In the spirit of Emily’s list post, and because it struck my fancy, here’s a list of my thoughts at the moment (disclaimer: her list items were much more concise. Maybe I’m just more wordy in general?):

* I love love love my new computer. No, they didn’t pay me to say that. It’s an amazing, light, powerful piece of metal and plastic, and it’s way better than my old new laptop. Still upset that it was stolen, but it was really all for the best, ultimately.

*It’s snowing. I have school this weekend, and am allowed to miss one of the days. I just might skip out on tomorrow–as long as the weather isn’t beautiful and I couldn’t rationalize it. The idea of lying around at home is more appealing at the moment. We’ll see. We might get as much as a foot and a half to two feet.

*I’m loving Stephen King’s Under The Dome. Great 1,000-page-plus King masterpiece, as usual. Buy it. If you have a Kindle, might be a good idea to buy it digitally–this thing’s heavy. K tried to convince me to do that, but I wanted a physical copy of this thing. Still, can hurt one’s wrists. Be aware.

*Our trip to Knoxville for Thanksgiving was pretty great. It’s nice to see the fam, and it would be even nicer to stay in touch on a more consistent basis. Still, we don’t seem very motivated to change that (none of us, really) so maybe it’s something I shouldn’t worry about. When we talk, we enjoy talking. When we don’t, we just wonder how people are doing. That’s life.

*Work is going swimmingly. I have possibilities here, and definite future options after I’ve gotten my independent license. A lot to think about in this area. So I’m thinking.

*School is…also going swimmingly, I guess. I didn’t think at this point in my grad school career that I’d be anticipating graduation so much, since I love learning and love my cohort so much. Still, three years is a long time. Almost a tenth of my life’s been spent in grad school, if I think about it. Strange. After this weekend and one more paper, I’m in my last semester. Two classes and finishing out this field period, then I’m done. And that’s really exciting to me.

*Studying when I get the chance, and when I feel motivated to do so, for my social work exam. Less than two months before I take it. I have around a thousand pages of review material, and it’s a lot to process and retain. At least I know a lot of it from my work experience. Still, it’s a lot to process and retain.

*Someone told me at work today that I’m not someone who ever gets stressed out about everything. That’s hilarious to me, since I’m nothing like that. I get stressed all the time, but don’t let most people know it. As I think more about genuineness with my Clinical Supervisor, and being who I am without sacrificing my true self for the sake of other people, it’s a complicated thing to balance. I think everybody “plays the game” when it comes to aspects of their personality that aren’t the norm, or things that the world doesn’t find desirable. Everyone successful at something, at any rate. If you’re really introverted, you don’t present that persona at work if you’re in a helping profession. It can be tough to be true to yourself, though, if you’ve been projecting a persona for a really long time in most settings. This is something that will continue to be an issue for me, I think, as I continue my career further.

*Finally got my Itunes straightened out in my new laptop last night, so I can go back to my podcasts. There you are, old friends. Have you missed me as much as I’ve missed you?

That’s an encapsulation of the thoughts running around my head at the moment. Off to do something productive for another couple of hours, then to the grocery store and home to hide under a blanket and play Assassin’s Creed 2.

Nope, I’m not sick, just watching SNL. We nearly committed to adopting a dog today. Decided not to at the last moment, but it has me feeling a bit melancholy. She was a 6 year old Miniature Schnauzer, but it turned out she isn’t socialized well to kids, which would be a bad idea if we’re still wanting to try for a kid within the next year or two. She was very sweet, though, and I hope she ends up in a good home. Poor thing.

And we don’t have $800 to spend on her grandpuppies. Ah well.

Spent some time frantically putting out fires at work today. I know I mentioned this earlier, but it always seems like chaos erupts when my boss is out of town. This isn’t because people are working less-hard when she’s gone, but rather because I feel the pressure more of having to handle this stuff when she isn’t around to back me up. Everything got resolved, and pretty well, I think.

