These are a few of my favorite things

So I've jumped into the world of counseling, to try my hand at helping some college students. This is the start of a list of my favorite phrases that I've heard so far. Some are silly, some are really important.


"And what are the people in your class like?"
"TRIFLIN' MOTHAFUCKAS."

"But... where was he naked?"

"Counseling is often like an abscess. As it fills up with goo, things don't really hurt. Then, when you break it open, it really hurts. But that's also when the healing starts."

"The tan penis is too ethnically specific. Use the blue one."

"She is just a pumpkin full of PMS."

"You know how everyone gets cold when the weather gets colder? We get a seasonal sickness, and once you get over that sickness, the weather is really lovely and worth is. I feel like that's where I am now. This part is the sickness before the beautiful season, and if I can just get through this, there's lovely weather on the other side."

"Any penis that smells is problematic."

"Everyone has their Vietnam - someone they shouldn't have gotten involved with."

My Political Campaign

I did something I swore I'd never do. I watched the Presidential debate last night. I was so confused and unclear on what either candidate was saying. And I'm disappointing that only the Republican and Democratic parties get to be a part of it. There are many other candidates. And the ones we have the chance to listen to are funded by the same exact corporations, Goldman Sachs being the biggest and scariest, in my opinion. We just plain don't have an actual choice here.

In addition, I really got the feeling like two people were just shouting political terms at me with no explanation of what they entail. Trickle-down government! Tax breaks! Big government! Raise the deficit! Doublespeak! Big brother is watching you!

Plus, my mother told me not to interrupt. Ever.

This is what my political campaign would hinge on:

1. Public schools would be required to incorporate "sufficiency seminars" into their curriculum. Teach children how to utilize solar energy, plant and maintain their own gardens, how to build wells, and crude, basic elements of survival that would help us not be so dependent. Private schools would be encouraged to also adopt these courses by a small tax cut to schools who do offer them.
2. Nationwide, an afternoon "breathing hour" would be adopted. As businesses are private, they would not be required to enforce or include these breathing hours. Individuals who were interested in practicing these hours could not be discriminated against nor lose their jobs. It is my belief that a spike in productivity would be experienced in business if this were adopted. If businesses so chose, they could extend their working day by one hour so that if individuals chose to participate in Breathing Hour, they would be required to make up that hour at the end of the day.
3. Free voter education courses would be supplied by and funded by the government. Voters would learn about the electoral college and how voting works. Included int he curriculem would be suggestions on how to spot biased information and how to find unbiased information. Teachers of this course would be required to be free from political influence. Endorsing candidates, however casually, would be strictly forbidden. These courses would be a requirement before voting.
4. Tax cuts would be given for green businesses and bicycle-related materials.
5. Tax raises would be put on all tobacco, gasoline, fried food, weight loss pills and supplements, and t-shirts with an oppressive amount of rhinestones or studs.
6. More strict protections would be implemented for historical monuments, lands, and buildings, including but not limited to nature preservations.
7. Miliraty members would be trained in descalation of mental health crises and multicultural competencies.
8. A small national healthcare system would be implemented, its size directly in relation to the precentage of Americans who do not have health insurance. Privitized health care would, conceivably, still make up a larger percentage of healthcare services offered. Tort reform would be implement, with the goal in mind of making it less expensive to become and to stay a doctor. Caps on how much a person can win in a medical malpractice suit would be implemented. Reward programs would be offered for doctors working in impovrished countries or programs within the United States focusing on the less fortunate, in order to aid in doctors paying off their student loans. In addition, insurances will be required to treat mental health service needs as any other specialist-required medical concern is treated.
9. Funding for teachers would be garnered from the above mentioned raises in sales tax. Colleges and universities offering Education Degree programs focusing on individualization, encouragement, and respect would receive significantly more funding than their counterparts not offering these things.
10. Funding would be given to the FDA with hopes of offering education through public service announcements and classes about the sideeffects of chemicals commonly found in meat and produce and ways to avoid unhealthy foods.
11. Political candidates and hopefuls would have a cap on how much money they may spend while campaigning. Donations from corporations will still be permitted, as long as the donations do not exceed the specified cap.
12. If states did not adopt anti-discrimination policies based on creed, religion, sexuality, gender expression, race, political belief, and and gender, they would lose all federal funding for transportation and road building.

