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Another day, another dollar

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Some days, I figure I have a couple of things worked out, and I fancy myself clever for working to live not the other way around. Other times, the universe isn’t what you might call kind and kicks me in the head just enough to remind me I have to work any way I can.

Could be worse – I type type type in a cubicle not dig dig dig in the dirt or bleed bleed bleed to make one piece more. But, with my addictions to having food, clothing and shelter, rather than racing hungry and nekkid in the streets, work must be done.

That’s my preamble. That’s my reality when I pull on my bootstraps or whatever other cliche working stiffs are told and remind myself of all of the choices I made that got me here.

Truth is, somewhere around 1989 or thereabouts, I sorted out a pretty major truth for myself. I like doing something where I’m helping out on something useful and good, but I’m not the captain of the ship. I don’t want to be on the bridge responsible for saving lives, steering clear of the shoals or icebergs. I like being a reliable deckhand, pointing out the rocks up ahead.

In ’89, I had my first not-for-profit gig. In the dark ages, we–the world–hadn’t mapped the human genome, cloning mice was sexy and got magazine covers and tumor suppressor genes were undiscovered. In those same dark ages, grant applications were on paper and giant boxes with multiple copies to hand out to the peer review committees were mailed into government repositories for sorting by human hands.

Copies I made and collated and put in boxes, narratives I edited and budgets I helped craft and checked and re-checked with long strands of old-fashioned calculator tapes were a tiny contribution to science. In small ways I contributed, and in more significant ways, I did too. I helped post docs decode their first grant applications. I sat on the floor and collated appendices alongside a young scientist who was the first to map the Y chromosome. Shit, I even fought another genomic rockstar when his brand new Mac computer was an allowable expenditure under government rules, but he’d have to pony up the cash for KidPix and other software for his kids.

It was fun. I got to hang out with smart people. I got to carve out a corner where I was smart and reliable people myself working alongside them.

When a crazy chain of events ended one job, it was amazing to realize how many friends I had made with the scientists. Real friends, ones where we broke bread, drank beer and danced at weddings together. We joked about putting a special sign in my condo that the leading lab in the country working with listeria had shat in my tiny bathroom. The most senior of the senior scientists called me at home to let me know he’d be a reference for whatever gig was next.

After that, my grants voodoo had me writing budgets for grants discovering the BRCA1 gene, lumpectomies that spared countless breasts, the statistical underrepresentation of African American women in cancer studies and overrepresentation in death. My strength is and was being able to connect what people wanted to do with aligning the bureaucracy to make things work.

Never has anyone said, “Boy howdy, that was some interesting science, but those forms, they were filled out flawlessly.” But, still in all, I have met a lot of people, I have trained a lot of people, and I helped move some stuff along.

I’ve mastered most administrative tasks and gravitated toward supporting executives who run centers and teams. Today the science is social and the work in different areas.

Here’s the thing, though, by definition good administrative support is invisible administrative support. When text reads how the scientists intended and their fingerprints overlay whatever I touch or people remember the meeting content not the dimensions of the conference room or that food, water and caffeine were plentiful but unobtrusive, I’ve done my job well.

When directors are well-prepared and organized or know every detail and bump in the road when they walk into the meeting, even if it’s minutes after a red eye flight, no one has seen me compiling the information they have in hand. When a few hallway chats or emails quiet work teams concerns, no one sees the ghostwriter. When departmental leaders trust me and my team, it’s through relationships I have steadily built. It’s not a coincidence in three decades of work, I’ve beta-tested, gotten equipment early and have special access from every IT department I’ve encountered.

Even when I have had major career setbacks, my performance feedback has been complimentary, and I’ve made friends at every level of the organization. In my current job, a senior manager told me I’m seen as an honest broker, willing to help others and speak up even on the hard issues.

And, even as I do well, including bonuses and other recognition, some people flat out dislike me or disagree with me or my style. I plug on — Mostly, the good outweighs the bad, and no one knows my shortcomings better than me.

But always there comes a time when–because my work is invisible, systems I’ve created are working and second nature or information I’ve created or complied is used by others and absorbed into the tissue of the work–there comes a time when my contributions are forgotten. Coming into work, newer people or growing teams see me only as today’s veteran doing daily work seemingly by rote.

It’s not just me. I see it around me with others like me — middle-aged workers in support roles, because we like it and are good at it and are actively contributing. We are not too stupid or ambitious to have done more with our lives.

