Where To Start??

Thesis is DONE! I cannot believe it- it feels like I just went through 6.5 months of intensive labor. The final title is:

SHOULD WE SEND THEM IF WE CAN’T TREAT THEM?
An Exploration of Current Military Mental Health Policy & Treatment
During Operation Iraqi Freedom.



Whewww am I glad that's over. Now I just have to write a quick paper over the weekend for my last three credits and I'm DONE DONE DONE.

On March 16th I present my thesis and then on March 17 I graduate. I'm so freakin excited to have my bachelors degree....it's been a long long two years.

I'll be semi absent until then but will be back after graduation.

What Now?

OK so my thesis is at the second reader and I probably won't get anything back until Friday. All of my graduate applications are in and I just did my taxes (getting money from the Feds & RI - have to pay MA). So now I'm stuck with the thought....is this what it's going to be like when I'm done with school? It's literally been 2 years since I just come home from work and been able to hang out...I think I'm going to have to learn how to do it all over again. I am definately going to have to get cable again.

More Music and Another Countdown????

This song just came on - on my iTunes. I'd forgotten how much I loved it. The video is pretty freakin strange....



OK so here's the deal. My thesis is due March 1st. I've just gotten back my 2nd draft (actually my 4th but we'll go with 2nd full draft). I've got a lot of work to do on it and then it needs to go to my 2nd reader by Monday. Then it will probably come back with more edits....but it has to be done by March 1st.

So this really is the home stretch and I may be absent from blogging (kind of like I have been) but any support that any of you can send me would be really appreciated. I know that I will finish and I know that it will be good - but there are moments when crawlin into bed and hiding under the covers never looked so good. I'm sure most of you know what I mean.

The other day in a meeting I saw what the diploma's are going to look like. I'm so happy that they are green (my favorite color). I just can't believe that in less than month (there are two weeks in between) that I am going to be a college graduate! It really is very exciting. Maybe I'll be more exited when I'm not so freakin tired!

And so with that all said I leave you with one of my favorites....

Phase 1 Complete

Today I met with my professor and passed in the first 29 pages of my thesis. I'm about half way done.....I'm actually ok with that as I'm finally in my opionion getting to the good parts. I hope to get another 20 pages written over the weekend. I'm on a role!

Nothing....

Sorry guys - I'm worn out and have nothing to give to the blog today. The stress from my thesis is actually making me feel like my head might cave in and I'm seriously having trouble breathing...(just from stress).

Here is my list

1. Thesis 1st draft due by Dec 6th
2. Watercolor exercises for class due by 12/21
3. Frame watercolors for exhibit to be hung 1/2/08
4. Watercolor paper due 1/1/08
5. Finish 4 grad school applications


6. Write 4 different grad school essays or personal statements
7. Take the Miller's Analogies on 12/15
8. Go to graduate info thingy at Simmons on 12/8
9. Plan the fucking company christmas party
10. Keep the new boss happy (notice that's at the bottom)
11. Find a new job
12. Turn 40 on Friday - 4 more days
13. Get my hair cut/colored before I turn 40 on Friday.

Decisions Made

So I had given myself until yesterday to make a decision about my school/work/loan situation. I have decided to not take the loan - the interest rate was too high - it was a variable rate and with the market the way it is who knows what the rate would have been when it was finally time to pay this back. The other factor was it was taking forever - so by the time I gave my notice December would have been over anyway. That was the really important month.

I do however have to do something about my job. Ironically enough I was contacted last week by an agency looking to place me in a benefits administrator job. I spoke to the woman and it looks very promising. What I want is 3-4 days a week on a contract position. I'm looking at MSW programs and one of them that I like alot starts in June. I can't change jobs now and then have to quite in 6 months. I could have done that in my 20's but as we all know I'm about to be 40 - so I'm a bit more responsible now.

I've done all the legwork and got a message from the woman at the agency. The client will be looking at my resume on Monday and I'm hoping they will want to see my next week. If I could go in on Monday 11/26 and give my notice - it would be the best birthday present ever. We'll see - keep your fingers crossed for me OK?

It's a typical fall into winter day here in New England. I love this time of year. I love that it gets dark so early and I love the chill in the air even when the sun in out. Call me strange - it's just my favorite. Right now I'm sitting at my desk wrapped in my Pendelton Indian blanket working on my thesis. I feel like I'm getting lots done.

Have a good afternoon everyone...

Short Week

So this week I only have to work 2 days. I wish it were for a better reason (you know, like vacation) but the truth is my mom is having pretty serious surgery on Wednesday and since my father is pretty useless when it comes to this stuff I am taking 7-10 days off to stay with her during the day. The doctor does not want her left alone for the first 2 weeks. She'll be pretty drugged up and will need help getting up and walking.
It's a routine surgery, but still, anytime someone goes under anesthesia there could be trouble - and wait until my mom starts to wake up. She does not react well to anesthesia, not at all. It's going to be a long- slow recovery. 6-8 weeks. Hopefully after the first 2 weeks she'll be OK to be alone part of the day.

