missroserose: (Default)
*surfaces* *waves* Hi everyone! I'm still here! Better than that, I'm doing wonderfully. I'm probably going to still be in limited-social-media mode for a couple of months, however, so you'd best get your photos now! Assuming this sighting is not just a prank being perpetuated by forces unknown.

Summer and winter are both wonderful, but I have to say that for my money, I particularly love spring and fall. They're the transition times: in spring, our sluggish blood starts to move faster, waking up from the long dark winter and reminding us that life is out there to be lived. And several months later, after the manic rush to experience the glorious summer weather and all the associated opportunities for community connection and celebration, autumn comes and encourages us to slow down, to contemplate where we are, where we're going, and where we'd like to be when we finally settle in for the long cold nights.

Spring here is rapidly turning into summer, however, and my calendar is filling up. Some updates, both on current events and future plans:

School: A month and a half left, and still averaging a 97.6%. Not that it really matters; no one asks about your grades in the field. But it makes me happy to know. :) I just started my Conditions class, which I'm very much enjoying; that's where I get to learn specific techniques to help people with particular muscular issues. First lesson: do not overuse your thumbs during a full day of practical classes after weeks of mostly-academic work. (Ow.) Second lesson, related: soaking your hands in cold water really works to reduce inflammation, even if you have to swear up a blue streak to do it.

Travel Plans, Concrete: I have tickets to Anchorage, July 23 to August 4, to visit my mother. Are you in the area? Are you reading this? Then chances are I'd love to see you! Let me know if that's a possibility and we'll make it work. And then later that month (August 24 through September 4), Brian and I both have tickets to Gothenberg to visit my friend Petra. Yay for facing my fear of international travel! Yay for seeing dear friends! (Also yay for built-in housesitters - when my mother-in-law heard our plans, she was all, "Okay, I'm housesitting for you." She'd never been to Chicago before visiting us last Christmas, and kept calling us during our first year here - "The news says fifteen people were shot this week! Are you guys all right?" Then when she stayed with us for a couple of weeks, she went from being clearly hesitant to leave our apartment to "You guys want to stay here? No problem, I'm going to take the bus downtown, bye!" So we're kind of cheering for her and possibly her sisters to come stay and paint Andersonville red while we're gone.)

Travel Plans, Hazy: A dear friend of mine in Washington is expecting in October; I've sent her a letter offering to be an extra pair of (massage-trained!) hands around that time. If she's interested, I'd kind of also like to stay in Seattle a couple of days; I have a few friends in the area and can probably find a couch to crash on, especially since I can pay in trade. :) It's been a while since I spent any real time there, and it's still one of my favorite cities. Plus, now that I've accomplished something that feels worthy of a tattoo to mark it, I'm thinking I might hit up one of the artists at Hidden Hand Tattoo - I've heard very good things about them, and their work is collectively pretty outstanding. But we'll see how it goes; I haven't even heard back from my friend yet, let alone worked out finances or tickets.

Future Plans, Also Hazy: People keep asking me what I'm planning to do after school, and my answer is generally "Read! And play guitar!" Since I haven't had the time to do much of either for the past six months. Career-wise, there's probably going to be a gap of a couple of months between graduating/applying for my license and receiving it; word is there's something of a backup on background checks due to various local political reasons. I'm thinking I'll apply to work at the school's associated clinic to start; it's not the highest-paid option, but they treat their employees well and there are numerous additional opportunities for related work like teaching if I want to pick up extra experience. Eventually I want to branch out into my own practice, but for now I'm okay with working for someone else, especially since I know it's a good group of folks who pull together when crises hit.

Celebrity, accidental: Thanks to a fortuitously-timed public expression of empathy, I recently was featured on a new local podcast focusing on Craigslist's "missed connections" section. It's not really fifteen minutes of fame, but I got to talk about the fascinating social tension between our desire to help others and our fear of making things worse, and also about stripping down in a convertible and incidentally making a truck driver's day. The producer did a really fun job with the Rango sound effects, too. Check it out! Mine is episode 3, "To The Girl Crying".
missroserose: (Default)
Everyone knows the flu is awful. But what I always forget about it is that it's not the initial infection that's the worst thing about it. The fever and body aches are a pain, true, as are the respiratory symptoms, but mostly it's the weeks-long recovery process from the beating your body takes. It's been nearly three weeks and I'm still not up to speed, and I have a stronger-than-average immune system. I know it's not reflective of any great moral failings, but given how capable I'm used to being, it's frustrating to be so limited. (On the other hand, it's been a good time to ruminate on the lived experience of these people I know who deal with chronic illnesses, especially less-visible ones. My hat is off to them.)

