music, therapy, and me

Here it is, Wednesday again. I had to leave work yesterday after an asthma attack that started after an incident. I couldn't stop coughing and that led to wheezing which led to more coughing. I had to sit in the back of a classroom group and cough and cough. I felt like I wasn't able to do what I needed to do, so I used up 4 of my sick time hours to get home for my new asthma medication. I am on it now, but I am not entirely happy about it. I have a real problem with some sorts of medications - and this is one of them. I don't know why I don't like this type of medication, but I don't like it at all. I think this one has something to do with the attitude of the doctor who gave it to me... Anyway... I head back into my part-time job tonight after my full-time job. I will be teaching Sunday School before the church service and leading the choir in some singing. My choir has shrunk significantly in the past three years. We are now a quartet most weeks as my choir membe...

It is Tuesday again, and I am gearing up for five groups and one individual. Usually, I have two individuals on this day, but one is away for the week, so I get a bit of a break. Not much, but a bit. The temperature is cooler - both outside and in my music therapy room - so tempers seemed to have cooled as well. We will see if that continues, but for the moment, I am enjoying the more relaxed atmosphere in the rooms next to me.  I felt the urge to sit down with my ideas book yesterday to record some ideas that have come to me as I have been moving into the role of observer rather than therapist. I am physically moving my body closer and closer to my office where I will spend most of the rest of my intern's time to provide supervision but not interference. I tend to be more likely to write TMEs when I am in my office for interns' sessions than when I am primary therapist. When I have to remove myself from client interactions, my brain starts to design things to do with those cli...

One of the AMTA requirements for interns is a minimum of 60 minutes per week of individual supervision - personal discussion about the intern's development and current standing in the program. One of the things that I have found is that 60 minutes a week is not always enough time to talk over all the things that I want to share with interns - and you know me, I do better with some plans and some systems, so I developed some special topic meetings in addition to the 60 minutes per intern per week. When I have two interns, they go through each special topic twice. When I have one intern, we cover more topics and the topics are not always decided upon by me. I try to put in some of that flexibility when I have two interns, but it is not always as possible as when there is only one. Anyway, I like our special topic meetings. Today, we will be exploring how to come up with ideas for things to do with our clients during sessions. We have almost finished the school required trainings and ...

I am starting to think that my random number generator is a bit biased towards the posts I wrote in 2016 since this is the second number spat out in two weeks that came from that particular year. Today's sentimental post comes from October 21, 2016 .  On October 20th, I had a long day at work where I just had to sit in my room by myself. As a result, I was looking for some things to keep myself occupied, and I looked for the movie Alive Inside  - you know the one - the one with Henry who changes when he gets to listen to an iPod filled with music that he knows. It was the first and only time I have watched that movie. Once was enough to get the general idea of the movie and to come up with my personal opinion about it. Read a little bit about my opinion on the post at this link . I think the issues that so many of us have with this particular movie is that it seems to promise that an iPod will wake up our loved ones and restore them to communicate with us. We music therapists ...

Today's creation is something that I enjoy doing, that I do on an occasional basis, and that needs to be done every once in a while - I am putting together some chairs.  I consider this type of task to be a creative task, but not in the same way as my other ways of creating. I enjoy putting furniture together. I enjoy the frustrations that occur when I try to figure out what the diagrams mean. I get echoes of "helping" my Dad put together things - did you know that I know how to fix sprinkler heads because of him? There you go. Here's the background to why I am putting together some chairs. I bought two chairs about four years ago. One was a chair with a back and the other was a stool. I usually use the stool for my craft area and the backed chair for my writing at my desk. About two months ago, my backed chair broke at the welds. I am not a welder, so I cannot fix the chair. I moved the stool over to the desk area, but I miss the chair back when I am writing. I order...

I am happy to report that a system I put back into practice this week seems to be working!! That's really what you want out of a system, isn't it? Something that works. This system is time blocking. If you are unfamiliar with the term, just know that it is planning out any chunk of time that you have and matching it with the tasks that you want to accomplish. I have done time blocking this week during my non-session times. Today is the day where I have the most time to fill with tasks, and this is the system that helps me get things done. I set up my work journal twice per week. I set up the first part of the week during the week before. I tend to set up the second half on Mondays of each week. This helps me see the times that I have available for my tasks.  Today's journal entry has a time set aside for making task boxes and tools for others, another chunk (or block) of time for intern supervision, and then the last chunk is set aside for cleaning and documentation. We hav...

