Friday Night Lights - Fundietonfieldvilleview Edition

Friday night the Fundietonfieldvilleview Weirdmascots slaughtered yet another team. You'd think that a team all the way from Dallas would fare better against our little farm kids - especially when they're outsized the way our boys were. Nevertheless, take a look at their fans and remember that Dallas isn't that far away - an hour or so at the most. This picture was taken well into the game not long before halftime...

Now take a look at our fans. The stands were packed and there were people standing all around in the concession stand, along the fences et cetera. Clearly the good folks in Fundietonfieldvilleview Texas have nothing better to do on a Friday night, but at least we show up to support our kids.

With the kind of support folks around here give our kids, it's no wonder they kick ass at everything they do.

From my iPod

Perhaps one of the most interesting words in the english language today, is the word fuck. Out of all the english words that begin with the letter 'f' ...fuck is the only word refered to as 'the f word... It's the one magical word. Just by its sound can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. Fuck, as most words in the english language is derived from german ...the word fuieken, which means to strike. In english, fuck falls into many grammatical categories: As a transitive verb for intance ...John fucked Shirley. As an intransitive verb...Shirley fucks. Its meaning is not always sexual, it can be used as... An adjective such as ...John's doing all the fucking work. As part of an adverb ...Shirley talks too fucking much. As an adverb enhancing an adjective ...Shirley is fucking beautiful. As a noun ...I don't give a fuck. As part of a word ...absofuckinglutely -or- infuckingcredible. And as almost every word in a sentence ...Fuck the fucking fuckers. As you must realize, there aren't too many words with the versatility of fuck...such as these examples describing situations such as: Fraud ...I got fucked at the used car lot. Dismay ...ahhh fuck it. Trouble ...I guess I'm really fucked now. Agression ...Don't fuck with me buddy. Difficulty ...I don't understand this fucking question. Inquiry ...Who the fuck was that? Dissatisfaction ...I don't like what the fuck is going on here. Incompetance ...He's a fuck-off. Dismissal ...Why don't you go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself... I'm sure you can think of many more examples. With all these multi-purpose applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word. We say use this unique, flexible word more often in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately. Say it loudly and proudly... ...FUCK YOU!

Tina Fey Is My Hero

I think I just peed a little bit.

And They Wonder Why We're Pissed

more music charts

More and more often as I go about my day I hear words like "taxation without representation," "mutiny," "Boston Tea Party," and similar language that is usually associated with the general populace growing increasingly weary of getting screwed over by big government. Isn't a break from a bloated and greedy ruling class the impetus for the beginning of what used to be the greatest country in the world - the country formerly known as the United States of America?

Graph shamelessly hijacked from GraphJam.com

FKN Newz

Morons Overrun Earth


Sarah Palin Tits & Ass 4Gawd

I'm Voting Republican

She's Such a Brute!

I'm so proud of my Girl. See, this boyfriend that she met earlier this summer was getting clingy and whining about not her not having any time for him. Well she's drum major and has a job, so when she's not doing band stuff, she's at work. We barely see her either and she lives here. So she was tired of the whininess and in the process of trying to break up with him at his house. He was trying to argue with her about it, then he got mad. He grabbed her arm, pushed her into the wall and drew back his fist to hit her. He didn't even get his hand all the way back when he found her knee planted firmly and with great gusto in his testicles, then himself on the floor puking his guts out. She kicked him again, yelled "Fuck You!" and stormed out. It's nice to know she's listening to me, even when she pretends not to. Nobody has to put up with that kind of shit and if she had put up with it this time, she might be doomed to a life of abuse forever.

Go Girl!

Unique - Just Like Everybody Else

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 1 or fewer people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Ohmygosh! Rain!

I can hardly believe it - after weeks with temperatures in the 100's and no rain, just as I'm finally able to get my schedule cleared enough to use the pool that's finally almost back to normal after the pump being down for 10 days, it's raining. I'd rather have the rain than the pool at this point, especially when all you can smell when you go outside is the grass cooking and all you can see is more burned up fields and the trees giving up early and starting to shed their leaves. A couple more days of this would be nice, but I'll take what I can get at this point.

Radar screen shot shamelessly hijacked from my favorite local weather source, KXAS TV's Weather Plus website nbc5i.com (Rest in Peace, Harold Taft).

Is The Effort Worth the Reward?

The final task for this week's training at Giant Corporate University is to summarize the learnings for the week. I couldn't write there what my real take is on the situation, but I can share this "real" interpretation of what I wrote there with you because I know you understand.

