holy shit

holy shit! new orleans is a fucking lake and coastal mississippi is now... just a coast. It's funny how nature in reality has no rhyme or reason, but sometimes it seems to say "YOU WANNA FUCK WITH ME?@! YOU ASSHOLES HAVE BEEN DEFILING MY LAND FOR TOO LONG! GET THE HELL OFF YOU GREEDY WHORES!#$@#!" It always makes me think about the bittersweet nature of the development of civilization. One the hone hand, it's good for us to further ourselves and innovate, but on the other hand, it's bad for the earth. It's also fleeting... All these things that took us years to build were flattened in a matter of hours by some freaking winds. The thing I keep going back to is all the cool things my mom told me about thier vacation at bay saint louis and the pictures on the news of nothing but coast dotted by a few broken buildings there. It's like those wood and brick two story buildings were no more than a measly house of cards.... wierd.

I didn't really want to get paid anyways....

Paperwork is taking so long these days that I am almost seriously considering just saying "fuck it" and not getting paid despite working 35-40 hours per week.
This officially sucks.
I would seriously bake some cookies if someone could give me a program that would search through my notes for the information needed for billing and do my daily activity sheets and my timesheet for me.

abbreviated musings

When you really peel back all the layers and get deep into why someone has emotionally unhealthy habits... The answers you get will blow your mind.

don't tell anyone....

But i've been promising the spiders outside the house juicy flies if they will come inside and scare my husband to the edge of insanity.

the hosebeast has awoken!

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA GIVE FOOD.
@#@#($*!~!)@#$(*$ HATE MORNINGS.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr WHY CLOTHES AND PHONE AND OTHER THINGS I NEED SMARTER THAN ME? WHY THEY ALWAYS HIDE?
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR ME NICE GIRL! WHY YOU LOOK AT ME LIKE ME MONSTER?!

Quick update

I haven't done a real update in a few days, so I thought I'd post something to let you know that I'm still alive and doing well. Work is busy and a little crazy, but overall, it's fun. However, paperwork is still the devil.

Whitey is doing well but he's getting a little homesick for big city living. I rather like having all the kickass good local businesses here... even if that's all that's here. And, while it takes forever to get anywhere that's not within the city, the drive is always fucking gorgeous.

We've been watching lots of 24 lately. Everyone says season 3 sucks, but so far, I would seriously beg to differ.
In other news, I finally got my hair cut!!

so umm... yeah that's all. nothing interesting here. move along.

My Husband always said you can't live without pie...

i guess he was right...
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/113-08092005-525263.html

everything i need to know i learned from working crazy ass jobs

1. Things will always take at least twice as long as they seem like they should.
2. Never EVER let someone go past thier noon meds. EVER.
3. Just when you know someone well enough to know that they won't do any of the bad things they say they want to....they'll do them.
4. Being "the nice girl" means that everyone will talk to you more than they will other people, but they won't necessarily respect what you say when you try to teach them something or give them advice.
5. Therapists are your best friends.
6. Psychiatrists are fucking gods.
7. If no one is laughing at you or trying to fire you, you probably know what the hell you're doing even if it constantly feels like you have no idea.
8. If you act like you know what you're doing, people will believe that you do.
9. Paperwork was invented by the devil.
10. Being a workaholic is going to send you to an early grave (if you work too late at a social services place, you can feel another 3 years peel off of you for every minute you're there after quitting time).
11. You cannot control other people and it is pointless to get upset when someone does something other than what you would like--it will only serve to add grey hairs to your head.
12. Everyone has at least one positive quality.

OMFG

We now have REAL mexican food in sandpoint. And there's actual mexican (hispanic anyways) people in the restaurant too. For those of you who don't live up here... people come in 2 colors: white and native american. There are a handful of other assorted races that you see on occasion, but i can seriously go through at least one whole day with plenty of contact with the outside world and see only white people all day.
We have another mexican restaurant in town that everyone loves except me, and the staff is all white people. IT's a horrible restaurant. This new one is yummy! Hurray for yummy food and cultural diversity!!!!!

