Inevitable Lena

My friends and I had a really good time playing downtown in Iowa City last night.  I had never listened to Euforquestra before, and they came samba-ing in after we finished with an encore, creating some nice momentum for their show.  They are young and friendly and full of juice.

I'm just happy to have juice.

My brother-in-law's former girlfriend, Lena, came up to greet me before the show.  Those of you familiar with my recent rant on serial monogamy will remember Lena.  She seems doubly determined since JD moved out to make herself a regular fixture in our lives.  Lena has been calling family members expressing her concern about JD's drinking.  She seems to want some sort of intervention.  They have sold off their farm equipment and Lena is reportedly selling the property they were occupying, and JD has moved in with his father out by the reservoir.  Lena and never called much, but now she's everybody's new best friend!  What gives?

I'm enjoying my position on the periphery on this one.  JD's going to have a hard time drinking at speed if he lives with his dad.  He seems to have had the same relationship with alcohol for about the past ten years.  Maybe something will come to a head.  Not up to me.  Living with my in laws, who are actually pretty good people, has taught me to offer advice sparingly, and when it is requested.  A good skill, if learned late in life.

Some folks are hard to get rid of.  I supervised a therapist when I started being a boss at my agency who was just a turd.  A control freak, he would become threatened and then would sound very patronizing when things didn't work out.  He was a bully to peers and would explode on them intermittently when he thought they weren't doing their jobs well.  He desperately wanted a leadership position in the agency and was roundly detested by a good portion of his peers, and seen as a transparent suck up by all but a few administrators.

I gave this guy a good deal of very blunt advice about leadership, how much of it is informal and that none of it is really associated with bullying or explosive outbursts resulting in demeaning interactions.  He was able to increase the interval between episodes, but he was not able to extinguish them.  He also continued to try to finagle some sort of leadership opportunity, but seemed to think it was going to all be about who he knew and how he manipulated.  (This can be true, but it also usually involves at least a certain degree of helpfulness and one or two social skills, used judiciously, with peers.)  At any rate, I got rid of the guy when I developed a new program, much to my relief, but then he was assigned back to me when I was involuntarily reorganized and restructured.

Being involuntarily reorganized and restructured is something I could think about riffing on for some time.  Perhaps a song. . . .

After a while, this turd man demanded more money or he would leave for another agency.  He went over my head to do this and had an interview scheduled with the COO about it.   She checked in and asked if I wanted to keep him and I indicated my indifference.  She paid him the money and he was more insufferable than ever, feeling validated or something.  Finally, he left for that other agency, when another internal supervisory position became available and he was given only token consideration for it.  I was free!  Freeeeeeeeee!

Again, I was overly optimistic.  This is a flaw of mine, really.  Recently, while tidying up 13 years of messiness and incomplete tasks, I discovered that turd man had not filled in all the demographic data on his clients when he left.  He had instead assigned all these cases to me.  To be fair I remember him saying something about this and I agreed, asking myself, I suppose, "how bad could it be?"

Bad.  I will spend my evenings the rest of the week cleaning up turd boy's data along with my own.  I am haunted by turd boy consistently for the entire duration of my career as a manager.  He is my corporate albatross.

Lena and turd boy haunt us, the follow in our wake, reminding us of our poor decisions, our hubris, our ambition and our own transparency.  They are at once clueless and knowing.

I suspect they are also in league with the Schwann's man.

my labyrinth

One thing I normally love about writing is how the thoughts must line up single file to flow through the words as they uniformly follow one another politely refraining from stepping on each other and tangling as they do in my head. As I try to understand the lessons of this time the untangling has been slow and uncomfortable for me.

I think I hurt Diana's feelings and pissed her off a lot during what came to be the final year of her life. So I've been wandering the labyrinth of sorrow alone in my journal, and out loud with those who love me and were somewhat removed. Some of it may be worth exploring here... given that any year may be the last we get to spend with someone we love.

I have thought for a long time, maybe always, that the best we can give those we love is the truth. I don't mean Truth, I just mean honesty...saying it as we see it, and owning sometimes our vision sucks. I consider this a difficult thing to do, yet very worthwhile in general, and specifically with those we love most. Diana totally is in that category for me. I gave it to her to the best of my ability. With all my love. It hurt and pissed her off and now she's gone. This is not good for me.

Agreements

At the risk of overly defining things, what are we hoping to accomplish here?  Writing, certainly.  Nancy has just opened up administrator status to us.  How do we want to proceed?   How is this different from our own personal blogs?  What thoughts did folks have when they signed on?

