Sometime around the 2nd of February, I will have put in 1000 entries into this blog. A couple-three years or so worth of entries. This boggles my mind, because I didn’t think I could stick to something for that long.
To be honest, I’ve never been good at sticking to things. I plant a garden and the weeds take over. I start a hobby and I abandon with a room full of supplies. A good amount of this is from the bipolar, when one gets a boost of enthusiasm and energy in mania and then heads down a spiral of depression. Some of this has to do with my ability to over-focus at times, and the subsequent burnout. Some of it has to do with my somewhat lacking planning skills. In other words, I’m a mess who can concentrate on two things well: My job and my writing.
Maybe I have something to learn from this — what keeps me on track on these two areas? Influence on the outside.
How can I use this? Provide myself with external contact points, such as this blog does. There aren’t many of you, but I don’t want to let you down, so I keep writing. I keep trying to publish. I keep asking for feedback.
So, if you’re stuck anywhere in life, what motivates you? What is your workaround?
Tag: learning
Day 28 Reflection: Wisdom
We are told that our elders hold wisdom (and having just reached AARP age, I certainly hope so). But at the same time, as people get older, many become more resistant to change.
We are told that wisdom comes from experience, but some people learn nothing from their experiences.
How do we discern wisdom, then?
Wisdom doesn’t bubble up out of fear or anger, although fear or anger may make us reach for wisdom. It rises from the still pool at the center of our being. It may goad us to act or ask us to wait, but it does so with a sense of what has gone before and a great deliberation. The answer it gives is grounded in humankind’s best nature, deep in understanding.
Do not mistake wisdom with the resignation of “things have always been this way”, or the self-righteousness of “things have always been this way”. Wisdom is not about preserving or giving to the past. Wisdom is about learning from the past and using it for advancing a life, a people, a world into its future.
The best use of my time
I have decided to quit NaNo this year. Not because I can’t finish it, but because I don’t need to finish it. I have serious editing to do on everything I write because a bad habit of mine has been pointed out to me (telling rather than showing). My past dev editor didn’t pick these problems up, but the current publishing editor (who missed the problems in my query materials) did. Go figure.
I need to learn to deal with these myself because I don’t know if I can afford another dev edit on the same document. I need to get better, and someday I might be good enough to publish.
I’m scared I’ll never be good enough to publish, but if I can’t find the problems in my writing, I know I’ll never be good enough to. Becoming Kringle can wait — the best use of my time right now is re-editing.
Going Back to School
Today is the first day of my Disaster Mental Health certificate program. I can’t believe I’m going back to school after getting a PhD and this late in my career, yet here I am.
As it turns out, I have a good role model in my father. My father got his high school diploma and learned electronics in the military. I remember growing up with him taking a correspondence course in electronics with all these little paper booklets that were individual lessons. Later, he would go off to Dublin, Ohio to take various courses on the changing technology of his job, installing telephone switching equipment. A lot of his colleagues didn’t take the company up on their training, believing that the union would protect them. The union did not protect them, and so they slowly got transferred and laid off. Eventually, my dad was one of the few remaining workers in an increasingly automated system. AT&T would hand him a building full of equipment and a 32-page schematic and tell him to throw the switch and lock the door when it was done. In addition to this, he took a pastry chef class at the community college, and my family let him make the pie crust from then on out.
I did my first lesson this morning, and I found the material engaging and worthwhile. Maybe I haven’t forgotten how to be a student!
A little about my day job/All I’ve learned will be useful
I’m running a bit late today, because I’ve been getting stuff put together for my Spring semester, which starts next week with a rash of meetings, followed by classes starting on the 8th of January.
My position in the department is an odd one, because I’m in a Behavioral Sciences — think Psychology/Sociology/Human Services — department at a small regional midwestern college. The oddness is that, although I have many classes in sociology and psychology and some in human development, my degree is neither in sociology or psychology. My degree is in family and consumption economics, which means I study families’ relationships with time and money and things related to time and money. In effect, it means that I’m highly versed in many of the items that human services deals with — resources, decision-making, basic human needs.
The classes I teach show a glimpse of the odd position I’m in in the department. I teach a behavioral economics class — behavioral economics is actually a thing where psychology tears down the belief that consumers are rational (i.e. the basic belief of economics) with lots of experiments showing exactly how irrational people are with their money.