Even though this is going to interfere with Thanksgiving, Christmas and more importantly MY 40Th BIRTHDAY. I'm glad she is finally having it done. She's been putting off the surgery for over a year and finally her doctor said "enough! You will have this done now!!!

More selfishly this couldn't have come at a better time. I am seriously hating my job right now. So to take a week off even if it is to care for someone who is sick looks pretty good to me. It'll be a lot of sitting at her house - I'm envisioning getting a lot of school work done and that's also a bonus. So since I brought up my job I'm trying to make a big decision here and I'd love your input out there in blog land.

I currently work 4 days a week as an HR Manager at a Metals Manufacturing plant. We were bought last year by a private equity firm. We haven't seen many changes but I think we will start to see them soon as we are not producing or shipping material at a good rate. We can sell it but we can't seem to make it or get it to the customer on time...Right now we have an 86% on time delivery rate. That sucks ASS. Our goal is 99%. We have a guy running out traffic dept. who talks a good game but doesn't get anything done..I hate people like that. Just shut the hell up and do your job. Stop throwing people under the bus and take responsibility for your dept. Jackass.




Anyway - I'm also a full time student. I'm currently writing my thesis which is due on March 1, 2008 and will be presented sometime later that month. It is by far the hardest thing I've ever done. It is taking a ton of time - and I'm not getting the quality of work that I really want due to time constraints. So I started to get stressed out and said to myself "what would I have to do no to work until after graduation".
That sounded fabulous to me so I started to think about it. These are the options I came up with:


1. I can get a student loan in the amount of 10-15k (in addition to my other loans) and quit work and just do my school work. Start looking for a job in Feb in the field of mental health and just go from there.


2. Start looking for another job now while I'm trying to do my thesis and work.

3. Get another HR job until I start Graduate school in 2008. A job that pays better that this one.

4. Just stay put and see how much I get done during my mother's recovery and then go from there.

Of course my brain says take the loan you fool and do your school work. But for once in my life I'm trying to make a logical decision not an emotional one.

Any thoughts??

First Day Part II

So far I think I've hit everything on my list except studying...isn't that the way?? It took me much longer to find the frame place and find my way back to the highway than it should of. I HATE driving in Quincy. It seems like it should be so easy but it never is. So just to recap I:

1. Went to the tailors

2. Went to Lowes (forgot the hinges) but got the plywood and got it cut for free!

3. Went to Quincy and picked up my work that had been framed. Spent another $50 on supplies (more than half of that on paper) and then dropped another $200+ for the framing. It's freakin expensive. I hate having things professionally framed because then you have to charge more to cover that cost. I'm only have a few things done for my show. The rest I'll do my self.

4. Stopped at my sister's to get stuff out of my oil painting bag.

5. Went to my aunt's and got her keys.

6. Came to my parents and did laundry. Now I'm waiting for the dryer to be done so I can go to art class. I suppose I could be studying now but somehow this seemed so much more important.

Next I'm off to have dinner (never did get lunch) and then go to art class.
Hopefully I'll have some good work to share tomorrow.

Have a good evening.

This Call Is Being Recorded

So as I mentioned a trillion times I am in school finally finishing my undergraduate degree. This is my last semester and we are working on a thesis. Your thesis is a big project and you have to do tons of research. Not just regular research out of a book but interviews, experiential etc. All the kind of research that you might do if your paper was going to be published.

So with that in mind I am doing some interviews over the phone. Anyone who has done this knows how hard it is to ask questions, listen to the answers, write everything down and keep the interview moving along. So on the advice of my thesis group I went out and bought this nifty little device.

All you have to do is to hook this into your phone and then hook up a tape recorder to the other end and before you know it you are taping your phone calls. The best/worst part is the other person has no idea. I called my sister and she said that there was no way to tell on her end that she was being taped.

I don't know about you but I find it creepy that for under $100 I can take everything that is said on my phone - or worse that I could be being taped without my knowledge.

Just a reminder it is absolutely illegal to tape someone's phone calls without their consent. Of course I will be telling all of my subjects in advance that they are being recorded and will immediately shut it down if they don't want to be recorded.

I mean who do you think I am? George Bush?


And let's not forget GO SOX!!!

Thinking, Thinking, Thinking......

I woke up this morning thinking about my birthday. I suddenly occurred to me that I am going to be 40 years old in seven weeks. I feel like I maybe I should be freaked out by this... but I'm not. Do I wish that I finished up my degree a few years ago so I would be working in a different field right now? Yes. BUT that means I probably would still be in the wrong field. Right in line with that "no coincidences" thing that I completely believe in, Lesley University showed up in my life at the exact right time.

