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David Eli Shapiro

Want to know who I am, what I've done, where I come from? If you've already been to my home page, you've had a chance to learn a good deal about my main careers and what I do now. Here's where you can dig deeper.

← Hit the caret, the solid triangle, to read about two former career paths

Psychology

I earned an M.S. in Experimental Psychology and an M.Ed. in Community Counseling. I have not performed psychological research since 1978, nor been employed as a counselor since 1979. I did maintain my American Psychological Association affiliation from 1979 til 2018, and continue to follow some research.

This education has supported what I do now in several ways:

Somatotherapy

I used to work as a massage professional, having studied standard Swedish massage, as well as training in the specialized approaches called reflexology and cranio-sacral therapy. (I am unclear as to the value of the latter.) Ultimately I trained as a Structural Integration ("Rolfing") Practitioner, learning to reduce the strain resulting from unpaired cantilevers (imbalances), using techniques related in part to those developed by Andrew Taylor Still. I have not practiced these skills professionally in decades. This education and training did give me a valuable understanding of body mechanics, in a different way than my study and occasional practice of modalities such as yoga, tai chi and Feldenkrais patterns. For information on the work devleoped by Dr. Rolf, check out the Rolf Institute, as the offshoot where I trained, the Guild for Structural Integration, closed.

Along the way, I've dabbled in other types of work. I spent a day as a cabbie in New York; not for me. Bartender, ditto. I've worked as a laborer, which was fine, though I wouldn't be up for more of it. Handyman--I made out okay. I'm not cut out to be a salesman. Plan review work was not a challenge. I had fun teaching memory, but I wouldn't want to have to earn my living at it.

The Person

What sort of information would you like? Hit the caret, the solid triangle, to the left of any heading to read the associated text.

One way to get an idea of who I am is to look at me; another is to see who I love.
Here's a picture of me more than half my lifetime ago (ahem: my lifetime so far), with my father, Lou Shapiro, who died December 23, 2001. I'm standing legs akimbo; we're holding each other, grinning.
A Happy Picture.

And here's a shot I snapped of my beloved in 2021. Mary Jo, standing in a ball field, cup in hand, smiling at me.

What kind of person do I think I am?

I think of myself as a humanist, as caring, as relishing and engaging both the intellectual and the physical. Some would characterize me differently.
Noticing some unconventionality, folks who never have known hippies would call me--or at least would have, at one point--a hippie or bohemian. Not a wild man. Despite my having spent 30-odd years motorcycling on sometime -funky bikes, no one who knows me in the least would mistake me for a menacing tough.


Serious-minded or silly? Lightweight or grounded? Reliable?

My playfulness might cause someone to see me as flip. On the other hand, as we sat down to dinner with another couple in March 2008, the evening before my colleague was to address the Consumer Product Safety Commission, his wife reminded us not to spend the evening talking shop.
I work hard at respecting the contexts of my interactions. This means that I try not to be overly heavy in light contexts nor to seem dismissive of others' earnestness. Hurting people with humor is never my intent.

Some, seeing my intellectual interests, would call me an egghead. Some who are uncomfortable with attempts at logical rigor--or irritated by my slips into pedantry--would call me a legalist, and some who are a bit inflexible, or simply more decisive, might call me wishy-washy. That observation is not unfounded. I can be slow to come to a decision, and can often see multiple sides to an issue, or recognize the validity in people's differing approaches.

My idealism can lead me to make impractical choices; but what's practical depends on the goals. I'm comfortable with who I am and most of the choices I've made. How comfortable? I don't mind hearing honest, well-meant criticism-- or moderate ribbing. And I'm grateful that I am able to surround myself with others who pretty largely accept me. And I mean a wide range of others. I've enjoyed connections around this country and around the world.

Another way to know me is by what I enjoy. I take pleasure in learning and teaching, in exercising various physical and mental competencies, in public and personal service, in humor, and in listening to and making music, as well as various sensual modalities.

And by what I don't enjoy. I am very uncomfortable with arbitrariness, narrow-mindedness, malice, and indifference to others' feelings. I hate to feel helpless in the face of pain, or to see myself as unreliable.


Affiliations: what groups do I connect with?

What do I read?

One way to know people is by their affiliations and activities; another, for literate folks, is by what they read. For fun, I read (mostly re-read -- I don't keep up, not really being a fan of any current genre) a fair amount of science fiction and fantasy, with a long-time favorite being Terry Pratchett. My tastes change; some time back, I decided to get rid of most of my Piers Anthony novels, now too juvenile for my taste. Old standbys include Nevil Shute, O. Henry, plus some humor and cartoons. I look forward to rereading my books by Paul deKruif soon.

I subscribed to The New Yorker strictly for the cartoons, and only gradually began reading the articles and stories. Bertrand Russell and G.B. Shaw I reread relatively infrequently, because there's so much to them.

