Giving Thanks

A year ago I had just moved up here and had finally sent in my application to UMass Boston's MBA program (but hadn't yet been accepted!) I had Thanksgiving with a good friend of mine from college. We ate Indian food. We made chocolate chip cookies. We drank a lot of beer. We sang Sondheim. We did not, in fact, dye the cat who lived at the house where my friend was house sitting-we only photoshopped the cat so it looked like we had dyed her.

Now I'm Ms. UMB MBA*. I bitch and moan a lot about school because it is time consuming and it is not always fun. But I feel like I have found my feet there. This is not at all down to anything UMB has done for me. This is due to my having been lucky enough to have good fellow students to work with as team mates.

It is true that my employment situation is far from ideal, but I feel that even the little MBA work I have done has given me more confidence and improved my relations with the friends/work partners I have at my place of employment. I say this hesitantly because they have a tendency to lay off my friends.

But we are all about being thankful now-not negative. I am thankful that when the professor in last night's class tried to launch a program to give us a demo (and we all suggested that perhaps he needed task manager) one of my classmates made me giggle by suggesting "I think it needs a nap."

I gave half of a ten minute presentation last night about a business case. While it wasn't "fun" in that it made me nervous and tied my stomach in knots, I enjoy collaboration and I enjoy feeling that we did a good job.

My sister drove her three children up to Massachusetts this summer so that they could hunt for hermit crabs on the beaches she and I had gone to as children and so they could see their Tia Cantabridgienne. My mom came along as well to help child herd. It was exhausting, but I'm awfully glad they did it.

My sister has also gotten a smartphone and joined facebook. So I can see pictures of her kids online or she can MMS them to me. Also, this makes it easier for us to share snarky commentary.

And of course, obviously there are my friends. Two of them got married this year, which gave me the opportunity to reconnect with old college friends and meet some of my facebook friends in meat-space (and their dogs!). I haven't seen enough of my friends these past few months because I am up to my eyeballs in MBA stuff, but they are still there (I'll see some of them tomorrow) and they are the duct tape that keeps me together. It's not just that they will lend me their iphones or advise me on editing problems--it's also that they will ask my advice on computer problems or trust me to water their plants and they will make me laugh until my tummy hurts.




*Well no, not really. After this term I'll have a whopping four courses under my belt and two that were waived out of eighteen total. I still have very little clue as to how the College of Management functions and I haven't talked to the IS department about declaring a specialty. But I can find classes in two buildings and I've started to get an idea about ..how to think about the concepts presented and how to explain them to professors and my employer as well as what to expect from a class workload-wise. Or to put it another way, arriving on campus no longer fills me with dread of the unknowable.