Dear Diary,

Although there are some exciting and significant developments in the works for my real job, this has been a shitty week at Giant Corporate University. One of my colleagues has no command of the English language and tries to use words that she clearly doesn't understand in her communications, making her writing unintelligible. I can't even respond to most of her posts because I don't know what she's saying, and am not sure she does either. This was the self-appointed leader of our team. Sigh. As the type who will usually go along to get along, I just let her do her thing, even after she used her caps lock key on me and another guy when we weren't going by her schedule (a schedule that we didn't agree to in the contracting process, I might add) but what I really want to do is hunt her down and kill her with my bare hands for butchering my native tongue. I have plenty of IQ points to spare, but I fear giving them to her would be a waste because she already thinks she's intelligent and knows everything. Tragic she's unaware of her deficit.

The facilitator is barely present, and leaves very short, almost cryptic messages when she is in forum. After several days of wondering whether my posts met criteria and no responses to communications for clarification from at least one of my colleagues, out of the blue my indicators of success mysteriously appeared. This reinforces some of my recently learned professional lessons that sometimes learning what "not" to do is just as important as learning what to do.

Even though technically we're supposed to have 2 days off per week, I'm finding myself working every stinking day. Since the first day of the course is a wash because there's no way to earn the necessary participation credits because there's nothing to respond to but introductions, which don't count, and there was something due every other day of the week, that means that GCU is turning into a 7-day-a-week job for which I'm still not getting paid and I'm starting to build more than a little resentment about the situation. I worked too hard for too long to get where I am today to be anyone's slave, especially when there's no guarantee of employment at the end of all this prattling on about nothing of real substance. I keep trying to remind myself that it's not the end of the world if I don't get the job and it may be a blessing in disguise if I don't since the pay isn't much more than minimum wage because Giant Corporation keeps most of the money. If I don't get voted off the island, I'll get about what one student out of the 20 pays to take each class I teach. There are 80-zillion programs out there and the more I get to know this one, the less I'm liking it.

Speaking of work, I'm finding most of the assignments to be asinine busy work. Every night I troll through what everyone else has said looking for some nugget upon which to expound my personal and professional wisdom (providing I have any, of course). There doesn't seem to be a clear criterion about what is considered acceptable so some folks prattle on and on and don't say anything. I've probably been guilty of that, too just because sometimes there's just nothing to say.

Also unrelated and twice removed but not really, I thought this component was supposed to be specialist training. I don't understand why I'm the only psychologist in a class full of nurses, IT guys and teachers. I'm not stupid - it's clear that this is still more generalist training. Any posts relating to my specialty area have come from me. Or maybe they're thinking of the other kind of specialist training.

Only one more week. Let's consider it an exercise in frustration management. Thanks for the vent.

Breathe...

There's a Light

Okay, so I had a meeting with a referring agency in another region that's about an hours' drive away from here today because they liked the eval I did for them 3 weeks ago. It was the first time I'd done work for them because they're in another region but they needed someone and I was it. The meeting went well. Very well. Matter of fact, they even bought my lunch and visited with me for nearly 3 hours. It went so well that they're going to urge their clients to drive to where I am for their evals and stop using the people there (partly because the one guy left there who does what I do shares office space with his wife - also a psychologist - and they have verbally abusive screaming matches with each other - in front of the patients, who are already anxious about having to go in for psychological testing O.o). Not only that but they're trying to score me an unused room somewhere with a table and 2 chairs to do work in a couple of the field offices because I'm willing to go there to do the work. Then, when I make my escape from Questionable Ethics R Us, my neuropsych supervisor with whom I've worked since 2001 will sign off on any of those reports until I can do my own thing after the first of the year when I no longer have to give half my money to the company. There's a light, indeed.

4 Months From Now

Sigh. Here I sit trying to cobble together enough business every month to pay my bills. Altogether they aren't much really, but I thought seriously that I'd at least be making a living wage by this point and could contribute more to our family expenses. As it stands, I have what amounts to a handful of part time jobs, none of which pay worth a crap because they're kind of on an on-call basis, and the people I work for have pretty crappy reputations, so the referrals aren't coming in like they used to, so I'm not getting called as often. Granted part of the problem is that some of the referring agencies are at the end of their budget year, so they should pick up a little after September 1.

The good news though is that four months from today, my postdoc year (read: indentured servitude) will be over and I can start my independent professional life on my own terms. Sure I'll be slogging through the Medicare and insurance provider paperwork and trying to get established in my own practice with all the headaches and bills that entails, but at least I will be working under my own reputation and license, not someone else's. The better news is that I am already beginning to establish my own reputation and relationships with the major referrers in the region. They like my work, they like me personally and they have made it very clear that they want to know when and where I hang my shingle. It just can't be done until after the licensing paperwork is completed. I'll mail it December 4. Last year when I filed my provisional paperwork on the same date, it was approved December 31. Of course I didn't get the confirmation for a couple more weeks, but at least I got it.

