“When I’m tired and thinking cold
I hide in my music, forget the day
And dream of a girl I used to know
I closed my eyes and she slipped away
She slipped away”
@SSteve we have several degrees online that transfer to our sister school that has online programs too. We are regionally accredited and are a 2 yr state school (so we’re not a diploma mill). I have a degree from here and so does my husband. My parents taught here from 1972-83 (my dad) and 1988-2016 (my mom). If you’re interested, feel free to email or call me. i would be more than happy to help you get a degree!
@Kidsandliz@ConAndLibrarian Thank you all for your kind encouragement. At the moment I have a great software development job where they didn’t care that I don’t have a diploma. But when I was looking for a job back in 2005-2008 there were a lot of places that wouldn’t even accept my application without a degree. And these were companies where I knew a lot of the employees and was close friends with some. In 2008 I got a job at a private physics research lab. That fizzled out over the years and right when it ended in 2016 I got the job I have now.
What’s funny is that I got both jobs because I took a calculus class at the local community college when I turned 40 just to make sure my brain still worked. I ended up taking two semesters and my wife and I became great friends with the instructor. After our 2nd semester final, she brought the class (all six of us) to the physics lab to talk to people who actually used calculus in their job. A couple years later, my wife saw a job posting from that company in the local paper and I ended up getting the job. Fast forward eight years when the company was shutting down and another company called the instructor to see if she had any students she’d recommend as a consultant for a programming project. The next day she and I went down and talked to them and I was a contractor two weeks later. Five months after that I was a full time employee.
That’s a long way to say that not having a degree isn’t hurting me at the moment. The nearest school that grants a bachelor’s degree (CSU Sacramento) is over an hour away, but I’ve never really looked into getting an online degree. I’ll send a whisper message to you, @ivannabc and see what happens.
@SSteve have you completed your general ed yet? Guessing where you might live, Sierra College has great online courses. If you do have additional questions, I am happy to help, I have been employed in the community college system for almost ten years, and over the course of the last four years earned three A.A’s and will have my B.S. completed in 5 weeks.
People who say they live without regrets either have terrible memories or incredibly low expectations.
I regret not playing sports in my mid to late 20s. It was something I always loved, and I let life get in the way. I started playing again in my early 30s and am having even more fun that before. I’ll always wonder what I could have done in my physical prime.
@Kabn everyone has things that they would rather had not happened. I would say i have no regrets, but it’s just because i know i can’t change the past so i don’t think about it or worry about it. I feel like regrets imply i ever think about or care about bad things in the past. I just don’t.
@Kabn In my own vocabulary, regret is more something that still bothers you than something that you would be capable of remembering if prompted. Maybe those people just don’t carry those things around.
@evilstan60 Well, the word “regret,” when used as a noun (as in “I don’t have any regrets”), doesn’t require you have any extended rumination on the transgression/omission/whatever. It just requires wishing you would have done it differently:
noun
a sense of loss, disappointment, dissatisfaction, etc.
a feeling of sorrow or remorse for a fault, act, loss, disappointment, etc.
Note neither specifies an ongoing sense or feeling; it just has to be once. While people may attach their own personal requirements to it, the actual definition is pretty simple, only requiring dissatisfaction with one decision or action one time. And, obviously, everyone qualifies for that.
Honestly, it’s just one of those sayings I hear people say flippantly all the time that bothers me because they will have just finished talking about how they wished they worked out more or took a different job or whatever.
regret
noun
Definition of regret
1 : sorrow aroused by circumstances beyond one’s control or power to repair
2 a : an expression of distressing emotion (such as sorrow)
b regrets plural : a note politely declining an invitation
Oxford English dictionary:
NOUN
mass noun
1A feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over an occurrence or something that one has done or failed to do.
Both of those definitions of the noun form link the past action to the present. The word is based on a present feeling based on a past event whether it is a noun or a verb.
But rather than taking a dictionarian’s attempt to summarize the meaning of a word in one or two sentences, think about how it’s used. If there are no present implications to regrets, why can you stop regretting something? Why does the sentence “I used to regret X until Y” make sense?