I still managed a 90 and a 93 on my finals last week, which isn't half bad considering how my focus was absolutely shot. And I'm grateful that I don't seem to have infected anybody; at least, nobody at school's come down with it, and I haven't been anywhere else. So I'm crossing my fingers that this branch of the infection chain ended with me. (Take that, Random Dude On The Plane Who Kept Coughing On Brian.)

I just found out that Andrea Gibson is performing tonight in Pilsen. I'm really torn on this; she wrote one of my all-time favorite poems, and I've wanted to see her live for a couple of years now. But I just don't think two hours on transit plus time spent waiting in line is the best plan, especially with a full class load tomorrow and Thursday. So another quiet night in it is. Sigh.

On the upside: there's a pair of incredibly impractical and sexy boots on its way to me. Now to keep an eye out for a short skirt and a looooooong jacket.

(Boots! :D)
missroserose: (Default)
Bummer start for the day:  I had to miss my cleaning shift at the yoga studio this morning.  I could've powered through, but I suspect it would've been a Bad Idea for recovery.  Even though my symptoms are mostly gone at this point (aside from a little residual congestion), my energy levels are still ridiculously low, and the last thing I want to do is relapse.  Sigh.  I'd forgotten that the longest and most frustrating aspect of flu recovery is just how ridiculously long it takes to get back up to speed.

Better start for the day:  Pathology reading is DONE!  Holy balls that was a lot of reading, even for me.  I am a veritable fount of knowledge!  Assuming I can remember any of it for the final on Thursday, anyway.

To celebrate, I put a bid on a pair of incredibly impractical, incredibly overpriced, incredibly sexy boots.  I tried them on once at Nordstrom just for the hell of it and loved them; they've been on my Amazon wishlist since, but given that they retail for $300 I wasn't surprised nobody bought them for me.  I'm not honestly expecting to win the auction, but I'm thinking of it more as a vote that someday, maybe, possibly in the very distant future, I'll feel sexy again.  And possibly even go out dancing.

And now, to study for my lower-body-anatomy final.  Practice question:  if a client wears sexy boots all day, which leg muscles would you expect to be short and tight?  Which would be lax?  What techniques would you use to help restore balance between the two groups?  How could you convince her to get you a discount at Neiman Marcus?
missroserose: (Default)
Flu recovery continues; slower than I'd like, but it's progress. Amusingly enough, my annoyance at the time recovery is taking has decreased dramatically today, as the weather went from sunny and warm to "35 and snowstorming". I think this anonymous person pretty well captured the citywide reaction. I'm slightly annoyed about missing class, but it's nothing I can't make up, and I have all of tomorrow, too.

On the upside, being confined to bed/couch has done wonders for both my social media interaction and my study time. Since the former's probably of little interest to anyone but me, here are some cool things I've learned from my Pathology reading over the past couple of days:
  • Growth hormone, in addition to its eponymous function in children and adolescents, is largely responsible for tissue repair/replacement in adults - in short, healing.  It is also secreted almost entirely during stage IV sleep, the deepest level.  This fits with my own lifelong observation that most of the feeling-better recovery from illness takes place during long naps or overnight; it also explains why the people I've known with sleep apnea or other sleep difficulties tend to seem operate under a consistent sort of run-down malaise.  (And it explains many of the statistics where lack of sleep/sleep disorders increase susceptibility to any number of problems, from colds to heart failure.)
  • For all that the vast majority of fad diet advice is absolute bunk, it's completely true that the typical American diet is damn near toxic.  The number of digestive and metabolic disorders that can be reduced in risk (if not outright prevented) by limiting intake of preserved/processed foods and refined sugar/flour is staggering.  Unfortunately, despite it having been repeated by the USDA with slight variations for decades, the dietary advice of "eat whole grains, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and some lean meat; keep consumption of processed foods and refined sugars to a minimum" has so far failed to catch on.  Maybe someone needs to take out flashy ads?  "Prevent cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes with this 1 weird trick!"
  • Be kind to your liver.  Seriously.  You likely have no idea how much it does for you, every day.  They call it a "live-r" for a reason.
  • Unlike the common cold (which is no longer contagious after three days of showing symptoms), influenza remains contagious all through (and, to a lesser degree, for a little while after) the recovery period.  Hence, I am refusing to feel guilty for staying home sick ever again.
  • My mother always thought 90s-era Barbie was antifeminist because her feet were molded to wear high heels.  Clearly she was simply suffering from a severe, untreated case of pes cavus.  New from Mattel:  Treat jammed arches and prevent bunions with Orthopedic Barbie!  (Unfortunately, her footwear is roughly five times the cost of her designer heels, because something something capitalism something big government something healthcare.  At least until she's 65 and qualifies for Medicare.)
Forty more pages to go, and then I'm done...until it's time to study for the final.  Almost there!

