Today I have a few things to do:

-Plan meals for the week and get groceries.

-Take the “Unexpected Christmas” Erroneous Triple Shipping of Chapters books back to the Chapters store downtown.

-Settle down to take a chunk out of my new book.

-Clean up the detritus from last night’s poker game.  Speaking of which, last night I baked some chocolate chip and walnut cookies for the gang and by the end of the evening there were only three left: an unqualified success for vegan baking!  There is little I find as satisfying as the disappearance into gullets of things I have cooked.  I’m generally a little trepidatious about serving vegan foods because I worry I won’t notice if they taste of soymilk or other strange veg foods that other people aren’t used to, but it seems I don’t have to worry about those cookies.  Excellent!

-Be a lazy slug.  Yesterday I endured my final day long class with Chi-Woman and I think I’ve earned it.  Later this week I have the final evening class with her, which is also my final class with her ever and my final non-supervision class ever.  YAY!  This calls for some slugging around, yes?  Yes!

Today I have already accomplished (warning: scatological content):

-THE MOST IMPRESSIVE BOWEL MOVEMENT EVER.  I think that after two years of vegetarianism I have at last achieved poo nirvana: the Perfect Poo.  Long, full, soft, with a gentle curve - it should be bronzed.  I’m so proud.

I occurs to me that talking about baking and pooping in the same post probably violates some etiquette conventions but I have to tell you, according to my blog stats, people come here for those two topics.  So in theory this should be my most popular post ever.

Which means if you don’t like baking and poo together, you are the one with the problem.

This morning I finished creating the powerpoint for the presentation I have to give this coming week.  I don’t like presentations - I get nervous and talk too fast and tend to repeat myself because my brain shorts out and I can’t access fresh material.  To get around this I write really detailed notes, which I more or less just read, but I don’t like this either because it sounds canned and I feel unnatural about it and wish I was just talkin’.

In other news, my chair is too hard, too soft, and just right.  All at once.

I also started work on a take home final exam, which THANK GOD it means the classes are coming to an end.  Christ, it feels like forever.  To you too, assuming anyone who was reading here three months ago is still around.  I read a lot of blogs and the sense I get is that there is a very good reason I have a small readership, ie, I can’t decide if I’m lecturing or sharing at the sleepover or just being a smartass and who the hell likes an inconsistent blog? I have no niche.

Anyway, don’t you hate take home exams?  What you gain in avoidance of exam-panic is more than made up for by the knowledge that you really have no excuse to get less than perfect answers because, hello, all the books and resources are right at your fingertips and there is no time crunch.  Plus, I don’t get exam anxiety.

Compounding this state of affairs is the fact that so far I have learned nothing in class… and out of sulky defiance and a general lack of giving a fuck I have done no reading or learning on my own.  But this exam seems to think I should know a thing or two, so all of a sudden I have to do a load of reading and working which should have been spread out over the last many weeks.  I believe this is what they are talking about when they say the chickens come home to roost.  I shake my fist at you, chickens!

(Whine: how unfair is it that I get no useful instruction and am suddenly called upon to seriously know things? End whine.)

But anyway, if I can get this exam and my final paper done early, I’ll actually get a good length holiday before practicum starts in September.  I’d like to get everything done in the next week and a half and that would be sweet.  Then I could just move the fridge and some novels into the bathroom and live in tub reading for three weeks.

Today is a blustery, beautiful day.  Outside it is blowing like heck, which is very unusual for Vancouver - a rare treat.  When I was out earlier I had to put on a jacket as a defense against the coolness of the wind - yet the sun is out, and warm, and my jacket made me too hot!  So off it came, and you know what comes next: I got cold.  Jacket back on.  Nothing was comfortable but who cares, it’s glorious out!

I went to the north shore for a while, and for the first time I saw crashing, curling waves on a city beach.  It was, as I keep saying, beautiful.  Lots of people were out enjoying the view with me.  I felt very peaceful and content, sitting with my hair whipping around me, watching the ocean curl and crash.

