You know you're a therapist when:

-you have the urge to resort to clinical shorthand in everyday writing. Ie bx, dx, sxs. rx,, mo fa, gmo.

- you watch portrayals of "psychologists" on TV/ movies and constantly go "You're doing it wrong!" and "Ethical/boundary violation!" Relatedly, you watch portrayals of mental illness on TV and also go "you're doing it wrong!"

- you use gait/behavior as a diagnostic tool when encountering someone who seems overly polite/interested in Boston. If they're doing that then there *must* be something wrong with them. :p

- you're totally not weirded out when someone on the bus is ticing and yelping. You just assume Tourettes or other tic disorder and feel kind of bad for them.

- you get pissed at people for making disparaging comments about "ethnic" names. Specifically of the "where do these names come from? don't the kids get teased?" etc. Especially when that person is a member of the clinical team.

- you are acutely aware of racism/sexism/classism on TV/movies/ advertisements. (This one isn't restricted to therapists, but I'm surprised how much more social-justice-minded I am now.)

-you are acutely aware of being white, middle-class and female. (which is the majority of therapists out there.)

There are probably others, but that's what I can think of off the top of my head. Anyone else?

I came home after a long and trying day, and after the first trip to the gym in 6 weeks, to find three pieces of mail: one from the University of Rochester, begging for money, one from my physical therapist's billing department saying "pay us or we send you to collections" and one from my bank telling me that I'm $244 overdrawn.

It was an instant trip from "tired, cranky and hungry" to "holyshit I can't do anything right and I'm trying so hard and nothing's working!" *flail*

Today has not been a good day. I was 30 min late to work because it took my bus 20 min longer than usual to get to the train station. Fuckers. This is the second day in a row that a bus fuckup has made me late to work and one of my coworkers goes "you need to get up earlier". Bitch.
I had my CPR re-certification training, which I was late to. And I've got two kids who keep demanding to have a different therapist every time I tell them "no." I know that that part is them being 14 and needing limits, but still... these two girls won't engage with me on any deeper than surface level.

And to top it all off... the gym sucked. I'm a lot more out of shape than I thought I was. I wimped out on my squats.

I take Boston's public transit daily to work. We tall it "The T" My commute is about 80 minutes, depending on whether or not the busses and the red line are playing nice. I do a lot of people watching. Some noteworthy observations recently.

- Skinny black guy, late teens/early twenties, wearing skinny jeans and puma high tops, puffy black vest. His messenger bag flap came open when he sat down on the bus to reveal tan ballet shoes tucked into a pocket.

-There was a festival of activist street bands last Sunday in Cambridge. One of the bands got on the train at Harvard and started playing. Horns, snare, very loud, very fun. Lots of people took pictures. Got on the bus, and there were a similar group taking up huge portions of the bus. Fortunately they got off a few stops later.

- There was a girl with a turquoise, purple and pink yarn wig on the bus headed home. At first it looked like dreads, but upon closer look it was definitely yarn.

-A group of 40-somethings were playing harmonica singing and clapping for about 4 stops.

- Everyone stares at the girl who is knitting. (meaning me)

- There's a Rollerderby girl who occasionally gets on/off at my stop. I've seen her with her skates over her shoulder.

-There is one woman who always pulls the same "I need (specific amount) of money to get home, I lost my wallet. etc." on the red line. I've seen her do this 3+ times.

-Adorable, skinny, clueless Jehovah's witness missionary boys ignore the girl in the headphones. Yay.

- I routinely get odd looks for being the only white girl on the bus near work. It doesn't help that 90% of my stuff is blue.

So you know how when a smoke detector has a low battery it blips at you? There was one doing that last night. And I woke up at 5am and it was doing it it at regular intervals, such that I got pissy and decided to replace it right then. Whooops. I unscrewed the detector from the wall and went to pull the plug out of it. (ours are all wired into the house. Probably something to do with building codes.) And it goes off.... loudly. And because they're all wired together the whole house goes off. It's not attached to the fire dept thankfully, but ugh. At 5am. Woke up my roommates, and D came up and helped me pull it all out and make it stop. But my adrenaline was up and it took me a while to go back to sleep. Suffice to say I didn't go to the gym this AM because I was such a zombie. Instead I will go to the chiropractor at 9:45 and then go to work. Yay.

Oh, and in the process of pulling plugs I badly chipped my nailpolish that I had *just* put on last night. Grrrrr. I'm normally not girly, so when a girly thing messes up I get annoyed. It's bright red and shiny.