Also, current average grade is 97.8%.  Just throwing that out there, says the former-barely-B-average student.

Feel-good moment of the day:  pictures from India's first lesbian wedding. What a beautiful commingling of traditions.  They look so happy.

And finally, here's Homework Enforcement Cat, helpfully covering up the answers so I can quiz myself (and pet him).

Homework Enforcement Cat
missroserose: (Life = Creation)
Technically I have class right now, but it's my clinic-skills class, which is the precursor to entering student clinic. And since the three members of my class are all strongly ahead of the curve, and our attendance numbers plenty high for state requirements, the instructor simply had us take the final on the second day and gave us the last few classes as either practice time or time off, as we preferred. Given how rarely I get to sleep in anymore, and the fact that I've worked quite a bit at the front desk and thus already know pretty well where everything is, I picked the "time off" option. I got to sleep until 9:00 AM! It was glorious.

School continues to go well. I finished my Foundations of Massage class with full marks, so I'm officially able (if not licensed) to do a one-hour classical massage. I've been doing my best to keep learning/devising new techniques, however, both because it's good to be able to customize and because, frankly, doing the same set of moves on person after person gets old fast. I have a practice partner who's been coming over every Tuesday afternoon for a month now; yesterday, I tried some new techniques and also made a significant effort to stay present and not be mentally multitasking (which is usually my biggest liability; I'm so used to cogitating on multiple subjects at once that it's tough for me to stay in the moment). She said afterward that it was the best massage I'd given her yet, and while I'd never done badly, she could really see how I was improving. I'm pretty pleased about that. On to Massage for Specific Conditions, Further Western Techniques, and Eastern Modalities!

On the work-study side of things, I recently finished Internal Anatomy and Physiology, which was a rather poorly-designed class: we were cramming an entire semester-long intro-level class into five weeks; the textbook was aimed at high school students and thus was written in a fairly juvenile tone; the curriculum, while useful information, wasn't made particularly applicable to bodyworkers, which made a lot of the students resent how quickly we were supposed to be learning the information, especially as many of us weren't used to high-intensity academic performance. I did fine, in part because I have a bit of a background in it from my psychology courses/reading, but a lot of the other students were struggling to keep up. Because I'm me, I wrote a pretty extensive critique with some suggestions in the end-of-class course evaluation; I didn't really expect it to have an effect, but I've heard through the grapevine that once my Pathology for Bodyworkers course is done I'm going to be working with the teacher to combine the two courses and make it more applicable/accessible. I'm seriously jazzed about this; one of my biggest frustrations with postsecondary education in the past has been how the administration clearly couldn't care less about the students and their opinions, except as a source of cashflow and enrollment numbers. Admittedly, this is a much smaller (and private) school, so caring is probably easier here, but I admit I'm especially pleased they've been so on-the-ball about recognizing that I want to contribute. (This has not always been the case with organizations I've been associated with.) Maybe I'll see if they want me to stay on part-time as a teacher/administrator after I graduate.

In non-school-related news (I do still have some parts of my life that aren't school-oriented, heh), on Saturday Brian and I had a case of multi-spoon-resistant-derp - we weren't sick, exactly, but neither of us had any energy or could even really think. So we ordered Domino's and sat on the couch to watch Lucy, our Netflix rental. (Capsule review: Fun action flick, with a bit of philosophy thrown in; not as smart as it thinks it is, but eminently stylish with laudable science-forward humanistic themes, even if the premise is a bit of folk wisdom that's been repeatedly disproven.) After that was done, we were still feeling derpy, so we fired up Hulu and watched Agent Carter, which I'd been hearing good things about. Color me impressed - it's a stylish and well-shot secret-agent-noir, with some great performances, some very clever misdirection in the writing, and a refreshing lack of the usual misogynistic "action-girl" tropes. It's definitely part of the Greater Marvel Cinematic Universe (there are moments when you think you're just watching a noir but then Comic Book Trope #384 comes along and you go "oh, right"), but it does a very nice job standing on its own, and Hayley Atwell absolutely kills the lead role, with a very human mixture of determination and vulnerability. If it sounds like something you'd enjoy, check it out; I haven't heard if ABC has plans to renew it, and I'd very much like to see a full second season.

