mia

Greetings! You have found my personal forum for expressing my global discomfiture on all things relating to my job (social work & mental health), my doctoral course work (clinical psychology) my spare time (attending to the first two), my perceptions of what is going on in our country, state, and the world; and all things either too minute or too big to say anywhere else...

Formerly, the purpose of this journal was going to be documenting my last year of grad school, the mad final push before i got my MSW (hence my username!) Now that I have graduated, I have found myself admitted to a doctoral program in clinical psychology, so I apparently will remain in academia a bit longer.

Welcome all who come here; some of this, the more personal stuff, will be friends only--post to be added.

from the Incredibly Surreal files:

i was on a date yesterday with nurse #3. (for some reason, my recent dating life has included a slew of nurses. for those interested, there have been four in a row, in the last two months) while on said date, we went to a used bookstore, where i found a copy of a cd put out by Ex #1's wife's band.

i got the cd, and am now using it as a trivet.

and nurse #3? has somehow managed, in her three decades of life, to never have an actual relationship with an actual gay woman. she had this thing with a gay-when-drunk straight friend that ended badly, and a string of crushes on other straight women. when i suggested that she seemed to have a thing for emotionally unavailable people, she had a mild meltdown in the poetry section.

jesus mary and joseph. there has got to be a better way to find a girlfriend than all this. in the meantime, i'm going to make a cup of hot tea and set it on my new trivet ;)

monday:

three clients are hovering around my office door. one is half an hour late for her office visit, and who is telling me she is in the process of dying. she is wrenching her shirt down to show me her flushed chest, without any prompting from me i might add. we are interrupted from a call from another client's state social worker, who remains on the phone with me and the client alternately, while i am shuffling her kid downstairs to the placement, who is waiting to transport. (btw, client and placement are not supposed to be able to see each other, since they rage at each other when they do) meanwhile, third client is hovering with her two kids under two years old, wanting to get my approval for her to not come to parenting class anymore. meanwhile, the first client, who had just finished telling me about the fact that she has been drinking and driving, and that she blacked out on the way here today, has just been maneuvered into driving somebody else's client home, although not home, because said somebody else's client is using the cover of a long bus ride back to her group home as an excuse to get extra time with her boyfriend while she gets a ride from my client. after defusing that, i drive 30 miles each way to visit a client who apparently cannot be bothered to arrive to her own home visit.

after that, i go to the inpatient facility to do a couple of intakes, and one new client is in the process of telling me how this boyfriend is different, how she can really tell he cares about their child, she could tell right from the start that he was going to 'step up' and 'do right.' i ask if he is paying any child support (the kid is placed with her dad). she looks at me in a daze. of course not, she replied. he has to pay rent and stuff. he only makes $100 a day from work.

tuesday:

me to client, after listening to her boyfriend ranting at the cps workers in the hospital room who are telling them he has to do certain things or not take their baby home: dood, ur babydaddy, hiz ppl skillz are teh sukz. gud luk wit that.

w.h. auden, "stop all the clocks"

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

ganked from changinglight

You are The Empress

Beauty, happiness, pleasure, success, luxury, dissipation.

The Empress is associated with Venus, the feminine planet, so it represents,
beauty, charm, pleasure, luxury, and delight. You may be good at home
decorating, art or anything to do with making things beautiful.

The Empress is a creator, be it creation of life, of romance, of art or business. While the Magician is the primal spark, the idea made real, and the High Priestess is the one who gives the idea a form, the Empress is the womb where it gestates and grows till it is ready to be born. This is why her symbol is Venus, goddess of beautiful things as well as love. Even so, the Empress is more Demeter, goddess of abundance, then sensual Venus. She is the giver of Earthly gifts, yet at the same time, she can, in anger withhold, as Demeter did when her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped. In fury and grief, she kept the Earth barren till her child was returned to her.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

so this idea came into my head this weekend, and i'm just mentally tossing it around.

the backstory:

my experience is that almost everybody--my clients, other people's clients, coworkers, family, people i try dating, and (literally) strangers off the street all seem to gravitate to me; they tell me their stories (often in very great detail) whether or not i ask, and that this becomes much worse if the person learns i am a therapist/social worker.

there are two reactions i have gotten when talking about my work to new people: the Objectifying = "oh my god! you're such an angel! i could never do that!" and the Personalizing = (and here i paraphrase) "fix me!"

so the idea that i'm having is that the vast majority of society views therapists pretty much like they do sex workers: that we both deal with kind of disturbed clients, in ways that they don't really understand, and that obviously we love what we do so much that we should do it for them, for free, right now. there's a scene in the movie Pretty Woman that comes to mind, where an associate of richard gere's character forces himself on to julia roberts and feels completely justified because she is a sex worker by trade.

hey, i know that it's not somebody else's job to enforce my boundaries, and yes i know that there is obviously 'something inside' that drew me to this profession, etc. but that only takes into account half the equation. so people, please help a girl out. am i crazy here, or is there something to this theory?

i went to the movie The Bucket List yesterday. while it was kind of slow to start, with a storyline that kind of meandered along, the sentiment is certainly strong. the movie centers around two terminally-ill older gents who make a list of things to do before they kick the bucket--the bucket list.

it's a simple concept, and not a new one. a few years ago, a book came out entitled 1,000 Places To See Before You Die. it's a perspective check, in a way--a method to help keep grounded into a place of thought-about goals instead of getting perpetually ground down into the minutiae .

