Tuesday, April 2, 2013

So much, so fast.

It seems crazy that the Spring Semester is almost over. I've been jammed at school & at home. I had my second of three semesters of Clinicals & gained a ton of confidence in the prep room. This was largely due to the thorough & patient disposition of one of my clinical mates. I feel very good going into my last semester this summer.

My LAST semester!

How insane is that?! If I can get through the end of this semester & the next, I'm officially done w/ school. I've got CANA (Cremation Association of North America) certification this summer & then all I need is Pre-need certification to be a very appealing Funeral Home employee applicant. I'll take my national board exams this fall & walk at graduation this winter.

We had originally planned to be moving back to Alaska whenever I completed my schooling but a perfect storm of opposing circumstances mean we'll be here for about 1 more year. I'm looking at this as a positive. I hope I have no trouble finding (any) job whenever I finish classes & I'll work up until we leave. Hopefully, we'll save some money & our road trip home will be enjoyable & not just utilitarian.



This semester, I have Restorative Art which means I've been sculpting a head out of mortuary wax. It's been slow going but I think I'm finally making a bit of progress. Tomorrow, I hope to get the ears on & maybe do some smoothing. After that, it's all cosmetics, lashes, brows & wig. Finishing touches. This go-around I've budgeted for all of that so I won't feel like such a failure for having a half finished head.

The day after tomorrow, I present a summary of a paper we did for Funeral Service Counseling. The teacher calls it a "Lossography" & it is exactly what it sounds like. A collection of the losses I've suffered in my lifetime. It was incredibly hard to write particularly in light of the recent loss of a close friend to drug overdose & the ongoing feelings of loss I deal w/ in regards to my father who suffered a brain injury which sped the progression of his dementia. Over the course of writing the outline & rough draft, it became clear to me that I might need some grief counseling myself. Hearing the presentations by my classmates last week cemented it for me. I'll probably be looking into finding a therapist soon.

Even morticians are affected by grief.

In Funeral Service Directing, our big project was a 2 part video recording of a funeral arrangement scenario role play. The first video went fine but in the second, we were under a bit of time constraint & as I was playing the funeral director, I really felt the pressure. I feel like I really didn't live up to my hype & my performance suffered. I think I'll actually do better in front of a real family. I have in the past. I just have to improve my impression.

A major personality defect I have is my tendency to take on the linguistic accent of the people I'm around. I never noticed it so much when I lived in Alaska because there isn't really one single accent I was exposed to for long periods of time. Down here, I affect a pronounced southern twang if I have to engage in conversation w/ a southerner for even a few minutes. It goes away once I'm back in my own home but the thicker the accent of the person I'm speaking to, the thicker my affected accent gets. I think it's likely a defense mechanism. Ironically, I hate sticking out too much so I try to adapt to my environs to better fit in. Part of that is affecting the regional dialect. Sometimes I worry that the real southerners find this quirk offensive so I'm actively working on on toning it down if not stopping it completely.

This summer is the time where I refine my image. I'm going to learn how to do everyday makeup & practical but professional hair styles. I'm going to work on my weight so that my wardrobe options get a bit more plentiful. Hopefully by August, I'll look like an honest to goodness career woman & not like a frazzled twentysomething pretending to be a grown up.

;)