Do you ever have one of those days where you start off thinking that things are going to be horrible, but they turn out to just be strange? That was yesterday for me. I spent a long time yesterday, debating about whether I wanted to go to work or not. The answer to that debate was that I really didn't want to go, but I went anyway because I have bills to pay and a tendency towards using sick time because I get really sick. I decided that since I was thinking so much about whether I wanted to go or not, I obviously did not need to take the time off. That was never really something that I was going to do - I just needed to whinge and whine a bit. Wednesdays are something I dread. It used to be tied to one particular client, but that client is now seen on Mondays, so I'm not sure why Wednesdays still fill me with so much of an "ugh" feeling. Yesterday, there were some students who were "off" during music therapy, but the scuttlebutt around work is that students...

It is Wednesday, it is the fifth day of excessive heat warnings, and my brain and body is deteriorating. My music therapy room is not too hot, but it is very stuffy, and I am just plain old tired all the time. So, of course it is Wednesday. Seven groups today. Oh my. I'm tired just thinking about it, and my back is hurting, so I am debating my need to go to work. I will, but I am so tired and so very uninterested in doing anything. These are the types of days when I just don't want to do anything. It is hard to walk, it is hard to breathe, and it is just plain old hard to find any sort of enthusiasm for anything. I know that I will go, but I don't want to. I wish I had some time that I could take without penalty. I have refilled my sick days and my personal days for this year, but that time is precious, so I am not really interested in using up 8 hours today. At the same time, my body is not feeling good and my brain is overheating. I might be better off if I take a mental ...

I am not always comfortable improvising. My jazz band teacher in junior high made me very nervous about making up any sort of solo and my perfectionism sealed the deal with that anxiety. My teacher would bark that it was my turn to improvise, and everything I knew about music and music theory would dribble out of my ears and I would end up crying (well, in seventh grade, I did - I found a backbone in eighth grade). This pattern of panic and loss of knowledge continued until my internship when my internship director gave me the best way of thinking about improvisation in music therapy sessions. "Just match your music to what you see your clients do, and then sing about what is going on."    - Sheryl L. Kelly, RMT-BC When she told me that little bit of reframed information, I felt that it made sense to me and my brain. I could do that. It wasn't rooted in perfection or following someone else's theory rules, it was rooted in my clients. Now, I still don't like jazz i...

It is Sunday, and I have counted all my posts to put into my random number generator and selected today's sentimental post. It popped out post #1094 . I checked my list and found out that I wrote that post on January 28, 2016 .  During this post, I talk about things I talk about constantly - struggling to get things done when there is lots to do. I am in that place right now, of course, because things are piling up as they always do. This is a good reminder that I continue to struggle with these same things. At times, I find this a bit disheartening because I haven't found a way to navigate this particular struggle, but I am also reminded that my struggles are pretty small compared to those of others. My current circles are breathing issues, doctor's appointments, and home struggles. Not home struggles like people at home but how to make my living space more minimalistic for my health while navigating my health issues. My work is a bit of a smaller circle right now - or, at...

It is Saturday. We are getting ready for excessive heat for the next five days (at least), and I am going to need something to do to keep me inside and not as depressed as I get when it gets hot. So, I am looking around my overwhelmingly messy craft desk to find something that I want to do. It has been a bit since I made a book, so that may be the project that I work on today. By the end of today, I am hoping that the craft desk looks less cluttered and more functional. Before that point, though, I have an appointment with an allergist for the first time in my life. That's not the point of this post, though. This post is about making things. Yesterday, I spent a long time in my work area making file folders and binder pages for some of my students. I finished twenty and distributed them between the three classes that I had heard from. I have one more stack for the class that I haven't heard from... I cleaned the area and then finished my clinical interactions for the day before...

