If you find yourself a little low, feeling a little out of sorts…do something selfless. Lift someone else up.
Good GRIEF, this is expensive.
Heartwarming Tearjerker of the Day: Staff Sergeant Nick B. was on patrol in Afghanistan when he came across Bodhi tied up, covered in mud, and missing both ears and half his tail to some kind of torture.
“They were going to use him to fight other dogs as entertainment,” Nick said. “You could just tell he hadn’t been fed properly. He was really skinny and malnourished. When I saw that, it just broke my heart. I knew I had to get this dog out of here.”
Nick says the owners didn’t want to give Bodhi up, so he traded packs of cigarettes for him. Then he coordinated with the Puppy Rescue Mission to get Bodhi out of the country. The pair were reunited in Florida on Saturday.
“It’s so much better knowing I saved this dog from a life of eating scraps of trash and not knowing if he’s going to be shot,” Nick said. “I know his life will be so much better now. He’ll have a lot of land to run around on, a pool to play in, a loving family, and he’ll be fed properly and bathed. It’s an amazing feeling.”
BWAAA?
Grades posted. I put off looking at them as long as I could since I knew I was going to have to retake Practice (anything less than a B- is failing).
With everything I went through this semester, I got an A and two A-’s
WHAT?????
Pretty sure I’m a superhero.
Now I just have to wait and see if my psycho supervisor will pass me for my first year internship, because if not….”absolutely and royally fucked” doesn’t begin to cover it…
Sudden Termination
My supervisor at work gave me a client load that was, quite literally, impossible to fit within one day at my internship while telling me to drop down to one day for the summer to finish up. There are not enough hours in the school day for me to see each client for a half hour session.
So I emailed her this and asked her to help me, thinking that she would allow me to terminate with a few of my clients that aren’t presenting with ANYTHING and do NOT need to be in counseling so that I could focus on finishing out with the clients that need it.
Evidently this was the wrong thing to do.
After bitching me out this morning and telling me how disappointed in me she was and how she obviously set her standards too high (read: I’m not good enough to reach her standards), she told me in reasonably nice terms to come in for a few days this week instead of just today to terminate with my clients, then GTFO.
Ruminating over our conversation this morning has allowed me to realize that she never intended for me to come for only one day, even though she told the faculty at my school that that was the plan. She had intended for me to realize that I couldn’t handle that client load in one day and step up on my own to come in for multiple days out of the week all summer to work with these clients.
I’m going to stop myself before I go into an explanation of all the things that are wrong with this and fly off the handle about it, and go back to writing client notes. I’ll pound out the whole story later. For now…Shady. Effing. Woman.
Student Loans are getting SCARY.
An email I just got about an online petition I signed. Scary.
Thank you for contacting me via a SignOn.org petition about the rising costs of higher education. In the future, if you would like to write to me directly, I encourage you to visit my Senate website at http://boxer.senate.gov/en/contact/policycomments.cfm.
Now more than ever, having a college education is vital to success in the global economy. More than six out of ten jobs require some form of post-secondary education or training, yet rising costs have placed a college education out of reach for many hard-working American families.
As you may know, interest rates on federally subsidized student loans are scheduled to double for 7.5 million undergraduates this July. I am proud to be a co-sponsor of S.2343, the Stop the Student Loan Interest Rate Hike Act of 2012, which would extend the current 3.4 percent interest rate on subsidized student loans for another year and help alleviate any unnecessary stress on students and their families.
Unfortunately, the Senate Republicans are filibustering legislation to prevent interest rates from doubling in July. This outrageous decision will hurt 570,000 California students who will have to pay thousands more for their education. Already too many students and families are struggling to afford the rising costs of college.
No one should be denied the opportunity to go to college simply because of cost. Be assured that I will keep working with Congress and the Obama Administration to provide financial assistance for students and institutions of higher learning.
Again, thank you for writing to me. Please feel free to contact me again at http://boxer.senate.gov/en/contact/policycomments.cfm.
peoplearesheep asked: What are your thoughts on person-first (people first) language?
Answer:
Disability should not have to be separated from an individual in order for that person to be treated with respect. (x)
I don’t take as much issue with it as some of the other normative labels, though I believe it still originates from the “see the person, not the disability” mentality—assuming that disability must be removed in order for humanity to applicable.
Reblogable by request
Fuck the Disabled: Disability and Normative Language (Dear James Cameron, Draw Me Like One of Your French Girls)
Why I am crippled and not (dis)Abled, differently abled, or handicapable:
When you say that we are not disabled, when you say that we are “better than that”; that instead we are “handicapable”, simply “differently” abled, or when you haphazardly throw a parenthesis around an unsuspecting prefix,…
I made a t-shirt that says this. Love it.
I really didn’t intend for this blog to become a forum to complain about USC. I swear.
I was SOOOOOOO excited to get in to this school. So excited to be a Trojan. Rah rah cardinal and gold, fight on, yay Traveller, etc. etc. etc.
I’m reevaluating my first year out of self-defense. Overall, the good really did outweigh the bad. I am AMAZED at how some of my professors really went to bat for me, particularly my behavior professor who went to the department chair on my behalf and got me an alternative midterm when the disability office was useless, and my practice professor who made sure to, in front of our entire class, give a quick monologue on how resilient I am and how impressed he was that I showed up to class every day given everything that’s happened to me.
I can’t even write about the craziness my seminar prof has put me through lately. The last few rants I’ve typed were really nothing compared to how this quarter ended. I feel a long one coming, but not now.
Aunt L pointed out something I had kind of forgotten the other day - I did all of this WITH A HEAD INJURY. I made the honor roll, dealt with personal life crises the likes of which only seem to happen in movies, went up against a seminar professor who seemed determined to make me drop this program, and still somehow got through it. With a TBI. It’s really weird to say that I had kind of forgotten, by the end of it, that I have a head injury. It’s immeasurable how much harder it makes my daily life, but reflecting on everything I went through and realizing that I had forgotten to account for that…weird, weird, WEIRD feeling.
On a personal side note, the next person at school (or, really, anywhere else) who makes some comment about how lucky I am to be alive or as recovered as I am is going to get decked. NO I’M NOT. YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT. YOU ARE GOD DAMN SOCIAL WORKERS, YOU KNOW BETTER THAN TO SAY THAT BULLSHIT. I am not lucky, every day of my life will be a ridiculous struggle and I have yet to find a purpose for it, and believe me I never WANTED to end up as a disabled social worker trying to help other people cope with debilitating issues. I’m here because now that my future was taken away from me thanks to my TBI, debilitating life circumstances are ALL. I. KNOW. That isn’t luck. It’s just pathetic.
I’m looking forward to starting research with a particularly prestigious and impressive professor in my area of interest - military social work. I’m looking forward to a very promising internship next year under a completely different professor than Professor Pollyanna “oh, isn’t this just such a lovely learning experience for you”, and I’m looking forward to hooking on the corner of 5th and Main when I graduate this program and can’t find a job to repay my private school loans. Ok, I’m not really looking forward to the last one, just prepared for it. But I’m trying to be optimistic. I remember (vaguely) how excited I was when I started. I want need that back.
Holy Hell.
Finals are over. I survived my first year of grad school. I’m almost halfway done.
I’m going to sleep for a month.
