ljgeoff

The only thing this made me think was, are there twelve Vorkosigans?

I've got a new fic up at Teaspoon. It kinda ran up and tackled me and I'm rolling along with it. One of the reviewers said, "I can't wait to see where you're taking us" and I thought me too. I was thinking today that I get much more pleasure writing fic than I do my own stuff. Perhaps I need to stop banging my head into that particular wall for a while.

Link - for my own records

Does anyone have experience with Smart Recovery?

Happy birthday to kightp! *hugs*

I woke up with the beginning of a migraine today and it built slowly, but never got completly unbearable. After class, I had to wait around campus because I have to pick up Sam from driver's ed. in a few minutes. So I went down to the common room in the University Center. It had a sign on it that it was closed, but there were people in there and I couldn't tell if they were getting ready for something or cleaning it up for something that was over.

So I grabbed a couch in back, stuffed my coat under my head and sacked out for an hour. I woke up to some guy checking the sound system. He was very surprised to see my head pop up. I gave him a bit of a grin, gathered my stuff and scooted out.

The migraine is better -- still there, but not too bad. I'm still grinning from the look on the guy's face. Heh.

This isn't spoilery. I watch Dreamland tonight. There was an interesting throwaway line:

Cassie: Did you mean what you said back there; you're not human?

Doctor: Weell, Human, Timlord; it's all just an accident of dimensional geography, when you get down to it.

( ok, this might be spoilery )

The Human/Timelord throwaway line reminds me of the Farscape Human/Sebacean thing. Timelords are AU humans?

for my own records -- Ocean methane hydrates as a slow tipping point in the global carbon cycle.

The core implication of our study is that mental health professionals need training on competence assessment and its use in decision making and must reexamine their own prejudices (ie, homophobia) to clarify their decision making about institutional policies.

My favorite quote: "Most striking, the analysis of therapeutic impact indicates that consent -- hypothesized to be a central and determinative issue -- is not a driving factor."

(snip) "The activity viewed as "most therapeutic" involved a patient (male or female) hugging a non-consensual female (M=2.1333) even though this is still seen as slightly antitherapeutic. Although hugging a female is seen as relatively more therapeutic than having sex, one would have thought hugging a consensual partner would have been preferable to hugging a non-consensual female.

The activity viewed as "least therapeutic" was a patient (again, male or female) having sex with a consenting male (M=1.1852). From a professional standpoint, the fact that the person who received the sexual advance was consenting should make having sex relatively more therapeutic than if sex was forced. Hence, non-consensual sex should have been considered even less therapeutic. This expectation was not fulfilled by the data."

Tribes that lived side by side for decades say they've been pushed to warfare by competition for disappearing water and pasture.

"Scientific and anecdotal evidence is mounting that the changes underway here are more than climatic variation. Droughts that once appeared every decade now hit every two or three years. Icecaps atop Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilimanjaro are evaporating, and Lake Chad has lost 90% of its water since the 1960s.

And Africa is getting hotter. Maximum temperatures in Kenya's Rift Valley and on its northern coast have risen by more than 5 degrees over the last 20 to 40 years, according to research by the group Christian Aid. Malaria, once rare in Kenya's central highlands because the weather was too cold for the disease-spreading mosquitoes, has become a major health challenge." LA Times, 27 Nov 09

-- I have to take a neuropsychology test this morning. I love neuropsychology, but I don't want to take this test because, GUYS, NEUROPSYCHOLOGY IS HARD. It's not hard in the way of omg-I-can't-get-this; it's hard in the way of omg-I-can't-memorize-all-this-stupid-shit. It's an online test, so I'm sitting her at the dining room table reading over my text and nothing is sticking to my brain. AARGH!

-- Luke has a friend who is in the fourth grade and I just noticed that when he was here after school the other day and doing his homework with Luke, he left his multiplication chart here. WTF is with multiplication charts? Cheat sheets? Are kids no longer required to memorize the multiplication tables?

-- I had the last of the Thanksgiving yams and hot chocolate for breakfast. Mmmm.

-- I'm about six weeks behind on my notes at GLRC. It's ridiculous. I need to get backdated for access, and I've got to get off my ass and write the damn things. I'm trying to figure out why I have let myself get so far behind and I think that it has to do with the fact that no one will actually read the damn things, and they will absolutely no impact on the clients' well being. It's just paperwork. No, that's a lie. The certification guys might read them, and the notes are how we justify getting paid. Why do I have such a hard time with this? Goddamned reactive personality.

-- This is the last week of class and next week is exam week. The week after that, I'll go down to Lansing for a few days for some job hunting. I am not ready for this in so many ways.

Josh is playing Stairway to Heaven on the acoustic guitar; he's very good, and it's lovely. And both he and Sam are singing like Zombies: "Ooooh, Ooohh! And it makes you wonder! Ooooh, Oooooh, aarghhhh, BRAINS! It makes you wonder!"

How can I leave this?

