Hello my name is

I've made a decision, which is that I am going to work on Monday and inviting my students to call me by my first name.  If they want to, they can.  If they don't want to, they don't have to.  But I'm sick of having a title imposed on me that only serves to create a false barrier that I do not believe in.  I'm letting the kids decide.

My colleagues might not like it and that has stopped me from doing this for long time.  I have been concerned about annoying others.  And now I've realised I don't care if it bothers them because that is their issue and not mine.

My administration might not like it, and I don't care about that either.  I have a colleague who has not been fired after putting a suicidal student's safety plan in jeopardy; if that doesn't get somebody fired, using my first name certainly isn't going to.  My job is fine.  If they don't like it, they can ask themselves why.



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With respect to secondary losses

The notion of secondary losses has resonated at times, particularly when I think of one who has been ill regaining strength and regretting the loss of their caregiver’s attention.  When I was a child I revelled in having the flu; it was the only time my mother seemed to like me much at all.  In the EMDR coursework I am doing now today I came up against my own resistance to healing in the recognition of the simple fact that staying angry prevents me from being scared of the fact that she is aging and will one day die.  The first connection, that it gives me distance, was made in class.  The second connection was later tonight.  Processing is quite exhausting.

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BPPV- left

I am thinking the most sensible response to recurrent bouts of vertigo is to remain drunk as consistently as possible.  It makes vertigo less noticeable, and certainly less troubling.


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SBT

Thursday's meeting was the funniest in a long time.  I was laughing at my own stupidity as much as anyone else's.  Truncated meeting notes:

admin:  Last June, I placed a billion pieces of paper in each of your mailboxes with no instructions as to what to do with them.  My assumption is that you pulled out the pieces relevant to you and your students and filed them, then passed on the rest of the pile to another department.  Did everyone do that?

N:  (lost down an entirely different rabbit hole)  I am looking at our intake form and wondering if I should adjust the font... mumble mumble

C:  What?  No one told me that!  I didn't know what to do with the giant pile of paper so I threw the whole thing in the recycling bin.  This is someone else's fault.

M:  Umm... what are we talking about?  I didn't get any papers.  No one can prove I did.

me:  Fuck, I thought I was supposed to file all the papers.  So I stayed late three days in a row and did everyone else's work as well as my own.

 (curtain)

 This dialogue summed up all our dysfunction beautifully and I could not stop laughing during this meeting even though admin was becoming irritated.  I have no regrets.  Except for the part where I did all the filing.


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