A while back, my big bro told me a story about one of his first post-college job interviews. He got the interview from a kindly relative looking to help out a fresh-faced young’un. The guy who interviewed him was a total dick and made it clear he thought his time was being wasted. He not only didn’t help my brother, he was pretty demoralizing. (At least, I think that’s how the story goes.)

Years later, through a series of jobs and climbing up corporate ladders and gaining experience and whatnot, the bro in question ended up on the opposite of the desk from the self-same prick who had dissed him in his youth. This time, in the power seat, brother got to let the guy know his services were no longer needed at the corporate offices. Sweet, if delayed, karma.

I got a bit of a taste of that kind of nectar my own bad self yesterday. I had coffee with one of the folks I knew I would miss when I left my last job. She was in my town, visiting another refugee from that employer, and we met up at one of my favorite cafes and chatted into the late afternoon.

Now, if you leave your job kind of sudden like in a ruckus, it’s natural to be curious about the aftermath. But, given the ruckus, I could never know what folks thought or what was left behind of me and my work. C’est la vie and la guerre and all that.

Turns out, there are a few folks who still give me credit for my mad admin and management skilz. A few folks who remember that I was neither malicious nor insane or whatever the gossip mill might have spit out given my circumstances. Best of all, this woman who I considered a friend back then and a friend now, has even cited me to a new wave of management as her first mentor who taught her some of the management skills she now possesses and is using to climb the ladder from which I got shaken off four years ago. (Of course, as a bright, thoughtful person, her success is probably a lot more organic and internal than she gives herself credit. Still and all, it’s nice to be remembered.)

Here’s the great part that makes me feel like karma does will out and every dog has her day while every scumbag gets a comeuppance — Apparently, on the day she had received my Christmas card in the mail, she had actually been talking about me and our past working together. She’s having a bit of trouble with the very same person who it appears knifed my younger and less wise back firmly between the shoulder blades a while back. My visage on our card was a reminder, she said, of who to trust (or not, as the case may be).

She’s truly an optimistic, kind-hearted person, and, thus, is at risk from trusting mother-fucking assholes, like my special friend from years ago. Except, she’s persevered now and come out from hiding, as it were, so that the mother-fucker in question can no longer claim her work for the MF’s own.

(Ironically, I think I laid the groundwork for her current career by crashing and burning in weblogging style. I gather she picked up a lot of the pieces I had dropped when I left, inadvertently shining light on the emperor who had no clothes. I’m pretty sure it was the nude emperor who stabbed me. Now she’s at least a grade higher than the perpetrator in the corporation, who has been stripped of much of the kingdom and had shit stopped (like buying home computers on the government’s dime). She has succeeded where I failed in a job that might have been mine in had things not happened as they did. I have no doubt the asshole will be gone in six months or less.)

I’m still angry and hurt by what happened to me. Not in an active way, since my life is quite lovely and all’s well that ends well. But, I really do think what happened was a malicious attack. Really, I do. One that has meant I can’t ever truly trust coworkers as I once did. One that had me doubting my own abilities and workplace relationships for years.

From my point of view, reporting this ‘blog to HR and implying I was threatening served no one well and served no purpose. If I were truly sick and a threat or stressed or otherwise in need of intervention, so many positive things could have been done, including sitting down and talking with me. Given that I wasn’t crazed, my reputation, my private life, my work history were all potentially damaged. Without a lawyer, I’m not sure I would even have been able to get the job I have today. Actually, I know I wouldn’t have.

Worse, if I gave a rat’s ass for my old employer, they ended up losing money and time, paying me off and sorting through the work I never properly prepared to transition to new staff. A loss all around, if you think about it.

I guess hearing about the place I spent so many hours toiling gave me a sense of vindication. Knowing that the asshole who fucked me and fucked the company hasn’t prevailed seems fair. Getting credit for mentoring, for some of the systems I had started to put in place, makes it all seem a bit less in vain. Knowing that a good woman, who I had enjoyed knowing when we worked together (actually through two different companies), has been promoted is promising. It all gives me hope.