Also: I can't help but feel like my friends are doing cooler/more important/more good for society work than I am. I have friends working in sustainability, and medicine and stuff like that, and while I recycle and try to be good to the earth, I work with kids and am somewhat doubtful about the impact I have on society at large. I love my job, but I kind of feel like a slacker sometimes. Which is silly I know.

Remind me to write some of my fun stories from work. Like supremegoddess1 stories from "The Place That Shall Not Be Named are almost completely unbelievable.

Due to having an insane work schedule, pet sitting 2 weekends ago, going to Nisky last weekend, and general busy and lazy, my house is a wreck. So I am dedicating today to chores.

To do today:
laundry (started last night)
make bread
sweep kitchen floor
wash kitchen floor
clean coffee maker
clean bedroom
sweep entire upstairs
clean bathroom
make studio workable
go grocery shopping
buy hair dye
re-dye hair
go to chiropractic appt (missed last night's due to MBTA fuckup)
go to the gym
feel accomplished

I will update as needed. :P
(edited @ 7:00pm)


I'm realizing how much I value time by myself. Spending the entire day with people and then spending multiple evenings out gets really tiring for me. I need time to just veg, and go to the gym. I'm such an introvert...I need to remember that I ought to keep Wednesday and Thursday evenings free to try to recharge from the week, otherwise I'm just fried by the time Friday rolls around.

I realized last night that the best advice for myself right now is expressed in the lyrics of the DJ Tiesto/Kristy Harkshaw song "Just Be". Well duh... it helps that the track makes me feel like I'm flying.
( Just Be )

I also realized that not going to the gym for a month has had a detrimental effect on my moods. I'm going to go tonight. I need more sleep and more gym time, and I think that will help. The problem is that I keep having things that I do in the evening, and there is NO way I'm getting up early enough to go before work.

We have 7 girls on a unit that holds 20. Usually we have between 12 and 16 girls. Right now we have 7. My case load right now is 1... I'm so bored it's silly. I feel like I should be doing things, but I have nothing to do. My groups are planned, all of my paperwork is up to date, we don't have any intakes coming in so far... I'm bored. In some ways it's good: few girls means that few girls are acting up enough to get arrested or timed-out of their other placements, but few girls also means that *all* of the admin and clinical staff are bored out of our skulls. I suppose I'll just take it as a blessing, and remember it for when I've got a caseload of 10 and I don't have time to breathe between sessions.

I made an appointment to get my hair cut and red-striped. It's Friday. I'm going to be very happy for having that.

I'm also borrowing fly_molo's car for the next day or so. Technically it's our dad's, but Si drives it all the time. It took me 40 minutes to get to work today, instead of the usual 90. I need a car. I'm debating getting a Subaru Outback. It's a hippie-wagon, but it holds stuff, and gets good gas mileage and lasts forever. October...

Is it just me or does Justin Masterson look like he's 12? He's 24, born in 1985, but geez. He looks so friggin' young! Pedroia, Ellsbury and Kottaras are all 26, and Jon Lester is 25. I feel old though...

Then again all of the high level gymnasts and figure skaters are 10 years younger than I am. It freaks me out.

Holy crap it's been a long week. After my fantabulous weekend I had to do the first 40 hours of my 80 hour training for DYS. Urgh. Had to drag my ass to Grafton, which is just this side of Worcester every morning. It's an hour if I drive straight from my house, it's an hour and forty if I have to go into Boston to meet with my coworkers when my roommate needs her car.

After seeing who some of the other DYS staff are, I fear for the kids in the system. There were a couple law-enforcement types who kept asking how/when you got to touch/hold etc a kid. One was asking about cavity searches. Urgh. We don't do them ever, and he seemed to think that strip searches were OK to do whenever. He fails to understand trauma and the history that most of our kids are coming from. I was one of 5 clinicians in the training. And oy... I debate whether or not half of them should be working with kids. What ever happened to "they're kids, not criminals". The good part is that I now know the DYS restraint, so I can move kids between areas and not get yelled at for not having training. I'm at work this week, then I go back next week for another 40 hours. Eugh.

fly_molo came down last night and we went to the They Might Be Giants concert at the Berkeley Performance Center. The opening act blew goats, he was highly pretentious and had the most boring, formulaic song writing ever. If he hadn't been an overweight, balding, 40something guy, I would have said that everything was written by a 12 year old girl. Just... ick. However, TMBG rocked. In honor of the 20th anniversary of their Flood album, they played Flood, in it's entirety, in order. It was glorious. They were awesome. And we had 3rd row mezzanine seating. It ruled.

