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Monday, September 3, 2018

Thirty-five Falls Later

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

What's Different:

As I imagine my arrival at the Detroit Airport and then on the University of Michigan campus on Wednesday, I'm thinking of all that's different since Day One of my freshman year there, and am grateful, mostly:
  1. I wrote an Honors thesis, "Women's Damned Desires: A Comparison of Four Twentieth-century American and Israeli Short Stories," and graduated with High Honors as a Comparative Literature major.
  2. Both of my parents (z"l) are gone and my two sisters and I have families of our own.
  3. I'm openly lesbian.
  4. Friends of mine died of AIDS in their 20s.
  5. My career is solid and I've been working full-time for 32 years so far.
  6. Sugar in most forms has been gone from my diet for 28+ years so far and I'm more fit now than I was at 18.
  7. I wrote an unpublished memoir of my life from 0 - 30.
  8. Relative prosperity is no longer a wild fantasy, and my wife Pat & I co-own two cars and a house.
  9. I volunteered to co-lead the Tri-State chapter of our LGBT+ employee group.
  10. I became a people manager.
  11. I chose to leave people management -- but returned to it ultimately -- so that a couple of colleagues and I could start up a business development team in our company dedicated to the LGBT+ B2B market. So far, it has contributed millions of dollars in attributable company revenue. We also enjoyed positive press and being quoted in a Columbia University Press book on LGBT+ marketing. And serving on a TimesTalk panel on being out at work. Although I chose to move to a different role three years in, it's still going successfully 17 years later.
  12. My sisters have children, our niece Zoe and nephews,  Zach, Max and Sam, and I tried to have a child, through nine IUIs, unsuccessfully.
  13. A few childhood friends and I revived our friendship, I held onto others from high school and college and made new friends at work, in grad school, at our shul and locally.
  14. Two great institutions each granted me a degree, one at the Master's level, and my employer kindly sponsored the Master's part-time while I kept working full-time.
  15. Work and vacations have enabled me to become acquainted with many countries, cities and people.
  16. Jerusalem was home for a year, Bangalore, for six months, and Chicago and St. Charles, Illinois, for a combo of nine years.
  17. I volunteered as a co-anchor of a cable access TV program, "The 10% Show," which showcased news makers of the Chicago LGBT+ community and beyond.
  18. With tutoring by my college friend Robyn Weinstein as prep, I chanted the Haftorah for Rosh Hashanah for the LGBT+ congregation we belonged to when we lived in Chicago.
  19. Montclair, New Jersey has been home for 22+ years so far. 
  20. I was working in New York City on September 11th, 2001.
  21. My mom (z"l) & I went to Israel on a Hebrew University global alumni/alumnae trip after the cafeteria was bombed by terrorists and nine people died.
  22. This blog has been my muse for more than a decade.
  23. I became active in all sorts of social media channels, including behind our firewall at work, where I also created a couple of blogs, and became an active agent of social learning.
  24. The University of Michigan chapter of oSTEM flew me in as an alumna to give a talk about my time in Ann Arbor and being out at work in a technology company.
  25. Pat & I adopted two American tabby sister-cats, our feline daughters, from the local animal shelter and named them Phoebe and Toonces.
  26. Pat & I were married legally in my hometown of Stamford, Connecticut.
  27. I became a people manager again and it turned out to be the most compelling of my job roles so far because of the pastoral aspect of it.  
  28. Pat & I visited Israel, including our many relatives, twice so far, and I posted My Israel Autobiography on this blog after our second visit.
  29. MOOCs, or massive open online courses, emerged and I became a spokesperson on our company's point of view on them.
  30. My mom and Pat's mother-in-law (z"l) died in 2014 and Pat's mom and my mother-in-law Bev died eight months later.
  31. Toonces died 13 months after Bev and three weeks after Toonce's death, we adopted Lucy, a giant calico, from the same shelter.
  32. I led the creation of Watson Academy, which was designed, in Watson's early commercial days, to educate the public and our employees on why Watson matters. It won a Brandon-Hall Gold Award for Best Use of Video for Learning.
  33. I was invited to serve on the board of our largest local park's conservancy and am its education leader. We'll host a lecture on New Jersey's hazelnut trees later this month.
  34. Our Chief Learning Officer and I started up the Digital Learning Consortium and invited his peers from 21 other companies and academic institutions to join us.
  35. I designed a course, Global religion and culture, which we're launching soon. It's my hope to encourage my colleagues and myself to teach one another about our religions and cultures for greater inclusion. And I also hope we commercialize it so that other companies can also be more inclusive around the dimensions of religion, atheism and agnosticism.