music, therapy, and me

Today is the last 12 hour day of my school year. It is parent-teacher conference evening for my school, so I will be completely alone despite a recent curiosity about what students do during school from parents involved in a support group. No one will come to the music therapy room to discuss their students, and if they do, they will tell me what instruments they want their students to learn to play. I did hear our school social worker stating to a guest that "one of the differences between other public schools and our school is that our music and art programs are therapies. We have an art therapist and a music therapist instead of teachers." After 29 years, the school social worker FINALLY gets that my job is different from the local music educators! Hooray!! I got an "atta girl" in the hallway on Monday morning when the quality assurance person stopped me by the printer to tell me that he had recently heard that I do more than just play a guitar during music thera...

Well, here we are on the brink of Day Five of my current break and another day at the World Congress of Music Therapy. Today is Friday - I have to repeat this to myself because I never really know what day it is during conferences. So, today is Friday, and all of my travel companions and I go home tomorrow to our various places in the world. They are going to stick close to the hotel today while I do more today than I have at the conference so far - one more session during today, if I last that long. I have been promised poutine when I get home - the one thing that I wanted to try while we were here in Canada - so that is the anticipated highlight of my day. I woke up this morning with a runny nose and a horrible sinus headache. I took some meds to help and am hoping that I will be able to be something other than a horribly sniffly mess during today's discussions and papers. It's been four hours so far, and no change, so I'm not really hoping for much. I had ice cream for d...

Other than a meeting with my intern, I am finished with the 2023 summer session of school. We ended up vacating the music therapy clinic when the temperature started at 75 degrees F yesterday. I had to spend a bit of time in the room, finishing my notes, and setting up the CD player so folks can have some music next week, if they decide to brave the heat.  My breathing feels a bit better today. The cough is back - I don't know what it is in the room that is making me sick, but I have my suspicions. I am hoping that an extended amount of time away will help me breathe better. We will see. I got some good financial news this morning when the city told me that they have been significantly overcharging me for water. My bill had gone from $70 to $331 per month over the past two months. Apparently, the new "smart" water meters that they installed were messed up, so I get a credit for all the money that I have sent them the last several months! That is really helpful since I hav...

Today's past post comes to us from March 20, 2017 . Post #1478 was the second post in a series. I am often surprised by things that I have written - this is one of those things. I do not remember these posts, but they challenge my way of thinking at the moment - this is a good thing, and it amazes me that these thoughts were my thoughts! This post happened after my attendance at a super regional conference in Colorado. It was a good conference - one where I had the opportunity to share my interests with others in ways that I find most relevant to me - we created some art, we watched videos, we talked about burnout, we talked about research in clinical practice. It was a good conference for me, and one of the last ones that I attended in person - I think there was one more regional conference in 2018 that I attended because it was at home. I was able to save on hotel fees while getting some time with my parents and siblings. I came home to write this series of posts. For some reaso...

Please know that this entire post is going to be affected by the fact that I have an outer ear infection and am in pain. So, just know that what I write might be different if I were a bit less stuffy and a bit more healthy at the moment... Today is the second day of the Midwestern Region AMTA conference. I am sitting here, in the hotel room, with about two hours before I want to check out of the hotel and just finish up the conference. I bought my breakfast yesterday evening - it is sitting in the fridge and waiting for me to pop it into the microwave. I have a list of presentations to go to for the rest of the day, and I am going to skip out before the end of the day to get home. I am tired and in pain, so a four-hour drive seems like an eternity to get back to my place and my ear drops (I didn't have an ear infection when I left home on Thursday). The conference has been fine. It really is nice to be around music therapists, but it is interesting to see what is going on in our re...

Please forgive my change in topic as I am currently away from easy access to my documents and do not want to make something up. I am sitting on the 15th floor of a hotel at the moment, listening to the sounds of traffic and construction, and enjoying the opportunity of just being away. Away from work, away from home - away. I am awaiting the beginning of the Midwestern Region conference in Lincoln, NE, a conference that I seriously debated skipping but ended up attending. To my disappointment, not many people were interested in what I had to say about competency-based clinical training (I need to look at my description and amp it up a bit before attempting to submit it to other conferences), so I am here early with some time to kill. I could go crash the Passages portion of things, but that seems a bit strange considering it has been 30 years since I was even close to being an entry-level student of music therapy. I would probably stand out, and there are at least a couple of students ...

I am currently a bit preoccupied with my to-do list. I get this way every time I get ready to make a trip of some sort. Today is the day. I am prepared. I have my list of things to pack - and have packed them. I have my list of stuff to take with me - and I have that stuff as well. My backpacks are stuffed with stuff for the conference that I will be attending. I have no marketing materials which is something that I am lacking these days. Good thing I am getting back into the conference swing of things so I can get that sort of task figured out. I enjoy moments like these. I can invent what I need to invent in order to brand my products to others. I have a logo that I really like, and I use it on all of my TPT products . This is a simple, black and white logo that includes a music staff and a treble clef. I am sure that someone else would find it bulky or not quite right, but I like it, so that's what matters the most. It is time to start figuring these things out because I am look...