I had a meeting with a School Psychologist that left me pretty angry. For the most part, painting in broad strokes here, they’re about testing. Not clinical work, not therapy, not mental health in general besides establishing baselines or IQ or looking at learning disabilities. Remember, I said I’m painting in broad strokes. She essentially told me that a few of my diagnoses were way off base, when talking about a few individual kids. That wasn’t what made me angry, though. What did that was her complete lack of knowledge of symptoms, being a diagnostician, therapeutic principles, and common sense. If you’re clueless about an area, why on earth would you pretend to be an expert?

In other words: don’t tell me that a kid who is exhibiting a lot of specific symptoms that point toward a specific diagnosis MUST either be on drugs or MUST have been sexually abused, and that there isn’t a mental illness present. Don’t tell me you see a lot of red flags that my diagnosis doesn’t address, if you DON’T HAVE A CLUE.

Pretend you’re a professional elsewhere. You haven’t fooled me. Trot back to your district and strike a pose.

This must come across as me still being pretty angry, but I’m more annoyed than mad at this point. People that view children and their mental health concerns purely through the lens of academics end up ignoring individual kids’ needs more often than not. Unique kids need unique ideas, not just the same recycled crackpot theories that you happen to enjoy most at the moment.

If you work with kids, don’t be lazy, okay? Promise me that. They deserve more effort than you’re giving them, I suspect.

The Office tonight was pretty amazing. That’s a good example of a show that only seems to get funnier. How is that even possible? Shouldn’t it get watered down and crappy over time? Still, it hasn’t. Not at all.

By the way, our Blu Ray player is amazing. We started watching Planet Earth tonight, and loved it very much. I adore technology more than you can know, people. We resisted buying a Blu Ray player until good ones were cheaper than a PS3, which is now. And now we reap the benefits of waiting–all the awesome things that other people have been watching for a few years are now available to us in one huge orgy of purchasing and watching. Fun. It’s like buying a video game system after it’s been out for two or three years. There’s a great backlog that you haven’t even explored. Nice.

Had our kitchen ceiling fan, sink light, kitchen drawer, and oven broiler fixed today. Bathtub paint or epoxy or whatever is drying, and will be until Saturday or Sunday. Then we’ll have a new shower. Bathroom floor replaced, nothing leaks, and lots of other little things fixed. Here’s what happened: for some reason, we tend to be nervous about telling landlords when things need to be worked on. That means a list gets compiled, and eventually the dam breaks and we admit that we need some help around the place. It’s really hard to have a guy in our place for all these days, while we try to live our life and ignore him, but it’s really nice to have all these little things fixed by someone who knows his stuff.

My new laptop got mailed out today, about four days earlier than they estimated! !! !!!!! Have I mentioned that I love technology?

Good supervision session yesterday. Things really seem to be fitting into place in terms of how I view myself and my future in this field. Having a mentor, a real mentor, is making this easier.

Life is good. Have I mentioned that life is good?

That means it’s time for me to start blogging again. Hooray, right?
Finished my NaNoWriMo book, and went 1200 words over the required 50,000. Did it a week early, too.
For Thanksgiving, I took eight days off, and spent them with my family. Really nice. Niece, nephew, brother in law, sister, and parents were really great to hang out with again. It had been a year since we’d seen most of them, so it was special.

And, best part, I didn’t get sick this year! Something always gets me a bug on our vacations down south, but it didn’t happen this time, which was amazing. Three cheers for that.

Bought a new laptop to replace my stolen one. I know I haven’t talked about losing my other laptop, but the pain is still far too fresh to describe that. Suffice it to say that someone has it, a stranger has it, and I had to buy a new one. It was awful, but the new one’s much cooler.

One more school weekend, then I’m in my final semester of grad school. It’s bizarre, but still really exciting. Studying for my SW exam has been kicked up a notch, and I plan to take it February first.

I think that’s enough for my first post back. More tomorrow, hopefully.

