[815] Knot Guilty

Ugh.

Let's start by trying to remember and paraphrase something I heard in an article about Sad Radicals. (Never mind, I'll just quote it.)

[The paradigm of suspicion leaves the radical exhausted and misanthropic, because any action or statement can be shown with sufficient effort to hide privilege, a microaggression, or unconscious bias. Quoted in JM, the anarchist professor Richard Day proposes “infinite responsibility”: “we can never allow ourselves to think that we are ‘done,’ that we have identified all of the sites, structures, and processes of oppression ‘out there’ or ‘in here,’ inside our own individual and group identities.” Infinite responsibility means infinite guilt, a kind of Christianity without salvation: to see power in every interaction is to see sin in every interaction. All that the activist can offer to absolve herself is Sisyphean effort until burnout. Eady’s summarization is simpler: “Everything is problematic.”]

This got me thinking about the ideas I've used to exhaust myself. I don't belabor nonsense about insufficient power or feel more than perpetually incidentally victimized by way of general life as it were, but feeling “infinite responsibility” is definitely something I've felt and talked about. I don't feel done. I don't really relax. I take a good majority of superficially good or reliable things and look for ways to poke holes or reimagine as accidental blips of good in an otherwise sea of shit.

What's my salvation? How ideologically driven am I? The irony of the ideologue is to maintain no inroads into thinking they're wrong. It's my general view that most people maintain at least one or a dozen Big Lies at the heart of their being that would more or less constitute the kind of irrational radicalism that keeps them chugging along. I think my only saving grace is the ability to be of two minds perpetually. It is all shit. It is all as good as anyone could ever dream of.

When it continues into guilt, I start to get curious. Guilt isn't really something I think I do well. As in, I don't often experience it anymore. I felt guilt when I was a kid. I didn't know why I was doing things and had little context. The more you own your behavior and speak your mind (or “truth” as people who phrase things ickily might opt for), there's little room to beat yourself up or require and seek salvation. I own my “fuck yous” as closely as I do my praise and enjoyment. When I feel evil and mean, I believe me, and maintain the conversation about the dangers of enjoying the destruction by occupying that place for too long or in questionable scenarios.

Interestingly enough, when you look at the Wikipedia page for guilt, you find:

[Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation. Guilt is closely related to the concept of remorse. Guilt is an important factor in perpetuating obsessive–compulsive disorder symptoms.]

So maybe I'm massively wrong. Maybe my compulsions are driven by a guilt inaccurately conceived in youth, and my standards are not my own, and the responsibility lies elsewhere. I mean, it'd be nice to pawn most if not everything off on childhood trauma, but I made the mistake of writing a lot. There's only so many times you can reference your crazy mother and get away with it. As well, my compulsions, so-labeled by me and not diagnosed or properly interfering with my ability to handle business, are of the variety that annoy people with the real problem of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have the counting, tapping, making things “even” boutique problem.

There's certainly always a veil of “all I haven't done” or generalized fear response for things I assume I've done wrong which absolutely ties in neatly with my childhood. I didn't do drugs on vacation and I don't hit on people at work, but when HR calls wanting me to screen, I assume the worst. The more I read this Wikipedia page, you could say I've a Freudian, more than an existential, form of guilt, were I in need of claiming it.

But back to the original quoted paragraph. Seeing sin in every interaction is a good one. I've been there. I still see enough disconcerting and dispiriting things constantly, but I'm more resolved to people's overt hopelessness, uselessness, ignorance, or naive selfishness more than maliciousness. The image of pushing a boulder up a hill comes to my mind often and has been considered as a tattoo.

Work feels like that. I'm not getting anywhere but onto the next not-quite disaster. The same tired lines, waiting for you to stop crying, emails with no or bad answers. There's no growth, nothing changing. People just default to cliches. You'd think something as theoretically dynamic as individuals and how they manage to hurt and neglect each other...well, let me stop myself, I said “individuals.” I'm just dealing with people. People stopped being interesting well before I got this job.

I want to take a break. I want to feel like I can take back more of my time without delving into spite. I want the prospect of typing the same stupid lines the same stupid ways to not provoke sheer exhaustion and the impulse to start acting weird.

I talked to the head of the agency on Monday. We sat down for lunch for a little over an hour. We discussed race, day-to-day office interactions, big-picture software and organization dynamics. We're both readers and constant thinkers so it went smooth and didn't show any obvious major failings but for all the things I must assume she thought about a few of my choice phrasings. On the drive back and in these following days, it's only sinking in further that there is no “top” person of any consequence that can move pieces any faster than one pawn at a time. I'm not under the illusion that the bluster of legislation is the hot ticket to be of influence either. Even when you buy your legislators, there's no guarantees. And with all the money in the world, you still die of colon cancer.

It all, always, resolves to you as an individual. You have to cross thicker lines when the otherwise adopted boundaries become too restrictive. That is, if you can't detach or negotiate, which I'm proving to myself I can't or would be unwise. Guilt in this train of thought would serve as a restrictive agent and as empathy for the hapless souls feeling as desperate around you. Good thing I'm still not prepared to claim it.

[814] Sharp Objects

I think this'll be one of those blogs that I've tried to write for so long, and tested so many ways to start, it's going to feel several degrees of disjointed, but I'm tired of not writing and want to get the word vomit out.