It's nice to dream.

Grace Facebooks

I'm not sure if you have read something I posted a while ago, my list of things I like about my family. One of those things is that my mom narrates the dog's life for her. Grace is my dog.

Recently, my mom even thought that Grace would probably like to get on Facebook, and to like this picture of her swimming with my mom and I. She couldn't, of course. Being a dog and all. So my mom mentioned it for her.

I wasn't joking.

We love our dog.

“To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” - Patrick Moynihan

Friday was travel day of my very last family vacation. On someone else's dime anyway. So we hopped a plane from Jacksonville to Philadelphia, and then Philadelphia to Dublin, and then a bus from Dublin to Derry. Or Londonderry if you're British. Or Protestant. 

I shall graciously screech my blog to a halt for a brief history lesson. After King James I "conquered" Ireland (bully to you, Mr. King, when all they'd had to eat for years were potatoes [COINCIDENTALLY did you know that potatoes actually originated from South America? They did. In what is now Colombia, people started growing them about 7000 years ago, and they didn't make it to Europe until the Colombians started stomping through Peru, who took the potatoes to Europe in the mid-1500s.]), he started dishing out Irish land to English people who had no land, and needed some on which to sow their seeds. So, they were planted in Ireland, in an event that you can google called the Planting of Ulster. Long story (about 800-1000 year long, actually) short, the Irish and the English, who were Catholic and Protestant, respectively, fought and fought and fought. Are there any wars that AREN'T over land and religion? Sheesh. Eventually Ireland liberated (most of) itself in 1919 after a guerrilla army called the Irish Republican Army, which is still in existence today and aren't the nicest people, rose up against the British forces. All but six counties were liberated, making the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland, which is still technically part of Great Britain. Those six counties are referred to as Ulster, and are: counties Derry, Antrim, Down, Armagh, Tyrone, and Fermanagh. The IRA would, of course, like those six counties back, but after the "Good Friday Agreement" in 1998 (which I won't detail because I don't know much about) the fighting has calmed down for the most part. It's really very interesting, and worth looking up if you like history. I suggest googling the Easter Uprising, the IRA, the Orangemen, and Sinead O'Connor's version of The Foggy Dew to get you started.  Here's a map!

I'm currently in Derry, and I certainly don't feel like there is a war going on. There are, however, different street corners and neighborhoods that have painted the curbs in blue, white, and red, and fly the Union Jack, and other neighborhoods boasting orange white and green. Often, when you see signs for Londonderry, someone has scribbled out the "London" part. In years gone by, when I've headed over to Donegal to the beach, I've had to stop at checkpoints  as I cross the border and declare all manner of things. There are no checkpoints now, though, and markedly less car bombs. Back to my trip! 

We actively traveled for 13 hours, and waited in airports and bus stations for another 4. But then I fell asleep in my Granny's house, and woke up to family, and it was lovely. Yesterday, we headed over to Rathmullen, where some of my uncles were racing their sailboats in the regattas. Just another summer's day in Ireland. 

Literally my whole family is in shorts and t-shirts, and that's how I'm dressed. But then I visited my aunt and saw THIS VIEW which made all the cold worth it. Would you ever leave your house if this was what you saw? 

If you look extremely closely, you can see two sailboats on the water, one being my Uncle John's, and the other being my Uncle Paschal's. No, I don't know which one, I can barely see them.

This morning I woke up early and went for a light jog/walk with my mom, and was very happy to see this...

... but very UNHAPPY to have to trudge up this. 

I have yet to have anything from my granny and grandad's fish and chip shop, as it's probably around 900 calories a meal, so I'm holding out, but I can't wait. I'll be spending another regatta day today on that bouncy inflatable boat, and praying that it doesn't rain, which is hilarious, because it's never NOT raining here. The rain is even beautiful though, it's like standing under the misters at Disney World, only less weird. 

