I came out of my apartment tonight, late to meet a friend, and saw that there was a crowd of people huddled around a firetruck, and cops everywhere. Someone had lit a palm tree on fire. Y'know, because there's nothing else to do on a Friday night in LA. The firemen were out with hoses and flashing lights, it was bringing the neighbors together. This was all an entertaining scene for a minute or so, until I looked down and noticed that my car was parked three feet away from the burning tree. My first thought was something along the lines of being frustrated that they probably wouldn't move the firetruck for me to get my car out, and then somewhere along the way I realized there was a flaming tree three feet away from my car and I did become briefly curious as to what effect that would have on it.
In the end, there was no damage, at least none that I could see at night, but I had to wait for the firemen to put the tree out and for a bunch of cops to come check out my car and take a statement. At least they let me move it before they started spraying this foam stuff into the tree that they said tended to be "kinda not good on paint" (I can only imagine how good it is for the tree, but I suppose it's not good for the tree to reignite either). Never a dull moment.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Hope, part III
It's been years since the days when Andrew and I would toss this one around until 2am, but our long-running conversation on the difference between hope and optimism always comes up for me. Somewhere in the midst of our long nights of philosophical rambling, I came to the conclusion that optimism, while a very good thing, is ultimately self-generated, and therefore at the whim of my capacity to generate it on any given day under given circumstances. Hope, on the other hand, has to be rooted to something outside of me - something that exists and persists outside the bubble of circumstances that undercut my ability to be optimistic.
If optimism is simply choosing not to see the glass as half empty, what happens when there's just a drop or two clinging to the bottom? Is it just naivete, or even stupidity, to see that glass as half-full?
School is kicking my butt right now. Classes are a barrage of laws and ethics regarding sexual abuse, perpetrators, mandatory reporting of child abuse. Professors with years of experience treating clients share stories about how they have never seen a pedophile be "cured;" the best case scenario is that they stave off perpetrating for longer and longer. Schizophrenia is incurable. And even when you gain the trust of your clients to the point where they share something with you even though they know you are mandated to report it, once you make that call you have no control over whether the investigators treat your clients with any sort of dignity or respect, or whether the kids actually wind up in a situation that is any better than the one they left.
There are facts that stare us in the face that prevent naive optimism, that make seeing a glass half full as absurd as flattering the Emperor for his new clothes. So I suppose I am asking more questions about hope right now. Does it exist? If so, and it is rooted in something (or someone) beyond us, then it has to exist regardless of circumstance. How do you hang onto it? And can you hang onto it for someone else, who has run out?
Most days, I don't find it so much a depressing topic as just a constant one. I don't have answers for too much of it. When I read the first few verses of Isaiah 61, I can't help but wonder what it means to be part of bringing good news and binding up the brokenhearted, in the midst of all this. I hold onto those verses in faith that what I hope for and the God I hope in exist, and are very, very good things, but I think I have to leave room for what I'm hoping for to look really different than I think it will look. That's generally the hard part, when we cease to be able to see the bright side because we can't see how the outcome that we would vote for is possible, like a cure for cancer or a magic pill that makes paranoid delusions go away for good and makes pedophiles stop fantasizing about little kids and stops parents from doing or saying anything that won't help their children grow up to be strong and healthy and know they are loved. Maybe hope only really kicks in when our idea of a 'bright side' is revealed to be insufficient, at best, or even impossible.
But another way I've been thinking about hope lately is in Spanish. Not "thinking in Spanish," per se, because that would not help un-muddle my thoughts on the subject, but in remembering a word: esperar. It means to hope in Spanish, but it also means to wait. They do not have a separate word for the two concepts. To hope is to wait. Wait for what? I don't know. That is part of waiting. Waiting for something to be completed. Waiting until it is completed to know what it will look like. Waiting to know what 'the year of the Lord's favor' really means. Maybe tearing some hair out and chewing down your fingernails in the meantime, but knowing that nothing you do can bring it any clearer any faster. Sitting in that, and being OK with it, because it is bigger than you are and you don't have a choice and you are not in control, and maybe your job in the middle of all that is just to sit with people who have lost their hope and letting people sit with you when you've run out.
OK, so I suppose this comes across as down with optimism. That's not really my intention. I just think it's not enough, and that I'd take hopeful realism any day.
If optimism is simply choosing not to see the glass as half empty, what happens when there's just a drop or two clinging to the bottom? Is it just naivete, or even stupidity, to see that glass as half-full?
School is kicking my butt right now. Classes are a barrage of laws and ethics regarding sexual abuse, perpetrators, mandatory reporting of child abuse. Professors with years of experience treating clients share stories about how they have never seen a pedophile be "cured;" the best case scenario is that they stave off perpetrating for longer and longer. Schizophrenia is incurable. And even when you gain the trust of your clients to the point where they share something with you even though they know you are mandated to report it, once you make that call you have no control over whether the investigators treat your clients with any sort of dignity or respect, or whether the kids actually wind up in a situation that is any better than the one they left.
