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I have 100 extra Thank You cards. I've decided to give all of them out and started a blog to document this process.







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30 January 11

From about January of last year when I passed my qualifying exams until mid-August, life was magical. Evidence of this is all over my blog. There were the multiple vacations Tom and I got to take with family and friends to tropical islands (only to return to Santa Barbara, California, land of staggeringly gorgeous scenery and perfect weather), the progress I made on my dissertation (and the grants I was awarded to fund it, and the people I’ve met while working on it), and the freedom and flexibility that my fellowship provided to work as late as I wanted and sleep when I wanted (I am a work late/sleep late girl). I feel like a jerk just typing all that out and those are just some of the highlights. Suffice to say that it’s no coincidence I started a blog about gratitude in what was one of the best points of my life.   

In May we used free airline miles, accrued during our trip to Puerto Rico, to fly back to the east coast to see one of my favorite bands reunite. In the week between those shows and the cruise we took with Michele and her family and friends to the Bahamas, I presented my work to a team of government researchers who were looking to add someone to the fold who did the type of research I do. After my presentation and Q&A session, I spent more than three hours talking to them and asking them questions. They offered me the job two weeks later; I accepted. With my mid-September start date in mind, Tom and I waited until July, when my hiring paperwork was in progress and I’d received the go-ahead from my future supervisor, to plan the move. We secured an apartment; we hired movers; Tom put in for a transfer with his company; we started packing. More of the same magic.

Then, my paperwork hit its final stages of approval at the federal office in Atlanta, where they decided that…I couldn’t be hired for that position after all, because my degree wasn’t on a list of those approved for it despite the job call encouraging folks with my degree to apply. I’d have to go through a different hiring process that would take months with no guarantee I’d get my own job.

It was bad news but…alea iacta est—the die has been cast*. The gears were in motion for us to move and they kept turning. Our movers (Lion Transportation, Inc.) were total scumbags. We couldn’t get in touch with them for days before they were scheduled to pick our stuff up. When they finally did show up late (at that point we were relieved they showed up at all, since our lease was up the next day) they told us our bill would be twice the estimate they’d given us. By the time they left with all our stuff and a large piece of what was in our bank accounts, I was almost sick. The next day we started to drive east, two humans and two dogs in a Volkswagen Golf for a week. On the way, a rabbit ran in front of our car in Arizona in the middle of the night and we spun out to avoid it, shredding our tires to the tune of $400 (we are friends to animals). Our dogs were attacked by bees in Colorado. Our movers wouldn’t answer their phones ever (this went on for weeks). When we finally made it to our new place, Yuuki had severe panic attacks whenever we had to leave without her and yelped like she was being tortured until we came back.

Two weeks into this new life, I had no job, almost no money, hardly any friends, no furniture, no clothes aside from those I’d been wearing for three weeks, no means of communication with our movers, and no way of knowing if or when our stuff would ever arrive. The straw that threatened to break the camel’s back was registering our car in Maryland, which meant submitting to the state’s safety inspection. I’d read horror stories of unfortunate souls who had to pay thousands to get their cars up to code, and while we’d gotten a lot of work done on the Golf before we left California, I braced myself for the dollar value associated with getting a 11-year-old car “safe.”  

So on what would have been my start date at the job we’d moved across the country for me to work, I found myself wandering along the side of Route 650 looking for a place to sit and work on my dissertation while the guys at a gas station inspected my car for safety violations. I already wasn’t where I should have been, and I couldn’t help but think that this whole “wandering along the side of the road looking for somewhere to be when I should be somewhere else” thing was a meta comment on my life (i.e., What the hell am I doing here?/I don’t belong here). With limited options, I surrendered a tiny piece of my soul and went to McDonald’s because it was there and I was there and hey, why not? Given the myriad unpleasantries I was facing, why not spend my afternoon in a McDonald’s? It was poetic. I ordered a small drink and found a booth in the back where it seemed least likely that someone would bother me. Another girl had her laptop plugged in to an outlet on the ceiling so I stood on the table and plugged my laptop in as well. The wireless was just poor enough to discourage me from using it, except for a brief sweep of Facebook, where I saw a post from a friend that The Dismemberment Plan were playing reunion shows in Washington, D.C. in January.