Okay, morning decadence is over. Time to get into gear and start my day. Anatomy quiz later!
missroserose: (Default)
Hello, world! I'm not dead! I've just been...kind of insanely busy. As mentioned earlier, school is ramping up in intensity, and while I don't feel overwhelmed, exactly, there have definitely been some things falling off the edges of the plate. Thus, this post - part assessment, part update, so I can get a big-picture feel for how I'm doing and my friends have some idea of what to expect for the next six months or so.


Stuff that's going well! )


Stuff that's going less well. )

On the whole, I think I'm doing pretty okay. I could probably stand to de-stress a bit more; maybe a few more hot baths are in order. But for the next six months, I think I can deal. After I get my license, hopefully things will calm down a bit, especially if I'm working part-time. We'll see.
missroserose: (Default)
The exchange of money reminds me a little of sex. You can do it thoughtlessly, to fill the need of the moment. You can make it the center of your universe and be addicted to it. You can do it cynically, to get things out of people you dupe. Or you can do it with sincerity and affection, hoping to give as much to the person you're exchanging with as you receive. Our culture tends to think of earning money as prostitution, rape, or sin. But earning money can be wholesome, healing, and giving, not just to yourself but to your community.
--M.C.A. Hogarth, writing as [personal profile] haikujaguar on LiveJournal

One of the first questions I asked about this school, before I enrolled, was whether they had business courses as part of the curriculum. I'm not going into the field to expecting to become wealthy, but I value self-sufficiency, and would like to have the training to operate independently if I can't find an organization I mesh well with. I was pleased, therefore, to learn that the owner's background was originally in business; it was his and his wife's dream to open a massage clinic, but they had trouble finding therapists that met their standards for business practices.  They started the school as a way to train their own therapists before opening the clinic a few years later.

I'm coming to realize, having spent quite a bit of time in both the school and the clinic (running the front desk for work-study), that it wasn't just business education in the traditional sense that they wanted - scheduling and tax forms and accounting. It was people who understood the ethics of business, who grasped the importance of being intentional and careful and communicative, who could manage that tricky balance between self-care and self-giving. As the owner put it to me on my first day of work-study, "We need to take good care of ourselves and our business -- to make sure that we are acting in accordance with our ethics and our values -- so that we can be of service to others."  English not being his first language, I suspect it was only lack of familiarity with current buzzwords that kept him from coining the phrase "sustainable service".

* * *

"Well, you see, you have to find someone who needs something you have. And then you figure out what they have that you need. You exploit them, they exploit you, and it becomes mutually beneficial. It's simple."

And, really, it is. The Boy's description of the economics of human transaction is arguably the simplest thing I've ever heard. Also the most simplistic, the most fundamentally debasing, and the saddest things, all at once.

"Don't you think compassion has a part to play? The recognition of someone else as separate from you?" I can't help but needle him a little bit, take advantage of the status he ascribes me due to my gender (he is, essentially, a mama's boy) and my greater age. "Would you see clients who didn't respect you as a person?"

The defensive shrug. "If they paid me, sure. Wouldn't you? Money is money."

I shake my head. "No. I have too much integrity." I do my best to say it as a statement of fact, not as if I'm bragging; though when he doesn't react, I suspect I'm giving his vocabulary too much credit. "If someone doesn't respect me, I'm not going to want to see them again. It's part of why I'll probably run my own business."

"Then how are you going to find enough clients?" He's still defensive, but also genuinely puzzled.

I turn and look at him, directly, for a long moment. "Do you truly believe that there are so few people out there who are willing to recognize your common humanity?"

He turtles, overlarge shoulders coming up, the scrunching of the face I'm coming to know so well. "Well, sure. But they're all broke."

I make some politely disagreeing response - "that hasn't been my experience", or something to the same effect - but ultimately I leave it at that. It's pretty clear my experiences aren't going to be real to The Boy. Not in the mindset he's occupying at this stage of his life.

But I'm rapidly learning that, much as they push my buttons, his behaviors -- the defensiveness and inability to learn, the unwillingness to connect with others, the dismissive demeanor -- are all tied to his fundamental values.  If his entire life revolves around making himself into whatever his clients want him to be, what use has he for personal integrity?  Arguably, in his situation, a lack of personality is an asset.  Human interaction is based around sharing oneself with others; if he has no self to share, it comes off as all the more real when he makes something up for his clients.

