I'm taking a break from writing my paper that's due on Monday. I've been working nonstop for 4 hours- I deserve one. SO! It's "I'm going to type up random thoughts time!"

On growing:



New goal this year: Learn when to shut my mouth. I wrote last year around this time that my goal was to express my opinion more freely. Objective achieved. Objective OVERachieved at some points. Now I just need to find a good balance between expressing my opinion thinking about what I'm going to say before I say it so that I don't sound like an insensitive jackass to my friends.

It's amazing how much personalities can change so drastically through the years. When I was younger I was a type-A perfectionist through and through...I've softened over the years. Or maybe I just seem much more laid back compared to my classmates. Seriously, I've never seen anybody stress out so much over schoolwork. I constantly have an urge to yell "Calm the hell down" to them when we're stresssing.

People often don't take into account that people change through the years when we don't see them that often. When you meet up with old friends or family members, no matter how you act, your actions willbeinterpreted to fit their original schema of you. Therefore, you find yourself regressing into the person you think you have grown away from and it becomes an annoying/depressing cycle.


School/career worries:



I could never have a home office. Although I love studying in my snuggie (Wes has dubbed it "stuggying") with a lit candle and a hot cup of something on my desk, I am not very productive at home. I think the root of my procrastination is that I have all the time in the world. I REALLY need something else to do these days. Today I got the last email I needed to be officially turned down from working at all the domestic violence shelters in the area, and I keep sending out resumes to postings about part-time social work related positions. I don't NEED a job...but I do need something to do other than schoolwork. I like being busy.


On a related note, I have only 2 other classmates who have not heard any news about their internship placements. These internships last an entire 12 months and have such an impact on which way our careers are going to take us that I'm DYING to know where GVSU's School of Social Work is going to put me. They said to expect to be contacted by March, and not to start worrying until then...but the suspense is killing me. My guess is that I would be harder to place because I emphasized the skills I wanted to learn at my placement on my application rather than what kind of population I would be working with. (Although I did put down populations/agencies that I could not work with eg. CPS, anti-choice organizations.)

I didn't put down that I wanted to work with domestic violence or sexual assault survivors. I figured since I have experience in that field already I should "broaden my horizons" by working with a different population. I'm still not sure if I made the right decision. Working to become a domestic violence counselor has always been the goal thus far, and I have no idea if I'm making a wise career move here by switching gears.

AND with all this accrediation bullshit that GVSU's SSW is going to through this year, I feel like I made the wrong decision by going to GVSU. But I don't know what a better decision would have been. I just feel stuck in a rut right now. The program hasn't been incredilby challenging thus far, and I don't feel like I'm growing much. (My classmates would disagree with me, but I'm not raising children or working a full time job or anything like they are.)

I keep thinking that I'll focus on domestic violence for my dissertation if I ever go back for my Ph.D, since I'm literally writing every paper in grad school about it. (Right now I'm researching financial (in)dependence and its relationship to domestic violence.)


On Freud:

I'm doing an hour long presentation on Ego Psychology next week, which I'm excited about because psychology was what I studied in undergrad. I know that "Freud is dead" and a lot of what he came up with was heteronormative, sexist and unfalsifiable, but he also got a lot of shit right. I mean, can you imagine how anybody tried to explain human behavior without the concepts of the unconscious or defense mechanisms?!

I found this great quote on tumblr the other day:

“The human mind knows itself the least. The human mind may be able to trace the origin of life through billions of years to hydrothermal vents in the ocean’s floor, it may be able to comprehend and replicate the means by which the sun produces energy, it may even be able to describe events that took place at the beginning of the universe, 13.7 billion years ago, but when it comes to exactly how we have made these discoveries, exactly how our thoughts are thought, we know a minuscule amount.”
—
The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block

Why I'm reading Wilde.

I bought "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" before Patty and I moved into our apartment in Grand Rapids at the end of the summer. The book takes place at the end of WWII on Guernsey Island, which is in the English Chanel. I thought it was lovely because 1. It's a book about how great books are. The characters lives are all transformed because of the book club that extraordinary circumstances force them to create. 2. The book is written entirely in the letters that the characters write to one another. At first I thought that I wouldn't like reading a book in this format but the letters feel so personal and much more intimate than dialogue. Each letter is written in what each writer thinks is total confidence and you feel that you have a real understanding of what each character is thinking and feeling because they do not hold back in their letters to their dear friends.

Anyway-

At one important point in the plot the characters discover that the letters one of their members inherited from her grandmother are actually letters from Oscar Wilde. The story was that while visiting Guernsey Island, Wilde found the grandmother, a child at the time, crying because her cat had just died. He told her that cats had nine lives, and Muffin still had another 6 to live. In fact, she was at that very moment being born as a cat named Solange in France. He knew this because he had psychic cat powers. After asking the girl her name and address, Wilde promised that he would let her know how Solange was doing from time to time.

Wilde wrote her 8 enchanting letters over the years, each one describing a new adventure Solange, who was something of a feline Musketeer, had during her 4th life.

"French Milk" is a drawn journal of a 22 year old's experience living (and eating) in France with her mother for a month. For her birthday, Lucy visit's Oscar Wilde's grave. "Oscar Wilde is the source of much interest, fascination, love and inspiration for me-not to mention tragedy...." "At the hotel, the bar is which Oscar Wilde had his last drink, before going upstairs to the room with ugly wallpaper, and dying with the famous last words: 'Either the wallpapers goes, or I do.'"

How the hell haven't I ever heard of Oscar Wilde? I bought his only novel, (his other works are poems and plays) "The Picture of Dorian Gray" last Friday and am so excited to read it. Especially since after I bought it, Wilde showed up again in something else that I really enjoyed: 500 days of Summer.

Summer: Well, you know, I guess it's 'cause I was sitting in a deli and reading Dorian Gray and a guy comes up to me and asks me about it and... now he's my husband.
Tom: Yeah. And... so?
Summer: So, what if I'd gone to the movies? What if I had gone somewhere else for lunch? What if I'd gotten there 10 minutes later? It was - it was meant to be. And... I just kept thinking... Tom was right.
Tom: No.
Summer: Yeah, I did.
[laughs]
Summer: I did. It just wasn't me that you were right about.

So, I'm really excited to start reading this!

This all kind of comes back to the quote I originally posted from "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society":

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive- all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment."