A Bowl Full of Sky

We just got back from dinner tonight and now I’m settled back in. A funny thing, I’ve only had this sliver of metal for about 24 hours and already when I take it off it feels wrong. But I have to set it down to type. The problem of course is that it’s a size too large. He took in one of my other rings but it’s thin wire and I think they may purposefully make them a little larger at first just in case. So it’s more of a feature instead of a bug (?)

I mean can you imagine some poor dear fellow trying to ram this thing onto his beloved’s chubby little paw? Not something you want to go through – and this is no doubt one of the million things men at ring stores do for each other as they settle down to pick out one as needed.

So anyway, until we get it resized it has to go on my other (middle) finger (sort of apt actually) and everyone looks at me like I’m retarded (yet I have a commitment from Mr. they-said-it-couldn’t-happen) but the only thing retarded (aside from people thinking I don’t know my ring finger) in my opinion (which I always have) is the thought of losing something (the price of a car) because you’re too vain (more the diet coke of vain) to put it on the wrong finger (although left and right are still mysterious at times) so it fits (my freak small fingers) instead of the bath sink drain.

I mean, I AM vain. Make no mistake. I’m blogging about my life. But I figure to the random passer-by, it’s amusing, and ONE DAY someone else might live though this. SO… It’s a good thing to mention the things you recognize in hindsight. The vanity to believe we are enough alike that a shared experience will matter to help a fellow human not feel an island?

I had this wonderful thought today. If it works out, there is the possibility suddenly available that breathes life into the idea that I might have a family. Do family things. Pack lunches. Have days in the park. Not right now, but some time.

It’s so nice to be back to “we” again after half a week of having to mentally prepare for the idea of moving into a two bedroom.

Apparently that’s when he put his foot down. The idea of me with a private bedroom all my own. If I had only known that before! Ah, but it wouldn’t have been the same. Always the way it is.

And on that note, I think I’m finished with this one. The quickest blog run in history.

And I didn’t even get to the part where I met an Arabic prince at the observation deck in the opening of a storm.

You know you live in interesting times when something like that slips out in edits due to there being so many other events already packed into your post.

Anyway, that’s life!

Much love to everyone out there in blog land. Aren’t you glad you finally got to a story that was ended in the right place so you can go home and not have to think big thoughts? It’s the story brownie a la mode!

I know I’ve hit my stride when I can walk outside every morning and feel the music of the daily patter, yet silence is still company enough.

How about you?

Squeaked One Past the Buzzer

It’s been an interesting week and it’s only Wednesday.

I’m sitting in my apartment looking out at the little rainbow in the clouds. I’m always in awe of nature. The direction of a bunch of tiny ice crystals a mile away and I’ve got a prism hanging in my living room window, disguised as a cloud.

Anyhow, like I said, it’s been an interesting week.

I got a promotion on Tuesday afternoon. I have been working like mad and will be ready to start in the new role asap.

Tuesday evening I got a ring. It’s shiny. I’d been openly surfing loft apartments under his nose, so this really is a case of squeaked one past the buzzer. Now that I don’t have to mentally prepare myself to dump anyone, and 24 hours later, I’m feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

Tuesday night I nearly got blown off the Empire State Building. We were the last batch to go howl at the city before the lightning. I like lightning. I was delighted to have it. Makes for good tourist pictures.

But I digress.

Now I have to take a nap, elderly thing I am.

Someone told me it’s odd to wear black the first day of your engagement, but I find it freeing. I was just in the mood. Whoever said Steve Jobs had the market on black turtle necks?

… Actually, I was thinking of Audrey Hepburn, I think. A ring from Tiffany’s and some Chanel studs and I’m quite happy thank you. He remembered. That movie. With Audrey.

I’ll stay.

It’s all about change

I’m working on the laundry this sunny Sunday afternoon, enjoying the quiet hum of the heater — soon to be air conditioning in a few weeks if we’re lucky, but then they were predicting snow this weekend so who knows what to think.

I do, actually. But not about snow…

I’ve spent the weekend networking and selectively sending out resumes. Still hopeful about the home front mainly because I really feel like it could be a perfect fit. But then it’s not all my decision, and belts are tight all over the country this quarter, so the bigger picture paints a dicey portrait of opportunities right now. No matter what people say, you can’t operate on anything but what’s printed in the documentation. I haven’t got a letter yet, ergo I’m not assured.

It’s just another reason to enjoy being home, looking out on an amazing, sunny day, and feeling strong in the face of this big wave of change. I’ve worked hard enough for it, I might as well enjoy the home I have created. But the changes are so big lately, you can’t help but feel the gravity distort around you.

I’ve got just a few short months to hit quite a few milestones simultaneously. I was hoping a lot of them would all work out, but I realize I might have been expecting too much. People aren’t rational and I’m not the type to go raving if I don’t get my way. Those people apparently get serviced first, but that doesn’t mean I’m in danger of being tempted to go all freaked if I have to walk out of my office with a plant under each arm. I already started taking some of the smaller ones, one by one, so they know I mean business, or so I was told.

