And it begins…

First classes of the new year last night.  This year, I am doing things a little differently — shifting my part-time/full-time balance to 20 hours of work per week, and a full class load.  My first two classes of the semester were Human Development and Social Welfare Policy.  Thursday I’ll go to Management in Human Service Organizations, meet with my advisor about my independent research project, and then head on to Advanced Practice with Families.  Sadly, my part-time hours at work don’t start until September 1st, so this first week is shaping up to be a busy one.  

It was bittersweet to be back on campus yesterday.  I felt so nostalgic for my undergrad days at Guilford College, when back to school always felt like coming home, and the excitement of reunions with friends was always the highest priority.  College then: sleep til noon, a class or two, work at the Academic Skills Center (read — get paid to do homework), ride my bike back to the apartments (a three minute commute), stop and chat along the way, food always available free at the cafeteria if I was uncool enough to brave it, and once a week, stay up all night in the pub suite finishing the newspaper.  

College now: up at 6 every day, four classes, an independent study, and work, an hour commute (gas money!), no time to see my friends, no time to cook, a house to clean, a dog to walk, and a husband who is just as stressed out and busy as I am. 

BUT.  I love being in class again.  I love the first class of the semester, when everything is just a possibility and the air on campus is full of anticipation.  It’s going to be a challenging, busy, and stressful, but also incredible year!

Rocky Mountain vacation, or, refusing to buy my books

Last week, Will and I took a break from our summer break and headed to Fort Collins, CO to visit a great friend from our undergraduate years at Guilford College.  Guilford College, if anyone is wondering, is an amazing place with a fatal flaw; like many small liberal arts institutions, it is a haven for free thinking.  That is, thinking which is free of any of the constraints of practicality, up to and including any sort of acknowledgement that one day, Guilford students will graduate and need to look for jobs.  And while those countless hours of sitting in circles, debating philosophy, religion, and the finer points of environmental ethics certainly went a long way towards making us all the people we are today, what it means, seven years out, is that everyone I know has become disillusioned with the employment possibilities a Guilford degree can offer them, and is now back in school.

Ian is no exception; he just finished a Masters degree from Colorado State University.  His girlfriend, Caroline, has a Masters from CSU as well, and has co-founded a non-profit called the Rocky Mountain Cat Conservancy.  Here’s their website: http://www.catconservancy.org/

We spent an amazing few days in Fort Collins, exploring the town, the nearby canyons, and Rocky Mountain National Park.  We even saw a mountain lion, running across the road right in front of our car while we were driving home from the park.  It was amazing.   

But now, while Ian and Caroline revel in not returning to school for the first time in many an autumn, I am realizing that it is August.  And August means school.  Class.  Papers.  No more Friday nights out on the town.  Saturday mornings at Earthfare, or the bakery, re-filling my coffee too many times as I struggle to get my thoughts clearly on paper.  

It’s not a happy realization.  Not this year, not after the absolute chaos that was my life last year, and the busy but amazingly fun summer break I’ve been enjoying.  My only consolation is that this year will be the last — Will’s last year of school altogether, and my last year of classes with only an internship to complete the following year.

I looked up all my books online last night.  My classmates have been chatting about them on facebook, commenting on who found which cheaper where, but I just can’t do it.  There they are in my shopping cart, ready to order, but somehow, I just can’t click that checkout button.  Maybe next week!

more summer adventures

I went on a fabulous hike yesterday with my best girl Amanda.  Amanda and I met our first semester of college…the fall of 1998…and although we haven’t always lived close by each other, we have managed to stay in touch and stay friends for almost 11 years now.  For the past two years, we’ve lived about a mile apart in West Asheville, and despite the business of both of our lives, every once in a while we manage to escape and have some awesome girl time in the woods.  

Our hike yesterday was a perfect combination of hard, hard work and relaxing on top of a beautiful bald with amazing views of the valley below.  It got me thinking about that balance, which I am so terrible at maintaining in my life.  Amanda is a self-identified workaholic as well, so she understood.  We both have a tendency to want to do everything we do full on, which is good, right?  But, you know, sometimes you have to put up your feet and enjoy the view. 

I’ve decided, after much debate, that this fall I’ll be cutting back my hours at work so I can focus more on school.  If you knew me at all last school year, you will know that I was stretched thin.  I got everything done, and for the most part, I did it well.  But in the process, I exhausted myself to a point which I don’t really think would be healthy to maintain for another three years of school.  SO, 20 hours of work per week.  Four classes.  An independent study.  I’m sure I’ll still be busy, but at least if I have more school than work I’ll be more flexible, more able to schedule my free time when Will has free time, AND I’ll be able to finish in 2 more years instead of 3.  Which sounds so much better!  

So, I originally started this blog as a part of the Idealist grad school bloggers program, and while I have certainly not been as reliable and responsible about updating it as I meant to be (see: all other postings, where I lament the insanity of my schedule) I have enjoyed keeping a blog and…maybe I’ll keep it up.  I haven’t written in a while, because I haven’t been in school for a blessed, blessed two months, but maybe the solution to my blogging dilemma is to expand my subject matter and not just write about school.  Because, quite frankly, it’s summer and I don’t want to think about school.  

