If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck…

Unfortunately, if you post a legal disclosure of your own design, it acts as a legal document that your clients must abide by, once they pay you for your goods and services. The second instructor has a lawyer for that reason. Her disclosures are boiler plate legalese.

Yes @hvert I am relieved it’s over now. I’m disappointed by the way it ended. I came across an Emily Dickinson poem tonight about gossipers. And I had to snicker out loud b/c Dickinson’s advice is to ignore the hot air that gossipers blow every day at noon (which is the time of day, I assume, women of her time period in the 18th century, sat around sipping tea and gossiping about each other).

“The farthest thunder that I heard
Was nearer than the sky,
And rumbles still, though torrid noons
Have lain their missiles by.
The lightning that preceded it
Struck no one but myself,
But I would not exchange the bolt
For all the rest of life.
Indebtedness to oxygen
The chemist may repay,
But not the obligation
To electricity.
It founds the homes and decks the days,
And every clamor bright
Is but the gleam concomitant
Of that waylaying light.
The thought is quiet as a flake, ?
A crash without a sound;
How life's reverberation
Its explanation found”

The first two lines, “The farthest thunder that I heard/was nearer than the sky,” basically I interrupted as, “The women I’m sitting next too like to gossip about their close friends and family behind their backs.” The “torrid noons” reference, I interrupted as tea-time or the lunch hour. Torrid means “very hot and dry,” and “difficult.”

And “their missiles” is the women’s chosen subject of gossip about a person, like their clothing, who they associate with, their education level, their income level, etc.

And “the lightening that preceded it, struck no one but myself,” I interpreted as Emily complaining out loud that she was forced to listen to this gossip b/c she was in the same room as these women who loved to gossip.

The “lightening” being the gossip, of course. The rest of the poem, Interpreted as Emily’s judgment on society and how concerned people were with appearances and used gossip to socially maneuver themselves from being out of favor to being the center of attention. I could be 100% wrong but I enjoyed reading the poem that way.

I thought I had met a group of people I had something in common with, from this workshop and previous classes. People who would accept me into their tight-knit group.

I guess I will keep searching for my “tribe.”