On one hand I have people giving me advice like “keep your head down” and ride it out. But that advice so far has just about ridden me out the door, and secondly, the people doling that advice in particular are making it pretty clear they care about their status quo and that’s about it. So yes, I am keeping my head down about office nastiness, and uneven politics that really have nothing to do with me. I agree that’s good advice and a positive that there are some other people out there who recognize there is merit to not retaliating or going into meltdown just because things are complicated. Things are always complicated, it’s just a matter of how near the complicated things you happen to have been placed on any given day. But I am keeping my eye on what’s ahead, and I think really that’s what industry needs right now. People who can work in a storm, even with no promise of a boat to stand on tomorrow. I sort of stared at it, blinked, and went “well alrighty then.”

But of course life can never be that easy.

About the point where I got my career mindset back in balance, and found my zen about career building, my boyfriend comes to me this afternoon. He asks if his friend can stay with us next month for a conference event.

At which point I looked him in the eye, and realized he’s A. never growing up B. never moving on from his weird infatuation with her and C. doesn’t understand that this is not something that will change. We are roommates now apparently, and if I had it to do over again, I suppose I would never have moved in with him. But of course, life is never so simple, and if I hadn’t taken the support he offered years ago, I wouldn’t have learned all I know now, so really, I can’t say I wish I had never had a relationship with him.

Now it’s more like, I need to find a way to break up, and try and comprehend being in this world without him because he’s taught me all he can in our time together, and now I’ve still got plans to grow, while he’s sliding back down to slumber parties and video game distractions.

It’s funny, but for all my perceptions that “modern” relationships can work, where a couple moves in together and standard social expectations about marriage and kids can be set aside until the time is right, I realize now that the whole construct of marriage and commitment was created because men just won’t behave otherwise. There is no gentleman’s agreement with a gentleman. They break their promises. They don’t stick to their word. If a conversation happens, they pretend to forget. As if you will just forget it all if told often enough not to “worry about it.”

It’s like a sort of death. Suddenly you don’t exist. You’re just a ghost living in your apartment and people are trying to move in on top of you.

I admit, that’s an added complication to the month that’s going to take some getting used to. Things had been going so very well, it totally surprised me out of left field that he’s still obsessively talking to her online, and not only are the claws in, but it’s actually much worse than I suspected. He’s like some weird Edgar suit lurching around our otherwise contented lives with each other.

I don’t really want to go through all this simultaneously, but I’m a strong person and I will. No more free time though. Time to really get to work if that’s how it’s about to go down. I think I need some Gloria Gaynor.

Who Knew There was a Sunrise?

I keep waking up right before dawn. I don’t know why, it isn’t usual, and I can’t seem to enjoy it because by the time it’s time to really get up I’m just falling back in bed. I’m not very alert, but it’s a real wake up. I get out of bed. I look out the window. Is it light yet?

I got a phone call right before lunch today. I went out to meet an old coworker who met a nasty end when he left to go work at a new company a few weeks back. He finally filled me in on the nasty bits of why he wasn’t given his proper two weeks, and I let him know my situation. No dice on a job lead, but it was good information all the same, and nice to see someone who used to look totally traumatized by our toxic environment suddenly relaxed and tan and I guess back to whatever they’re like in real life. I guess it’s a little like old people huddling together at a bar to talk about being in the trenches together in some distant war. Cheers mate! Most importantly now I know what I could expect should I put in my notice, being optimistic of course if the transfer doesn’t work out. It does make me hopeful to see this guy’s transformation just a few weeks out of the place. There is hope for us all.

Truthfully I’m not sitting around over expectation that a new fit in the company is a done deal. Interviewing for half a dozen internal positions while simultaneously interviewing for half a dozen external positions, doing the job of three people in your current environment, and wrapping up all the loose ends in your department without your boss is challenging. I have to admit though, just being back in the saddle to get the work done and finally being able to focus on what real opportunities that are available is refreshing. One of the worst things I’ve been battling is just the constant sand bagging my former boss kept lodging into place. The idea that any of the bad management on her part could have any responsibility in the matter of why I’m being kept on eludes her, I think. It’s like being the baby sitter of a spoiled toddler. “I hate you,” she hissed at me while she came upstairs a few days after leaving the department to ask me to print some reports for her. I was elated to find her attack didn’t create that skin crawling sensation of debilitating anxiety of even just a few days ago, when she sat in her office chatting on her cell phone in that loud monotone whisper that’s supposed to be loud enough for you to “accidentally” hear when someone who wants to say something nasty to you. No, after her departure into the fringes of another department, as she struggled to slam the filing cabinet open and shut, rifling for supplies, cursing me softly, I just felt this sense that the cord was finally cut. It’s an empowering feeling to know that you’ve got your confidence back.

I can’t even begin to explain it, except I’m so glad to be able to say I can have positive opinions about someone who hates me and has built me up as some monolithic concentration point of all her problems in her life. Not to hate someone who hates you is just incredibly freeing, and it does not come without experience, and is in fact horrifically infuriating to be on the other side of, which I know but cannot do anything about. I’ve come across this personality before, the female equivalent of the Peter Pan complex, and a friend of mine brought up the good point that I had used a negative experience with this woman to understand and get over the way I was treated by one of these women in the past. Once again, the merry-go-round passes the same scene again, and I’m able to appreciate the experience now, and take the experience from the last maniac and apply it to this one. I don’t hate these people, I embrace them in all their clinical strangeness. I use their drama to understand more about myself. It’s like synthesized life experience. The more issues people have, the more opportunity to learn about the contours of the road ahead.

