Whoever Dances is One with the Universe

Does anybody have any tips for talking to NGOs on the phone? I need to call Human Rights Watch and Women for Women International to see if I can get interviews with certain of their staff, and I'm really nervous about the correct protocol for doing this.

I'm a big baby, yes.

I am really scared I'm going to offend somebody and get blacklisted for-ever. >_>

--

On the plus side, Jen said she would drive me to this beekeeping thing to-morrow that I promised to help with, so YAY, and I already got a tonne of my homework done so now I am just going to read my religion pdfs and then curl up and go to sleep. Arrgh I still have to write a proposal for Cog.Psych though.

Trying to be a competent student/human being always intimidates me at the same time it makes me feel really good and grown-up. I shudder to think what's going to happen when I become a graduate student.

On the other hand, I talked with my advisor about how I want to do hospice pastoral care, possible to the exclusion of actually having a congregation someday, and he seemed really positive about my ability to do that (I said that I didn't want to have a congregation until I was a LOT more experienced, and he said that was a mature outlook, so :D I'm mature! ha).

Sometimes I feel like this year/lifetime/last grasp at irresponsible undergrad-dom is going by really fast.

To-day has been. I don't even know.

This morning was nice! I went out to lunch with Dani and her friends, and one of them bought my lunch for me! And then I went to start work on the Project with Andy, and we got the whole photographing part done, which is awesome.

The problem is that it took almost six hours, and we were in a small studio with lots of bright lights, and I have had the worst migraine ever since. On top of that I didn't get to eat until late, and I feel really terrible. I also realised I have an essay due to-morrow that's six pages. Edit except the professor just e-mailed me and said it's due next weekend, OH GOD THANK GOD.

So I'm kind of rolling around on the floor in misery right now.

Thursday was horrible -- I ran out of medication and failed an exam and decided to take a conciliatory nap at eight and ended up sleeping all the way until eight the next morning, and then Friday all I did was homework and brief hanging out with the_chloroplast and immoralwitness and Kat until they went out to a bar, and then I hung out with isjusterin to maintain my sanity. And then TO-DAY OH GOD.

Also my mother has been leaving hundreds of passive-aggressive voicemails and e-mails in my inboxes this week, oh my God I want to die and not have to talk to her. She talked to me to-day but she still wants me to call to-morrow as well. I need to call Maria instead so I can weep all over her and have her understand.

Basically EVERYTHING IS CRAZY and when I tried to intimate this fact to Mama she just said, "oh you always worry about everything" all dismissively. Which makes me angry, because she's the one producing most of the pressure on me right now.

...Somebody write me some nice Arthurian porn. I need it.

Tuesday's New York Times science section had an article this week on old people getting plastic surgery. That, coupled with my post from Tuesday, has led me to a rather icky discovery of something I did admittedly kind of already know. Which is that we kind of have this ideal, in America -- I don't know how it is in other cultures, having dog-paddled but never really been immersed in any other than American -- that old people are supposed to be adorable grandparents.

Old ladies are supposed to be tiny and do knitting, or fat and do baking, and old men are supposed to whittle things and dispense pithy pieces of wisdom and fix neighbourhood bikes. They're allowed to be lonely, but only so they can adopt small children as honourary grandchildren or be used to shame us generally into spending more time with our own old people. If they're bad-tempered or put their makeup on all over their faces or have to wear Attends or sag in random places, we turn them into the subjects of honestly very mean-spirited comedy.

And I'm not trying to say that everybody needs to go out and adopt some isolated nursing-home inmate, but really I think it's wrong both to idealise old age or to make fun of it. Idealising it removes us from all the problems that come with getting old and also makes it look like people who don't fit the ideal are defective -- hence, I think, things like old-person plastic surgery. I mean, Jesus Christ, this one woman in the article spent seventy-seven thou on facelifts to get rid of wrinkles and implants to cope with sagging breasts. She's eighty. At eighty, people should not have to focusing on this kind of thing. I cannot even count all the better ways to spend that money to enrich one's own life or someone else's. And at the same time this whole "lol let's as a culture shame old people and send them the message that once you are old your usefulness has ended and you should keep out of sight" thing is absolutely heinous.

The thing is, old people are just like everybody else, in that they deserve to be treated with respect. Whether they bake you apple pies and tell stories of their children, or have Alzheimer's and scream at you and refuse to bathe or -- like one old lady I visited while I was working -- have to be talked out of suicide. I've really kind of run the spectrum of old person personality types; I've had an adorable old man who wanted me to meet his cat and showed me around his house and called his wife "Mom", I've had a hilarious old lady with MS who was wheelchair-bound and showed me how to lift her from her chair to her toilet, I had an old man who was totally bedridden and with whom I communicated through really patchy hand signals, and an old lady who threatened to punch me while I was giving her her bath. And every single one of them deserved my respect and the best care I could give them, by virtue of being human beings. And I really hope that's how I've carried myself throughout this summer, and how I do for the rest of my life, because that's not just true of old people, it's true of everyone.

