Can't say where I am...
...but it gives me pause thinking about Foucault's remarks about asylums. You see, most asylums work by subjecting the inmates to a very rigid schedule (breakfast, 7 AM, group meeting, 9 AM, Arts & Crafts 10-12...). Most people would blench at the notion of making clay ashtrays as an avenue of self-fulfillment, and most patients do. But because that's not doing what the warders want, that's sick behavior. If you want to get out, you display "healthy" behavior, which is to make the ashtrays, talking all the while about how it's very creative and fun, and how the MSW is so great to have thought this up.
Life here is similar: if you don't have a Program, school, or work, you have to go to meetings. Mostly, they're supposed to be useful stuff: how to apply for a job, how to look for "housing" (read: apartments), and suchlike. Some are semi-useful, or would be good to talk about in general, if you didn't know about it: birth control, nutrition, stress control. But then, there's what I like to call "mandatory fun": yoga, knitting, and so forth. It's not that I wouldn't enjoy knitting with some people, it's just that they insist that I knit with other people at the house, in the late afternoon, on pain of getting a demerit (five demerits get you kicked out). Multiply this pointless activity by four or five, all at inconvenient times for someone trying to do anything else, and you get a good idea of what a week here is like.
The Intern MSW tells me that I should think of this as a club, with meetings and activities, and rules, however arbitrary. I pointed out that in real clubs, the members get to pick what the rules are, and when to have meetings and what activities we should have. She can't quite answer this.
It's even weirder when you consider that this is not, strictly speaking, a theraputic community. It's a homeless shelter.
Life here is similar: if you don't have a Program, school, or work, you have to go to meetings. Mostly, they're supposed to be useful stuff: how to apply for a job, how to look for "housing" (read: apartments), and suchlike. Some are semi-useful, or would be good to talk about in general, if you didn't know about it: birth control, nutrition, stress control. But then, there's what I like to call "mandatory fun": yoga, knitting, and so forth. It's not that I wouldn't enjoy knitting with some people, it's just that they insist that I knit with other people at the house, in the late afternoon, on pain of getting a demerit (five demerits get you kicked out). Multiply this pointless activity by four or five, all at inconvenient times for someone trying to do anything else, and you get a good idea of what a week here is like.
The Intern MSW tells me that I should think of this as a club, with meetings and activities, and rules, however arbitrary. I pointed out that in real clubs, the members get to pick what the rules are, and when to have meetings and what activities we should have. She can't quite answer this.
It's even weirder when you consider that this is not, strictly speaking, a theraputic community. It's a homeless shelter.
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