How sad it must be not to think you can be friends with someone until you’ve bonded with them over the charred remains of some other office competitor. Sorry, I don’t do bonfires, but I do print emergency reports, even after the dust has settled. She had this eager, expectant face again, hoping against hope that today would be the day. Her face actually fell when I politely told her it would be no trouble. Perhaps she was hopeful that I wouldn’t so she can have some kind of narrative ammo to continue the bashing after all of last weeks stories have wound down. I’m sure at some point people will realize it’s a little strange. In that sense the world is as it is. I’m finally starting to feel my place in it, which is wonderful.

I still don’t get why I can’t sleep more than four hours without waking up though. That’s not good, and it’s strange that I’ve been operating that way lately. Too much on my mind I guess. I wake up mid-way through my to-do list ever-running on internal QA to make sure I haven’t missed something, and when I have, I wake up with the fully-functional addition rolling through my brain as needed. Nothing too important, just the general din of stuff to accomplish.

But it’s still wonderful. It’s like part of me is waking up after a long sleep of pointless endeavors. Now I don’t have to chase my tail to make someone else feel important, yet safe from the possible competition. And not just in the sense of one troubled boss woman, but my whole life in general. The wheels are finally moving. As it turns out, several people got together and complained on my behalf which I was just told about a day ago — after the fact of all this experience over the last year. That explains a lot of the downward spiral that transpired, and the mixture of fear and loathing that spread across her face the last day I dealt with her just fits into place. People are like dominoes. You just get sandwiched between them, and you have to know most of the time the forces acting on you are actually going right though you. They’ve got nothing to do with you. You just happen to be symbolically in the line of fire between two people or people and their own perceptions. In this case, I fully realize I don’t represent just some hire, I represent who this woman was to herself ten years ago. I don’t think she actually sees me as a real person at all, or who I actually am as an individual or there would be some kind of empathy, and she could let go because I’d just be a person. Ironically, I’m the one person who’s stayed completely mum through the whole shake down, but of course it doesn’t occur to people hell-bent on some kind of symbolic war that people will have feelings and responses that are unexpected. They see the ghost of you (the ghost of them?) rather than what you’re really doing.

One last “I’ll get you, my pretty…” week little peep is more of an affirmation these days than a fright. I’m not afraid of these people. It’s good to finally get to that place where people hating you doesn’t block your path.

If it’s yours, it’ll stay that way. If not, move on to stay with your goal. We are are all spiritually nomadic if we are willing to own up to it…

Bah. Still no sunrise. Back to bed.

A Man Walks Into A Truck

A man walks onto the train in front of us with a small brunette.

The first thing noticeable was that they were looking. They wanted to know who was around them, and of course you can’t help but notice that alertness in other human beings.

“I think I’ll just charge the mac,” she says.

“Hmm?” he asks. A distracted mumble. An attempted response to the non sequitur.

“I really want one. A mac. I think I’ll just charge it to my credit card.” The line is cast.

The statement is confident, but somehow flat with a certain piercing tension. It’s the flatness in the voice of someone who is testing the waters. Polling for probabilities.

The girl is young. Obviously much younger than the golden band on his finger. She looks back at me with a sense of concern at my sudden attention.

Soon his balding head is joined by hers as she whispers in his ear.

If there was any question about her being his wife, it is gone by the passionate devouring that follows minutes later. She slithers her fingers around his neck. He is granite, sand stone, putty. We are all human.

Except now he’s about to get royally fucked.

All this, the forced, faked moaning, for a laptop.

Here I just gave my new one back to my partner. Some things are too expensive.

I’d rather have the ring.

She’d rather have the laptop.

Art Imitates Life

I was talking with a friend of mine a few months ago on the subject of what you experienced in one context that tends to carry over into the next. — How finding out what carries over can actually be an empowering moment to help you offload some of the confusion about what has happened. Things that go bump in the night just because you walk into a room aren’t necessarily your doing, though it is your responsibility to turn on the lights before you step on someone else.

A lot of backwards-analysis is guilt or ego, but some of it is true inexperience, and as such riding the merry-go-round a few turns will do wonders.

That being said, it’s still somewhat of a shock to be dealing with people on a professional level, and then your former life suddenly rounds the bend of reality like an old context crashing down out of the catwalk.

What are the chances that I would do dealings with a place where, on the front page my name sits prominently in a story that is a detailed description fanfic about a certain teacher who had a certain issue with a certain student? All those year ago, and now the weirdness seems confirmed. — Not that I think the professor of my adolescence wrote the thing, but that the archetype appears again, this time as a detailed account of a situation as written from the perspective of the dear ‘heir professor’ in all his goofy glory.

I only read the first few pages. Fanfic sites are weird. Fanfic relevant about your life is just off the charts. I can look back now and tell you I wasn’t looking to get in a relationship. I was looking for role models. This weird zing you get back from men when you reach adolescence is tangy and brackish and strange at first. It makes your chest catch so you feel like you have to cough it out. You don’t get that online. You get just the shared conversation of another mind.