If you have no present emotion toward a past event, then you can say you don’t regret it, even if it was a bad thing that would have been better had it not happened.
I do, however, agree that the phrase “no regrets” is so often used by assholes that are using the phrase to justify their future actions that I hate the phrase. But that doesn’t change the meaning of the word. Just a distaste for the phrase.
@evilstan60 Again, none of the definitions listed require you to feel sorrow or distress continuously, which seems to be the crux of your point. It only needs to be the current latent association. Emotional attachments don’t disappear just because you’re not actively thinking about them. A guy may go a decade without thinking about the girl he never asked to prom, but if something reminds him of her, he still regrets not asking. Unless something changes to make him feel something positive the next time he thinks of it, that’s regret.
Recollection is the trigger, and the associated emotions (including regret) are the response. Saying it’s not regret because you don’t feel anything about it in the immediate present would also mean the logical contra: you couldn’t claim you’re happy about any event or decision in your past because you’re not actively thinking happy thoughts about it right now. Which is silly.
I don’t buy the claim that people don’t have any emotional associations with major decisions they’ve made; you’re either at least somewhat happy you made a good choice or at least somewhat sad you could have done better. Of course, the more mundane the decision, the weaker the emotional memory probably is.
You can easily stop regretting something: all it takes is a change in either the information you have about the event or your viewpoint of the circumstances. You can find out your coworker was actively trying to get you fired, causing you to stop feeling bad for leaving them with a lot of work when you quit. You can learn later that the house for which you didn’t submit an offer in time actually has a crumbling foundation. You can form a more realistic view of self and realize actions you thought were selfish were actually you asserting yourself in a healthy way. The examples are endless.
If a person says they truly have no regrets, they are technically saying there’s no action or decision in their past that they would, upon reflection, like to change in any way. Just because a statement becomes cliche doesn’t make it correct, either grammatically or logically (See: “I could care less”). Again, bad memory or low bar.
Romantic mistakes have pretty much ruined my life. But I have another that I remember and ask for forgiveness every time I pass the street corner where I saw three boys laughing after overturning the wheelchair of a young man who was severely disabled. It was before the days of a phone in every pocket, rush hour at one of the busiest intersections. I wanted to go do something, stop them even if it was three against me, wait for police, but I didn’t because I couldnt move out of line of traffic. I will regret this until the day I die.
I have regrets for not being kinder, and for being too kind to people who don’t deserve it. My biggest regret though is probably my first marriage. My goal in life had always been to marry in my early twenties and start having kids relatively young because I wanted to be able to be active with them, if that makes sense. I had terrible taste in guys though and after a string of bad relationships, I settled badly with a guy who was willing to commit (or so I thought). I ended up marrying when I was 21 and ended up dropping out of college shortly afterward for related reasons. It was incredibly stupid. I got two wonderful kids out of that marriage; I wouldn’t change that for the world, and I’m in a good place now, but honestly, I destroyed my life and any chance of ever being anything other than a housewife now. There’s so much that I didn’t get to do and experience in life because I was in such a rush to marry and have kids.
Not picking a clever username so I can answer this stuff honestly… can I change it without losing my history (366 click streak …) or my imminent FYB box???
I guess my biggest regrets are because of my ex, but more because I no longer have my horse.
Several things happened because of the ex. I got in a car accident visiting him because he didn’t drive. It messed up my plans for college and I lost my ambition.
When I bought my horse, I lived in a place where I could afford it. He broke it off with me shortly after we were married and moved an hour north. I stupidly moved to be with him, took a demotion at my job and the only places where I could keep my horse were ridiculously expensive. I ended up working my full time job, a part time job similar to what I was doing, and then I worked at the barn to reduce the payment for my horse. My ex worked part time and kept quitting when things didn’t go his way. When he was working, he didn’t even pay half the rent and no utilities. I was an idiot to stay after all the other mess he put me through.
When my dad was dying, I was so overwhelmed with all the work and I barely ever rode my horse anymore. I gave him up.
