Halloween Goodness

I went to a Halloween party hosted by an old friend from high school. I saw a few people I hadn't seen in several years... (oddly, some people I went to high school with also moved to this city.) Sometimes it makes me feel old, not in that "I'm all creaky and bitter and depressed" way, but...it's hard to explain. I enjoyed myself, and I think it's interesting to realize that I click with some people I didn't really like back then and that I don't click with some people that I had been fairly close with. And, of course, I was privy to the drunken presentation of the US presidents, as per tradition.

It also makes me become a strong advocate of "party hard while you're young, then grow out of it before you graduate." I got my partying out of my system before I even turned 21, and now I see a bunch of people who were morally opposed to drinking, etc. who are going crazy in their early 20's. There's more screw-up room in your teens and fewer responsibilities...I don't know.

I taught today, and attempted to give Freud a good show. I failed. When I asked for comments, they mentioend that Freud is a strange fellow indeed, and asked if he has problems. Whatever, I brought them chocolate, and they were pleased. I'm up there doing a feminist deconstruction of penis envy, and they're still stuck on the Electra complex. I ended up just babbling about Freud's cocaine habit...

I might be getting my very own undergraduate ;). I talked to an old student about working as a research assistant, and I think she's up for it. I promise to be careful to not abuse her!

I got roped into an awesome project for this afternoon. (Note the ambivalence in THAT sentence!) Another woman in the program wants to do a mock therapy session where she struggles with the themes of the cultural diversity course. She'll transcribe it and deconstruct the mock session. I'm REALLY excited, actually. I think that it would make a wonderful conference presentation. It's blurring so many lines...therapy/acting/talking/performing...Plus, I've actually used my own therapy as a space to deconstruct psychotherapy, which I think is enormously cool. I've wanted to write that up for a while, but it's still my therapy and it was too private. I think it'll be neat to try to take it to a conference...

I wrote 8 pages of my performing performance ethngoraphy paper....32 left...it sounds like a lot, but I was quite pleased with writing 8 pages in one semi-productive day. So, yay!

Depressing....

Sometimes I wonder how the HELL I have survived this long on this campus. I'm waiting here, patiently fielding incoming e-mails from my students who have an exam tomorrow. So, I started reading the campus paper (I just gave an hour and forty-five minute case history in a class and I'm burnt...) and I feel like crying.

Last week, there was an article about a student's facebook posting being taken down by the administration. Normally, I'm really opposed to censorship...but GOD...this student had written that homosexuals are subhuman. He had started a group to oppose the formation of a Gay-Straight Alliance on campus.

I'll backtrack...last year, a gay student sent a letter to the campus newspaper indicating that he is leaving the university due to the intense homophobia. He had attempted to form a GSA and was told that it would not be "in line with the university's mission statement." When he pushed it, he was told the the university does not have homosexual students. Since then, the faculty's social justice committee circulated a petition demanding a GSA. Due to all the pressure, the administration has created a committee (largely comprised of priests) to evaluate whether or not a GSA would violate the university's mission.

In the campus paper today, there is a letter that expresses horror that a student was disciplined for "expressing his faith." What the hell?!? Since when is calling groups of people "subhuman" a Catholic position? Sure, the Catholic church and I have long since parted ways, but I was raised in the church! I don't even have the energy to go into the whole letter right now.

My students are damn lucky they have an exam tomorrow....I love teaching them and I love them, I do...but they piss me off!!! After teaching a particularly abusive section of a diversity class, one of my favorite faculty members said that he just couldn't teach it anymore. Sometimes it's just exhausting. And I get angry. I want to give up on them, I want to stop giving a shit. It's painful and it hurts to see students be hurt by comments made in my classroom. I want to protect them from all the crap, but I know that they're dealing with it all the time...I don't know...it's exhausting.

They think feminism is either castrating men or pole dancing.

A lot has happened recently, but most of it is either too personal for me to share in this journal (particularly due to a recent reminder that Blogs Get Found) or is related to my clinical work and is thus off limits...

