Shifting the focus (Moving: Day 2)

As mentioned in previous posts, I am in the process of moving from job-searching (based in Seattle, WA, and Atlanta, GA) to my new job (in Northeast New Mexico). I am also transitioning from being a graduate student (in Laramie, WY) to the afore-mentioned job.

A lot of my most recent focus has been relief. Relief that I have something lined up after a such a long (four months) period of uncertainty, joblessness, and lack of a paycheck (= relying on my parents in my mid-30s. Doesn't feel good. AND I'm so grateful for them). The relief of having secured a position, of signing a contract, has been so welcome that I have actually dropped the ball on other goals I'd set for myself that had been anxiety-based.

Moving sucks (Moving: Day 1)

'Moving sucks...' like that's new information. Quick list of today's suckitude:

1. Leaving at 3:50 a.m. Which meant that I had to wake up at 3:00 a.m.

2. Yowling cat.

3. Realizing before my dad wanted me to take a driving shift that I had packed my driver's license (and debit card. And my mother's Sam's card) somewhere in the moving van. (Upside? Found it when I opened my first box!!)

4. Realizing I offended/hurt my mother to the point of tears when I jokingly referred to her as a 'nervous passenger' (although she is!!). She spent the rest of the day offering to drive, but revoking the offer because "I know it would drive you two crazy."

5. Having someone try to steal our trailer while we had a family dinner at Chili's.

It's over now. and mom and dad and I had quality family time. Or something. Now I'm going to refresh my glass of wine and go to bed.

The last time I moved across the country in winter

I have moved or helped others move across the country nine times. Next week (make that tomorrow) my parents and I will make that number a solid '10' when we leave Georgia, cat in tow, to head to New York and remove most of my worldly possessions from storage in Brooklyn, and then head back west to New Mexico. There I hope to establish a new and somewhat... I don't know... adult? respectable...? life.

The seventh time I crossed the country was on behalf of a friend and her lab/german shepard mix who were moving from Athens, GA to Denver, CO. In the winter. We left two days before the New Year of 2007, in H's rear-wheel-drive truck with a U-Haul trailer loaded with her household fixings with which she would establish her new home. Assuming we made it there.

I had lived in Laramie, WY for eight years by that point and was somewhat familiar with winter driving. Not saying I was good at winter driving as I had spun out on ice (no injuries to self or auto) twice prior to our journey, but as H was a Georgia native, it made sense for me to drive when things got snowy.

And things got very snowy.

On Semantics (#1: Systems)

Over dinner tonight, my father disagreed with my use of the word 'system' to describe our military and the global method used by nations to sometimes settle disputes (more specifically, war). At first I was surprised and would have inquired about his objection further, but these days dad tends to steer clear from conflict in discussions regarding politics. He had already changed the subject by the time I thought to ask, "What word would you use?"

During our ride home, I realized that our disagreement was probably more one of semantics rather than an actual disagreement (although I'll never know as I can't imagine that we'll revisit the conversation). There is a very good chance that my father interprets the word 'system' differently than I do, and that if we had identified a more concise definition rather than relying on a word, which can have different meanings to both of us, we might have come to a better understanding of the other's' view.

So many arguments can be started by misunderstandings. Arguments can be avoided if we take the time to communicate our thoughts or arguments clearly, or prevent ourselves from jumping to conclusions... using our own meanings to blanketly interpret another's words, instead of really trying to understand what the person is trying to say.

So the following is my part of the conversation I wish I could have had with dad.

Some things never change.

Like many I know, I love Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. I love the analysis of gender issues in the series, the portrayal of the different eras, the character development (it is so crazy that they help us find a way to sympathize with even the biggest douchebags) and looking at time periods usually idealized through less forgiving eyes.

Two Christmases ago I gave my parents the first two seasons of Mad Men. I am thrilled that they love the show as much as I do and love hearing their reactions to the show.

However, I do not think I will ever, ever feel comfortable sitting through sex scenes with my parents. Ever.