In the end I think it was a hoax. Just another layer of seared crap.

I have this black and white picture a friend took of me during that time, and I remember he snapped the shot at the exact moment I was thinking about what was going on. The photo shows it. I look so young and scared. Yet somehow nobody knew, or never assumed that I knew something frightening and horrific was happening. It was not a happy experience. It was bread and water bare minimum of emotional survival for a while.

I suppose it’s cautionary. I will never read it to know. Ten years ago I would have. I have no desire to go look this person up. The result is that you leave some part of yourself behind.

I realize as an adult that there are things I will never feel in the “normal” way because it was all wiped away early on, and that may be why intimacy online became so important. I wasn’t able to experience that sort of romantic love in person because that sort of love had been taken away. I think this happens to a lot of people. Large gaps of your childhood go away. It isn’t the anxiety.

Whoever took the time to pen the story in some seedy slash novel knows this. Maybe they were trying to send a message, or apologize, or just get one more jab in for old times. I’d guess the latter, because anyone who actually had something to say on the issue by way of apology would show up at the door.

Whatever the reason, I saw one of them the other month, smiling at me in a cafe. I said nothing. I want nothing to do with him.

Ten years later he moves a thousand miles away to the same city I did. What are the chances?

Ten years later he meets one of the less savory women I work with, likely floating around the same circles. She mentions him in idyl conversation one day, senses my concern, and says nothing else.

Not long after, my life is made hell again. I don’t know what she wormed out of him, or gained access to when she and he collided.

I just know that there are certain people in this life who are socially and emotionally toxic to one another.

I might be biased, but I tend to think I’m the one in the right.

While my gut reaction may be that the blue eyed quiet boy was the devil when I was sixteen, I know it was probably some three hundred pound Yugoslavian with bad breath and a stutter around women who wrote desperate sonatas for anyone, so long as they installed his spyware and helped him wile away the hours pretending to be something else.

The world is too big for a sixteen year old to handle. It isn’t immaturity, it’s the expectation of ethics. We scant few may be raised with them, but the world today doesn’t have it. All you have is hope.

Job Training

The last two weeks have been rocky, and it’s sort of nice at this point to be able to just have the wave cresting. I am doing my level best to keep a strategy and mostly it’s been a practice in learning to understand where other people are coming from, and finally learning to have compassion for people who aren’t exactly easy to respect. At the office anyway. Learning how to respect people is satisfying, even when they’re unconscionable – it gives you compassion when people would otherwise expect anger. The different ways people tear into each other is a fascinating sort of train wreck, if a bit complicated at times. The more you understand about why they do it, the better and richer life becomes, if you can survive the bruising. You can. It’s like boot camp.

My significant other and I seem to trade off on emotional states. It’s the weirdest thing I have ever seen, and I wonder if all desperately attached couples go through that, or if we’re just touching noses trying to figure out who’s alpha, and who’s omega.

The majority of my time over the past few months has been the art of keeping my hands to my sides and watching the different sorts of desperate, raging people throw different kinds of emotional punches that stop just a breath from my face. The hope is that it will incite me to throw up my arms and be the one to get aggressive. For whatever reason, people seem to think it’s acceptable to want to screw over someone who hasn’t actually done anything to them, yet they still seem to have enough of a guilt reflex to need you to be bad enough for them to feel justified in going through with their plans. They get more angry if you AREN’T into villainy. I don’t know why we go through all this. It’s the most absurd circus I’ve ever seen, but it always goes on.

I’ve got a reputation for getting things done, and for my adult life it’s been unpleasant mostly, trying to get most people on board to DO anything. In some ways it’s probably the industries I have worked in, where the steady decline or reputation of it has warded off most of the like minded people I’d feel comfortable working with.

On the other hand, even the people I do have a good professional balance with, as in the people who are bright enough to see the logic of the things I am proposing, are often pitted against each other (and me) so quickly that they never get the chance to form any sort of long-term traction.

After being at several companies where this all worked out in the same way, I’m able to finally realize the problem with the modern company isn’t the company, but the people who go work for them with the expectation that there is no such thing as business ethics. Right now I’m working with a man who I know has stolen from one of our previous coworkers at another company, a man who is married and led on a twenty year old office assistant who broke down and left, a woman who screams so cruelly at one of her employees the entire office chills, and another office assistant who regularly ruins the reputations of everyone around her in a bid to get a bigger title and more than a pittance salary. My thinking is more, why sell your soul screwing other people over so madly for such a pittance, but then her boss tells me she has no time to train the girl because they have drummed out the last associate and there is no budget to replace the groundling staff. What comes around, goes around as they say. The key is in how you handle it.

All the times people afraid for their jobs have turned nasty, making whatever they want to make of my age or background or whatever, i stay as unfazed as possible. I just stand still, wipe away the spit, and offer alternatives. I was warned not to outdo the work done in another division, but in my opinion, then I really would be wasting my time. Crazy people I am willing to put up with. But I’m not cut out for doing nothing. It’s not pleasing, and while I’ve had some bouts of just being ground down so much that I can’t even concentrate for the next hour on my todo list, I recognize that for what it is, and inhospitable or not, i use it to practice on calming my anxiety. One of the best self-cures of anxiety-riddled people, is to square off with the dragon queens who really do try and break you. You’ve already worried your way through just about any nasty, sharp comment they can come up with, so you might as well go through it finally, and remember for next time that in the end, you handed it well, and it doesn’t really change you as a person if you’re solid in who you are. It’s just more proof, really.