So I’m actually doing this. Nineteen days down in my first NaNoWriMo, and I’m over the 35k mark. Eleven days to go, for only 15,000 more words. The end is actually in sight, and it looks mighty fine. My plan is to be a novelist before Thanksgiving. Sweet. Then the editing process begins.

Here’s the thing: I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m not cheating, in the sense that I’m not writing gibberish, or doing other tricks to inflate my word count. Still, I have a vision for this book that’s a lot better than it is in this form. So I have some work to do after November. But I’d like to be largely done by sometime in December or January. THAT will be a sense of accomplishment. For now I’m trying to win this thing.

And it looks like I will. What else should I do that I’ve never managed to follow through on? It bears thinking about…after this last fifteen thousand words, that is.

I spent a long time writing today. The negative result of that is that I didn’t get some stuff done I should have. The positive result of that (which FAR outweighs the negative one) is that I have 21,063 words done. That’s somewhere around 70 pages of original thoughts from my head, stuck into the guts of a computer. This has been a huge eye-opener, really. The fact that I’ve stuck with it for eleven days so far, and am way ahead of where I have to be, is proof positive to me that I’m capable of finishing a writing project longer than a poem. And that’s a really big thing for me. Another tip for those considering doing this next year: don’t save your writing for at night, after supper, just before bed. Things don’t flow as well for me when I’m dozing off on top of the computer. Go figure. My best writing happens in the morning. Also, the half hour I spent sketching out rough plot points led me on a streak of more than four thousand words, without much effort at all. Writing as you go is for suckas. Plan ahead, and you’ll be fine. Oh, and don’t be easy on yourself with your word goals. Know what you’re shooting for, and hit it more times than not, and you’ll manage 50,000 words without killing yourself.

Okay, listen. I know it’s been a while since I blogged. Truth is, it’s because I’m writing so much for NaNoWriMo that I’m finding that takes up a lot of my free time outside of work. Free time I was using blogging, when I tried to blog each day last month. So I’m sorry, I’ll try to do better, let’s move on. After November, I’ll likely be able to do a lot more in the way of blogging again, when this first year of my insanity has ended.

Let me just say this: writing a novel is HARD. I don’t say this lightly. I know I find it easier to generate words than a lot of people do, and I’m not just giving lip service to the idea of being humble here. But listen–if you ever decide to participate in National Novel Writing Month, probably because I’ve inspired all of you (why else?), learn from my mistakes. K’s strongly considering going for it next year, and I think it’s something I’ll make a yearly tradition for myself. I’m learning a lot from this experience, but like I said up there, it’s HARD.

Here’s the deal: 50,000 words written in November. Beyond that, everything else is pretty unimportant. This exercise is all about generating word count. As participants shout over and over (and as I have running through my head daily), December’s for editing. November’s for writing. This doesn’t have to be the best book ever, not right now. It just has to be a book. I can dissect it, tweak it, rip it to shreds starting in December (or more likely, January, if it continues to burn me out). November’s for writing. That’s the rule. Now comes my advice for you all: do some prep work before November first. I only decided I wanted to do NaNoWriMo this year about a week before it started, and so I had about a sentence in my head laying out what the story would be “about”. Yeah, that was a mistake. I’ve never been a big one for outlining. Ask any of my teachers who wanted an outline of a paper–I’d just end up writing the dang thing and then composing a fake outline secondly, after the paper was done already. I’m not saying storyboard everything, all your plot twists and guns running out of bullets and false closet backs. Just have a general idea of who you’re writing about and what’s going to happen during the course of the book. Because 50,000 words? Yeah, that’s a lot of things happening. And if you don’t realize that beforehand, you’re in for a loooong month.

I’ll write more about this tomorrow, depending on how crazy my day at work gets. As a progress update, I’m up to 14,267 words. 29% done after eight days. I’m very pleased with what’s happening at this point in my book, and I’m really, really enjoying accomplishing this. I’m going to win, and when I do I’m going to be pretty fricking proud of myself. The only way to help you all deal with my big head after this is to make plans to do it yourself next year with me. You in?

