music, therapy, and me

I attended an online training about self-employment taxes as a musician last night. I found it a really good training as it explained things like self-employment tax, quarterly tax payments, and the difference between a hobby and a business. Basically, what I am doing right now is a hobby rather than a business. I am going to change this. Now, I am going to do something that I rarely do - recommend someone to you. If you are someone like me - someone who has NO idea what to do as far as taxes are concerned, then I recommend - Hannah Cole . Her website, sunlighttax.com , is a place where most of the questions can find answers. I have not had the opportunity to delve into all of the resources that Hannah offers, but the webinar that she gave last night was concise, clear, and important to me and my understanding of taxes as a creative professional. Check out her blog for more information about all sorts of things! One of the things that I am thinking about is how I want to pivot from hav...

It is 4:30am, and I've been up for an hour now. This wasn't planned or desired - it just happened, so I am trying to wake up and think at the same time. As I woke up, I heard some thunderclaps, so I might have been awakened by the rain that is going on right now. Who knows?   I have been spending some of my non-client time engaged in thinking about the hidden curriculum present in my internship program (I wrote about this on Monday in this post , if you are interested in knowing more). I have spent some time refining the skills that I want an intern to possess before they start my program. I am developing interview questions to help me identify some of these skills. I am going back and thinking more about what I think being a professional in my work setting means - the skills and responsibilities of being a professional. What I am finding is that my interns do not have some of the essential tools that I think they need to be successful music therapists later on. As we are all a...

'Tis the season for self-examination and thoughts of new resolutions. The new year is coming, so it is time to sit down and think about what has happened this year. I did not do well on my reading goal. I started the year with the intention of reading the 13 books that I ordered from Barcelona publishers last year. I read through three books. That means that there are 10 more books on my To Be Read list. Reading has been less important to me than surviving the continual changes of a COVID world. Oh, dear. I just used the archive function to look back at my posts from last year around this time and fell into all of my grief. Now I am back into my own grief situations and am finding things difficult to go through. At this point last year, my cat was fine, my Dad was not, Mom was beside herself trying to get help with Dad's health needs - he went from being perfectly fine to being completely unable to walk, use the bathroom, and be nice to her - we still think it was a stroke, but...

  I am currently in a stage of nostalgia and attempts to distract myself from thinking too much about the past several weeks, so I have been thinking about our technological advances in my lifetime and in my parents' lifetime as well. I was watching a documentary that came up on my YouTube suggestions list (I wonder why this came up for me...I haven't been looking at these types of things before...) that was narrated by Walter Cronkite (famous newsman) all about predictions about life in the year 2001. It was interesting to see what folks thought would be happening in that year, long gone now. Some of the predictions were correct, some didn't happen until later, and others were completely wrong. This interests me - I am a person who thinks about the future of music therapy on a regular basis, so any sort of futuristic predictions are part of that construct. One of my escapes over the past week has been writing a story. I am writing a book about music therapy (sort of) in a ...

I cannot seem to find anything positive to write about this morning, so I am going to offer another chapter in the life of my protagonist, Persephone, as she goes through music therapy training in the future...this will be short and sweet because I've already spent about 45 minutes trying to come up with something else to write about. It's been some time since I wrote a Persephone chapter, so here goes! Now, where were we...    CHAPTER ELEVEN  The rest of the semester seemed to drag on once mid-term results were announced. Peers who had not passed were missing from seminars and lab classes as the program offered additional lectures and course work for those who would not be continuing in the program. Persephone's cohort had shrunk by about 20 students, leaving spots in her lecture tier empty. Her friends and acquaintances had passed, so her social groups were stable. Calla had found Persephone as soon as the results were posted. They had cautiously inquired about the stat...

After I finished my stint as a moderator at the MAR AMTA conference yesterday, I had to get away from my computer for a while, so I went back to my bedroom and did some writing. If you've been reading this blog over the past couple of months, I've been working on a vision of the future of music therapy education ( Look for Persephone in the labels ). It is completely based on nothing other than some articles and thoughts that are out there in the world and then my own imaginings, but it is a bit of an exercise to identify the things that I wish we did and taught in the course of music therapy education and clinical training. Unfortunately, I am kinda stuck in my creative writing right now. I have my protagonist situated into her initial music therapy education process, but I don't know what I should be writing about to get her to her final role in my music therapy future. I do know who she will be in the larger story, but she has to get there somehow. I am flitting back and...