Assertiveness and limits

I like to think of myself as a nice and accomodating person. I want to be helpful and I want people to be happy. The problem is that I sometimes forget to think of myself because I'm so busy thinking of others. Everyone always tells me that I need to set limits and learn to say "no". I hate doing this because I like to do everything, I want people to like me, and I also sometimes feel more confident that things will be done right if I have my hand in them.

However, there are times when setting limits becomes absolutely necessary to make sure I do not allow myself to be used up and burned out. What I always find interesting is that people respond well when I set reasonable limits. I hate telling people not to do certain things because I'm afraid they'll be mad or feel put out. But what generally happens when I set limits so that I can stay sane, is that people respect them without too many problems. Other limits, such as whether or not a kid can have ice cream, are another issue altogether--they don't generally respect those types of limits. However, if I command a little respect and consideration of myself, I usually get it. This will never make sense to me, but if it helps keep me sane, it's a good thing.

Is there a full moon out ?

Good lord this week has been nuts.
Monday... Or.. Someday anyways, I was on the phone with a client for an hour talking through her problems. Tuesday I was on with her two hours talking her out of making a stupid decision. Today I had someone else go to the hospital for making a stupid decision. Fucking hell. I like my job, and I'm hanging in there knowing that this will calm down once the clients get used to me, etc. However, if it does not mostly calm down in a couple of months, it will be time to consider a new job, if I am not already in the damn looney bin. I am doing my best to do things that will keep me out of the looney bin, but I honestly cannot spend too many more nights/weekends on the phone talking someone through something or out checking on someone before my brain starts to erode.

However, I am happy to report that I am feeling much more confident about my work and my judgment calls related to work than I generally do. I am usually really uneasy about anything with a new job, and especially when we're talking about making judgment calls on what mentally unstable people may or may not do. But the last few days, the more I think about things, the more I am okay with what I'm doing. I haven't talked to anyone and there's some possibility that I'll lose my job over something that happened tonight, but I think that most of my co-workers would have done the same thing in my position.

All I can say is, thank goodness for supportive co-workers. They have been more than willing to give me ideas for how to work with people. The one therapist spent about a half hour on the phone with me just coming up with ways to set limits with other people. I loved my old job, but I feel like this one is much more understanding of individual styles. The therapists and other workers seem to understand that not everyone likes to set hard limits and that not everyone is comfortable being super-assertive. They have really talked me through a lot of options and ways of handling things, and tried to make me feel like I'm doing well. They really seem to take the attitude of "lets help you understand this better" as opposed to "why don't you understand this better?" (which is sometimes how I ended up feeling in my old job).

Also, mom deserves a big thank you for sitting up with me for an hour at 4 am to help my nerves calm down. As do numerous people on the internet. And my husband for just generally putting up with my crazy ass work schedule and high stress levels.

The final thanks and praise goes to wal-mart for being open 24 hours so that sleepless social workers can get a sub sandwich and chocolate milk before going back to bed.

very random thoughts

Well, I managed to completely forget everything I said about being nice to my parents ebcause the did my laundry. Last night we went somewhere, and I didn't know where the place was so i was riving around in circles cursing at everyone in the car. I was very rude to say the least. Once we got where we were going, all was good.

We went on a cruise around lake pend orielle and ate some yummy food and saw some eagles. It was quite cool. Here are some pictures me and my husband took last night.






The other cool thing about the cruise was that I decided that it was not going to be interrupted and turned off my phone. Technically, I am on call 24 hours for all of my clients, but both my boss and co-worker said that it's no problem to do stuff like that where you can't return calls or go help someone right away. I knew the only way I wouldn't stress over my clients was to turn off my phone altogether. So, I did. Hurray for me!

Then I got home and ended up being up with one of my unstable clients until 1 am. We have to do something to get her a touch more stable soon or I am going to become very unstable very quickly (I have gotten to the point where my job has made me mentally unstable and it is not a fun place to be). But the people at work are very cooperative and have alot of good ideas. I also came up with some good ideas of my own. So, this will get under control one way or the other because I am not going fucking crazy because of a client.