There are facts that stare us in the face that prevent naive optimism, that make seeing a glass half full as absurd as flattering the Emperor for his new clothes. So I suppose I am asking more questions about hope right now. Does it exist? If so, and it is rooted in something (or someone) beyond us, then it has to exist regardless of circumstance. How do you hang onto it? And can you hang onto it for someone else, who has run out?
Most days, I don't find it so much a depressing topic as just a constant one. I don't have answers for too much of it. When I read the first few verses of Isaiah 61, I can't help but wonder what it means to be part of bringing good news and binding up the brokenhearted, in the midst of all this. I hold onto those verses in faith that what I hope for and the God I hope in exist, and are very, very good things, but I think I have to leave room for what I'm hoping for to look really different than I think it will look. That's generally the hard part, when we cease to be able to see the bright side because we can't see how the outcome that we would vote for is possible, like a cure for cancer or a magic pill that makes paranoid delusions go away for good and makes pedophiles stop fantasizing about little kids and stops parents from doing or saying anything that won't help their children grow up to be strong and healthy and know they are loved. Maybe hope only really kicks in when our idea of a 'bright side' is revealed to be insufficient, at best, or even impossible.
But another way I've been thinking about hope lately is in Spanish. Not "thinking in Spanish," per se, because that would not help un-muddle my thoughts on the subject, but in remembering a word: esperar. It means to hope in Spanish, but it also means to wait. They do not have a separate word for the two concepts. To hope is to wait. Wait for what? I don't know. That is part of waiting. Waiting for something to be completed. Waiting until it is completed to know what it will look like. Waiting to know what 'the year of the Lord's favor' really means. Maybe tearing some hair out and chewing down your fingernails in the meantime, but knowing that nothing you do can bring it any clearer any faster. Sitting in that, and being OK with it, because it is bigger than you are and you don't have a choice and you are not in control, and maybe your job in the middle of all that is just to sit with people who have lost their hope and letting people sit with you when you've run out.
OK, so I suppose this comes across as down with optimism. That's not really my intention. I just think it's not enough, and that I'd take hopeful realism any day.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Do. Or Do Not. There is no TRY.
One of the nicest things a boss ever said to me was, "So you failed. So what. If you don't fail at something else by Thanksgiving, you're not trying hard enough." It was a petty event, that roller-skating night that no one showed up to six years ago. But Joe giving me free reign to fall flat on my face definitely opened the door to some creative thinking for the next few years.
I've been wondering lately where that freedom has disappeared to. It didn't exist working as Pete's assistant, where he used to email me from the plane to tell me he didn't like the seat he got stuck in (I kept telling him when you book a nonstop to JFK two hours before the flight, you don't get an aisle seat). I don't know whether it exists in therapy, where you're stepping into someone's life. Somewhere along the way the "safe zones," the places to mess up royally and gleefully in the name of experiential education, disappear.
So I've been making myself play intramural volleyball. "Volleyball," you ask, "what does that have to do with failing?" Well, you see, I suck royally at volleyball, and the compulsion to just go play more ultimate instead is pretty tempting, especially because everyone else on my team is really good, and I'm usually off in the corner trying to get out of the way or hitting myself in the face. But in a recent conversation with a friend, the question was raised, "would you still do something you weren't good at, just for fun?" I do it all day long professionally, but could I do it, on purpose, as a hobby, and find it fun? The truth is, I seethe for the whole first game of volleyball. I do not like to be incompetent. But my team is very welcoming, and they insist on continuing to set the ball to me despite the fact that I rarely hit it over the net. So I keep hitting, and every time it goes flying across the gym I tell myself that I am not defined by whether or not I do something dumb, and by the end of the second game I almost believe it, because the people around me believe it, and by the end of the third game I'm actually having a good time. And thus, being really bad at something is proving to be very good for me.
So maybe Yoda was wrong, maybe there is still a "try" and not just a "do," even a few years into grownupdom.
I've been wondering lately where that freedom has disappeared to. It didn't exist working as Pete's assistant, where he used to email me from the plane to tell me he didn't like the seat he got stuck in (I kept telling him when you book a nonstop to JFK two hours before the flight, you don't get an aisle seat). I don't know whether it exists in therapy, where you're stepping into someone's life. Somewhere along the way the "safe zones," the places to mess up royally and gleefully in the name of experiential education, disappear.
So I've been making myself play intramural volleyball. "Volleyball," you ask, "what does that have to do with failing?" Well, you see, I suck royally at volleyball, and the compulsion to just go play more ultimate instead is pretty tempting, especially because everyone else on my team is really good, and I'm usually off in the corner trying to get out of the way or hitting myself in the face. But in a recent conversation with a friend, the question was raised, "would you still do something you weren't good at, just for fun?" I do it all day long professionally, but could I do it, on purpose, as a hobby, and find it fun? The truth is, I seethe for the whole first game of volleyball. I do not like to be incompetent. But my team is very welcoming, and they insist on continuing to set the ball to me despite the fact that I rarely hit it over the net. So I keep hitting, and every time it goes flying across the gym I tell myself that I am not defined by whether or not I do something dumb, and by the end of the second game I almost believe it, because the people around me believe it, and by the end of the third game I'm actually having a good time. And thus, being really bad at something is proving to be very good for me.
