it's halloween and i'm scared silly.

No vampires or monsters in this locality: just the terrifying spectre of the Meta-Goals Statement (eeeeeeeeeee). I mass-e-mailed a while ago with news about my new aging traineeship. Well, the first step once you're in is to assemble a mentoring committee - check - and write out your career goals. Um, not check. Frozen state of trepidation. Still, I had to discuss it with my mentor this morning, and never anticipated sitting there heart racing, clicking and unclicking my pen for over an hour.

I can handle concrete goals, like number of publications and conferences per year. But articulating what my life will look like in 2016? Can we not think about that? I can't say whether I'll have a family then or even a boyfriend, much less discuss maternity leave with someone whose role in my life is unmistakably a little dad-like. Not that I don't appreciate the guidance - I really do. It's just staggering to think about this stuff. Nattering away to my friends is one thing. Sharing my ideas with someone who'll help me fulfill them is another. Because for the first time in my life, I'm aware that whatever I want to do, I can do it. I have everything I need. That's unbelievably cool, and pretty daunting. I'm conscious this is a serious blessing. So I'd better do right by it, and choose well.

I've felt a growing pull toward mental health and cognition disparities among older adults. I think this is the perfect area for me to do meaningful clinical practice, research, and - this is what's nagging me - public service. As much as science turns me on, service and caregiving is my thing. It was hard to come out with that to my tenure-track, research-minded mentor, but he seemed to understand. So much so, he pointed out that I'd probably benefit from a second Master's in Public Health. Which is conveniently offered in conjunction with my PhD.

And here's where I yell: Wait! How far is this going to go? I like working, I want to do something meaningful, but I also like sleeping til noon, going to the beach, noodling around on the internet reading crass and pointless stories. I like playing with animals, eating cookies, making out. I'm content watching moss grow, or at least watching Shaniqua stalk non-existent animals out the back window. And that is a good life too. So where do I decide enough is enough?

WHO, you are kinda cool.

After 2 mind-numbing hours of handwritten speculation on the relevance of developmental norms to child psychopathological assessment (I don't even like kids, much less want to analyze their bizarre little brains), never in a million years would I have guessed that a talk on healthcare classification would actually excite me. Either I'm really deprived for excitement or just really weird: the eroticized Alice in Wonderland this weekend, replete with naked knife-wielding women and a giant dude in drag as The Queen, did nothing for me, but the minutia of coding for dysphagia was TOTALLY AWESOME.

Tired rambling aside, this was actually pretty cool. So the World Health Organization wanted to address the issue of individual differences in healthcare: a one-word diagnosis in a chart doesn't provide much insight to what life is like for a person. WHO created this common numerical language to code for a whole host of issues in a person's life. With a combination of numbers, doctors can indicate not only a medical or mental condition but how it impacts details of the person's everyday functioning, and how their environment helps or hinders them. There's a number for every little part of the body, every little thing people do. EVERYTHING. I don't know who takes the time to think of all this stuff, but I think it's cool they do. There's actually a code for "this guy's illness will make him drool, which will make it difficult to take communion without weirding people out" (slight paraphrase on Shannon's part).

It's a simple, universal shorthand for healthcare providers to communicate medical problems, but also what it means for what the patient does in his or her everyday life, and what in his or her life will make the situation easier or harder. This enables us to consider - quantitatively - all the ways a person is affected by their one-word diagnosis. To anticipate how their life will change and what should be done to help them deal. So with a handful of numbers arranged a certain way, you can communicate all the important things related to a person's diagnosed condition. A way to offer much more complete help than just a label. COOL.

another rts victimization (no whitehead-popping involved this time).

Florida, we just don't like each other do we? You just CAN'T be nice to me. You wait until I leave town to flood my apartment, you send me to Orlando and send my luggage to outer space, and today, you steal my cell phone. Actually, you steal my purse, which happens to not have my wallet in it but does have my glasses and Burt's Bees chapstick. Florida, I liked that chapstick. And I really liked my phone. I had just taken a picture of the biggest onion I'd ever seen, and now that memory is lost forever. Why would you do that to me?

Thankfully I have comrades in the Alliance Against Cruel Florida. Rae is awesome, not only for consoling me with delicious burrito-food but for driving all over this ass-backward town looking for a Cingular store when she could be doing delightful stats homework instead. My other ally against the agonies of Florida: beer. About a year's supply-worth, by my estimate. I returned my spare guitar today, but since they only offer store credit I conceded to accept the biggest prepaid tab in my young history. It's really quite providential if you think about it. See? When God closes a door (phone) he opens a window (beer). I'm sure you could find that in Isaiah or something.

nobody, not even the rain.