A piece of a part of the process

When I was a kid I believed that being an adult would be cool because adults had everything figured out. Transitioning from child- to adulthood would be a categorical shift, fundamentally different, and, once reached, a state of easier living characterized by knowing how to handle challenges as they arose. Although being that together seemed intimidating as I was a somewhat fearful child and couldn't imagine how one achieved that adulthood togetherness, I looked forward to the shift because hey- who wouldn't want to be that contained, composed, and confident.

Graduate school relieved me of that delusion. College was fun for me, and my first true academic challenge was getting accepted into a Ph.D. clinical psychology program (a tough life pursuit, by the way... I'm not sure I'd recommend it). Once I enrolled in my graduate program, though, I figured my academic pursuits would be a downhill stroll.

They weren't...

Being Erica

Last year a friend turned me on to a Canadian series titled Being Erica. After the second episode I was hooked. The premise? Magical-reality based... our protaganist meets a 'therapist' who helps her grow by going back in time (primarily, but she learns from other things as well) to fix her regrets.

Not only do things not always go according to plan when Erica re-dos her past (or future... or stands still in time), but the consequences of her choices on her life in the present are often surprising.

Hence my love for this show. I suspect we would all like to go back in time to do some things differently. Hmmmm... I'd also like to go back in time to relive an experience or two. And wow. To have a day that I could do anything and have no... well... almost no consequences? I'd sign up in a heartbeat. So. Throwing it out there to the intertubes. Check out Being Erica.

Countdown

I'll be moving to a tiny town in Northeastern New Mexico to start my first 'real' job in early- to mid-January. Now that the pressure of hunting for a job and the stress of not having an income is finally almost over, I've been more than a little annoyed to find myself just as listless, un-energetic, and over-whelmed as when I was waiting to hear if I'd been invited to interview at a site or offered a position.

As I mentioned in my first post, Anchorless, I'm no stranger to moving, especially over the past few years. Aside from getting over my initial disappointment regarding leaving New York, I have actually enjoyed my time in so many different places. In hindsight, one of the reasons this period of my life has been fun as opposed to a collosal pain-in-the-ass was because I had support systems in every area in which I spent time. The primary stressor was being under- or unemployed, and my friends and family have been more than supportive when it came to helping me during this (thank God) relatively short period of joblessness. In a way, not having a lease and, at least for the last three-and-a-half months, a job has allowed me to have incredible freedom when it came to traveling, be it for interviews of for pleasure.

Publishing publicly

Publishing publicly is weird. I have virtually no followers and started this blog for myself. And it's not like blogs have some sort of peer review requirement. That said, I have started four and almost completed two posts that I'm scared to slap up on the intertubes for fear of saying something 'wrong.' Offending someone.

As one of my impending posts is titled You Can't Please Everybody, you'd think that I'd be a little more comfortable having an opinion, acknowledging others may or may not agree, and leaving it at that. I also believe that opinions change as one is confronted with new information (hence the name of the freaking blog), so even if I did change my mind regarding a post, it's not like I couldn't write a new one incorporating new thoughts into my modified belief. Hence my curiosity and annoyance with pausing to post.

It makes me wonder how people with well-traveled blogs do it. But I'm making myself write stuff publicly to learn and grow from the experience. Hopefully the more I do write, and the more I (hopefully) hear others' feedback, the better I'll get. Part of the process.

Ironies*

(Hopefully I’m not pulling an Alanis Morissette with this one…)

Last night I watched a very well done documentary about the Hollywood portrayal of United States indigenous peoples named Reel Injun. Watching documentaries that challenge the history I learned in elementary, middle, and high school is always bittersweet. I love history and love learning about how past times contribute to our present; how we got where we are.  The flip side, of course, is learning that the history I embraced as a child was skewed to present people best described as my ancestors in the most positive light possible: highlighting their accomplishments, downplaying and at times, erasing their failures, and perhaps most egregiously, telling others’ stories for them.

