Hey. Hi. Four days away from a computer, and not only do you not do any work at work except check and answer your email, you also don’t update your journal. For a week. I have to say though, it makes me realize that I do update fairly regularly, which I guess is nice. For me. Because there’s nothing like the feeling of self-righteousness that comes from updating your online journal…read by dozens of people!..on a semi-regular basis.
So I went to Tucson for this conference I’ve been yammering about for the last couple of weeks. I got last night at about eleven with daylight savings time, which was sort of confusing because Arizona doesn’t have daylight savings time, and I didn’t know what time tit was anyway because I didn’t have my pocket watch. It was late, is all I know, and I had to get up and go to work this morning WAAAAAAH. The conference was fine. I did my little poster presentation thing…I tell you, after all the crying and wailing about how hard it was and how much it sucked and how much I didn’t know how to do a poster and why had I volunteered to do this anyway…it was very anticlimactic, I have to say, especially after dragging around the airport and the shuttle and the hotel and everything. I put it up and let it hang there while everyone else got drinks. Every once and again some tipsy PhD would wander over and stare at it as I tried to eat a big plate of hors d’oeuvres and look moderately competent. I would use one of my old admission counselor ninja moves and ask people “So! Are you interested in limb loss, social support…or both?” so that I woudn’t be forced to stand there and watch the PhD frown at my sketchy statistics. Then the PhD would shake him or herself and down his or her gin and tonic and go, “Oh, uh, yeah, both. So, what were your results on this, huh?” and then I would go “I don’t know! We haven’t finished the study yet! Okay! Thanks for stopping by!” and the PhD would stumble back towards the bar. That was it.
I went to several talks with fascinating titles like “A Practical Approach to Evaluating, Supporting, and Treating Families” and “Psychosocial Aspects of Spinal Cord Injury.” I hung out with my very cool bosses and requested a Cuban song from a mariachi band (they played it!). I went for a swim in the hotel pool. I had smoothies on the U of A college strip and thought about being in college in California where everyone wore shorts all the time. This university was a really different atmosphere from UW…many fewer earnest, dogged political science/women studies majors in overalls and dreadlocks wandering around. A lot less homeless kids too. And a lot less pho places…or as Sundry and I both confessed we used to pronounce it: “fo.” I went to the campus bookstore in between lectures and posters and hung out for a while and guess what there was in the middle of the two-story bookstore? A GIGANTIC TV. One of those projector TVs that took up a whole wall and was super loud and was turned, naturally, to non-stop round-the-clock CNN war coverage. It was awful. Whose idea was that, a humoungous TV in the bookstore? And whose idea was CNN, too? I’ve been hearing all this stuff about how awful and weird and frankly gratuitous the war coverage is, and it’s true. I couldn’t believe it.
Of course, since I was at a hotel, I did have my own TV to watch(with HBO!) and I promised myself I would watch some reality TV just so I don’t get my citizenship revoked (I do speak French after all). I think I caught a couple of minutes of this Hot Or Not? jive all the kids are talking about, but I could only bear it that long before I watched a Seinfeld and then some other show from the mid-nineties and then a movie about Val Kilmer as a meth addict, which was extremely bad but which I found strangely compelling, as in I refused to talk to my boyfriend on the phone who wanted to tell me about his ski trip in the blinding snow or something until it was over. I had been holding out for American Idol or something, but no. I got an aging Val Kilmer with a Mohawk. Not a great look for him, I don’t think. I don’t think I’m going to call the cable company any time soon.
I felt a little lonely this weekend. People kept assuming I was a PhD candidate, and I kept having to say, with a forced lilting laugh, that, oh, ha ha, no, I’m a…I’m only a…I’m just a research assistant and I’m just here out of the kindness of my bosses’ heart (that part was very true) and I’m trained as a social worker and blah blah. I started introducing myself as “ a social worker on My Big Bosses’s Pain Grant, “ as if they’d hired me special to do some of the special heavy social work lifting, you know, the kind only trained social workers can do. I treated this issue of my neither having nor wanting to acquire a PhD in psychology as though I wasn’t at a smallish psychology conference in a Marriott in Tuscon, Arizona, but as though I had somehow slipped under the razor wire into the Playboy Mansion and was having to explain to Hef that I wasn’t really a Bunny, that I was just there to check things out, and gosh, wasn’t it a learning experience? And could I still please, please, drink cranberry juice from the golden goblets and hang out with some of the Bunnies? Ridiculous. I can’t believe it bothered me so much.
On a more interesting note, I went to a talk about sexuality and disability, and during the presentation the speaker told us she was consulting for a sex toy company about, yes, sexuality and disability. The guy who owns the company decided to quit being a psychologist and be a vibrator salesperson instead, but since he’d worked in rehab settings he wanted to make sure that his company addressed all this disability stuff. I thought this was a pretty good article on the topic, and I have to say I’m glad that people in both the rehabilitation psychology field and the sex toy industry are thinking and talking and writing about this subject. I thought it was even better that this woman, during her talk, passed out sex toy catalogs and told us that we can get a ten percent discount at this site. She passed them out, and I had been looking through it for about ten minutes, all wide-eyed, when I noticed that no one else was reading their catalogs but instead were continuing to listen to the talk, occasionally taking notes. Can you believe it? Hmm, let’s see, sex toys or statistics about incidence, occurrence, and prevalence? Toys? Stats? Toys? Stats?
The other thing I did in Tucson was go to a botanical garden for part of a morning. I took some pictures of cacti with Carl’s digital camera. Want proof? Well, okay.
