On Becoming a Person

It came on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving.  We were up at my parents’ house celebrating the holiday.  I don’t think there was snow where we live, but because my parents live an hour north of us they were lucky!

I went outside immediately to take some pictures while the sun was coming up; I was in such a haste that I went out onto the deck barefoot at first until I realized that my feet would fall off.  Anything for a good picture.

I think a good theme for some of these might have something to do with the harshness of winter (especially that thorn one!).  It’s kind of funny how it can creep up on you so quickly.  Just two weeks ago I was taking pictures of flowers and grass :-P.

I told this story to my colleagues during lunch on Friday at the counseling center where I work:

Thursday on campus I was in my office for my office hours, and I was sitting there thinking about how hungry I was.  About 5 minutes later, this student who looked familiar but who I didn’t know came in and said, “Do you like tacos?” I said, “Why?” and she said, “Because I bought Taco Bell for the office but nobody wanted any!” She looked really disappointed and frustrated, like she was about to cry.  I said, “What do you have?” and she said she had a plain taco and some nachos.  I said, “Actually, I was just thinking about how hungry I was.  I’ll take a taco.” So she handed me a taco and said, “It’s still warm and everything.”  She asked me if I wanted some nachos and originally I said no, but then I changed my mind and said, “Sure, I’ll have a couple.”  She opened up an untouched platter of nachos loaded with meat and cheese and let me take as much as I wanted. I thanked her, and told her that what she did for her office was really nice and that I was sorry nobody appreciated her gesture of kindness.  She looked a little bit happier, and I was a little bit happier to have some food in my stomach!  She went on down the hall looking for other graduate students in their offices that she could share the nachos with.  How random! 

My colleagues’ first reaction was, “You didn’t know her?  And you took food from her?  What if it was poisoned?! What if it had the date rape drug in it?”

I mean, they do have a point.  But it was Taco Bell, and I was hungry, and she looked kind of familiar and sad all at once.  It did not seem very likely that she was trying to poison me with taco meat.

That prompted one of the staff psychologists to go to his office and get me one of these cards that you can take with you to the club and you can “smear” a drop of your beverage on it and it will indicate whether or not your drink has the date rape drug in it.  He passes them out to his clients.

He said that I should have had one of these with me when I was offered the Taco Bell… maybe I could have dropped some taco meat on there to check and see if it was poisoned.  Yes, that’s exactly what I should have done; smeared a slab of meat around on a piece of cardboard before eating it.  Hilarious.  It wouldn’t have worked anyway though—you have to wait for the circles to turn blue, and I doubt I would have been able to see that underneath all the taco seasoning.

So I am home alone tonight because John went to the 11pm showing of the Boondock Saints movie. 

(Here he is, drinking a ton of coffee beforehand to keep himself awake!)

I graded papers for as long as my  brain could stand it, then I planned on going to bed.  However, once I laid down I couldn’t fall asleep (maybe I should grade some more papers, haha)—too much thinking, too much anxiety, too much stress.  So I have been on the internet for the past hour and a half searching random things in hopes to bore myself to sleep.

It’s not working.

What is hilarious though is that I Googled the phrase “I am lonely” just for kicks, and the first hit was this forum post titled “I am lonely will someone please speak to me.”  This post got almost 2000 responses.  All from folks who also Googled the same phrase as I did.  Geez, there are a lot of lonely people out there.  We should all unite.  Then we wouldn’t feel lonely anymore :-).

Never underestimate its’ power.  Ever.

My intuition hooked me up two separate times yesterday.  First, as I was walking to my car last night in the rain and the dark, I came across an envelope lying on the sidewalk.  When I first saw it I just stepped over it and went on, but when I got to my car I started thinking, “what if there’s money in that envelope?” or “what if it’s something important someone dropped?” I shrugged these thoughts off at first, thinking that if it was money I would not want to feel the guilt involved with finding someone else’s cash, so it would be better if someone else found it.  I actually got in my car and started driving out of the lot and something in me was like, pick up that envelope!  So I literally stopped my car and got out and shoved the dripping thing in my coat pocket.

Inside my car I tore it open (it pretty much fell apart it was so wet), and there were 3 checks inside written out to the same person, totaling over $900.  Dang.  I had no idea who the person was that the checks were written to, but one of them did have a phone number on it.  So I called the number and left a message explaining who I was and that I found a check they had written to this certain person.  Like 2 hours later a college kid called me back and said he had gotten my message from his mom, and he asked me if there were any other checks there.  I told him about the two others, and it turns out they were the rent checks these students were going to drop off for their landlord.  He was super relieved and said, “Thanks for being a good person.”  I am kind of glad I got out of my car!

Second, we are writing this “critical literature review” paper in my Vocational class.  It is supposed to be on some area of diversity as related to vocational psychology.  That’s all the instructions for the assignment say; 15 pages of critical lit review.  Naturally, I was assuming that a “literature review” means a thorough sweep of the existing literature on the topic; kind of like the “literature review” (cough cough) that you write for your thesis or for any journal article.  So I have spent hours going through and reading articles on sexual orientation as it relates to vocational psychology.  The paper is due tomorrow.

