5 Pieces of Advice I Never Took

Through the years, many people were generous with their advice. Even as an adult I seem to inspire the latent parent in some people. Here is a sample of advice I politely, in most cases, declined to follow.

1. Marry an Irish girl (my father when I was 12) — I don’t know if this was bad advice or good advice or where my mercurial father got this idea, and it’s not that I didn’t meet a few Irish girls I might have married, it’s just that …. well, they have to agree, and well ….. they didn’t.

2. Take advantage of your status as a minority in this career field (three different professors when I was studying education)- Thank you so much but I’m not an ethnic minority. I’m often identified as one, which I take as a high compliment, but I’m Russian and Middle Eastern, which counts as white in the current census. I did come from a mixed religion family, and later chose a third one for myself. If the Obama suggestion about the way the census question should have been asked was in place, I could have selected Middle Eastern, and then I would no longer be white, and the college professors would be vindicated, retroactively. But Trump didn’t allow all the true descriptors that really say who we are.