Now I’m home, drinking a diet pop and smelling my simmering black bean stew.  I’ve been reading an intense and challenging and eye opening book on psychotherapy - and feeling so excited about this work, and incredibly humbled as I read the transcripts of sessions performed by a master therapist.  It’s okay to be a novice, I tell myself, and settle in as though to watch a movie.  This is one of the key things that tells me this job is right for me: reading books on my topic is delicious, fascinating, the way I want to spend my free time.  I bring therapy books with me into the tub, which horrifies Husband, who treats books excellently and would never dream of reading one in the tub.  (I take the view that the physical book is but a vessel for the content, the information is the gold that it merely houses, and therefore there is no need to respect the actual pages.)

And that’s my day!  I hope yours is as satisfying.

I need to learn a new skill.  I need to learn how to endure frustrations without becoming frustrated.  Frankly, my frustrator is on the brink of burnout and I have a suspicion that when it goes, I’ll default to violence.  Options are required because I don’t think I’d do well in jail.

I just spent another brain-bending day in the company of the Chi Woman, also known to me privately as The Sow, and That Idiot Creature.  (Others call her a professor.)  Guess what we did?  First we spent about five hours discussing Hollywood movies about addiction.  Because that’s a really good way to learn how to counsel addicts.  Then we spent another two hours talking about chi energy. Turns out that we really can’t examine chi in terms of things like outcomes or evidence because it belongs to a different paradigm than western medicine, though of course Chi Woman knows many people who have had full recoveries at the hands of chi practitioners.  (Notice: Evidence requirements don’t apply, but anyway we have evidence.  I never borrowed your kettle, but even if I did, I returned it last week.)  (Also, if outcomes measures belong exclusively to the western paradigm, how do we know anyone got better?)

Besides, chi treatments are thousands of years old and doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know?  Everything old is good!  Like putting butter on a burn!  Or slavery!  And sexism!

And can I just add a little aside here: Why are we so ready to embrace wacky “spiritual” theories so long as they come from somewhere else?  We scoff at American Evangelicals who speak in tongues and claim to faith heal - and we scoff because it’s so obviously charlatanry.  Why then do we accept, for example, Reiki?  There is no difference - invisible holy spirit, invisible energy bolts: po-tayto, po-tahto.  As long as white Europeans didn’t think it up, we eat it for breakfast.

But back to the ranting: at the end of the day Chi Woman asked the class what we thought of spending the day talking about movies.  I stayed quiet because I learned long ago that it’s a waste of time to tell people they are wasting your time.  No one will accept it and even if they did they certainly wouldn’t admit it - and even if they would admit it, they wouldn’t admit it in front of an entire class of people they are supposed to be educating.  Instead I began mentally formulating my scathing letter to the dean about this utter fucking waste of time class.  Of course a couple of sycophants in class spoke up and said they loved it - what a useful exercise, to look at addiction through the educated and enlightening perspective of the profit driven blockbuster industry! (Okay, I paraphrased that last bit.)  And then Chi Woman says this:

“Glad to hear you all liked it.  Isn’t it so much better to do fun things like this, rather than a bunch of boring research?”

Yes… if you don’t want to LEARN ANYTHING.

I am so exhausted from being angry I could weep.  Please, if anyone knows how to sit through this shit without utterly freaking out on the inside I would love to know your secret.

I’m in class right now and feeling quite sassy.  Imagine: blogging in class!  I am so bad!

Have I mentioned this is my last semester of academic work? Oh, only about a thousand times. It’s not a moment too soon. Get me out of here!

School is a lot of work, if you actually do it right and try hard and stuff. Yeah, I’m a nerd. Okay. But this last term I am doing as close to nothing as I can manage. For one thing, I’m tired. It’s been a year and a half without a break and some of my courses were real ball busters. I guess I’m lazy because I can’t keep up this pace. I needed a summer break or something, some kind of moment to regroup. I didn’t get it.

For another, I am in two classes with that same professor who is all about the chi. In addition to being kind of flaky, she doesn’t know her material, uses powerpoints created by someone else and which she obviously has not viewed before class, assigned textbooks she never read (”Hey, I’m half way through this one, what do you guys think of it?”), and generally is useless. It is basically impossible for me to care about her classes because it is so painfully obvious that there is no material to be learned from them. Even the textbooks I referred to are popular books rather than proper texts or journal articles or even, I know it’s a lot to ask for, books written by psychologists. I have entered this state of apathy mixed with anger: I know there are two topics (her classes) that I’m paying a lot for but am not learning shit about, but it’s so hopeless and I know there’s nothing to be done for it.