I should be sleeping: I have a full day of memory screenings tomorrow at a retirement home and the older folks deserve a cheery volunteer. But, as is often the case, I'm so at peace with my tea and honey (tonight with the Trapeze Swinger continuously looped, yep I'm a nerd but it makes me happy), I don't want to miss it by sleeping. And I've been thinking of an old poetry collection and want to set some of it down to remember. Tonight it's e.e. cummings, who's unparalleled for more than his adroit use of syntax. (Note: I prefer his darker pieces, but I'll share something more lovely here.)

I went home last weekend, a spontaneous decision spurred by Mom and Dad's willingness to spot me a ticket. Now I've developed a pretty sturdy resolve to make do with where I am, but you should have seen the glee set off by going home. I was ignoring Gainesville before I even left. By the time the plane descended toward the city I was wildly excited, heart thumping, face plastered to the window. It was expensive, it was a lot of travel, and it was heartbreaking to leave, but it was worth it to be that happy for those few days.

My parents drove 4 hours round-trip to pick me up, and again to drop me off. And while I was home, I wasn't really social. I did the usual things. Slept in, stayed too long over coffee and breakfast, played with the dog. Picked apples with Mom, helped make apple crisp while we watched a documentary I picked out with Dad. We ate dinner at the table together: wine, chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans. It was weird to be back. And it was so nice. To be not a kid again, but nothing more complicated than a daughter. To be covered by the company of two people I've loved all my life. What makes us whole isn't the valiant proclamation. In real love, proclamations rarely say anything we don't already know. It's the layering of love, insignificant moment upon insignificant moment.

This is what I have in mind posting this poem. It's also the poem that subserves my little collection of hand pictures. I know it's a "love-poem". But I think it also speaks about the love you have with anyone you know so well that all it takes is a look or gesture of theirs, something so familiar and practiced but it carries the weight of the hundred times you've seen it before. The meaning small things take on over so many repetitions. How the people we love open and close us with the smallest of hands.


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

florida, you SUCK.

THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANT TO WAKE UP TO IN THE MORNING! F you Florida, I'm going home.

a big new porch.

The title, of course, is for you Justin. I've found a new porch; perhaps I'll take a picture and you could think of me there when it's cold and raining. :) I'll get to it later on - first, a brief tour of Gainesville's highlights.

It was the ideal Shannon-day, loafing around all morning with coffee. I biked downtown for the afternoon and explored: it started out as a search for a new guitar but as usual, rapidly devolved into wandering toward whatever interesting thing next presented itself. I commiserated with a former New Yorker who opened a music store here (why? would you do this to yourself?). I pored through stacks of shitty used CD's and DVD's at Hear-It-Again CD's, which I mistakenly thought was the record store Laura had mentioned.

Note to fellow Gainesvillians: It was in fact a warehouse for useless crap no one would ever want to re-purchase (e.g. 8 Ace of Base CD's), topped off with a few worthwhile things that, because someone might actually want them, were exorbitantly overpriced. Hey Hear-It-Again: there is no excuse for selling "Heathers" for $12.99. Winona would be very disappointed. She'd probably steal it just to spite you. So would I.

I found a feminist bookstore with scant but well-selected poetry. Walked out with a $3 used Rumi, half-price Levertov, and a bergamot-oatmeal soap so lovely-smelling I can't decide whether to rub myself with it or stick it in my mouth. Next I found Flashback, a resale shop with a wicked upstairs collection of home stuff. The owner just hits up local garage sales and flea markets: one of the hidden treasures of North Central Florida is the many, many people with cool old shit who sell it off for pennies. Owl-shaped olive green salt & pepper shakers? Yes please!

I thought the day had hit its high point with sidewalk dinner at the Top, reading the new poetry books, drinking coffee, smoking cloves, light breeze... but when I finally found a guitar, I also found my favorite place. A big old house set back along a street overhung with spanish moss and big trees. Tim & Terry's has a crowded music store upstairs, a bar downstairs, a living room for live shows, and a huge porch out front. They have live music every night - folk, bluegrass, reggae, metal - and music lessons for guitar, fiddle or mando. Not a grad student in sight. It's like a smaller, even-less-bureaucratic Old Town School with a much larger beer selection. Dangerously conducive to long hours of hanging out. Case in point: I bought the guitar, I sat on the porch and played it, called Rae, we had beer, we stayed til 3.

It may just fill the biggest hole of homesickness. It's the place, the beer and music and smoking and hanging out, but of course it's also the people. Perhaps it was growing up with brothers, with music around me, who knows - but hanging out with a bunch of easygoing guys puts me right at home. The Tim & Terry's clientele is mostly that. Ben, remembering you banging on the guitar while I shouted Weezer lyrics at the ceiling still makes me grin. :) And eating blue cheese fries with Pat, and Joe singing "Man in the Mirror" at the top of his lungs. Jason making Stewie impressions and stalking me in the kitchen. We had some good times; thanks for letting me hang out. You guys are irreplaceable. But it's good to find a place to be at home. Maybe, if I'm lucky, someone'll condescend to join me for danger karaoke.