Second Grade Mathematics Unit 02 Lesson 03: Fill & Download for Free

Well, yes. And, I suppose you want to read them, or you wouldn’t have asked. Reluctantly, though, for I suppose I could just as easily embarrass myself as tell interesting things. Reluctance be damned; full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.I think John Denver was one of the best folk singers of his era. He died at 53 when the light aircraft he took up ran out of fuel. It’s sad. He had a lot more to offer us, or so I believe.I’m HIV+. I seroconverted in 1982. I’ve lived with HIV for some 37 years.In ‘82, many of my friends in Philadelphia began dying of GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome, as AIDS was called then). I was certain I was going to die too.Rather than obsess over it, I just went out and bought the best medical insurance policy I could find. A year later, the insurance companies wised up and stopped selling medical insurance to males between 18 and 45. I got in just under the wire.I bought a $250,000 life insurance policy so I would leave something for my mother and grandmother. I bought an income disability insurance policy for myself so that I wouldn’t be destitute when disabled.Then, I went back to work and gave it not another thought. If I died, I died. Que sera ….I’m gay, in case you hadn’t worked that out. I came out in 1970, at 22, three months after graduating from Johns Hopkins University.I was born in Garden City, Kansas, some 60 miles from the town in which my parents lived because that was the closest doctor and hospital. Leoti was my hometown. It was the county seat and had a population of 1,250. I know well what life in a small town is like.When I was 4, I could get on the chair and use the telephone that hung from the dining room wall of my grandmother’s house. It was a wooden box that had a mouthpiece extending from the center and an earpiece that hung on a hook on the right side. Also on the right side was a crank handle.To operate it, you took the earpiece off the hook and turned the crank. A voice on the other end of the line said, “Information, please.” For the longest time, I thought that was her name, Information Please.I was born tongue-tied. The doctor, who got there the day after I was delivered, said he would cut the thickened frenulum linguae, but I might nonetheless never speak correctly.I did learn to speak, well enough that I spoke freely and with effect in front of juries and in arguments before appellate judges.One summer, on my grandparents’ 1,000 acre Colorado farm, I saw my little brother standing frozen in the middle of the yard. I just knew there was a rattlesnake. Without thinking, I grabbed a hoe and ran over. There it was, poised to strike, with rattle shaking fiercely. I chopped its head off. Then my knees buckled under me, and I was flat on the ground next to the still wriggling corpse.I had nightmares for weeks. I just knew that that was a Mr. snake and somewhere out there, there was a Mrs. snake really pissed at me. She was hunting me, or so I dreamt.I’m a voracious reader. When I was in 9th grade or so, my mother gave me Churchill’s 6-volume history of WW II. Each volume exceeded 1,000 pages. I read all of them in one summer month.Among the books I’ve read, some of my favorites are:Encounters with the archdruid and Coming into the Country, John McPhee,The Kryptonite Kid and As If After Sex, Joseph Torchia,John Adams, David McCullough,The Charioteer, The Last of the Wine, Fire from Heaven, and The Persian Boy, Mary Renault,The Guns of August and The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman,The Gathering Storm (first of the six-volume history The Second World War), Winston Churchill,Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Carl Sandburg,The Cousins Wars, Kevin Phillips,A Separate Peace, John Knowles,The Man Without a Face, Isabelle Holland,An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce (short story),Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger,The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield,Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocum,Enders’ Game, Orson Scott Card,Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein,Maurice, E.M. Forster,A Single Man and Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood, andGILES: Goat-Boy, John Barth.I’m a life-long liberal Democratic snowflake in the FDR/JFK mold. Snowflake I might be, but I don’t melt under heat, I sparkle.I’ve been a confirmed atheist since 13 when I looked at the flyleaf of the Bible and saw the words “King James version.” I wondered how many other versions there were, and questioned why I wasn’t reading one of them. The minister said there were somethings I wasn’t to question but just had to take on faith.I found I