I regret that I didn’t keep him until his old age because he had been abandoned once already. He used to jump Grand Prix and do Dressage. He was super sweet. I would never be able to afford a horse as well trained as him and as well mannered. He was ideal for me. A stocky warmblood that I didn’t feel gigantic on top of. Being a taller lady, most horses were too thin or too short, or a combination of both. I remember riding one horse and my legs came down to it’s knees. It was pretty funny. With my boy, I never had that problem. I miss him a lot.
I don’t know that it’s a regret, because I have an amazing life now, but I could have done things a bit differently when I was 18 and I wonder how my life would be now.
I applied and was accepted to three colleges. One offered me a full ride, one a scholarship, and the third accepted me but with no scholarship.
My parents didn’t have a lot of money and I didn’t want paying for college to be a burden. Plus, the full ride college was only an hour away, and at the time I was stuck on a girl who was younger than me so staying close seemed ideal. (By the time I got out of high school, we weren’t even speaking anymore.) So I picked the full ride at a passable engineering school close to home.
That third college was MIT, which would have set me on a totally different path than the one I’m on now. The public school here was a little dumbed down, so I lost some of my academic drive and eventually just dropped out of engineering completely and got a degree in CIS just to GTFO of college.
I think about it sometimes, but, again, I wouldn’t say I regret it.
@djslack Yeah I made that kind of mistake with my PhD program. The path never taken… I wonder sometimes what it would have been like…Turned down UCLA (at the time one of the top 10 programs in the country for a PhD in my area) due to money which also included it being so expensively far from my father who was slowly dying and I wanted to be able to see him more often than maybe once a year. My career trajectory would have been really different too. The school I finally went to (I had 4 choices) I got my research awards and did my dissertation (which got an award) despite the faculty, not with their help. I wonder what it would have been like graduating from a top school with that record too. I do know that when I was done I would have had a job where I was valued for who I was rather than being dumped for having 2 cancers in one year (this is on top of the one I had had 7 years prior as a grad student which slowed me down and increased my student debt load substantially).
Now I am stuck with a gap in my vitae that is hard to explain because when you use the C word (and treatment nearly killed my bone marrow which took a while to recover enough from that I had any energy not to mention a really troubled kid whom I adopted when she was 10 that had I moved she might not have finished high school as it takes schools about 18 months to get it together with IEP’s and actually give the kid the help they need) some people don’t want you and when you don’t (and just say family issues now resolved or something like that) they wonder what you are hiding. Sigh. PS open to suggestions on how to word that several year gap in my vitae where I didn’t work for a while and then worked as an online adjunct for whomever would hire me, unfortunately including some for profits (which also is a career killer).
Most of my biggest regrets would not be for public consumption but… I do regret not telling my husband that I love him the day before he died. I had a come apart over that a few months later.
@lseeber I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that happened with you and your husband, but…
A few months back, my Dad went into the hospital for a procedure because he was in some pain. Nobody called to tell me what was up. He’d been in for a few days, and then he called me one night, sounded OK, and said he was going to have a minor surgery in the morning. He said he liked the surgeon, everything should be OK, etc. I was a little taken aback that I hadn’t heard anything about it until then, but just figured he didn’t want to make a big deal about it.
Talked to his wife the next day. She called me, I think. I can’t remember why I didn’t call him. I think he’d said he’d call me the day after, or something. In any case, the procedure had gone great, he was resting, maybe talking to him the next day would fine,
Well, as you might guess, he suddenly got much worse the following morning and died that afternoon. So the last time i talked to him was just a kind of casual conversation, no big deal. I always was in the habit of telling him I loved him, so I’m pretty sure I did that time, too. But what bothers me more is that our relationship was so arm’s length. He didn’t want to bother me, I never wanted to bother him. This was mostly his decision…I’m not that way with a lot of my other friends and family…or less so than I was with him, anyway. And it just seems dumb to me now.
