Category Archives: Social Science

The Process of Change

This metaphor came my way when I was in graduate school. I don’t know whom to credit (if you know, please tell me). I’m posting it here as a way of managing my frustration. A good friend is repeating a self-destructive cycle of behavior, and yet she has the insight to stop and change. I’m worried she won’t. And I’ll need to make a decision. It’s difficult to watch someone abdicate responsibility and unhealthy, to some degree, to remain in relationship with that person. I wish she would learn the lessons below.

Chapter 1: I was walking down the street – there was a big hole in the sidewalk – I fell in. It wasn’t my fault, and it took me a long time to get out of it.

Chapter 2: I was walking down the street – there was a big hole in the sidewalk – I tried to avoid it but I fell in. It wasn’t my fault. It took me a long time to get out of it.

Chapter 3: I was walking down the street – I saw the big hole in the sidewalk, but I fell in it anyway. It was my fault, but I knew how to get out of it quickly by now.

Chapter 4: I was walking down the street. I saw the big hole in the sidewalk. I carefully walked around it.

Chapter 5: I chose a different street.

The Difficult One

His name was Jason*, and he was four feet of willful energy. He, his sister, and his parents were residents in the homeless family shelter where I volunteer. My job was to read to the children, or play with them, and then help make 65 bag lunches for the next day.

A recent arrival, this eight-year-old was the type of child whom it becomes easy to resent. He charged toward other children, grabbing crayons and markers away. He boisterously demanded his wishes be met. He threw small toys. He ran and shouted despite being asked, and then told, not to do so. He incited other children to misbehave or agitated them to the point of anger or tears. He pushed other kids. He was unruly and disrepectful. He his behavior was not, to my eyes, endearing.

One little girl had a temporary heart-shaped tattoo made of shiny sparkles on clear tape. Jason saw it and demanded to have one too. He wanted hers; she refused. I think he might have tried to take it if I hadn’t suggested we get him one of his own. We found the volunteer who had given out the others. She opened the box, revealing Jason’s choices. Did he want a star, a dragonfly, a zigzag? No! No! He wanted the tattoo made of pink sparkles that said: LOVE.

Each letter was separate. She asked Jason where he wanted them. He pointed to his left arm, and she affixed the L. She was about to put the O next to it, but he stopped her. He wanted it on his face. “Where?” she asked, “On your cheek?”

“No, put it on my chin,” was his reply. “Are you sure? It would look better on your cheek,” she offered. Jason insisted, and so the O went on his chin. The V was placed on the back of his right hand, with the E landing on his leg. He beamed.

Another girl came in and requested a tattoo. As Jason passed her to leave, he touched his hand to her back and said to me, “She loves me!” Her response was emphatic. “No I DO NOT LOVE HIM!” He ran and she chased him. I followed to supervise, and he raced toward me with a brown magic marker and a sheet of notebook paper. “How do you spell love?” he asked. Telling him he was wearing the word didn’t matter. He wanted me to write it, so I wrote in large block letters, LOVE.

He then ran around laughing and showing that piece of paper to everyone. He held it up to the nursery window where the very little children played with caregivers. He showed it to the older kids in the computer room. He ran up to the program supervisor and proudly thrust it at her, saying, “Look! Look what I’ve got!” She smiled indulgently.

And here I’d been steeled against him at the beginning, resenting his behavior. I’d been tempted to interpret his character by it. If anything, Jason especially needed love.

[*named changed to protect identity]

Ah, The Girl Crush

This is not a new phenomenon. Women, especially young women, have always had such feelings of adoration for each other. Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women’s nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively. What’s new is the current generation’s willingness to express their ardor frankly.

–Stephanie Rosenbloom, She’s So Cool, So Smart, So Beautiful: Must Be a Girl Crush

I’ve been fortunate to experience this mutually in several friendships. When I meet a woman who is intelligent, curious, expressive, compassionate, with whom I connect, sometimes there is a synchronicity that sparks a lovely, intense regard. I believe I only learned the term “girl crush” in the past couple of years; it is quite apt.

