I woke up with an adrenaline rush.  I knew I would need it.

This morning I had the honor of meeting my first really horrible parent.  I can think of no other way to describe her without resorting to name-calling.  She actually dropped the f-bomb.  At me.  And meant it.  I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt.  I'd rather have given her the benefit of my boot.

What has 5 letters and strikes fear into the heart of any education system peon?  A-U-D-I-T.  Being a good little peon, I went to check the files I inherited two weeks ago to make sure they're in order.  They're a mess.  CRAP!

Meanwhile, after driving across town 3 times...

I get a call on my cell.  I'm thinking it's a parent (good), or an administrator (bad), but no!  It's only the biggest harp gig of my entire life!  Sure, I've done some weddings and maybe a dinner or two.  These people want to book me for an entire day!  Cha-CHING!

And the week's not over yet.

The longer I work in the schools, the more I am convinced that teachers are superbeings.

Yesterday was my first day back at work after being off for summer vacation.  I had expected it to be a difficult transition, but found it surprisingly easy to resume my post.  My commute is a fraction of what it was last year and I really like my co-workers.  Those two factors alone can make or break it for me.  Overall, my day was a solid "good."  Have I explained my day-ranking system on here before?  Maybe I better take a minute and do that...

A question I hear quite often after returning home from work is, "How was your day?"  Most of time I lack the energy to give a detailed report, so I have broken it down into a continuum of six one-word responses.  They are, in order from better to worse, awesome!!, good, okay, meh, crappy, and @#$%-y.  If I resort to profanity, you know it was a really horrible day.  As I said earlier, yesterday was good; it was better than okay, but not quite awesome.

I was so stunned that my first day didn't suck, that I didn't remember until 10:00 at night that I had to go back the next day.  And everyday this week.  And everyday after that until June.  The first day went by so fast.  If only they all would.

"Speech stinks!"

Up yours, kid.

I didn't really say that.  I didn't say anything.  The comment came after I had just given her a treat for Christmas.  I was too stunned to formulate a verbal response.

We had words later, worry not.

Losing one's voice is only fun for about a day or so.

"Alright, this is how it works.  You can say 'that sucks' in here, but you have to use your good 's' sound."

I am so the cool teacher.

Today was my last day.  I led a snack group in one of the cottages, helping the residents make pudding pies.  During last week's group, I had unintentionally agitated Greg, who is blind and has Down Syndrome, resulting in a fit of screaming and overturning tables.  I didn't mean to set him off; I felt terrible.  Today brought a similar episode, only I was in another room.  At least now I know it wasn't anything I did.

I wasn't the only one upset by it today, though.  I noticed Shaun was missing as I started passing out the hand sanitizer.  I thought maybe he had retreated to another room, until I nearly stepped on him.  He was on the floor on the other side of the table.  Shaun's chair was back to back with Greg's at the adjacent table.  He must have taken cover when Greg started acting out.  He lay on his stomach like a soldier behind a barricade.  Shaun doesn't say much, but Jeffrey does.

"I'm going home this weekend.  I'm leaving tomorrow." 

"That's great, Jeffrey."  He tells me the same thing every time I see him, no matter what day it is.  He has moments of apparent lucidity, broken up by instances of incoherent mumbling, his eyes out of focus.  Whenever I ask questions of the whole group, he is usually the first to answer.  He'll even jump in when I pose a question to one of the other residents.  Today, though, he couldn't tell me what we were making when I asked.  I held up a pudding cup.

"What is this, Jeffrey?"

Nothing.

I tried to help him out:  "P-p-p-."

Nothing.

"Puuu-."

Nothing.

"Pudding!"

"Pudding," he mumbled.  There was no indication that he knew what he was saying.

We made the pudding pies—graham cracker crumbs, pudding, and whipped cream.  Everyone told me which flavor he/she wanted:  chocolate, vanilla, or butterscotch.  Ronald always picks butterscotch.  It's his favorite.  But he never eats his pudding pie.  Each week it sits on the table untouched.  I thought this week would be no different.  As others finished up, Ronald's bowl sat neatly on his napkin with his spoon beside it.  I was in the kitchen starting to clean up when I heard, "Tastes good!"  Ronald finally tasted his pudding pie, and he ate the whole thing.