Random thoughts

I have a lot going on currently. My parents are here from Alabama. I thought I was going to go fucking crazy on Sunday because I kept walking around finding unclean knives laying on my counter (damnit RINSE the dishes BEFORE they sit in the sink and the peanut butter dries up and cakes on them) and somehow ended up with enough food for a thousand people (which makes it difficult to find anything and makes it take a lot longer to cook). However, my parents did ALL of our laundry yesterday and then took it to a laundry mat to dry it and then folded all of it. I will be ever grateful to them for this. So, the next time I have to clean pie filling or peanut butter off a knife left on my counter, I'll just suppress the curses and be thankful mom and dad are so nice.

Secondly, I have a new job and this is my first week in full swing. It's a little crazy getting everything coordinated time wise and I feel like I'm being pulled in 8 directions at once. This will settle down once I get used to it and once I stop writing appointments on the wrong damn day on my calendar (seriously, WTH is up with that?).

The other fun thing about my job is that I have a couple of clients that are not stabilized right now. This means that I have to talk on the phone to them, go see them, etc. after hours. This is a bit draining. Sometimes this happens right before bed, so I dream about the things we talked about. I don't view this as a positive thing, especially since it sometimes gives me trouble sleeping. I am aware that part of this is a coping skill on my part, and I am aware that maybe I should get my ass back to therapy. Therapy is actually fun for me because I *know* the therapist knows what I'm talking about when I talk about being drained and creating relationships with clients and other things because therapists deal with this stuff everyday.

The last Random thought for the day is that we are going on a dinner cruise on the lake with my parents. This should be pretty cool. Hopefully, it will also help me de-stress, but that will only work if I don't worry aobut my unstable clients the whole hour and a half I'm out there. I am going to work out some kind of plan so that if the unstable client calls me, they an get a response, but I won't have to spend an hour on the phone while I'm on the boat.

parents...

A friend of mine, xerocube, posted in his blog about the "hot coffee" mod for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and how it highlights how many parents in this country pay no attention to what their kids are using. You can find his article here:
http://xerocube.blogspot.com/2005/07/just-thought.html

I completely agree with him, and I think that not enough parents pay attention to what thier kids are playing, watching, and listening to. I will go one further and say that ratings systems and censorship by the FCC are quite possibly making this situation worse. Because the government slaps an E rating on a game, alot of moms think that it's okay for thier spawnlings to play it. There are plenty of games that are rated E that I would not find appropriate for children under the age of 15 or so because of one or two certain things. For example, Many of the DDR games are rated E. In general, DDR is a pretty innocuous concept, and most of the songs are fine for family consumption. However, some of the DDR games include songs with very specific sexual content, such as "oh nick please not so quick" and "blow my whistle".

This just goes to show that you should ALWAYS always pay attention to what your kids are into. That way, they hopefully don't get into anything unwholsesome, and if they do, you can talk to them about what they saw/heard. Kids want parents who are there for them in every way, Including setting limits. While they may whine and tell you how suzie's mom lets her watch the movie/play the game/listen to the album, they crave discipline. If you are fair and consistent in other matters, they will come to understand that you have a good reason for limits on TV, games, movies, music, etc, even if they don't "like" it.

In addition to the ratings system making parents feel "comfortable" when they should not, I think that censoring content and saying that it is then "okay" for kids is also doing nothing but making parents comfortable. All censoring words does is take one word out of the middle of something that's generally completely innapropriate for children to hear. For example: " I wanna _____ you like an animal/ I wanna feel you from the inside" ends up being just as adult as "I wanna fuck you like an animal/I wanna feel you from the inside" because of the context. This is the case with most songs with "curse words."

Songs and movies use adult words because they're about adult subjects. Children do not need to hear adult things all day every day, which is what ends up happening when we censor certain words and do not pay attention to context. I think that we should do away with censorship of words in songs on TV, etc.. However, I think that there should be a concerted effort to make truly "family appropriate", movies, TV, and music. What I would love is for me to be able to turn on the radio and hear whatever filthy song I want to hear, AND for Suzie Soccermom to be able to turn on the radio and hot have to worry that her children are going to get an education in human sexuality or guns or drugs. I would be willing to support the Government taking some of the money away from the FCC to put it towards incentives for people who develop truly family appropriate media.