[link via my brother, Tony, who often happens across cool articles that he knows I’ll enjoy]

Real Life Fairy Tales

I completed the first writing exercise from Your Life as Story. The author assigned a fairy tale — the writerÂ’s own. She said it could be three sentences or as long as one wanted. It simply needs to contain:

  1. A beginning in which something happened so that a person had a problem and a need.
  2. As the person pursued his or her desire a struggle ensued.
  3. And in the end the person changed with a realization.

She instructed not to overthink these, but to just start with “once upon a time” and to write in third person.

The second part of the exercise was to write a short letter to a grandchild or child sharing what it is I learned from my life. This letter should contain an important insight, vision of reality, or bit of wisdom I wish to pass on.

As I wrote my story, I realized all the details I left out, as well as the different perspectives from which this tale could be told. For example, within this story about my endeavor to get an education await the relationships I had that started and ended; these too had an effect on my goal, but to incorporate them would overwhelm the tale. As I wrote, I also saw other fairy tales I could tell about that time of my life offering other themes and lessons; and, of course, I detected a cache of narratives about other times of my life.

Mostly I had fun writing the story, and this in itself made the endeavor worthwhile.

I see what I created as raw material, pieces of which can be used as source for a poem, or re-worked for an article or essay. This book is amazing. IÂ’ve only just begun, but her premise is to teach how to use story structure in writing autobiography. IÂ’ve never been interested in writing fiction, though IÂ’ve felt as though I should be; I perceived nonfiction as the domain of published novelists — a prerequisite, I suppose. I hesitated to write seriously or consider myself a candidate for publication, because the most natural form is telling my own life stories; being an obscure person among billions, I thought it not worth pursuing. Then I discovered blogging, which provided a means of expression. But itÂ’s too rough — the result is not polished. It is also too immediate; it doesn’t encourage discretion. Others can be harmed in very real ways by self-revelation, especially on the Internet, and this awareness begets self-censorship. IÂ’ve been drawn to reading memoirs in recent years, almost more so than fiction. I think I have found my genre. I may never share what I write, but it now feels real and legitimate.

All At Once By Remote Control

Roads aren’t real anymore. All roads are now metaphors about the road. Most people would rather stay home. In their homes they feed on lots of clichés about the road so that they won’t feel as if they’ve stopped moving. Only the dead stop moving and most people don’t want to be dead. Every couch potato dreams himself or herself on the road, and they are, thanks to TV, which gives them the illusion that they are somewhere else. Everyone lives on TV now, which is everywhere and nowhere. People are in the Amazon, in the Arctic, on the streets of Detroit, in the Southwest, in San Francisco all at once, by remote control. When TV travelers do travel they go to places they’ve seen on TV, straight into the tourist postcards and never see what they haven’t already seen at home. If they stumble on something that’s never been on TV they shoot it with the video camera and then it’s on TV. They go from postcard to postcard by plane so they never touch the road.

–Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century

The Breathing of Poetry

There is a sense in which poetry is not so much the writing of words as it is the movement of breath itself. To write it, you must pay attention to the breathing of poetry, to all speech as breath, to the relationship of our thoughts and emotions and the actual way they fill our bodies.

–Robert Hass, from The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets by Bill Moyers

Doldrums

I’m struggling.

Lately I’ve detected that I am supremely bored with blogging. I don’t read many blogs, I lack inspiration to comment, and I don’t feel much like posting or replying to comments. I am beholden to my habit, my readers, and even the layout of the blog. I pay attention to nit-picky, irrelevant details such as adding the books I’m reading and watching my stats. It doesn’t provide pleasure or release. It is a sham activity that yields the illusion of busy-ness and involvement while I remain disengaged.