The training for the giant corporate online university feels oddly like American Idol. There ended up being 378 trainees in my entry level class, then I was assigned to a group of 1o. Within the first week 4 of them dropped. Of the remaining 6 only 3 of us were in the same entry class so there was at least one other huge ass entry class somewhere. The training itself seems like a lot of busy work, but they have selected me to continue on to the next stage so that's good, I guess, except so far I'm not seeing a lot of attention being paid to academic rigor. After the next 2 weeks in developing syllabi et cetera (mind you I've already been through the first 2 weeks so in total this will be a full month of "training" i.e. working for free), the next stage will see me actually teaching a class with an instructor's instructor who can give me feedback on how I'm doing. I appreciate that. I will get paid the full rate for a doctoral level instructor for teaching that class, but that won't happen until the end of September. At least it's something to look forward to, but there's no guarantee that I'll even be offered a position until after the class wraps up in mid-to-late October.

Still no word on whether or not I'll be teaching at the community college again, and class starts in 3 weeks. The Psyc/Soci instructor/coordinator guy left in May, which is why the division chair asked me to apply for that job, which I did immediately - in May. Now the division chair is leaving so the two top leadership positions in that area are vacant, and nobody's saying a word. I'm debating whether to shoot a friendly email to the human resources coordinator to check on the status of my application.

The good news of the whole thing is that at least I'm 2/3 of the way through the postdoctoral purgatory year and that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Take one look around and you can see that nobody's starving around here. We still have a roof over our heads, the lights are still on, and I still have stuff I can sell on eBay. I can do anything for 4 months. However, if you know the money fairy, could you send it my way? Kthxbai.

There and Back $5

So I won a prize over at Brunhilda's. How cool is that? Although she wants to envision us Texas wimmin as all having big ol' bleached blonde bouffant hair and bright red dragon claws, I just don't fit that pattern. My makeup is pretty minimal. Hair and nails are both cropped short and the closest thing to bleached blonde as I get are the highlights The Girl talked me into awhile back that I am allowing to grow back out and the -ahem- "natural platinum" that's growing in as I get older. I own a tanning bed but plan to sell it because I haven't used it in a couple of years.

I promised a juicy, newsy post, so first things first: I survived the oral exam but won't know until around Labor Day whether I passed. The problem with the oral exam is that examinees are given ten minutes to formulate a case and talk about it for an hour with two examiners who have no knowledge of the examinee's clinical skills. They know whether or not examinees have passed when they allow us to check out, but we have to wait six weeks for the "official" letter from the state. There are only one or two other states that still do the oral exam because of the lack of reliability and validity, partly because examiners only receive 3 hours' training and the outcome is highly subjective, but Texas still hangs in there because that's the way it's always been done.

I have some misgivings about my outcome because my anxiety level was through the roof. Ordinarily, I can talk about neuropsych all day long, but Saturday I didn't feel like I could construct a coherent thought to save my life. First of all, I like to think deeply when I'm formulating a case and take into consideration as many of the potential variables as possible. That just can't be done in ten minutes. Second, the people I've trained with over the years were genuinely down-to-earth people that you wouldn't know were psychologists if they didn't tell you. My two examiners acted the psychologist stereotype. It was creeeeeppyyyy (*shudder*). We were seated in a very tiny stark white room with a table, tape recorder, a black file with my name on it, and a 2-way mirror. The examiner seated closest to said mirror kept trying to look into it to see if anyone was on the other side - either that or he was checking his hair, or to see if there was something in his teeth, I don't know. Then, he kept checking his fucking BLACKBERRY throughout my exam!! Goddammit, if I had to leave my cell phone turned off and in the waiting area, he should have been held to the same standard.

The worst part though was the questioning. I had only ten minutes to review the case, which by design, contains only limited information. I could take notes for that ten minutes but that was all. Bet your ass I filled a page in that time. Then, instead of asking one question at a time, the questions were embedded - like 2 to 4 questions all in one shot. By the time I'd get finished with the first part of the question, I'd forgotten the rest and had to ask the guy to repeat the next part - of course, he repeated the whole fucking thing. Then, they started reading the questions e - x - c - r - u - c - i - a - t - i - n - g - l - y s - l - o - w - l - y, as if they were thinking , "Wow - this one is really stupid. How the fuck she got through doctoral study is beyond us..." Either that or my mind was racing so far ahead that there was a warp in the spacetime continuum and it just seemed that way. Then, they asked me what I'd done to enhance my professional skills in the last few years. Um, duh? I just cranked out four degrees in ten years? Finished 231 credits toward a 135 credit PhD in clinical psychology with a neuropsychology concentration as the cherry on top? Did ground-breaking research in the relationship between geriatric cognitive functioning and affect? All those CE's I've taken in the last 4 years? Teaching a doctoral level hands-on Halstead-Reitan lab? Did I mention that I did all of this while juggling work AND a family AND community activism? Does any of that count? Because really, I'm not so sure because my cogitator is really fucked up right now. At any rate, we'll know by Labor Day. Meh. I'm just glad to have it over with - at least until January if I failed the goddamn thing. Fuckers.