After I freeze to death on the boat, maybe I'll sit here in my grandad's garden, where the grass is softer than any carpet I've seen, and have a drink. 

Slainte!

Happiness

A while ago, a friend asked me if I thought that happiness was a learned behavior or if it was more of something you were just born with- and if you didn't have it, tough nuts. Zach has sometimes called me Happy-pants, usually prefaced with a "calm down." I would say I'm a pretty happy person. It takes a lot to really worry or stress me, and when I am worried or stressed, it usually doesn't take long to de-stress me, and I'm pretty clear about what I need to do to get my feet back under me.

For instance, this past weekend, I had bought tickets to see a production of Trey Parker's Canibal! The Musical, at the Orlando International Fringe Festival. The theater is about two and a half miles from my house, so Boyfriend and I decided to ride our bikes. Unfortunately, due to oppressive heat and wind that seemed to ALWAYS be blowing against us, the 12-15 minute bike ride took about 25 minutes, and we JUST missed the closing of the doors. I was so angry because my good friend's cousin was in the production, and I had heard it was hilarious, and the tickets were non-refundable, non-transferable. So I was fuming, and Boyfriend making suggestions of other things we could do or asking what he could do to fix it was only making it worse. So, I sent him away (he's lovely for not taking that personally) and I sat and fumed really nastily for 5-10 minutes, then decided that I had had enough of that, and we went to find a free production.

Now, I think that happiness is both innate and learned. I've always been a bit of a pollyana. That's not necessarily a good thing. My mom used to compare me to Scarlett O'Hara at the end of Gone With the Wind.

 "I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow."

I love that picture of her. Classically pouty for Scarlett. Anyway, I'm a champion of not paying attention to stressful things.

However, I took a class in my last semester at Flagler, taught by Erin Hightower, called Positive Psychology, and it changed my life. We used a book written by Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches the positive psych class at Harvard, that I really think helped me to make my happiness a little healthier, and to help me to be happier more often.

 Happier is almost like a workbook, with the idea in mind that you can train yourself to be happier. The book defines happiness as a more stable contentment, and not spikes of elation that we all experience. Here is a chart of what someone's happiness may look like over the course of the month.

I hope you can read the above Graph that I made, but the general idea is that we have a "happiness baseline." We have spikes when good things happen, and the dips when bad things happen, but generally we return to the baseline. The book Happier strives to -using a combination of more "spikes" and adding things that are proven to slowly add contentment - "raise" your baseline.

Some of the things that Happier suggests you do are exercises in gratitude, and quantifying things that make you happier.  One study that it mentions examined the letters that nuns wrote to their loved ones and colleagues. The nuns whose letters included expression of gratitude had longer lives than those whose didn't. If you google "Gratitude and Positive Psychology," you'll get a wealth of information about how expressing gratitude can help maintain a longer, happier life.

As far as quantifying things that make you happier, the entire books is peppered with opportunities to write responses to questions and consider things about yourself. It helps to draw out patterns about when you're happiest, and how you can recreate these moments. It's very logical and Cognitive-Behaviorally oriented, I do believe.

Lastly, I opened the question to my Facebook family when I started writing this blog, to see what they thought. Here are their answers! (For now, I'll update it tomorrow after people have had more time to comment.)

So there are some other ideas. I do think some people are born naturally sunny, but, like all things, I think it's a trait that's learn-able.

I highly recommend giving Happier a read. It's not hippie-jargoned nonsense, it's quantifiable, supported science that suggest of making yourself happy.  

My Sister...

... is crazy. When she was confirmed in the Catholic Church two years ago (Catholics are usually baptized at birth. Confirmation is a rite we go through when we're older in which we confirm that we really do believe in the teachings of the Church and want to continue in our faith) she asked me to be her sponsor. A sponsor is the person who fosters the Confirmation Candidates growth in the Church and helps them along their path.