I also woke up thinking about Grad school. Right now I've got three schools I'm applying to. The first one is Sarah Lawrence in New York. They have the only Masters in Health Advocacy in the country. I'm planning on taking a ride up there and seeing what the campus is like. They don't have graduate housing and it sounds like the area is pretty expensive to live in - but they are still on my list. The second choice is Boston University. They have a dual degree program that is a Masters in Social Work and a Masters in Public Health that looks very interesting to me. The program is three years and you get your MSW after two and then continue on and get your MPH. The third one is Lesley but that really is my "safe" school. They say you should have a "reach" school and a "safe" school. I would love to apply to the JFK school of government for their Masters in Public Policy. It's a two year intensive program that makes you live on campus. The prospect of living in Cambridge for two years is very exciting to me. The only problem with this program is that you have to take the GRE's which are the Graduate Record Exams. I don't do well at standardized testing so am not sure how I would do with this. I'm going to take the practice test online and see how I do. If I do OK I may sit for it and give the JRK school a try.

I never in a million years thought I would be in this position where I would be worried about getting "accepted". It's a bit nerve wracking.

Anyone out there with any advice? Who am I kidding I'm just looking for someone to tell me what to do!

The Party's Over

When I went back to school 18 months ago I was having a hard time juggling my job and the load of work. My job is pretty stressful. I'm a single HR person who supports 96-100 people at a manufacturing plant. This means everything from payroll to benefits to employee issues. To add a little spice to it 60 of those guys are Teamsters so that makes it just a little tougher especially around contract time (which is next year). So needless to say I'm pretty busy most days. So, when I started to realized I couldn't do both I started looking around and was going to piece together a couple of part time jobs, bite the bullet and pay for COBRA (health insurance) in order to give myself more study time. At that time I really didn't want to leave my job I had a great boss (the CFO) and we worked really well together. I hadn't had that much fun at a job in a long time. But my degree was important so I thought I needed to do it. He however thought differently an came up with a brilliant idea of us getting a payroll person and me working three days a week. Well we couldn't find a payroll person but I went down to three days. In the meantime our company was up for sale so the amount of work coming through my little one person HR Dept was pretty significant - so I went up to 4 days. I was working Mon-Thurs and getting paid for 4.5 days because on Friday's I would take phone calls and check my email. It's been a great year and half with this schedule. When the school workload wasn't too over the top I would meet friends for lunch - head out of town or just relax. Sometimes I even did some school work.

Well, yesterday I sat down with the President of our company who is my interm boss (my CFO left in January before the sale was over) and told him that I thought it was time I came back 5 days. There are a lot of little things that are slipping through the cracks. This is my last semester of school and I've got the workload thing pretty figured out (I hope). Luckily they are very flexible with me and let me take the time I need. So if I need a day here and there I know its not a big deal.

It was fun while it lasted!

2 weeks off!

So I've mentioned that I'm in school full time right? Yeah, I thought so. Yesterday at 5:39 pm I passed in my final project (a power point presentation on Theories of Personality), the bibliography, my final bib for the semester and my first stab at my final transcript. And the best part is that none of that was due until TODAY. I was a whole 24+ hours a head of myself.

This means two things - I am now officially a thesis student which in my program is a student in their last semester (more on that in later posts) and more importantly it means that I have TWO WEEKS OFF. Two weeks where I can actually meet friends after work for drinks and food, two weeks where I can not read something school related on my lunch hour, two weeks where I am not scouring the Lesley Library website for journal articles and two weeks where I can come home from work and just lay on the couch and watch tv.

I'm so happy to be done with this semester it was a boring one - with the exception of my first study which was on Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution. I'm fascinated by this whole period and by Mao himself. Let me be clear - Mao was a terrible, awful man who may actually be the biggest mass murdered in history (even bigger than Hitler) yet the country still loves him or at least they pretend to. I am just fascinated by the personality of a person who can convince a country of billions to do the things that Mao did. It was a fun but sad paper to write and I got an A which always makes even better. If you are at all interested in this period of time rent the movie "To Live". I know Netflix has it because that's where I got it. It's a bleak portrayal of the cultural revolution and a great movie.

My other two studies were boooorrriiiinnngg. Research Methods for Social Sciences - important for my career and I need to have it on my transcript for grad school but eeeesssshhhh did you ever try to read about research? Yeah, it's as fun as it sounds. In the end it worked out fine and I got an A- which is far above what I thought I would get. The one I passed in yesterday was Theories of Personality - I'm more interested in learining about people's personality and why they act they way they do but this was a totally basic study on some prominent theorist's and theories of personality. Not terribly exciting. I think the work is ok but I would imagine it's only B work. We'll see. As long as my GPA stays above 3.5 for grad school I'm happy.

