On Becoming a Person

Introducing… my (so-to-speak) famous husband!

A guy from Microsoft emailed John not too long ago and asked if they could feature his professional blog on the official ASP.NET webpage. This webpage is the official online Microsoft community for web developers. They haven’t put his link up there quite yet because they are working on re-doing the website, but I guess they are planning on it.

(This famous Microsoft guy already linked to him at the bottom of this post: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/)

To be honest, I really understand about 1.3256% of what John writes about on the blog. I know he comes up with creative ways to solve problems with website code, or he invents new programs for applications and stuff, and then shares his work and gets comments and ideas from other like-minded developers. That’s pretty much it, and I’m okay with that!

Even if I really don’t understand it and can’t appreciate it as fully as I wish I could, I am happy to see my husband using his talents and getting noticed out in the community :-)

I think it is hitting me pretty hard this evening that I am feeling weary of giving up so many things to pursue a career in counseling.

Think of it: to be a therapist, you interact with so many people in an incredibly intimate context. You sit across from someone while they share with you their most secret, private, negative, hopeless, or unacceptable feelings. The goal is for them to open up as much as possible. On the flip side of this though, your goal is also to keep your personal reactions, thoughts, and life circumstances to yourself, lest it affect your client. After you listen to people tell you horrible stories about suicide, abuse, rape, poverty, discrimination, depression, you name it; you cannot repeat this information to anyone. You can’t go home at the end of the day and tell your significant other about your work. You can’t really talk to your friends about how heart-wrenching it all is.

In addition, you have to watch what your clients (or students, or supervisees) are able to find out about you. Should your clients know you are married/partnered, what city you live in, what you enjoy in your free time, where you grew up, or where you like to hang out and what you do for fun? Should they be able to see pictures of you and your kids? In our profession, we have pretty much been taught that the answer is no. Supply information about yourself with discretion. Express your opinions rarely, and with caution when you do. If you find out that you and your client like to go to the same bar, you stop going there so that your client doesn’t have to feel uncomfortable. You don’t do or talk about anything in public that you wouldn’t want a student seeing you do or talk about.

One big newsflash that I am realizing more and more as I interact with other mental health trainees or professionals: Counselors are not superhuman! We have fears, insecurities, and emotional pain just like everyone else. We just say things like, “Tell me more,” and talk about scientific data and “what the literature says,” and lobby for social justice and equal rights, and give lectures on personality and treatment modalities, and have case conferences about people dealing with issues that we ourselves have dealt with also but are afraid to admit out loud to each other, lest anyone know our true selves.

For some reason, I was thinking about this as I was going to bed last night:

I learned in my cognitive psychology class eons ago that the more important or common a construct is for a society, the more words they will have for that construct. For example, Eskimos have a bazillion different words for “snow” since that is something so central to their daily life. So this got me thinking about the United States and what constructs we have a myriad of words for (though a lot of them are slang).

I decided probably the most common one is sex. Though I will not repeat any slang terms, euphemisms, or phrases here, you can pick your own brain and understand how sort of creepy it is that we have so many words for this act. One of the other most common constructs, in a similar vein, I think are probably the male and female genitalia.

The other big ones:
Money – cash, change, dollars, bills, coins, bucks, greenbacks, tender, moolah, bread, dough, cash-money, G’s, grand, stash, loot, wad, lettuce, smackers, chump change, Benjamins… and the list goes on…
Alcohol – booze, sauce, moonshine, toddy, nightcap, brew, brewsky, spirits, fire water, libation…

I think one ray of hope in this list is this one:
Mother—mom, mommy, momma, mama, ma, mammy, ma’am, mum, mummy

Yeah, I probably need to find other ways to fall asleep!

Romeo save me

I’ve been feeling so alone…

Since I have been on break for the past month, I took the liberty of reading a TON of books.  Probably around 15 (I think I lost count after 12 but it’s definitely more than that). That’s about 4 books a week :-).

Some of the highlights include:

* Harnessing the Wind by William Kamkwamba, which I wrote about previously
* Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders – this is a book that one of my teachers asked us to get for the class and then decided we weren’t going to read after all. It’s about medicine, not counseling, but interesting nonetheless.
* The Other Side of Paradise by Staceyann Chin – this one is by far my favorite! It’s about a girl growing up in Jamaica without knowing her parents and being passed from one (often abusive) home to the next.
* Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo – translated from the French, this is an account of the holocaust captured in poetry and short vignettes. Beautiful writing; very graphic but moving.
* Keeping You a Secret by Julie Anne Peters – This one was recommended by my Ethics professor; it is a fiction story about a high school girl and her experience coming out as a lesbian and the discrimination she faces. Also a really good read, though the writing is sort of juvenile.

I have also been sick for over a week now and haven’t felt like doing much of anything except laying on the couch like a turd, so I have spent a lot of time watching NOVA. (I have always loved science, even since I was a kid).  I saw some interesting episodes, including one about a robot car race that had a team from Carnegie Mellon where my brother goes to school. Also there were episodes about deciphering the ancient Mayan code, doing an archeological search of a remote cave in the Holy Land, rebuilding the Parthenon, the discovery of a four-winged dinosaur (which led to the conclusion that birds are descended from dinosaurs—wow!), and a piece about the making of refrigeration and absolute zero.

Wow, I am such a nerd.

It’s pretty scary to think that all of the Y2K jazz was TEN years ago. I still have a pretty vivid memory of what I did that night—my best friend Liz came over, and she and I, along with the rest of my family, made crazy party hats and had a contest. At midnight, we all ran outside screaming and banging on pots and pans. I have pictures of us dancing in the driveway in our pajamas (we were 14).

This past New Year’s Eve was fun—we spent it with some of my friends from school. On New Years Day, we went to my parents’ house for dinner. It was kind of nice because it was the first time I remember ALL of my family being together at the same time—both my parents, all 4 of us kids, and all of the significant others. Here is some documentation, courtesy of Alan:

I decided that Parcheesi is a horrid game of death, and that Pictionary is more fun when NOT played by the rules. (Hilarious moment was when my mom was trying to draw "Little Women" and I yelled out, "Boobs!"). Best quote of the night came from my sister Katie, telling me: “You’re gross because you have lice!” (Which, to be clear, I do not).

I was actually pretty sick during all of this though—I started feeling bad on New Year’s Eve and it never let up.  I even had to miss my lunch date with my brother Greg, newly returned from France, due to the fever, which I was really sad about. In the past 2 days I have gone through 4 full boxes of tissues, filled an entire 13-gallon trash bag with the used ones, drank 4 pitchers of Kool-Aid, and slept for a total of about 6 hours. What a way to ring in the new year! At least I have a week to recover before we go back to school.

And with that said, I should probably stop covering my laptop with snot.