When I was in graduate school, I was afraid I wouldn’t make it. It was a new experience. And so of course I had to work very hard. I had not been in class for some years. Going back to class was really a new experience, frightening, intimidating. Every night I sat at the typewriter and worked, thought to myself, “Am I going to make this?”
So one day I was in the cafeteria, eating lunch, and I was eating salad, and I bit on an olive pit. Pulled the olive pit and a tooth out of my mouth…right here. The tooth was out. The same afternoon, I played soccer. It was one of the great soccer matches of my life. We played against a very tenacious, Japanese team. And I played the goalie on the German team. The end result was 0-0. I had not let in a single ball. It was a great game, but during the game, I broke my little finger. Now I had a missing tooth and a broken finger. After the game, I went to the doctor, had my finger set in a splint, and I came home to my room. That night, wearing glasses, I dropped something, bent over and in bending over, lost my glasses, they fell to the floor and one of the lenses broke. So, in the same day, I had a missing tooth, a broken finger, and I had broken eyeglasses. And I sat down and cried. I thought this was it. It was not meant to be. But something told me I had to go on. I did. And here I am. I graduated from graduate school.
The part of high school that I’m happy I’m over with is the whole thing. I didn’t really enjoy high school, just because I didn’t really feel like I was getting anything out of it that was going to correlate to my future. I wasn’t on a college prep kind of course. So, for me a high school diploma was meaningless to me. I felt like I needed a trade, and the trade was going to be what would help me to develop after high school, not a high school diploma. That wasn’t going to do anything for me at the time. I had the feeling that it was useless to me and that it wasn’t going to do anything for me at all.
I attended Lincoln High School in Jersey City, NJ. I am so happy I do not have to live through math class with the teacher named Melianie. Oh my goodness! It was so boring. I fell asleep in class, just…just falling asleep, and I would just get the tap from my *shoulder, “Miss Taylor! Miss Taylor! Wake up! You’re not learning anything.” I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re just boring.
Communication Exercises 