And, in my current job, in the year end/year beginning review I’m due to finish and hand back to the boss, I think I’ll have a bit more perspective. My boss has lauded my team spirit, my leadership skills and my stewardship, in the words of the HR forms. Above everything, she’s mentioned my judgment and ability to communicate.

Given my past history, it’s been difficult for me to remember that these are skills with which I’ve been credited before. I had forgotten that I had been a contributor to my last job. That I had made friends and that some people admired my work. For fuck’s sake, one reason my lawyer pushed back for me, apart from the fees I was paying him, was what he saw when he demanded my old work files. According to him, you just didn’t see very often in a labor dispute such a stellar record of reviews and promotions.

So 2007 is on the brink of dying, and my head is back in July 2004. But, I’m feeling good about that year and it’s death, too. One quote that still rings true for me in summing up the situation, and the reality I hope my friend remembers when she is back in Boston if she’s right about who my accuser was, is this one:

I could have lived with getting fired. I probably wouldn’t have fought back if I was dismissed for a conflict in how my interests and the workplace’s had fallen out of alignment. Ho hum, to no longer find yourself as a productive drone in the hive.

But, that was not what happened. It was more, it was worse and it was personal. I was associated with violence and the potential to be dangerous. That is a fucking sick thing to do to someone.

Technorati Tags: abuse, karma, fired, vindication, happiness, relationships, work

After some good wine and a few light beers, I promised to write here about my tormentors. On the eve before flying out of town again, I reverted quite thoroughly back to when I had lived in the rocking burg known as Braintree fulltime.

Apparently, homecoming or coming home, since there was no football game, means last call at Chili’s with the beers being served by a mouthy waitress who knows one of your companions well. It could have been 1984. I could have been 20.

Steve, Donna (who has no last name), Deb and Liz, thanks for reminding me that I actually have grown up. A little.

Technorati Tags: Christmas, Christmas, family, drinking

I guess it’s like Boxing Day squared. Or doubled. Or something math like. And, being a chick, math is of course something I don’t understand. It’s all numbery and shit.

M. is back in Cali, and back in his workaday office, eating lunch with the coworkers. The part of me that shows up for work every day, which is the same part that would make me fucking excel at occupational therapy in an asylum, I mean seriously, I could ace that shit, that part of me is jealous. I’m not good at sitting around somebody else’s house idle.

Or, more accurately, I’m less comfortable being my self and tooling around with computers and whatnot in front of people. That gets a mite ratcheted up in the bosom of my family. That crowd of folks that spent a chunk of my childhood trying to convince me I was adopted, because I was so alien. I think one can imagine that maybe a couple of folks in my bloodline might be hip to ‘puters and the interwebs, and another section might be OK with creative shit, but combined, I’m a bit out of the loop. Or out to lunch or off the beaten path or left field.

Pick a cliche that equals abnormal.

The rational part of my all grown up brain realizes that possibly ever human being feels that kind of alienation with their bosom and kin now and again. Human condition, self-reflection, nature of the beast. But, fuck that rational shit, I am an artiste, I am so super sensitive. These people cannot know how I feel, how I ache, I yearn, I long to communicate.

Goddamnit, I’m special.

Actually, I’m pretty comfortable at my bro’s house. M. is a bit too comfortable. I spent some decades leaving the suburban oasis life behind and sucking some more exotic marrow from the universe. M.’s pretty much willing to embrace the ‘burbs. Ah well. In my head, I will imagine another world, like many a 50s housewife. Only I won’t have the uppers to enjoy.

In my comfort, though, I’m painfully aware of my own fucked up internal churnings. One might say I am either blessed or cursed with a certain level of self-awareness. I try really hard to imagine what the other side is hearing when I speak. Another of the expanding clan is blissfully not so wrought. Nope, not a lot of inward/outward reflection I think.

