choose one word

Hey, thanks for the congratulations and well wishes, everyone. I appreciate it.

It strikes me that for the past few weeks I haven’t delivered much on the blog front, with the exception of a few short, profanity-laced posts that make me look awfully cranky. I’d like to sink into a meaty, substantive post, but all this boring life crap keeps getting in the way.

One thing that has really come through to me in the past week is a strong reminder of where my strengths lie. Yesterday I sat down and read the graduate handbook of the program I’m starting next fall pretty much cover to cover. In the past, when I have considered graduate programs, I have found such handbooks terrifying. Not because I don’t feel up to the tasks described therein, but because the sheer quantity of those tasks, heaped up one on top of the other like that, makes the degree seem like Mount Impossible, or Mount Only-for-the-Truly-Brilliant, or Mount Only-for-Suckers. Or a live volcano. Anyway. As usual my metaphors are getting away from me…let’s just say handbooks make grad school look really, really hard.

That’s how I felt before completing book one and two of the state foster/adoption training program—which, incidentally, is supposedly written at a seventh-grade reading level. Now, I am much more scared by homework questions such as “Describe one of your strengths, after reading this book, in identifying the strengths and needs in children between the ages of five and seven in finding constructive ways to express their feelings.” In order to make the material less intimidating, the trainers emphasize to us that we should not worry about grammar and spelling. Which is good, because the thing that most worries me, when answering a question like that, is the possibility that I might inadvertently use poor sentence construction.

Even worse are the questions about one’s own feelings. They usually stick them at the end of a long description of a hypothetical situation that could lead to a child being placed in foster care. Upon reading one of these sobering, complicated hypothetical situations, invariably we are asked to “Choose one word that describes what you are feeling right now.”

I understand the intent here, I do. They need to make sure people aren’t drowning. The material they are presenting us with is far more daunting than anything in a graduate school handbook. The sheer scope of human tragedy that this system manages, and in some cases perpetuates, renders me speechless and numb. Which is why I find this ubiquitous, facile instruction to describe my feelings in one word so maddening.

A social worker might reasonably respond that however inadequate they may be, words are what we have to work with, and asking doofus questions about feelings is better than ignoring them. She or he may well be right. Due in part to years of difficult experiences with members of my extended family who bill themselves as communication professionals and inflict paternalistic linguistic workshopping on the rest of us in transparent attempts to control everyone and everything, I am very jumpy around such language. When someone asks me to name a word that expresses how I am feeling, that very request sets off a whole new set of much more potent and less complicated feelings than did the nuanced situation to which I am being asked to respond. So the first response that comes to mind when I read the question, “Choose one word that describes what you are feeling right now,” is always “angry.” Fearful of being perceived as a chronically angry person, I instead leave it blank.

As out of the loop as I feel in the world of academia, as difficult as it can be to pick up a dense, multi-stranded article and make sense of it, or crystallize a ten-page paper into a 300-word abstract, or use theoretical language without sounding gimmicky, I am eager to get back to it because it gives me the capacity to be analytical—to explore and to respect the sheer complexity of things. Most professions deal with complexity, but academics have the advantage of being able to acknowledge it, and entertain it thoroughly.

(This is why, I think, I am attracted to academia and not to mass media. At its core, the question American mass media seems to be asking is “Choose one word to describe what you are feeling right now.”)

Having said all that, I find that the complexity of the issues I am flirting with in this post is beyond me at the moment. I need to go on a run, call a contractor, get my tax materials together and figure out the most financially workable time to have my cat’s rotten tooth pulled out. Let’s just say that while I’m doing all that, I’m thinking a lot about language, and hoping that in all my endeavors I find the right words at the right time.