Which is not to say it wasn't hilarious when my one old gentleman had me burn a bonfire made of used Depends, or when Audrey (my Wednesday client) stole the dated brick from a condemned schoolhouse down the street from her apartment (actually, Audrey always does something funny when I visit. ♥ She makes me squee).

In other, non-soapboxy news, I stopped by Michael's to-day to enjoy my new and undoubtedly brief period of solvency. It's been about a whole week since I was over, so they already have about eleven-thousand new products in the scrapbooking section, and I was amazed and ... hilarified? amused is too gentle a word, I think. Hilarified to find that you can now buy adhesive metal gears and keys for your scrapbooking or cardmaking projects. At this point, I'm starting to think that 'steampunkery' should be a word in much the same way 'fuckery' is. I may start using it. "What kind of steampunkery is this?" I will say, staring in disbelief at the fact that you can now buy tiny watch faces as embellishments. They discontinued my goddamn copper pearlised dots that I use for eyes, but they've started producing tiny glitter-covered top hats and monocles that are already adhesive-backed.

Naturally I eschewed this silliness and instead managed to spend seventy-five dollars (!!!!) on scrapbook paper and cake glitter, and that embellished tape I've had my eye on for about six months now. >_>

I also went to Target and discovered that it is nearly impossible to find a black, wire-free bra in 38B. Did you know that there are a lot of black, wire-free bras in the nursing section? There are. There are a lot fewer in regular. But I got to embarrass a teenage male cashier by buying bras and underpants, and I found The Most Beautiful Scarf in the World, which I purchased because of its aesthetic qualities and also I love scarves and also it helps me pretend winter is NOW DAMMIT.

To-morrow I work at the library, and Saturday we are going to our vacation in the mountains. I look forward to sitting in the sun by the lake doing crossword puzzles and reading all day, as well as the greased-watermelon water polo that has become something of a family tradition. Also Maria's birthday! I finished her calender and everything. :D

I would say that to-day was a success.

Ooo! The new LJ header has STARFEESH. Cool.

I am now the Mama of fourteen guinea keets and seven new poults -- though there may be more; the seventh just hatched about two minutes ago. He is being pitiful in the box.

I had a great weekend with random_prophet, who is mad cool. Unfortunately, she is also going to Russia for all of next year, so it will be a long while before I see her again.

My work week is crazy again -- they seem to like giving me one very light one and then one insanely heavy one. So -- ugh. 12 hour shift on Saturday with my least favourite client. Who I am also seeing Thursday. Who has no AC. Which -- we have no AC at my house, either, but at my house I do not have to carry old ladies back and forth from the bathroom once an hour. Also, at my house we keep the fans on and try to circulate the air, whereas this client is always cold so she insists on keeping the house warm. Hey, did you know there's a heat advisory going right now? Yeah. So she's going to yell at me when I refuse to heap blankets on her, sigh.[1]

Pigs are coming soon!

Not much interesting news. Mostly I am tired, and sometimes I have time to do art.

[1] I'm not sure if I've explained my thing with heat, but basically I can't function. I mean, I can force myself to if I have to, but being too hot makes me want to sit somewhere and cry and cry, and given half the chance that's exactly what I'll do. Cry and sleep. I can't eat when it's hot, and I'm just generally really miserable. Also I sweat a LOT. So I'm not really very much fun to be around during a heat wave, and left to my own devices I would spend this week in the library or hiding in the cellar reading. Instead, I'm working, and while most of my clients have AC in their homes, which actually makes things better, my Mon.Thus.Sat. client is compounding my dislike of her personality by attempting to cook me to death in her house. Ugh. Naturally my work uniform is sweltering, too.

So I'm sure everyone is desperately interested in hearing the continuation of the Saga of the Insurance Company from Hell (yes, you are).

Yesterday my doctor told me that she had called the insurance company again and faxed them being all URGENT URGENT MY PATIENT IS DYING PLZ SEND HER HER MEDS, and she assured me, when I phoned, that they had told her I would be authorised to have them within twenty-four hours. So this morning I ran to the pharmacy, because I'm out again.

Where the pharmacist told me, as nicely as possible, that the insurance company had NOT authorised my scrip and everyone was now out for the weekend, so it was unlikely I would be authorised until Tuesday. He also suggested that I call the insurance company and grovel to them on Tuesday. In the meantime, I could buy some meds out of pocket.

Now, because the pill I'm taking does not come in 225 mg caps, which is the dose I take, I have to take three 75 mg caps every day. Which means in order to get by until Tuesday, I had to buy twelve caps instead of four. And because Mama is broke right now, I paid for them with my birthday money. ;___; Which is just a minor complaint, honestly, because at least I have money, but I am whinging because I wanted to get art supplies with it.

