dx and tx re: grad school.

I haven’t blogged in a while. Since then everything/nothing has been going on, like it always does. I am at the midterm of the first semester my second and last year in grad school for social work. I am moving in on graduation (but I’m still not sold that graduation is not actually a mirage on the horizon like my favorite part from the epic movie Fifel Goes West.) Also, Jessica Boyd, roommate of the mostest, moved into Old North to encroach upon the hipsters to learn their ways. So far I’ve only learned that the neighbors kids start playing really early, really loudly, really close to my window, and I find myself kind of wanting to break their toys. School is do-able but my internship is hard. I have more work than I ever thought I could do … and I end up doing hugely irresponsible things things like sitting in coffee shops writing blogs for my faithful readership of two (hey mom and dad!). I basically do various social worky things, very few of which I am qualified for by any definition of the word qualified. No ones appears to have this figured out yet which is great for me.

In the meantime I’m testing my limits of sleep deprivation and playing a game of chicken with my stress level. I have perfected the art of turning coffee into pee and acting out on my ADD by eavesdropping on conversations in those coffee shops when I should be studying. (Very often I’ve wanted to be like, Whew, honey, listen, he is even boring TO ME and I’m not even in the conversation. I’m going to insert my headphones, and I suggest you do the same). I digress (ADD). Most importantly, I have brought back a skill I made up when I was a kid in which, whenever I feel like I might start hysterically crying in inappropriate places, I take a deep breath and hold it in for as long as I can. Then I let it out slowly and resume a normal rate of breathe, sans meltdown. I’ve tried to practice this often while I also practice being more adult on the outside than I feel on the inside. But it’s hard to make your outsides and insides match and extremely difficult when your breath is taking up all your inside space.
So I exercise my life pleasures on delicacies like sleep and food. Back to the basics. And as the weather gets colder my bed gets hotter (not in that way, very unfortunately). I am referring to my intricate system of bed heat that involves both a heated mattress pad that SantaDonna brought me last year AND a heated blanket that my granddad gave that probably dates to circa 1989. (Smokey the bear would have a cow (pun always intended), this thing is running rampant with all kinds of fire hazard possibility.) As my sister very accurately describes, “this heated mattress pad, it's like sleeping on a little baby angel … with a fever.” (Smith, 2011). You might think that both the mattress pad and the blanket would get really hot, and it probably would be way hot to a normal person. But lucky for me, my thermometer is broken and I never get hot. I only get toasted in my panini bed and wake up all golden and bubbly. and the mornings, LORD, THE MORNINGS. I tell you what- in the morning time, my inner child is a PILL. Every night I tell her, "listen, we’re gonna have to wake up AGAIN tomorrow morning while it’s still dark, just like we did this morning. and we are going to peel ourselves out of the panini and go to grown up things, like practice our skills of empathy and crossing things off sticky note to do lists and holding our breath and watching people who suspect dont have to hold their breath and acting like they act." Despite my patient nightly explanations, my inner child takes over in the morning, (she is freakishly strong) and pushes snooze up to six times (!). I finally (wo)man up and (wo)manhandle in her in “tough love” kind of way and rush around to do my morning things like brush my teeth in the dark so I don't’ have to look at my wake up face in the mirror.
Here is picture of her in the mornings

I felt torn between representing my inner child as a crying baby or a crying monkey so I decided to go with a crying baby in a monkey costume. This is actually a remarkably accurate representation.

I have also resorted to buying meals in the forms of delicious pumpkin muffins at various coffee shops I patronize where switch between between typing furiously to aimlessly staring out the window. I also have developed a spidey sense to find vending machines that sell me delicious cheese crackers and animal crackers, always the animal crackers. That’s the way the vending machine cookie crumbles: no change, no lunch. It has recently come to my attention that at grocery stores, you can go get food to keep *in your house*. They sell the kind of food that you can in fact mix together with other foods and sometimes there is some stirring or a recipe to read and, if you’re real fancy, measuring and mixing. Then you just stick all the stuff on the oven (that’s what’s underneath the stove. (I know about the stove. (the stove is thing I once learned that made water hot and real bubbly for eggs or tea or ramen noodles (but not that the same time (that’s gross)))). AND I MEAN VIOLA, a bonafied cooked meal. (Apparently there are people out there who get so down with this cooking bidness and have enough copious amounts of free time to sit around for hours for fun and watch Paula Deen talk to sticks of butter in her southern accent. I love butter and accents as much as the next girl, but for crying out loud, people don’t you know you are not ever going get to eat this food. Take your inner child to chickfila and get her a happy meal). I digress (again). People have time for this shopping, home food storage, and have figured out how to work an oven- man, it can be delicious. It’s hard to believing that i was the kind of person that was at one time organized enough to go to the grocery store, buy things that are not in single servings that you take out of a box that says “lean cuisine” and heat up on some “magic grilling tray” (please come on, this not magic, I know because there is no stirring or mixing or ‘viola’ oven work). Those same people that do the oven magic, some of them also run loud machines over the carpet and take care to smooth out there bed things each morning. Such things remain a distant memory to me and perhaps when I’m a grown up I can bring these things back. I can make up my panini before I go out for the day. (Maybe not, I’m not really into details.)