After everyone else was done, I made a pie for Kim in her adaptive bowl and let her feed herself.  Half of it ended up on her bib.  In the hallway, Ronald handed her a page from a coloring book; he knows she likes to play with paper.  She alternates holding it and crumpling it.  Every so often she'll switch hands.  I pretended to try and take it away, then let her pull it out of my grasp.  She grinned.  We played that game until I had to go.

As I was leaving the cottage, the last voice I heard was Jeffrey's.

"Bye, Meredith!  Thanks for coming."

Melton sits at the table in the corner and you have to watch him like a hawk.  I gave him a bowl of potato chips and stood there as he ate them one at a time.  As soon as I walked away, he shoved a fistful in his mouth.  "Melton!  Slow down," I heard over my shoulder.  I'd be lost without the cottage staff.

Lori sits at the center table, brushing her blonde dollbaby's hair into a fro.  Her nutritional status has been downgraded, so I couldn't give her a snack today.  They don't know if she'd be able to swallow it safely.  She has one good eye and always seems to be smiling.  Across from her is Willis.

Willis, blind and deaf, is the most graceful eater I have ever seen.  His hands hover lightly over the food in front of him as he orients himself, then they make the clean trip to his mouth.  As I was giving him his snack, Lori pointed to the corner and said, "Go back!"  I looked and there was Melton, eyes fixed on Willis' cookies, sneaking out of his chair like a runner stealing third.  "Sit down, Melton," I said, "Lori's got your number."

"Get your cookies, Craig."

I watched as strings of saliva, one after another, stretched and pooled on the table.  Was he looking?  I couldn't tell; he was hunched over so far.  We were making ice cream sundaes, and it was time to add the oreo pieces.  I untangled the fingers on one hand, hoping it would get him started.

"Get the cookies."

After a minute or two, he reached toward the oreo container and picked it up.  The ice cream was melting and we still had to do the whipped cream.  He was moving slower than usual today.

It is finished.  Twenty-two pages of Pam Anderson's frozen strawberry yogurt.  I only worked on it for a week, but it sure felt like I got a year older in the process.

Excedrin is the best thing ever.  I feel like I could lift a car.  Maybe even write this paper.

Hearing Christmas songs being sung downstairs doesn't exactly put me in an industrious frame of mind.

Anybody wanna write my thesis for me?  No?  Well, it was worth a shot...

1) You walk around your house with your forefinger pressed firmly against your lips.

2) You have uncontrollable cravings for peanut butter and jelly.

3) You write to-do lists in crayon.

4) You have a smiley face stamp on your arm, and you can't figure out how it got there.

5) You see Fruit Loops, not as food, but as art supplies.

6) You see paste, not as art supply, but as food.

7) You think SpongeBob should run for governor.

8) Whenever you hear a bell, you have a strong desire to line up at the door.

9) You want to play Hungry Hungry Hippos at your next dinner party.

10) You wake up at 8:00am on weekends saying the pledge of allegiance.

My friend Stacey and I manned the hearing booth at a screening fair on Saturday.  The kids were totally cute, but there was a lot of down time.  So what did we do?  Only what any normal grad students would do when left alone in a room with fun audiological equipment...  Go nuts.  We tested each other's hearing, and it turns out I have better than average hearing in some frequencies.  Rawk!  We also played around with the tympanometer, this thing you shove in your ear canal to find out if everything's kosher in your middle ear.  My tympanogram came back normal, but Stacey's didn't; she had a cold.  So we wondered if blowing one's nose would change the readout.  It totally does.  This stuff is amazing.

You know how little kids tend to mix things up sometimes?  Like, they'll substitute a familiar word/phrase for an unfamiliar one?  This time it worked in my favor.  At school I go by Ms. Meredith.  And what does this sound like to a little kid?  Miss America.  My supervisor Peggy thought it was so cute when one of the kids said, "It's Miss America's turn," that now she actually tells them to call me that.  I have been dubbed Miss America henceforth.  I did rather luck out in the name department, though.  What does Ms. Peggy become?  Oh yeah, Miss Piggy.

You know you've found your calling when you can fall off your chair and get a huge bruise, spatter orange paint on yourself from ankle to forehead, be subjected to cafeteria peas, and still consider it one of the best days you've ever had.