My discomfort is I spend way too much time, then, in those conversations trying to understand the other side and simultaneously biting my tongue as bitchier versions of “I can’t fucking believe you just said that” are repressed. Some day maybe I’ll let it lose. Or not. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure the other side of the conversation, the one in which I’m frothing and churning, searching for the right words, goes internally on that other side something more like, “When will she finish speaking? I have more to say about me.”

Thankfully, Christmas comes but once a year.

I’m mostly busy just living kind of regular-like without writing. Or actually thinking much. Here’s the photographic evidence:

The Comedy Studio Christmas Show and Party on December 23, 2007

Home for the Holidays with the fam.

Merry whatever to whoever you are.

The local news is featuring warnings on a silent killer that claims more lives than murder — cold, fucking cold. Not just freezing cold, but the kind of cold you get around here. Apparently, folks are expiring all over San Francisco. For a city with no snow, no mountains, no glaciers, SF is plenty fucking cold, though. Just not in a macho kind oflumberjack cold way. More wilting pansy, really.

Truth is California is pretty wussy on weather. Probably more so up here in the north, where sure there are microclimates up the ass, like varying 30 degrees in as many miles, but still in all it’s what you would call mild by non-wusses everywhere. Some days I’m leaving the house thinking shit I might actually need a scarf or an extra layer. Oh no.

Imagine then the horror I’m feeling, the gut-knotting clench of anxiety, imaging snow. Imagining ice. Imagining below freezing temperatures. How do people live like that? How did I live like that essentially for four decades?

My coworkers have been taunting me of late about my immersion and assimilation into the lifestyle, because, face it, California ain’t just a state it’s a life style. Stupid me for leaving the organic black tea with cardamom pods and other chai spices purchased from the farmers’ market on my desk. Pretty much outed myself at that juncture.

And, then there’s the large scarves and shawls in which all Bay Area women seem to wrap themselves throughout the pussy non-winter winter. I’ve been scene rocking those glad rags myself.

If my DNA is mutating. If I am becoming one with the local climate. If I am now a full-time California resident. How in fucking holy snowball hell will I survive a week with a white Christmas? That’ll be me swaddled in polar fleece with nary a pimple peaking out from the layers.

Technorati Tags: cold, Christmas, mortality, California, New England, snow, family

A certain someone who knew the man in the flesh and blood of his life and witnessed his parenting in the first years of my life, pointed out the questionable nature of conflating my own dad and perps in one sentence.

Thankfully, I was not born of the Phelps family, and I have no reason to doubt at all, one bit, the great things I’ve heard about Earl M. In memory of my father, consider him separately from the post below. And, consider him missed.

Technorati Tags: abuse, family, father

Things are so getting done around the house, easing my mind so that I could doze off a bit on the couch. My head isn’t racing with the panicked feeling of undone. I think partially because I finally got my stupid self-eval done for work.

Here’s my report, now give me that spare percentage point or so of extra dough. That’s the dance, in this job as in all the rest as with all jobs in the history of mankind. Somewhere before the combustion engine a young apprentice farrier took a thick grease pencil and checked off whether he had met or exceeded expectations. And, then, he pondered hammering a hob nail through his brain pan.

Anywho. I dozed off which means I didn’t read Howard Dully’s book, which I’ve started. Fascinating local guy and the poster child survivor for lobotomies. Now, if my stepmom signed me up for the ice pick through my eye hole and on to the good stuff of whatever lobe could get poked, I’d be bullshit. I’d be unrepentantly angry. Fucking hell, I was peeved when I realized M. had thrown away my mini marshmallows. But, to lobotomize me and make it so I’d spend a good lot of years bouncing in and out of institutions? Colossally ripshit. Nothing less.

