I have been and still am extremly busy with my site and my business, sorry I'd like to stay in here awhile and get a better handle on whats going on. I'll do that soon. I see you have a couple of players above do you have any problems with them? Can you put it anywhere? I have been looking for a player I can put in my group ( I call them sessions) that I can put meditations on. Hugs Marlene

Thanks for the encouragement! :)
I have always wanted to go to Australia every since I saw the movie Crocodile Dundee when It first came out. I hear it's hot out there. Is it spring for you guys "down under"?

=)

Thank you for the comment. I'm trying to promote the 2 paying sites I'm on but I'm not having any luck.

Thank you very much!

Kamal

Shalom~~~~~~~~~~

Wow, I almost forgot I said I would do this! Our Logo:

Since it's a png file, make sure to Save As, and not copy/paste. That will turn the background black. ;-) Thanks again, Jen

Rather than posting a prose-poem, as I suggested I would, I will post an outline of my job application process over the last 50 years. I hope this post encourages others who have difficulty getting a job, getting the work they like, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as Shakepseare once put it. The job-hunting and job-hanging-in-there world is beset by problems and this summary below of my 50 years of hunting, finding and then hunting again may help others. I hope so. The post which follows is somewhat long and some readers are simply advised to stop reading when they think they are not getting "a bang-for-their-buck" as we say colloquially therse days.
-Ron Price, Australia
----------------------------
LETTER WRITING: 2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK
FOR 50 YEARS---JOB HUNTING 1957-2007

The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer need or use in any direct sense in the job-hunting world after fifty years of use, should help anyone wanting to know something about my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This resume might be useful, in some residual capacity, for the few who want to assess my suitability for some advertised or unadvertised employment position which, I must emphasize again, I never apply for anymore--at least in any direct sense. I have registered at several internet sites whose role is, among other things, to help people get jobs. Perhaps this process of registration at such sites is engaged with some sense of nostalgia, out of habit, out of an inability to stop applying for jobs after five decades of persistent and strenuous efforts to obtain jobs, better jobs, jobs more suited to my talents, jobs that paid better, jobs that freed me from the impossible situations I had become involved with in some job I already had--along the road of life. I stopped applying for full-time jobs, as I say, in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work three years ago in 2005.

At the age of 64, then, on the eve of the Australian Old Age Pension, ten months, in fact, away from the formal condition of old age, I have become, self-employed as a writer-poet, an independent scholar. I have gradually come to this role in the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, nine years ago. Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a week in a job and many other hours to community activity, as I had been for so many years, marked a turning point in my life. I became able to devote my time to a much more extensive involvement in writing and reading material of my own choice.

Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary, hopefully stimulating, but not always pleasurable leisure-time, part-time or full-time pursuit. In my case in these first years(60-65) of late adulthood(60-80), writing has become full-time about 60 hours a week. And this activity is, for the most part, an enriching and enjoyable pursuit. I have replaced my former paid employment and extensive activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure, namely: writing and reading—independent scholarship.

Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the person, their experience and their philosophy. On occasion, I set out a summary of my writing, my employment experience, my resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this introductory statement, this commentary on the job application process which occupied my life for five decades. If as that famous although not always highly regarded psychologist Carl Jung writes: we are what we do, then some of what I was and am could and can be found in that attachment, that resume and its several appendices. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these days since it now occupies nearly 30 pages and many more pages if the appendices are also included.

Half a century of various forms of employment as well as community, leisure and volunteer activity in the professional and not-so-professional world, all this time in many places produced a great pile of what used to be called one’s curriculum vitae, one’s CV, one’s bio-data and is now, at least as I see it, more of a lifeline, a life-narrative, a memoir, an autobiography-of-sorts. As I say, I make the list of this stuff available to readers of this account when appropriate, when requested and, occasionally, when not appropriate. I update those many pages to include recent writing projects I have completed or am in the process of completing during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-time and most volunteer activity.

My resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another bit of gadding about, another slice of a quasi-pioneering, peripatetic existence of moving from town to town, from one state or province to another, from one country to another, one piece of God's, or gods', earth to another piece. And so I come to work in another organization, gain entry to another portion of my life, like a modern form of a traditional rite-de-passage, and come to take on what often seems like another personality, another me in the long road to discover if, indeed, there is a Real Me underneath all this coming and going. I'm sure this process will continue, will also be the case in all its many forms in these years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should, for some reason, movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be necessary to continue for some reason I can not, as yet, anticipate. This continued movement, though, seems highly unlikely as I go through these early years(60-65) of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life, from sunset and early evening to night’s first hours and then, finally, the last hours of night, the final syllables of my recorded time. This rite de passage expressed in the form of yet another job in another place seems to have come to an end. Time, of course, will tell.

In the last four years(60-64) which are, as I indicate, the first ones of late adulthood, a period developmental psychologists call the years from 60 to 80; and in this first decade of my retirement(1999 to 2009), I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able to do in those years of my early(1965-1984) and middle(1984-1999) adulthood when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept my nose to the grindstone as they say colloquially in many parts of the world. With the final unloading of much of the volunteer work which I took on when I first retired, in the years from 1999 to 2005; with the gradual cessation of virtually the entire apparatus and process of job-application by 2007; with my last child having left home in 2005; with a more settled home environment than I’ve ever had by 2007 and with a new medication for the bipolar disorder that afflicted my life since my teens, also by 2007, the remaining years of my late adulthood beckon bright with promise. My resume reflects the shift in role, in my lifespan activity-base and lists the many writing projects I’ve been able to complete in this first decade of independent scholarship and full-time writing.