There’s a weird click that happens to people in desperate situations. It’s an excellent observational opportunity to see humanity as the zoo it is. I realize that most of the pulled punches at me were actually considered favors, encouraging me to learn to fight, but the truth is, I know how to fight, and I know how to fight dirty, I’m just not into the office political scene, and definitely not enough to have a throw-down over it. I’m long retired from being friends and surfing circles where this is the norm. I’m looking for zen.

I don’t fight because there’s a reason why we’re all pointed in the directions we are, and there is always more to the scenario than he said, she said. The people instigating the daily skirmishes know this as well, but they don’t suppose the groundlings are going to figure it out, so fists are waved in our faces with the hope that we fall in line with divine edict quietly and silently.

When quietly and silently doesn’t work, it kicks up a notch. People start experimenting on each other with typical school yard bullying tactics.

I know all this. It’s not that I’m stupid, it’s that I’m an objector. It’s like a war being fought to bring in some regime that’s going to starve everyone. I’m a professional. I don’t want to spend the last of my integrity on some petty cat fight. I’m here to learn and the one thing I’ve learned repeatedly is that there really is no one you can trust in these situations. I may guardedly tell people when something horrible just happened to me by the water cooler not because I expect them to really be good people and do anything about it. I occasionally offer things only as a way of compassion and showing people the effects of their nastiness. Encouraging the zen, in other words.

I understand that there are different levels at which people will throw the switch. Most people sadly do enjoy being nuts. The thrill they get from abusing and pulling power is a big up from the bad treatment they get from some other person. But being adaptable comes in all creative forms, and one of them, the best I think, is just learning to get so good at your job that your defense is more trouble to blast through than it’s worth. The day my boss got so mad at me for not popping off at her (or quitting) that she broke her pen, I heaved an invisible sigh of satisfaction.

The coordinator who spent time weeping in the bathroom as silently as she could was not met with compassion from the ladies at the door, but later by whispered scorn. We all sat while the pigeons pecked her, and while you can try and offer compassion to people, as the game goes, when someone is trying to squeeze you out of the organization, the first thing they do is try and pit you against other office mates who might otherwise make you strong to stand up and have an opinion.

By the time I heard she was in trouble, she was already so closed off there was nothing I could do but a few emoticons and kind good morning. Just insert a little human decency into her day, knowing the same people who are kind one moment to me, are the same ones who have no real sense of responsibility, or perhaps just lack recognition that this is something they are doing to another human being that is wrong. “If it works,” smiled one of the coordinators at me one day. “She doesn’t even realize it’s possible,” said another. “Her mind doesn’t work that way.” Actually, it does. My decision at kindness is a choice, not a defect. There are a million ways people can screw each other at the office. I’ve had people pop off at me for “saving emails” so many times it’s comical. Foot stamping at me for being right and having the organizational capability to forward the conversation in five minutes. I see it coming.

It’s like clockwork, and after you’ve seen it a few times, you know what it is, and you know where it’s going.

Take the conversation I had with someone today. The woman doesn’t read anything – not emails or special instructions, nothing, and says so as if this is an unalienable right of middle management. Other people have complained that she has terrible communication skills, but I know better. I’ve had conversations with her before, and while there’s a lot she doesn’t get, it’s a sort of willful ignorance. We’ve been dyeing of frustration with her, and more than once I’ve functionally done her job.

I don’t mind doing people’s jobs. It’s good training. It’s how I can waltz into a meeting and suddenly know what I’m talking about. It’s not sudden at all, I’ve been in the background busting my chops. But to people who really want to believe the social order, they give you the mock shock that you really know what’s going on, because to admit with a wink and a nudge that you’re good at what you do might empower you to take a stand, and that’s what it’s all about.

The reason strong innovation in corporate America crumbles is in the aggregate of all the little businesses falling into the sea. People like my boss, who as of today is no longer my boss, have screamed and raged at how some people only show up to work to save college money for their kids. I’ve spent my own mornings annoyed that I’m fighting the fire fight I was hired to do, and yet for all the work I put into it, when it comes time to pull out the contract on some vendor and really go to the mat, these sorts of people look at you like kids on the play ground, who’ve just had a scuffle. I agree, it is infuriating, because without backing you’re dust.

But something strange has happened recently. After all the hair pulling and teeth gnashing done in my direction by the frustrated and the clueless, I’ve finally found compassion for all these weirdoes. For all her obstinate brush-offs and complete lack of engagement with the office, at the end of the day she actually had something to say, and it was good advice.

“In six months, no one will know how hard you worked. They won’t remember or care. You have to set your priorities. It’s easier when you have kids, because you just can’t stay in the office late. I’ve got a baby-sitter. I have to pick them up. It’s taken me years to learn to find a balance with my work life.”

Just when you wonder if the lights are on, something like this happens, and really I don’t think it’s too much to expect that it can happen in regular intervals from people who you work with.