I guess I could do the research on my own, but it just doesn’t seem right. Why am I in these classes if I have to do all the work on my own? And how to even begin? The great thing about classes is that (ideally) someone who knows the field picks out the best sources, tells you what the most important things are to know, explains the difficult concepts, answers your questions, and so on. It’s a massive undertaking to try and learn a field with no guidance. You waste a lot of time and energy. I am not up for that right now (see comment above about lazy).

So what am I doing these days? Glad you asked: reading mountains of books that have absolutely nothing to do with psychology. Now that we are totally without satellite I just live on the couch and nerd out to reading (this week I read this and this, am in the middle of this, and am starting this today). If I were more clever with the internets, I would add one of those “what I’m reading” sidebar thingies to this blog so I can show you what’s keeping me busy, but yeah, the internet is not one of my strengths. I do however make a wicked pasta salad! Speaking of which, I’m thinking of buying a new camera and if I do, I may do some posts with good recipes including step by step pics. Could be fun, no?

What I’m not doing: learning a damn thing in school. Oh well.

Our friends Steve and Lisa just announced that they are having a baby.  I don’t know if either of them reads this blog - I am strangely secretive about it in real life - but in case they do, I wanted to say congratulations!  That’s totally awesome!  (And not just because it gives me an excuse to go buy baby things for them… mmm… baby things!)

I am, of course, insanely jealous.  I would totally have a baby right now if I weren’t still in school.  Like, today.  I would have five today.  Okay maybe not five.  But you know what I mean.  Baby madness!

The only problem is I need to figure out how to not give birth to them.  Man that gives me the willies.

Speaking of school, I am COMPLETELY incensed at the shocking credulity and, I’ll be blunt, stupidity of my current professor.  I have lots of reasons to dislike her (such as, she doesn’t know the field she supposed to be teaching us) but I’ll limit my ranting to the events of this past class.  My teacher brought in a guest speaker who presented to us about chi energy and treating addictions.

This is surprising because in theory we are supposed to be learning things that have scientific backing.  It would be like walking into math class and finding yourself in the middle of a sermon.  It’s just not the right place.  Anyway, I didn’t grill the speaker because he seemed like a nice guy and anyway the real problem is the teacher, who booked a fucking chi medicine dude to teach us how to be addictions counsellors.  But when his talk was done (after pitching Rescue Remedy and a special herbal tea that will leach mercury from our bodies), my professor started in about chi.  Gloves come off.

I asked what chi is.  Nicely.  Because although I already know she won’t have any sort of explanation that will be satisfactory for our setting (an academic graduate program in the sciences), and she deserves to be called out for that, it always pays to be civil.

She says, “Life force.”  Okay… this has not advanced our understanding in any appreciable mannner.  So I ask, “What is life force then?  How do we know it’s there?” This was a mistake on my part because she could choose which question to answer, and she chose the latter, rather than the former, which was what I was really after.  She replies: “We know it’s there because there’s a long tradition of eastern medicine that uses it.  It’s been around for centuries, long before western medicine.”

This is absurd on its face.  She’s talking to a room full of people who have had extensive training in research methodology and positivist, empirical methods.  She can’t seriously expect us to accept an argument based on the authority of some unnamed, long dead guys?  So I say, “That’s not an adequate explanation.  Just because someone a long time ago said something doesn’t make it so.  We still don’t have any understanding of what chi is, or how we know it’s there, or how we know where it supposedly lies in the body, or what it does, or how to manipulate it, or anything!”  And this is when the event occurred that caused me to lose whatever scraps of respect I had for the teacher.

“Here,” she says, “I’ll prove to you that chi is real.”

As far as I’m concerned she has just conceded defeat because she’s run out of explanations without proving her point, or even really supporting it.  (Further proof of her stupidity.  She can’t even marshall an argument, which I’m guessing most chi advocates could - we were done with the verbal portion of the exchange in under a minute.)  At this point we’ve switched over to demonstrations of proof, which are sure to be witch doctory and laughable.  I am surprised because I can’t imagine what she’s going to do but I know it’s going to be stupid.