So maybe Yoda was wrong, maybe there is still a "try" and not just a "do," even a few years into grownupdom.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Planet of the Grovers
I ventured out the furthest I had been so far this weekend... about 50 miles west to Malibu, to go climbing at Pt. Dume, which happens to be where they filmed the original Planet of the Apes, I believe. Grover came with, of course. We didn't see any apes. Or Charlton Heston.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Stuart Smalley to the rescue
So, just when I go and post about how well I'm doing, I wake up and have a day where I wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. Oh well, I knew it would happen... Actually I am still able to realize that I'm where I want to be, doing what I want to do, but that the process is just messy right now.
I had an interview today for a practicum site, and it was a group interview with two other women from my class - and the interviewer didn't ask us one single question. I asked a couple of questions of him, but other than that there was really nothing I could interject that would tell him anything about me that wouldn't have looked like I was being a giant butt-kisser. I just don't schmooze well. Take me out to coffee, cut the crap, we'll have a good conversation and you'll get to know me. Put me in sensible shoes and stick me in a room where I feel like I'm competing with my classmates for a job, and you are not likely to see me shine. I just don't have that competetive gene -- if you put me on The Bachelor, I wouldn't make it past the first commercial break. Just can't do it, for a job or a guy or even a parking space. But it's easy to get swept up in, and some days I feel like I'm surrounded by a bunch of 23-year-olds who all know what they want out of life and how to get there, and I have to remind myself that's not who I am and not who I want to be, or could be even if I tried.
One of my classmates has a much more laid-back attitude about things like this. When he sends out resumes and doesn't get called back, he means it when he says, "I guess God has something else in mind for me right now." I want to believe that, but I also have mostly given up on ever having a concrete theology of God's intervention in my life. I believe He cares, deeply, but I never know what that means when it gets to the nitty gritty details. But this all loops in with the topic of my OT Writings class last week: Lamentation. We tend to think God already knows everything about our problems, so when we pray we gloss over the problem itself and spend a lot of energy telling God how we want him to fix it. And then, of course, we don't really think God will show up on our timeline, so we go try to fix our own problems. But the Israelites, they worked the other way around. They felt justified wailing, in excruciating detail, over their problems, and leaving it up to God to know what they needed, to figure out how to fix it - which they fully expected him to do.
So, I will get more sleep and eat better and do what I can to keep showing up and putting myself out there, and I will feel free to lament, and to figure out what it means to expect God to show up, and I will stop trying to tell him how I want this all to work out, and we will see what happens. In the meantime, I'm counting on "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!" to get me through a month of interviews.
I had an interview today for a practicum site, and it was a group interview with two other women from my class - and the interviewer didn't ask us one single question. I asked a couple of questions of him, but other than that there was really nothing I could interject that would tell him anything about me that wouldn't have looked like I was being a giant butt-kisser. I just don't schmooze well. Take me out to coffee, cut the crap, we'll have a good conversation and you'll get to know me. Put me in sensible shoes and stick me in a room where I feel like I'm competing with my classmates for a job, and you are not likely to see me shine. I just don't have that competetive gene -- if you put me on The Bachelor, I wouldn't make it past the first commercial break. Just can't do it, for a job or a guy or even a parking space. But it's easy to get swept up in, and some days I feel like I'm surrounded by a bunch of 23-year-olds who all know what they want out of life and how to get there, and I have to remind myself that's not who I am and not who I want to be, or could be even if I tried.
One of my classmates has a much more laid-back attitude about things like this. When he sends out resumes and doesn't get called back, he means it when he says, "I guess God has something else in mind for me right now." I want to believe that, but I also have mostly given up on ever having a concrete theology of God's intervention in my life. I believe He cares, deeply, but I never know what that means when it gets to the nitty gritty details. But this all loops in with the topic of my OT Writings class last week: Lamentation. We tend to think God already knows everything about our problems, so when we pray we gloss over the problem itself and spend a lot of energy telling God how we want him to fix it. And then, of course, we don't really think God will show up on our timeline, so we go try to fix our own problems. But the Israelites, they worked the other way around. They felt justified wailing, in excruciating detail, over their problems, and leaving it up to God to know what they needed, to figure out how to fix it - which they fully expected him to do.
So, I will get more sleep and eat better and do what I can to keep showing up and putting myself out there, and I will feel free to lament, and to figure out what it means to expect God to show up, and I will stop trying to tell him how I want this all to work out, and we will see what happens. In the meantime, I'm counting on "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!" to get me through a month of interviews.
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