Whenever I have regrets, I try to learn something from it. But I still have a hard time being as affectionate as I’d like to be with my friends and family who are “shy” or reserved. I don’t know how to fix it, but at least it’s on a back burner in my mind, percolating, maybe I’ll figure it out someday.
@lseeber@UncleVinny I didn’t get home in time for when my dad died either. He was alive when I got on the plane and had died prior to when I landed. I should have just walked out of finals week despite the threat to fire me as a grad assistant if I did that. Instead I made sure my classes were covered before I left rather than covering them from a distance. That is a regret I will always have too. It’s hard. Really hard to come to terms with things like that. I also regret not stopping to see my brother on prior to leaving my mom’s going to a new job. I said to my mom, “I am in a hurry I will see him next time”. There was no next time. He was murdered by his wife 8 days later. We can’t foresee these things but it is sure hard to stop beating ourselves up about them anyway. Don’t be too hard your yourselves…
@Kidsandliz@UncleVinny Well, in my situation, he died with his face in my hands. My last words to him were… Think on Jesus Jim…think on Jesus (he was a new Christian, something he detested most of his life but was quite happy with his decision) and I don’t regret that at all. Not one bit. But, the day prior he was frustrating me because I could tell he wasn’t doing so good and he wouldn’t go to an ER and so, I was trying to be patient with him but was failing some in that.
But after he passed I wished I had told him that because I hadn’t said it in a long time. Although he was one to say that he knew I loved him and I told him that everytime I did something for him. So, he knew anyway. It’s not a regret that eats me up. It’s just more recent and something at this point in time that I would like to be able to remedy but cannot.
Honestly, the both of you seem to have more painful type situations than I do.
His death was quite unexpected (as you both are too familiar with) but, I can’t say as far as deaths go that it was a bad death. If you can understand that.
@Kidsandliz@lseeber@UncleVinny please don’t compare what you went through to what someone else went through if it makes you feel as tho your pain is small compared to theirs. You are allowed to feel how you feel when experiencing trauma and that whole “what they went through is worse” business trivializes the pain you’re experiencing. Stubbing a toe vs losing a finger is one thing, but ya’ll are talking about truly painful, traumatic life changing events.
Forgetting my wallet at the gas station, losing it, along with my debit card which I had to cancel not realizing that it was the very day before my VMP membership renewed thus I lost VMP :c
@RiotDemon@uninflammable support can only help if you write in. I don’t know if we’ll change this one, since the new Universal Membership rolled out, but you don’t know unless you ask.
Romantic missteps
Being a VMP on watch day.
NO REGERTS. But also see the thread I just made. I don’t want to admit it to myself, but it may or may not be a regret…
Switching from iPhone to Android. Yeah, I said it.
@mjc94ma
Anything specific?
“When I’m tired and thinking cold
I hide in my music, forget the day
And dream of a girl I used to know
I closed my eyes and she slipped away
She slipped away”
Choosing the wrong option in this poll.
That girl I didn’t bang in Belgium
@mfladd forgot your wallet?
@evilstan60 Now that was funny
Not knowing the winning lottery number until after the drawing.
@phendrick
You’ve never asked me to give them to you BEFORE the drawing though.
@PlacidPenguin - So, next Wednesday’s, please…
@aetris @PlacidPenguin Yes I’d like that too. I’ll share. I don’t need a zillion million. A lot less millions will do.
Hmmm, I notice there’s nothing in the poll about buying a Martian Smartwatch…
@aetris Or candy corn, speaker dock-knives, …
@aetris @rtjhnstn that is what the unofficial mehrican exchange is for… to unload regrets and be rid of them.
Missing 2 Meh button clicks since the site was started (including day 0).
I believe one was a ghost click that was stolen and the other was a 12:01 realization.
Side note, at 21:50 last night (or so) I realized I hadn’t clicked yet and almost went to sleep, YIKES!
Not finishing college.
@SSteve i work at a college. It’s never too late. Ever.
@ivannabc @SSteve Agreed.
