â┚¬Å”I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I needed to be.â┚¬Â Ã¢â”šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ Douglas Adams
I turned 45 a couple of weeks ago. Weeks prior to the big day, I had all these grand deigns for marking this lustrum with celebrations. Little did I know that my birthday would be flavored with my third lay-off in as many years, and planning celebrations seemed more stressful than joyous. The actual day was marked with an impromptu gathering at local gay dive instead of a big potluck and, to be honest, it was still pretty damn joyous.
One birthday plan that did come to fruition was volunteering for Keep Orlando Beautiful and Green Up Orlando on their annual Plant Seedlings for Civil Rights event, honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Here, too, the things not going according to plan theme played out: I had romantic visions of planting trees in my head and instead picked up garbage along the street. I'd love to write a Volunteering for Dummies book one day and one of the things covered would be that you should be ready to do whatever is needed.
My other surprise was pulling up to the church for volunteer check-in, anticipating about six other poor souls ready do their service to the community, and instead I found 200! Among them was our friend Cynthia and she and I joined a pod of people and got our assignment cleaning up a stretch of road that branches off of busy John Young Parkway. Clearly a low-income area, it was also a neighborhood I hadn't been to in my 25 years in Orlando.
It wouldn't be until later that it would dawn on me how fitting it was that Cynthia and I were the two Caucasians in our pod of six. This fact isn’t one that we overthink these days, and I think that is a great testament to the work of Dr. King.
Here are your Monday Ripples. I hope you find something worth sharing and pass it along to everyone you know. Yes, everyone.
Ready for Your Close-Up
Playbook Guide: YouTube for Good
When it comes to building a social media platform, it's unusual for marketers to not include YouTube as part of the plan. If you're a do-gooder, you'd do well to check out this link to Playbook Guide: YouTube for Good. In just 24 pages, YouTube gives you tips that usually take people a buttload of trial and error to learn.
LincVolt Speaks
Under the Hood
Whether we're fans or not, we all know Neil Young is a musician â┚¬â€œ he's a household name, after all. What you might not know is that he's a bit of an environmentalist. He loves driving his 1959 Lincoln, but isn't too keen on what it was doing to the environment, so he has taken to converting it into a hybrid. Another layer of coolness is added with this blog that documents the endeavor. The car, who goes by the nameLincVolt, apparently writes the blog.
You Going to Eat That?
Fungi Discovered In The Amazon Will Eat Your Plastic
This Wired article and the amazing photograph that accompanies it renewed my anger at how we treat our oceans. We're killing things we don't even know exist with our selfish, short-sighted needs. Same feeling occurred when I read this article about Yale students discovering a fungi that eats plastic and needs no air to survive. Here's a solution to a puzzle we've created for our planet and it came ironically came from a place we're slowly destroying â┚¬â€œ the rainforest.
This Saturday, I'm walking in the Out of the Darkness Community Walk to help prevent suicide. I hope you'll consider supporting me with a small or large donation. Thanks, in advance. Donate Here!
