Diana’s Little Corner in the Nutmeg State: My Story Part 36

Thursday, July 15, 2010

My Story Part 36 – The Future

In the past, I wrote about how past events have shaped my life, but today I want to write about my dreams of the future. Next May, (May 7th to be exact, not that I’m keep track or anything like that) I will be graduating from UConn with my Masters in Social Work and I have been thinking about what I want to do then. One of the ideas that I have been thinking that I might like to do after I graduate, is teach. Last semester, I developed a curriculum to teach a course called “Working with Gender Variant Clients” and I would to peddle the course to the local colleges. One of the biggest complaints that I hear from the trans-community is that we end up teaching our therapists because they are not exposed to any classes about trans-issues in college. I would like to rectify that omission. I would also like to give
workshops on diversity to businesses and universities. People have joked with me about getting my doctorate and I joked along with them, but there is a little seed in the back of my mind that says, “you know, that might not be a bad idea.” I would say the probability of that happening is only about 10%. However, if I did go for my PhD, it wouldn’t be in social work, but in gender studies.

I would also like to continue helping the trans-community with civil rights, housing and employment. Hopefully, once I get my MSW that it will help me to bring about change here in Connecticut. I just see so many trans-people who are struggling to get by that it makes me feel so helpless.

I have been also thinking about traveling. Someday I would like to travel around the country in a RV to visit the National Parks. I have been to almost all the National Parks this side of the Mississippi and now I would like to travel west of the Mississippi and visit the parks there. I loved the trip that we took out west to the Pacific coast when my cousin’s son was married in Everett Washington in

1999. On that trip my brother, sister-in-law and my nephew drove up to Port Angeles and then drove down the coast to San Francisco. I loved seeing new places. Another dream of mine is to take a trip in a windjammer along the Maine coast in the fall.

I have no desire to travel overseas, there is enough to see here in the United States. Except I would like to take a train ride through the Canadian Rockies, from what I understand, Lake Louise in Banff National Park is beautiful. Also I would like to visit Nova Scotia.

1 comment:

Kwizgiver7/15/10, 7:44 PM
Nova Scotia is worth going to visit. Halifax is a great city--kind of European feeling but definitely not old-world.

I love your plans for the future. Your course idea sounds interesting.
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Quotes

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

A right delayed is a right denied.Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

Martin Luther King Jr.

No one is born hating another person… People must learn to hate and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
Nelson Mandela

We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist
James Baldwin

There is a fine line between free speech and hate speech. Free speech encourages debate whereas hate speech incites violence.
Newton Lee

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
Albert Einstein

"The point is that there are always obstacles, whether they seem insurmountable or merely bothersome. The question is not how difficult the path, but whether in your heart, you wish to undertake the journey."
Zandru's Forge

Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.
Mahatma Gandhi

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught
You've got to be taught
To hate
And fear
You've got to be taught
From year
To year
Its got to
Be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to
Be carefully
Taught
You've got to be taught
To be
Afraid
Of people
Who's eyes are oddly made
And people who's skin is a different shade

South Pacific
Songwriters: Oscar Hammerstein II / Richard Rogers