It’s just usually it doesn’t, I find, which is probably why I spend my time in my apartment either too anxious to enjoy myself or too exhausted to entertain company. I’m paying my bills.

Going back to the idea of keeping your hands to your sides though, would I have understood or been able to see clearly the path these people are on if I had given in to just hating everyone around me? No. There’s just no way to survive in such an inhospitable environment when people are intent to force you out, if you let them trap you down like that.

I think I’m a good person. I think I’m good at my job – maybe too good at this point, which is how I get the black mark from new hires who have a good conversation with me early on, and then are immediately threatened by someone else with the fear that I’m after their jobs. The idea is to keep the younger ones out of alliances so that the older ones can coast to retirement. And most of the time it works, like a mechanical process so well-greased nobody ever hears it.

This new guy and I would be a fabulous duo if we were allowed to be on the same team. But now that it’s clear we won’t be, the little whisperings of insecurity have seeped in. My boss squaring off with his boss months ago during early rumors of transferring me out of my group. The constant push to belittle everyone wearing on this poor guy’s face like a quiet rage.

Would they actually lay him off? What about the rumors instigated by my old boss, who looked at me one day, forgetting I’m not really one of her kind, and asked deliciously, “so… what are you going to do with HIM?” It wasn’t a sexual suggestion. It was an assumption of man-eating destruction. The she looked at me, my eyebrow raised, and remembered who she was talking to.

In an office where walls are paper thin, if he heard that, and he’s not experienced enough to realize when there’s been a setup, I’m not surprised he’s trying desperately to figure out how to crash what’s left of my options to navigate around the layoffs.

Actually, I think that was the point. Stick us in a small, enclosed space, suggest to one of us that the other is out to get them, and see which one of us cracks and goes after the other one first.

There is a quiet joy to recognizing this sort of horse-shit. I don’t know. I suppose there is a protection to people thinking you are completely naive. But at the same time, I think people choose to believe what they want because maybe to look at someone who is working hard and not swiping at other people, it brings up a little reflux of guilt. I think maybe that’s a good thing. Being reunited with their inner humanity is a good thing. I don’t feel bad about continuing on the path if that’s the core source of the reaction.

In any case, it’s good to have given the effort and not quit on the goal. When you stay above board and do the best you can you can, you can leave and turn the lights out, and not have to carry any baggage out with you.

For a position I was told I would be rubbed out of within the first few weeks, having lasted to my anniversary was an accomplishment. It’s another square in my pattern, something rich, and complex and interesting, and it’s the tail end of a company era that we won’t see again. I’ve gone and I’ve proven myself there. It all works out in the end.

Now I just gotta find the next way to pay my rent.

Water & Air

So the new laptop is nice. There are worse offerings people can leave you, all things considered. A few short tempers and screaming fits later and equilibrium seems back in town. I guess. Life… What are you supposed to do with it? We all march on.

Appeasement

I’d like to say that bribery didn’t work, but you know, when it’s you, and you’re there, it’s slightly harder than you think.

And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter. A few grand can go a long way in this town for someone to show where they park their boys at the end of the night.

The lease isn’t up yet. I’m being sensible. That’s all.

Unavoidable

There’s nothing like waking up at 2am in the morning with a sour stomach and then having your significant other casually walk in the bedroom from a late night of chatting to ask you if his female friend can spend the weekend.  – The same one who accused him of feeling her breast – with me standing there a foot away – as he gave her an awkward half-arm hug after a dinner three weeks ago, a dinner in which she lamented that her other friend’s apartment was not as nice as staying at ours, almost guilting him at the table for not securing her a more comfortable spot and doing away with my convenience all together.  Nice. 

As it turns out, in his zest to get some strange new service (yet another pointless bell or whistle – and we all know if he spent half as much time planning our lives together as he did planning his phone we’d be in a château in France by now…) he has also mistakenly canceled my phone.  Granted call center people cannot be trusted and it’s not like he told them “hey, could you screw my girlfriend’s life a little while you’re buffing my plan?” but the point is, of all the things to obsess over, stupid phone plans and other women who want to grind me into the dust don’t rank highly in common interests. So it’s 2am, I haven’t had a phone for 24 hours, which means all my calls during this time are going to cost something ridiculous being of the out-of-plan variety, and somehow I’m the bad person for pointing out that letting a woman who claims you molest her breasts uncontrollably in public BACK into your apartment after she insists on staying AFTER you’ve made it clear your girlfriend doesn’t appreciate the rent-free monthly squatting is, shall we safely assume (?) a bad idea.  Trouble.

I don’t know if she’s just so blitzed that she doesn’t feel bothered by the overall awkwardness of it – causing even more awkwardness to someone’s long-term committed relationship so that she can wake up in a “nicer” apartment further uptown than her single friends afford her – or if it’s just the delight of asking my significant to ask me if she can stay, just to highlight the fact that she’s still got her fingers dug in, but the more important question is simply, what kind of moronic idiot goes to his girlfriend like a retarded child and even ASKS to see if he can get her lodging? Who in their right mind looks at their long-term, successful relationship with someone who loves and supports them, and then looks at a woman who has the outright lack of class to continue insisting that a monthly extended weekend inconveniencing his girlfriend is acceptable, and actually makes the choice “I’d rather have homeless?”