As an aside : HAPPY BIRTHDAY fly_molo!!! You're 21, don't be an idiot about it.

I've been in a food rut recently. I often get home from work starving, but not knowing what I want to eat. It sucks. I made falafel tonight because I had a ton of chickpeas that needed eating. I need a food processor. The one that I've had is busted. And making things like hummus and falafel would be so much easier with a food processor. I broke my potato masher today trying to smush the chickpeas.

I had a friend IM me out of the blue on Friday night. I haven't heard from this guy since 2000-ish I think. He went into the Navy and then promptly fell of the face of the planet. Apparently he's married, with a 3 year old. YahooMail has been automatically starting YahooMessenger when you log in. And I've had that email since high school, so he decided to IM me. So strange! Incidentally, stoner_cowboy also found me on YM. The internet is a strange and small place.

And I'm crushing hugely right now. Like to the point where I'm distracted at work. It's bad.

I'm supposed to be picking up a rental car right now to drive to Niskayuna to see Travis and co. for Americade. But I'm not. Why? Because Bank of America doesn't post payments until Midnight, meaning that the payments that I set up for today won't post until midnight tonight, meaning that I have $0 credit available meaning that I can't have a $300 hold put on my card to rent a car. FUCK!!! And of course I find this out now. If I'd known about it last night, I would have made a payment last night, but since I assumed that things worked on a business day model, not so much. FUCK!

So instead I'm leaving in 20 minutes to get a bus from South Station to Schenectady which instead of taking 3 hours will take me 5. And I've let down my friends. I am displeased.

Work has been fucked recently too. I keep staying late, because intakes come in around 4, and I foolishly think that I can finish them in an hour. And the last few intakes I've done have been trauma-licious and that means the write-up is really fucking long. The good thing is that my supervisor says that I'm pretty good at them, I just need to pay more attention to detail. Which is a relief, because I was really concerned that I wasn't doing them right at all.

I dislike my office mate. Distinctly. I'm able to be professional with her, but I really don't like her. She is one of the most judgmental people I've ever met. How do you become a therapist and be so fucking judgmental? I don't get it. She went to Smith for social work, and then did a year's fellowship at MGH in psychoanalysis. And she's not used to working within a team. I've done team approach my entire career so far, and I love it. And she has the gall to tell me what to do with my clients, and how to work with them. I've been working in the field longer than she has, albeit by a year or so, and I know how to work within a team, and with angry teens. With short term therapy such as ours we don't go to root problems, we problem solve. I don't want to hear about your family unless it has a direct bearing on what's happening now and how you're operating in the world.
She's smug, and superior, and thinks she's so wonderful for being vegetarian. We were having a conversation about it, and she said "I can give you some pointers on switching to vegetarianism if you're interested." And when I said "I'm not, thank you", she got pretty annoyed. I grew up veggie. I started eating meat for a reason, and I don't like the "veggie meat", because it's so fucking processed. She's full of contradictions, where she's all good for the earth veggie etc. and then she'll go drink 3 Diet Cokes in a day and eat stuff from the vending machine. And because I've been there 4 weeks longer than she has she expects me to tell her what to do/how to do things. I'm fucking busy! She hasn't managed to learn how to fill her time yet, and she'll just sit and stare and be bored.

Oh, and she's got severe anemia which means that she's always fucking freezing. I'm an athlete, I tend to run warm. I like my rooms cool. It's a constant battle, and one that I can't be super-forceful about because it is a medical thing. I work Sun-Thurs, she works Tues-Sat, so when she finally starts her normal schedule I'll only have to deal with her for 3 days a week, and one of those days will be short because one of us will have a Wednesday late night.

She also miraculously doesn't seem worried about waiting for the bus on Blue Hill Ave on her late night. Bitch is crazy. Seriously. Anyone who lives in Dorchester can tell you that it's a bad idea to hang out there at night if you want to stay safe.

My 80 hour training starts next week, It's a week of 40hours of training, a week at work, and then another 40 hours. This is the mandatory DYS statewide training, procedures, restraints, etc. I'll probably know 1/3 of it by the time I get in there just from working for a month.

So basically: job=awesome, stressful, office mate= bitch, staff=awesome, boss=awesome. I think it works out fairly well.

And now off to Americade. I will drink heavily tonight. I will also buy a motorcycle jacket this weekend. Wish me luck!