Now when people see me, new people, younger and younger people, they don’t really see me. They don’t see my value as a mentor, because on their career paths they self-assuredly know they will do better than me.

Managers see my inevitable, all too human mistakes, which are mostly rare, in a harsh light, because the bar for me is higher, and they no longer afford me the patient tones provided new recruits. Performance reviews evolve and paragraphs are spent on what still can be tweaked rather than all the forgotten moments when things went well or smoothly.

My sisters (they are all women) in arms, other career administrators, face the same challenges. We talk in hushed tones in corners about our jobs. We wonder to each other how to work with new people and come up with plans both formal and blessed by leadership and informally. We give each other advice when new managers come in and smile as we train those with higher salaries and more prestige who will soon also not see our invisible work.

We back each other up, providing advice or a shoulder, when the very thing we took part in creating is torn down or taken, or others casually insult the nature of what we do by choice or actually like to do. We commiserate when someone comes in with a “new” idea and is praised vociferously, an idea that we tried or suggested years before that hadn’t taken root.

We notice when no one asks for our input about things we know. Right now, as I face a management change, I can see in calendars, my teammates’ meetings to discuss what to do. I’m not invited and no one has asked for my input or my colleague’s, even though she and I were put in charge of a similar change in years long past.

Over time we watch how people stop asking us questions on how things work. New people assume we only know the simple tasks or only are driven by maintaining the status quo. New committees form, and slowly my dance card empties.

In my current job there is no special recognition for years of service. Some people are term-limited and the company ethos focuses on them. It’s the only job where I have not gotten even a certificate or paragraph in a newsletter or simple thank you at 5 or 7 or 10 years let alone a gift or bonus. So, it’s no surprise younger and newer workers don’t even learn the veterans’ names.

I brace again for change, and I have to look forward to a new manager. It’s simultaneously daunting and refreshing to face a clean slate.

All I know is I’m not “just an administrator.” I’m an administrator. Somebody’s got to do it.

Happy Pat’s Day 2019

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It’s not unusual for me to think of my mother.  She was a force to be reckoned with and from feminism and progressive politics to arts, crafts and approaching the mundane with a creative flair to just wanting to be a contrarian, she formed a lot of who I am today.

With the hot fucking mess that is Donald Trump in the Whitehouse and the latest wave of Catholic scandals, she’d be on fire.  Her acid wit would burn holes in the atmosphere as she would undoubtedly be glued to CNN fueling an internal flame of discontent.  “Me too” would likely create rants of how is it that men have stayed in power this long and why not give women a chance?

Lately, though, there’s a restlessness that has me thinking, “What would Pat do?”

I keep wondering if I’ve stayed too long at the fair in terms of employment.  She’d totally understand my simmering thoughts about appreciation.  Much more basically, she’d probably remark casually that the longer you stay anywhere the easier it is for your contribution to become the status quo, and everyone forgets how hard you work. You know, she’d say laughing, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”

But, at the same time, she’d be the worrying voice that tells you to keep a good job and not take any chances.  My worrying voice about money, work, the mortgage, all of it is her voice.

Yet, we both know, she knew when she was here on earth, that I probably shouldn’t let myself become too complacent.  We’d fight, of course, and she’d find many, many ways to tell me that I’m crazy.  And, she’d be absofuckinglutely right.

But, yet, there would be a glint of appreciation. Some pride.  And, she would agree,

“Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum.”

And, for you, Pat.  For everything you’ve taught me, I still tilt at windmills to mix a literary metaphor.  I still fight the power.  And, I always just laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Finally, for the tulips at the top, a friend–who also remembers and needs herself to be reminded sometimes to never allow yourself to be ground down–shared them for the ides of March and esprit to guerre.  Maybe somewhere in the infinite space the spirits of those who make this date important to each of us are sharing a joke.

Pat Day 2017

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I think I fucked up last year, and didn’t write.  But every year on dear old Pat’s anniversary, the anniversary of when she was born, the legendary Ides of March, I think of the old gal.  In this episode of remembrance of things past I mostly am thinking about the conversations I would have had if she were to still wander around planet earth. (I think I just subjunctived the shit out of that sentence.)

The first conversation is all about crafts.  I ridiculously bought myself a button maker to make little pins like thes
I suspect the desire for this little gadget was straight up recapture of the 1970s I never had.  I always wanted whatever the toy version was back in the olden days.  I think it might have been this Button Factory. Although, circa 1978 seems past my peaked pique interest.