hadn’t enough faith not to wonder about those other versions. Besides, I really didn’t like being told what I had to believe.My three most admired people in history are Alexander the Great, Lincoln, and Churchill.In elementary school and through high school, I was an overachiever. I got As with only a few Bs.I got a D in personal typing. I really wasn’t interested and didn’t apply myself though I had ample manual dexterity to type correctly.I learned typing on a manual, now old fashioned typewriter before the IBM Selectric was invented. Ugh. I’m old!The first court sport I played was handball at the YMCA in San Francisco when I was 27. I took it up on a challenge in 1976, my first year in law school in San Francisco. A straight friend, Peter, said I couldn’t beat him.He was right. I hated losing. I was competitive in things I was interested in, overly competitive.I took lessons from a man who had been U.S. handball champion four years running in his youth. He agreed to coach me if I was serious enough to practice 3 hours a week with him, practice by myself 3 hours a week, and play against other players another 3 hours a week.I did all that plus long distance running, swimming, and exercises at the Y.Peter stopped playing me because I kept beating him. I was good enough, said my coach, to be an A- professional player.In 1978, I graduated law school and accepted a trial court clerkship in Fairbanks even though that I had locked up a 9th Circuit appellate court clerkship with a judge in Idaho. The 9th Circuit clerkship would have given me a lot of resume power.But I already knew how to research and write. I thought a trial court clerkship would be better. Besides, Fairbanks would be an adventure, and, anyway, who wanted to spend a year in Idaho?I was admitted to Johns Hopkins University in 1965, my high school junior year, as a pre-med student.I spent the summer of that year as an intern at Goddard Space Flight Center.At Goddard, I did original research on the spectral distribution of the carbon arc lamp. I wrote a paper on the research that was published by Goddard. So, technically, I’m a published author.Summer of my high school senior year I spent working in the restaurant of the only motel in Leoti.I learned to love rare (rare) steak when a Texan came into the restaurant, walked past the cash register, past the owner, directly into the kitchen and up to the cook. He said, “I want the best steak in the house, and I want it rare. I mean pass a match under it and send it out.”She put it on the grill for a minute, flipped it over for another minute and sent me out with it and with the message that, please, if it wasn’t cooked enough, send it back.An hour later, the Texan walked again into the kitchen and up to Tillie. He gave her a $20 bill (this was 1966 when $20 was serious money in western Kansas), and said, “That’s the best damn steak I’ve had outside Texas.”I thought that if it was worth $20, I should try it. I got Tillie to make me one that I took into an empty and darkened room (dark so that I couldn’t see the blood as it ran from the cut). It was the best damn steak I’d ever had.I’ve eaten all my steaks rare ever since. I soon got so selective that I would only eat a filet mignon. It’s my favorite and the only cut I will eat.I’m choosy that way, or perhaps just a show-off.I’m an INTP, of which only about 3% of the population is.I’m contrary. I don’t like being told what to do. I rebel. I always have.In a junior-high English composition class, the student teacher told us we had to do 12 book reports. My immediate reaction was, “Oh, goody. I get to read 12 books and get credit for them.” Everyone else moaned.She gave us a list of 13 books from which to choose the 12. We had to read from that list. My immediate reaction was that I wasn’t going to read a one; I’d select my own.I was smart enough to know I’d better have an unassailable list, so I decided to read only Pulitzer Prize works.For my first one, I chose Giants in the Earth by Roølveg.I got a D. She didn’t even read it. I took it to the Vice Principal and noted that there was no crease where the staple was; she hadn’t even turned the first page. He liked me. I think he was a contrarian too. He summoned her and said she should read it before giving me a grade.I got a B+. I was certain it wasn’t an A because it wasn’t from her list. I’ve never since liked student teachers.I accidentally discovered Computer Science in my university freshman year. It was intuitive to me, ridiculously simple and easy. I got an A in the course.I switched majors from pre-med to computer science and applied mathematics. I had much more fun than ever I would have in Biochem.The professor got me a paid, graduate-level teaching assistantship. I taught a lab section in the adult education school that summer. I was 19. I kept teaching it through my senior year when I had two sections and was in charge of the 12 other instructors.I was a capitalist early on in life. I worked for the computer center programming for a group of professors who needed work on their grants. The computer center charged them $15/hr and paid me $5/hr.In my junior year, I quit the computer center and went to the professors offering to do the same work as an independent consultant for $10/hr, thus doubling my pay and saving them 1/3 on their grant expenses. The computer center director was not pleased.I taught myself to operate the IBM 7094 mainframe from the operator’s control console. One night around 02:00, I had entered a small program into high memory that waited until the next operator logged in.When he did, the computer flashed on the console’s light panel, “Jason has cold hands. I refuse to work for him.” At which point, all the lights on the panel and the two banks of tape drives began flashing wildly. Had there been a warning klaxon, I would have sounded it too.I thought Jason was smart enough to find the program and throw it out of memory. He wasn’t. At 03:30, I got an angry call from the director wanting to know what the Hell I’d done to his machine.I wasn’t thrown out although the Dean threatened to. Perhaps he too was a contrarian.I consistently operated in the 97th percentile. I’m complex and intelligent., although I have no example to offer you. I just know that I am.I’m well read and skilled at writing. Some times I can even write an entertaining or moving vignette.I have a sometimes droll sense of humor, tightly leashed.I’m a quiet, self-directed, self-sufficient, mildly extroverted introvert. The mild extroversion is a quality hard-won during my character makeover in junior and senior years in college. I determined to stop being the loner I had always been. I did.I can’t believe I’ve reached halfway. I’ve still got a lot of stuff to tell and am feeling no pressure, no fear that I might not make it to 100. I can sometimes be a prolific and prolix bloviator.My most valued skill is surviving life, though sometimes just barely.All my life, I’ve had two operating speeds, all ahead flank, 110% on the reactor, and all stop. That’s how I consistently described myself.I can also be a showoff. Sorry.In therapy in my 40s, in the middle of a 12-year depression, my psychiatrist diagnosed me as Bipolar II, NOS. I guess I was right in my self-description.I no longer read voraciously, not because I haven’t the interest, but because I’ve developed a double vision and another eye condition that makes it difficult to read the print. However, I can enlarge the font on my iPad sufficiently so that I can read on it.I now spend my reading time with the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker magazine, and sometimes the Economist. I’ve digital subscriptions to all of them.I’m Quora Top Writer 2018, an “accomplishment” with which I’m pleased. But, I feel pressure to continually do better so that I’ll be a 2019 Top Writer. I thought I left performance pressure behind when I quit my litigation practice.I’m an attorney. The lawyer is the mealy-mouthed, obnoxious, conceited little piss-ant on the other side.How I got from pre-med to computer science to law is a good story, but it would be too long to recount here. I haven’t the time to make it short.It’s 01:55 hours as I write this. I often can’t sleep, so, I occupy the night hours with Quora (reading as well as writing). I’m listening to John Denver’s Wildlife Concert on my Bose Quiet Control 30 blue tooth headset.Did I say that I think Denver was one of the best?Three months after I came out in DC, I sort of accidentally crashed a dinner party for two lovers on the occasion of their 7th anniversary. The gay couple across the hall was giving the dinner.I had had a date with my boyfriend who lived on the floor above. He didn’t show. I didn’t want to go home. He had introduced me to Raj and Ulf, the couple across the hall, a few weeks previously and they had said I should visit anytime. I knocked, was invited to stay, and accepted with alacrity and without compunction.The honorees were two lawyers who had met and brought each other out in Harvard law school. They were smart and ever so cosmopolitan. Within an hour, while still at the table, I knew I was in love, in love with both and with the entity that was the two of them together. Really. Strong, visceral, undeniable love at first sight. Well, at first hour’s sight anyway.It was a Sunday night. We talked for hours until Raj and Ulf threw us out because they had to go to work on Monday, which it was because we had talked well beyond midnight.I went back with them to their apartment. After another hour, Tommy and Michael disappeared