no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Awww, thanks Jenny. I work at a youth/community center on a team that deals with extremely disconnected and at-risk young ppl between the ages of 16-24 who are all either gang, court or street involved and often all three. Right now I have a caseload of 16 kids. The ultimate goal of the program is to get them into educational or pre-vocational programming and hopefully out of extreme poverty and violence. I've only been there two months but I absolutely love it so far but still have so much to learn. I won't lie - it can be really frustrating and heartbreaking but also really rewarding and fun in a lot of ways.

<3<3<3

That's good stuff.

oh man I WISH I had thought of the IUD for a co-worker/friend who is my age (27). She's a single mom who started seeing a guy (37) who insisted she go off the pill for some douchebag reason, and she went with it, she got pregnant, he was there when she found out so he knew right from the start. Next day she found out he'd been cheating on her for entirety of their 6 month relationship. She doesn't want it, wants to try to give it to him when it's born and concentrate on raising her own daughter. She scheduled two abortions and chickened out each time - this fucking asshole has told her he'll "cut her into little pieces" if she gets rid of the baby, but also wants her to keep it, raise it, etc so he can pop in and out of its life and feel like a Dad without much of the effort. the whole situation makes me sick and an IUD would have been the PERFECT solution when he insisted on not using condoms/letting her continue to take the pill. Ugh.
/rant, sorry about that

^^^ I hear this sort of thing a lot. Sadly it's not all that uncommon. :/

x-post The fact is that it would be really really easy to dismiss most of these kids as lost causes or something similar and most in their lives have done so. The thing is that most of these kids have experienced extreme trauma in their lives pretty much since birth and I'm talking the kind that would fuck someone up for life esp when coupled with growing up in an environment of drugs, violence and crime. I think keeping that in mind is what keeps my co-workers motivated and unwilling to give up even when things are at their most frustrating.

we have a program like that which feeds students (if they're interested/willing/ready) into our school. many of them wind up in my developmental writing class. i was sad because this past semester one of my best students stopped coming because she lived like 3 bus transfers away and her mom refused to give her money for the bus pass because she's on disability. i had to fail her. it sucked, but she never called me or anything :(

she didn't have kids, but many of them are 19 year girls with 2 kids, etc. i am in no position to talk to them about their reproductive health unless they explicitly ask me for help, but it would be nice if someone had told them about IUDs.

Abusers often exert control over their partner's reproductive options like that. This asshole is abusive, and I am so sorry for your coworker/friend. It's an awful situation. xp

Yeah, IUDs are pretty perfect for these situations.

it sucked, but she never called me or anything :(

Yeah, that happens a lot where they'll just drop off the face of the Earth and stop showing up for months at a time. Part of our whole thing is relentless outreach so that we'll go try to find these kids wherever they might be. I haven't heard from one of my girls for a couple weeks and I'm pretty sure she's using right now so today my supervisor and I are going to go out and try to talk to ppl and find out where she is. It's really frustrating because he phone is turned off so I don't have any other way of contacting her right now.

not on topic, but

another irredeemable romcom? here you go:

http://blog.onlinemoviesunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/leap-year-movie-poster.jpg

the premise of this movie makes me physically ill -- it's what 13 year olds watch (who else would watch this?) and it warps their brains and then they have difficulty being happy until they're 30. sweet jesus stop this movie before it starts next time.

But Amanda! This one is DIFFERENT. The girl is going to propose to THE GUY!!! Wacky!!!

yeah in some loophole day bc she's been waiting so long for him to be prince charming and he isn't. and doesn't her father put her up to it? that movie looks terrible.

spacecadet, i had the same issues as you with the pill. it was almost like withdrawal during the off week or something. i'd get crazy headaches and just feel like my body was being fucked with for a week. it was really unsettling. and this was a low dose one, too!

fuck i hate this movie so much

Someone needs to stab that movie in the face.

i just read this about 2 minutes ago: http://jezebel.com/5443630/leap-year-a-movie-only-in-a-strictly-technical-sense. "When The New York Times compares your latest film to "a load of poo," there's a problem."

The ads for it on USA and Bravo are non-fucking-stop. Enough already, Universal.

just to go back to the contraception issue: a few years ago i was having a really hard time on the pill - i was so depressed and crying all the time and unhappy, and really wanted to stop taking it... but my bf at the time completely refused to deal with the situation - he didn't outright 'refuse' to use condoms, but he wouldn't buy any, wouldn't be proactive at all, just wouldn't participate in the ~contraception conversation~ at all. like it was all my problem to sort out and take care of.

Ugh thats awful J :(

Just wanted to say that while I know that the BCP isn't great for everyone, that much like Harbl I actually had no problems with at all and for some ppl it's still def the best option.

erica, what is your take on tubal ligation (hope that's the right term)

bad idea imo if you ever might might might want kids!

no, i mean for after you're past 'child-bearing' age. i don't think i still want to be using condoms when i'm 60

i worry about the carbon footprint my condom usage is leaving

hahahaha well then yeah go for it, then!

my mom did after my little sis was born because um, 'catholic family planning' was not really doing the trick.

