SO.
Dear readers.
I have been really great about blogging Monday Miscellany link posts. Except for that time I posted on Tuesday last week. And when I haven’t done them.
Okay, so I’ve been mediocre.
But! There are reasons!
1) Big Life Changes. I’m increasingly sold on the idea of graduate school following this year. This means applying to graduate school. Which eats a lot of time. Common App? No such luck. Individual applications with ambiguous instructions? Yeah, got that bit covered.
a) This meant picking graduate schools. Yeah, that’s hard to do. I’m intending to get a Masters in Social Work (MSW), and I needed to decide exactly where to do that. Since certification as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker varies from state to state–and licenses don’t transfer–I’m effectively picking where I want to live for a long while. That’s…scary. I don’t have a strong identification to a place as My Place.
b) In the absence of having My Place Where I Want To Live Somewhat Permanently, I have to decide what I need and value from a location. Real seasons seem to be a minor but notable requirement. A support system seems very necessary. At the same time, I feel a strong aversion (which seems to be socially conditioned and not useful at all) to not be That Girl, who moves because of friends, who isn’t independent enough, etc. This is probably a stupid feeling, since all my experience in the last four years says that I like being in places with people who make me happy, care about my feelings, and will sit in coffee shops and blog with me. Unfortunately, stupid feelings want be just as loud as reasonable feelings, and don’t come with warning labels.
c) Good news! I have a whole list of places I’m applying to now. I have started those applications! This feels delightful. The future seems a little less like a big scary black hole of paperwork and failure.
2) It’s finals. It was midterms. (These keep happening.) This results in lots of stressing and very little writing. What little writing that does occur does seem to be in the pursuit of finishing papers.
3) I’ve been working. I just finished a teaching assistantship on the weekends, and I’m the social media contractor for the SSA. These are both fun, but they take time, and I haven’t managed to get my hands on a Time Turner.
4) Fear. For some reason–perhaps reading more specialized science blogs, perhaps jerkbrain, I’ve started a number of posts over the last weeks, and then just…stopped. The impulse would die, or I’d get caught up in another project, or I’d look at 300 words and think, nah, someone else has written a much better version of this anyways. So…link posts reigned. These will continue! But I’m trying to talk myself into more blogging. I LIKE it. I really do! So! Ideas for blogging? Stick them in the comments? Topics you want to see? The same!
I wonder if your experience dealing with different applications and non-transferable licenses might lend itself to a blog post about annoying, frustrating, or dissuasive aspects of trying to start a career in your chosen subject? These seems like unnecessary difficulties in an already under-appreciated field. And maybe blogging about it could be cathartic!
When a barman asks me what I’d like to drink, I tell him what I’d like to drink.
When a very minor blogger asks me what topics I’d like to read their opinion on, I don’t visit that blog again.
Well, I was actually inquiring about fact-type posts, but do feel free not to come back.
WOW. Bloggers don’t exist for your fucking approval. If we ask for readers’ input on what to blog about, it’s because we need ideas and value your input. If the fact that Kate did that means you shall not deign to visit her blog in the future, then leave. Nobody’s gonna miss your shitty, entitled attitude. Bye bye now!
“Bloggers don’t exist for your fucking approval.”
Many do, many don’t.
“If we ask for readers’ input on what to blog about, it’s because we need ideas…”
A blogger who “needs ideas” is a shitty blogger.
“Nobody’s gonna miss your shitty, entitled attitude.”
Ah, the “entitled” card gets played. Hee hee, so predictable. Shut down the other person’s opinion by calling them “entitled”. My well is well and truly poisoned.
Oh, I guess you do come back. Now we know how to weight your words. Not that we didn’t already.
A good friend of mine is an LCSW. She’s licensed in one state, but got her MSW in a different state.
If this is how it normally works, doesn’t this mean that you have some flexibility in your decision? Couldn’t you go to your most-preferred graduate school to get the education you want, then later move wherever you choose to settle and work toward your license in that state?
Also, some states have reciprocity in licensure. You should look into that, too. It might offer some more flexibilty.
And however you decide to pursue your advanced degree and your career, I wish you all the best.
“If we ask for readers’ input on what to blog about, it’s because we need ideas…”
Truly a sad image. The mighty minds of Free from Thought Blogs, so bereft of inspiration from the real world that they need to ask their readers what to blog about. And further, that their readers will accept this as normal behavior from actual, respected, knowledgeable bloggers (pro tip: it isn’t).
It’s so pathetic, so sad that this is classified as atheist blogging. It’s just a bunch of mindless idiots who are apparently eating what their readers ingest, digest and expel, repackaging it, and feeding it back to them. FfTB is, in other words, the “Human Caterpillar” of atheist blogging. A circle of ingestion, digestion, excretion, repeat.
You’re not very good at this, are you? First you claim that Kate’s blogging behavior is going to drive you away. Then you keep commenting. Then you reveal that you’ve been hanging around for quite some time while hating the place, while simultaneously guaranteeing not one person will miss you.