Another class I teach is a human services class, Intro to Case Management, which comes naturally as well, as I have taught resource management classes for years. It’s all about how to build a rapport with the client, help the client plan a set of goals toward getting toward their new life, and arranging linkages with professionals and other services that will help them toward their goal. In other words, it’s all the steps of resource management with a client.
The third class I teach, I only teach in the spring, and I believe I teach it because nobody else wanted to. It’s a really fun class, despite the name — Personal Adjustment. It’s a hardcore psychology class about theories of … happiness and well-being. Because it’s a hardcore psychology class, I need the students to remember that Seligman is attached to the concept of the “Good Life” and signature strengths, Csikszentmihalyi developed the concept of Flow activities, and Diener was the guy who did the beeper studies where he’d randomly ask subjects to report what they were doing and feeling. (I was a student of Diener’s as an undergrad and I so wanted to be in that study!) But I studied quality of life from an economic viewpoint in graduate school, and so now I teach it from a psychology viewpoint.
Do I believe everything is interrelated? Yes, most certainly! I see myself as standing in the middle of a universe of information and pulling out stars and comets of information as I see them (please hold off on the “center of the universe” jokes). I braid the strands of information together, and search for more information to continue the braid into a whole concept, a theory, or even a metaphor.
Everything I’ve ever learned is in that universe waiting for me to remember it. Nothing is too random to keep — not Existentialism, nor food garnishing, nor the significant of slow blood refill when you squeeze someone’s thumb, nor how soap works, nor Becker’s third theorem in A Treatise on the Family, nor the first snowflake I’d ever seen …
I need to keep learning for the rest of my life. I’m not done at age 54 with a PhD in Family and Consumption Economics from 1991 (Shout out to those of you who weren’t born yet!) I need to learn for my job, I need to learn for my writing, I need to learn for the thrill of standing in the middle of that universe of information…
Ironically, I may get a chance. Higher Learning Commission, our accrediting body, suggests that I need to take 21 hours in a psychology-related field because I’m teaching Psychology without a degree in Psychology.
I’m thinking of a certificate in Disaster Psych, which would add many interesting comets to my universe.
Learn Everything
Everything a writer learns will help their writing.
First example: after twenty-something years of teaching college students, I’ve learned that classes get categorized in three groups: “I loved that class”, “It was okay”, and “Why did I have to take that class?” The number one class in the third category was Philosophy, otherwise known as “that class where you argue totally unimportant things”. I sympathized with these students because I’d taken philosophy myself. I had discovered the purpose of philosophy was to come up with a internally coherent argument about unseen and unknown things. There’s no way to objectively test if your argument is correct. (in the words of my mother, “What difference does it make if we have free will or not? We can’t change it!”)
When I took philosophy, I said what countless other students said — “what am I going to use this for?” Years later, I started writing novels, which required different skills than short stories and poetry. Because I wrote fantasy, I had to build talents and powers and magic and the like that were internally consistent. (Trust me, Harry Potter fans have convinced me that every single discrepancy in magic will be noted by the readers — Just look up “Elder Wand” and you’ll get an earful.) The jump from internally consistent arguments to internally consistent magic systems wasn’t that big. So now I finally get to use philosophy for something useful!
Another example: Moulage. According to my annual report last year, I am a nationally recognized moulage expert. (This means I’ve been moulage coordinator for two (going on three) of the disaster training exercises for the Consortium for Humanitarian Service and Education.) Moulage, by the way, is otherwise known as casualty simulation. Yes, that means I make ordinary people look like victims for emergency and disaster training. I taught myself how to do this after some lovely people mistook me for an expert, and I keep getting better as I go. But the reason I mention it here is because I have had to study many, many gory pictures to do my art — closed abdominal injury, disembowelments, burns, open and closed fractures, gunshots … If people get wounded or killed in my writing, I either know what the carnage looks like or I look it up.
In short, a writer can’t say “I’ll never use that”, because that most arcane or useless bit of information can, and will, come in handy.
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If you’ve read this far: I will be taking the train out to upstate New York on Wednesday to serve as Moulage Coordinator for the third exercise in the CHSE series, New York Hope. I hope to have time to write, even on the train. I would post pictures of my handiwork, but it’s … gross.
Words Like Me 