I was thinking all DSM-y and wondering how to code my experience in grad school and the symptoms of my chronic persistent mental maladies. I was thinking that the DSM IV would probably code this 666.0- High levels of school induced stress and anxiety; characterized by 3 or more of the following:

excessive caffeine intake, procrastination escalating to the form of an art, lethargy, forgetfulness, grossly neglected personal hygiene and nutrition, listlessness, hopelessness, depression, death.

Recommended treatment:
developing thicker skin
tolerance for excessive amounts of caffeine
high tolerance for ambiguity in field/life/school
great breath holding skills
good friends afflicted with similar illnesses
Lots of change for vending machines

I would be a great case study.

Welp, my monkey/baby is getting real whiny. I need to put her to bed in my panini. Morning times comes early for babies in monkey costumes.

peace.

Romans 4 {The Message}

Trusting God

^1-3 So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not a story about us. What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."

^4-5If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself-no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.

^6-9David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man:

Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off,
whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.
Fortunate the person against
whom the Lord does not keep score.

Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don't we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?

^10-11Now think: Was that declaration made before or after he was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision? That's right, before he was marked. That means that he underwent circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to bring him into this acceptable standing with himself, an act of God he had embraced with his whole life.

¹²And it means further that Abraham is father of all people who embrace what God does for them while they are still on the "outs" with God, as yet unidentified as God's, in an "uncircumcised" condition. It is precisely these people in this condition who are called "set right by God and with God"! Abraham is also, of course, father of those who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision not just because of the ritual but because they were willing to live in the risky faith-embrace of God's action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he was marked by circumcision.

^13-15That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God's decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed. If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That's not a holy promise; that's a business deal. A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God's promise at that—you can't break it.

¹⁶This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God's promise arrives as pure gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that's reading the story backward. He is our faith father.

^17-18We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"

^19-25Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up. He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said. That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right." But it's not just Abraham; it's also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.

Finally

Finally

Finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shape of clouds?

Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shape of flesh, everchanging
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of body for body,
unending light.
You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.

- Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir

Summer Bucket List

“Day by day nothing seems to change but pretty soon everything is different” Calvin and Hobbes

This past week I got done with the first year of grad school in the social work program. Finished the presentations and turned in papers and did two take home exams and …. then we all got done. At a monumental time like this, my feelings can be best expressed from a monologue from the super smash hit 90s blockbuster film Clueless:

“I’d like thank my parents, for never giving me a ride to school. The LA city bus driver, for taking a chance on an unknown kid and the fine people of McDonalds for making those little Egg McMuffins without which, I might have never been tardy” (DOES ANYONE ELSE REMEMBER THAT?)

Jump back to real life. SRSLY, I’d like to shout-out to owl Purdue, you ivy league birdy, for helping me through every single citation I’ve ever done and to the NASW Code of Ethics for keeping me honest. The year went by so fast even though some of those days felt soooo looonnng. I know I changed somewhere in there in probably lots of different ways, and I know I’ve met some great people in the program that I am thankful to know. Seriously, that has been by far the best part.

Right now, I am so thankful to have a break.

I remember at the beginning of the summer when I was a kid I would get so excited and literally think the long days of summer would never ever end. And this summer is especially sweet because I have a job that I like a stupid lot with people that I like a crazy lot too. More to the point, no school means no homework which means unknown and uncharted free time on nights and weekends. Without the structure of school sometimes (all the time) my tendency is to be lazy and do what comes easy-which is to lay around and daydream and wonder around downtown and sit in different coffee shops all the live long day while I thoroughly facebook stalk each and every one of you to my satisfaction.This is the thing about facespace- She/He/Shim/It and I have a real love/hate thing going. Sometimes the 'book and I are the two best friends anyone has ever seen. Facebook helps me get through those super long classes, helps me stalk people I may or may not know and helps me make you people think I am more clever than I actually am. But sometimes the facebook is super hateful to me and lets me sit around for HOURS and go through picture after picture AFTER PICTURE until I am convinced that there are at least 500 people who are just crusing through life being skinnier than me, writing funnier blogs than I write, getting married, having babies, taking great vacations, eating great food (that for some reason they choose to take pictures of- people eat. your. food). These people probably sleep 8 hours a night, never stutter, don’t apologize profusely and probably don’t drool on their pillows or lose their stuff ALL THE TIME. Point is, I sit there on the facebook and make up stories for every single one of you (and all of you have great lives, btw. You’re done very well for yourselves. Your mothers are proud) ... and that’s when the facespace starts to give me The Big Sads. AND what’s worse, is that I’ve now got netflix. That is the Crystal Meth of lazy people. So the point is I’m not very good at moderating myself or moderation in general and I come from a long line of people not good at moderation, those people being the human race. I need goals that function as little reminders of what I’m going to spend this sweet time during summer doing rather than totally wasting it. I need like a summer syllabus, of sorts. This syllabus is all about finding myself a rhythm, and I love me some rhythm. This rhythm is going to include more intentional time with friends by way of taking walks or making phone calls or writing snail mail. I will make trips to hobby lobby (Mecca) so I can learn to be more artsy fartsy (lifelong goal) , take more long runs downtown and read BOOKS.
SO here’s my summer syllabus ‘O Not-Wasting-My-Freetime-Fun.