To stay abreast of current events, I subscribed to World Press Review (very solid information) until it folded. Naturally, I look through my local paper, the Greenbelt News-Review. (I volunteer a couple of hours a week on its staff.) I also read the weekly or monthly newsletters put out by the Authors Guild and the DC Science Writers Association. I read Mensa Bulletin, and for the decades in which I received it, I read Electrical Contractor. (My subscription ended not long after my long-term column was dropped.) I still read EC&M, and I have from the days when it was Electrical Construction and Maintenance, and I find considerable material of interest in NFPA Journal, which teaches me about the world of fire safety.

That's general. What was I reading the third week of January 2025? That's what an anthropologist might ask.


Formal Education and Work History: where do I come from?

I was brought up an Orthodox Jew, and most of my childhood schooling took place in yeshivot, Hebrew schools. Besides a decent secular education, I gained some knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic, and an intensive grounding in religious law and thinking, including sources in the Old Testament and commentaries. I suspect that the model of disputation and exegesis I learned there underpins the skills in research that I developed in graduate school.

Thinking out my beliefs, I put the religion away in my first year of college. Subsequently, I gradually lost much of my Hebrew, modern and biblical, and of course my Aramaic. While I had some understanding of those two languages from early years, and had studied some French, in college I did not pursue any language study. As an adult, I have a great interest in English, and a secondary interest in other languages, especially but not exclusively ones that have words cognate to English ones. After college, I studied enough Spanish to gain rudimentary use, because my neighbors in New York were Hispanic.

When I was an undergraduate, an alternative way to fulfill the language requirement was to study computer science. I learned to operate and even program keypunches and program mainframes in BMD, FORTRAN, and COMPASS, using both batch and interactive programming. That is long behind me. I officially majored Industrial Engineering for three years, and then graduated in psychology. Over one summer I worked for the Army Engineers, reviewing survey reports; over another I worked as a safety and health compliance officer for OSHA. After college, I took an electrical engineering class or two; that was long ago, and mentally far away.

Starting in college with encounter groups and continuing ever since, I have been interested in humanistic psychology and in somatotherapies. I have been trained in and worked at many bodywork modalities, including massage (both as a practitioner and as a teacher) and structural integration.

I can't determine which is cause and which effect, but my attitude towards all my enterprises relates to humanistic psychology. Whatever my work, I try to invest it with passion. I want to feel as though I am accomplishing something worthwhile, forwarding my personal goals while benefitting others. This orientation also maps onto some religious doctrine, particularly the teachings of Hillel. I want my work to be, metaphorically, making love to the world rather than serving time.

In graduate school, which followed an incomplete electrical apprenticeship, I benefitted from coursework in statistics, the analysis and design of experiments, science writing, teaching, and the development of instructional materials, including programmed and computer-aided instruction. I have taught in many arenas, before and since. I do a much better job than I might have, thanks to the formal training and the teaching assistantship I enjoyed at Lehigh University.

After graduate school, I worked briefly as a counselor, and then moved to the Washington, D.C. area when offered a job as a statistician performing safety research. If the position I'd been offered had not been defunded, I might have a very different history from my thirties forward. Fortunately, I was able to change direction. During the period from graduate school on, I worked off and on as an electrician's helper and, eventually, a journeyman, without the benefit of further formal instruction. As a master electrician, of course, I studied and still study furiously, both by myself (aided by various printed materials and web resources) and by attending continuing education activities. Most were provided through the International Assocation of Electrical Inspectors, until that organization's top leaders renamed it and recreated it as a different type of entity, and I left.

At this point, I expect my continuing education activities will be a combination of seminars I teach and my attendance at conferences of the National Fire Protection Association, which publishes so many safety codes.


Metaphysics, Religion.

I don't see a valid basis to answer metaphysical questions; the fact that someone's experience convinced them of this or that does not satisfy me as proof. Argument from first principles about first and last things can be amusing, but it doesn't move me. Although I have religious friends and beloved family, I'm generally distrustful of religion. My stance stems from my unease with dogmatism. Some hard-line atheists insist that I'm an atheist because they deny the validity of agnosticism. Some religious Jews consider me one of them, even a good Jew. Their choice, either way: Die gedanken sind frei. My sweetheart (now wife) eventually convinced me that however secular I am, my Jewish roots are a big part of me. Sometime I refer to myself as a "Jewmanist." Any religion, any religious person, to my mind, is selective. If I call myself a type of Jew, it's one who believes in some of the ethos and doesn't buy into many bits.


Well-married?

Yep. Over the years, I have enjoyed the love of quite a few fine women, and have not more ceased to love any of them. I have been in a monogamous relationship for 33-some years with Mary Jo (Hlavaty) Shapiro. At the beginning of 2005 we turned our commitment into marriage. Diving into love with her was more wonderful than I could have imagined.

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