So anyway, it's Saturday of Labor Day weekend and I'm heading down to a friends house in Jamestown RI. These people like to party and I can finally let go and have a little fun without that voice in my head saying - "shouldn't you be reading?" Some other friends are coming down to and as my friend said "could be ugly". I'm good with that,I have my vodka and I'm ready for an ugly weekend.

Happy Labor Day everyone!

Do You Believe In Luck?

I don't. I don't think things happen by "accident" I don't think people just "fall" into our lives and I don't think situations just "fall" into our laps. I had one of those moments the other night. You can think it was lucky or you can think it was divine intervention. I prefer to believe the later.

As my friends already know, I have been working on my bachelors degree. I am in a program that allows you to create the degree you want and study the things you want. It sounds kind of hippieish don't you think? Well believe me, it isn't. The sheer volume of work that we have to pump out more than makes up for the lack of class time. The program is a tough concept for most people to understand. In September I will be starting my fourth and final semester, so basically I've been in the program for two years and I still have people ask me almost daily "so when do you go to class?" or "do you have class tonight?". I've just learned to say yes or no and leave it at that. Unfortunately for the most part we have become a society that moves to fast and listens very little. It's quite sad actually.

Anyway, what I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself about school is that I although I am getting my degree in Psychology I have spent a ton of time studying Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other veteran's issues. I was all set to start graduate school in the Fall and begin working on my LMHC (Lic. Mental Health Counselor) degree. The thing that bothered me the most about this was that it was going to be a minimum of 3 years before I was able to really get in the field and work with the men and women I want to work in. Then it happened.....

Last Wednesday night (when I should have been doing school work) I happened across the final meeting of the President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors. This was a non-partisan commission put together specifically to make recommendations on revamping the current care system for veterans. Anyone who reads the newspaper knows how bad the system is right now. Care is at an all time low and if you have done any research on this subject you know that this actually happens during and after any war we've been involved in. The biggest difference with Iraq and Afghanistan is that more people are surviving their wounds. Sounds like a good thing right? Well it is until they get home and can't get treatment or worse tell them that their mood swings that are being caused by a Traumatic Brain Injury are actually part of a personality disorder that they had before they joined the service. So in other words - bye bye no benefits for you.

As I was watching this commission meeting they started to go over their recommendations. The very first one that they talked about was the creation of a position called "Recovery Coordinator". This caught my attention immediately - they went on to talk about this position. This person would be the first point of contact for vets who were wounded physically or mentally and needed care. They would be the person to cut through the bullshit and red tape and get the services to the right people. They would work directly with the vets and make sure that the Dept. of Defense and the VA lived up to their promises. It was like a lightening bolt had come down in front of the TV and I said to myself "THAT'S IT!". That's what I want to do. So now my graduate degree plans have changed. I met with my professor and we went over some ideas but I'm looking at maybe public heath - public policy or health advocacy. I've actually emailed the commission to see if they can tell me what kind of an education they imagine this position to have. We'll see if they email me back. One of the men on the commission is a wounded vet who is currently attending Harvard Business school so I might be able to find him...we'll see.

So to go back to my original thought. Do I think it was lucky that I found that meeting on C-Span? Not at all - I was meant to find it - so it could lead me in the right direction.

Thoughts on school and blogging

As I mentioned in that oh so swanky "about me" box I'm a full time college student. I am getting my Bachelors in Psychology from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. They offer this tremendous program called the Learning Community Bachelors Low Residency Program. Basically twice a year you hole up for a week at a hotel with 20-30 other adult learners. During this week you meet faculty, plan studies (not packets people, studies)and learn more about yourself and your learning style that you probably ever wanted to know. People take anywhere between 6-18 credits that are due during the six months in between residencies. I just passed in a paper that was due yesterday, it was a three credit elective course and I did it on Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China. You see that's the best thing, you get to pick what you want to learn! It's a hard program, you have to be self disciplined and humble enough to reach out to friends, other students and faculty when you are in trouble. I probably have it the easiest. I'm single, live alone and have no kids. There are plenty of people who have husbands, kids, pets...you name it. My biggest time issue is my job..but thats for another time. Anyway, I've met some incredible people and made some fabulous friends that I know I will keep for the rest of my life. That in itself is a strange thing. Making new friends at 39. These friends have added a whole new dimension to my life and I am forever grateful for that.

This whole blogging thing is just a bit bizarre. You can follow the lives of people that you don't even know. Check out this blog that I found completely by accident. I am able to follow this man's life as he re-enlists in the Marines just so he can go back to Iraq. Through his site I can follow his sister's journey while adopting a child. It's all so surreal...but I have to admit I like it.