W.W.Y.D? (What would Yale do?)

I’m angry right now. Yes, whole wide world, I’m going to admit that.  Angry and fired up.

Why?  I’ll explain in a minute.

Yesterday I was walking around the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.  I was there waiting to pick someone up from an appointment.  It was a nice fall day and students, purportedly some of the the best and brightest in the world, walked and wheeled around me.  The streets are for the most part clean, the architecture comes from old Europe replicated here.  I enjoyed it yet my mind was elsewhere.

The night before I had received an email with a scanned attachment that showed red and a lot of cross outs and scribble.  Underneath all of that was the resume I had put together for a business class for a client of mine.  My client has been self-employed for the past 10 years after being laid off and has been slowly working their way through classes for a college degree.  It has not been easy for them.

The professor, and later another gentleman in career services, took off her self-employment and put her down as a “professional” student.  They left them with a 10 year gap.   Why?  I was yelling at the computer, because in the eyes of these professional academics self-employment is a crime? They took away their databases that she used for classes and that transfer over to the real world and left them with general “database management”.  There were a few other things as well, including not giving hard numbers and adding in “fluff” that anyone can add in.  Good customer service?  Even drug dealers can say that.  Show your hard numbers.  They took those out and left in the good customer service.

As I walked around Yale I know Yale would never leave their students or graduates with a resume that I was reading.  They would have every little specific thing the student has ever done, every computer program, every database, every class, every internship, and they would surely play up the fact that this person is self-sufficient, self-employed, and gets out there and hustles for their living.

I’m still furious thinking about this.  I can only imagine how many other students this has happened to over the years and now feel down and out, frustrated, upset, and wonder why they can’t find work.  Yale would never do this to their students, why are other schools allowed ot make a mockery of their students’ lives?

 

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The dogs are…….

Dear Molly Ivins,

I wish you were still alive.  I would love to hear your commentary about the country today.  Yet maybe you are in heaven banging out on your computer in frustration and only the saints are reading what you have to say.

It’s one thing to have lived through a period and another to read your take on this same time in US history.  Thank you for the laughs and the honest truth about many of the topics that this country battles about everyday.  Thank you for raking everyone over the coals equally.

I can’t wait to read more of your writings.

Sincerely,

Angela

 

Glory Road Part#2

I’m about half way through Glory Road.  Yes, I’m one of these people who may be reading a book or two or four at the same time.  I’m also working my way through The Wolf of Wall Street.

Talk about a contrast of character.

 

Reading “Glory Road”

It’s amazing what seems to pop into your life or just be sitting there when another situation presents itself.

I found Glory Road this past weekend.  I started reading it to a family member this week.  I wrote down one of my goals is to have the best year for a school year program I work in.  A little while later I open my email and find it’s being insinuated that I don’t create a “warm and nurturing” environment and I’m basically a monster and 6 people are copied.  So, guess what?  Now a few thousand people can read about it.

I saw Glory Road Super Bowl Sunday the year it came out or just following as it was still in the theaters.  I usually scoff at Disney as I find they take stories of great achievements and oversimplify them and/ or dumb them down.  My significant other wanted to see the movie as they love the movie Miracle.  I enjoyed it and it was a feel good.  I can sympathize of being in plenty of situations where doing the unpopular thing is frowned upon and you are ostracized.  Yet usually I don’t find myself in the position of coming out on top.  I find I’m “tolerated”.  I have yet to find Disney making a movie about me.  Maybe one of my not-so-exciting EMS shifts someday?  Or the soccer team I coached years ago when a coach quit last minute?

Like Coach Haskins, I don’t take any crap from people.  I’m only up to the third chapter and I wish I had known him.  People love the story, love what he did, then turn around and won’t tolerate people in their own midst who do the same thing.  Or is it because my organs are different?

So right now instead of working on my goals and my grit and my business, I’m writing this.

Why?  Because if you want to “succeed”, you want your child, spouse, whoever, to “succeed”, whatever that word means to you, it takes getting down in the dirt and working at “it”, whatever “it” is.  It means dragging your child into situations they may not like.  It means dragging yourself into situations you may not like.  It means dealing with new people and situations.  It means having those difficult conversations and not just emailing people before pulling someone out of a class just “because”.  It means people are going to complain about you, be jealous of you, it means saying “no”.  No one held my hand and chaperoned me around because some therapist recommended it.  I grew up with nuns yelling at me, a jerk for a gym teacher who did more than his share of humiliating me, yet I was RESPONSIBLE.  I did what I had to do.