The first day of school still feels like the first day of school.  I still worry about finding my room, whether the teachers will be nice, whether or not to buy my lunch.  Only now I am a big person and not a little person.  I still feel like a little person, but the actual little persons remind me of the true state of things with their frank and entertaining comments.  Here are just a few:

"She looks nice."

Thanks, kid.  You're looking pretty terrific, yourself.

"I want to talk to her."  "Ok, what do you want to say to her?"  "I lost eight tooths."

Oh.  My.  Gosh.  How on earth did I ever manage to live each day without this vital information?  You have returned meaning to my life, O toothless one.

"What is she?"

Human life form:  female.  Sugar and spice and everything nice.  Sarcasm on legs.

"She looks like a dinosaur."

What the...?!?!  See previous question.

Studying is hard.  I know, studying is hard for everybody, but it's really hard for me.  My body rebels against it.  However, I have found that the information goes down better with some goldfish.

I AM NOT FUNNY!!  Dangit.  I want so desperately to be funny.  To have readers the world over frequent my site and giggle their problems away for a minute or two.  Like I do.  On other people's sites.

I am, at most, clever.  And that's on a good day.  And I can't remember the last good day.

The sad thing is... I used to be funny.  Or at least, approaching funny.  Like, give the girl a few months/years to find her voice and she'll be frickin' hilarious.  But my finding-my-voice time was reappropriated to grad school and became finding-what's-left-of-my-sanity time.  Blog took back-burner status right next to sleep and personal hygiene.  I'm lucky I can write in whole sentences.  When I want to.

So, is there hope?  Will I regain my sanity/sense of self/creativity?  Will I ever be... funny?  Ask me again in a year.  Right now, I have to go shower.

Ok, I've gotta start this thing up again.  Two years ago, I had plenty of material to write about and nobody to read it.  Now I have regular readers and nothing to write.  I keep waiting for inspiration, but it's getting to the point where I think I'm gonna hafta make my own.

Hmmm...  What inspires me?

My latest Netflix rental.  American Splendor.  That was a cool movie.  I was completely fascinated, mostly because the story had been going on under my nose for 20-odd years and I had no idea.

Camping.  Communing with nature.  And screaming babies.  And barking dogs.  And nazi park rangers.

School?  No.  In fact, I find school definitively uninspiring.  Summer classes, being condensed, last approximately 3 hours each.  My attention span for articulation disorders and cleft palate, respectively, is about 1 hour each.  That leaves two hours, 3 times a week, of me wanting to poke my eyes out.

The boy.  Yes, he is a significant source of my inspiration these days, but not the kind of inspiration that makes me want to run home and fire up the laptop.  Rather, it's the kind that makes me want to plan the rest of our lives together and then hurry up and start living it.

Of all the issues to which I expected to apply my clinical problem solving skills, this is not one.  My four-year-old client farts in the middle of therapy.  Loudly.  Flagrantly.  And he's getting bolder about it.  The first time it happened, he looked at us (myself and the other clinician) with a big grin pasted across his face.  After the most recent episode, he laughed out loud.  We're not quite sure whether the key to extinguishing this off-task behavior is to ignore it or address it directly.  Maybe I should add it to my list of objectives: The client will produce /l/ in all contexts and refrain from flatulence in the therapy room.  It seems to happen whenever he is having a good time.  Regardless, he makes it clear he's having a good time whenever it happens.

You gotta love it when your supervisor calls you aside and says, "Walk in there and tell me what you smell."

I would like to be able to say that I live my life with no regrets.  If there were such a thing as nearly true, or almost true, it would apply here.  I don't regret most of my mistakes, even the big ones.  Others, however, are riddled with rue.  Like this one:

I regret ditching my freshman roommate.

She and I got along relatively well.  I liked her a lot.  But I knew someone with a better number for the sophomore room lottery, and I wanted to stay on campus.  She was really hurt when I told her, which surprised me.  I didn't know she liked me that much.  But the decision was already made.  And I got a great room.

She, however, got to keep the friends.  And we had an amazing group of them.  Phenomenal and rare.  I didn't realize just how rare until it was too late.  They all went off campus with her, and as easy as I thought it would be to hang out, it wasn't.  I had lost them.