So I look at him, wait for him to say “Oh, sorry, I think I just LOST MY F%&#$NG MIND for a moment, forget I said anything…” and then I just go “No. You do remember this is the same woman who called you a molester in public for the imagined offense of touching her chest not even a month past?” And yet… and yet he’s still looking at me as somehow inconsiderate for not bearing the burden of yet another weekend of constant sniping and backhanded quips from a woman who has made it clear she has no interest in mending the relationship with me on a social-outing-only basis, and has yet again brazenly started pushing herself into an already fully-occupied single bedroom apartment for her “decided upon” monthly stay in the city.  

I’m just saying, has reality gone completely South?

Either way, it’s late and I’m tired, and her home-wrecking is working.   It’s not that I think he’s going to throw her over the bed, or that I think he’s terribly interested that way at all, or that her own interest is in being any more than a squatting mooch, though having the possibility or her suddenly flinging her self at his crotch is still one of those things you have to wonder about with women who seem to talk with quite a bit of authority about how “you guys don’t really get the city swinger scene”  (Note: is this is a thing of which to aspire?). It’s more the fact that he’s actually encouraged that she wants to come stay with him. That’s the bothersome point.

I’ve told him before, she would have no power over our lives at all if he didn’t let her set the temerature of our conversations. I never once got worried that something had just happened inappropriately because I was standing right there and I saw clearly that he had not touched her the other night, or any other. But her wide-eyed desperate look at me, hoping with such intensity that I would freak out at her outburst and finally strike, all so she would have her reason to encourage him to come out without me, and my retort “well, you know, they’re KIND OF hard to miss,” only made her more frustrated, and me more sure not that I had a problem with her, but that she had a problem with me. You don’t do that to a fellow sister you respect. You do that when you’re trashy and too lazy to do the work yourself. “I don’t actually want to DO the work, I want my freelancers to do it, but they frustrate me when they don’t call back.” Um, ok then. I mean, god forbid I suggest if her business is tanking that she consider learning to do some of the work herself if she really wants to make it work. Heck, if she stopped swiping at me I’d let her set up shop on the couch again to do it. But there’s the big “if” that she’s not allowing. “If” we could be allowed to get along. “If” I could be allowed respect in my own apartment. If my boyfriend would drop a pair and tell her where she needs to stick her attitude when it’s one in the morning and I’ve got to go to bed instead of arguing a fundamental difference of opinion trying to talk some calm into the catastrophe so that people will settle and go to bed.

No, I don’t feel jealousy. I don’t even dislike her. We’re quite alike in many pleasant ways, and we’ve had enjoyable enough conversations that she even forgot to hold back her pride that she’d wormed her way into a continuous monthly stay in the city free of charge. So it’s not that she CAN’T like me. It’s more a conscious decision to chip away at me for some unknown but wholly undeserved reason – I mean considering how many times I’ve said yes to whatever the kids wanted to plan. I just don’t think it’s a good sign when I’m the only one remembering to be even remotely responsible on everyday things whenever she’s around. Her comfort zone just gets more and more oppressive to mine by comparison.

I don’t think she’s got it all in the bag either. I think that’s part of the continued struggle. I think the “did you just feel my breast” comment was a desperate backhand at me for being someone who does well, and it’s not the first slap I’ve received on this front by an older woman frustrated by her career, and slightly allured by the brilliance of my boyfriend. I mean, I understand. I’m quite fond of him myself. There is something about him, I assure you. It’s tasty delish. But I just can’t be the lamb chops here. When we all had dinner last, he made a point to defend me, instantly angering HER at ME for my relationship daring to interfere with her play time, just to give an understanding of the depths to which women go to claw at each other. Her face fell when she walked into the restaurant and saw me standing there. It fell further when she tried to take another prickly swipe at my position and he finally stepped in. (And we wonder why I keep my distance of all but a few of my species.)

But even still, all that aside, and the sadness and humiliation a woman must feel to have to claim some kind of desperate sex act has just happened in an obvious last-breaching episode of seafaring vengeance, at 2am when I’m sitting up to find the antacid, and I find my significant other still up, tapping away his life, looking at me with all the energy he used to feel years ago when we first started going out, it just made me realize how pointless it is to help a guy who frankly doesn’t want to be helped.  He’s happy wrecking his life just so he can sit around being taken advantage of by people who get off on feeling like they’ve wrangled control over him and can take advantage at will. I always told him if he treated people badly, he’d end up with people who were only willing to put up with it because they were users, and I’m sad to say it looks like it’s starting to happen, and I don’t want to be a part of those people and those circles. She’s encouraging the bully in him to stable him further. It’s not fun to watch. It’s not the sort of sales tactic you hope a new friend will use.

It can be said I’m fairly good at sales myself, but the reason I don’t eat and breathe personal magnetism is because I recognize a the end of the day, you have to prove yourself to yourself. Confidence is an internal thing. You have to put in the work, and you have to let other people put in theirs. You can be successful and show good leadership in social situations without being part of the gossip mongering. And perhaps that’s what it really comes down to. I’m not one of “those” girls. I sit there quietly and wait for someone to realize I haven’t actually done ANYTHING but wake up and brush my teeth, and yet here I am getting hip checked in the flutter, and what a poisoned flutter it can be.