Just like that, everything got better.   

I love The Dismemberment Plan. They are one of my favorite bands ever. Emergency & I is one of my favorite records ever. Others have written about the beauty of this record here (and a million other places) more eloquently than I ever could, so I will just point out some things about it that I love. Their bassist is excellent, and as someone who plays bass, it is the first instrument I listen to and care about in music. Bass is often an afterthought, but for the Dismemberment Plan it is a focal point just as much as the other instruments. I love that. The drumming is creative and the rhythm section together makes this record worth listening to even if brilliant indie rock isn’t your thing. The lyrics are smart and the themes are consistent enough to be noticeable, but not obvious enough to dominate the record like so many bands have done with “concept albums.” I suppose it helps that lately I can relate to feeling hopeful and hopeless, fearless and afraid, and like the world is both starting over and about to end at the same time. Emergency & I captures those feelings, which makes it a record you can listen to and feel like someone understands you, even at what is certainly a transitional, uncomfortable, intensely weird but also strangely beautiful point in your life.

Now imagine the feeling of comfort in being understood and multiply it by hundreds, and that comes close to approximating how you feel at Dismemberment Plan’s live shows. Everyone there gets it. And of course, the band itself is amazing live. They play forever, and the whole time they look like they’re having fun (how many bands can you say that about these days? Very few). I recently heard someone say that this band’s records are personal experiences, and their shows are communal experiences, which struck me as accurate.

But back to Mc-fucking-Donald’s. So this singular moment in a day that was starting to seem as though it would be the nadir of a spectacularly bad stretch of time completely changed my outlook. It was like a little pinpoint of light breaking through the dark, threatening to broaden into something bright enough to see by.

With all this said, handing Dismemberment Plan’s singer Thank You Card #14 after Tom and I had seen them play two nights in a row last weekend was a really nice moment for me. And even things are decidedly not going your way, it’s these moments that keep you appreciative of life for the lovely, messy, complicated, uncertain, wonderful thing that it is and allow you to be happy right where you are.

*One of the two phrases I remember from Latin class (sorry, Mrs. Piedmont!) The other? De porco datum est, which translates into “A bit of pork was given” — it’s unlikely you’ll ever see me use that here though.

** The video above was taken by my brother Adam from onstage at the Plan’s show in NYC on Saturday, January 29.

6 June 10

Thank You Card #4

I’ve been running around like crazy the past week and a half, and though I’ve now given out about ten thank you cards, I’m pretty far behind with blogging about them. Now that I have some time I’m going to make an effort to catch up. So, all the way from lovely Milford, Connecticut, I bring you: Thank You Card #4!

TYC4 was given away in response to a minor miracle. Have you ever just thought to yourself, “Wow, it would be great if $1000 was just magically deposited into my bank account”? I think that all the time! Especially since I’m a graduate student already living in poverty, and simultaneously at the end of my funding while just about to start recruiting participants for my dissertation (whom I will need to compensate for their time). It’s a little frightening for me to think about money, unless the thoughts are of the “wishing for money to just be given to me for no reason” variety. But yeah, when does that actually happen?

Since this is a blog about gratitude, you can probably guess where this one’s going. Last week I went to campus, checked my mailbox, and found a letter from the department informing me of the momentously amazingly awesome incredible news that they were going to be direct depositing $1000 into my bank account. No, I’m serious, that actually happened to me! It seems there was some leftover money that the department would lose if they didn’t spend, and the faculty decided to give it to the graduate students to use for research (some students got travel money, too). I will use this money toward compensating my dissertation participants, and feel incredibly fortunate to have received such ridiculously timely gift. This also teaches me the valuable lesson of dreaming big: next time I will hope for random cash deposits in $10,000 increments — that would really stem participant attrition!

So, Thank You Card #4 went to the faculty, specifically the acting grad advisor, for making every grad student in the department feel like he or she had won the lottery.