Getting back to Pat and crafts more generally, though. Kindred spirits to crafty Pat stroll the hallways of my work. The knitters among my colleagues have of late left the shadows. We gather during the workday and create knitting circles during lunches.

(Completely tangentially, I should disclose that Pat’s own crafty daughter, the person typing this sentence, may have held a little sway in bringing the crafters into the sunshine. )

One knitter spouted a surprising reflection of Pat to me.  She said that there is value in using your hands, having a hobby, an outlet that wasn’t the thought-heavy essence of our daily work. Not everything can be reading and thinking and computers and communication and using your brainiest bits of brain.

Instead, things were solvable by not dwelling on them.  The best of a good hobby is that it takes you out of whatever the thing that you might be doing or might supposed to be doing and puts you somewhere else.  If your hands are busy for a little while that’s all that matters.  Then, while making something homey and crafty, your brain gets to rest and fight another day.

Pat would have nodded in agreement.  One of my favorite Pat quotes in reference to someone going through a bad patch of depression and struggle and maybe a soupçon of intoxicating substance — “She thinks too much.  She needs a hobby.”  It was that simple.

Given half a chance, Pat would have tried to bring a junkie to Jo-Ann Fabrics or Michael’s and had them pick out something to do with their hands.

Which brings me to thing number two that I’d be talking with Pat about if she were here — The scourge that is Donald J. Trump.  The knitting circle at my work and the pussy hat phenomenon, doubtless come from the same place — Scores of woman with hands and a need to do something, anything to make something, create something, build something in the face of the nihilist president.

My aunt and my sister and I have each and all wondered: What the hell would Pat say about Trump?

She’d probably throw herself deeply into doll house making, maybe making the Capitol dome, the real one already miniaturized in moral authority, wee little unethical congress.  Maybe a miniature Capitol dome would be too redundant.  Or, maybe a  White House, tiny and to scale of what real grown up governing looks like, something in line with Trump’s tiny vision, one-inch scale.

And as she built, she’d be ranting.  Each shingle on the miniature roof would be another grumble. Kellyanne Conway would be angrily painted furniture and wrapping paper cum wallpaper.  Betsy DeVos might warrant her own wing or maybe a wall.  She’d build a wall, little bricks glued together to ease the pain of a woman ignorant of how education works being in charge of the whole enchilada.  Schoolteacher Pat would be, in her word, livid.

Maybe this year’s Pat day is about Pat the ultimate maker.  And, now, in the dark days of the most fucked up presidency, the maker spirit is living.  When protests arise out of nowhere.  When knit stocking caps, and really the homespun warmth of DIY, are the cultural fashion gracing the New Yorker magazine.  When everyone is not sure what to do, but they just start doing, because to do nothing is worse.  When strangers speak up, band together, share, write postcards together, share congressional phone numbers on Facebook, march, walk, make signs, rally, write words in the sand on the beach, that’s DIY, that’s maker, that’s crafts.

The best of making shit with your hands is knowing that you can. We can all build a movement.  My next pussy hat will be made for my mother.

I’m pretty sure Donald J. Trump has never built anything with his own tiny digits.  And maybe for just that alone, Pat would never have trusted him.

Mother’s Day, Pat and life is so damned tough

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I completely fucked up and didn’t write my annual tribute you on Pat’s Day, March 15, her erstwhile birthday. So, on the hallmark-iest of days, I’ll write about Pat and how much I particularly wish she were here today, right now, this week of all weeks. And, I will provide a tribute in a pic of her favorite meal.

In the way, way, way back days, Pat taught “special needs” kids. In those days of the 60s, 70s and 80s, that euphemism was used for students who had things like dyslexia or couldn’t sit still. They were normal kids with learning disabilities and rode the regular long bus not the short variety. Instead, the short bus riders were called mentally deficient or most often retarded.

Now it’s a slur, and then it was an adjective.

So, back in those dark days, my town, the same one in which Pat taught, was actually not bad in handling kids who were developmentally delayed or had an intellectual disability. I’m not sure of the best words to use. Anyway, according to what my mother and her friends told me, and my own experience, there were students from nearby towns joining our schools,nand for a few hours a day or week, the handicapped kids were “mainstreamed” into our classes. Pat was besties with Debbie, who taught, or in some cases just managed, the classroom in their school where these kids were the rest of the time, and Pat would help that class, too.