Meanwhile, the group I tried to join never quite accepted me.  Despite the Christian connection, I didn't have nearly as much in common with them as I had with my other friends.  My new friends never understood me.  Plus, I was the only one without the shared history of that formative freshman year.

Now, six years later, I keep in regular contact with the latter group.  It is always awkward for me, and a little painful.  My second roommate became my best friend through the rest of college, and probably still would be, if she would ever return my calls.  The friendships I long to have kept--Ladan, Hilary, Erika, Nick, Erin--are unmistakably out of reach.

My 3-year-old nonverbal client imitated consonants today.  Little did we suspect that "p," "b," and "m" hailed an overwhelming flood of hope.  What do you tell a mother when she asks if her child will ever be normal?  Now we can tell her he's making significant progress.

He loves peek-a-boo.  When he discovered that he could walk into the closet and close the doors behind him, it was all over.  We fill the closet with a bunch of toys, and all he wants to play with is the closet.

I decided to quit today.

I didn't toy with the idea.  I didn't bat it around.  I actually decided.

I spent the entire morning in the ladies' crying my eyes out, for you see, I had exhausted my ability to wait until I got home.  I can't tell you exactly what I found (and have been finding) so upsetting, except to say that it must be a combination of a million seemingly insignificant things.  Altogether, they became overwhelmingly significant and engulfed me like a tidal wave.  Drowning in emotion, I clung to my only perceivable deliverance:  a less-than-graceful exit from all things grad school.  Seeing as I could no longer control my tear ducts while at school, I figured it likely that I may lose it during a therapy session.  And that's what every kid needs, a speech therapist having a breakdown.

It can be a somewhat scary prospect when two years of your future, which had previously been spoken for, suddenly become wide open.  And with those years, the rest of your working life.  I mentally explored the gamut of career fields, from professional harpist to mail carrier.  It forced me to face my values and priorities regarding higher education, investments, and quitting.  Will I regret not getting my master's?  Will I regret being miserable for a substantial portion of my twenties?

I prayed.  And I was surprised to realize that I hadn't really done so up to that point.  Not about this.  I had prayed about a lot of other aspects of the program.  The people.  My clients.  But I knew I was supposed to be there and what I was supposed to be doing.  That part was a given.

Then it was taken away.

So I prayed what I had learned to expect from so many other previous trials:  Lord, teach me a lesson.  Make me feel silly, when I look back on this, for not trusting You in the first place.

My therapy session this afternoon was the best one yet.  Everything else fell into perspective.  And I felt like a giant tool for telling people I was gonna quit.

I didn't cry today.  I am definitely making progress.

My professor's comments on my recently submitted paper:

"Excellent mixing of sources."

"Nice integration of Zemlin [anatomist] with topic."

"A pleasure to read."

"Excellent content and organization."

"A copy if you will."

Anybody wanna write my 10-page paper for me?  The topic is ventricular dysphonia.  Ready, go!

***
Update!

The paper is finished and turned in.  Now I need to find something else to stress out over.

I submit the following for your amusement.  For one of my projects at school, I had to elicit narrative samples from children.  The original narratives below were given over the course of one evening by Ryan, age 5.

?The Dinosaur Could Walk.  That?s the cover page.  One time, when the dinosaur had a cut-off leg, it still could walk.  But couldn?t walk.  Couldn?t get out of the way.  The end.?

?The Snake.  The Snake, that?s the cover page.  The snake could walk, but the snake keeped falling down.  It couldn?t even stand up.  The end.?

?The Lizard.  The lizard could walk, but it didn?t have any teeth.  But it could sneak under doors and it can, and it can sneak, sneak up your head.  The end.?

?The Shark.  And this is the cover page, The Shark.  The shark could swim in the sea.  And it eats the crocodiles.  And it eats the dolphins.  And it eats the octopuses.  The end.?

?The Raptor.  The raptor could eat every animal, every dinosaur in the world.  And it had sharp claws.  And it?s evil.  And it?s very evil.  And it sneaks, try to be quiet coming in the door.  And, and come into you and sneak into your house and, and, and cutting your arm off and you?d be dead.  The end.?