My mom did it after me and I'm an only child! Not sure what that means or if I even want to know.

If you're past child bearing age, surely you don't need birth control?

Think she probably meant past the age at which she would like to have kids but where it might still technically be possible.

yeah, like after mid-30s

sounds ok but invasive if doctors aren't already in there doing something else (like pulling out a baby)? safer, quicker, and easier for yr dude to just get a vasectomy

Way way way true. It's an out-patient procedure and MUCH safer than the female options, and I know bcp is a lot better than it was 30 yrs ago, say, but messing with hormones that affect a person's whole body and brain over DECADES is still a bigger deal than one stupid little physical change.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/119090/30-rock-james-franco-on-30-rock#s-p1-sr-i1

your hand feels like a pillow that's been in the microwave.

try to look like you just got drilled. you know the deal.

ok has anyone ever read this? is it stupid and self-helpy or is it good?
http://www.phantasmaphile.com/images/2007/04/08/034540987601_sclzzzzzzz_ss500_.jpg

what i want: interesting myths
what i don't want: finding your inner alpha female

Ha, I just said this on the Chicago thread, but I owned it for a long time and never read it. I think it is inner alpha female, like Starhawk type shit.

i think my mom tried to buy it for me when it came out, when i was in high school. i think i probably needed it more then than i would now.

I read it in college, Amanda, but a LOT of it made no sense to me then. Recollection is hazy but I suspect Jenny is right about inner blah blah blah.

I read it when it first came out - I remember enjoying the Jungian archtype myth parts of it somewhat, but my lingering impression after almost 20 years is that it was over the top and irritatingly new-agey in other parts.

Hi, btw - I've been reading this thread off and on but hadn't jumped in before.

Hi!

Hello, friend!

The psychics at the hotline where I used to work were all pretty into that book, too, if that helps any.

I think WWRWTW was my first foray into er wimmen's issues/feminist anything so it was like picking the wrong software package to learn a new language (since that book was pretty much off the deep end). Did not comprehend.

Got that as a gift from a family friend when it first came out but never read it. It just seemed too new agey to me, I think.

The psychics at the hotline where I used to work were all pretty into that book, too, if that helps any.

― she is writing about love (Jenny)

omg i want to hear more about this!

yeah, that's what i thought too. i just wondered if maybe i had been wrong all these years and it was just an exploration of women in myth, etc.

i guess my initial suspicion that if that were so, it wouldn't have been such a bestseller is probably accurate. sorry to underestimate the general book buying public, but...i didn't even trust them when i was in high school.

i also thought that clarissa pinkola testes would be a stoopid punny username :-/
i call this my weird al problem.

oh yeah jenny, storytime

In 1996, I lived in Boulder, CO (natch) and got a job as a customer service representative at a small, independently owned psychic hotline. I was eventually promoted to customer service manager. They did a reading on me to determine whether I was a good fit for the position. I worked there a little more than a year, and quit when I moved back to DE to get away from The Worst Boyfriend Ever. Shortly after I left, then sold out to a bigtime 900 line.

what kind of customer service issues arise when dealing with psychics? how do you diffuse an angry customer whose reading had not come true? or was it mostly billing?

Well, as a self-proclaimed "ethical psychic line," matching the customer up with an appropriate reader was very important. We had 12 or maybe 16 readers working for us, but they worked regular shifts. They specialized in different areas, too. So while everybody was adept at relationships, we had a couple who were good with pets, some who were good with careers, one who was good with real estate. Plus they had different reading styles - some were very sweet, some were no-nonsense, some were practical, etc. etc. They used different tools, too (Tarot, scrying, runes, just being psychic). So how it worked is a customer would call a toll-free number and the CSR would tell the customer who was on duty and what their specialties/styles/methods were. We could recommend a particular reader or patch the customer through to the reader of his or her choice. If the customer bought 20 minutes or more of phone time, they had five no-cost minutes to figure out if they didn't like the reader and then they'd come back to the CSR and we'd try again or just refund the money.

We also kept a database of regular customers and tracked who they read with and how much money they spent. We had spending caps! And time limits on 900 line calls! I mean, the spending caps were high enough to get somebody into some trouble, but not high enough to put somebody into bankruptcy.

I don't think I ever had to deal with a customer whose reading did not come true, but I did have to put a woman through to a suicide hotline when one of our readers told her that her cat was going to die and she called back in a bad way saying that she was going to kill herself. Eeeeeeeee. She got put on the "No Calls" list, meaning that we would not accept her business anymore. This was for the protection of the psychics, who could be psychically harmed by a particular kind of crazy.

Which isn't to say that people's readings always came true, just that most people were placated by the personal attention and money back deal that they didn't make a fuss if a reader was inaccurate. Also, it is easy enough to explain that away by saying that there just wasn't a good connection, or that the customer knowing what was going to happen changed the outcome, etc. etc.

Oh as a CSR, I got free readings from all of the staff psychics so I could better explain to customers how they worked.