User:PaulSank

In August 2015, I got a little job editing Wikidelphia, because Wikidelphia needs 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 to do this job is that I started and have been gradually expanding another reference source. It's called Study Love, and it's about what I consider, and what many Near Death Experiencers call, the most important force in the universe: spiritual love (not the Hollywood kind or the gay kind or the romantic kind or the passionate kind or the much-promoted "I love my job" kind). The site is large, detailed, well-organized, and easy to use, just as we want Wikidelphia to be.

Since 2011, I have volunteered at many events throughout the Phila-NJ area. Some of the ones I do regularly--and I hope you'll attend or support these--are:

Macy's Family Fun Days at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, a monthly event on some Saturdays where I set up and run a "toy zone", a table full of toys from my own large collection. Apparently, as I've been told by many professionals and parents, I have a special, magical knack for playing with kids. I'm a white guy, by the way.
Philadelphia Reading Olympics, a multi-day, multi-venue annual event where I act like a game show host, asking schoolchildren questions about books they've read. The organizers suggest that volunteers think in terms of Jeopardy, but I make it zany, complete with sound effects and as many laughs as I can extract.
West Park Arts Fest, where I act like a concierge in the Children's Pavilion, making sure visitors, performers, and exhibitors have whatever they need throughout the day.
Brides Against Breast Cancer bridal shows, where I've done various tasks from registration to truck loading.
Mount Laurel Harvest Fest, where I set up and run my "toy zone".
Maple Shade Holiday Festival, where I've usually overseen the sales of feed for the petting zoo.

Something else I do on my personal time, since 2009, is to provide daily Twitter news-and-views services:

@FruitNJ "I tweet about the fruit of the Spirit, hoping we can all get more of a taste. Eg, Gal 5:22-3, 1 Cor 13:4-7, 2 Pet 1:5-7, Col 3:12."
@LingFan1 For linguistics, the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be so complicated, I actually heard a professor say it gives most people a headache, so it always surprises me that this is by far my most popular Twitter timeline. My favorite famous linguist is Sydney Lamb, whom I was thrilled to finally meet at LACUS in 2013.
@NetMan3 Against malaria. "Wild about the idea of covering entire countries with nets!"
@LifeNetNews Against poverty. "Continuing the mission of Life-Net News: Covering Poverty Widely In A Net Of Many Voices Since 1997."
A fifth service on an issue so controversial that I have to do it anonymously because of the extremism, hostility, and violence of the other side when the TV cameras aren't pointing at them. America is no longer the land of the free. Dissent will be punished, either by the government, or by employers, or by rabid, raging mobs.

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. Notably, I don't feel certain that I ever found a Republican, and the gay community didn't seem interested, either. I produced over 540 new episodes.

In 2008, I received the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognized my many thousands of hours of volunteer service. The President who started these awards was George W. Bush.

From 2007 to 2014, I had a job doing clerical work, website maintenance, flier creation, operations reports, and various other tasks at Nonprofit Technology Resources.

I've been married to Vicky since 1988. She's my first and only wife. My advice for marital longevity is to say to yourselves and mean it with every fiber of your being, "Divorce is not an option!" If you stick with that, you'll force yourself to find other ways to resolve problems that arise. If you don't maintain a commitment to your marriage, how can you be sure you'll maintain commitments to anything else? I can say this with authority because we had a long, rocky period where we separated many times, but when it came to divorce, neither of us would actually go through with it. We found ways, and now we're growing old together and helping each other through the inevitable health problems, etc.

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 so do I. It's incredible, all the things they're doing! Maybe you thought the last Space Shuttle trip was the end of anything interesting, but no, they have lots of missions and experiments happening all the time. The Pluto mission is just a major highlight among many other fascinating activities.

My religious affiliation is Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a Bible-believing denomination very much opposed to what we consider the apostate, false "church" called Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). Our beliefs are summarized in the Westminster Confession.

Some of my favorite sayings are:

"There's always something to do." There's never a good reason to be bored. You always have something to do, even if you're in the hospital. So if you think you have nothing to do, keep thinking! You'll find something.
"Where there's God's will, there's a way." I relied on this saying many times during my Life-Net Radio period. I believed Life-Net Radio was God's will for me, so whenever a situation seemed impossible, I said this to myself persistently, and, sure enough, I was always able to find a way forward.
"The righteous man knows and cares about the cause of the poor; the wicked has no such concern." This from Proverbs 29:7 was the key to my Life-Net News & Radio efforts. I sought to raise awareness, knowledge, concern, and action. Show me a person who doesn't care about the poor, and I'll show you a person I want to have nothing to do with.

Sometime in the early 1980s, I first met Stan. I volunteered in his Public Interest Media office, organizing, filing the influx of paper, much of which I found fascinating. I'm still involved with something I discovered there: The Glass Plate Game, invented by Dunbar Aitkens of Corvallis, Oregon. It's an attempt to realize the fictional Glass Bead Game from Hermann Hesse's Nobel Prize-winning novel Magister Ludi, and it's always had active players over there on the West Coast.

Over the next few years, I got more involved with Stan's Other Networks Newsletter, the final issue of which I took a lot of responsibility for, as if it were "my baby". This experience inspired me to make a newsletter of my own for a couple of years called Paradise or Bust! which I mailed to friends and family.

In my teenage years, I hitchhiked through all 48 states. I started by hitching from Collings Lakes, NJ, to Pascagoula, MS, with my girl friend to visit friends who had moved there. We then went to Texas, where she got a job and stayed. When I returned home to Haddonfield, I colored a blank map and discovered that the round trip had taken me through 19 states. That discovery inspired me to set a goal to cover all 48 states by thumb. Over the next few years I actually did it. Contrary to popular belief, I never suffered any violence, though I did go through more than a few seduction attempts by homosexuals. One of my final experiences was standing at the bottom of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, sticking out my thumb, and getting a ride from a couple of partying dudes up the mountain--literally a peak experience! Other favorite stops were Glenwood Springs (CO), San Rafael Swell (UT), Freeport (TX), Yellowstone National Park (WY), Spokane (WA), Paseo del Rio (TX), Beartooth Pass (MT), Bar Harbor (ME), Brock's Books (TX).

I graduated from Haddonfield Memorial High School, winning the awards for achievement in Spanish and in foreign languages, and then spent a couple of years at Ohio Wesleyan University studying linguistics and music. Later I received a certificate in programming from AIRCO Computer Learning Center.

What would I want on my tombstone?

J P SANK
STUDYLOVE.ORG

Note: Throughout this bio, I have avoided saying "I am" anything. Long ago, from an insightful book called Compassion and Self-Hate, I learned to shy away from that. Whatever you think you "are", you really are more than that. To say, "I am a plumber", or "I am gay", or "I am [fill in the blank]", is limiting and confining. Or it can be depressing, e.g., "I am a busboy", while on the other hand, it could inflate your ego, e.g., "I am highly intelligent and innovative". It could even cause you to lose the mental war against a physical problem, e.g., "I am in pain". Stay out of all "be" boxes! As Popeye said, "I am what I am and that's all that I am." I'll go so far as to say something broad, like, "I am a person", or "I'm a man", but that's as far as I'll go. In this bio, there are a few exceptions to this rule, but it's only because I couldn't think up another way to say the same thing clearly.

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