Howard Dully, though, is thoughtful and searching. Calm, evenhanded and reflective about a childhood that included regular beatings. (Maybe it’s a placidness thanks to the procedure). You have to wonder what kind of man, what kind of thoughtful, reflective man, he might have been without modern surgery.

Instead of reading, M. put “Fall from Grace,” a documentary about the Westborough Baptist Church and Fred Phelps and his family, on the TV. Also known as the “God Hates Fags” crew. (Google it, since I ain’t linking.)

A couple of the Reverend Phelps’ offspring, now estranged, were interviewed by phone about their earliest recollections of his utter assholishness. Raging, violent crazy lawyer dad turned preacher and protester and overall fucked up, erroneous agent of the lord, dad. Must have been some kind of fun kiddiehood.

In my dozing, with the familiest of holidays almost upon us, I can’t help but think, “Damn, there’s some shitty parenting out there in the world.” I’m not saying my own dad, about whom I have only heard wonderful tributes, would be a perpetrator. But, maybe it’s not so bad growing up with just the one parent, Pat, whose protection knew no end.

Technorati Tags: family, happiness, abuse, lobotomy, Fred Phelps, relationships, Howard Dully, work, review

Happy Winterval, Festivus, Chrismahanukwanzakah.

Now that I’ve mailed out this year’s model in the old, polluting card style, and in the new-fangled electronic, green model, I feel I can add it here. Happy holidays to anyone I’ve missed. (Thanks to the walloping of New England snow, this virtual greeting might proceed some of the through snow, sleet, dark of night delivery kind.)

Also, if you want to be added to my card-giving list, just let me know.

Finally, a big thanks to the folks out there in the cybering land, a handful of whom seem to be emailing this old chestnut.

You might also like this gem from 2006.

One more week of work in 2007. It’s not even really a week, since we fly out on Friday. But, flying is fucking work.

I have about 30 work things to do before it all ends, not least of which is figuring out my last year’s goals, next year’s goals and wrapping it all up in an online bow and a meeting with the boss. A complicated pursuit for a pretty average next year of salary.

At least, shopping is pretty much well and done. ‘Cept for a couple of things for a couple of friends, to whom I just want to say “Hey, Christmas. Happy. Joy.” Nothing major, no big outlay of cash, but that shit’s the hardest. That kind of gift has to have a little personal recognition.

But the big shit is done. Well, except for how the hell am I going to haul it across the fucking country. And, the terrorists are so cramping my holiday flow. Obvious youle joy to buy and bring “home” would be a couple of bottles of notable Cali grape juice. Can’t carry it, though, so I’d have to pack it, and risk broken glass at 30,000 feet. Fuck me. And, fuck Al Qaeda.

Fa la la la fucking la.

I haven’t been writing here, because all of my meager, measly gray matter was going to one line. I was trying to think of something, anything, anything beyond the seasonal “Fuck you, I’m tired,” to slap on a Christmas card.

Of course, clever fuck that I am, I likes to make my own cards. So, in addition to hauling out the holly, I was busting out the Photoshop. Here are my lead rejects. My original “vision,” and by vision I mean self-important, self-appointed artistic bullshit, was to have annual frolicking antics with M. and me. But, M. in an empty room is in some pseudo-intellectual statement really is a portrait with me. Who else would be shooting the camera.

Draft 2 was me trying to add myself back in somehow. Numbero three-o was an arsty thing. They all lost the contest in my head.

I do really think I will never top the beautiful, simple, resonating greeting of “Merry Christmas by any means necessary.”

If you want a real live postcard off of the printer du dee-rob, and you don’t think I have your mail addy, drop me a line. If you want the soon to be released digital postcard, let me know your email. If you don’t give a shit, and really who would blame you, don’t do nothing at all.

Other than seasonal greeting agony, work has been crazy busy in a very frustrating end of the year gotta get it done now way. One result, though, is that it appears some time in 2008 I might be doing a business trip to Kenya. In Africa. Like, African Kenya. In Africa. How fucking cool with that be?