Here is what I have been doing so far this summer: Going to weddings.  Working in the garden.  Eating delicious food from the garden.  Dreaming about traveling.  Hanging out with the dogs.  Reading books that are not about social work.  Yoga.  Taking a spanish class.  It has been glorious.  

In the absence of school to take up all of my time and brain space, I’ve remembered that I actually have hobbies.  Reading being the first and foremost, but also, I love yoga.  I love taking pictures.  I love my friends.  And I love speaking spanish.  (I’m about to start reading Twilight in spanish.  Don’t laugh at me!  Young adult fiction is just my speed.)  And, speaking of taking pictures, here are some recent shots from the garden:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This summer, I’ve rediscovered that I am a real person.  And it feels really, really nice!

what to do next year?

So, the year is rapidly coming to a close. As of today, I have two weeks, four papers, and one final exam to go until I have officially finished my first year of graduate school! It feels as though I have been busy forever.

I’ve been trying to decide what to do about work, school, and somehow managing to succeed at both of them without driving myself crazy or ruining my personal life. It’s been such a crazy year — I’m not sure I can keep up this pace for three more, even though that was my original plan. I may have the option to cut back to 20 hours of work by splitting a position with one of my coworkers who will also be in graduate school next fall, but then I have to worry about money…I was hoping to make it out of a Master’s program without getting myself into too much debt. (Hence my decision to go part-time.)

But how much is my sanity worth??? How much would I pay right now for a day off once in a while???

research, journalism, and that grey area between

So, this semester I am taking a research class.  I thought, starting out, that a research class would involve some original research.  It does not.  I was a little disappointed by this, and even more dismayed when I realized that what we are doing involves much less of the “discovery of new and amazing information” side of research and much more of the “attempting to understand the difference between construct and criterion validity” side of research.  Don’t ask, by the way.  I can tell you what the book says, but I can’t tell you what it means.  

I, however, refuse to be daunted by the statistics, the nitpicking, and the obscure vocabulary.  I wanted to do research, gosh darn it, and research is what I will do.  But none of this quantitative mess for me — someday, maybe, I will take a statistics class and begin to understand the alpha coefficients, the correlations, and the standard deviations.  For now, I’m setting my sights on a qualitative study — a series of interviews, designed to identify common themes and explore the experiences of a target population.  That is the kind of research I can handle.  The kind that sound more like journalism.  

I was a college journalist, so it make sense that I would be drawn to a research style that involves talking to people, recording, analyzing, and publishing their unique stories.  Interactions with people, after all, are why I was drawn to social work in the first place.  Ironically, the appeal of the interaction over the technical was why I decided not to pursue a career in journalism after all.  I loved writing stories.  I loved interviews, I loved news pieces, I loved searching for that “golden nugget,” as my professor called it, that one amazing quote that would tell the story for you.  But as I graduated, I realized that no one was going to hire me to write stories or edit a section of a real actual newspaper, even though that was what I had been doing for years at school.  Instead, entry-level journalism positions usually involved fetching coffee and copy editing, a dreaded combination which I just could not stomach.  

Sometimes I wish I had taken that path.  When I read Nicholas Kristoff’s columns in the New York Times, for example, and realize that a few years of copy editing might have someday led to a job where I would travel the world, finding injustice and bringing it to light, standing up for the oppressed and raising my voice for justice in a global medium.  But…instead, here I am in Asheville, standing up for the oppressed in a much less glamorous and public sort of way.  

I’ve just heard this week that my proposal to complete a qualitative research project as an independent study next semester was approved.  I have a plan, a professor who is willing to help me out, and years of college journalism under my belt.  Who needs statistics?

must. write. in. blog.

I’m sorry! I haven’t written in this blog in weeks…in my defense, the universe seems to have decided to fall apart around me, while still insisting that i go to work and class everyday and get my homework done. i know that’s no excuse, but what can i say?

a few weeks ago, i was out of town taking care of my post-op dad, who was recovering from having several metal widgets surgically inserted into his spine. painful. then, just as i was returning home, a friend from college killed himself. he had struggled with mental illness throughout his life, but no one knew it had gotten that bad. it was horrible and sad, and, needless to say, it’s been a rough couple of weeks.

but apparently, the world keeps turning. this has been both surprising and annoying to discover – somehow, people keep expecting me to do things. clients keep calling with one crisis or another, teachers keep passing out tests they somehow expect me to have studied for, and supervisors keep sending me emails with “just one small request….” All this, despite the fact that I obviously need to be curled up in bed crying, and the fact that I am totally unprepared for anything school-related due to the fact that I spent my weekend (and by weekend, I mean “the days I do homework”) driving eight hours to a funeral.