Strategy, dude. It’s important.
You should probably look at your own blogging morals before defending other people’s.
Here’s a dead link to one of your posts, which you have taken down because you are a sloppy fact checker, and reactionist idiot.
https://proxy.freethought.online/almostdiamonds?s=one+more+thing
Everybody gets things wrong. It sucks to get important things wrong. I got something wrong–yes, even after a good deal of fact-checking. So I issued a retraction and an apology and deleted the original post at the request of the person who was wronged. That’s my “blogging morals”.
You, on the other hand, have lied to Kate, lied about Kate, lied about me, lied about the content of that link (it’s a search, which is quite live), lied about FreethoughtBlogs, and gotten the meaning of “reactionist” entirely wrong. What are you doing to fix any of that?
Form was good, routine short but familiar, leading up it looked like the landing would be solid, but then the contestant wobbled and just fell right the fuck off the mat. It matters not how solidly you land if you can’t so much as stick a flounce.
US judge gives a tentative 2.0, pending deductions for repeated flouncing without follow through.
Well played. Onamission5. Well played.
Onamission5 wins.
Commentality!
Shorter DanDanDan: “My life is so boring and pathetic that I have nothing to do but post dumb comments on blogs after I already whined and said I was leaving and never coming back.”
And yet, DanDanDan is here reading. I wonder why that is?
Good luck with the grad school applications, Kate.
Get over yourself, DanDanDan. Staring today.
“If we ask for readers’ input on what to blog about, it’s because we need ideas and value your input.”
DanDanDan: “Truly a sad image.”
Translation: “Why would anyone care what [DanDanDan] thinks?”
Answer: “Indeed, why would anyone care what a nobody commenter thinks?”
Your opinion is invalid, for you are but one Dan, and DanDanDan is three.
If you haven’t talked about representations, positive and negative, of mental illness/autism/what-have-you in the media, I would love to read your take. Thanks for all that you are doing, Ms. Donovan!
Kate, good luck with the grad school applications. I’m sure you’ll land somewhere that’s a great fit for you.
As far as ideas for posts, if I had any, maybe my own blog wouldn’t be dormant. I do want to mention, though, that your voice and outlook are fresh and interesting to me. I wouldn’t worry too much about “someone else has written a much better version”. I get a great deal out of reading different folks’ takes on a subject, and I suspect I’m far from the only one. Your take is different, and your own, and, partly perhaps because you’re young and I’m a jaded old coot, but mostly because you’re an interesting writer, I enjoy the opportunity to see things through your eyes.
I’m a bureaucrat working for (in part) the Counseling program here at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, and I wanted to let you know that while licenses like those for social work do not directly transfer state-to-state (they work very similarly to the LPC certifications with which we deal directly, at least here in WI) as they are based on state regulations, it is often possible to functionally transfer the license with a minimum (often none) of additional work, as long as practicum/internship hours requirements are met. We get a few dozen requests every year from former students who are attempting to be licensed in states other than Wisconsin. What they typically need are copies of old syllabi from their courses that they have to submit to the state licensing body with a form from the state licensing body that validates that they’ve covered the same material required by the state in their degree program. Whether you’re initially planning on staying in the state in which you earn your master’s degree or not, make sure you keep your course syllabi, for all of the courses you take as a graduate student. Stick them in a file and keep them forever. Seriously. Our department had not been consistent about collecting and archiving syllabi before I started working here (I now scan and digitally archive all syllabi each semester), so for students who graduated more than a couple years ago, many have been out of luck*. In the event you DO (eventually) want to pursue licensing in a state other than that in which you earn your degree, keeping your syllabi should allow you do do so with a minimum of new/repeat courses (and perhaps none) and no dependencies on possibly-unreliable records-keeping at your university.
*Statutorily out of luck; in practice, these statutes can bend quite a bit in their implementations, and for the most part, licensing agencies have been happy to accept the current versions of syllabi for courses taken even more than a decade ago, despite the fact that much of the content will have changed.
Or you could come to Canada! We’re friendly and I wouldn’t be surprised if tuition is cheaper (most grad programs subsidize international students so they pay the same as domestic students). And if you do grad school here you automatically get a work visa when you’re done.
My first thought is to consider some state with a big city in it, but the large number of possible clients may be balanced by lots of competition.
As to topics to blog on, why not the rise and fall of the reputation of Freudianism? A century to half a century ago, Sigmund Freud’s theories and practice used to be a Big Thing in psychology and psychiatry, but those theories now seem to be marginal. It’s disappointing that his work has not had the enduring quality of (say) Newton’s or Darwin’s. Or even the roughly contemporary revolutions in physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, revolutions which turned Newtonianism into a limiting case.
If you wish to continue on a Freudian jag, you could also discuss offshoots like the work of Adler and Jung. They were both originally Freudians, but they split from The Master about various issues.