Posted: 2:46 PM

Thank You Card #3

As I’ve progressed through graduate school, I’ve had to face the sad reality that as I learn more, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain to the world just what it is that I’ve dedicated my life to studying. Not only have I become so entrenched in my specific area of study, but I’ve also spent the majority of the past five years immersed among academics who speak the same obscure language. This isn’t a problem until I’m in the company of non-academics and someone asks me what I do and I start rattling off some mumbo jumbo about health communication and media effects and Lazarus and Folkman’s classic cognitive phenomenological theory of stress and wait…what? Or worse, if I’m in mixed company and I make a joke about the likelihood that the Yankees will win the game once Mariano Rivera comes out from the bullpen being significant at the p < .001 level and I’m like “Haha, I’m funny!” and mostly everyone else is like “Wait…what?” because they either don’t know that Mariano Rivera is the greatest closer of all time (Comm grads, I’m looking at most of you), or they’re not familiar with p-values.

Anyhow, the above is a disclaimer, because in service of telling you about Thank You Card #3, I have to write about what it is that I study. I’ll attempt to write it as non-snooze inducingly as possible if you try to stay awake. Here goes: broadly, I study health communication and media effects—this means I look at the ways that people use media (tv, internet, etc.) to communicate health information or promote positive health outcomes, such as behavior change or stress reduction. Over the past couple years, I’ve become increasingly interested in the latter, and as such, the dissertation I’ve developed is a media-based intervention designed to generate positive emotional experiences for people who are coping with chronic illness. That is a fancy way to say I’m using YouTube clips to make people feel happy or hopeful (depending on the condition to which they’re randomly assigned). But okay, so they feel happy…then what? And this is where the recipient of Thank You Card #3 comes in.

My dissertation is an applied research project (which means it might be useful in the real-world), but it is grounded in theory so I can make predictions about what should happen. The main theoretical rationale that underpins this project is Richard Lazarus’s cognitive appraisal of emotions. He argues that each emotion has its own “plot.” When you feel angry, for example, it’s because you perceive that someone has committed a demeaning offense against you or yours. Emotions also have action tendencies, which means that they typically motivate specific behavioral responses. Now that you’re all angry, your likely course of action is to retaliate (though this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to act on this motivation, just that it’s there). So, for each emotion you have the cognitive experience and a behavioral motivation. This is really cool, and it’s been the basis of so much amazing work, the bulk of which has focused on negative emotions — which is why I’m sending a heartfelt thank you to Barbara Fredrickson for her “broaden-and-build” hypothesis of positive emotions.

The B&B hypothesis says that positive emotions momentarily “broaden” one’s outlook, and over time, these expanded mindsets build psychological, social, and physical resources, all of which can help people cope with stressors. I love this work not only because it fills the gap of addressing positive emotions, but also because it makes predictions for both the immediate and long term effects of positive emotional experiences. (It’s also pretty easy to understand, no?). Furthermore, Fredrickson has conducted some very cool studies to test the “build” hypothesis. For instance, she and her team developed a meditation program designed to cultivate positive emotional experiences for a group of CompuServe employees during their lunch breaks over the course of a few months. The intervention increased daily experiences of positive emotions, which over time built resources such as social support; distal outcomes included enhanced life satisfaction and decreased symptoms of depression relative to control groups. That’s awesome! So, to take stock, Barbara Fredrickson has not only identified a giant gap in the emotion literature – no one really paid attention to positive emotions – but she also thought hard about how positive emotions are different in nature from negative emotions, not just in terms of their valence, but in terms of the cognitive and behavioral patterns they motivate. She then took it a step further and argued that positive emotional experiences are beneficial, and showed that they could actually counteract some of the damages of negative emotions. This is not even taking into consideration that her work has been with “real people” (i.e., not undergraduate samples) and conducted over time.

So, I owe a lot to Barbara Fredrickson, because not only does my dissertation borrow from her theorizing (as well as Lazarus’s) to make predictions about the cognitions and behaviors that hope should motivate versus those that joy should motivate, but also because I’m inspired by the way she conducts research. I feel it’s not often enough that you find the combination of someone who can do amazing theoretical work and take the time to apply it in real-world contexts to see if it actually works. She has done both, and for that reason she’s one of my academic heroes. And any time you find an academic hero, you have to thank that person, because he or she can represent a beacon of light in the long tunnel that is grad school.

Themed by Hunson. Originally by Josh