Let's declare some intent, throw some ideas around.   My thinking would be that anything expressive is fair. 

S.

Transitions

I don't need no stinkin' methods -- I've got an owl in my backyard. This is a photo of him from last year. He's been around all month. Right now, he's peering intently at the ten new goldfish in the pond.

I'm still working on this whole widower thing. The first couple of weeks, I was thinking I might get off pretty easily. With a couple week's hindsight, my current theory jibes with something Dede said a couple weeks ago.

Here's my reference story: Thirty-some years ago, I built apartments for a construction/rental property firm in Ames. We were building walls, which entails laying out two long boards (a top plate and a bottom plate) and then nailing 92 5/8-inch studs between them, sixteen inches apart. We used air-powered nailguns, which could shoot a 14-penny nail with the muzzle velocity of a .38 revolver (at least that's what somebody told me). One guy holds the stud's end up to the plate, and another pops two nails through the plate into the stud, and we move on down to the next stud. I was the senior guy, and I should have been running the nailgun, but other guy was notoriously slow, and I was trying to get the rest of the first floor walls up that Friday, so I was holding the studs and trying to set the pace. Somehow, Slowguy managed to shoot a nail under the plate, so that it skipped off the floor and buried itself into my knee. Time slowed down, as time does in situations like that, and I realized that I was on a raised platform with my kneecap nailed into place. I gave it a some thought, pulled out my trusty claw hammer, and proceeded to pull the nail out of my kneecap, using my thigh for leverage.

If I told that story right, you just cringed. I do, every time I think of it, even to this day, but at the time it didn't seem that bad at all -- it was just what had to be done. Looking back on the month of April, particularly the last week or so, the stuff I described at the time as "not that bad" seems pretty darned traumatic in retrospect -- I think I'd rather pull nails. I think a lot of the immediate loss of Diana was offset quite a bit by the relief of the end of that whole surreal experience.

Currently, my mood oscillates between sad, okay, and weird. I'm about half way through The Year of Magical Thinking (the book, not the year) -- it's given me some stuff to think about, but so far I'm noticing the differences in our stories more than the similarities.

So far, she hasn't talked about identity. I find myself thinking about that. dp and I used to joke that we could have our last names changed to Andkevin and Anddiana. 'Husband' has been pretty high on my list of hats, and that hat got even bigger through the whole cancer thang. Right now, I've flipped it inside out so I can call it a widower hat, but I'm sure that will get old.

I had the same rearrangement when we closed Unbound. 'Counselor' and 'cult expert' had become part of my identity, I remember feeling gaps that needed to be filled out. Looking back, I think 'filled out' is more accurate than 'plugged,' but I'm already mashing metaphors. Let's not go stuffing hats into holes.

That was eighteen years ago, and my sense of identity has a lot more experiences to it these days. It didn't seem that undeveloped at the time, but it feels much more solid now. It can take a few holes. The reframe is interesting, though. I still tend to say 'we' a lot, and cook for two, and I realized that I was apparently waiting for Diana to get the trashcan liner put in. (What will I do without Diffusion of Responsibility?)

Emotionally, I think I'm being pretty careful. I feel like grief is this big old mud puddle that I could just go wallow around in if I wanted to, but I don't see much advantage to doing that. I've never been much of a believer in the ventilation school of emotional baggage. Yelling about something that makes me mad only makes me more angry, so I'm sticking my toe the mud, but I'm not jumping in. Still, I get bushwhacked. I was having lunch with Bob this week, and the restaraunt's music starting playing Etta James' 'At Last.' I instinctively picked up my cell phone, because that's the song I used for the appointment alarm for dp's doctor's visits. It took me a moment to put it all together, and then I just lost it for a minute. I'm not wallowing, but I suppose I am grimy.

That's more than enough self-disclosure for today. It's the Memorial day weekend, so I've got three days to try and get some more stuff done. I'm making progress -- I've finally got a good handle on the bills and the paperwork, and I have a reasonably-clean kitchen. Trooley and I have been walking every other day or so, and I got a full, reasonably-productive week in at work. I'm still behind on my web design work, and I'm doing my best to ignore the piles of dp's stuff that still have to be dealt with, but all in all, things move forward.

More Methods and Transitions

Welcome dd and Kevin!

My method is a bit different in that I start with an idea and then find the right picture. But it's amazing how often Cranium Man is blogging about the same ideas I am working on at the time.

