quoththeraven

I audited courses at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and did most of the reading required and occasionally took part in the class discussions, especially in the literature courses. And made several close friends- more professors and students than folks my age.

After thirty-six years of teaching, in an outstanding public high school, I retired in June of 2002. My decision was actually quite sudden. I had originally plan to teach another year but as it appeared that my favorite class was not going to make I decided to leave earlier. Once my decision was finalized and announced I look a very cavalier attitude publically. However, at home, in bed at, night I was panicked out of my life. The vast majority of my life had been centered on the school in which I taught and on the community which it served. I simply couldn’t imagine what I would do with my time.
 
I had always gone to the gym prior to going to school and I continued that routine. There I had time to talk to others and quite quickly made friends and joined their coffee klatch. I finally had the time to read to my heart’s content. I joined the board of directors of my condo. All of a sudden one day, about a year after I retired, I suddenly came to wonder just how I had had time to work considering all the fun things I was doing. Now I am able to do my household chores at my convenience rather than pack them all in a busy weekend. One amazing consequence of my retirement is that I don’t get things, I don’t necessarily enjoy, completed as quickly as I did when I was working – there is always tomorrow.
 
The best advice I can give you is sit back relax and allow your life to evolve. Spend more time doing the things you really enjoy and life will take care of itself. I always tell people who ask me if retirement is a good as I had anticipated -- NO -- it is a thousand time better.

I was a just few years younger when my company offered a buy out. After almost 30 years there, home already paid off for ten years, I decided to take it.
 
Forget the first year, its been almost five years. Like you, sleep late, and a lot of the same etc., but have also taken a few nice trips, and see out of state relatives in the summer.
 
I occasionally think of starting to do something part time, but never get around to it. I'm worried they wouldn't hire me because I would want too much time off.
 
Don't feel any guilt. Sleep till you wake, don't set the alarm if you don't have to. Soon you will begin to think, as other retirees have said, you don't know how you got so much done while you also working.

20 years into my career the company I worked for went under. I was a wreck. The labor market in my area was tight and suddenly flooded with over 1000 newly unemployed individuals. My house was deeply under water so relocating was not an option. I did some consulting and volunteer work for a while as I assessed my situation.
 
One of my greatest fears was that my skill set was limited to the very specialized area of my last position. I decided to take a 90 degree turn and do something completely different. I took classes to develop the skills I needed as well as prove to myself that I had the ability to learn new skills.
I've worked in that industry for the past 14 years but seeing the writing on the wall (online businesses changing that industry) started looking for a new job.
 
It took 4 years and 100s of applications but am now 3 weeks into my 3rd major career.
 
The things that tipped the scales in my favor:
Work ethic
Community engagement
Strong references
Well built resume
 
I strongly urge you to speak with a job transition professional be it a resume consultant or head hunter. They often see the marketable skills the don't occur to you because it was 2nd nature to you. "Just part of the job."
 
Abilities like prioritization, multitasking, logistics, attention to detail, etc are so often automatic as to be overlooked and unrecognized by experienced workers.
 
And, finally, approach your job search as a job. Apply the skills you've developed and your work ethic to it as you did your recent career.
 
It's not easy, believe me I've been there. You'll send out dozens of applications/resumes with little response. It's the nature of the beast. Don't let it get to you too much. Your value will ultimately be recognized.

I strongly suggest doing some vulenter work in assignments that genuinely interest you. You may not get a chance to mention it during an job interview, but more valuable than a follow up letter after the interview. I often asked applicant "how well do you get through interviews like this?" People are usually honest because it is difficult to determine s good answer on the spot.
 
Most important: you will be ok, trust me.

Richard Bolles wrote 2 best selling books on this subject: The Three Boxes of Life and What Color is Your Parachute and @purplekow has neatly distilled their content four paragraphs. The key is to quickly get over the hurdle of self doubt and get on to a clear-eyed assessment of what are the things you have to offer in the marketplace. As @purplekow found, your chief and most important asset may be the different perspective you bring to a new employer’s problems. I too found that to be true. I went into each interview focusing not on my need for a salary but on what could I learn and possibly share with this individual. That level of communication led to a wider network and ultimately an offer.
Two important words of advice:
- Do not neglect a prompt thank you letter after an interview. A well written letter that refers to topics covered shows how well you can think and communicate. It also shows your willingness to join the staff. And if nothing else it can keep your name in active consideration.
- Acknowledge the fact that you are and will be on an emotional rollercoaster for a while. Some days will be filled with high expectation and following will be days of great despair. Learn to live with both.
Now that I’ve reached the safe shore of retirement I’ve found that some of the more interesting moments in my career were in job searches. Then again there’s a reason that to the Chinese “May you live in interesting times!” is a curse rather than a blessing.
Good Luck.

