music, therapy, and me

This is the last day of my work week, and it will hold the first "last" session of my current job. I found out yesterday that my first group on Thursdays will be going on a field trip next Thursday, so today is my last group with them. I am not sure if they know that they will be going on the field trip, so I can't really tell them that it is our last group, but I know that it is.  This is difficult. So far, three kids have cried and many more have asked me to stay. I cannot, but I am also feeling the guilt that people can dump onto you when you are choosing to leave a work situation. My facility is famous for trying to guilt people into feeling bad about their decisions to leave, so I have not been very vocal about my retirement plans unless asked.  One group of coworkers noticed that I attended a meeting yesterday afternoon without my work planner. I figured that there was no reason to take notes, so I left my notebook on my desk. I have no more meetings to sit through ...

Today is the day. Today is the last Talent Show that I will run at my current facility. I have no idea if there will be a Talent Show next year, and I am okay with that thought - mostly. I have sixteen acts to coordinate and one of the students is coordinating a "surprise" for me that I will have to play guitar for... we'll see how it goes. I think I have run at least 29 of these shows. We even did virtual talent shows during COVID. It has been an interesting process of finding how I like to run things to provide my clients with opportunities to show off a bit. There is not one right way to run anything, and I've found that my attitude towards the talent show is that flexibility has to be the key. I've had students freak out about being looked at by everyone in the school and run out to pull the fire alarm. After that happened, the student sent someone to tell me that the student wanted another chance. I did not allow that. Sorry, but putting everyone in potential...

One of the benefits of ripping my CD collection onto my computer is that I have the opportunity to dive back into the music that I have used over my career so far and the music that I have acquired that I love. I am currently working on one of my soundtrack cases - I have a couple of these - and I am reminded of why I purchased specific songs for specific reasons as I look over my collection. I have been taunted lately by a younger colleague (not at work, but a music therapist) for still having my CD collection. I admit, it is easy to stream music these days, but I still enjoy having the music available to hold. There is something more personal with CDs and records and cassettes. The convenience of streaming is wonderful until the wi-fi goes down, and then you feel pretty silly because you do not have alternatives. I will NEVER give up my CD collection!! I love it too much!! So, call me old-fashioned or anachronistic, if you must, but I will continue to use my CDs. I am just going to c...

As a vintage music therapist who has invested in records, cassettes, CDs, mp3s, and now streaming services, I have lots of music around my house. I have managed to give away most of my cassettes, but I have all of the records of my family as well as my extensive CD collection lurking in bookshelves in corners of my home. I have started the process of ripping my CD collection onto my computer to store that music on the cloud. This is not a process for the faint of heart, and it is taking lots of time. I have a CD drive in my computer - I bought it specifically because it had an integrated CD drive because this is a quest I always have at the back of my mind when I am purchasing things. I want to have my music available to me the next time I get a computer. This is a long introduction to the benefit that I am finding with this task. As I put on the topic line, I am finding old favorite songs again. Part of being a music therapist is a love of music, and I have many pieces that I have lov...

One of the advantages of going through my CD collection and ripping music to my computer is that I am being reminded of music that I have loved over my life and career. One of these songs is by Fiona Apple who was part of the "angry girl singer-songwriter" movement that happened at some point in my past. Criminal  is one of my favorites from Fiona Apple. Okay, let me explain something about me. I tend to find one song by an artist that resonates with me, and I then explore more of the music. I am not always impressed by the other songs that those artists share, but I have many CDs that I got because I wanted a copy of the one song that I love. I used to be part of a CD club - BMG got me many CDs for less than $2 each back when I was budgeting for everything - so I was able to find many of the songs that I loved back then for very little money. (I never really paid full price for any CD.) So, with Fiona Apple, I have a couple of songs that I like and more that I do not like as...

It's Wednesday of this Spring Forward week, and it has hit me hard. I was okay the first three days of this week, but today I was struggling to open my eyes and find any sort of enthusiasm about leaving my bed. It doesn't help that this is the week before break, I still have a 12 hour day tomorrow, and a day of professional development with arthritic knees and spine ahead of me. Everything is just seeming more and more difficult to navigate - and it is all stress that I put on myself!! So, to distract me from all the senses of stress and doom that I am feeling due to my timing and need to get things organized that will not be organized no matter what, here is what I've been reading lately.  I turned in my last batch of library books on Sunday, so I am tackling my To Be Read pile. I bought BIG books this last time. There is a Jane Austen omnibus waiting for me to bite the bullet and dive back into the world of Victorian romance and courtship. That is not my favorite world to...