Here’s what she did: she removed her necklace, which was a chain with a dangly thing on the bottom that could act as a pendulum.  She held the chain in her fingers and let the chain hang down in front of the face of one of the students.  “You see,” she says, “the chi energy of so-and-so will cause the chain to swing in a circle.”  And obediently the necklace starts to swirl gently, the dangly at the bottom moving in a circle.  She’s looking at me now as if to say, see, I told you so!

I say: “That doesn’t prove anything about chi.”

And she says, with apparent sincere surprise, “Of course it does!  See, it’s moving!  That’s the chi!”

Are you kidding me?  Where do I even begin?  “I don’t find that convincing at all.  Even if the chain is moving on its own, that could be due to any one of several explanations that don’t involve chi.  And it may be that you are moving the necklace yourself, perhaps unintentionally?”  I’m trying to be nice but am not willing to back down.  Not when we’re supposed to be in freakin’ school.

Professor shakes her head, and moves the necklace from the student’s face to the top of their head: “See, now the chi is moving the necklace in the other direction.  It’s there, you can see it.”

I’m a bit flabbergasted that she’s continuing along in this totally ridiculous manner, and I could actually see her moving her hand to twirl the necklace.  So I said, “I’m sorry, but I can see you moving the necklace.  This isn’t at all convincing.  What I would find convincing is if we devised some sort of experiment where we suspend the necklace from a tripod, or something fixed, and then see what happens.”  I already have lots of ideas for further refining this experiment to make it more solid, but the point gets across.  Now I have her trapped and I can tell because her next comment is this: “Well, it doesn’t always work, it might not work on a tripod, but that just means the person involves has closed their chakras.”

Ooo-kay.  I actually liked this because not only did I enjoy sticking her into a corner, but on the surface it’s pretty clever.  She has set up a nonfalsifiable hypothesis.  Chi makes a chain swing, but a still chain doesn’t disprove chi.  Win-win for her, as long as the audience shuts off their brain.

The professor started walking around the class, hanging her necklace in front of different faces and showing how, again and again, it twirls.  Which supposedly proves chi.  She’s totally run out of anything to say and is clinging to her demonstration which anyone should know doesn’t demonstrate a thing.

This woman is in charge of teaching people.

Here is the thing: I don’t care if you believe in chi.  I think it’s stupid and credulous, but if it helps you, or you enjoy it, or whatever, hey, that’s cool.  The placebo effect is real and it is powerful.  But chi clearly falls into the category of things you do on your free time, not things you teach grad students in school who are trying to prepare for a career in the real world.  It is not something you teach as though you can prove it.  And if you can’t even see that your “evidence” is totally, totally inadequate… well, what hope is there for you?

Hello all. Today was my final day of this practicum and I must say I am feeling mighty fine about it. After the serious ego battering I took for these last five months, it felt great to walk out of the office with some thank you cards from clients and from my supervisor, who also loaded me up with a thoughtful pair of gifts. I feel appreciated and, what’s better, hopeful about my burgeoning abilities to do therapy. Stay tuned for upcoming bursts of this bubble. Because there is nothing like trying to do something very hard to have your ego knocked down to size.  I am probably not qualified to be a garbage man, that’s how I feel after nearly half a year of trying my hand at being a therapist.  But man is nothing if not irrationally hopeful!  Surely this trend will turn around!  Right?  …Right?

Bueller?  Bueller?

Ahem.

I am also hard at work on a response to Incognito, but the post is just growing and growing and it’s not going to be done tonight.  I think tomorrow it should be ready to go.  But yeah, it’s getting long.  Who knew it was going to be so difficult to give an explanation for the claim to not be judgmental of meat eating?  Oy!  But it’s a fun process and hopefully one or two of my audience of four will find it interesting.  Otherwise I am wasting a lot of time that could otherwise be spent in the tub, but doesn’t this just show how dedicated I am to all of you, how I give you all personal attention?  Think of the havoc you could wreak in my life if you just commented more often with brain bending questions!

But now I am off for a little reading, a little tubbing, and general relaxation.  Good night all!

