I love tiny little plates full of tiny little bits of food, which is why I like sushi, tapas, and cocktail parties. That also explains why I am eating frozen appetizers for dinner tonight. I am justifying it by reminding myself that one of these appetizers involves spinach, which is a vegetable..an anti-carcinogenic vegetable at that, thanks very much…and therefore a smart dinner choice. I may feel guilty shortly and saute up a zucchini though. I know, edge of your seat, right?
Today I went to a meeting at work about a chapter for a book my department’s writing. Sometimes you forget I have a job, don’t you? My part of our chapter has to do with social support and coping…this is the kind of assignment you get, apparently, when you’re a social worker in an academic department. They just automatically think that you know something about social support and coping, and that you’d like nothing better than to write four pages of heavily stilted and coma-inducing academic prose on social support and coping. What they don’t know is that you spend quite a lot of time writing in your silly online journal about puppies and kittens and unicorns and what you eat for dinner every night, and in a style upon which the American Psychological Association (not the mention the National Association of Social Workers) would frown mightily, were the APA and NASW actual disapproving people instead of nebulous accrediting entities.
This is what my part of the chapter should say:
1) Coping is important when you have a disease like MS.
2) There are a couple of different kinds of coping.
3) Here is a list of various ways of coping, in which is included this thing called “social support.”
4) Social support can be helpful sometimes to people coping with a disease like MS.
5) The end.
Here’s how I would write about those things if I were writing for this journal:
“Okay. So. It totally makes sense that you deal with different things in different ways, right? Depending on your context. And on who you are, and what you’re doing, and what your disease is doing. It’s like you control what you can control, you know…if you have, like, a neurological disease? The etiology and prognosis of which is highly variable? You’re going to do whatever gets you through the day. Expensive imported cheese, stencilling, karaoke: whatever works. A bunch of other people think so too.”
And here is a verbatim quote from my horrible, horrible portion of the chapter:
“Problem-focused coping has been positively correlated with higher levels of psychological adjustment and with self-esteem in patients with MS (Pakenham, 1999; Wineman, 1993), while several other studies have confirmed that higher levels of psychological distress is significantly related to emotion-focused coping. A relationship between control of the effects of the disease and coping style may be ascertained through evidence that MS patients currently experiencing an exacerbation tend to favor emotion-focused coping (Warren, Warren, & Cockerill, 1991); similarly, patients with MS were found to use emotion-focused coping during times of higher uncertainty and higher perceived danger (Wineman, Durand, & Steiner, 1994). “
And you know what makes this whole thing even worse? Those four sentences up there took me probably an hour to write last week. I used to be able to churn out the ungainly academic prose pretty well when I was in grad school, but it’s something you have to practice constantly, apparently, because this was me on Friday: “Uh, okay. S…O…C…I…um. Wait. What comes after I? Does “social” even have an I? Okay, focus, focus!” I was all watching the clock and wiping my fevered brow with stacks and stacks of article citations…I am happy to report, by the way, for all those of you who have done time in the academic salt mines as an RA, that a lot of those articles are online now and so you spend a lot less time at the photocopiers in the dank underground tunnels of the health sciences library than you did even five years ago. Great strides. But that didn’t make me feel that much better as I was shuffling frantically through outlines and citations and quotations and charts and graphs and histograms, all so I could just make those five points I made up there in a unneccesarily awful fashion. At least I got paid, is all I have to say.
Are you done hearing about work? Okay. In the “Other News” section of today’s Snapshot Entry, I recently put some laundry in the dryer. I am sitting on the purple futon with my feet on the coffee table to write this. Both my housemates are out so you’d think this would be the perfect time to do all sorts of naughty things while I have the chance. Nothing, sadly, is coming to mind. (That I’m willing to write about online where people can see). Maybe I should do some yoga in the middle of the living room floor? Maybe I should do my patented don’t-strain-anything-if-you-can-help-it dance to A Little Respect…ABL party attendees, you’ve seen it before. How sad is it that I can’t think of anything intriguing to do while I’m alone in a nice pretty house with hardwood floors?
Oh wait! I just thought of something. I have to go now.