and miles to go

I know, I know; I haven't updated in ages, but the Internet connection is finally working in my apartment again, and I'm catching up on Livejournal. I've snagged this interesting meme from mvmontgomery and gandydancer that was developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University.

( Privilege meme )

Occasionally I've had doubts about being where I think I should be, but I don't think I'd be as (wannabe) activist if I had gone to, say, a small liberal arts college. The ones I had considered attending are very much the relatively homogeneous bastions of intellectual, well-to-do youth; no offense, dragonfly66. The class that I facilitated with laleia, was a seriously eye-opening experience that forced me to reformulate my understanding of privilege. The all-girls school I attended for 7 years gave me a warped view of the cost of everything and the intangible benefits of being among or at least affiliated with the elite. I can honestly say that the majority of my high school friends' parents (and my parents' friends) have gone to grad school at Stanford/an Ivy League/other school of "that" standard; that's not quite the case for my college friends. People in Silicon Valley are educational snobs; Angelinos don't care so much about how you became rich and/or famous.

Honestly, it's uncomfortable being on the upper end of the socioeconomic scale among the people I know in college; USC has a surprising amount of class diversity among the student population for a private university especially because it has such extensive outreach to local neighborhood kids, partially for generating good PR and overturning the "University of Spoiled Children" nickname and partially for altruistic motives. (The UC system nowadays tends to attract the upper middle class, particularly at UCLA, Berkeley and even to a certain extent UCSD; poor kids who do get to go to college are channeled into the Cal State system.) As a TA leading discussions this time around for a seminar I took last semester, I felt like I learned so much more listening to various community organizers about their research and direct experience with the issues of access to some of the most fundamental services, particularly education and health care, and the barriers to them, both institutional and attitudinal/behavioral. Heck, just having students who lived in an uncle's garage for several years upon immigrating to America or who are on full need-based scholarships has made me appreciate how much I've been cushioned from reality by my family. I feel awkward advocating my students to Make A Difference considering that really, I haven't done much, if anything, after going through the same learning process they have. You need to know about the development and manifestation of prejudice and the incarnations of discrimination to be a more informed person, but what's the point if you're not doing anything about it? Changing your own attitudes is great but doesn't make much of a difference on the scale of things if you don't then take action on some issue. One of my goals this year is to volunteer more; I'm doing this program called the Joint Educational Project (JEP) for extra credit to alleviate some of my guilt about my hypocrisy. The problem with knowing so many über-involved people is that I always feel like a slacker by comparison, and that I waste my free time on relatively trivial matters that don't save the world in the end. That last statement is facetious, of course, but my conscience doesn't let up on me.

I know that discrimination is VERY much alive and well and keep discovering more and more flaws in the system, but even still I don't think I can honestly say that I personally have been a victim of injustice. There's that ambivalence about advocating for Asian American issues - I know that there are so many members of the APA community, particularly those from Southeast Asia, who have suffered from racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism and so many other -isms; immigration brings its unique set of challenges and traumas. I feel more comfortable focusing more of my energy on mental health issues/disability awareness (disabilities, occupations and the healthcare system has been my favorite class so far) because they affect everyone; at some point in time, we all gone into some kind of decline, and if we don't acknowledge the problems now we're pretty much screwing over ourselves and those we care about not so far down the line. Maybe I've taken too many psych classes, but I'm becoming a little hypervigilant about keeping an eye out for mental disorders in people I know, and part of me is prepared to give the awkward "I've been noticing lately..." talk when most often I'm missing a crucial part of the context. It's a variation of the medical student syndrome where suddenly you start spotting constellations of symptoms of various illnesses seemingly everywhere. Unfortunately, I tend to find good reasons for freaking out on friends, but self-confirming biases are also in action.

In the meantime, I need to figure out my new research schedule as I'm transferring into a new lab focusing on clinical psychology. Evaluating multisystemic therapy FTW! It'll be loads of fun trying to fit that in with peer counseling, admissions and film music research (more Elmer Bernstein rejected film scores and wrangling with the cinema archives about photocopying material), but my inner psych geek is really excited. Let's just hope I pass the treatment evaluation tests after training in February.