Well Antonio, a few years ago, I sold my medical practice to a hospital with a contracted 2 year employment guarantee. Within those two years the hospital moved the practice twice. They mismanaged each of the moves, making it almost impossible for patients to find the practice. After three years, they c,losed the practice, leaving me unemployed.
I started doing part time teaching at the local hospital and as a result, I ran into colleagues, one of whom advised me of a job. I interviewed and was offered the job in a temporary position with the proviso that they would look to find someone with more longterm potential. I took that job, which was always meant to be a stopgap and after eighteen months, they found the specialist they wanted to run the facility and eventually I was dismissed. (The new person lasted less than a year. Oh well.)
I went back to the teaching position, which is paid but on an as needed basis. I volunteered to do as much time as they could give me, After, doing that for 16 months, I was offered a full time position, which I am considering.
Long story even longer, I put myself out there, I made contacts, I let people know I was interested in full time work and I kept my eyes and ears open. In that time, I applied for several jobs, but despite promising interiews, none resulted in a job offer.
I got better at interviewing and found that I needed to hone those skills which would help me excel at the interview. Also, on several of those job interviews and even at the two I landed, I decided to address the hidden agenda of ageism. I prepared for this and even though it is not legal to directly question about age, I made a point of bringing it up and I discussed why my age, experience, maturity and dependability far outweighed any perceived advantages of youth
So there are jobs out there, You need to convince yourself of your worth before you can convince anyone else. Sit down, figure out why they should hire you and then do not be afraid to tell them. Apply, even if you do not think you are right for a job and use that to hone interviewing skills and development of confidence, Keep your ears open and recruit friends and colleagues to do the same.
Find temporary employment, as the best testament to your ability is to have a job,
Finally, you should consider jobs which are related but not directly in your usual area of expertise.
In medicine, I did private practice. The jobs I got, involved hospital care of patients, teaching, administration and insurance management. Skills which were not my forte but areas of practice to which I brough a different prospective.
Good luck. It may take time but do not get discouraged.

Just what we needed today.
[MEDIA=twitter]1212446293206994945[/MEDIA]

Good doggo and hopping frog toy
[MEDIA=twitter]1210727060974571520[/MEDIA]

Are you effing serious? The stereotyping, queerphobia and misogyny in that statement is just dazzling.
 
(PS As a cis woman, I'm particularly appalled.)

This one's for @mike carey and everyone else struggling with the fires and extreme temperatures in Australia:
[MEDIA=twitter]1210712481708068864[/MEDIA]

Are you effing serious? The stereotyping, queerphobia and misogyny in that statement is just dazzling.
 
(PS As a cis woman, I'm particularly appalled.)

"Over the top" is a matter of taste. You are showing off your "taste," which is culturally determined and subjective.
 
Helping non-binary people accept themselves is helping others even if it doesn't help you.

Are you effing serious? The stereotyping, queerphobia and misogyny in that statement is just dazzling.
 
(PS As a cis woman, I'm particularly appalled.)

I don't have an opinion on how you feel about the person who told you and the person who didn't, but your feelings weren't the point, and you were out of line for bringing them up. You're assuming that the first person asked the other to pass the information along because of the bad blood between you when it could have been for other reasons. You don't actually know.

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Kentridge’s “Wozzeck” paints an industrialized nightmare in Met premiere
Sat Dec 28, 2019 at 5:26 pm
 
By George Grella
 
Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck is a misfit in the canonic repertoire. It is one of the finest opera scores made but is so particular to a style from a specific era—Expressionism—and so downbeat, that it both contravenes the grand opera tradition of the major houses and exists at a distance from the kind of sympathetic personal experience one can safely find in Verdi, Mozart, and the like.
 
Productions, more than the work itself, are responsible for the latter. The weirdness of Expressionism and the main character, a simple-minded soldier driven to insanity and murder, are hard to connect to contemporary audiences, and stagings often come off as taking place behind glass, observed but not felt. The frustration is that Wozzeck has an explosive device at its center, sitting in plain sight.
 
William Kentridge’s new production, which opened Friday at the Metropolitan Opera, has lit the fuse and burst open any artifice or phoniness.
This staging, with the great baritone Peter Mattei in the lead role, presents the ugliness that Berg saw during his WWI experience and translated through his score. Wozzeck is not the usual kind of pleasure; it is beautifully made but not beautiful—honest and sincere about ugly and upsetting things, it shows people in extremis without making their anguish into something musically glorious.
 
Supported by the Met, the Salzburg Festival, the Canadian Opera Company, and Opera Australia, this Wozzeck creates a world that is unstable and chaotic. The program notes specify that Kentridge (who brought new productions of Berg’s Lulu and Shostakovich’s The Nose to the Met) decided to set it in pre-WWI Germany. There is in that milieu an atmosphere of a society coming to its end, of atavistic impulses and decadent meaninglessness coming through the characters. Berg wrote this into the music, and tenor Gerhard Siegel, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, and tenor Christopher Ventris as the Captain, Doctor, and Drum Major respectively brought it to life in their full-bodied performances.
 