toward the back. I sat on the sofa looking out the great window that was the north wall of their apartment at the DC night lights, all the Jefferson Memorial and Lincoln Monument ablaze in light.Michael came out a few minuted later saying that each of them wanted to bed me. Whichever one I chose, the other would sleep in the second bedroom and wouldn’t be hurt.I didn’t hesitate. I said I’d sleep with both or neither. I spent that night and Monday and Tuesday with them, talking, laughing, reading a book to each other (John McPhee’s The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed), and screwing our collective minds out.That is how I met what I call my two first lovers. We were together 3 years until Tommy decided he was in love with someone else. Michael and I stayed together another year until I left for a Ph.D. program at Cornell in search of my professional soul.I was supposed to come home over holidays, spring break, and summers. But, when I came back for Christmas, Michael said he had met another man and was leaving. He disappeared and left me alone in the apartment.For the first time in my life, I decided I needed to get drunk. My sorrow, anguish, and desperation demanded relief in the oblivion of Stolichnaya.In our favorite gay bar, I sat at the bar with my first Stolly and cranberry juice with a lime. I had finished the drink and was absent-mindedly pummeling the lime wedge in the bottom of the glass with the straw when the bartender came up with a second.He looked at me with a smile that curled up on the right side of his mouth and a twinkle in his brilliant hazel eyes. “I’d sure hate to be the guy you’ve got in the bottom of that glass,” he said as he slid the second drink toward me. He winked, “I get off at 2:30.”I decided I didn’t need to get drunk after all. I nursed that second drink the rest of the night.On the few occasions since, when I’ve felt I needed to get drunk, I’ve recalled those hazel eyes and the week I spent reflected in them. I remember, I really don’t have to get drunk at all.Since then, I’ve bedded perhaps 2,000 or so men. I’ve had 3 lovers and any number of boyfriends. A lot of men fell in love with me. I broke all their hearts. Two broke my heart.I fell in love with only the 3. I left the first two, breaking their hearts in the process. The third I was with for 8 years until he died on April 28th, 1995, of AIDS in San Diego. I know we would still be together but for that.We met in 1987 in Fayetteville, AR, where I had gone to practice law. In 1992, we decided to move to San Diego where he could get a job as an Emergency Department nurse despite being HIV+.He went out first. It took me 3 months to wind up affairs and sell the house. Upon my arrival in San Diego, he wrote this.Welcome Back BabyEden lets me in.I find the seeds of loveAnd climb upon the high wire.I kiss — and tell all my fears.Playing in the dirtWe find the seeds of fun.We scream like alley catsTearing down what we attackTo prove that we are one.Cutting through the night,We find the seds of lustAnd lose our minds on one intent.These passions never seem to end.© 1992 Loy Dean SloanOn his death 3 years later, I wrote thisThe Reflection Of My SoulYou are the reflection of my soul.No more than could my shadowCan you be torn from me,Though time and distanceinterpose, though Death’s persistenceDeliver you to Heaven’s fold.You are the reflection of my soul.© 1995 Steve AlexanderI was what is called an HIV slow progresser. My immune system resisted the virus from ’82 until ’96 when my T-cells dropped so far below 200 that I gave each of the remaining ones names.I received an AIDS diagnosis myself, but never got an opportunistic infection. Instead, I survived long enough to see the arrival of the so called three-drug-cocktail in Feb. ‘97. My viral load dropped to undetectable. My T-cells bounced back. I didn’t die.For 8 years, from 1979 - 1987, I practiced law in Philadelphia. I was a litigator in a small firm owned by the former 9=year First Assistant District Attorney of Philadelphia. He had one of the more brilliant legal minds in the country.I was fortunate to have complex, high-profile, high-pressure cases given me. I never had the same type of case a second time. I sued the National Football League in antitrust. I lost. The Third Circuit said they were immune from antitrust suits. I sued the sitting mayor of Philadelphia for libel committed during a campaign speech. I won.I defended an orthodontist in a medical malpractice case and won. I sued a gastroenterologist for medical malpractice and won. I worked on the divorce case of one of the most prominent lawyers in the city and made new law about how a professional practice is evaluated in divorce proceedings.At one point, the owner assigned me to review and approve