Letter to My Mentor

 Dear Mentor Who Won’t Talk to Me Anymore:

I don’t know why you won’t talk to me.

Really, it’s probably none of my business.

But it’s kind of humiliating, when you used to be my biggest cheerleader (I know that was 30 years ago ) when I leave you cheerful, confident messages about my current prospects in your voicemail and you don’t return the call.

Or the Email.  Or the text.

I’m in a bit of a fix because I have a good job prospect, one that will be less stressful and make it less likely that I pass out, be hospitalised with an unknown stress influenced illness, and see double out of lack of sleep.  Anyway the manager of this facility says they want references right away.  I can ask other people for references, but I’m not convinced you hate me yet.  Maybe you feel bad because when you told me to stay at my job in 2011, they kept me in the dungeon, in various torturous devices, demanding to know what my patients’ addresses were and what the diagnostic code for a patient I’d seen a month ago was.  Maybe it’s because you offered me a job and gave it to someone else.

Regardless, Mentor, I still feel like I must get in touch with you some way.  If you don’t like me anymore that’s fine (see “none of my business “above) , I likely will not want to use you as a reference, but I would like to know.  If it turns out this was only a big misunderstanding, and of COURSE you’ll  happily be a reference, so much the better.

Yet telephone, voicemail, emails and texts have failed to elicit your response, Mentor, so I have compiled some possible alternate ways to reach you that will be more successful (maybe).

I could pretend to be a window washer and wave my arms furiously when you come to the window.   This idea suffers from the fact that you have no windows in your office.  I’m working on getting  a contact in the women’s hospital, which has a lot of windows, to try and sell you one.

I could mail myself to you in a large box.

I could send you and your wife free tickets for a Caribbean yacht cruise.  When you come aboard no and get settled for the trip…guess who the captain turns out to be ?  (No, not Capn. Quigg; it’s yours truly…maybe I shouldn’t use you as a reference!)

I can come parachuting through the glass ceiling between the ER and the Psych ER.

Candygram!

What about a singing telegram? You know, I come in singing “I’m so wild about my Mentor, he’s just wild about meeeeeeeee…”

Land shark! No, too scary.

The possibilities are endless.  Still, I just wish you’d give me a reference.

Referently, 

K. McAshton, LMSW, brilliant clinician with a past checkered with mistakes

At the Dentist

Today I went to the dentist to get a filling.  My regular dentist, who owned the dental clinic, retired earlier this year and I have had a string of dentists since then working on my rather poor teeth.  This one was named Dr. Yuri.  I recognized this as sounding Russian, so I asked him if he was Russian.  "No," he said, "Ukrainian."  I told him I was studying Russian. "That's great.  It's a wonderful language." During this snippet of conversation, Dr. Yuri was giving me a shot of local anesthesia and I was getting goofy from nitrous oxide.  "Yeah, it's really hard though.  I learned pronunciation and spelling right away---my cursive is great.  But my grammar...it's really slow going.""Why did you want to learn Russian?'  "Well, you know, I'm a cold war kid [I doubt he is, since he didn't have a gray hair on his head], and I always was curious about the culture, but we could never find out about the culture, and then I got to know a bunch of Soviets who emigrated here..."

"Could you open your mouth for me?"  I did, as wide as I could.  "Hmmm," he said, "I think you're going to need to use a block,"  which turned out to be a large piece of rubber that went in my mouth on the opposite side of my jaw than the one on which he was working. Now my mouth was fixed in an incredibly wide open state.

"Is that ok?" he asked.

I answered "Ah-hah..." which is what "Mmm-hmm" sounds like if your mouth is stretched as wide as an alligator's.  And then he started to work.  This is what I imagine he was thinking:

On the Recording of “How Do You Do”

https://youtu.be/KAGAf85613A

The scene:  A 70s era recording studio in the 70s.  In Amsterdam.  Their manager watches in as they start to perform their first take.

MOUTH AND MACNEAL:  “🎤🎧📇🎵💲How do you do, Uh Huh/ I thought why not, na na na na  Just me and you and then we can na na na na...

MANAGER:  (waves to the producer to stop). (To M&M: ). What the hell is this, this na na na business??

MOUTH OR MACNEAL:  Well, that’s as far as we got. 

 MACNEAL OR MOUTH:  It’s hard to come up with good English. 

MANAGER:  Do you have a Dutch version?  

MOUTH OR MACNEAL:  It HAS to be in English.  We won’t make the US charts otherwise.

MANAGER, (sarcastically). Well Ok John Lennon.  But the only chart you’re gonna make with those lyrics is “Sub-par Bands Who Aren’t  American.”

MOUTH AND MACNEAL(murmuring to each other in Dutch, trying to sing a little bit and making half hearted effort to fill chorus with real words.)

MANAGER: Well, I guess you’re gonna have to do it your way.  We don’t have time to write a new song.

MOUTH AND MACNEAL:  (Records song and releases it.  Song makes it to the American charts.  Young Boomerlets like me march around together in Girl Scout Canps singing chorus.)

The Individual-crushing Machine of Identity Politcs.

Allow my to introduce myself.  My name is Kelly. It is true that in the year of my birth, there were many births of people named Kelly.  But I didn't really have anything in common with those Kellys because I was this Kelly, the only one I know of  who was born at 11:50 a.m. on August 7, 1962, at St. Mary's hospital in Livonia, Michigan.

Things I think about when I wonder why Jesus is waiting so long to come back (which is a lot these days)

How the Americans Really Should Have Ended

(Safe house.  Claudia is meeting with Elizabeth and Phillip)

Attender les Americains

It's Saturday.  More pointedly, it's Saturday, the 11^th of March.  If you are reading this post, you no doubt are seeking the first Keblog on the fifth season of The Americans, the show that makes you wonder if your kid's best friend's mom could be a Putin plant.

But I'm sorry, minions.  There is no blog here about the first Americans of the season, which was on on March 7.  First of all, I DVRd it on the 7^th because I work midnights and I sleep through its time slot.  No worries, my mom & I planned on watching it together the next day anyway. 

Then,  the next morning I got an Emergency Weather Alert in my email.  The news?  It's gonna be windy.

Windy?  I thought.  They're warning us about wind?

Don't worry, they're not leaders anyway. They're your employees.

Now that the Apocalypse has come and gone and the guy who is by all accounts the scariest contender for the US presidency...