So, now, I will go home and do some lovely peer-editing, crash, then be back here by 7:30 tomorrow morning...sigh...

Another week...

Last week got increasingly intense with more and more crisis interventions. I let myself take Wednesday night off to hang out with my hubby and cat and not do work.

This morning, I was getting out of the car at the gas station (the purveyor of my favorite coffee, oddly enough) and I heard someone calling me, and shouting: "Do you remember me?" I turned around, and there was one of the little boys I used to tutor. Except that he's not a little boy anymore. And he has a little mustache! He filled me in on the other kids, and I gave him my number. I'd love to get involved with that crew again...besides, they're in their mid teens, which is such a "get it together or fall competely apart" time.

The maturity level of my freshmen is so varied...I taught infant development this morning. Some of my students were discussing infancy with some maturity. One of my students was describing feeding her child. A handful of other students couldn't get passed the fact that, alas, nursing involves breasts. They spent a significant amount of time saying: "Boobs. Heheheheh. Boobs." Ahh, freshmen. Class ended early with a fire drill. I hate those fire drills. First of all, they post signs that say "We will be having a fire drill today!" Then, they ring the bell right before the end of a class. The bell itself souns like someone hitting a metal pot with a spoon. If your students are even talking, you can't hear it. The most offensive part of the fire drill is that you are instructed to LEAVE BEHIND your disabled students. A few years ago, I was on crutches when the alarm went off (foot surgery.) I had to slide down the stairs on my ass. Some of my classmates offered to carry me, but frankly, I was skeptical. The psych faculty wrote a letter to the University complaining about what happened, hoping that it would spur them to create a better emergency plan. Nope. You are supposed to take your disabled students to a designated room and leave them. All of my students are able to walk. But you better believe that there's not a chance in hell that I'm going to say: "Hey, so, it's getting kind of hot up here...I'm gonna get going!"

I had a cancellation for tonight, so I could technically head out at any time. Unfortunately, I told my husband I'd meet him on campus at 7pm. And I don't have his new cell phone number with me. And I have his keys to the apartment....D'oh.

That reminds me...I actually had a dream about the Simpsons the other night. Very odd, very odd.

I handed in a draft of an article I'm submitting...sometimes it depresses me that, even though I don't FEEL all that radical, I'm reminded that I am all the freaking time. It doesn't get to me when mainstreamers tell me that I'm radical. It DOES get to me when I go to a freaking Critical Psychology conference and I realize that I'm radical for THAT crowd. Psychology just isn't that radical...Try finding a feminist shrink, and you'll see what I mean. Anyhow...off to the library with me!

Getting bad at updating..,.

I have begun to really neglect this, but oh well.

I've been a bit depressed the past few days, actually. Some of the community mental health stuff is just...draining. Yesterday, I came home and just cried. I felt so overwhelmed by other people's pain that I collapsed briefly. I also developed a severe migraine.

So, the effect ended up being that I was sobbing and clutching my head that was throbbing from stress-induced pain while putting together stuff for my class today. What was I going to teach, you ask? Stress reduction techniques. The irony did not escape me.

I think I'm somewhat recovered now. A wrench was put in one of my typical ways of coping, so I regressed to somatization and tears. It happens.

I enjoyed teaching stress-reduction, though...it gives me a break, and they love it. 18 year olds instantaneously regress when you give them markers. We did meditation, guided visualization, a hypnotic technique where you visualize the problem having been solved, and "drawing a piece of music." You give them markers, and they start giggling, etc. Cute.

Right now I'm working on developing the methods section of my proposal. It's a little bit...shall we say....informal. I discuss feeling "a bit shady." Eh, whatever.

In other news, the cat does not have kidney stones. It took $200 to determine this, but hey. My little fuzzy one is okay.

Finally, I' ve been thinking about what it must feel like to be homeless. I'm working with some people who were homeless for years (some of whom still are) and thinking about the psychology and experience of that. You can never really relax, ever. There's never the safety of closing the door behind you. Everything always feels unsettled and unsafe. There's constant shame, especially along with the begging and prostitution that often follow. It's to not have a place in the world. I try to wrap my mind around it, and I can't.

