The Giving Tree

Earlier this evening, my boyfriend (who is close to finishing his last quarter of graduate school) mentioned that he felt like the old man pictured on the last page of The Giving Tree. Not being able to recall this book from my childhood, I went ahead an looked up the Wikipedia article. The plot description nearly brought me to tears. Watching the following video all but pushed me over the edge:



In fact, I could only watch portions of it because seeing the story unfold through animation was just so depressing.

I suppose what saddened me most about this story were the sacrifices made by both the tree and the boy. In order to make the boy happy, the tree gradually allowed parts of her to be removed to be sold or constructed into a house and boat. The tree gave freely, while the boy simply took and took in return. Ultimately, only the tree's stump was left.

The boy, on the other hand, sacrificed his carefree childhood spent with the tree to fulfill "adult" tasks such as working, making profit, and accumulating and maintaining assets (such as the house). Despite this, he still found life unsatisfying and used the tree's trunk in an attempt to escape. In the end, the boy, now an old man with simpler needs, found comfort sitting on top of what was left of his lifelong friend.

I suppose The Giving Tree tells two stories here. One is about unconditional self-sacrifice due to love. The other is a lament for a simple and carefree childhood lost to the adult world of endless responsibilities. Both stories resonate pretty equally with me. Having been with my boyfriend for almost two years, I know I would probably make the same sacrifices the tree made for the boy in a heartbeat. Now that I'm done with school and work, I sometimes long for those childhood days that seemed free from care and worry. With the work I do with the elderly in the hospital, I can't help but sometimes feel like I'm aging at an accelerated rate.

Before going to bed, my boyfriend told me that rereading The Giving Tree helped him put things into perspective. Indeed, this story has given me new insight into the meaning of unconditional personal sacrifice and reminded me of the joys of a carefree life. These are definitely important lessons I intend to incorporate into my own daily living in an attempt to decelerate my self-perceived aging!

I'm not scheduled to work tomorrow. Perhaps I'll look for something cheery to do during the day.

New Look

I spent the majority of today messing around with Blogger's different templates. As much as I enjoyed the polka dots, I feel that the new templates give my blogs a cleaner and fresher look. Maybe someday I'll learn CSS and design something really awesome involving polka dots.

I have work tomorrow, so that means I should probably go to bed early instead of playing around with my blogs. In the meantime, check out my latest article on my Cheap Social Worker blog, which gives advice on balancing becoming a social worker career with addressing financial wants and needs. Have a great evening everyone!

Yet another new beginning...

Hello, and welcome to Adventures of a (not so) Cheap Social Worker! Here, you'll find me talking about my life as a social worker, ranging from daily happenings to discussions pertaining to relevant social work issues to other random topics. I have a wide variety of interests and hobbies in addition to what I do for a living, so expect anything and everything on this blog!

This blog is an off-shoot from my main site, (not so) Cheap Social Worker. Since I wanted to limit the scope of that site to money saving matters, this blog was created and all non-pertinent articles were moved here. Don't forget to check out my other blog and read about my adventures in making the most out of my social worker salary!

I am pretty excited about this site and will make it a goal to post regular updates. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to have more material soon!

Bad Publicity Yet Again

I stopped by the CNN.com website tonight, only to find this video on the front page:



As much as I like Anderson Cooper and AC360, I found this entire video to be rather unsettling. Right from the beginning this report seemed to have a biased, condemnatory tone towards the medical staff caring for the baby and child protective services as a whole. While the parents may have felt that a great injustice was committed against them, I think that the hospital staff was completely appropriate in the manner they responded to this suspected shaken baby case. What surprises me, though, is the fact that the other child was actually placed in foster care for two weeks. Typically, removals are usually done only as a last resort and if a child is suspected of being in immediate danger. It's hard to say whether child protective services was justified in removing the second child, and I feel that there's more to this case than what was shown in the news report.

What bothers me most about this video is negative portrayal of social workers as individuals who take babies away on a whim. Social workers already have to deal with the "baby snatcher" stereotype, and news reports like the one on AC360 only seem to perpetuate this misconception. To me, it's safe to say that social workers provide more help than harm to people on a daily basis. Is it so hard for the media to run a story that isn't an abasement of our profession?

Social work receives bad publicity from the news media yet again. I suppose this shouldn't be news at all.