She affectionately and without a shred of malice–seriously it was a different fucking decade–called them her “retreads.”

Because I was me–a dorky, lumpen, possibly doughy little girl, who far, far preferred reading and writing to actually talking with people, and because I was for better or worse Pat’s baby and shadow in so much of her teaching life, which chronologically coincided with my schooling life, my mom had a plan. She put the word out to her teacher friends to use me in classrooms, as peer and friend to the kids getting their mainstream swerve on when I was in class.

Doubtlessly if asked, my mother would have said wryly that I actually belonged with the intellectually disabled.

It would have been a crime of capital proportions if I was anything but friendly and respectful to these other kids. I think one disparagement would have pushed Pat over the line from threatening a physical beating to actually doing it. So I was on a first name basis with kids with all sorts of issues — cerebral palsy, what was probably autism, Tourette’s Syndrome, Down’s, Fragile X–all of the things that could get them beaten up by the bullies.

I also learned from Pat and her friend Debbie some pretty horrible tales of mistreatment for these kids. Teacher Debbie, for example, reported physical abuse, then fostered, then adopted a friendly little boy whose dad (or step dad) would daily try to beat some sense into him. When we became adults, my mother long retired, he would great my mother by name in the local grocery store where he worked with a big smile and wave.

I was taught to just not be an asshole, and (mostly) I kept my mortification of being in with these kids in check and genuinely tried to tutor and be a friend.
Pat championed these kids. She really championed any kid who had it rough. Broken-heartedly, she also helped abused kids, including testifying in court for a poor little dude who came to her for help, which led to the revelation that he was being sexually abused.

As a side visual — there was a lot about Pat that was more grandmotherly than motherly in appearance. With her cap of sometimes untamed curly hair, big glasses and panty hose, standing all of 5-foot-2, she was not a MILF. She was kindly and comfortable to the kids, and undoubtedly they cried in her soft arms more than I ever did. I never really talked with her about sex, since that seemed so out of her area of expertise, so I can only imagine how desperate the little boy was who came to her with a health issue involving the most private of his parts.

Why am I thinking of all of this on Mother’s Day? Because this week, more than many a week, maybe ever a week, I would love to hear what Pat would say. 
In my daily life, because I am still the little girl who Pat made befriend developmentally disadvantaged folks, I chatted with a guy around my age who could only handle minimal tasks and mostly talked about baseball. He has been a fixture of my morning routine for years, greeting me with a smile and “Good Morning, Sunshine,” and I talked to him like I was taught normally to people with intellectual disabilities in a place where some people ignored him.

He was arrested this week, accused of child molestation, and then his home was searched, and they say they found child porn. After the news broke, I found out through people who knew him better than me, that at least on paper, he was not actually one of Debbie’s “retreads.” Because of the labeling and terrible situations years ago (and probably still), his mom never wanted him to be one of those short-bus kids.

So who knows what has happened, and whether anything is true. Innocent until proven otherwise. In the newspaper, he’s a grown man. But assuredly he wasn’t on the same page intellectually with most men his age. He’s sitting in jail, where certainly he will be broken if only because of his own stubborn adherence to his own daily routine.

But, he may have done one of the worst crimes you can commit.

So I wish I could hear from Pat. I wish I could hear her heart, the ferocious defender of the less fortunate. I wish I could hear her professionally, the teacher for decades of so many kids with so many problems. Where would her feelings fall? What would she say? I need her help to understand a fucked up, monstrous, horrible, bad thing. I want my mommy.

This post is intended to insult your intelligence

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Here I am, quietly home alone.  OK, not so quiet, considering the Rolling Stones are playing.  And, I haven’t quite nailed Virginia Wolff’s:

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

For a few hours it is a room of my own.  And, with my lemon trees in constant bloom and fruit, fluttering with birds, it is a room with a view.IMG_3768

The last few weeks of my employment have brought me closer to the employment of others, or their aspirations thereof.  Yeah, less pretentiously, I’ve been interviewing eager hopefuls for a job.  Not all that eager in truth.  Here are some minimum requirements to keep the conversation not the potentially fruitful side:

  • Know the name of the company that is on the phone or inside of which you sit
  • Know the name of the department, as above
  • Have some kind of vague notion of what it is we do and, therefore, what might be asked of you
  • Don’t make me cry with boredom.

The last one is actually much simpler than you might think, even if I am a bitch.  I love stories.  I love imagining myself in other shoes.  I love picking up tidbits of humanity as I chug along.