I am getting ready to head to work for the first Friday of the new school year. Since we do not have two classes, I have an entire morning of planning, preparation, and task box time to fill. My intern is not expected back this week, so I will not have supervision time today. When we are sick, our work responsibilities stop so we can focus on getting better. So, we will postpone our supervision session until the intern returns to work. That means that I have an early release time today. I also have the entire morning to work on my stuff, two groups and one individual in the afternoon. I have most of a stack of laminating to work with today. I have a stack of file folder activities that I have neglected this summer because my Fridays were days off rather than work days. So, I have plenty to do but little to no motivation at this particular moment. I will find that motivation. I still have the movies that I brought in for my work days to play on the ancient television and DVD/karaoke pla...

Yesterday's post was titled, "I Don't Want To Go," and yesterday was an interesting day, to say the least. My intern is sick and needs to go to find medical care, so I ran seven groups on my own yesterday. Interns are always so funny about asking me if I can cover their groups. My response? "Oh, yeah, I think I can do that." Intern #36 will not be at work today. Intern #36 will probably not be at work tomorrow either. In fact, I will send intern #36 home to rest and get better. I am glad that I went to work yesterday. This morning is a relatively free morning. I have an entire hour before I need to leave for work. I will be heading to Walmart before work to replenish the chocolate jar and get some food for my office. I am completely out of everything to eat. That is the only thing that I have to do this morning before work. I woke ten minutes before my alarm, so I was able to turn that off which meant that I was not startled awake. Things seem to be going pr...

It is the dawn of day three of the regular school year, and I just plain old don't want to go today.  This is not uncommon for me around this time of year. I am feeling pretty arthritic and tired and crabby, so I just don't want to leave my bed and go anywhere. I know that I need a paycheck, so I go anyway. Once I'm at work, I am completely happy to be there, but it is the process of getting there that I do not like. It was hard to get upright this morning. It doesn't help that today is a Wednesday. We have six groups today. I am tired just thinking about it. Once September starts, Wednesdays are my choir rehearsal nights, so the day is full from dawn to past dusk. So, I usually feel this way on Wednesdays. The rest of this week will be really easy. We see three groups on Thursdays and two groups on Fridays. I am filling the gaps in our Thursday schedule by adding in push-in groups for some of our classrooms and scheduling some individual sessions. My Fridays are being ...

Monday again. Monday and the first day of the 2023-2024 school year is upon me, my intern, and our clients. We have three groups today, and my intern will be leading two of the three sessions. It was split evenly, but one class is empty, so I have one less session to do! Anyway, it is time to start being present in sessions but not lead those sessions. We started this process before the end of our extended school year session, but we will need to start the process over again. One of the things that I have learned is that my clients and my interns have some amount of regression when we are gone for breaks. In fact, I do as well. It always takes me some time to get back into the routine of working - clients and interns are no different. So, as a result, I plan on being an active part of every session for some time. We are entering the part of my intern's time with me when I am going to start actively pulling away from my clients and group participation. I do a bit of a fading process...

To do my Sentimental Sunday posts, I use a list of my post dates to count the posts so I can figure out which post has been selected each Sunday morning. It is currently missing from its usual place. I have no clue where I put it - I know it has to be around here somewhere, but I just can't find it. I will probably need to make a new one - that takes a bit of time and some focus and some simple math, so it will not happen this morning... I am enjoying revisiting my past posts. There are times when I wonder what I was thinking, and there are other times when I am really impressed with what I wrote in the past. I find it really interesting to see the things that I have written over the years. So, I will continue this series - just not today. Today is my first day back to my part time, church job. I am feeling the itch to get going, even though I know that I will be shoved into teaching Sunday School three weeks early if I go. I don't get paid for any of the time that I am around ...

As you know, I am working on strengthening the communication options that my clients can access during music therapy sessions by reworking my binder system. I made some progress yesterday towards my goal, but found that the ideas that I had about putting together said binders just didn't work, so I am not finished, and I am back to the beginning. Let me tell you a bit more... Yesterday, before I left for work, I printed out seven copies of my binder pages. I put together this project about a year ago when I was part of the Berklee Music Education and Special Needs course, but I haven't made the time to put those binders together. In the past, I have used regular three-ring binders to store my initial communication pages. Each binder tends to last about three months before it is completely ruined by my clients. I have a couple of clients who will walk out of their way when they enter the music therapy room to walk on top of the binders. If the binders are not on the floor when t...