne Sirodot from Collings Lakes, NJ, to Pascagoula, MS, and Freeport, TX. I finished the 48 a few years later between college semesters by hitching a ride up Mount Washington, NH.

My religious affiliation is Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a Bible-believing denomination that would warn people away from the secular-leaning Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA).

What would I want most on my tombstone? Other than my name and maybe dates, I'd want "StudyLove.org", which I hope has some fans in Heaven.

Note: Throughout this bio, I have avoided saying "I am" anything. Long ago, from an insightful book called Compassion and Self-Hate, I learned "I am what I am"--and that's all. I am not my job. I am not my skin color. I am not my sexual preference. I am not my height, weight, age, or hair color. I don't sit and ponder, "Who am I?" Human life is too multidimensional to classify simply. Forget about "being" anything!

PaulSank 09:18, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Paul, thanks for writing up your personal experience at the Franklin Institute!  Stan 17:31, 7 March 2011 (EST)