Uggghhh....

I felt sick the past few days...

Achy, feverish, the works. But I kind of sounded alright, and I pushed myself really ahrd to keep going.

Today I saw two clients, taught class, went to two meetings, and went to class.

Since I've been home for the past hour, I've vomited five times.

I really have to stop telling my body to shut up when I feel like shit....

Organic Moments...

*Does a happy feminist dance*

So, anyhow....I'm registered to teach Cultural Diversity in the Fall. I am utterly THRILLED. The course I took as an undergrad made me realize just how HORRIBLY REPRESSED the school is.

And I discovered this morning that the Cultural Diversity course is paired with the Psychoanalytic course in the Spring. I was so excited that I nearly throttled the bearer of this good news.

Shortly thereafter, a second year student asked me if she could teach the course. The trade-off is that I wouldn't have to develop two new courses while working on my dissertation proposal and everything else. I agreed.

Then I realized that I'm interested in how someone else would teach a psychoanalytic course for undergrads. So I asked her if I could see her (eventually created) syllabus.

Well, we talked a bit more, and we have a meeting this afternoon to petition the department chair to allow us to co-teach both!!!

Poop....

I babysat tonight.

I had a great time with the kid, reading books, crawling around the floor, dancing and giggling.

However, at one point, he made the tell-tale "I'm pooping" face, and emitted an odor. I naively assumed that this was a normal poop. I was horribly, horribly mistaken.

The little boy is 19/20 months old. So he can poop a lot, and he is far past the stage of odorless newborn poop. And he's on antibiotics.

There was poop EVERYWHERE. He had poop from his armpits to his toes. I eventually took my sweatshirt off and tried to just keep the offending mess from touching my tanktop. I basically hosed him down and found him some clean clothes. I must have used half a container of wipes. I put the poop-coated clothing in a paper bag.

I think this is why kids are cute. It's a biological necessity. I'm up to my elbows in gag-inducing poop, and he's looking at me with this adorable "oh my god, i'm covered in poo, you're going to help me, right?" expression.

Symposium

We had a graduate symposium this weekend, and I think we all had a pretty awesome time. We each had an hour to present a paper and get some feedback.

I presented my piece on the performing experience of performance ethnography.

I really enjoyed the papers and conversations, the inside jokes about the anatomy of particular professors, and the various mediums through which my classmates explored psychotherapy and research.

It makes me realizes how much I'll miss everyone when I finish my course work.

And such is the ambivalence of being a doctoral student!

There are days when I freaking despise my life, when I wonder why the hell I subject myself to this. Even in the midst of all of that, I know that I'll miss my intellectual community when I go.

And here you'll see the doctoral student in her natural habitat....

I'm sitting in my class' office with a classmate typing up some session notes and eating lunch. We have our "big deal colloquium" this afternoon, so our training director was schmoozing the speaker and showing him around.

Suddenly, the door cracks open wider, and three heads peer in:

"These are our student offices...here are some of our third years..."

I looked up from the screen with alpha-alpha sprouts hanging from my mouth and didn't comment.

You know when you're hiking and you see a deer eating, and it stops mid-chew and looks at you with food hanging out of its mouth? That's EXACTLY what it was like...

In other news, I am insanely sleep-deprived and a little punchy....

Exhaustion...

Well, I survived the first week back. I feel completley uninspired today. I've read some Lacan and some Heidegger, talked to my parents on the phone, talked to a friend, bought a desk chair, and a pair of boots.

Tonight I'll babysit.

I was a total mess by the time I met up with my husband after class yesterday. I got into the car and began babbling incoherently...the sum of it was that I was starving, burnt out, and exhausted. We went out for dinner, rented a movie, and I curled up on the couch crying. I know I can get through the semester -- I always do! -- but I feel this bone-deep exhaustion and dread that I feel sucking me into the couch...

It's more than just exhaustion...it's the feeling I get when I am sick of doing this bullshit program while living in this bullshit country. It's the times when I wonder why the hell I'm fighting so hard when it doesn't seem to do any good. It's when I feel old, jaded, and bitter.

Heh...I've themed my graduate school project "Fighting for Subjectivity." This week was particularly depressing for me. I feel hopeless, when I look around at the generation of shrinks that I'm in training with and realize that nothing will be different. And then I want to crawl into bed and sleep for years, because I don't want to face the world.

Struggling...

Today was difficult, primarily for reasons that I'm not comfortable addressing here....it really implicates other people, so....yeah...