@ivannabc @SSteve I’d agree too (also am a college prof)
@SSteve we have several degrees online that transfer to our sister school that has online programs too. We are regionally accredited and are a 2 yr state school (so we’re not a diploma mill). I have a degree from here and so does my husband. My parents taught here from 1972-83 (my dad) and 1988-2016 (my mom). If you’re interested, feel free to email or call me. i would be more than happy to help you get a degree!
@Kidsandliz @ConAndLibrarian Thank you all for your kind encouragement. At the moment I have a great software development job where they didn’t care that I don’t have a diploma. But when I was looking for a job back in 2005-2008 there were a lot of places that wouldn’t even accept my application without a degree. And these were companies where I knew a lot of the employees and was close friends with some. In 2008 I got a job at a private physics research lab. That fizzled out over the years and right when it ended in 2016 I got the job I have now.
What’s funny is that I got both jobs because I took a calculus class at the local community college when I turned 40 just to make sure my brain still worked. I ended up taking two semesters and my wife and I became great friends with the instructor. After our 2nd semester final, she brought the class (all six of us) to the physics lab to talk to people who actually used calculus in their job. A couple years later, my wife saw a job posting from that company in the local paper and I ended up getting the job. Fast forward eight years when the company was shutting down and another company called the instructor to see if she had any students she’d recommend as a consultant for a programming project. The next day she and I went down and talked to them and I was a contractor two weeks later. Five months after that I was a full time employee.
That’s a long way to say that not having a degree isn’t hurting me at the moment. The nearest school that grants a bachelor’s degree (CSU Sacramento) is over an hour away, but I’ve never really looked into getting an online degree. I’ll send a whisper message to you, @ivannabc and see what happens.
@SSteve have you completed your general ed yet? Guessing where you might live, Sierra College has great online courses. If you do have additional questions, I am happy to help, I have been employed in the community college system for almost ten years, and over the course of the last four years earned three A.A’s and will have my B.S. completed in 5 weeks.
Not taking Mattress Mac up on his wager last year…
When I was in 8th grade I was a total bitch to this girl who had a clef palette and I still feel awful about it…mean girls suck
@candiedisilvio1 i have some mean girl regrets as well. I would bet the majority of us do if we ever matured out of middle school mentality
People who say they live without regrets either have terrible memories or incredibly low expectations.
I regret not playing sports in my mid to late 20s. It was something I always loved, and I let life get in the way. I started playing again in my early 30s and am having even more fun that before. I’ll always wonder what I could have done in my physical prime.
@Kabn everyone has things that they would rather had not happened. I would say i have no regrets, but it’s just because i know i can’t change the past so i don’t think about it or worry about it. I feel like regrets imply i ever think about or care about bad things in the past. I just don’t.
@Kabn In my own vocabulary, regret is more something that still bothers you than something that you would be capable of remembering if prompted. Maybe those people just don’t carry those things around.
@evilstan60 Well, the word “regret,” when used as a noun (as in “I don’t have any regrets”), doesn’t require you have any extended rumination on the transgression/omission/whatever. It just requires wishing you would have done it differently:
noun
Note neither specifies an ongoing sense or feeling; it just has to be once. While people may attach their own personal requirements to it, the actual definition is pretty simple, only requiring dissatisfaction with one decision or action one time. And, obviously, everyone qualifies for that.
Honestly, it’s just one of those sayings I hear people say flippantly all the time that bothers me because they will have just finished talking about how they wished they worked out more or took a different job or whatever.
@InnocuousFarmer See above.
@Kabn merriam-webster:
regret
noun
Definition of regret
1 : sorrow aroused by circumstances beyond one’s control or power to repair
2 a : an expression of distressing emotion (such as sorrow)
b regrets plural : a note politely declining an invitation
Oxford English dictionary:
NOUN
mass noun
1A feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over an occurrence or something that one has done or failed to do.
Both of those definitions of the noun form link the past action to the present. The word is based on a present feeling based on a past event whether it is a noun or a verb.
But rather than taking a dictionarian’s attempt to summarize the meaning of a word in one or two sentences, think about how it’s used. If there are no present implications to regrets, why can you stop regretting something? Why does the sentence “I used to regret X until Y” make sense?
