What a nice backhanded compliment!

I apparently missed a few more emails by not being a board member, but Mom passed along something he wrote on the 19th—five days later—and you can probably detect my change in tone pretty easily. First, his message about his conference call:

The just-concluded Prohibition Trust Fund conference call approved $1000 to upgrade the NGT. They’re concerned, as I am, that it appear slick and professional.
Suggestion: Let’s see how nicely Shawn does his first couple of issues. If we like them, we can go back to the Trust Fund in July (their next meeting) and ask them to allow us to use the $1000 for something else. If we’re not happy with the first two issues, then we can ask Shawn to switch to a better printing process, using the $1000 grant to spiff up his concluding 4 issues.

Jim

If you’ll grant me a brief aside, here’s a story you might find interesting, amusing and/or horrifying. When I was writing my response, my hands were shaking. Not because I was furious—I was mad, but not mad—it was because I suffer from what’s basically a type of stage fright. Seriously. It’s basically a super-duper big boost of adrenaline that makes some people freeze up, get sweaty palms, they can’t talk… not me! I vibrate!

At my high school, every senior was required to give a “Senior Speech” in front of the entire school. I got behind the podium and felt fine initially, but I was standing on the balls of my feet instead of resting my weight on my heels. After about thirty seconds, my legs were bouncing so much that I blurted out “BLEEAAAHH!” into the microphone and started shaking out my legs behind the podium. As you would expect, everyone in the auditorium was laughing at me, but I managed to recover fairly gracefully. I stayed on my heels for the rest of the speech and things were okay, but I imagine the shaky muscles that accompany a surge of adrenaline will be around for a very, very long time.

So like I said, when writing this second response, my hands were shaking. They calmed down as I kept typing and after some brief revising (Mom read through the first draft and made some suggestions), here was my formal reply:

This email is specifically about the National Good Templar and it should have been sent to me along with the rest of the Board.

I want to make this absolutely clear: We are not accepting conditional grants. If they want to give us money to help fund the NGT, great. If they’re going to held it over my head to ensure that I meet their standards, give it back.

Shawn Bakken
Editor, National Good Templar

The next day, he sent out an email to let me know that he was declining the grant money. Oh, he didn’t send it to me or the Board. Well, he sent it to the President, but aside from her, he wrote to several other members: my mother’s personal email account (not the one she uses for IOGT), my uncle and my 95-year-old grandmother. What a pussy. (In his message to the Trust Fund people, he blamed the President for rejecting the grant and accepting my bid without waiting to see if the money was available, which was done over his objection. You may remember that back at the beginning of this blog entry, he never told anyone he’d submitted a grant application in the first place, so… yeah.)