Many of the inaccuracies and downright deceptions about which I’ve learned regarding white or mainstream culture’s portrayal of indigenous peoples are documented in Charles C. Mann’s excellent 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. From reporting lower numbers of the baseline population of indigenous peoples in the Americas in an attempt to downplay the atrocity of the genocide committed in this country to dismissing the accomplishments of the native peoples (ex., bridges and other contributions to architecture, maize, and many other advances), white people’s re-writing of American history has been to our benefit and others’ detriment.

Paradigm shifts

Disclaimer. My knowledge of philosophy and the sciences outside of psychology is a matter of intrinsic interest and is elementary at best. My understandings are still in process, and I’m using them to provide structure for this post. Thus, this is a super-simplistic synopsis of a topic I find interesting and my personal experiences through the lens of that topic. Any feedback regarding misrepresentations of the science in question is welcome.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of paradigm shifts, the name of this blog comes from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962.  A friend in college first introduced me to the philosopher when she gave me Kuhn’s book for Christmas. While she was correct that I would enjoy the reading, I didn’t get around to finishing the work until about a decade later. When I completed SSR, I was approximately half way through my graduate program and so used to reading research papers that, at the time, a book about the process of science and theory change seemed riveting in comparison.

Paradigm shifts refer to science's change in attachment to the theories that describe, explain, and predict occurences in our world. The shifts happen when enough contradictory or unexplainable evidence accumulates to challenge traditional theories, in Kuhn's words, normal science. The new findings lead to revolutionary science, described as research attempting to yield new evidence to inform and contribute to the development of new theory that accounts for new and old findings. (There is also a phase termed ‘prescience,’ which describes the state of a field that has no unifying theory to provide a framework for the studies contributing information to the field… such as the field of Psychology before Wundt and Titchener developed the theory of Structuralism.) Ultimately, Kuhn proposed that science, our theories and understandings of the world, is a continuous process. Sometimes the process is characterized by violent upheavals as we attempt to reconcile new information to frameworks that do not always account for them, often ending in new theories that best account for new and old information.

Things that Seem So Obvious to Me (#1)

If I wrote a blog (I guess I still haven't committed...), I’d want to write about stuff along these lines. So I’ll just start there and see if I, perhaps, continue this blog.

I don’t have the longest list of friends on facebook, but I do try to have some diversity on my friend list so I can keep a finger on the pulse of things about which people talk outside my circle. (Sometimes not ending with a preposition lends itself to wicked awkward sentences.) When news of the sexual harassment charges against Cain broke, a “friend” (if I were honest, I would use that fancy new FB designation system and classify the person as an ‘acquaintance’) wrote: 

“Bill Clinton gets a BJ in the oval office, sticks cigars in places they should never be, lies under oath and somehow Herman Cain "allegedly" sexually harassed a couple women and it disqualifies him for running for President?”

When news of Cain’s decision to ‘suspend’ his campaign was announced (and what does suspending one’s campaign mean? He might be back if his ratings improve?), the person wrote:

“I guess the media lynching of Herman Cain was successful, damn shame what politics in this country have become. Alleged sexual misconduct is more damaging than getting BJ's in the oval office and then lying about it under oath.”

(By the way? I edited the quotes for my ‘friend.’ To quote my favorite MTV young adult show, Awkward … “You’re welcome.”)

I haven’t followed the Herman Cain sexual harassment story too much. I have, on occasion, caught some of the republican nominee debates, which I find alternatively hilarious (“You know what you get when you turn ‘9-9-9 around? 6-6-6.” [Michelle Bachman]) and scary as fuck (please see previous quote). Despite my relative lack of familiarity with the subject matter, I feel like I can at least begin to field this question posted on FB.

Anchorless

I have turned into a social media whore.

More of an observation, not a judgment. I graduated with my Ph.D. last May and have spent my time job hunting since. The cool thing about this transitional state is that I have been able to travel all over the country, primarily for interviews, but also have crashed with family and friends during the down times and have spent meaningful time with people who have felt distant while I pursued my degree.

The down side? Holy shit- I’m literally homeless.