The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for fifty years, 1949 to 1999, is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place, a domain, a bailiwick as politicians often call their electorate. Such people and other types as well often have very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is inevitable from a person’s teens through to their late adulthood even if they sat all their lives on the head of a pin, one of the theologico-
philosophical metaphors associated with angels and often used in medieval times. This process of extensive change is even more true in the recent decades of modern time at this climacteric of history in which change is about the only thing one can take as a constant--or so we are often led to believe because it is so often said in the media of most places. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context.

This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years in a new form of pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of history’s long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites.

This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called a curriculum vitae or a CV, until the 1970s, at least in the region where I lived and dwelled and had my being, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their artistic work. These people take the philosophical, indeed, somewhat religious position, that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs."

I frequently use this resume at various internet locations on the World Wide Web when I want to provide some introductory background on myself. I could list many new uses after decades of a use which had a multifactorial motivational base: to help me get a job, to get a new job, to help me make more money, to enrich my experience and to add something refreshing to my life as it was becoming increasingly stale for so many reasons in the day-to-day grind, to help me get away from supervisors and from situations I could not handle or were a cause of great stress, to help me flee from settings where my health was preventing me from continuing successfully in my job, to help me engage in new forms of adventure, pioneering, amusement, indeed, to help me survive life’s tests in the myriad forms that afflict the embattled spirit, et cetera, et cetera, inter alia, inter alia, inter alter inter alter.

The use of the resume always saved me from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One could photocopy it and mail it out with the covering letter to anyone and everyone. The photocopier became a common feature of the commercial, business and government world in the 1960s just as I began to send out the first of the literally thousands of job applications that I would over the next forty years: 1967-2007. One didn’t have to write the application out each time; one did not have to “say it again Sam” in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium. The photocopier itself evolved as did the gestetner. There were many ways one could copy one's basic data. For a time, my mother used to type applications for me. I became entrenched in the job market in the 1960s. This entrenchment was so very much like trench-warfare back in that Great War of 1914 to 1918--when millions died, were simply mowed down on the European continent in a process whose meaning we have yet to fully plumb. But, however little or much we have come to understand the meaning and significance of WW1, we--my generation--have come to experience a new warfare. As Henry Miller, one of the first to get away with using the "F" word in his trilogy: Sexus, Nexus and Plexus, expressed back in 1941 the new warfare of my generation: "a war far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the first two phases, with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble." It is not my intention to document any of these three phases of the destructive calamity that visited humankind in the century I have just left, for this documentation has been done in intimate detail elsewhere, both visually, orally and in print. I do not document but I frequently refer to these three phases. I have different purposes here than mere historical documentation. My job application process was clearly, at least as I look back over half a century of the process, part of that third war.

Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet became, though, an activity sometimes resembling a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 is a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of one’s personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life’s game can go on or can come to a quick end over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace. During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters, in a file in my Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs.

This autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs goes for 2600 pages in five volumes and, due to its length, will not likely be read while I occupy space on this mortal coil. Much of my autobiography, portions of it, are now found, though, on the internet at a multitude of sites where in nano-micro-seconds anyone can find portions of my writing. I am known in a multitude of microcosms, microworlds, miniworlds, where neither name nor fame can reach me, and where all the problems that go with any degree of celebrity status in our fame-hungry world will pass me by into cyberspace, into an electronic ether.

Given the thousands of hours over so many years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to my venture across two continents, two marriages, with at least two personalities being the bipolar person that I am; given that this new style of pioneering, voyaging-via-employment venture in our time has been at the core of my life with so much that has radiated around this core; given the amount of paper produced, the amount of energy expended and the amount of money earned and spent in this great exercise of survival; given the amount of writing done in the context of those various jobs, some of this employment-related correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life.

It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire as I entered the years when I no longer applied for jobs, to write this short statement fitting all those thousands of unkept resumes and job-applications into a larger context as well as all those letters, emails and internet posts written in connection with trying to make connections with others, into some larger framework of action and meaning. For those who would like to read more on this theme, I invite them to go to the internet site: Baha’i Library Online>Secondary Source Material>Personal Letters>The Letters of RonPrice: 1957-2007. If such readers prefer, they can simple google: Ron Price Letters and more of this story will become available with only a few clicks. -Ron Price, Tasmania

Thanks, Jodi. The main reason I don't get to this site as often as I'd like to promote my work is that I am already posting at literally 1000s of sites. If you google my name "RonPrice" without the space between the first and last name you will see over 700 sub-sites at which I post. I will leave a prose-poem here, though, in appreciation for your encouragement.-Ron Price, Australia

Thank you Jodi for the beautiful well wishes! How do I use this network site more effectively? Any suggestions? Thank you for your support.

Andrew Carnegie: Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.

Directory of Ning Networks Staff Member / legalasone.ning.com Legal As One Motivational Network

BEST IDEA YET! HOW BEST TO GET ON PAGE #1 OF NING'S POPULAR NETWORKS? And what better place to be FOUND by Community Seekers than there? Here's the plan. We already have tons of traffic. But, if you come here every day, several times a day, give a hello, check your comments, etc... Besides, it's a blast on the Directory! I don't see how we can miss! In no time, the chances of us moving to page #1 of Ning's Popular Networks are HUGE! In just 4 days, we're already moving between Pages #14 and 18, out of 2,795 pages. This will help everyone. There is simply no doubt about it! Let's go to the top, together!
Best Regards,
Suzie
Directory of Ning Networks Staff Member
/Owner: Pet Lovers Paradise

Looks GREAT! YAY! If it doesn't for you, give the cache time to catch up. I can rest now, LOL!
Best,
Jen

I'm hoping this will help us all with members...good members.