1. Quit Smoking/ Keep running. I set a goal at the beginning of the year to run 4 5K’s this year- So far I’ve run 2 of the 4. Truth be told, I am just not a very good runner. My roommate of the mostest (who is actually is a good runner) wrote a blog about running and she said that even if you’re really no good at it, who cares. and who even knows. I used to hear people say that they LOVED running and I would think, I love the beach. I love really good nights sleep and cuddling and peanut butter but I do not love to RUN. I thought these mysterious people galloped and pranced and danced along the same pavement that made feel like that little place underneath my right rib was being repeatedly stabbed by a sharp object. But the more I do it, and the longer I go without my beloved ciggys, I find that I really do look forward to putting on my new running shoes and getting my rib stabbed. What I’m saying is, I’ve actually started to like it. And I literally NE-VAH thought that would be the case. So I’ll accept it as a gift that I’ve turned into “one of those people” and be thankful that will (hopefully) only get easier.

2. Rebind my bible- This is my teen study bible and it has been with me since freshman year of high school. Since that time, it has gone to church and parks here and there and all over the southeast, to Europe and the beach. If my bible could talk it would tell you all about the coffee stains and where the ink bled all over and how I love the beauty of the Old Testament in Isaiah and Psalms but not so much of the stuff about goats and pork and blood in Leviticus. It would also say, listen woman, is there no rest for the weary, plz just buy a new one. And I did that. Several new ones over the years but that Teen Study bible just has a special place in my little heart. It is the best of all Bibles. So I’m going to give it a little do-it-yourself- face lift and see if I can’t rebind with the help of some interweb directions and a pilgrimage to Hobby Lobby (moment of silence). It is and has always been my goal to be more artsy fartsy. I will possibly blog in the future about these endeavors. If they are successful. If they fail, I will never mention them again as to save face around the rest of you fabulous facebook people. duh.

3. Go to the Farmers Market. This makes me looooooove Knoxville. Saturday morning the summer time is the greatest of all mornings because I wake up and roll around in bed like a sloth for as long as I damn well please. I drink coffee and eat cereal out of the box with my fingers and finally put on some “I am a downtown dwelling, hobby lobby shopping, wanting to be hippier than I actually am twenty-something” outfit and walk to the Farmer’s market. and I find this

And This:

Thats Ferd Moyse IV from Hackensaw Boys and he is a treasure. He is sitting on a old suitcase that he’s using a kick drum with his right foot and kicking a tambourine that’s taped to his left foot while he plays the violin (which I’m sure he calls “the fiddle”) while he is singing. and I wish the blog could live stream the music because this just doesn’t do it justice. ‘twas awesome. I will buy food and spend time with Ferd and then spend Saturday afternoon cooking with some of these foods I buy there. Something with sweet potatoes or eggs or strawberries. Will let you have some iffen its edible. if not, see the end of #2.


4. TAN- The good ole fashion natural way too. By the pool being ever so precious with my besties. Boy oh Boy am I glad that I am not one of those poor unfortunate souls that gets talked into buying a package at the tanning bed and then decides she LIKES IT. That chick started keeping her plastic space-suit like eyewear in her purse all the time. That way, anytime she’s out after she’s bought herself her Sonic for happy hour she can suddenly decide she needs to tan, pull the car across three lanes of traffic on Kingston Pike all so she can fake-and-bake on demand. That girl is so shallow that the poor thing probably sits and looks at facebook until she wants to cry and talks about Sonic so much that people at school bring her sonic coupons. (As I take a long pull from my sonic happy hour diet cherry limeade) Man alive, people these days.

5. Find me man. This is a big one. ISO some boy who is social worky/bordering on socialist who loves Jesus and is wonderfully interesting and absolutely hilarious and plays music and has a beard and is looking for same. Except that boy is looking for a girl. (Me.) and I don’t play music. So. yeah. But he is probably already snatched up by one of you 500 girls (or guys. GAH) with beautiful and amazingly fabulous lives. or more likely, he’s probably found an Asian because if there’s one thing I know about guys, its that love Asian girls. Please explain this to much sometime that I haven’t already totally depressed myself looking at skinny people on facebook.

6. Read a whole buncha books. readreadreadreadread. I like to read but i have to tear myself away from facebook and stop daydreaming long enough to do that. And i really do like to run (kind of) but I have to remind myself of that every single day when i want to lay bed and stare up at the ceiling and let daydreaming movies play in my head.

Thanks for reading. This was long. You're a beautiful person. Ask me sometime about the movie I made up in my head about you while I looked at all 2048 pictures of you and your boo on facebook. I'll describe the entire feature length film. With Bloopers.

Walk Slowly & Bow Often.

When I am Among the Trees

- Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple!” they say,

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.”