I am on break for the summer, but the company I work for may not call me back to work until October. It’s a startup that provides supplemental education services, and my employment depends on the company securing contracts. This cannot occur until school starts and parents make their selection as to what company they want providing the service. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that will be a job. So this leaves me wondering what I want to do with my time.

The question of what job to seek is complicated by the fact that what I truly love to do is unavailable to me. Because I will not undergo a second, duplicate master’s program, 3000-hour internship, and state testing, I am not permitted to seek clinical jobs in mental health or general social services; nor can I have a private practice as a therapist. I’m a woman of diverse interests, skills, and talents, and I know I am quite capable of many types of work. I simply don’t know what I want. This knowledge is muddled by the ambivalence my husband and I feel about living here. We’ve begun discussing in earnest whether to return to Austin. Nothing is decided, but it’s under serious consideration. So what employment do I seek when I’m not invested in staying? However, leaving isn’t an option yet, and I need to do something.

I’m lonely. Oh, I’ve been volunteering — at the city library and Hands On Bay Area. I exercise at Curves and have become acquainted with women there. I chat with grocery store clerks and greet people I meet on my walks. But my closest friends are in Austin, and while we talk on the phone and email, it is disembodied community. I spend enough time with the ethereal community of cyberspace; I need flesh-and-blood friends. Seeds of friendship I planted when I arrived here didn’t take root, in part because my life was full of disruption for many months with family issues, and in part because the relationships simply didn’t click into place. I recently visited a UU church and enjoyed the experience, but then I miscarried. I have difficulty pulling energy together to foray into more of the uknown and lay groundwork for community. I would be doing this alone, since my husband and I have differing positions on spirituality and church.

In the 12 months I’ve lived here, the only original art I’ve created is a tiny collage that I used on my name badge when I worked at a bookstore. And writing? I’m wasting it. I’m piddling away my hours on blogging, which provides an outlet but also bleeds away my time, attention, and energy which could be applied to a more substantial writing endeavor. I’m reading prodigiously, but not with attentiveness.

I also feel the shadow of residual grief from both my father-in-law’s death four months ago and my miscarriage three weeks past. Oh, and I’m angry. At myself, for not filling my needs. At life, for continuously changing. About all the difficult transitions in my life in the past 18 months. About the fact that I am in control of very, very little.

I’m struggling with dislocation and disenchantment. I need purposeful employment. I need a muse. I need self-discipline. I am one bundle of confused, aimless need.

Ugh.

Identification, Please

on the road to somewhere

My life would have been much simpler, I think, if I had learned how to drive when I came to America. An American without a car is a sick creature, a snail that has lost its shell. Living without a car is the worst form of destitution, more shameful by far than not having a home. A carless person is a stationary object, a prisoner, not really a grownup. A homeless person, by contrast, may be an adventurer, a vagabond, a lover of the open sky. The only form of identification an American needs is a driver’s license.

Time and time again I stood humiliated before a bank clerk who would not admit to my existence because a passport meant nothing to her. Over and over I’ve had to prove my existence to petty clerks and policemen for whom there is only one valid form of ID. Driven to despair, I wrote my first autobiography, The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius, at age twenty-three for the sole reason of having my picture on the cover. Whenever a banker asked to see “some identification,” I pulled the book from my mirrored Peruvian bag and pointed to the cover. More often than not, it was not enough. “What we mean is,” the flustered interpreters of rules and upholders of reality would insist, “we want to see some proper ID!” Books have never been proper to those in charge of upholding the status quo.

–Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century

Yes, I took this photo while I was driving. Slowly.

Also see: A driver’s license as national ID?

Why I Loved Counseling and Miss It So

Though this quote pertains to ministry, the work of psychotherapy was also rooted in what the words below describe.

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or want,” and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.

–Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Experience the Power of Community In Action

join hands on bay area!

Hands On Bay Area creates social change by mobilizing our communities. Every day, Hands on Bay Area volunteers are helping to address the needs of more than 300 community-based organizations in a wide variety of meaningful, flexible volunteer opportunities.