I just received one acceptance and one rejection for the World Congress for Music Therapy that will be held in Vancouver. British Columbia next July. I am a bit disappointed that I didn't get both ideas accepted, but I am happy to be leading the one that was accepted! I am happy to be a workshop presenter with an audience of music therapists from around the world. My last World Congress for Music Therapy was in Brisbane, Australia in 2005. I gave a workshop there as well. My sister invited herself along on the trip (after not inviting me, but going with her best friend to Hawaii the year before - yep, still holding onto THAT one, sis!), and we spent two weeks in Australia together. We took advantage of a trip package that was offered by the conference coordinators and went to both Brisbane for the conference and Sydney for purely touristy reasons. It was mostly a good vacation, but hormones arrived and complicated the end of our vacation. (I did get to go to Hawaii with my sister ...

This evening is the beginning of OCMT - the Online Conference for Music Therapy's annual conference. So, I am awake an hour before I set my alarm, sitting here, trying to figure out when I am going to get all sorts of things done before tomorrow morning when I have to be moderating presentations. Today is not a snow day...yet. I am not holding out much hope that it will be a snow day at all, but another snow day would be really convenient for me. So, that means that it will not happen. I will do my usual things for this conference. I will spend some time explaining to people that they cannot register after the fact. I will send lots of links to panicked presenters who didn't register. I will be present for the opening part of the ceremony, and then I will head out to get some sleep while the other folks take their turn at the helm. I will come back when I wake up. I am an early morning type person, so I will be helping out in the early morning hours. Then, I present on music th...

For many of us, the American Music Therapy Association national conference is now over. For me, it is still going on because I have so many presentations that I want to watch that I was not able to see live because the same thing happens every time I go to conference - all the presentations that I want to see happen at the same time! So, conference continues. In fact, I will listen to the MTex session right now while I am writing this.  **I can't wait for Cathy Knoll's rant!!**   I enjoy hearing about clinical technique. If you look at my most recent posts, there is one about the lack of clinical presentations at AMTA (something that I have noticed happening since I started presenting for AMTA - anyone else remember the days of Clinical Forum presentations?). I am a proud clinician who wants to be able to take ideas back from conference for direct application to my clients. I do not often have those ideas when I am finished up with conference, and I do not like that. I think m...

This morning, I saw a link for the live Twitter feed from the AMTA Business Meeting that happened earlier this week. I would like to thank Kyle Fleming, MT-BC for tweeting during the meeting as a record of some of the things that were shared. It has greatly helped my understanding of what is going on in the American Music Therapy Association, and I recommend that others who are curious and confused read this feed as a place to find some information. I have saved this thread in my AMTA 2021 folder on my computer so I can continue to parse through the comments and issues that are returning over and over again to our conversations. This thread joins several other resources that people have sent to me over the past week as I have been writing about our association and what is going on. I still feel very strongly that we need to be reorganizing how we do things within the membership of AMTA. I also feel very strongly that we need to be focusing on the membership and not those who have dec...

This is the second version of this post - the first seemed a bit disjointed, but that is primarily because my life is a bit scrambled at the moment. My inspirational message at the moment is "It's not happiness that makes us grateful. It's gratitude that makes us happy." I am grateful for so many things today, so I think I will engage in some gratitude journaling here today - mostly focused on you, fellow music therapist! I am grateful that I am one of a small but vocal group of dedicated professionals who get up every day and go out into our uncertain world. You do important things, fellow music therapist! It is often not recognized in the bigger world, but it is important to the people who ALWAYS matter the most - your clients! I am grateful that there are music therapy clinicians who go out into the world to do the art of music therapy. Without us, the profession dies. We have to remember that fact and embrace the burdens and the powers that come with acknowledging...

Okay. Here's the deal. It seems that there are significant problems happening within our national organization. I am not a person in the know. I am not someone who has been keeping up with whatever is happening on Music Therapists Unite because I decided a LONG TIME AGO that Facebook is not the place where we can unite on ANYTHING! I withdrew my participation in that group MANY years ago due to the constant bickering and nasty comments about other music therapists that I saw over and over again. All I know about situations is what is being filtered out by various parties about various circumstances. So, all of the following blog nonsense is based on my current status of not really knowing lots about the situations that are being debated and are causing so much concern! Keep the above paragraph in mind, please, as you read the rest of my opinions about stuff - I am a bit ignorant of all the details, and I am seeking to know more without overwhelming my entire life with any one situa...

It is almost conference time, and while I am currently lamenting the fact that I actually have to GO to work to get my job done (the October blues - happens every year), I am looking forward to some music therapy immersion this weekend around the other things that I need to get finished up. I have only taken a cursory glance at the program, but I am feeling a distinct lack of clinical focused sessions. Which makes me wonder where all the clinicians are in our presentation process. I know that I have tried to propose clinician-focused presentations recently that have been denied by the review committee (I didn't even bother this year.) I wonder if we have swung so far over onto the Research 2025 side of things that we have neglected the people who do the job with clients day in and day out. I have always wanted more ideas, more examples of clinical relationships, and more things to take back with me to my music therapy clinic from national conference. I like going to a presentation ...