Teaching went well, and we finally sent in our panel submission for the big qualitative research conference. That's something...

And I got an e-mail from an old friend who is writing a book on eating disorders and asked me to contribute as a feminist and therapist....which is absolutely AWESOME...

But I still feel sad and angry and stifled...

So, I shall grab a book and snuggle up against my sleeping husband....

Yup.

Grad school sucks...

After having an asthma attack last night, I went off to work at the hospital this morning. Things got crazy and some genius assigned me 8 clients without telling me. WONDERFUL. I can't talk about work much, but today was CRAZY and STRESSFUL.

Then I had supervision. She kept me late. I had 8 minutes to run down the street, over a bridge, through a tunnel, up a hill, and hop on an elevator to make my session on campus (I work on the other side of the river.)

Sprinting through the tunnel with my gigantic coffee tin banging against my leg with my already-upset lungs sucking in tunnel fumes, I realized that Graduate School Sucks. I sat with sweat running down my face for the beginning of my session. Therapeutic.

Now, after working since 8am, I finally had a break to eat at 5:30 before class at 6pm. (Lunch just never happens, and dinner is a sometimes deal. I once shamefully scarfed a salad with my hands on a bus taking me from my old practicum site to campus. I had no utensils, hadn't eaten for 10 hours, and had no breaks for 4 more.) Class was brutal with an hour and a half devoted to syllabus reading. (It's a cross-registered co-taught class.) Holy crap. I was so tired and sick of everything...

Heh...and I scared a junior. She asked me about psych doctoral programs. I told her that, well, they're brutal. My classmate chimed in: "I haven't eaten yet today. I haven't even had time to pee." I noted that I cried myself to sleep last night after realizing that the semester had started again.

Wow. So, I still promote grad school. But not on days like today...

Alright, well, off to make sure my lecture is in teachable condition....

Syllabus Day

The whole point of the first day of class is for the teachers and students to size eachother up. Honestly, I view the first day almost like an assessment.

Will my students speak to me?
Will they speak to each other?
Will they speak to me if I let them speak to each other first?
Where are my suck-ups? (surprisingly not always located in the first row.)
Where are my scowlers? (Back left corner every time, I swear!)
Who's defiant? (The ones who refuse to fill out a note card.)

I think I have an okay class this semester. They wouldn't talk to me, much...but a few did. They worked in groups well, and they talked more when I called on them after group stuff. I do, however, have the Most Intense Scowler Ever. I casually looked around the room, and I swear that I could only see the whites of her eyes. As a result of this informal assessment, I'm putting them in groups on Wednesday to see if I can get them comfortable enough to talk to me without the groups.

For their part, they spent the time sizing me up. Will I be a bitch or a pushover? It's such a strange ritual, but I'm glad to have it done with.

The room I teach in absolutely sucks. The past two semesters, I've been centrally located on the same floor of the department. That was pretty awful, but I at least had some ROOM down there. I don't even have a frigging overhead projector in there! There's very little room to do anything. Because most of my activities involve movement of some kind, this'll be interesting....

The end of break...

Following a rather exasperating day spent in various airports, I returned home on Monday night. My trip began at 4:30am driving down the mountain in a horrendous storm and ended -- a cancelled flight and two cities later -- around 12:30am the following day. I happened to be travelling with an airline that announced that morning that it is going out of business. On flight number 1, the flight attendant was in tears. On eventually-cancelled-flight-number-2, a lottery was held to kick three of us off, as we were, as a plane, overweight. Safe in my apartment, I promptly had an asthma attack. I took my life-saving inhaler and then stayed awake until 5am as a result of the stimulants and the cat's constant yowling. Around 2am, I called my practicum and explained that I was, for all therapeutic purposes, useless for the morning.

I have already settled back into my comfortable (albeit somewhat sadistic) graduate student lifestyle. I went to dinner with a friend, read several books, cuddled my cat, and met with clients. This morning I realized that classes begin on Monday, and I should seriously consider printing up a syllabus. With a mix of elation and dismay, I noted that I have done very little in terms of academic work since the semester ended. Sure, I've read several books. But this weekend, I will be researching journals to which I want to submit an article I wrote last semester, writing an abstract that is due on January 15th, and cutting a 40 page paper into a 30 minute presentation. I'm still glad that I took a break.

I again realized that I am entirely unsuited for Life Outside of Psychology. In addition to the Christmas Eve incident, my husband and I lost our keys in the middle of a national forrest in Georgia. Oops.