Volunteering with Hands On Bay Area is easy, simply register online and then attend one of our New Volunteer Orientations. There are over 100 volunteer opportunities each month in San Francisco, the East Bay, the Peninsula and the South Bay. To learn more, please browse our online project listing or phone us, 415/541-9616 or 650/965-0242, with any questions.

Not Worth the Paper It’s Printed On?

What newspaper do you read?

  • The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
  • The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
  • The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
  • USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
  • The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time, and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.
  • The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
  • The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
  • The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
  • The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.
  • The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.
  • The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
  • None of these are read by the guy who is running the country into the ground.

unattributed, via an email list

[lifted boldly and unapologetically from MacRaven]

Everything Has At Best

hearst castle garden path

It struck me as odd and sad that man could for centuries have so effortlessly graced the landscape with structures that seemed made for it — little arched bridges and stone farmhouses, churches, windmills, winding roads, hedgerows — and now appeared quite unable to do anything to the countryside that wasn’t like a slap across the face. These days everything has at best a sleek utility, like the dully practical windmills slipping past with the scenery outside my train window, or else it looks cheap and temporary, like the tin sheds and concrete hangars that pass for superstores on the edge of every mid-sized town. We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

–Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

Christian Iron John

According to the article linked below, on any given Sunday women outnumber men 61% to 49% at Christian services.

Murrow, a 1983 Baylor University graduate and author of “Why Men Hate Going to Church,” contends that the modern church is too chatty, too touchy-feely and full of hokey rituals that don’t affirm a guy’s manhood. In short, the faith founded by one man 2,000 years ago needs a testosterone shot.

—Modern Churches Don’t Suit the Macho Man

However, the article also mentions a 1910 YMCA survey found that two-thirds of church attendants were female. So I’d say this problem is more deeply rooted; 1910 isn’t ancient history, but neither does it qualify as modern to my thinking.

As one who belonged to a charismatic, evangelical church for several years, I do concede one point to Murrow. He says, “Praise and worship services are 20-30 minutes of love songs to Jesus Christ in words no man would say to another.” Services are, and while some of the songs are lovely, they may not suit all personalities. However, Murrow also says church services have become “a time and place for mush, emotion and sentimentality.” This has not been the case in all denominations (Roman Catholic comes to mind, as do other churches with more formal, ritualized services). The atmosphere Murrow bemoans is a key trait of the evangelical charismatic style, which aims to heighten a person’s awareness of his unsaved condition by making him aware of his wretchedness and sinfulness, and by then appealing to fear (of damnation) and hope (of salvation) by calling him to “be born again.” It is a highly emotional style that has been a component of evangelicalism for many, many decades. Perhaps less focus on emotional manipulation and more education on what it means to follow Jesus is in order?

Interesting article.

[via MacRaven]

Unassuagable Little Frailties

caltrain

There is this curiously durable myth that European trains are wonderfully swift and smooth and a dream to travel on. The trains in Europe are in fact often tediously slow, and for the most part the railways persist in the antiquated system of dividing the carriages into compartments. I used to think this was rather jolly and friendly, but you soon discover that it is like spending seven hours in a waiting room waiting for a doctor who never arrives. You are forced into an awkward intimacy with strangers, which I always find unsettling. If you do anything at all — take something from your pocket, stifle a yawn, rummage in your rucksack — everyone looks to see what you’re up to. There is no scope for privacy and of course there is nothing like being trapped in a train compartment on a long journey to bring all those unassuagable little frailties of the human body crowding to the front of your mind — the withheld fart, the three and a half square yards of boxer shorts that have somehow become concertinaed between your buttocks, the Kellogg’s corn flake that is unaccountably lodged deep in your left nostril. It was the corn flake that I ached to get at. The itch was all-consuming. I longed to thrust a finger so far up my nose that it would look as if I were scratching the top of my head from the inside, but of course I was as powerless to deal with that as a man with no arms.

–Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe