I took down most of my archives; 2008, 2009 and this year are still up. I also removed certain posts. These are the stats for my blog as it is now:

• 869 Posts
• 24 Categories
• 8,309 Comments

This is my blog as it was then:

• 3,768 Posts
• 35 Categories
• 20,976 Comments

I may take more down. I may change my blog up.

I thought about waiting until my ten year blog anniversary (January 1, 2011 — and now that I see the date I think maybe I should have just so I could retire on 1/1/11) but it’s going to take time for the internet to purge its cache and I wanted to dismantle it sooner. If I’m going to be (maybe) seeing clients in about a year, I need to unbuckle myself some. I don’t want to disappear entirely but I’m going to be rethinking my blog.

It’s been time anyway. I feel like what I started my blog to be it no longer can be and hasn’t been for awhile. I never thought that these public journals would become mainstream let alone targets for marketers and PR reps. I never though there would be huge blog conferences or ad networks or competitive awards. Originally I thought of a blog — my blog — as a kind of virtual performance art where I would try creating in public and see what would happen. I’ve always seen a blog as a living thing that is impacted by its environment as much as it is by its creator and that the creator herself would be changed in the act of blogging. And this is no less true since the commodification of blogging. (It’s like my argument that Disney fairy tales are as true a cultural representation as the original folk talks from which they’ve sprung and that they speak to our culture’s sanitzation of harsh realities in search of profits and so cultural literacy curriculum ought to include both Grimm and Walt.) That is to say that even though I am sometimes overwhelmed by all that Blogging with a capital B has become, it’s been a terrific ride on a personal artistic level and on a professional one as well.

But I feel like I’ve gotten all I can get out of it. I feel like I’ve wrung this medium dry. The number one thing I get out of my blog now is a relationship with all of you but I can get that on Facebook and Twitter. (And I don’t know about the rest of you but when Facebook took off? My stats dropped by about half. People don’t read my blog anymore; they read my wall.) So in many ways, my blog has jumped the shark.

Add that to my need to be more careful about what I share publicly and well, it’s time to move on in some way.

I’m not ready to give up my blog entirely because 1) I love the domain name; 2) I love WordPress.  I mean, I love my virtual space and I’m interested in exploring other ways to use it. But as a personal journal? I am sadly less enamored with it.

I’ve put my blog on a local WordPress installation on my Mac and I’ve tentatively gone to updating that version here and there to get a feel for journaling in (gulp) private again. It’s ok. I don’t think I’ll go to it that much (it’ll take time getting used to it) but I do like still having access to my 3700+ entries somewhere else. I love going through them — there is a lot that I forgot I wrote.

Now I’m thinking that maybe 1/01/11 might be my chance to do something new so that gives me about four months to figure it out. I’m still interested in that virtual performance art possibility so maybe I’ll be able to come up with something nifty. Until then, I’ll practice blogging less personally and I’ll keep taking down my archives. (My google page rank is sure to plummet. The only reason I’m so entrenched in the search engines was all of those archives I just removed. This is going to kill me that way!)

© moominmama for this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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I found out that if I stay full-time, I will be seeing clients in about a year.

This is how the program works:

• You do your course of study and then when you finish all your prerequisites, you start your practicum at one of the sponsoring organizations. I thought this meant that you’d be shadowing someone at a clinic but actually it means that you start building your client caseload. The practicum is about 7 hours a week on-site, which translates to about 3 or 4 direct contact with clients and 3 or 4 record-keeping, staff meetings, etc. That’s one semester.
• Then for the next three semesters you do about 15 hours of clinical internship, which is about 7 or 8 client hours and about 7 or 8 indirect work for clients. During your practicum and internship (usually taken at the same place), you are supervised by your supervisor and then you also come back to school to discuss your clients within a group setting.
• At the end of this you graduate and immediately take your PC (professional counseling) exam and your PCC (professional clinical counseling) exam. However you cannot be a PCC until you have 3,000 supervised hours working with clients.
• With your PC, you can see clients but you need to have one hour supervised time per every 10 hours of direct client contact. You can get this supervision either within a program setting (like working with a clinic) or you can hang out your shingle and see clients on your own and then hire someone to supervise you.
• Those 3,000 supervised hours equal about two years of full-time counseling practice. I’m a little unclear about the paperwork around this but you come out of those 3,000 hour with a PCC and then you have the same rights and responsibilities as a psychologist (PhD) or a LCSW. (In Ohio you can’t get your LCSW unless you have a MSW although that wasn’t always true and have a friend with a bachelors who has her LCSW.) Except for being able to write prescriptions, you have the same rights and responsibilities as a psychiatrist, too. My understanding though is that we can’t have people committed involuntarily and the other folks can. But you can diagnose people, you can create treatment plans, you can take insurance and you can have a counseling practice.

I’m hoping to crank through full-time but we’ll see. Life has a way of being unpredictable. But I am excited about how quickly we are able to get into the field (ok, nervous, too, of course). I’m going to be looking for a program that works with children and their parents, hopefully somehow related to adoption and/or fostercare.

Seeing as how I will be out there seeing clients in about a year, I am dismantling my archives post-haste.

© moominmama for this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: caseload, clinical internship, paperwork, rights and responsibilities, supervised hours, working with clients

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Two things about my blog today:

1. I will never host a major giveaway again. I had no idea there was a giveaway attached to the $200 Just My Size shopping spree when I signed up — I just wanted to do something fun with Pennie. But the giveaway has been a wreck of comment moderation and I’m unlikely to know the person who wins because it’s been over 400 random strangers (the vast majority of which won’t become readers). And the influx of traffic doesn’t happen on a page with ads (because BlogHer won’t let you run their ads on giveaway pages) so it hasn’t even been good for my stats. Today is the last day of the giveaway and as soon as I announce the winner, I am taking that page DOWN.
2. Speaking of taking things down, I’m going to start removing my deep, dark archives. I am a little sad about this but only in theory. In reality I don’t care much and in two years time if I’m counseling people, I don’t want to be so easily stalked.