Have you ever read something that made the hair stand up on the back of your neck and, without thinking, you started whispering oh, hell yes and you had to get up and walk around because THIS, THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE BEEN FEELING.

*breathes*

I really like working at GLRC. I like being a substance abuse counselor. But from the get-go, I've been in conflict with the management's treatment philosophy. We have a lot of rules here, rules that are designed to keep people in line, keep people from doing harm to themselves and others, rules to keep people in their place.

So, ok, I hate rules. If a rule bugs me, I will break it, just because. I'm difficult that way. I get myself in trouble. I'm arrogant and sometimes I'm downright stupid about it.

But there's this other thing that goes along with the rules, here. It's the us-against-them thing. The we're-doing-this-for-your-own-good thing. It's the we-can't-expect-you-to-act-grownup thing. It drives me fucking crazy.

So tonight, I thought I'd do a little research on the topic, and came across:

Walker, M.T. (2006). The Social Construction of Mental Illness and its Implications for the Recovery Model. International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. 10 (1), 71-87

Humanitarian, political, and financial pressures have given birth to the recovery model. Being outcome-driven, recovery programs have had to bend to the truth of what works. This includes being client-centered, being passionate about helping clients get what they want and find meaningful roles in life, having a vocational and community integration focus, and really meeting clients where they’re at. However, the discourse of the medical and psychological models still lives in the language spoken in recovery programs.

So you can have the best recovery program in the world and still be linguistically casting clients in roles in which they are in fundamental ways different from the rest of humanity. The discourse, the spoken language, creates the distinction “mentally ill” versus “not mentally ill.”

(...)

Though recovery-oriented programs are more client-centered, the double-bind communications of days of old are still alive and well. The content of our conversations with clients can be about their goals, their quality of life, accountability, community integration, high expectations, self-determination, independence, self reliance, etc.; but the context of our communication is “you have a pathology that makes you different from the rest of society” and “we have the expertise to help you overcome this pathology in order to live meaningfully like normal people do.” Don Jackson (1965) drawing on Gregory Bateson’s work on systems theory, asserted:

“Every message (communication bit) has both a content (report) and a relationship (command) aspect; the former conveys information about facts, feelings, experiences, etc., and the latter defines the nature of the relationship between the communicants.” (p.8)

The “command” or role relationship aspect of the communication, brought forth in the vocabulary, creates and privileges clinician knowledge and marginalizes the client’s knowledge and skills. This will be the case no matter how much the client accomplishes. This is true no matter how many wonderful recovery-based systems you have in place as long the medical and psychological vocabularies are still being used. (my emphasis)

I've heard and talked about this before, but I've never got it like I got this: an Authoritarian structure tends to infantilize those who are being dominated. Of course it does. I see it all the time.

I was going to write about how native Americans often see the holiday of Thanksgiving, but Jacqueline Keeler said very well: Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims.

The boys are starting to get up and get themselves together. I just had a lovely late breakfast of fried potatoes, eggs and toast. Since my Mom revels in preparing the Feast, all I'm required to do is make some candied sweet potatoes.

I work at midnight to 8am, tonight. Then 4pm-12am on Friday, and 9am-3pm on Saturday and Sunday - about the suckiest schedule I can imagine. The money will be good though!

Talking with kaffyr, I have come up with the most excellent idea:

You are all cordially invited to a Whovian End of Time (Part Two) Slumber Party

Date: January 2, 2010
Place: Somewhere around Chicago

There will be food! There will be drink! Most likely, we will knit! And there will be SHENANIGANS!

I'm so pumped! Can you tell that I'm pumped? WOOT! Social time that doesn't include substance abuse or psychobiology!

Pass this around to any area Whovians! RSVP in comments

Come on, Winifred Hensinger? Of course she works on the project. I can hear Al Calavicci sniggering all the way over here.

Last week, Fred got word that his SSI will start up in December, and today his mother came and they packed up all his stuff and left.

I have mixed feelings. His mother was very happy to have him come home, and Fred is happy to be going home. I think that she will be as good to him as she's ever been -- which is, loving in a rather offhand-as-long-as-she-doesn't-have-to-exert-any-effort kind of way. Fred's an easy guy to love, and now that he has assets (about $700/mo plus $200/mo food stamps) I'm sure that she'll put a little more effort into making sure that he's happy.



(left to right) Back row: Drew, Fred -- Next-row-down: Crystalynn (holding Seth), Haley (Crystalynn's friend), me -- Next-row: Sam, Carl, Mike, Luke (in hoodie) -- In-front: Dillon, Emily (Luke's friend)

When I leave next month, the residents of the house will be Carl (18), Sam (17), Drew (19), Justin (18), Josh (18), and Dillon (17). Crystalynn will be staying at the house on weekends, and there will be a room set aside for Seth.

My sister Renee just emailed me a link to some family pics she just scanned. I've never seen some of these! Of course, only interesting if you're related to me...

( lots of pics, various quality, 1900 to 1968 )