I wrote someone she knows a recommendation, for example, and she told me I’d made a mistake because one of her friends deserved the job and the credit. Some people wouldn’t think that was such a big issue, but when people get so desperate to rank everyone around them, that spells out a lot more to me about their personality, and it’s not something that makes me comfortable with them. As it turns out, when I actually pressed her for a reason, all she could come up with is that she just doesn’t like that he’s able to sell himself successfully. The last time I saw him I always wondered why he was suddenly down when she showed up beside him. Their conversation up ahead had been so brief, but I could just tell after all the laughter, he had just completely shut down around us. We were “her” friends. She had made this “clear.” Now I realize exactly the predicament. Without even really making a sound, she jabbed him where it hurt, and so subtle that he was just staring out into space wondering what had happened to his mood. I hated that for him. But somehow people who do this can drag their nails across people without even touching them.

So now I’ve got to get untangled, not because she wants a rent-free luxury apartment, but because my boyfriend wants her in our lives, and that’s not a choice he can make and yet still seriously suggest we’re moving forward. I should be more upset than I am, that’s all I can think at this point. But in the end she was brilliant. It was a strong move. I have to respect the cunning of setting him up to break his own situation. Now I’ve got to look after myself.

And consider smaller apartments.  

But I do have to come to terms, that at this age, and with my situation, that’s that. No kids or family. I’m just too burned out after this relationship to want to ever look at man or woman in the same way again, and if you’re not a looker it’s not like you can find much better in the city men’s market. People are shallow. It’s true. I mean, not to be all doom and gloom, suppose it’s possible there is someone out there who isn’t totally damaged, but unlikely they would mesh well with my odd personality, and to be honest I decided a long time ago if it doesn’t work with this, I’m done.

Someone wise once told me love kills your work from a creative perspective. I’m not sure that’s true, but I do think a slight derivative might work, that love can be replaced with work, and if you’re a determined enough person, that can truly be what your life is meant for. Besides, I’m just not as obsessed with men. I like the art form of their bodies, the nice, rugged look of their faces, but only in so much as a sculptor likes the lines in an old marble column. He told me that once, on one of those rare magic dates when we sat down for dinner and life was exciting and I was happy to just have someone to share it with. “You’re classic” he said. And no, it wasn’t in that snide way people do. He meant it, and I loved him with all my heart in those rare ways you can be sure absolutely. I’m not a big one to care about what a guy looks like, if he’s got weight on him, if he’s not Adonnis beautiful, if he can’t bench 300 tons.  I value the sweet things like having someone who brings you tylenol when you’re sick or makes you laugh at dinner when you’ve had a bad day. That’s something friends can do for each other without getting entangled. But it’s not really something I can say I want from someone who isn’t my own. That’s what I heard tonight, and that’s the big point he was stupid enough to make if he didn’t mean it, but it seems fairly certain that he did mean it to have to insist on her staying again, even after it became clear I’m not comfortable with it. He told me he wasn’t mine. It’s been a long windfall between moments of total joy to share the life of a brilliant man, and now I think it’s just enough to have been sucking the life out of me all those horrible times in between. Like when someone looks at you sleeping and won’t touch you from the other side of the bed because you told him his new friend can’t stay over.

She speaks volumes through him, and when she says “yeah, but you know in order for there to be a wedge in any relationship, there had to be room for it before…” what she really means is that I have to now be willing to put up with her, and that somehow I should consider it my duty and my fault considering in her opinion I’m just not worth it enough to expect anything else than being the side car when she’s around.  I’m being forced into a game of being just as vile and catty back at her when she makes natty comments about my areas of expertise, which I won’t be manipulated into, or having the unavoidable choice of putting up with the abuse while waiting patiently for my loving boyfriend to come to my defense.

The fact that she outright hip-checked me as we walked to dinner last, physically making it clear that I was too near to near him in what she now considers her space, and that, after my having told him about this laughing in bed that night when he promised me that in fact he had NEVER touched her breasts, that even after that, he walks in with an excited gleam at 2am and STILL expects me to house her again right on schedule, is pretty much the catalyst helping him express his own true feelings.

The fact that she’s leading him to a relationship graveyard that I’ve visited before in this life, and he hasn’t, is one of those things that you do wish you could impart to the people you love before you have to watch them go thought it.  But we are adults, and the choices we make are our own.  So now I’ve got to find another apartment.  I’m not going to waste my time helping to finance one that is becoming less and less like a home, or participate in a relationship that is all promises and no return.  This isn’t a good place if he isn’t mine, and he’s not committing on even a symbolic front if he’s making a desire known to bring women who treat me poorly into my living space. What she’s saying when she treats me poorly is that HE is willing to treat me just as inappropriately, an that is a woman taking a man’s actions and completely screwing his life with them, and a man being too focussed on his own amusement in the now to plan how that will change his entire future, one that apparently isn’t valuable in his mind if it were to stay the same with me in it.

I hope that if any man in a relationship ever reads this, they realize how much of a damage not getting married ultimately becomes. Yes, you can live a long happy life without a ring. We certainly have. But in the end, without the net, when you push someone near the edge of the platform, the lack of room becomes a much more important limitation.

Cheers.