Of course I said yes, I would love to be her sponsor. However, in the weeks before her Confirmation, my sister's behavior became out of control, and she started to really hurt my family. I felt that it would be hypocritical of me to stand in the Church and say that I thought she would be a good Catholic. I'm not very religious, but that made even me squeamish.

One of my duties as a sponsor was to write my sister a letter. In my confusion of whether or not I should actually sponsor her, I wrote two, and now I will share them with you.

Before you read these, I feel like I should apologize for not explaining the extent of my sister's bad behavior. I won't detail it, but just know that she wasn't merely sneaking out of the house and calling boys late at night.

The first letter expressed my true feelings about her being Confirmed:

Victoria-

You are not dumb. I know you’re not, you know you’re not. So let’s be smart and look at some facts.

Mom and Dad spend thousands of dollars every year to get you a good education.

You ignore your education, and would rather talk online all day than do homework. 

Mom and Dad make sure that there is always phone, TV and internet in the house.

You use the internet that they pay for in twisted, and often illegal ways.

They make sure that you always have more than enough food.

You thank them by never helping out around the house, and whining when you are asked to.

They nourish your basketball talents and take you anywhere and everywhere to play on teams and in games, and pay whatever it costs. 

You steal money from them to do strange things with phones. 

They buy you a gorgeous dress, take you to Cotillion, and let you have 9 girls to sleep over at the house.

You tell them you hate them and lie to them constantly.

They take you on at least one vacation every year, more than most people have.

You tell people that they abuse you. Another lie.

Just some facts. Think it over, you’re not dumb.

I know you’ve been telling me for a long time that it’s none of my business, and to butt out, but it is my business, Victoria. This is my family that you’re messing with. You drag me into it every time you start your crap in the house, so I’m well within my rights to call you out on your bullshit.

You’re selfish. For some reason you think you deserve the wonderful life that you’ve been handed without doing anything to deserve it. You’re a bitch, Victoria. And you need to grow up and get over yourself. You’re taking it for granted that your family will always love you. And we will always love you, but you are hurting our lives. There will come a point when we have to move on from having our lives stopped by a selfish little brat like you. Who knows when you will push us all too hard?  But you need to cut this crap out soon.

Think about your Confirmation. You’re supposed to be confirming how you are going to lead a Catholic life. Do you think your actions are very Catholic-like? One thing that I will tell you is that you need to start thinking about sponsors to choose last minute, because I am seriously thinking about not being your sponsor anymore. I’m not saying that I’m not going to be your sponsor... but you’ve pushed me almost too far. Almost. So I’m thinking about it. Because I don’t think any of your actions these days are Catholic at all. In fact, I don’t think you should be getting Confirmed. I’m just saying.

Look at the facts. And stop messing up my family, and your life. 

The Second is the letter I actually gave to her:

My Gorgeous Beautiful Little Sister

This is a big time for you. Being Confirmed means that you are making a commitment to God to stay strong in your Faith, and a promise to yourself to show your Catholic values every day in your life. It’s not an easy thing to do, to always act as a good Catholic. It’s not easy to love everyone that you meet, and it’s hard to do the right thing, even when you know what that is. But when you make the choice to Confirm your Faith, you’re making a promise to do your best always in everything. It’s a big promise to make, and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s a challenge.

Victoria, I have never known you to back down at a challenge. It’s one of the things I admire most about you. When you are joining a new basketball team where you know no one, you throw your shoulders back, smile at everyone, and pass the ball until you have made friends. You face situations that other people find uncomfortable, like feeding the less fortunate at the Schulsbacher Center, and lead everyone to be comfortable, while sharing your joyous smile with all. You are a treasure to watch while you share your gifts.

Your gifts are only growing every day. I love watching you grow with them.

Being sisters is a complicated friendship. Sometimes, I tell you to leave me alone. Sometimes, I tell you to stop asking so many questions. And, sometimes, I get mad when you don’t do things my way.