I hate Wednesdays. This is what my Wednesdays look like:

7:00am - Wake up. Groan because I’m already tired - yesterday I worked (drove to and from Chilliwack) and taught a night class (Richmond), and there aren’t enough hours between the end of class and the morning alarm to become rested.

7:30am - Hit the road in the Sprite Car for Chilliwack, which I have to arrive at before nine so I can be there to greet my supervisor’s first client of the day. She is invariably ten minutes late and it has fallen to me to be the one present and on time to let them in and keep them busy until she arrives. Note that I live 100 kilometres and a major bridge away from the office. She lives about eight. Great. It’s not even 9am and I’m already resentful.

9:00am - First client of the day. I observe and am impressed but also disheartened by my supervisor’s skillz. Will I ever get this?

10:00am - 12:00pm - More clients, and some supervision from my supervisor.  I am not getting this.

Noon to one: lunch, which is not really a break because we talk shop all the way though. There is this lady on the till at Subway who is a very nice woman but also a slow talker and the line takes forever because she’s cracking stupid jokes and inquiring about everyone’s day. If she were a man she’d have fat uncle pants on, they’re those kind of jokes. When she talks she stops working the till. She never stops talking. My sandwich wilts on the counter waiting for me; we exchange longing glances. Plus, today they screwed up and dumped a bunch of dripping chicken on my bun - for once a staffer was fast, too fast for me to prevent chicken. I ask for a new bun, the girl glares, I feel both angry and embarrassed. I just want my vegan sandwich for god’s sake.

1:00pm - 6:00pm - more clients. By my last client my brain is a pudding, I have no idea what I’m doing, and no idea what the client is doing either. I’m hungry and tired. I will never get this.

6:05pm - Go out to the parking lot to find yet another fucking happy-gram from the local commissionaires of whoever the fuck has nothing better to do with their time than put little yellow papers under my windshield wiper congratulating me for using the club. Maybe I’m a jerk but I find this condescending and incredibly irritating. I don’t need some small town busybody to tell me it’s good that I locked my car. You know what’s not good? Seeing a ticket on your car and experiencing the rush of anxiety because you think you just got a ticket. And then finding out it’s a stupid fucking happy-gram. You know what I’d like to do with that happy-gram? Find the person who put it there and shove it right up their ass. How’s that for happy, motherfucker? Instead I crumple it up and throw it on the ground with what I hope is obvious disgust.

6:30 - 8:00pm - Dinner with my brother. Finally I am enjoying the day. No sense in hitting the highway at this time, and it’s pleasant to share a meal. We gossip about family members and lament the lack of vegan options at Boston Pizza.

8:45pm - In the middle of my drive, exit the highway because for some reason I seriously have to pee, even though I was well trained in toddlerhood to go before I leave the house. My bladder hates me. I hate me. I also hate this traffic, which, ha ha, has not appreciably decreased since the afternoon. Some lu-lu is riding my ass even though I am in the slow lane and doing 110km/hr. I entertain elaborate fantasies of slamming on my brakes and killing us both just for the sheer (though temporary) joy of being right: see what happens when you tailgate, you dipshit? But of course I don’t. Barely.

9:20pm - get home, a full 14 hours after leaving. Discover Husband is not home - that’s for the best, I’m not fit for human company and he should be spared my mood. I always feel guilty when I’m a turd to him, he doesn’t deserve it. Frankly, neither do I, which is why I feel like flinging myself off the building to end this frustration and anger. Instead I take a shower. I hate my shampoo, it smells too smelly. Also, I bought a vegan soap that is so big I can’t hold it in one hand. It’s absurdly huge. I have to manhandle it with both hands to soap up, which is kind of funny… but kind of makes me want to cry too. My frustration tolerance has evaporated.

I know lots of people work longer days, do harder jobs, experience greater stresses. But speaking purely subjectively, Wednesdays just kill me. They are too long, too hard, too tiring. I enter them tired from the late night on Tuesdays, and it’s all downhill from there. There are things I need in order to function like a normal person: downtime, breaks, private time, rest time. None of these exist on Wednesday except at dinner time… bless dinner time!