I started a novel today. NaNoWriMo has been intriguing to me for several years, but I’ve never felt up to it before. For some reason, this feels like the right year to begin. The idea is that I’m attempting to write a complete (at least) 50,000 word novel from November first through thirtieth. I worried about my beginning and my topic for days, but today I just sat down and started to write.

It felt awkward, it felt all wrong….and after my first thousand words, I realized it shouldn’t be in first-person, that the story didn’t want to be told that way. So I changed to third-person, edited the first thousand words, and ended up with 2,054 so far for my first day. 50,000 words sounds like a ton to do within a month, I know, but that’s only 1600-something per day. Which isn’t as much as it sounds either. Took me an hour and a half, including my huge editing spree. The point of this is to be DONE with a book within a month, to not freak over rewrites, and to have an accomplishment to be proud of. I’ve got great starts on all those fronts, I think. By the end of today’s writing, I didn’t feel like stopping, since I was having fun. I might do more later…this experiment is going to be good for me, I think.

Also, in other news (of things that made me mad), the Star Beacon (local paper) started out an article with a ridiculous sentence today. As they wrote, (and I quote), “The 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol bestowed on the average citizen manifests itself in a variety of ways in a culture inundated with Jerry Springer and Internet blogs.” Huh? We’re inundated with Jerry Springer? I didn’t think it was still on the air (a google search showed that it is), but besides that, is it really the arbiter of our cultural values at this point in America? Plus, “Internet blogs”? Are there such things as non-Internet blogs? Work on your writing, guys….at least put as much work into your writing as I did today. That’s all I’m asking, Mr. Warren Dillaway.

Got the chance to tour a mental health/substance abuse inpatient facility today. It just counterpointed the stuff that’s going on in healthcare in this country right now. As I said, I attended a meeting last night with a county commissioner, Senator Brown’s northeast Ohio aide, and the CEO of the local hospital (along with some doctors, some good people, and a wacko). It was an interesting meeting, but I came away from it with a (further) profound distaste for people who continue to not understand the situation mentally ill people are in in our current healthcare climate. When K mentioned to the CEO that there are many people in this county with mental health issues, he (and many others) took it to be a joke and laughed over it. Why is it funny to hear that someone has a serious mental illness and needs help for it, but it’s not funny to hear someone has cancer or congestive heart failure? People with cancer have a voice. They’re respected for what they’re living through, and people listen to them. Mental illnesses can make it impossible to advocate for oneself, though.

If you look weird, and maybe can’t stay coherent for long, or are just really depressed, how do you tell people to take you seriously? You’ve got more serious things to worry about than that, like making it through the day today. We need to be the voice for people who can’t speak for themselves.

Mental health parity is something that’s been too long in coming, too. Health insurance providers need to value mental health treatment as much as they do physical health treatment, and this is still a major issue.

Which leads me to the other issue I haven’t even mentioned yet: substance abuse and addiction services. The place I visited today charges people up front for an admission, if they don’t have health insurance. This is for detox, btw. They charge $700 per day, and bill for six days out of pocket before you get a bed. $4200 for an addict or alcoholic to get treatment. What addict or alcoholic has $4200 to spare?

Anyone who feels our healthcare industry currently isn’t in a massive crisis is incapable of viewing reality. Either that, or they are selfish idiots. WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO HELP PEOPLE WITHIN OUR SOCIETY. It isn’t a level playing field for the poor, the minorities, the mentally ill, those with substance abuse issues, and I could keep listing categories. Picking yourself up by the bootstraps is a fiction. A complete fabrication of reality. And that’s why, Joe Lieberman, I’m calling you a complete prick today. You have no right to commit to filibuster that healthcare reform bill. You, sir, are a morally reprehensible ass. I have no more patience for you or your ilk. I’m done with you.