But the staging is tied specifically to WWI itself. There are images of maimed soldiers, barbed wire, gas masks, and in Act III a battle map projected over the stage that shows Ypres, site of some of the worst of the war’s industrialized butchery. The set looks like it’s made out of wreckage, and rather than cutting sticks, Wozzeck and Andres (tenor Andrew Staples in his Met debut) venture out into no-man’s land to recover chairs, which litter the stage.
There is the sense that both the world will be destroyed and that, through the debris, it already is destroyed. There was a foreboding feeling from the Captain’s first “Langsam!” Siegel’s piping, unusually graceful singing was one of the expressively destabilizing factors—he had a Colonel Blimpish pomposity and a glassy-eyed madness as he sang about his terror of eternity and the world’s spinning.
Mattei was performing against type in this role. His typical easy command of the stage and the intelligence and pure beauty of his singing at first made it hard to accept him as the simple-minded soldier. Mattei is one of the most self-aware opera artists, and Wozzeck is helpless exactly because he has no self-awareness. But the Act I scene with the Doctor—sung by Van Horn with almost bouncing malevolent vitality—set in a claustrophobic shack, worked brilliantly, Mattei’s sincerity playing off the Doctor’s unhinged pseudo-rationalism.
Wozzeck was a sane man turned crazy by madmen, the madmen were all his social superiors, everything flowing downhill from them. Along with the chairs, a second key detail that Kentridge changed was that Wozzeck isn’t shaving the Captain at the start, instead he rolls a movie projector on stage and starts showing the producer’s trademark animation (projected on a small screen on stage, while large projections encompassed the entire stage). Wozzeck’s movies were the chaos of memories from the war, and one saw the character as shell-shocked, emptied out by those experiences.
Soprano Elsa van den Heever was Marie. Her shining voice was a lovely contrast to those of all the men, especially the accumulated falsetto passages that Berg gave them. She was as empty as Wozzeck, but in a different way—while forces pushed down on the soldier, they pulled Marie into their embrace. That meant Ventris’ peacocking, strutting and sinister Drum Major, and in a larger sense the world of gaudy, hollow uniforms.
In another small but radical departure from the score, Kentridge replaced Wozzeck and Marie’s son with a puppet, one that in no way could be mistaken for a human child even without the puppeteers handling it in full view. At the finale, their son and the children who discover Marie’s body sing from offstage. This change didn’t work—one felt nothing from the puppet, nor from the absence of the human performers. And it made it impossible to feel the crucial bit of human love that Wozzeck and Marie had for the boy.
Still, the overall power of the production was such that the climactic murder was still devastating. Here is where much credit belonged to conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Met Orchestra. Their playing was colorful and sinuous, the conductor handling voluptuous phrasing and changes in tempo, shaping Berg’s great forms to dramatic ends. The performance grew darker and deeper with each passing measure and reached a plateau of tension in the beer garden scene in Act II, which had the grip of a nightmare. Surrounded by a crowd of people with bandages covering their facial wounds, Wozzeck was lost, confused and desperate.
From that point the denouement was intense. Although this was only the 70th performance ever at the Met, this orchestra is expert in Wozzeck, honed in the score by James Levine.Their playing covered the gamut from delicacy to serrated brutality, while all the singing was utterly clear.
At the end, with nothing but death on stage, the projection showed no-man’s land being shelled, the screen eventually covered completely by images of explosions. The last word was not the score’s “hip hop” but the destruction the world brought on itself.
Wozzeck runs through January 22. met

"Feels irrelevant" in the sense that no matter where I go or what I do, I don't have to be "out," because no one takes it for granted than I am straight (the usual default mode). People are sophisticated enough not to assume that because I wear a wedding ring, I must be heterosexual, as happens in most other places when I interact with strangers. In other words, I don't have to assert my homosexuality, because it's a non-issue.

That was a great article, thanks for sharing.
 
Working in healthcare I have seen LGBT clients hide their sexual orientation for a long time and then tell me or someone after a few months of working with them. If they were living with their partner they would refer to them as their friend or roommate. On the other hand though I've seen clients that were very open and their husband or wife would visit daily.
 
The other thing with assisted living facilities although there are some that will say they are LGBT friendly the other residents may not be so friendly...elder bullying is pretty common unfortunately.

Is Palm Springs the only place where the high school marching bands march in the Pride parade? Might be. I noticed parents brought their kids to view the parade. At least when I attended, it was a family friendly event.
 
If not for global warming I'd find a place over there.

Does it really matter who told you? It seems very petty to me to have such a reaction. Just be glad that someone told you.
If it was me I would be laughing about getting a message like that and showing it to everyone but that is just me.

I think you're nuts to be upset about this. Miss Manners would disapprove of your calling him out.

When we've had co-workers pass, we often initiate a call tree to inform those that need to know. Usually the colleague closest to the deceased knows the most people that need to know. Rather than having to call 50 people to inform them of someone's passing, one might call perhaps six to ten people and ask each to call others they know to help reduce the time it takes to get everyone informed.
 
As I look at it, if the "different co-worker" asked someone to call you, and you were called, then the "different co-worker" was being respectful to you. Perhaps calling him out was out of line.

2 illusions: porn tops never have soft dicks, and porn bottoms all have easy-entry butts that are magically pre-lubricated and never get messy.

Flew back to Portland without any problem or muscle pain. Have appointments in January with my multiple doctors. Will discuss with them my pains / weakness after flying. Very curious that I didn't have those problems on my last flights.

I’d love some citations/further reading on this statement.
 
first I’m hearing of it