Conversation Starters

I am terrible at math. You might (wrongly) assume that I'm being hyperbolic about this -- but when I tell you my addition-subtraction-multiplication-and-division skills are lost in a box in a subbasement of brain power somewhere -- I really mean it.  This morning I was watching an old episode of The Wire  where Bubbles, a heroin-addicted street hustler, presses his new teenage business partner (business partner?) to do the quick math of 5x4 plus 6x7 and shakes his head in disgust when the kid can't immediately spit out an answer. And it made me feel a certain way -- for I, too, couldn't do the math that fast. Bubbles would never want me working his cart with him. Say la vee. And while part of this is simply by virtue of being, oh, twenty-something years out of my last math class, part of it is how I've always been.  Math was always a challenging subject for me in school.  I struggled to see how the quadratic equation applied to my everyday life.  And I thought t...

I had a dream that I was in a doctor's office where one of my male friends was giving medically safe abortions.  For some reason, he had invited me to come hang out while was working and so I was in the room with these women as they came in for their procedures.  I have a very squeamish empathy that kicks in with anything that could be even remotely painful but in the dream, I did my best to put on a brave face and stay there to help ease these women through their procedures being administered by my friend.  He is not a medical profession IRL but he was more than competent in this dream-space and did an excellent job making these women feel comfortable, clearly explaining what he was doing while also idly chit-chatting with me. I woke up thinking  what a weird dream . That was the morning of Friday, June 24, 2022.  Roe vs Wade was overturned mere hours after my waking. Friday, June 24, 2022 is a frightening and grotesque day in the United States of America. I le...

Recently, I met up with a friend of mine from MSASS and had an incredible four hour lunch where we caught up on our lives and talked about what's teaching us these days.  Near the end of our time together, my friend was talking about how she sometimes falls into this "therapist" role with people to help them "solve their problems."  And I smiled at her and said, "Let me throw this at you and see how it sticks: what if, instead of the problem-solution model, you used Asset Based Community Development?  What if instead of deficits, you thought about strengths?" My friend grinned at me because she knows my affinity for ABCD, so she indulged me as I explained: "I think in my own life, I've struggled a lot with this idea that I should 'get over stuff.'  That there's a pressure to 'get over' a relationship or a traumatic event or really anything.  What does that even mean, 'get over it'?  Who does that language benefit?  ...

Y'all. Taking the LSW was a real challenge for me.  And I mean that literally sitting in that chair for three straight hours, staring at some Helvetica font while my stomach tried to scramble up into my throat, was hard .  I had studied as much as I could and felt decently prepared, but when that first question flashed on the screen and it was formatted a little differently than any of the practice tests I took and didn't have answers that seemed like the "best" option I was supposed to determine, I thought my ship was sunk. But I took a breath.  Answered the best I could.  And advanced to the next question.  Then the next and the next and the next.  To be honest, I never fully relaxed.  Typically in situations like this, I self-regulate quickly and my anxiety dissipates.  But not today.  Maybe somewhere around Question 95 I surrendered to the god of "it is what it is" but as the questions neared the final one -- 170 -- I started to feel almo...

As you may know, I'm a fan of the podcast   Ghost of a Podcast .  This weekly show is hosted by the psychic/medium/astrologer Jessica Lanyadoo where she answers a listener question and then gets into the astrological forecast for the week ahead.  Sometimes I skip over the listener questions because her answers are so specific to this one person's chart and while that can be interesting, it's not always the sort of voyeurism I'm into on any given day. This week, though, the listener wrote about her own psychic abilities and how she'd followed them in pursuit of finding her own life partner.  Now, I'm not super-expert on this, but what I know about psychics and mediums is they often can't "read" themselves -- so I'm going to chock this up to the listener's own intense gut-instinct and intuition, which is what most psychic ability derives from.  Anyway, this listener said she asked the Universe to bring her a soulmate and it did -- but what sh...