The Seattle Times has an article on the subject. the article interviews several people about their own bucket lists. one person had this to say:

"It's like the phenomenon of buying a red car — all of a sudden you see red cars all around," he says. "When you take the opportunity to write down your goals, there's a heightened awareness. It's not that there's more red cars; you just see things a little differently."

put that way, it almost sounds like something from
the secret, a book/movie empire that has circulated for a few years that highlights the 'law of attraction,' a notion that states that we attract into our lives the things we give the most energy to through thought and deed.

while not exactly a fan of 'the secret,' it does a good job of helping people refocus; just what the bucket list does. it is a psychological placeholder, as it were, that creates space for a dimension outside the here and now, a place for goals and wishes and dreams. it helps get us out of the daily grind and into a realm of possibility. so while it's no great homage to scriptwriting or cinematography, it is worth seeing nonetheless.

so, what's on your bucket list?


cross posted over at my other digs: http://politicsoffear.wordpress.com/

the incredible & talented astres spontaneously put her incredible talentedness to use making a syndication feed for my new blog: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/politicsoffear/

thank you Kate!

the new blog:
the new blog is going well, it's kind of a struggle to post regularly, but worth it in terms of community involvement, keeping up with current issues and events, and having to write something cohesive on a regular basis.

health:
i've been putting off going back in for the next needed cholesterol test, basically because it involves fasting and i'm addicted to my morning latte ;) it feels so crazy though, because my doctor had told me in october that the plan was for me to lose weight and then recheck the cholesterol (this was to see if stored body fat had anything to do with the high levels--if that's all it is, yay! i won't have to be on a lifetime of cholesterol drugs).

so, since october i have lost 30 pounds. i feel that my eating has become disordered in most every way. i count every calorie, feel guilty for even approaching the 1200-calorie daily limit imposed by the doctor, and find myself bingeing (and then feeling horrible). it was hard when i reached a plateau and had to ratchet things up to keep losing the weight. jeans that were too small in october are now too big to wear. some of my favorite skirts now literally cannot stay over my hips. when i look in the mirror, all i see is fat. i hate how this is fucking with my mind, how it seems the bar keeps moving--oh, i think, just another 5 lbs, another 10 lbs, plugging numbers into the bmi tabulator to find out what the number would be if i got to xx lbs. and i knew this would happen, back in the fall. yet, here i am.

relationships:
yep, still crushing on S, the incredible woman i met on match. and she is still dating someone else. i had coffee today with someone i met for the first time, and aside from the fact that she was incredibly nervous, it was fun and we talked for about three hours. we'll see. no instant chemistry, but she's cute and nice.

school:
still in school. i passed all my classes!! this is very good, since a lot of folks in my cohort, didn't. the minimum passing grade is a "b" so it's kind of intense. but it's a new quarter, and yet another 2.5 foot stack of textbooks to inhale and process.

work:
pretty much the same. no real changes.

greetings, campers!

okay, after over two years of blogging in relative
secrecy on livejournal, i have taken the plunge and
have started a real blog:

http://politicsoffear.wordpress.com/

this is the new catchpoint for my sociopolitical
commentary. personal stuff will remain at the old
livejournal site; after a hiatus here, i'm glad to be
able to start new with a place to put my diatribes on
social justice issues--and hopefully have some great
dialogue.

hope to see you there!

~mia

Let's start the new year off right; The problem with LJ: we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you!

(hat tip to Dylan)

testing out the new Flickr account, where you can post directly to your blogs from there...

so i just ordered my textbooks for this fall at amazon. it looks like there is only one that i cannot get from them, because it is not released yet: The Wounded Researcher, by R. Romanyshyn (who will also be teaching the course).

my haul includes:
The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell;
Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Jung;
Man and his Symbols by Jung;
The Symbolic Quest by EC Whitmont;
History of Psychology by D Hothersall;
Handbook of Psychological Assessment, (4th Ed) by Groth-Marnat (who will also be teaching the course)
and the Penguin dictionary of symbols.

figuring the cost of the Wounded Researcher, which i will probably have to get from the university's bookstore, i will still have saved about $113 by ordering from amazon. yay!

i still have to figure out the airline tix, however. i subscribe to travelzoo's email, but none of the sales seem to apply to my travel. i think i'll get a travel agent to work on it, because it's exhausting to constantly be checking all the travel sites to see if anything is on sale. grr.

