Friday, June 20, 2008

Peeling skin cancer.

Today is take your dog to work day. We're celebrating with Peli at the bike shop, because I don't want to have to lock her up for the entire afternoon while I'm at the Boys and Girls Club (apparently they want to avoid potential law suits).

Yesterday, I found the saddest web page ever created. Naturally, I have to share it with everyone in blog world. http://www.seviercountypetadoptions.com/memorialpage.html It's hard to think that Peli was a shelter dog, and that she could have been put down eventually. She's an amazing little girl, and so snuggly. The littlest things make her happy, and all I have to do is rub her belly every now and then, and she gives me everything she has in return.

My internship has been kind of a struggle lately. I'm not sure what the Lord is trying to teach me now, whether it's about the reality of office politics or how I should handle them or all of the above, but I wish I could figure it out quickly. In middle school, we got a talk about drugs and how reporting someone's drug use was not tattling. I'd learned that a friend of a friend was smoking pot, and told the counselor. The friend of a friend didn't seem to care that it was not "tattling," and informed me I'd be beat up after the weekend. Since then, if a peer is doing something that I don't necessarily agree with, I recognize that they are doing the best they can and we all have different ways of doing things. So when I work my tail off for one of the classes I'm teaching at my internship and the other teacher forgets the things I tell her, I deal with my frustration privately and move on. I was naive to assume she would do the same. Rather than remember I told her I would be missing the scheduled classes during June because of my job, and remember the rehearsals we had arranged for outside of class when I could be there, she went to my supervisor to tell him his intern wasn't showing up and the outside rehearsals conveniently fell off her schedule. To try to remedy the situation, I scheduled a short half hour rehearsal, from 12-12:30, and was then yelled at in front of coworkers and clients by the rec therapist because she had an activity at 12:30, and I was committing a "cardinal sin" (her words) and overstepping my bounds.

A good social worker would have asked the rec therapist to join her in her office so they could discuss the matter calmly and inform one another of the facts of the situation. Perhaps the rec therapist did not understand the rehearsal would end at 12:30, and that the social worker had no intentions of taking students away from her activity. Both would leave with respect for one another and the problem would be resolved.

So what did I do? I cancelled rehearsal, left work 1.5 hours earlier than I had planned, and cried while I counted down the days until I graduate. Now when I see the rec therapist, I avert my eyes and scurry out of her path. I know, I know, maybe I'll grow a spine some day. I did manage to take all of this to my supervisor, who explained to me that there were rivalries between the departments, and that I would have to do something really unethical for him to not write me a good letter to get into graduate school.

On a final note, the three kids in the basketball class for the morning program at the Boys and Girls Club were practicing their free throws with good form when two of the kids started digging into each other. "You need blind aids." "Yeah, well, you need hearing aids!" The smallest of the three, whom I call "Scrappy," stood up and said, "You two need RESPECT AIDS."

It made my heart smile.

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