verbatim

If there's one thing our professors do not do, it's beat around the bush, and if there's one thing they do do, it's tie everything back into personal development. Compliments of my very grandfatherly integration prof:

"You don't know why some clients make you angry and some make you horny. But you've got to let it help you grow as therapists."

Lenten Feast Days: ashes and dust, part II

It's funny how attempting to explain to someone why you do something makes you think about it in totally different ways. So thinking about lent this year, I've started to realize how easy it is in American Protestant culture to completely reverse the purpose and meaning of this season leading up to Easter. We often make sacrifices in an attempt to master ourselves (or, of course, we give up ice cream because swimsuit season is around the corner), when the real purpose is to do the exact opposite -- to remind us that because we come from ashes and dust we cannot, ultimately, master ourselves, but will always be dependent on God. And I don't think that means God is orchestrating every moment of the future and we're just supposed to sit around and wait for it to arrive, like room service on a silver platter. But ultimately, I think it means that God is a lot bigger and more mysterious than we give him credit for, and recognizing our dependence is somehow acknowledging that. In the Hebrew lesson for the day (compliments of my OT class.... since my Hebrew is nonexistent), the word yada, "to know," also means "to acknowledge." So maybe I don't have to know, or understand, God very well in order to acknowledge him and be grateful.

Lent has never been part of G's world, but he gave up chocolate this year. When I was explaining feast days to him (on Sundays, you don't have to fast from the thing you gave up for lent), I was really thinking that I could tough out a lenten discipline for the whole seven and a half weeks. I can handle it, I thought, I don't need no stinkin' feast days. But then, a few days after Ash Wednesday, G asked if it ever got easier, to resist the thing you sacrificed. I said I thought that, in some ways, it gets easier because you adapt to life without it. I was looking forward to the day when I adapted, when I didn't get in my car and absentmindedly reach to turn the stereo on every time before I panicked and realized I didn't have that option. "Maybe that's why you're supposed to have feast days," he said, "so you don't adapt so much and you remember how important that thing is to you, so it still means as much that you gave it up." There I go, learning about lent from a Jewish boy.

Woo Hoo

OK, don't want to get ahead of myself here, but I think I may have found a church in LA that I would actually relish going back to a second time. I was having lunch with friends from Berkeley yesterday, lamenting that I seemed to be nearing the end of my church search prospects, and mentioning that I wouldn't mind finding a church where a few cynical people hung out (remember, I like to call them 'hopeful realists'). My friend mentioned that her cousin had been going to Pasadena Mennonite Church. I think the Mennonites have ties to the Amish, but there was nary a buggy in sight. And here are five reasons why I'll be going back:

1. It was small (maybe 50 people?), and the woman in front of me turned around after the service and said, "I've never seen you before, have I?" and then proceeded to talk to me for 5 minutes and remember my name later.
2. She turned out to be an ethics professor.
3. They're big on social justice, and they're not theologically wishy-washy (because I've become theologically wishy-washy of late and while I'm sorting through all that I need to remember there might be something more constant than my personal opinion out there).
   
4. There were nerds, hippies, and punks present -- and not a small amount of polar fleece.
5. Someone invited me out to lunch afterwards.
6. They sang off-key.

WhySpace

OK, can anybody give me a compelling reason to be on MySpace? I mean, once upon a time everybody told me I had to get on Friendster, so I did, and really the only thing that happens is that I get an email every six months from someone from my past who found me, and wants me to be their "friend," and I say yes, and then I never hear from them again. Maybe that's because they all left for MySpace.

Anyhow, I'm thinking about this today because I just wandered upon a website where people with camera phones can post their pictures... and some guy posted, like, 25 pictures of people writing on a white board at a business meeting. I don't really get it. Maybe it's art. I think I missed the Net Generation revolution by just a few years, where all the random stuff that you say and think in passing gets immortalized with emoticons. I blog and I email, but that's where I draw the line. I can't IM either... it makes me anxious to have to write in such short snippets, and then while you're writing your reply, the other person changes the subject, and you hit "enter" anyway to respond to the question they asked before, and then they can't figure out what question you're answering, and you spend five minutes trying to unravel why, when they asked what they should do about their boss's habit of putting them down at staff meetings, you answered "because I was out of cheese."

