Today has been one of those days that is both good and bad, and also marks an important turn of events in my life. I would say it has been bittersweet, but that isn’t the right word for it.
I went to my juvenile delinquency class this day knowing that we would have a guest speaker, Ron Powers, but hadn’t thought about it too much. We had been told to read one of his articles, The Apocalypse of Adolescence in preparation for today’s class, but I had read it several weeks before and didn’t have time to go over it again. I was unprepared, but today’s class found me pleasantly surprised.
The article is about these two teenage boys from a small town in Vermont who brutally murdered a married couple of college professors. Beyond these two boys, it spoke of how the small-town values espoused by Vermont and so much of the United States often hide a dark and even ugly underbelly, one in which the children–supposedly the reason people hold those values–are bored, anxious, depressed, filled with pathos, and sometimes are even murderous. Mr. Powers talked with us about the article relates to the state of the juvenile justice system today, and the conversation eventually turned to one of his books, Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore, and how during the process of researching for it he had visited this out-of-the-way, nearly abandoned little hospital where some “feral children,” as they were unofficially called, were kept. These were the children who were known as disruptive or dangerous and simply could not be managed within the normal school system, and thus were sent to this “alternative school” for lack of a better placement. He met the children and described them as blank, distant, nearly translucent, and asked the man who was in charge of them, “Is justice being done here?” The man shrugged, spread his hands, and said, “I don’t know.” I think that’s a strong metaphor for the way we’re dealing with juveniles who run across the legal system. We try our best, but rarely are we sure that we’re doing the right thing.
At some point I was making a point about how there are two Vermonts–the idealized Green Mountain state, full of small town mountains and skiing, and how that struck me as odd, having grown up in Missouri. Missouri is also a predominantly rural state, but has no such duplicity about itself. It is what it says it is–a state of farmers and meth labs, and no one pretends that it is any different. He asked which area of Missouri I was from, and I told him that it was near Sedalia, and he said that he knew the town and had written about it in the book. During a break about midway through the class, Mr. Powers came up to me and asked if I’d like a signed copy of Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore. I said of course I would, so he signed his own copy and handed it to me. The inscription reads, “To Rebecca–who knows the territory.” I thought that was quite nice of him, and am looking forward to reading it. I’m a little peeved at myself for not realizing until later that last year I had read one of his books, Mark Twain: A Life, and liked it quite a lot.
I came home after class feeling pretty happy, and sat down to check my email. This was when I found out that I did not gain acceptance into the program at Drexel. As I’ve heard from all of the PhD programs now and haven’t been accepted into any of them, it seems I won’t be able to start working on my doctorate this fall. I did get accepted into two PsyD programs, but neither of them would be anything approximating a good fit for me. Now it’s time for the backup plan, which means I need to go about getting permanent residency in Canada. Bryan can sponsor me as his partner, so it should be easy enough for me to get it (we hope). Once I gain permanent resident status, I’ll be able to get some work experience within my field, which will hopefully make me a more attractive candidate for Canadian doctoral programs. I will also take the Graduate Record Exams again next year since my old exam scores are going to expire soon. That won’t be so fun, but with some study I hope to improve upon my previous scores and make myself a more attractive candidate. I’m happy about this chance to live and work in Canada, as the Canadian corrections system holds values that are more liberal than those of most of the United States, making them more in line with my own. I like Canada so much that eventually I’d like to become a dual citizen, but that will have to wait until I’ve been a permanent resident of Canada for at least three years.
All in all, this has been quite a day. It hasn’t been bittersweet, but it has been a day of tempered optimism.
, but the double cable addition and placement was my own, and I guess that’s enough to call it my own pattern.