But that brings up the corollary question.  If every worthwhile transaction is based upon mutual exploitation, why should he care about making his clients feel genuinely nurtured and cared for?  

I wonder how he ended up at this school -- heck, in this entire industry -- in the first place.  The trite answer, of course, is "Because it's exactly what he needs to learn and grow!"  But while that may be true, he also needs a willingness to reconsider his values, to examine his assumptions and where they came from.

That part of the curriculum, he's failing pretty spectacularly.
missroserose: (After the Storm)
It's been a good couple of weeks.

Last week I was at my mother's for Thanksgiving. We had a holiday dinner, and decorated her house, and I got to see the Eugene Ballet's touring version of The Nutcracker twice. (Short version of long story: my mother was going to take Brian and me and my friend Carl and his girlfriend Leilani, who in true Alaska small-population fashion my mother once worked with and quite liked, out to the ballet; they ended up breaking up a couple weeks beforehand, so I changed her ticket and and bought an extra one for myself so we could go the day before. It turns out she's pretty awesome, and she's a massage therapist too, so hurray for new friends/future colleagues.) Then we took the overnight flight back Saturday night, slept most of Sunday, and Monday it was off to my first day of class.

One week in, I'm pretty impressed with the New School for Massage. My entire class is a grand total of four people (winter classes are usually slow), but I don't feel that anyone's stinting on the quality of attention. Quite the reverse; I rather like that all of the staff and most of the other students knew us by name after the first day. Dominika, the school director I met before, continues to be incredibly warm and sweet whenever we run into each other; the first day I was running a few minutes late and didn't know where to go and wandered into her classroom by mistake, and she took me to the orientation group personally. (Not that it's a large space, exactly, but it was a nice touch.) And I got an email from her today asking how my first week of classes went, and could genuinely tell her that I feel like I fit in well here. I hope it continues.

For once, I'm not among the more well-traveled of my class. One of my classmates is from Germany and spent the past four years in Tel Aviv, and another is from Guatemala and lived in California before moving here when she was younger. Somewhat amusingly, the three of us are all women in our thirties; our fourth is a twenty-three-year-old dude who currently works as a personal trainer. Fortunately he's pretty easygoing and doesn't seem to mind kicking back and letting us all go on about our experiences; as he put it the second day, "I like listening to stories."

On a more ambivalent note, there's a certain amount of (often jokingly acknowledged) woo-woo stuff in the curriculum. I've been trying to keep an open mind about it, but have been surprised at how strongly judgmental my reactions have been, despite the fact that I have almost no direct experience with it and no knowledge of whether there have been any scientific studies on the subjects. (I am, unsurprisingly, relieved that the bulk of the lessons seem to be largely anatomy- and science-based.) It's not that I have anything against chakras or reflexology or aromatherapy or any of that; I know they've helped lots of people, and it makes sense that it would be part of the material, given that they're commonly used in the field and a lot of clients probably expect you to have a working knowledge of the theory. And believe me, I understand how strongly intuition factors into any healing profession, and whether that intuition takes the form of "your chi is misaligned" or "your muscles are knotted up" probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference on the level where I'm likely to be practicing. (Aaaaand I probably just vividly demonstrated exactly how little I know about either form of medicine. Heh.)

Upon reflection, I think a lot of it's about my personal hangup with pride and how others perceive me; there may (or may not) be lots of evidence supporting the efficacy of alternative models, but science-based healing is, ultimately, more prestigious and respected than alternative modalities in our culture. And I have a real trigger around not being taken seriously; so anything that feels too hippy-dippy crunchy-granola gets a negative modifier attached to it. Which is not precisely flattering; I'd prefer to react to ideas based on their own merits and not whether or not people are going to like me if I espouse them. Clearly I need to ruminate on this issue some more.

Still, it's not hopeless. Rather than using the term "alternative medicine", with the implication of it being a replacement for traditional doctors, the textbook suggests referring to acupressure and massage therapy and chiropracty and whatnot as "complementary medicine". I like that a lot better; it implies that these can be useful tools but aren't meant as a replacement for Western-style treatment. It's nice to think that both modes of thought can peacefully coexist, even if nearly a decade of Apple vs. Android (or Playstation vs. Xbox, or VHS vs. Betamax) tribalism seems to imply differently.

...Now that I think on it, I have almost no personal experience with 'alternative medicine' outside of massage and some very limited acupressure. So, help me ruminate! Have you tried (or learned to administer) any complementary medicine? What was your experience? Did it seem to help? I'm curious!

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May 2022

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