?The Deadly Man.  The deadly, the deadly man couldn?t do anything but it died all day long. And, and, and it keeped?  It got bited by a snake and, and?  [At this point, Ryan paused and one of his siblings watching TV shouted, ?She?s got two sets of twins!?]  And the twins died and, and the end.?

?The Eyeball That Could.  The eyeball died all along and it couldn?t get up but only his blood, blood.  And it hopped in the bookbag and when the person opened it, they throwed up in the bookbag on the eyeball.  And, and, and trash was in there and slugs and the end.?

?The Kid That Could.  The kid, the kid flied up in the airplane and they goed to Mexico and there it died.  The kid died at Mexico and, and the kid throwed up.  When the kid throwed up, when the kid throwed up, when the kid throwed up ?cause he looked around and looked at the old [unintelligible] eyeball and he squished it with a foot and then he looked at the bottom of his feet.  He throwed up and, and trashtruck and slugs on the bottom of his foot and trash and spiders.  The end.?

I suppose I should have titled this entry the Mystery of Dr. A., since I have yet to uncover the story behind her unusual appearance.  Dr. A. is one of my professors, her specialty child language, and she is severely disfigured on one side of her face and scalp.  My first class with her I didn't hear a word of the lecture, being instead completely preoccupied with her abnormality and what could have caused it.  How long had she been that way?  I kept hoping she would say something about it and quell my raging curiosity, but alas.

Since that time, I have made it my quest to find out what happened to Dr. A.  I thought surely the returning students would know something.  Nada.  No one seems to know anything.  I didn't come upon my first clue until a full semester later.  Dr. A. told an anecdote in another class and my friend happened to be there to hear it:

When she was eight years old, Dr. A. went to visit the eye doctor.  After checking her over, a nurse or someone asked if she had been having any problems with her vision on the left side.  She responded, "Well, seeing as it's my glass eye..."

I saw a six-legged woman today, the characteristic cadence of her walk heralding her arrival on the linoleum floor.  Ba-dum bum bum, ba-dum bum bum.  I saw her and marvelled at the evolution of Man.  She moved with the grace and precision unique to a hexapod, slow, regal.  Each step, or combination thereof, had a purpose, as did she, traversing the library in search of her source.  She came up and went back, and then she was gone.

There you have it, folks.  I have been pronounced "silly" by a three-year-old.

I wasn't even trying to be silly at the time.  I was trying to take a language sample: 100 utterances from a child aged 3-5.  It is a daunting task, requiring complete mental focus.  After all, children, like dogs, can smell fear.  Or in my case, silliness.

My audiology professor told an anecdote last semester about a more unusual ear exam.  The client evidently had an insect lodged in his ear, because when my professor looked through the otoscope, there were two eyes staring back at him.  Apparently he wasn't the only one to whom this has happened.

This semester I have a class on Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).  I'm reading about devices and methods used in schools to accommodate children with cerebral palsy, and it is absolutely breaking my heart.  I think this is mainly because in middle school, I had a classmate with cerebral palsy. 

His name was Jack, and we avoided him like the plague.  We were scared of him, or rather, we were scared of not knowing what to do, of being in an awkward situation.  I regret so much that I never tried to talk to him, or get to know who he was on the inside.  There was so much to him that we couldn't see.  He was smart!  He made straight A's.  Of course, in middle school we told ourselves that his aide was really taking his tests for him.  But I never believed that.  He was more aware than we gave him credit for, as I found out one day in World History, and will never forget.

They were testing the fire alarm that day, and they warned us over the PA system.  When the alarm sounded, Jack flinched noticeably in his wheelchair.  It was such a sudden movement that it drew the gaze of the entire class for a moment.  Afterwards, my friend who was sitting near Jack heard him ask his aide, "Did they laugh?"

I have to stutter.

I-I-I-I have to stutter.

In p-p-public.

For a p-p-project.

I b-b-better p-practice.

Is it just my imagination or does every college employee, with few exceptions, seem determined to stick it to the students?  As an undergrad, I was blessed with online registration, so I never had to brave the bureaucratic hell that is the registrar's office.  Their first line of offense is the incomprehensible form, which, if not filled out correctly, will ensure the student has to make at least two trips to the end of the line.  Then, if by some miracle nothing can be found lacking in the completed form, there is always the old standby, the inexplicable "block:"

Employee:  Sorry, there's a block on your account; I can't register you.
Hapless student:  What?!  What kind of block?
Employee to self:  That's for me to know and you to go on a wild goose chase.

