Settling in

Unbelievably it’s already September 5, which means I have been home from the Peace Corps for seven weeks and in Philadelphia for almost three, and I’m now sitting at my desk all Doogie-Houser-style typing up a long-overdue update on what I’ve been doing with myself during that time. It might even contain a few poignant observations on the nature of humanity or something.

Well, seven weeks – or even seven days, for that matter – is a little daunting, so I’ll start with today. After attending the MSW orientation for the better part of the day, I was thrilled to discover that I still had an hour left until the Philadelphia public library closed (on their library card is printed: “This card enables you to exercise your freedom to be informed. Use it often.” How cool is that?), so I ran myself down there a few blocks from campus and stocked up on all the books I’d been pining for while in Moldova, AND still made it back in time for the MSW student happy hour at 5pm! I then settled in with my new comrades for a few Yuenglings (the local cheap yet surprisingly good beer) and a mountain of French fries covered in cheese and bacon, as all things should be. Everyone I met throughout the day in our awkward ice breaker exercises and at the happy hour was great, and I was pleased to discover that for all my worries and misgivings over the past months of anticipation, I seem to have finally shaken most of my adolescent “I’m a huge dork” anxiety and people maybe even think I’m sort of cool. And two girls liked my shoes! Hoorah!

Tonight I caught a Penn shuttle home – hey, I’m Ivy League now, we have our own buses and shit – and then settled in to read a book while simultaneously watching a movie because for some reason just watching a movie doesn’t really work for me. I only figured this out the other day, that the reason I’ve fallen asleep during 95 percent of the movies I’ve watched is because I get bored or lulled to sleep or something. So, I now give myself permission to multitask my little heart out. I put in Million Dollar Baby, which as I anticipated had the same effect on me as my beloved girl boxer flick Girlfight, which is to say it got me suddenly doing crunches and leg lifts almost without realizing it. Nothing like a good training montage to get me wanting to go back to the gym! Anyhoo, I lay on my bed reading a book and doing leg lifts and watching the movie and glancing at the stack of other library books and thinking, Maybe I should go grab that one, followed by, No actually you shouldn’t, and then I realized that the movie was actually pretty good and required more than my fleeting attention. Then the movie progressed and, not to give anything away, I found a tear or two slipping down my cheek, until by the final scenes I was full on bawling my eyes out. I had had so much weighing on me ever since arriving in this city and I handled it all largely alone, I didn’t even feel like calling people to vent, I just wanted to focus and try to find my way around the obstacles in my way, and now that I was finally moved in and reasonably familiar with navigating my way around and my car was registered and I had a driver’s license and I had determined that I wasn’t in fact a social pariah….I guess I just needed a good cry. And it was good.

Then I looked up and caught my reflection in the shiny surface of my laptop’s screen, and my face was all scrunched up the way it will when you really let yourself ball your eyes out, and I had to laugh at myself a little bit.

Now tomorrow morning it’s up at 7:30am (oh, the horror!) to walk to school about 15 blocks away, where I have my intro to something or other class with a professor who is supposed to be a hard ass but brilliant, which is my favorite kind. As I’ve said a million times going into this grad school business, I am not here to screw around, and I won’t feel I got my money’s worth (and oh, the money it is) if they don’t make me work for this degree. I could probably name the five A’s I have from undergrad that I’m truly proud of, and not to sound like an asshole, but it wasn’t for lack of A’s. Hopefully some of you out there know what I mean. I think I flourish under professors who have exacting standards, don't take my crap (don't accept my late papers or tardiness, etc.) and make it known they’re tough graders. When I meet their expectations, that is satisfaction. When I walk into a class and the professor announces “my class is an easy A” that’s the death knell for my motivation. Hopefully I won’t be hearing that at this school.

Oh, that reminds me of something. Today we had a “break out session” where a bunch of us stood in a class room and moved around along a continuum of low/high power and privilege in response to prompts read by a professor. For those of you not familiar to the concept, power and privilege is big in the social work/non-profit/volunteering world. Most commonly you’ll probably hear it used in reference to race, and if you’re interested there’s an excellent short article called “Unpacking the invisible knapsack” which illustrates the unrecognized forms of power and privilege white people receive by being white. For example, a white person feels “normal”, that they’re without special status; whereas non-white people are very much aware of being an “other”. A white person sees their normalcy reflected in magazine ads, the appearance of dolls, the color of band-aids, even – up until a few years back – the “flesh” crayon in the Crayola box.

So those are examples of what is called white power and privilege. The reason I bring this up is, as we were doing the exercise earlier, I was surprised to find myself often the only person standing along the far “high power” wall, until I almost felt like I had to explain myself. The thing is, I don’t think all of my peers got it. Seriously they seemed to view it as a sign of cockiness or something, when the point is not that by being, say, able-bodied, I’m saying “god, I am soooo awesome and not disabled!” but rather that society accords me power and privilege based on that status. I was the only one over there when the professor read off “physical appearance”, for example. Was I there because I am a model and therefore powerful? Nooooo. I was there because I’m relatively thin, not short, do not have any unusual features and so on, all of which give me privilege in society over the heavy, the short, and so on. (Don’t believe me on the short thing? Read Malcolm Gladwell’s stuff on how in America each extra inch of height translates to into higher salaries.)

Then – then! – we had to break into dyads and discuss the power status we ranked ourselves most highly on. I chose to discuss heterosexuality since I figured the other 15 or so white people in the room would have race pretty well covered, but to my amazement not one, not two, but five people chose…geographic location? WTF?!

That’s right, folks. Today I learned that one young woman has been accorded power and privilege by being from California, because when she moved to the East Coast “people thought it was really cool I was from there and asked me about it.” Another pair of girls said that they had power and privilege by growing up on the East Coast “because I guess I just grew up thinking it was better”. Then another two people informed the class that they received privilege due to religion, which is entirely plausible; however, they then proceeded to explain this privilege as including the feeling of hope and meaning that they gain from their Catholic faith, which non-religious folks probably miss out on. Not. The. Point!

Power and privilege is not about whether you like your status as a member of a particular group, it is about the rights (or lack or rights) society gives you based on that status. Religious privilege could include being Christian in America, where this is taken to be normal, expected, even “right” and in accordance with the principles on which the nation was founded; religious privilege is not that you really like the donuts you get at each Sunday’s coffee hour.

Gaah! And the professors nodded sagely and murmured over how insightful this bunch of doodie was and never mentioned that maybe these students completely misunderstood the concept. Yes, I understand that in the touchy-feely world of social work people are always entitled to define for themselves what things mean and so on, but it is also our school’s job to make sure we don’t leave with our diplomas spouting nonsense.

I left that exercise feeling very un-social-worker-like. But surely the field needs people like me, right? I don’t want to sit around being all self-congratulatory and telling everyone that everything they say is right just because they feel it is.

Sigh…give me a few months in the program and I’m sure I’ll be back to my jargon-spouting, active-listening social worker self.