I’m off to work. I’ll be back to blogging soon, I promise.

sick days and research

So, I haven’t posted in a while…haven’t been to class in a while either.  I was sick earlier in the week, and one of the downsides to only having class once per week is that if you miss it, you miss a lot.  

Having recovered from my illness, I am back to research…reading for my weekly Indigenous Psych paper, which this past week was about Indigenous child removal policies in the United States and Australia.  Also beginning to clarify my idea for my research project.  I wrote a “statement of the problem” recently, for which I found some background statistics about immigration and deportation numbers and then proposed the question, “what happens to the families of deportees?”  

Before I began working with Latino immigrants, I probably would have assumed that when someone was deported, their whole family would be deported.  Not so!  In fact, it seems to me that most immigrant families are actually made up of people with a variety of immigration statuses.  The younger children were probably born here, and are therefore US citizens.  One parent may be a legal resident, while the other is not, or the grandparents may be naturalized citizens and the parents in the process of applying for green cards.  It’s more complicated than I would have thought, and what that means is that for every deportee, there is a good chance that there is a family of some sort staying behind in the States.  And because the majority of non-border deportations happen at job sites, chances are really good that those family members were depending on the deportee for some income.  

For my lit review, I am going to look for studies which document the effect on families when a parent or other supporting family member is lost.  I don’t think I’ll find much that specifically relates to deportation, but hopefully when I combine the more general research with the facts about immigration and deportation, I’ll be able to make some kind of point….

finding your tribe

Today in class I was privileged enough to meet an amazing alum of my program.  Her name is Keredith, and she came back to Western to speak to us about growing up in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. 

(One of the classes I’m taking is called Western and Indigenous Perspectives on Mental Health.  I’ve been reading a lot about Native American perspectives on mental health, historical trauma, and how people raised in a non-Western culture tend to respond to Western methods of healing.  Interestingly enough, this was not the same class.)  

Keredith’s talk was about community, and what that means to her as an Indian and a member of the Cherokee tribe.  She spoke of the layers and layers of community she is a part of – not only her family, but her clan, her band, her tribe, and all Indigenous people on this continent.  She described the sense of belonging she feels to a great big flashing light that was always behind her, advertising to the world that she was someone, and someone important.  

She also spoke of the history of her people, the intense prejudices they faced and still face, the genocide and intentional attempts at complete extermination.  But through it all, even the horrors, her sense of belonging and pride in her community were almost visible.  

It got me thinking about the human need for a tribe.  We all crave that sense of belonging, that sense that we are an important part of something bigger than ourselves.  That’s why gangs are so appealing to urban teenagers, and cliques so unavoidable for their suburban counterparts.  It’s why we obsess over myspace and facebook – why it is comforting to be constantly linked to several hundred “friends,” whether you actually know and like those people or not.  I wish I had a tribe.  

Eduardo Duran, who wrote Healing the Soul Wound: Counseling with American Indians and Other Native Peoples, used to assign his students a year-long project with a three-word description.  Find your tribe.  Every culture, he explains, has traditions which helped them understand the world, get through the hard times, and relate to each other as a group.  Most of us, at least in the modern-day United States, have lost our connections to these traditions, and many of us have lost even the knowledge that they used to exist.  No wonder so many of us feel so lost, drifting along without understanding our purpose.  Duran writes about the healing traditions in American Indian culture, but believes that people of all cultures can find something of themselves in the traditions of their own ancestors.  Someday, I would like to find my tribe.

Week 2 — Inauguration Day

Today I feel like a citizen of a new United States.  Or maybe I feel that I am a new citizen – that for the first time in my adult life, I can join my countrymen and women in those activities which have, up ’til now, seemed so inexplicable.  I can salute the stars and stripes, and mean it.  I can say the pledge of allegiance.  I can sing the national anthem.  I can let tears run down my cheeks as I am overwhelmed by pride in our nation’s history, in how far we have come and how many times we have learned from our mistakes, and even in those imperfections we have yet to address because today, I have faith that we, as a people, and that I, as a citizen, can somehow overcome.  

I know this feeling won’t last.  I’ve been overwhelmed lately, with the start of a new semester, the economic crisis causing such desperate need in the families I work with, and even just the cold.  It’s cold this winter, colder than usual for North Carolina, and there are so many people without heat.  It got down to 4 degrees the other night, and I cuddled in bed under layers of blankets and literally cried for the families I know whose windows are broken, whose heaters don’t work, and whose trailers lack insulation.   Part of being a social worker is leaving your job at the end of the day; understanding that you can’t solve everyone’s problems and not worrying about it when you aren’t at work.  You have to put up some walls, but every once and a while, I get tired and they just don’t hold.  

So I am going to hold onto this feeling of inspiration as long as I can.  I am going to choose to have hope, I am going to choose to believe in our president, and I am going to choose to enjoy feeling proud of my country, because I need to.  This world is a cold, scary, and fundamentally unfair place, but hey man, if Barack Obama can be president, what else can happen, right?