I only pretend to hate people.  But I just might be the one who smiles at you and shares conspiratorial chatter in a long grocery line or unruly crowd.

In a job interview, I really, really, really want to like you.  I’m incentivized out the ass — there’re piles of work of both the shit and not shit variety that I’m meant to be covering, because we haven’t met you yet.  I already have a full-time job, so doing yours alongside my own is just the reason I want to hug you and squeeze you and bask in the salvation and glory that your hire will be.

I need you for my very sanity.

It’s a pretty minimal bargain this boredom thing.  A low bar, in fact.

But, I’m not going to write about my experiences.  The universe knows that the gods of Google have not always smiled warmly upon my face and shoulders, so I will leave the above as guidelines only.  As they say in movie land, any resemblance to real people and real anything really is coincidental.  My thoughts from my head.

However, I will mention an experience told to me.  In comparing notes with another person doing an entirely different job search, she mentioned a phrase that has stuck with me for weeks.

In response to the worn, tattered, clichéd intro question “why are you looking to leave your current position?” the person’s response was just the kind of philosophical conundrum that rolls inside my echoing skull for hours of navel-contemplation fun.  The reply about her current gig, and despite the quotes, I wasn’t there, so I’m either paraphrasing or making it up:

It’s OK, but some days it’s like it’s just an insult to my intelligence.

Let’s leave aside that this statement was uttered in a job interview.  While I tend to do well enough I suppose in a conference room full of interrogators (well enough to get jobs, it would seem), I’ve said enough monumentally stupid things in the workplace to not feel like casting the obvious stone.

Instead, what’s killing me, the riddle I can’t fucking solve or information I ain’t parsing — What the fuck really is an insult to one’s intelligence?

OK, OK, reader thus far, there is my prose.  I’ll give you that.  Although, it’s less of an insult to your intelligence and more a cry that you could have done so much better with your synapses and your time than to have read this far.

Earlier today, I put spoons and knives and toast plates and coffee mugs into the dishwasher.  It did not challenge me.  The thoughts inside my head were dull and plodding not glimmering and profound.  Was filling the dishwasher an “insult to my intelligence.”

At work some days I tick little boxes.  I collate.  I answer phones.  I do things for other people that I don’t feel like doing for myself.  I remember things like telling my boss that we should have cookies for a festive little reason.  I buy plane tickets.  I cancel plane tickets.  I spent ungodly amounts of time in Outlook calendar moving squares around in infinite patterns.

Some days I ab-so-fucking-lute-ly hate it.  I have to remind myself that the first world joy of office work is M&Ms and sodas, mini-cupcakes and the internet.  Dear, sweet, timewastingly infinite internet.

And, there are assholes.  Insulted I have been.  But my intelligence, she is still there even when the assholes try to shake my convictions.

So, if you got this far, do me a favor.  Give me an example of what might in the glare of fluorescent lighting and computer screens be an actual insult to your intelligence.

I cannot rest until I know.

Finnegan’s wake without the whiskey

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I’d make a terrible anthropologist, I think. Rather than finding the unique and reportable, my thesis would be “people, right, yeah, pretty much the same.”

As the crow, or maybe a toucan or something tropical flies, I’m sitting just under 10,000 miles from my birthplace. All of the funerals I’ve attended have been in New England. The magic has been brought mostly by courtesy of your Roman Catholic holy and apostolic traditions, with the occasional Protestant mass for flavor.

This time around on another continent I was a newly minted family member, daughter-in-law and wife of the elder son. Just as with every service I’ve ever been, it all started with the family convergence, phone calls, the bustle of professional death handlers, friends, neighbors and relations. And in the ensuing afternoons and evenings, something like a party.

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I’m not James Joyce. And, I don’t speak Hokkien, Hainanese, Cantonese, Bahasa Malay or any other tongue piping up among the crowd. So I don’t have any stories to tell.

A bottle of whiskey wasn’t in the coffin. Nor was it stolen and sent around the crowd. No one evilly plotted a cannibal meal. And, no spare whiskey and beer were passed among the crowd.

Still and all, among the chaos, the scene was familiar. Old friends and extended family wandering in and out. Reminiscing about who was where when and what ever happened and how did everyone get so old. It was a wake, just the same as “visiting hours” in the U.S. Like in a not so distance past in my old neighborhood the guest of honor lay quietly among candles and prayers inside the house. And catered food and handshakes stayed up on the porch.