I learned yesterday that I'll be presenting my research in geriatric cognition and affect at my state psychological association's annual convention in November. Tragic that they misspelled the title of the research on the website. Gotta remember to call them Monday to correct it. It's Dysphoria, not Sysphoria, fools.

In other news, my intro psych class is over. They were awesome and everybody got an A. I doubt I'll ever get a class that good again. The developmental psych class I was scheduled to teach for Summer II didn't make (even though I worked my butt off getting the course ready to go - upside is that at least it's ready to go next time), so my finances are looking beyond bleak right now, but I'll make it. I always do. I applied for a full time position at the community college but they wait until the last damn minute to make a decision over there, then expect you to be ready to go - like - yesterday, so I probably won't hear anything from them until mid-late August (classes start August 25).

In the interim, I've been selected to take the faculty training for a big, giant corporate university and will start this Tuesday. The recruiter wants me to teach undergraduate and graduate level courses online. We'll see how it goes. In my research though, I've noticed that they advertise for faculty pretty regularly and that there are over 20,000 - yes, kids - twenty thousand - online instructors for this school worldwide. My entry level faculty trainee class is about 250. Jeez, Louise. I can't imagine the management structure they must have in place to keep track of that many people - and that doesn't include the on-ground people or administrative staff. The picture at the top is one The Girl took the other day for my faculty profile. She said that of the dozen or so pictures she snapped that day (actually sitting on the edge of the pool with my feet in, but I cropped all that out), this one captured my personality the best. See? I told you I don't have big hair.

The Girl worked at Sonic for about 2 weeks after drum major camp and never got a chance to work more than 2 hours at one time, even though she got a "promotion" to carhop the second day. By the time we factored in a gallon of gas there & back and taxes, it wasn't worth it for her to work there. Sooo, I talked to The Man and pointed out that sad little fact and that she would never be able to save for another car if she couldn't get any hours. We agreed that she would be better off at her old job, where she could at least work a full shift and get tips from being the best little tableside guacamole girl ever. Of all the guac I've eaten there (which would be approximately a shitload), hers stands out as the best, and I'm not just saying that because I'm her mom. People she doesn't even know request her specifically to make their guacamole. She's started doing this thing she calls "Guacamole Theater," where she acts out bastardized scenes from movies with the knife and the avocado as the main characters and the other ingredients and tools (salt, lime, tomato, garlic, onion, cilantro, molcajete, pestle & spoons) play the bit parts. (Knife: "I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." Avocado: "Ayudame! Ayudame!" After a mighty duel, Knife slices into avocado with a great squishing noise as the other ingredients shriek in terror...et cetera). That Girl is a scream, I tell ya. She's happier there, having loads more fun and making a lot more money, so everybody's happy. She even has a new car, 2 years newer, 4-door & white which we found for exactly the amount the insurance company settled back in April. All's right with her world.

The Man has a job interview Monday for a job which he is totally overqualified but it's close to home and since, despite my efforts, I'm not making shit for money, and the weather's been too dry for his hay business to get any work, somebody's gotta work around here.

AAAAAACK!

Okay, just so you don't think I've fallen off the face of the earth, I haven't abandoned the blog, nor have I abandoned y'all (actually I stop by all my faves at least once a day, I just haven't been commenting much, if at all). You see, I sit for the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychology's oral exam for full licensure tomorrow down in Austin. I'll be sitting for the neuropsychology specialization. It's pretty much the last hoop I have to jump through to practice on my own once my postdoc is over in December and I have been studying and reviewing like all hell to make sure I pass it the first time - even though there's really no way to study for it. Anxious doesn't even begin to describe how I'm feeling. The panic attacks aren't as bad as when I sat for the national exam, the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP) four years ago, because I have better coping skills now to handle them, but my anxiety is palpable and I'm really not feeling like very much fun or very good company. I have a lot to talk about, I'm just too nervous to do it right now, so just know that all's well and I'll have a really juicy and newsy post once I get tomorrow out of the way.

*smooches!*

Have You Seen the Fail Blog?

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Bwahahahaaa!