And then there is the I.T. department.  Just today I had to see about fixing my non-functional userid/password because, gee, I might want to get my grades at some point.  I bade farewell to the light of day and descended to the bottom floor of the building.  There I found an unmarked window, and below it a red button with the sign, "Ring bell for assistance."  I pushed the button, which was not a bell, but more of a buzzer.  It sounded a mocking weah-weah-weah on the other side of the window, alerting the employees that another pigeon had landed.

After a few minutes of ignoring my existence, a dour employee approached the window.  At this point, I realized that the floor on the other side was a foot higher than the floor where I was.  Since the window, midway down the wall, was only 6 inches in height, I was forced to stoop to look at the employee as he loomed over me, brimming with sysadmin authority and malicious intent.  He ignored my grievance, just recited back to me the prompt on the login site, with a terminal "If that doesn't work, come back tomorrow."

Y'know what?  I don't like exams.  I know that sounds examist.  But I really don't.

I came across an old sorority photo today as I was walking through the garage.  It was from my first week of college, when I had just pledged.  I had forgotten I had it.

There we all were.  When I hardly knew any of the people embracing me.  When I still thought being in a sorority was about sisterhood and ideals.  Before any of it went downhill.  But there next to me in the picture stood my best friend, only she wasn't my best friend at the time.  We met because we pledged the same sorority, and we bonded because we both became disillusioned with it.

Still, to be able to gaze at the picture and go back to that instant made me happy.  It was the most fun we ever had.

I hate being smarter than my professors.

That is all.

Children are expected to be 90% intelligible by age three.  That's really important.  At least, my professor sure thinks so.  That question stumped me on the test today and now I'm all bitter because I went back to my notes and, sure enough, there's a big stupid asterisk by that information.  I don't usually use asterisks.  I can only surmise that the me of September 5th was trying to send a message to the me of today.  Pay attention, McFly, you might need to know this.  Well, I didn't get it.

I am such a wimp.  I have agreed to tutor one of the undergrads who is having difficulty in the grammar course.  She was given my name by the professor; I didn't know her beforehand.  I'll be meeting with her for an hour twice a week.  The problem is... I can't bring myself to ask about compensation.  Did she think I would be doing this for free?  I mean, I want to help her out and everything, but my time is valuable (not to mention my expertise as a degree-holding linguist).  And it's not like she's a little 19-year-old who wouldn't be able to afford a tutor.  She's a returning student in her 40's.

I saw her today and she bought me a coffee since I didn't have any cash on me.  I laughed and said, "Ok, we're even," relieved that I didn't have to ask her to pay me.  But now I fear I've only delayed the inevitable so that it will be even more awkward when I do have to bring it up.  I don't even know what the going rate is for tutoring these days.  I wouldn't ask for a lot; I don't want to be cost-prohibitive.  Neither do I want to be a doormat.  Any suggestions as to how to broach the subject?

When I decided to go grad school, I imagined myself keeping my readers updated with all the cool things I would be learning each day.  That hasn't exactly happened, mostly because the things I'm learning I don't believe to be particularly interesting to the general public.  However, this I will share with you:  I now feel completely justified in my utter disdain for cigarette smoke.  And you would, too, if you had watched videos of surgery and the subsequent rehabilitation after removal of the larynx (or voice box).  It is a gruesome thing to watch someone breathe out of his neck and try to talk with his esophagus.  You can't sing, you can't shout, and your voice quality will forever sound at various points "gurgly."  I found myself terrified to be in that predicament someday, and I don't even smoke.  I can't imagine how anyone could light up again after seeing that.

We were discussing radical laryngectomies today and the off-the-wall procedures surgeons have invented to compensate for the loss of the vocal cords.  One procedure involved pulling the stomach upward in order to use the stomach wall as a pseudo-voice box.  Another required the importing of sphincteric muscles from another part of the body.  We just couldn't help ourselves:

"Gives new meaning to the phrase 'talking out your butt.'"

"Yeah, I bet the voice quality is pretty crappy."