Alright, back to work....

Weekend course...

We have our semester mini-course this weekend...this will be the first time that I don't attend a full weekend of the lecture. I agreed to go to Friday night because my practicum supervisor wants to hear about it...

It's by a pothead who talks about how pot has created us to genetically engineer it.

Yeah, mean.

I don't know. I'm conflicted. I've heard this guy talk at a party, and he was holding his kid and smoking up. I have a problem with getting little kids second-hand (or actually) high because they can't consent. I support legalization, and I see no problem with experimentation (and back in the day, I certainly did my share.)

But other times, I look around and wonder where the radical left would be if we stopped offing our brain cells. The radical right is increasing in power, and then I see some of my husband's colleagues-really intelligent, motivated, radical people-going "yeahhhh...man....hehhhh....cooooolll..."

I'm working with hardcore addicts this year and it really makes the experimentation thing seem so much less glamorous.

I'm not sure where I stand, I guess. I feel frustrated that this weekend's lecture is all about getting high. We've had some pretty impressive people come in the past, and I wonder what it says about our priorities that we invited this guy. I don't care if people smoke up sometimes. Whatever, it should be legal. But is this really the most enlightening weekend course that we could have created for ourselves? In the Spring we had this awesome critical community psychologist come in....I don't know....

Class time!

Avoiding a public health crisis...

I found out on Friday that I do not, in fact, have a staph infection. I merely had a fever and a rash. Crisis averted. I was not exactly looking forward to calling the County Health Department and my practicum and explaining that I had just exposed a bunch of immune suppressed people to Staph. So, good.

I'm teaching about eating disorders tomorrow, and I've been getting tons of e-mails from students saying "I was too embarassed to ask about this in class, but I was wondering if you could tell us about _________." I have to start remembering to ask them to write down (anonymously) their questions about these things. At least they're asking me at all...and I use it as opportunity number 7,000 to insert a little feminist plug. I'm surprised that no-one has bitched on ratemyprofessor.

Sometimes I'm just struck by how freaking obnoxious students can be...One student skipped my exam and then informed me that he "expects me to be accomodating." Ummm...yeah....well, I expected you to take the exam!!

I had my independent study yesterday. I'm really into my topic, although I find myself so paranoid that I'm hesitant to blog it...Odd, huh? Basically, I'm talking about the performing experience of performance ethnography. I'm looking at the performance of performance ethnography as simply another step in the reflexive/research process. The performance itself is an enacting of a dynamic...the experience of the performance alters both the performer (through the experience) and the script (whenever language becomes fixed, it shifts.) I'm also looking at the alteration in the power dynamics of ethnographer/audience when the ethnographer shifts from presenting the performance as product (and a product that will "enlighten" the audienc) to offering the performance as a continued mutual exploration of dynamics of difference. Yup.

Group today focused on chronic illness, which happens to be one of my "things." So, I'm excited for Thursday, which is the day that I lead...

A final somewhat random babble...I've been thinking a lot about the phenomenology of using various theoretical approaches. I'm in a case formulation course right now, and I just did my first case presentation. I really enjoy case presentation courses because they REALLY help me with my clinical work. Anyhow, I was noticing such an embodied difference in my experience of theorizing from an object-relations/Jungian perspective and a more language-based/Lacanian approach. Working with object-relations, I feel more embodied, more warm, and even a bit maternal. I feel my belly activated in the process. From the Lacanian approach, I feel much more cerebral...my head is working, but my belly isn't...

Ah, the musings of a psychdoctoral student...

Finally, (I mean it this time!) I've been noticing what it's like to work with female supervisors. Oddly enough (for me, anyhow) I feel much less judged by them. On the one hand, it's because I'm working with some fairly direct (okay, one is downright blunt!) women. I don't feel like I have to do any guess work with them-if they say good job, I did a good job.

Yup...okay...enough babbling!