Things are a lot better today. Sunshine. Sammich from a sammich shop (one of the few identifiable cravings I have). S addressing a little bit of the last five days’ nonsense this morning. Very nice dental hygienist this morning. So much so that I think I’m permanently switching to Fridays for dental cleanings. And now, waiting around at site 2! If no one shows up for this group I won’t evict the two men having a meeting in there at all.
There are two things that OTs are kind of known for (I take it; to me the association was always pediatrics until I started digging), and they are cooking/baking and gardening. Those are two things that I'm not really about - at least not these days. I do remember a time when I used to bake and cook. Baking in my teens, mainly; cooking in my 20s. Gardening when I was a child, but mostly because my dad told us kids to go do it already and what were going to say - no? There have been a few forays since then but I mainly fail at those types of long-term systems maintenance things which probably means they're really good for me, actually, and I should do them the most.
My sensory system, however, doesn't like them. There's a tool called the Sensory Profile (not creative, but very descriptive) and while it's mostly (in my experience) used for kids, you can use it for adults too and it tells you where you fall in relationship to a normed group of people your same age (it's not divided by gender, though) as regards four types of sensory processing styles. What are they? Thanks for asking! They're: sensory seeking, sensory avoiding, low registration, and sensory sensitivity and once you take the test you find out if you're much less, less, about the same, more, or much more like people in that normed group I talked about in relationship to each um...sensory processing style.
The thought is that if you know that information about yourself then you can kind of hack yourself into being higher functioning or just, you know, feeling better in the world, or (I suppose) requesting accommodations for yourself. It's not a perfect measure but it's the best one out there to my knowledge. Here's the thing though - I think there might be a relationship between sensory processing and addiction. And now that I'm at the end of my capstone I'm kind of out of time to explore that in-depth, but I do want to bring it into some of the interventions I'm doing one-on-one with people here at the end. Because what if someone scores...I don't know...Much More Than Others on sensory sensitivity. Wouldn't engaging in certain types of addictive behaviors or substances level that out? Or what if someone else scored Much Less Than Others on sensory seeking? If I were going forward with this much longer I'd probably start looking at that and try to design a large-scale study to see if there are any correlations between types of substance use/psychiatric diagnoses/sensory processing style.
So if anyone out there is looking for a capstone...there you go, and get on that IRB approval.
Not so great things:
- The dude throwing an almost-empty pack of lucky strikes at a woman on the sidewalk. Hey! Don’t do that.
- Dreams about my grandmother and how her friends were…shitty? Odd dream. She was on some sort of space cruise and I was trying to help her out mobility and ADL-wise, and her friends were just running laps around her and not even stopping to ask her how she was.
- During one of the last groups in which a person attended, he (the person) was talking about things and stuff and in the background, outside the window, someone was dumpster diving. I assume for needles (there is a needle exchange in this building)? Distracting.
Neutral things:
- Running into Sc, my ex (surprise!), at Site 1 a few days ago. Not negative, not positive, just A Thing. 'twas 12 (...damn) years ago since we dated and we're both professional af, so that's good. What a long. Ass. Time. Ago that was. 12 years, that is.
- Piecing together my final presentation for my degree. The process really...does work? Like, actually? And there are a lot of pieces of my project that seem kind of like they (the school) are just trying to get free labor from students, but that's kind of part of the deal with academia. Right? Right. As long as they approve the hours.
- H intermittently dropping down in my pelvis for fun and profit. Another mom at school pickup yesterday said that since I'm scheduled for a c-section anyway even if I go into labor early they should still give me a c-section and so not to worry about that. Hope she's right.
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