On a whim, I decided to stop by my professor’s office yesterday to see how broad of a literature review she wants us to do.  I have thought about checking in with her many times before and always been like, “nah,” but yesterday something inside of me was like, “Go check!”  So I did… and it turns out she takes “literature review” to mean 5-6 articles but deeply critiquing each of them.  Hm.  Now I have to pretty much start over.  What a waste of all those hours!  At least I checked though.  I told her what I was in the process of doing and she was like, “Yeah… no…”  Sigh.  It might be a really late night (again) for me to get this right but at least I know now I won’t fail!

Integer Vitae

The beautiful gray dog
loping across the lawn
all afternoon for the sheer
joy of summertime,

bees at their balm, the dragonfly
asleep on a raspberry leaf--
that’s how we’d live
if living were enough:

innocent, single-hearted
like the mourning dove who’s called
his mate in the cool dawn
from one pine for a thousand years.

These do not wake in tears
nor does deception drive them
down to the blue pond
where the beaver, prince

of chaos, who appeared
alone as if from nowhere,
is tirelessly constructing
his dark palace of many rooms.

_______________

All of this reminds me of graduate school.  Very much so.

 

So our last Vocational Behavior exam was a massive killer.  All of the exams in this class are killer—generally you need like 12+ hours of studying to do well.  Our professor asks for citations and nitty gritty details from articles we read weeks and weeks ago.

I had been so busy before the exam (I graded 51 papers two days before; it took me like 8 hours straight) that I didn’t get to study as long as I would have liked.  I did put in about 7 hours the day before the exam, but clearly, it wasn’t enough.  On the day of the exam itself, I think I literally made up answers to 1/4 of the questions.

Got the test back today—turns out that I missed an abundance of points for leaving out some minute details on the questions for the material that I apparently thought I knew, but that every single answer I made up was 100% correct.

Whoa.  Maybe I should stop studying all together.

(My photos and excerpts from Mary Oliver poems)

In matters of love of this kind
there are things we long to do
but must not do.

I would not want to see your smile diminished.
And the flowers, anyway,
are happy just where they are,

on the pale dunes,
above the cricket’s humble nest,
under the blue sky
that loves us all.

How quietly,
and not with any assignment from us,

or even a small hint of understanding,
everything that needs to be done
is done.

 

Sometimes I dream
that everything in the world is here, in my room,
in a great closet, named and orderly,

and I am here too, in front of it,
hardly able to see the flash and the brightness--

and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing;
and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.

 

I am home sick today.  I think it is both a physical and emotional sickness. 

I am stressing out about how messy my apartment is (especially now that I get to behold it for the entire day).  How I should clean up all of the Voc Psych materials I have managed to spread over my entire living room during Sunday’s blast of studying.  How I should do that mountain of dishes in the sink.  I am also stressing out about all of the work I still have to get done for school – how I need to make lesson plans and come up with my Ethics presentation on Thursday and do the reading for Voc class tomorrow and grade my students’ tests.  How I need to come up with some new dissertation ideas because my adviser keeps shooting down all of the ones I have because they aren’t backed in enough theory.

But I am in bed eating oranges and not doing any of those things.

I am also looking at the above postcard—one my brother Greg sent me from France.  He said he conceptualizes “Randonee fleurie” to mean something analogous to “the fruited plains” in English.  I like this postcard a lot.  Sometimes I feel like that old hiking boot—all ragged and tired and worn—and I wonder how anything beautiful can ever come from that.

 

He put the music to some Newsboys stuff up on the TV and started playing and singing really loudly in the living room.  I was feeling pretty crappy but this kind of helped.  Ah, marriage.

  

I’m referring to my new age, not the TV show.  I’m not sure how I feel about it, really.  I kind of feel like I just grew into 23, and now I am old all over again.

 

Naturally, every birthday requires some reflection on the previous year.  My reflection of this past year is that it was really, really hard.  And it feels like it just keeps getting harder.  Since I started graduate school, it seems like every single week meets me with a new challenge to overcome.  Just when I think that I could not possible handle one more ounce of stress, the scale tips a little further off-balance. 

And somehow I always adapt.  That’s actually what scares me.  Is there ever a breaking point?  Will I ever say, “Enough is enough!?”  This semester alone I have had so many different people—classmates, professors, my supervisor, my research adviser, my parents—tell me that I have WAY too much on my plate.  Everyone likes to observe this, yet no one has any suggestions on how to remove anything from my schedule.  I welcome any and all ideas!

There has been a lot of other things going in, none of which I would post here, but suffice it to say that sometimes I think what is expected of mental health professionals, psychologists in particular, makes us seem like superhumans.  We are always supposed to be “managing our emotions” (as my research adviser so aptly put it), putting others’ needs before our own (always!), and containing what we really think for the sake of someone else’s emotional needs.  And I do think this is good, but at times it just gets exhausting.  There’s only so much you can hold in before you feel like exploding.

Oh Carl Rogers, what would you say to me now…