i am really excited about my courses, though. i got the syllabi the day before yesterday, and i am looking forward to these classes in a way that i haven't for years. these next few years are going to be hard, balancing work, school, and internship and a practicum (and having to get a second job to pay for it all) but i am feeling good about it now. somehow, it will all work out.

well, the past several weeks i have successfully avoided thinking about continuing education. when i was in santa barbara on may 30th for the marathon series of interviews with a prospective doctoral program, i flew home to seattle that night to find my dog dead. so now i have an association between the school and the loss of my baby that i cannot shake.

but now, it is down to brass tacks. they offered me a place in their clinical psychology program, which i accepted. i have sent off the admission deposit, and have gotten the financial aid loan packet back. what i have figured out is this: life for the next four years is going to significantly suck.

the loans that i am eligible for cover $5125 per quarter, total. tuition is 6000, plus another 1200 for mandatory fees, (room & board, and whatnot). transportation is going to be three round-trip flights from seattle to santa barbara per quarter, i figure that to be at least another thousand. so my doctorate is going to cost $3000 a quarter OVER what my loans will cover. and you know what? i haven't even figured in books yet.

thankfully i work full time. but i don't make much. i get paid on the 15th and 30th, rent and stuff comes out of the 30th for the next month. taking all of the 15th-of-the-month checks per quarter, i'll barely make it. that leaves me with half of one paycheck each month (after rent) to cover food, gas, car repairs (which are in progress) car insurance, doctor copays, prescription copays, dental work (also in progress), phone bill, clothes, emergencies, and everything else. so i'm going to have to cut back significantly. and make more money. i talked with my supervisor, who is encouraging me to start private practice work in the evenings as a second job. she even said i can use my work office for that purpose, so that's nice. but pretty soon i'll have to start practicum, which is 1000 hours, followed by internship, which is 1500 hours. so theoretically i'll be working three jobs at once: regular work, private practice work, and practicum & internship.

not to mention that i'll likely, by my calculations, meet my lifetime max for student loans before the doctoral program ends; where that money comes from, i can't even begin to say. unless something in my life radically changes, there is no way to save up that much money by then. i would be looking at about another $20000 for that.

and what does this do to my plans/hopes to start a family in the next few years? i want to have a child before i am old enough to increase the chances of birth defects. but that is not looking good, given that i'll barely be able to support myself. you know, i really wish i was settled in a relationship at this point in my life, where i could pool resources with someone and get support and encouragement through this process. right now i'm really shell-shocked about this whole damn thing. i feel anxious and unsettled, and vaguely depressed. when i take stock of my life, i have a lot going for me, but also a lot is missing. i really want emotional fulfillment. i really miss my baby.

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Mingle² - Online Dating

h/t daddysambiguity

Emotional Cripple Seeks Good Looking Crutch - 44

Reply to: *****@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-06-23, 7:26PM PDT


Recently released emotional cripple is seeking good looking crutch for long term, damaging relationship based on unrealistic expectations. I'm a 44, manic depressive with anxiety disorder and fear of intimacy. Employed, blue eyes, dark hair, weeps at imagined slights. You be good looking, able to deflect jealous accusations with ease, and passive aggressive. Together we can embark upon a journey of discovery and projection while reenacting childhood traumas involving rejection from our parents! With my commitment issues and hysterical paranoia and your unchecked anger management problems, we're an unstoppable team of crushing instability!

tomorrow is the school graduation (as opposed to the larger, whole-university graduation that is on saturday) for my msw. i have already had my business cards changed to have the new credential. i wish i could be more enthusiastic about it all, but i lost that somewhere along the way.

do i need to rename my journal? too bad "phdorbust" is already taken.

so on sunday i'm off for a week and a half to stockholm. maybe there i'll get some perspective back, along with some much-needed rest.

so this past week has been very emotional.

i went down to santa barbara to interview for the doctoral programs. when i came back home that night (wednesday) my beloved Keifer was dead. Keifer Keaton O'Malley, my baby, my perfect companion, appeared to have died in his sleep. he was almost 6 years old.

i really cannot say enough about him. he was the absolute perfect companion. he truly, honestly, could read my mind and i never for a moment thought he would die young. it was quite a shock (i already have issues about never getting to say goodbye to the significant others in my life who leave). all i can say is that there is a big hole in my life right now.

people have been very supportive at work, there's a lot of cool folk there. i guess some people will mock this loss, minimize it or whatnot, but fuck them. the only thing i haven't lost in this life is a child, because so far i have stayed away from having one. losing Keifer hurts so much because it is the loss of unconditional, enthusiastic love. it's rare, and it leaves a wound when it goes.

You Are Amy Lee!

Gothy, expressive, woman-in-pain Who looks damn good in a corset "When you cried I'd wipe away all of your tears When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears"

this is kind of cool, but i don't like how the questions presume heterosexuality as the default state.