If you have no present emotion toward a past event, then you can say you don’t regret it, even if it was a bad thing that would have been better had it not happened.
I do, however, agree that the phrase “no regrets” is so often used by assholes that are using the phrase to justify their future actions that I hate the phrase. But that doesn’t change the meaning of the word. Just a distaste for the phrase.
@evilstan60 Again, none of the definitions listed require you to feel sorrow or distress continuously, which seems to be the crux of your point. It only needs to be the current latent association. Emotional attachments don’t disappear just because you’re not actively thinking about them. A guy may go a decade without thinking about the girl he never asked to prom, but if something reminds him of her, he still regrets not asking. Unless something changes to make him feel something positive the next time he thinks of it, that’s regret.
Recollection is the trigger, and the associated emotions (including regret) are the response. Saying it’s not regret because you don’t feel anything about it in the immediate present would also mean the logical contra: you couldn’t claim you’re happy about any event or decision in your past because you’re not actively thinking happy thoughts about it right now. Which is silly.
I don’t buy the claim that people don’t have any emotional associations with major decisions they’ve made; you’re either at least somewhat happy you made a good choice or at least somewhat sad you could have done better. Of course, the more mundane the decision, the weaker the emotional memory probably is.
You can easily stop regretting something: all it takes is a change in either the information you have about the event or your viewpoint of the circumstances. You can find out your coworker was actively trying to get you fired, causing you to stop feeling bad for leaving them with a lot of work when you quit. You can learn later that the house for which you didn’t submit an offer in time actually has a crumbling foundation. You can form a more realistic view of self and realize actions you thought were selfish were actually you asserting yourself in a healthy way. The examples are endless.
If a person says they truly have no regrets, they are technically saying there’s no action or decision in their past that they would, upon reflection, like to change in any way. Just because a statement becomes cliche doesn’t make it correct, either grammatically or logically (See: “I could care less”). Again, bad memory or low bar.
Romantic mistakes have pretty much ruined my life. But I have another that I remember and ask for forgiveness every time I pass the street corner where I saw three boys laughing after overturning the wheelchair of a young man who was severely disabled. It was before the days of a phone in every pocket, rush hour at one of the busiest intersections. I wanted to go do something, stop them even if it was three against me, wait for police, but I didn’t because I couldnt move out of line of traffic. I will regret this until the day I die.
I have regrets for not being kinder, and for being too kind to people who don’t deserve it. My biggest regret though is probably my first marriage. My goal in life had always been to marry in my early twenties and start having kids relatively young because I wanted to be able to be active with them, if that makes sense. I had terrible taste in guys though and after a string of bad relationships, I settled badly with a guy who was willing to commit (or so I thought). I ended up marrying when I was 21 and ended up dropping out of college shortly afterward for related reasons. It was incredibly stupid. I got two wonderful kids out of that marriage; I wouldn’t change that for the world, and I’m in a good place now, but honestly, I destroyed my life and any chance of ever being anything other than a housewife now. There’s so much that I didn’t get to do and experience in life because I was in such a rush to marry and have kids.
Not picking a clever username so I can answer this stuff honestly… can I change it without losing my history (366 click streak …) or my imminent FYB box???
@llangley
/giphy regrets
@llangley well, that’s not true but pretty fun to see
@llangley
Changing your username would not affect anything.
(Aside from your username.)
@llangley @PlacidPenguin ex-GoaTs, beware this advice!
@mfladd @PlacidPenguin um…why?
@llangley @mfladd
Just ask @Kittysprinkles.
@KittySprinkles @mfladd @PlacidPenguin
This feels like a weird kind of scavenger hunt…
@llangley @mfladd @PlacidPenguin
@KittySprinkles
But you already know where the hunt would end up.
@KittySprinkles @llangley @mfladd @PlacidPenguin i swear to god kitty sprinkles is the single greatest user name I’ve ever seen.
@ivannabc @KittySprinkles @llangley @mfladd
Fun thread.
Regrets? I’ve had a few.
But then again, too few to mention.
