Get Off My Chest - Part 1

http://m.tacker.org/blog/830.la-z-boy-redford.html

Now that I am here, safely ensconced in an overstuffed leather comfy chair at Starbucks and the kiddos are in the free childcare service that they have here at Annapolis Mall (Annapolis, MD, USA),  the less-than-a-respectably-adequate-mother-passing-her-children-off-to-strangers feeling I always get from taking advantage of that service is being diluted by warm, reassuring chai.

I have a few things to say to certain people.  Some of them are long though, so I'm going to break it up. 

1.  To my first graduate advisor:  You were right back in 1994.  I was having trouble adjusting.  In some ways you helped at first, in other ways later you exacerbated the problem.  I could have, and subsequently did, although it was years later, benefit from  exercise, counseling, and medication.  I am sorry for having wasted your first year of funding at the U.  If I win the lottery I'll return the funds.  Thank you for the kindnesses you did show me.  I haven't forgotten them.  I thought you might like to know that it wasn't a total loss on my side, I learned a lot of important things about myself in that short Quarter.  It would have been better if it hadn't come to my sitting in the hall in front of the wrong and locked door to what I thought was the counseling center, curled in a ball and silently sobbing until a kind stranger took me to the right place.  Not that you knew about that.

I hope you have found happiness and contentment in your life and I am glad that you've been successful in your career. I still don't feel things were handled appropriately that fall in that questioning my integrity and yelling at me were both shocking and quite offensive. But I forgive you and can certainly see where you were coming from.  I know you were under a lot of stress too.   I hope one day you can forgive me.  I imagine there were ways I could have handled things better.  I was not well toward the end.  I sincerely hope you will have continued success, and all the best in life. 

p.s.   I am now a total NPR junkie, as opposed to when we were driving and I couldn't stand talk radio,  and I still ask my dog if he had a "good doggie-day" remembering how you asked your cat about it's "good kitty-day."