the written work of three other attorneys; two were senior to me. I had a Mont Blanc fountain pen with red ink that I used to make revisions and criticisms in the margins. The hated that pen with the red ink.At Johns Hopkins, I was the only undergraduate in university history to hold a paid, graduate-level teaching assistantship. In my year at Cornell, I had a TA in finite mathematics. The second semester of my second year in law school, I taught a lab section in Appellate Advocacy, a course I had just taken the prior semester. I was the only student in the school’s history to teach a course.I think I would have made a good professor — in comparative religion and philosophy perhaps.In law school, I made law review. I was on and then president of the Moot Court Board. I was on the admissions committee.My third year, I took no classes but was appointed an intern law clerk to a United States District Court judge. He treated me just as he did his paid law clerks, giving me the same freedom and responsibilities and expecting the same performance as he did with them. On one of the cases, I argued him into holding a Coast Guard seizure of 5 tons of marijuana from a boat in theSan Francisco bay unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. It was a first impression case that made new national law. I was really happy with my performance.I ran long distance in college with the track team, but I wouldn’t join the team because I didn’t want the coach telling me what to do. At Cornell, I picked up the pace and began running 6 days a week, 6 miles a day, 6-minute miles. I like the number 666.One night around midnight in San Francisco, Nikos and I were holding hands and walking quietly on the top of a hill near Castro. I felt a rock come swishing by from behind, clipping me on my right knee. I turned to see two teenage boys with rocks in hand and arms poised to throw again.Without thinking, I was sprinting toward them, suffused with white-hot anger. They dropped their rocks, turned, and ran away. I chased them to a chain-link fence where the first dived down and through a hole at the bottom. The second was down and headed into the hole when I caught up. I could have but didn’t grab him by the ankles and haul his butt back. My anger had dissipated even as I had closed the distance between us.Nikos caught up with me just as the kid scrambled through the fence, leapt up and ran on. Panting, he asked what I was going to do with the kid if I had caught him. I had to admit I hadn’t the slightest idea. I would have marched him by his ear to the nearest police station, but there wasn’t one.I determined then that white hot anger was not a state conducive to good decision making. I’ve since seldom been white hot with anger, but when I have been, I recall that evening and delay action until I’ve calmed down.I had gotten my first motorcycle ride from Nikos a couple of months earlier. I was walking up Market St., headed home after classes, an hour spent at the Golden Gate YMCA playing handball, and a couple hours studying at Hastings Law School across the street. It was near midnight.I was standing at Van Ness street waiting for a light to cross when a guy on a motorcycle stopped at the light. The rider looked over and asked whether I needed a ride. I couldn’t see his face for the helmet, but his broad shoulders and well-defined pecs were silhouetted by his tight-fitting leather vest. I said sure.I got on behind him, seated with my chest firm against his back, and my arms wrapped around him, hands clasped against his chest. He reached up, took my hands in his and slid them down to his groin.We spent the night and the next day together. He called in sick, and I skipped classes. We became close friends with benefits.Two years later, in Anchorage, I was with two lovers, with whom I was spending the weekend, in the only gay bar in town. Across the dance floor stood Nikos, staring at me with a stupid grin on his face. He was the stage manager of a San Francisco ballet troupe. The company was performing in Anchorage for the week. The four of us spent the weekend together.At Cornell, one morning as I was hiking up the river bed to my office on campus, a boy jumped from a bridge high overhead. He landed just in front of me on the rocks with a soft thud.It was cold, freezing, but he had no jacket. His right leg was twisted full back, his heel resting against his hip. His right hand that he had reflexively extended to break his fall lay torn and crumpled. Bloody froth came from his mouth.His eyes caught mine. They latched onto me. He was still alive. I knelt beside him. My knees gave way, and I landed flat on my butt on the rocks. His eyes still held mine.I held him close to me as he died. I felt the last breath leave his spoiled body.He had been a