Think Thank Thunk

I've got a bunch of incomplete blog entries piling up, but never fear, that doesn't mean I've stopped thinking... all the time... about everything. Just ask the boy who popped into my life when I wasn't looking (we'll call him G... and I bet he was wondering when he'd show up here), who gets quite a chunk of it these days. It's just all been sort of big things I've been thinking about that are impossible to contain in a post. I need to get over it and just be OK starting threads that I never tie up... maybe over spring break I'll try that out. For now it's finals week and, despite being not exceptionally stressed or taxed this time around, it's hard to muster up the energy to do anything other than compulsively check my email and move the piles of clothes in my room (clean but too lazy to fold, not clean but might still wear again tomorrow, skanky from Ultimate) around in little circles, from the chair to the bed to the floor and back again.

I like thinking. But every once in a while I go through a phase where I get frustrated about being a thinker, and wish I could chill out a little. I was home for my brother's birthday last year, sitting around in the garage he built, listening to him talk with his friends about building things, and towing things, and fixing cars, and it felt so.... tangible. They make stuff, and break stuff, and fix stuff, and it made me really jealous. I sit around with my friends talking about esoteric things that don't even exist. Or, they exist, but you can't see them or touch them or measure them. I know I am who I am, and I've learned to work with it, and I suppose my chosen profession is my way of putting my proclivity for relentless thinking to good use. But my brother is building a house now, and sometimes I just want to fly there and pound some nails, and learn about drywall and how to drive his excavator. That just sounds really cool. In the absence of being able to do that right now, maybe that is what Ultimate does for me... running around after a piece of plastic for two hours shuts down my head and roots it back in my body.

And since if I go any further with this, I'll just be thinking more... I'll just stop there.

Milestones: happy no more tuesdays

That's Happy No-More-Tuesdays, not Happy-No-More Tuesdays... in four and a half hours I'll be done with 11-hour days of class. Spent the last day of clinical lab role-playing a suicidal adolescent girl. The cool thing about today was the sense of balance that is creeping in for the first time... between talking about elder abuse and postpartum depression, we had a potluck marking the end of clinical foundations class, where we reminisced over two quarters of in-jokes and drama, and talked about transitioning into practicum. Somewhere along the way we've gone from people who know nothing and are stressed out about it, to people who know only infinitesimal amounts more but who can laugh about it now. I was having trouble seeing it before today, but it finally helps me realize how far we've come since orientation week.

I kept a list of professorial quotes this quarter, here are a few of the more entertaining ones (not sure if they're funny... maybe it's just therapist humor?):

"So what would that mean to you if....?" (regarding anything - i.e. if I hugged you, if I were your mother, if you wore red shoes today)

"who's that idiot who wrote the book about men having caves? how come women don't get to go into caves? he doesn't need a cave, no, he's depressed, you idiot!"

"I used to hate depressed clients"

"Why won't you take your Prozac!? Just put it on the pile. Treat it like a vitamin deficiency."

"Psychotic persons should not be traveling the world. that's just a bad thing."

Mortality Therapy: Ashes and Dust

"Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou will return."

OK, so most people wouldn't find that a particularly cheery thought for a Wednesday evening. But last week was Ash Wednesday. And yeah, if I were thinking about death all the time, that might be a problem. But on a random Wednesday, in the middle of a long week of studying, and interviewing for practicum, and trying to remember to keep my fridge full, and 72 other things that feel really urgent if you let them, a little dose of my own mortality in the form of a charcoal cross across my forehead was a good thing, to begin 40 days in which, somehow, I am meant to remember that God is God and I am not. (OK, so I'm supposed to remember that one the other 325 days too, but the intentional discipline of lent helps bring it home).

I gave up the stereo in my car for lent this year. The faceplate is now living in my sock drawer. So let's just say that it was a looooong drive to Palm Springs in Friday afternoon traffic at the end of last week. I figured it would be a good chance to be more present, to God and to my own self, since I'm usually pretty good at distracting myself with email, music, people, bellybutton lint... you name it, I'll get sidetracked by it. In the car, I'm trapped. Hopefully in a good way. But after an hour and a half of being alone with the little spinning hamster wheel of my own thoughts, it was not a good feeling. Praying wasn't getting me very far, and besides, I was managing to distract myself from that too. I needed something short and sweet. So I repeated the "dust" line 20 or so times. Really. There is something about remembering, as Ecclesiastes points out, that the sun comes up and the sun goes down, and the rivers flow and are never full, and that all of this stuff runs whether or not I get out of bed on any given day. Yeah, the stuff I was thinking about is important, and somewhere within my theology I assent to the idea that God cares about things that are important to me, because I am important to God. But pondering my eventual demise takes a lot of the pressure off and definitely puts a few things in perspective.

Anne Lamott has a great passage in Operating Instructions about how revolutionary it is to show up for your life and not be ashamed that you don't really have your shit together. So this week, I'll drink to "dust," because mortality therapy helps me keep showing up.