School stuff

First, it appears I've got myself an internship site.

Found a clinical director and potential supervisor who I seem to click with pretty good, which is something of a relief.

During the first interview, when I asked her whether the clinic appreciates a variety of theoretical approaches or prefers one, she replied, "Well, the state wants us to use 'best practices,' but they don't actually know what the best practices are. So we are a democracy here."

Today, during a second visit, it seems we sealed the deal with her internship offer by agreeing that someone should make a bumpersticker that says, "I have sex with men. But I vote lesbian."

Apparently, the clinical and senior administrative staff at this joint was primarily gay for a long time, and got a reputation for being "the gay clinic" in town. So there's another potential supervisor who does a lot of work with sexual minorities, which is a field to which I'm attracted.

And the third potential supervisor is seriously into Gestalt.

The staff psychiatrist is a Jungian, and conducts all his staff training with a psychodynamic twist, even if he's teaching CBT.

Sounds kinda like the place for me, doesn't it?

And, second, I gave my presentation in Couples Therapy last night.

While presenting my "art" to the class, I gave a slightly meandering but still pointedly (yet modestly) outraged talk about my outsider's perspective on marriage. Outsider as in a class of people denied the right to marry. Outsider as in none of my significant relationships have been with men, and so patriarchy does not come to bed with me (although it *is* insidious enough, to tell the truth, that its influence affects lesbian sex and relating anyway).

I gather some found my delivery a bit angry, but I'm sure others did not. When the professor asked if people wanted to respond to me, the one gay man in the class batted his eyes at me and said, "I enjoyed every minute of that" in a way that was delicately humorous but also sincere. Another classmate called me brave or courageous or something.

I don't know how many appreciated my humor, though. I got a couple of laughs at the right points, such as when I compared getting married to "taking the waters" (a term I appreciate because it evokes both absurdity and quaintness at the same time). But I don't know if there was a larger appreciation for the dark humor of a lesbian giving a lecture to a primarily heterosexual class about "the stigma of marriage."

The truth is, I have no clue how the thing was received. I got a round of applause when I was done -- as did we all. So that is at least better than stoney silence or people throwing cooked cabbage at me.

I was feeling very deflated this afternoon, the post-theatric frenzy letdown of having spent WEEKS on a project that I really wanted to do -- and wanted to do well -- only to drop it like a thud into the laps of my classmates in 15 or 20 minute's time. This project was the focus of my wandering mind for a couple months, and then it took a couple weeks of dedicated work to get it all done.

I've been contemplating just why I put so much effort and energy into this project. Part of it, clearly, is that I've been feeling periodically outraged in this class. Not for the whole time. There was a part in the middle of the term where I was enjoying it. I have a great deal of respect for the professor's ability as a clinician, as The Debutante often said about a particularly difficult instructor we had last term. But there was a part of me that was simply fed up.

S2 has said a few times over the past year that she thinks I am in a different developmental phase of my sexuality. I think I understand what she's saying, but I can't quite pinpoint the developmental phase in question. I'll have to revisit the whole minority identity developmental chart and see what it says. There's probably some value in that.

But other than that, why so much energy into this project?

Another big part was the challenge of doing some new graphic design work and trying new media. This was a massive departure from the work I used to do on computer, and it's also qualitatively different than the decoupage I've been inconsistently playing around with for a couple years (having in that time made all of two journals -- my own and one I made for S2 as a Christmas gift).

One barrier I have to working as an artist is a compulsion for perfection combined with a complete lack of training and knowledge. I didn't know how any of this media was going to work together, having used just about none of it previously. And I can reach points of paralysis when trying to commit to using adhesive on material for which I have no duplicates. (What if I move it just over this way a little? Should I change the color of this paper? Is that what I *really* want to do? Or this other thing here? And so on....)

So that was very time-consuming. I just don't like to do less than what I envision doing -- even though I almost always do. My visions are far more grand than my capabilities....

In the end, I'm proud of the art. There are six pieces in all -- three about 13-by-9 inches, and three less than half that size. I used paint, images from magazines, words I printed on vellum or cardstock. For a first effort in mixed media, it wasn't half bad. One of the pieces I made uniformly draws a laugh, which was the point. In fact, it really tickled me the first time S2 saw it because she laughed so heartily in a way I have rarely, if ever, heard her laugh.

But I tell ya, people, I feel like I can do better.

Maybe next year, when I'm done with school, I'll turn myself to this stuff again. For now, I'm glad I had the chance to do a project like this, to have my thoughts and the roiling undercurrents of my emotions find some unusual form of expression.

I picked up the gauntlet and turned it into "art." That counts for something. Even if the only person it means anything to is me.