I am indeed looking for a new job. A couple of years ago I realized that I would be able to retire from my current job with benefits long before reaching the traditional age of 65. I officially became eligible in the middle of March, about the same time the economy began it's latest nosedive. I always knew I wouldn't be able to stop working entirely, but thought I'd be able to do parttime or short term jobs for the intervening years until the government bennies kicked in. (I still have some optimism that there will be some bennies, at least.) But now it looks as if I will have to continue mostly full time for at least a few more years.

So, you may be thinking, why not just stay where you are? Well, that is becoming increasingly more difficult. It's a long drive (gas prices), and it's getting harder to tolerate the long night shifts. And the final straw was being docked a days pay for calling in when my best friend died. It's not so much the money but the attitude. I don't want to work for a "health care" organization with so little compassion.

Tomorrow I will talk to my financial adviser for the big picture. In the meantime, I'm scouting for jobs with a shorter commute and daytime hours. It will mean a change of specialty since all the intensive care nurseries in the state are at least an hour away from home. But I'm still capable of learning new tricks, old dog that I am....

"Today's Sagittarius Horoscope: May 21, 2008

Ingenious new techniques for making money grow may come your way today, dear Sagittarius, and while you're not one to jump into anything, you are certainly likely to give these ideas some serious thought. Take care to go only for those that are totally up front, with no hidden sides."

I found this Horoscope on the Internet after I wrote the rest of this post-really!

Methods

Mine's simple.  We take a lot of photos and I carry a camera with me in the car.  When I'm in a certain mood and see something I appreciate visually, I stop and snap it.  In the morning, when the paper is done, I pull up a photo and write something along with it.  Sometimes the writing relates to the photo, sometimes the connection is tenuous at best.

I'm thinking a lot about transition because I'm leaving a career with a large human service agency and joining (gasp) the Federal Government. ( And, for some other reasons, too.  This was the year my ex-wife died and the year one of my oldest friends died.)  

This hiring process involves an enormous number of forms and I need to take a WHOLE DAY and get these done.  I have to remember to ask Harvey in Security to remember to send me two sets of fingerprint cards, so I can go down to the Cedar Rapids cop shop and get my pinkies listed in the Giant Federal Database of Information About Citizens.  Part of the global liberal conspiracy you've been hearing about.  I also have a large number of tasks to complete that are not complete, and no one really knows for sure who will succeed me, so I have no one to transition to.

I think this means that I was pretty useful to this agency and that they really hadn't thought about what would happen if I left.  This didn't stop them from letting me go, though.

The most difficult thing is ending therapy with folks with whom I am not finished.  This always feels a little like betrayal (a thought I work not to have, since it implies "rescue" and dependency).

The next job sounds eminently doable.  I went to Vinton and met the director and we talked for a while.  She seems very upbeat and energetic.  She is also not my boss.  We're not sure who my boss will actually be, and he or she may not actually have started yet.   But what the Hell, I'll be on employee probation for two years.  This gives me plenty of time to locate a boss.  My office will be in the basement of one of the dormitories occupied by Americore/NCCC  "members."  These are the 18-24 year olds who serve.  Sounds like my job will be part resident assistant, part counselor, part trainer, and I'll have involvement in disciplinary issues related to members.  Okay. 

I sat in my office yesterday looking at all the things that must be done in order for me to go.   It was hard to pick something.  I dug in and worked on paperwork until the next client came.  I told them I was leaving and tried to work with them on what we think we learned in therapy.  This family is divorced and the parents are so stuck in their anger that they get lost in recrimination while their son struggles with anger and flounders between them.  I reminded them again that the war between them is optional and that their son is not.  I genuinely like this family, as I do with most that I see, and am sorry they are so stuck.  It's time for a new set of eyes here.  These folks will not make it to the hourly caseload on Saturdays.

[Moments of reflection interrupted by the need to haul Caitlin and two friends to student council.  I thought the friends' deadbeat parents were dropping them off, but this was not the case.  Walker, who took four calls to get out of bed, fell asleep on the sofa and then got to the shower where he went into a state of suspended animation, awaking only to yell "SHIT!  Will you take me to school?!!!" when I told him what time it was.  I yelled "NO!" as I headed out the door.  The bus arrives at the end of our suburban driveway, for God's sake.  How cool that I can inspire the children before they head out on their happy days!]

I arrive home to find that a miracle has passed and Walker dried, dressed, and got on the bus.

I know it will all be done.  I know what I filled was a role and that now others will endeavor to fill that role.  They will create their own roles, and the large organization of which I was a part will lumber on, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

This must be the week for Yeats.