I have clients who sit and shake the entire time I’m working with them because they are anxious.  Yet they keep coming because I’m going to help them get through their “it”.  I have clients who it took weeks before they agreed to do what I asked them to do.

They know they have to do this.  They have to get to their “it”.

Do I feel sorry for people?  Yes.  Do I have sympathy and empathy?  Yes.  However, I’m not going to baby-talk people or the situation.  The teenager I recently had as a patient probably didn’t want any goo-gooing or ga-gaaing as they had a gallon of blood pouring out of their body.

Coach Haskins, I have much more respect for you now and I wish I could talk with you, wherever you are now.  I wonder what you would say.  I wish you could talk to some of the people I know.

A Letter to Anu Partanen

Dear Anu,

I really wasn’t sure what I was getting into when I picked up your book The Nordic Theory of Everything.  Yet once I got started, I couldn’t put it down.  Then I got to the end and my reaction was: why did you stay?  Love?  Wouldn’t you both be better off if you followed the Nordic System of Love?

Some days I would give up everything to have unquestioned access to healthcare and free college and a system that values education and learning.

Yesterday a friend told me that a 10 year-old family member wants to kill themselves after being bullied for an entire school year by a teacher.  The teacher is not being disciplined.  Would this happen in Norway or are teachers as strongly vetted as they here in the US?  You mention about teachers not being able to teach but not about how they treat their students.

Recently I had to pay $125 in order to get a prescription for a $5 bottle of amoxicillin.  And I had to tell the doctor what I had.  I find this is the experience of most people here in the US.  They have to go in prepared and already done their research when talking to a doctor.  Does this happen in Norway?

In college the choice was pay for college or have health insurance.  I was furious when I received the insurance company packets and they said because I’m a woman, my premiums were four times that as a man the same age as myself.  (Never mind that male teenagers and young adults pay higher car insurance but I don’t think the insurance would have been as high as those premiums I was quoted.  My car insurance was a drop in the bucket compared to the health insurance.)  All of those packets went into the recycling.

I was also working full-time while going to college and my employer paid me out of three separate accounts so that it would look like I was part-time and they didn’t have ot give me benefits. And these were local politicians.

Speaking of politicians, they use the word “reform” for healthcare here in the US.  Does this strike you as strange or weird?  They should turn away the lobbyists and bling and set limits on drug costs and a whole other host of items.  Yes, I know equipment costs money but sometimes….Yet all they do is talk, talk, talk and no action.  Well, usually it consists of bucking and fighting whatever is being presented and then knocking it out when new people are elected.  Price setting in the current way of being and thinking would never work here out of pure greed.

Have a job after many months after having a baby?  What concept is that?  I know people who have gone back to work 4 days after giving birth.  Again, large corporations cry and complain, yet as you point out, it’s a boon for new entrants into the workforce.  Just a huge “WOW” is all I can say.  Even if most women don’t express it directly, I’m sure they would give anything to have this after having  a baby.  And money to boot?  I’d work three jobs to get that money back when I need it.

Your work dredged up a lot of not-so-pleasant memories and reactions, my own personal reactions, mainly being upset about how this system is available and it works yet out of greed people and corporations claw at it and fight it every chance they get.

People here in the U.S. are split in different directions regarding healthcare.  However, I’m seeing more and more people on social media venting their frustrations and people are wiling to have “socialized” medicine because our system of care sucks and as one woman pointed out, due to the lack of specialists, she already has to wait six months for an appointment anyway.  I’m glad to see that you brought up medical bankruptcy.  One woman I know, and her husband died, is now $1 million in debt for his cancer treatments and she has small children.   I can’t imagine.  This is another “taboo” topic.  Why?  Why can’t we have conversations about this and make changes?  Nobody wants to talk about it.  Is it the stigma that going through bankruptcy means that you have failed?

One item you referred to but didn’t mention is that going on individual State benefits opens the door to the individual State to freeze your assets and/or take the money from your estate before your heirs receive it.  Does this happen in Norway?  I’ve heard stories of families in probate court have a State official show up at the probate hearing and submit the documentation for the State to take the amount in benefits that the person used for food stamps et al. while they were alive.  The State gets the money first and then the family can split the rest.  Some people don’t know this and I know some people just don’t care.

I don’t know how it is in New York.

I’m glad you wrote this book and I hope everything is working out for you here.

Sincerely,

Angela

 

 

 

 

Books to Read

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/08/15/inspired-by-crazy-rich-asians?utm_source=eNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NYPLTopPicks201809&utm_campaign=NYPLTopPicks

To Speak of Woe

via To Speak of Woe