freshman. I learned that he had gotten a D in a course, and couldn’t face telling his parents. That week, I joined the university suicide prevention, crisis intervention hotline.I’ve seen 5 people die, the suicide included. The first was my uncle of bone cancer when I was 19. The last was my mother of Alzheimer’s when I was 61.That’s not counting the hundred or so of my friends who died of GRID/AIDS from 1982 through the late 1990s. My entire generation of gay males is dead of AIDS. I’m the only one I know left alive. There must be others, surely, but I’m the only one I know.When I was 5, I had my first homosexual experience. I played naked doctor with 6-year-old Kevin from across the street. My grandmother caught us and whisked me away by my ear. I don’t recall what happened next, but I’m sure it was appropriately corporal. That’s how errant little boys were dealt with by grandmothers in Leoti in 1953.At 15, while watching the riderless horse, boots reversed in the stirrups, and JFK’s caisson go by on Pennsylvania Ave., I cried when taps were played.While a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell in Engineering, I took and passed a course in the Hotel Management School in wine tasting.Also while at Cornell, I audited a class at Ithaca College on creative writing given by Rod Serling.While a law clerk in Fairbanks, I was appointed an acting District Court judge.Also while in Fairbanks, in my second job as the night- and weekend-manager of the racquetball club, I met a young teenager from Ordway. Colorado, a town in which I lived when 4 years old.Also in Fairbanks, my friend and co-volunteer at the crisis intervention and suicide prevention hotline was murdered by her ex.I found spirituality one night at 3 am, 80 miles north of Fairbanks. Stamping my feet against the -40F cold, along with some strangers from Fairbanks, I watched the Aurora Borealis dance and prance across the black night sky. I swear, one of the multi-hued streamers leapt down from 40,000 feet and touched my soul that night.That year, the courtroom clerk for my judge fell in love with me and asked me to marry her. I had to come out to her to explain why, despite that, we had a deep attraction for each other, I could not marry her.The year before she had been widowed when her husband was killed working on the Alaska Pipeline. She had gotten a million dollar settlement from them. I was tempted to marry her but decided it wouldn’t be fair. I’d always be wanting sex with men.In Philadelphia, I had the first inkling I was getting old (my secretary didn’t know where she was the day JFK was shot because she hadn’t been born yet).While retired (forcibly so by that 12-year depression) in San Diego, I served as a “Child Advocate” for the local Superior Court, and, otherwise, did absolutely nothing but read, bike, and swim at the local nude beach.My brother and I are the last surviving Alexander males in a long patrilineal line stretching back 346 years to 1673 when Samuel Alexander, one of 7 Scots-Irish brothers and 2 sisters, arrived in the New World from County Donegal on the ‘Good Ship Welcome.’I’m also descended from the 1620 Mayflower colonists John Alden and Priscilla Mullins. Alden was 22 and the ship’s cooper. He had been scheduled to return to England but elected to stay in Plymouth. Priscilla was 18. She arrived with her parents and brother. She was the only one of her family to survive that first winter when literally half the colonists died. They were the second Mayflower couple to marry.My great, great grandfather Daniel T. Alexander murdered his neighbor in Red River County, Texas, in 1853, in a dispute over a pig. He fled Texas for Jackson Port, Arkansas, where, 22 years later, he was recognized and extradited back to Texas for trial.I’m an autodidact in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, which I learned to build a website for a local genealogical nonprofit organization that puts on an annual conference.I also present classes at the conferences. This year will be 2 in DNA for genealogists, a subject I’ve yet to learn.Up until I got old and shrank, I was 6′ 2.5″ tall. I was always the tallest fellow around.One day, at Cornell, I felt uncomfortable kissing another guy. My neck was angled back and I was stretching up. He was 6′ 4″. It was the first time I met someone taller than me. It was also the last until I shrank.For 38 years, from 1966, my senior year in high school, until age 56 in 2004, I weighed from 175lbs to 180lbs. I was always long, lean, and lithe — qualities that stood me well with all the gay men I met. At 56, though, with age finally catching up with me and no partner for whom to stay fit, I got old and fat.There, that’s it. My, but aren’t you sorry you asked?Q:Can you write 100 things about yourself?