Today's Sentimental Sunday post is the most viewed post on my blog - ever, and I am glad that I happened upon this one in my morning perusal on this Spring Forward Sunday. Here it is - the 7 things I wish someone had told me about music therapy post.  The sad thing about this post is that I think we still do not talk about these things much in the music therapy world. It has been almost 10 years since I wrote this first post and not much changes in the world of music therapy...ever. I still think that we, as a profession, are on a precipice.  We have to do better, as a collective group of professionals, at preparing our future professionals for this life. I am reading through the report of the commission for the 21st century group very slowly. My initial reaction is that what I have read is very similar to what was recommended 10 years ago, but I haven't delved into things the way I should before I start to talk about it all.  I am frustrated with how long it takes to ge...

This morning, I saw a post about having an indoor snowball fight with kids, and it got me started thinking about things I used to do with my clients that I no longer do. The indoor snowball fight is one of those things. We used to have massive paper ball fights in the gymnasium. We would take all the recycling, cut it in half, and then encourage our students and staff members to crumple it up and then engage in a battle royale! We would go until we were tired, and then we would time ourselves as we cleaned up all the snowballs into bags. We would then stack the bags into snowmen as we sang winter songs. I miss those days. These days, my clients are not able to be safe with themselves or with others to handle a snowball fight of any sort. I have been spending some time steeped in nostalgia lately. I am not sure why, but I know part of it is being tired of work situations. I have been thinking about the things that I used to be able to do with my students without the possibility of compl...

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 ...

It is Sunday again. Today's randomly selected post comes to us from May 22, 2015 - the day after my birthday - and is all about music-themed gifts. Do you ever get things that are musical because you are a music therapist? I don't get them very often, so when music-themed gifts arrive for various celebrations, they make an impact. On this birthday, I found a music and cat themed necklace in my gifts. It is still one of my favorite pieces of jewelry because it combined things that I love into one representation. My jewelry is still in a box somewhere - I need to find it and unpack all that stuff so I can wear it again. (Not at work, but when I am not at work... you get it!) Most of the things that I own that are music-themed are things that I have found for myself. Most of the things that I own that are music instruments are from my family members. Most of the music that I own is something that I purchased, but some of it was gifted to me. It is interesting how things arrive in ...

The prayer shawl I started OCMT 2023 is over - at least the live portion of OCMT 2023 is finished. I am interrupting my really short stretch of nostalgic posts on Sundays to reflect a bit about the Online Conference for Music Therapy, and how it has enriched my life over the years. In 2003, I took a course on how to develop online courses in the School of Education at my local university. This was part of a minor in Curriculum and Instruction, and it was one of the first courses offered on this topic (at least, according to my professor). I developed an online course for education teachers on how to add music into the elementary classroom. I didn't have a place to put it, but I started thinking about using the internet to teach music therapists things. In 2010, John Lawrence, a music therapist from Canada, sent out a message on the Music Therapy Listserv asking if anyone would be interested in starting an online conference for music therapists. After about a week of contemplating i...

This morning's post is from July 2013 , selected from the random number generator, and an interesting post because it was right before my very first surgery. I wasn't feeling well, and the topic is all about relaxation.  As I re-read it, I am both taken back to that period of time and struck by how much I write about relaxation. My definition of relaxation is something that seems unattainable and has for a very long time. So, I guess it is time to change my definition of relaxation. July 2013 was an interesting time in my life. I had diverticulitis, a recurring infection (that we found out later was from drinking the water at work - go figure), and eventually had to have 13 inches of my intestine removed - in fact, it was about two weeks after this post that I ended up in surgery. It was an interesting time. I had never had a surgery before, and I was scared spitless. My mom came to help me (and to make sure that I actually went through with it), the water in my apartment becam...

  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 ...

SOME of my mess!! I've been spending some of this morning throwing things away. This is something that I struggle with on a regular basis. You see an envelope, I see pages for my junk journal. You see a very old notebook, and I see all the time I spent in class with classmates learning about music therapy. I have WAY too much stuff that I've justified as having to keep because it sparked memories in me when that's all that it has done - sparked memories. I mean, who needs journal references from 30 years ago? NO ONE!! So, I tossed out my papers from my freshman year of observation - the year when a client fell very loudly in love with me (and ignored EVERYONE else in the room!!). I found some of my first therapeutic music experiences and put them back in the card box where they belonged (I still use many of those TMEs to this day). I'm thinking about what I cherish more - the memories (which I have) or the old notebooks? So, I've taken one load of old pape...

The day has come when it is time to say "goodbye" to another intern as she heads out from under my direct supervision into the world of music therapy professionalism. I have done this many times, and it always makes me feel simultaneously very happy and very sad. We've been preparing our students for the transition for the past 4 weeks. We don't often get to go through official termination of treatment procedures at our facility - students often come and go and we don't have a voice in the decision - but I do ask my interns to prepare my students for their absence in the next school term. So, we've been talking about "graduation" and how the intern will be returning to find her own music therapy job. This is a topic that my students understand - we celebrate graduations around our place pretty seriously. As we've been talking about graduation and moving on, we've all experienced different emotions. We talk about these emotions, we somet...