The most interesting thing about this post to me is seeing the progressive emergence of my rage over the course of the day. My actual client hours are the best times - I may feel like I’m totally floundering but I’m also totally immersed, totally focused, really trying hard. They often end with me feeling wiped out and guilty for being such a novice. It takes a lot of work to climb the big learning curve I’m at the bottom of. It’s daunting and simply knowing that adds an element of stressed out resignation to everything I do. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know how hard it will be, how long it will take to master my craft. It makes me feel despair to know that I have to live in this limbo of mediocre work (at best) for probably 2 or 3 more years.

And there’s the usual - family stress, eustress over Husband’s new job (he likes to stay super private here, so I’ll just say he got into a program he’s been angling for for about four years, and this is a MAJOR celebration for us and him. He survived seven interviews and a massive bundle of paperwork and he’s about to embark on a fellowship to become something much more suited to his temperament than his current work. I couldn’t be prouder or happier! Way to go, Moof! Yay!), my ongoing fears about my stupid fucking nerves, Canada Post can’t find my parcel.

But here is the upside: my house is disheveled but it reads Husband… I can see what he ate, where he sat, and what he did while he was home. It’s comforting to see his spoor about the house. I have a great place to live and though it is so, so hard, a career I can work on. And… okay, I ran out of sunny things to say. Maybe I should have kept that happy-gram after all.

For the last six weeks, I have been teaching a parenting group.

I’ll wait while you finish laughing.  Yes, I know I don’t have any kids.  What I have is theory.  Okay.  I totally accept being ignorant as an egg.  Now we move on.

Tonight something amazing happened.  See, the purpose of the group is psychoeducational.  It’s not group therapy, it’s learning.  My partner teacher and I come prepared with lessons and handouts and all that stuff, which is the easy part.  I know the material so there’s no difficulty there.  What has been difficult is my lingering feeling of being a fraud, because I don’t have kids and have never taught parenting before, and a feeling of anxiety and fear lest the theory I am teaching turn out to be a total flop.

I know this shouldn’t be the case.  The stuff we’re teaching is old as the hills and has a very well established track record.  And you don’t need to be a great player to teach people to play great baseball.  But since it’s my first time, I have felt like something of a liar when I assure the parents in my group that what I’m telling them to do will work, because they have some BIG problems.  People don’t come to parenting school because everything is fine at home.  So I feel tremendous pressure to be useful, and to give them information that really works, that will really help them in a nuts and bolts kind of way.

Tonight though, the inner therapist broke through and me and my partner teacher scrapped the curriculum.  The last two sessions were major downloads of information and we sensed they needed a chance to integrate the material as a group.  And wow, did some amazing things happen.

As soon as we let everyone know that tonight’s agenda was problem solving with their concrete examples rather than learning new material, which was basically code for “free for all,” they started really expressing themselves.  We didn’t even stay talking about particular problems for long - soon they were just expressing general feelings of alienation, frustration, mixed emotions, all of that.  All talk of theory was gone - it rapidly transformed into what we would consider an early stage group therapy experience.  My partner teacher and I also slid from teacher mode to the (more comfortable, for us) facilitator mode, and next thing you know the moms are talking about when they didn’t bond to their baby, or the times when they hate their child and being a parent, or their fears of abusing their kids as they were abused.  It was very real and amazing to be a part of.  They’ve been working together for a month and a half and have built trust and rapport to the point where they can be honest.  We’ve worked to make sure the environment of our group is non-judgmental, and tonight it paid off big time.

This was my first experience of a “live” group, and properly speaking, it’s not really group therapy.  But some elements were present and it was electrifying to watch it happen.  A lot of the chemicals were in the petri dish, and some of them reacted.  I even think one member had a significant breakthrough of complex emotion - not normally something associated with a psychoeducational group!

Also, my parents have each reported improvements in their kids’ behaviours and in their relationship with them, which they credit to our lessons.  So the method I’m teaching is (whew!) working.  I feel just fantastic!

Also, it feels great to see how I am helping real people with real problems.  They are grateful and happy, which fills me with joy.  There’s some pride in there, and some relief, and a lot of altruism.  There’s just nothing like giving to others in a way that helps them.  We started as a hodge podge bunch of strangers plus two hesitant grad students, and ended up a bonded unit of support that created a place safe enough to confess hating your baby (if only sometimes).

This is why I’m becoming a therapist.