This is the most important part of my letter:

Never never never leave me alone. Every day you teach me to be a little more selfless, and to find wonder and excitement in the little things in life. I want you always right by my side to teach me more.

Never stop asking questions. Your curiosity is one of your best gifts. Keep asking why, keep asking how, and keep discovering new things to be amazed at.

Do things your own way, always. Listen to God and use your Faith to decide what “your own way” is, but after you figure it out, always stay true to it. Continue to use your gifts every day: stay kind to everyone you meet, wonder about everything around you, and help anyone who needs it, even if they don’t want it.

Meet this challenge, Tori. The challenge of being a good Catholic everyday and growing in your Faith is the hardest one you have had to meet yet. I know you will be great, and I can’t wait to see it for myself. God is proud of you every day Victoria, and so am I.

Squid, I love you more than you will ever know. 

What's really twisted is that I meant every word in both letters. 

I never went to her Confirmation.

Thoughts from an Ex Gifted Individual

Today, I was told that gifted children don't ever resent being gifted, and usually enjoy being taken out of "regular class" with all their friends to be put into gifted classes. My Human Growth & Development professor said that gifted kids enjoyed the creativity they got to indulge when they were put into their "special" classes.

This is simply not (always) true.

It was in a class setting that this offense occurred, and I didn't want to be the douche who said "Well... as a gifted child..." (I hope you read that in a nasally, obnoxious voice), so, instead, you are getting to read about my affronted indignation. Lucky.

When I was younger, and enrolled in the Mentally Gifted program at Afton Elementary (looking back, I can't believe "mentally gifted" was what they actually called it. Does it seem a little politically incorrect?), I hated it. I was a strange kid, and people thought it was weird that I read during lunch and recess. There were some "looks" when I told a group of girls in my fourth grade class who were discussing perfume that their lovely scent was most likely made with ambergris, a flammable gooey substance found in the intestines of a sperm whale (that's a conversation I'll never forget). All I wanted was to fit in with the people I went to school with, and I didn't know how. Because I wanted to talk about why Beethoven wanted us to switch hands back and forth to play the same series of notes in that A section of Fur Elise (did he just want to add a display of grandeur? did he want to ensure that the pianist played it with the articulation he thought appropriate? What was he thinking!?), and my classmates wanted to discuss the Barenaked Ladies and kissing.

Saying that I didn't fit in is a wild understatement. It was even more noticable, I think, because I so desperately wanted to. I would repeat things I heard other people say in different theaters because I figured if people liked it when they said it, they would like it when I said it, too (false). But there were other things, like the fact that I hated brushing my hair, and wanted to climb trees more than I wanted to pick out my own clothes (the result: tangled hair with leaves in it, and a solid color sweatsuit that my mother picked out. In teal.) So I'm sure you can imagine how I felt about it when all my classmates stared as I stood up and left the class at a certain time every day to go and be "special." 

I did the least amount of work possible in those classes. If I had to be there because I was smart, then I would be as dumb as I could. Unfortunately, at 8 or 9 years old, I didn't know how to convince everyone I wasn't smart enough for the classes. Failing to do all the homework, but then finishing the test in under ten minutes was not the way to go, lesson learned. It just taught everyone that I was lazy.

I think eventually I gave in to the freak flag thing. I started dying my hair blue and purple, and playing vocabulary games for fun. But to this day, in my second to last semester of my graduate program, I can honestly say that I have only put forth my best academic effort on one single project. It was a clay and cardboard replication of the Appalachian Mountains. And it was beautiful.

Fortunately, I had my brainiac brother to cover all the smarts of the family. So I learned to be funny and sort of smart, and it's served me pretty well so far. Sometimes I wonder if my procrastination, horrible spelling, and lazy school attitude are inherent or learned, and today put me a little more on the "learned" side of things.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that some kids don't want to be different - even if it's "good" different. Some kids just want to fit in, so if you're going to torture them through admitting that they're smart, put them in a school with a whole lot of other smart kids, where 8-year-olds talk about ambergris.