/giphy I regret everything
I guess my biggest regrets are because of my ex, but more because I no longer have my horse.
Several things happened because of the ex. I got in a car accident visiting him because he didn’t drive. It messed up my plans for college and I lost my ambition.
When I bought my horse, I lived in a place where I could afford it. He broke it off with me shortly after we were married and moved an hour north. I stupidly moved to be with him, took a demotion at my job and the only places where I could keep my horse were ridiculously expensive. I ended up working my full time job, a part time job similar to what I was doing, and then I worked at the barn to reduce the payment for my horse. My ex worked part time and kept quitting when things didn’t go his way. When he was working, he didn’t even pay half the rent and no utilities. I was an idiot to stay after all the other mess he put me through.
When my dad was dying, I was so overwhelmed with all the work and I barely ever rode my horse anymore. I gave him up.
I regret that I didn’t keep him until his old age because he had been abandoned once already. He used to jump Grand Prix and do Dressage. He was super sweet. I would never be able to afford a horse as well trained as him and as well mannered. He was ideal for me. A stocky warmblood that I didn’t feel gigantic on top of. Being a taller lady, most horses were too thin or too short, or a combination of both. I remember riding one horse and my legs came down to it’s knees. It was pretty funny. With my boy, I never had that problem. I miss him a lot.
I don’t know that it’s a regret, because I have an amazing life now, but I could have done things a bit differently when I was 18 and I wonder how my life would be now.
I applied and was accepted to three colleges. One offered me a full ride, one a scholarship, and the third accepted me but with no scholarship.
My parents didn’t have a lot of money and I didn’t want paying for college to be a burden. Plus, the full ride college was only an hour away, and at the time I was stuck on a girl who was younger than me so staying close seemed ideal. (By the time I got out of high school, we weren’t even speaking anymore.) So I picked the full ride at a passable engineering school close to home.
That third college was MIT, which would have set me on a totally different path than the one I’m on now. The public school here was a little dumbed down, so I lost some of my academic drive and eventually just dropped out of engineering completely and got a degree in CIS just to GTFO of college.
I think about it sometimes, but, again, I wouldn’t say I regret it.
@djslack Yeah I made that kind of mistake with my PhD program. The path never taken… I wonder sometimes what it would have been like…Turned down UCLA (at the time one of the top 10 programs in the country for a PhD in my area) due to money which also included it being so expensively far from my father who was slowly dying and I wanted to be able to see him more often than maybe once a year. My career trajectory would have been really different too. The school I finally went to (I had 4 choices) I got my research awards and did my dissertation (which got an award) despite the faculty, not with their help. I wonder what it would have been like graduating from a top school with that record too. I do know that when I was done I would have had a job where I was valued for who I was rather than being dumped for having 2 cancers in one year (this is on top of the one I had had 7 years prior as a grad student which slowed me down and increased my student debt load substantially).
Now I am stuck with a gap in my vitae that is hard to explain because when you use the C word (and treatment nearly killed my bone marrow which took a while to recover enough from that I had any energy not to mention a really troubled kid whom I adopted when she was 10 that had I moved she might not have finished high school as it takes schools about 18 months to get it together with IEP’s and actually give the kid the help they need) some people don’t want you and when you don’t (and just say family issues now resolved or something like that) they wonder what you are hiding. Sigh. PS open to suggestions on how to word that several year gap in my vitae where I didn’t work for a while and then worked as an online adjunct for whomever would hire me, unfortunately including some for profits (which also is a career killer).
Most of my biggest regrets would not be for public consumption but… I do regret not telling my husband that I love him the day before he died. I had a come apart over that a few months later.
@lseeber I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that happened with you and your husband, but…
A few months back, my Dad went into the hospital for a procedure because he was in some pain. Nobody called to tell me what was up. He’d been in for a few days, and then he called me one night, sounded OK, and said he was going to have a minor surgery in the morning. He said he liked the surgeon, everything should be OK, etc. I was a little taken aback that I hadn’t heard anything about it until then, but just figured he didn’t want to make a big deal about it.