So my plan is to call the insurance company on Tuesday. Yayyy! In the meantime, I have incredibly expensive medication, and a twelve-hour shift at work to-morrow.

On the PLUS SIDE, Maria and Mama and I went clothes shopping to-day and I managed to find two pairs of jeans that fit, as well as a really cute denim skirt and even a pair of shorts (which is disguised to look like a skirt, which suits me just fine). Which is great, since usually the fact that I am shaped exactly like a hobbit makes clothes shopping a fairly traumatic experience. I also made cupcakes for a party to-morrow that I will not get to go to, but they turned out really nicely! Even though I burnt my hands, bleh.

Yeah. If it weren't for this insurance thing, my life would be going pretty nicely overall.

1. What do you do when someone you consider a pretty good friend keeps talking about stuff you have explicitly said is triggering to you, even when you have asked her to stop? (i.e. you said "ilu but please stop telling me about how much weight you're losing, how much fat is in the food I eat, etc" and she said "but I want you to be healthy" and went on talking about it? even after you said "hi EATING DISORDER"?)

2. On Celexa now. Haven't picked up the scrip yet, though.

3. Have three papers left for the semester (1 3-pager, 1-5/7-pager, 1 10/15-pager), three exams, and a story to write. Was going to do the short paper to-day, but feeling kind of too depressed atm, so maybe I will go watch bad horror for a bit. Thursday is LAS, so we get a day off--good time to get stuff done. As is to-morrow.

Bleh.

Last Tuesday I learned that my preschool teacher, Miss Stacy, was held at gunpoint and sexually assaulted on her wedding day.

In response, she started an agency that provides assistance to victims of trauma, from helping a Iraq war veteran with PTSD find counselling after the death of two of his children in a fire on Christmas, to finding a foster home for an abused baby, to providing medical care for a mentally retarded homeless man some folks found in a truck in the woods last winter. One of her biggest goals is to get her clients to a point where they can join in the helping: thus the veteran offered his spare camper as a temporary home for the homeless man while the agency found a place for him to live.

So, people are pretty amazing, I guess.

She offered me a volunteer position. It's a forty-five minute drive, but I kind of think I should take it. You know? There's not a whole lot of time left in the summer, and it seems like it might be more important to do this than to sit in on Daphne's meetings in her air-conditioned office two days a week. And it was such a coincidence to meet her--went with Daphne to talk about ways to get money/support/useful information for a shelter for domestic violence victims in Perry County, since Miss Stacy has been running her agency for a long time and knows who to contact and what's feasible and what's not (she even knows which restaurants will give leftover food/free food to people if the Food Bank is unavailable and was hooking someone up with one such restaurant when we came in), and she just happened to recognise me--anyway, if it weren't such a tricky theological thingy and a statement that makes me seriously uncomfortable, I might be tempted to say it was purposeful.

Which, granted, it is so hard to know what is just ordinary life coincidence and what is God saying HEY YOU DO THAT OKAY. There are never any angels or sparkles, which would make it SO much easier. But.

Should I give up my internship to volunteer with this agency, or should I keep the internship since it is providing some practical experience and will certainly look good on my resume?

Dear Livejournal,

A few weeks ago I decided to ask out a very cute boy in my French class. He was pretty sweet and he wears sweater vests unironically, which made him very attractive to me. I asked him if he would go to a movie with me. He said yes.

He then proceeded not to talk to me for a week. Liz and I decided I had made him nervous by asking him out, so when I saw him again I cornered him and asked him whether it wouldn't be nice to have dinner before the movie so we could talk to each other and get to know each other better. He agreed that that might be nice, then told me he wanted to take things very slow because his last girlfriend had "scarred" him. I agreed. I told him to let me know what movie he'd like to go to.

He then proceeded not to e-mail me or in any way contact me. So I sent him an e-mail telling him I thought maybe he had felt pressured into the date and if that were the case I completely understood and it would be okay with me to call it off. I wanted to make sure he knew that I wasn't going to be offended if he wasn't okay with the idea of going on a date, even a low-key one.

He never answered, so I assumed the answer was no and the evening we had planned to go out passed by. I ended up hiding in Shawn's room with Liz and Shawn and Dani, watching a movie and reassuring myself that I had handled the situation as well as possible.

This afternoon, he sent me the following e-mail: "we never went on that "date" like last weekend, then you started ignoring me in class. I mean you didn't even try to talk to me about it.

Well I'm at my home right now, and am then headed to California, so we won't see each other for a while, but if you still want to drop me a line next semester."

I feel that I am being reprimanded for something that wasn't my fault, however rational or irrational that feeling may be. I decided to write him back asking whether he had gotten my original e-mail, and suggested that there might have been a miscommunication. He hasn't replied yet.

I'm starting to think this whole "boys" thing may be a silly idea.