Two things about my kids:

1. Madison just hosted her first sleepover with Abby‘s youngest. Movies were watched, snacks were eaten, giggling was done in great quantities. Sasuke (guinea pig) woke them up at 8:30am, which is around Madison’s usual time but I have a feeling Maya is gonna be feeling it later today. Madison, too, actually. I don’t think they fell asleep until about 11pm. They slept at either end of the twin bed and it was pretty cute. I meant to snap a picture but they woke up before I remembered I meant to do that.
2. Noah is a great semi-brother to Roscoe. They adore each other. I was thinking about how fun it is to see Noah with a baby and how nice it is to see him with a baby who does not live here so I don’t have to be waking up in the middle of the night with said adorable baby. But as mother’s of teen boys know, there is nothing more heartwarming than seeing a teen boy play peek-a-boo with a chortling almost one year old.

Two things about school:

1. I have my first paper (it’s not much of a paper) due on Thursday and should probably write, that, eh? And also I have to give a presentation for a reading also on Thursday but my books aren’t here yet. My first meeting of my other class is tonight and my seminar is this weekend. I found out I have to go to court as an observer for the seminar.
2. Transportation to my classes is quickly becoming a challenge and we may need to buy a second very used car. We’re going to crunch the numbers this weekend, I think.

Two things about the state of my mind:

1. A friend of mine asked me to present at an upcoming open adoption conference and I thought it was in the next month. She emailed me to say they’d moved the dates up a week and I thought, my god! And they haven’t even sent out a call for proposals! They must be really confident! So I wrote her saying something to that effect and she said, “Well, we have a whole year…” You can either use this story to judge my state of mind as someone who is that confused about the dates or you can use it to imagine my state of mind now that this particular worry is off my plate!
2. Despite the weather being back up in the 90s, having a headache because of the humidity, being worried about my books arriving in time and having a broken kitchen sink (long story) I am enormously cheerful because I’ve started school. I’m looking forward to tonight’s class because I believe it’s an overview of the program, the internship and the licensing process. I have a lot of questions about all of that and am looking forward to having them answered.

© moominmama for this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: counseling, guinea pig, humidity, Madison, Noah, Roscoe, school

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Being a mama’s boy, new research suggests, may be good for your mental health. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association by Carlos Santos, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Social and Family Dynamics.

Santos recently conducted a study that followed 426 boys through middle school to investigate the extent to which the boys favor stereotypically male qualities such as emotional stoicism and physical toughness over stereotypically feminine qualities such as emotional openness and communication, and whether that has any influence on their mental well-being. His main finding was that the further along the boys got in their adolescence, the more they tended to embrace hypermasculine stereotypes. But boys who remained close to their mothers did not act as tough and were more emotionally available. …

Using a mental-health measure called the Children’s Depression Inventory, he also found that boys who shunned masculine stereotypes and remained more emotionally available had, on average, better rates of mental health through middle school. “If you look at the effect size of my findings, mother support and closeness was the most predictive of boys’ ability to resist [hypermasculine] stereotypes and therefore predictive of better mental health,” Santos says.

via Emotional Openness May Be Good for Males’ Mental Health – TIME.

So first let me thumb my nose at the people who worried I was smothering Noah with all that attachment parenting (the extended breastfeeding, the co-sleeping, the slinging) and that Brett was “allowing” me to turn him into a girly-man by respecting Noah’s feelings.

And second how about we stop this whole “mama’s boy” stereotype altogether, ‘kay? Let’s just say that human beings — male or female or self-identified other — are healthier and happier when they are allowed and encouraged to be in touch with their feelings and taught skills to communicate effectively.

I mean, duh, people. Really and truly DUH.

© moominmama for this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: communication, mental health, Noah, share feelings

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A no excuse but it’s Friday so what the hell kinda post.

Back in the mid to late 80s I had a terrible fake ID that I used to use to get into the bars on campus. These bars have since been all cleaned up (i.e., totally razed) and now my youth has been taken over by a massive Gap store or something. It no longer smells like beer and vomit on that block; I miss the good old days. These then are the top 10 songs that would make me RUN onto the dance floor during my tenure as a girl who thought nothing of throwing herself around in public in a short black flippy skirt with garters underneath.

1. Love & Rockets: Kundalini Express
2. Skinny Puppy: Assimilate
3. Nitzer Ebb: Join in the Chant
4. Ministry: Stigmata (I have to give a shout out to Ministry: Everyday is Halloween because the first time I felt OLD compared to the kids is when the Stigmata fans had no idea that Ministry used to make songs like that. Stigmata came in 1988 so that puts me at eighteen and mourning my lost youth.)
5. Front 242: Headhunter
6. This Smiths: How Soon is Now (of course because nobody could understand my pain like Morrissey and apparently everyone felt that way because man, you’d have to SHOVE people out of the way to dance to this one)
7. Afrikka Bambaataa: World Destruction
8. Erasure: A Little Respect (rarely played outside the gay clubs)
9. Cabaret Voltaire: Sensoria
10. New Order: Temptation (rarely played at all)

I miss dancing.

And now just because it’s so devastatingly pretty and the DJs rarely played it but sometimes they did at Crazy Mama’s, a bonus video.

© moominmama for this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bars, crazy mamas, dancing, mean mister mustards, teens, video, youth

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