music, therapy, and me

This is a week of vacating all of my responsibilities. I enjoy weeks like this - times away from most of the responsibilities that I usually have during any and all weeks. This vacation started like most of my others - with a long car trip. I drove through the Painted Desert and five states on my way to my final destination, Southern California and my family. I've become very good at taking pictures out my car window while streaking down the Interstate. Here are some of the results... Vacations are something that I didn't really think about before I started to work full-time. As I have become an experienced therapist, I am more and more appreciative of the opportunity to leave everything behind in an effort to relax and refresh. It is important to leave things behind every once in a while. I do not do this easily. I spend much of my vacation time corresponding with music therapists from all over the world - I find it difficult to completely disconnect. I always find ...

Yesterday, I posted about a to-do list. Something I like to do to make myself feel organized. I am pleased to report that I finished almost everything on yesterday's to-do list, and I am feeling good about my day.  I spent my day alone, cleaning and organizing. As I have repeatedly said on this blog, I am a packrat of a person, so cleaning and organizing often takes me several days. I am constantly on a quest for being organized in my home life and would love to be a minimalist, but just can't bring myself to throw away my notes from school or give away my textbooks. This contributes to my packrattiness. (Gee, for some reason, spell-check doesn't like that word! It suggests attractiveness instead.) I get a sense of accomplishment when the bathrooms are clean, when you can see lots of carpet, and when the dishes are completely finished. It interests me that, while I am a messy housekeeper, I am an organized therapist. My work space has more organization than my home sp...

I am a list maker. I enjoy writing things down and organizing myself into planned completion of each item. Today my list is all about getting my home and car ready for vacation. I am trying to organize my life into a vision of what I want to be. My major life plans have changed recently, and I find myself envisioning a future that is significantly different than the one I thought I would have. So, I am making a to-do list... Be happy Love my job Be around people I love Be away from people I find toxic to any of the above There. A to-do list for the future. Now I'm off to complete some of my list items so I can feel like I am ready to go. See you all soon!

I thoroughly enjoy getting to know music therapists from around the world. It is wonderful how social media has exponentially increased the amount of contact with people from all over the world. It is crazy to think that there used to be times when I felt like the only person in the world who believed in the power of music as a therapeutic modality. That is definitely no longer the case. You know the game Six Degrees of Separation? You have to find a link between two seemingly unrelated people within six connections - some people call it the Kevin Bacon game. It is not difficult to do within the music therapy community and is becoming less difficult every day. I "met" a new music therapist yesterday and had a nice conversation with her about being a music therapist as well as developing new ideas. We found two mutual friends within seconds and talked about a bunch of topics. It was fascinating to find out that we knew several of the same people and had probably passed eac...

FAIL! I did not read nearly as much as I had originally intended. I will NEVER get to my next reward level!! I'm going to start over in my count - back to one solid week of reading and then, special dessert! Oh well. In my defense (because I always need to have a defense to justify to myself when I don't do what I had planned), this was a busy, crazy week. I did get some reading in - a bit more of Baker & Wigram's Songwriting text and a review of my old Sheet Music Magazines , but nothing was really in-depth or all that relevant to what I do on a daily basis. So, back to the plan. I want to read the equivalent of 60-minutes per day. The readings will be on music therapy techniques, theories, or therapeutic music experiences. I will stay within my own library offerings (translation: the scads and scads of texts that I have already purchased and use sparingly). I will read a bit of whatever tickles my fancy at the moment - there is no need to start at the beginning...

This week was just plain surreal. You know, one of those weeks when everything is just a bit off? It wasn't necessarily a bad week, but there were some strange things happening all around me. Some of the things that have been happening can probably be chalked up to end-of-the-year school situations. The paraprofessional who deliberately defied me in a music therapy session will not do that again - I'm sure that she just wasn't thinking (ULTRA SARCASM HERE!). In addition, the series of hysterically giggling music therapy clients were probably just feeling the excitement of being near the end of the year (I'm not at all upset about the giggling - it was contagious and uplifting, especially after insubordination!).  Some of the situations were not related to the school year at all. Two days ago, the construction company working on a new assisted living facility down the road opted to cut a 6 foot wide ditch in the only road to both my facility and another facility. T...

I have some strange likes on social media, including several blogs that I do now want my father to know that I enjoy... one of those bloggers sent a link about a website that turned your writing into cat font! I have to admit, I REALLY liked it! Let's see if it worked!

This week, I found reading for a set amount of time per day to be a HUGE chore. Nevertheless, I persevered and got a second week of reading into my brain.  This week's reading topics? Ethical Thinking in Music Therapy (Dileo), Music Therapy Reimbursement Best Practices and Procedures (Simpson and Burns), Models of Music Therapy Interventions in School Settings (Wilson), and Music Moments to Teach Academics (Nichols). I also spent some time in Music Therapy, Sensory Integration, and the Autistic Child (Berger). My reading technique is based on an attempt to refresh and extend my knowledge of music therapy theory through reading the textbooks that I already have in my library. I grab a book off the shelf that interests me in the moment and read as much of it as I can. When I get tired of the topic, I switch to a different book. I have included my songbooks and "things to do" books into the category of "texts" when I need something a bit lighter than ethic...

This is my 400th post on my blog. Wow.  Now, you may be thinking that I will have something really exciting or profound to say, but you will probably be disappointed as I am not really in a contemplative mood right now. I am simply relieved that I have made it through a work week without having a breakdown. SCORE! I spent time this week engaged in games with my clients. We played a variation of Kim's Game - memory game - using audio discrimination to identify played and unplayed instruments. My students were surprisingly good at remembering what was under the blanket and not played. It was fun to listen to them as they called out the names of the instruments (even the difficult ones like the kokiriko) or yelling about how the instruments are played! That was fun. I also spent time reading parts of my library books, thinking about the ethics of being a music therapy internship director, and entertaining a visitor from another program. The last thing that I did was to avoi...