Talked to his wife the next day. She called me, I think. I can’t remember why I didn’t call him. I think he’d said he’d call me the day after, or something. In any case, the procedure had gone great, he was resting, maybe talking to him the next day would fine,
Well, as you might guess, he suddenly got much worse the following morning and died that afternoon. So the last time i talked to him was just a kind of casual conversation, no big deal. I always was in the habit of telling him I loved him, so I’m pretty sure I did that time, too. But what bothers me more is that our relationship was so arm’s length. He didn’t want to bother me, I never wanted to bother him. This was mostly his decision…I’m not that way with a lot of my other friends and family…or less so than I was with him, anyway. And it just seems dumb to me now.
Whenever I have regrets, I try to learn something from it. But I still have a hard time being as affectionate as I’d like to be with my friends and family who are “shy” or reserved. I don’t know how to fix it, but at least it’s on a back burner in my mind, percolating, maybe I’ll figure it out someday.
@lseeber @UncleVinny I didn’t get home in time for when my dad died either. He was alive when I got on the plane and had died prior to when I landed. I should have just walked out of finals week despite the threat to fire me as a grad assistant if I did that. Instead I made sure my classes were covered before I left rather than covering them from a distance. That is a regret I will always have too. It’s hard. Really hard to come to terms with things like that. I also regret not stopping to see my brother on prior to leaving my mom’s going to a new job. I said to my mom, “I am in a hurry I will see him next time”. There was no next time. He was murdered by his wife 8 days later. We can’t foresee these things but it is sure hard to stop beating ourselves up about them anyway. Don’t be too hard your yourselves…
@Kidsandliz @UncleVinny Well, in my situation, he died with his face in my hands. My last words to him were… Think on Jesus Jim…think on Jesus (he was a new Christian, something he detested most of his life but was quite happy with his decision) and I don’t regret that at all. Not one bit. But, the day prior he was frustrating me because I could tell he wasn’t doing so good and he wouldn’t go to an ER and so, I was trying to be patient with him but was failing some in that.
But after he passed I wished I had told him that because I hadn’t said it in a long time. Although he was one to say that he knew I loved him and I told him that everytime I did something for him. So, he knew anyway. It’s not a regret that eats me up. It’s just more recent and something at this point in time that I would like to be able to remedy but cannot.
Honestly, the both of you seem to have more painful type situations than I do.
His death was quite unexpected (as you both are too familiar with) but, I can’t say as far as deaths go that it was a bad death. If you can understand that.
@Kidsandliz Oh man… that’s rough.
@Kidsandliz @lseeber @UncleVinny please don’t compare what you went through to what someone else went through if it makes you feel as tho your pain is small compared to theirs. You are allowed to feel how you feel when experiencing trauma and that whole “what they went through is worse” business trivializes the pain you’re experiencing. Stubbing a toe vs losing a finger is one thing, but ya’ll are talking about truly painful, traumatic life changing events.
Forgetting my wallet at the gas station, losing it, along with my debit card which I had to cancel not realizing that it was the very day before my VMP membership renewed thus I lost VMP :c
@uninflammable if you had messaged support, they would of fixed it. I’m not sure if it’s too late now.
@thumperchick?
@uninflammable that is the frowniest frown I’ve seen in a while.
@djslack don’t forget it’s bigger brother. :C
@RiotDemon @uninflammable support can only help if you write in. I don’t know if we’ll change this one, since the new Universal Membership rolled out, but you don’t know unless you ask.
Not going on a free vacation a little over 2 decades ago.
@mflassy
Really? For two decades you’ve lived with that regret?
Although, I suppose that could mean that you don’t have any other regrets, so good for you.
@PlacidPenguin owwwwwww!
@UncleVinny
Cyanide and Happiness has what they call 'Depressing Comic Week’s, where the comics are extra
hilarioussadhilarious.@PlacidPenguin that is depressingly depressing. I think I hate it.
@PlacidPenguin Wellllll. That’s actually quite good.
Regrets …
I’ve had the flu …