I think the word “progressive” is presumptuous. Progress describes the pieces of a story or process that start and eventually end with something that's taken for granted as worthwhile. “Progressives” imagine a series of social policies that are meant to speak towards equal opportunity or the staying of disenfranchising history. Progress is thought simultaneously with “gain.” The people involved picked up perspectives or relationships. “The real treasure was what we learned along the way.” Progress, as conceived of as the “positive” or “affirmative” carries an undue nobility or incivility for things that don't feel as though they are aiding you on your quest. The realities of those things often get ignored instead of incorporated or wrestled and contained.

A few things have reminded me of how to continue thinking sideways instead of up. At work, positions open often enough for a mildly different job with about the same pay. The State doesn't cultivate and harvest leaders or visionaries. The State walks you right up the line you can tolerate, and then offers to walk you down it until the scenery of something new keeps you chugging along another 6 months or year. As you “progress” through your career, they tell you to be excited at the opportunity to learn different aspects and “take something away” from your time there. Is it a very personal lesson regarding your emotional turmoil or an indomitable will instead of enough money? Always.

I think about myself in charge of my modest, but successful, entrepreneurial entity. When I have my dozen employees and niche blogs want to “hear my story.” I did an AMA on reddit once while I was working the coffee shop. I spent several hours tearing through the idea that anyone can just do something like that without people giving them money and trusting and relying on them in spite of a system designed for you to fail. Whatever I create in the future, no manual for how you can do it too should include, “get lucky on Craigslist and find x, y, or z” or “sell your body, save, and get real lonely and tolerant of rural living surprises.” I think it was Robert Rodriquez who said on Bill Maher he did a drug study to fund his first movie, so the sentiment would always reduce to “be infinitely creative, and stay healthy.”

Would I have “progressed” in my, very lazily conceived, goal of “retiring by 30?” I didn't even imagine a life past the age of 30 because I was sure I would pretty much have gotten whatever I was aiming for. At 31, technically, it's taken me like 9 years to get the kind of smoke and rumbles of the ability to keep playing the experimental business game. I've had the land for almost 3, a livable house for less than 6 months, the shed 2 years ago, and I've already got the paycheck en route to confidently say I'm no more than a month and a half from getting out of debt that matters. You know, when I type what my life has looked like out like this, it's occurring to me the severity of my compulsion to get what I think I want. I've spent blips of time securing my future. There's a version of this paragraph where 34 or 37 step in for 31 and anyone who reads is going to find me an impossible cunt in my casual reference to what I have, as though what I have right now isn't appreciable enough.

I remember thinking as a kid that I would be “properly successful” when I could afford a big screen TV. I idolized TV, and it was the “cool parents” or rich person in movies who always had one. I obviously had no idea the degree in which TV technology would progress, and could have a dozen of those TVs for the price of what one 65” big black box would have cost back then. Once I got my first big TV, I felt great. I found it for free, and got it repaired for like $100 bucks. I still enjoy it, and my other one I got at Wal-Mart. I like all of my toys and electronics on down the line. The wants didn't stop. The desire multiplier is always in play.

Can you “progress” in such accumulation? Many books and philosophies on that have soundly landed on “no.” Owning isn't appreciating. One of my TVs is quite heavy. It feels like less of a gift when you can't get it moved in, or even across the room, by yourself. A giant organization or a ton of money in and of itself aren't going to do it for me. I have too much stuff already that I've found for free that waits to be put into circulation. I've had considerably more money and did precisely nothing with it until I found the land. I will always find it wildly instructive to consider what I did with my in-class Star-bucks, give them away, when I had accumulated too much and had nothing left to buy. It's not enough to have the money, you have to know how to use it. It's not enough to have the idea, you have to see evidence of you working it. It's the process, not progress. It's the journey, not the destination.

There's probably no greater testament to my underlying obsessive tendencies than when I play video games. A “challenge” section in Spider-Man I'll replay a hundred times for several hours trying to crack how to get ranked at the top. I have to come in first in racing games, marathon races with a slip-up at the end are no exception. There's a zone of “do it, do it, do it” that provokes severe headaches that get ignored, reactive explosions of swearing or hitting things, and just a general “nothing outside of this matters” feeling. It's possible. It's just a bunch of code that wants to be appeased, and there's only so many ways you can continue to fuck up or time you can inhabit the incorrect mental space before you get there.

A similar sensation, though more dreadful, takes place when it comes to doing other work I don't particularly enjoy. At least the video game, I picked it. Paperwork or asshole parent and perpetrator interviews? I have to get paid. A degree of civility and trampling over what my body conceives of as the best time to sleep? There’s a persistent force working against my intention and what I'd like to try and control for. I excel at getting things done or achieving not because I want to. I have to. The alternative is a black abyss of spiraling self-loathing and other not-so broad abstractions of accepted shit into your life.

I have a coworker who has anxiety attacks. She's traced it back to when she had to ensure her sick step-father got his medication several times a day. If he didn't take them at the right times, he could get much sicker or die. So the same sense of “I have to pay attention, I have to get this right” is embedded in her. It was traumatizing to be her age and thinking about being responsible for maybe getting someone killed by not doing what she needed to.

Her story got me thinking about my relationship to school and trying to get approval. My mom was less of a bitch when I got good grades or would read a book. It only occurred to me much later in life how many parents get off on the idea of their smart kids, especially if they don't have to spend countless hours going over the work with them or paying for extra help. Being exceptional at school or a kind of perfect working choir boy kept me safe. So much so, I remember a dinner once where I was trying to tell my mom about a book I read, and she was either tired or had a bad day at work, and was so dismissive of my story, I'm talking about it 20 years later. The only thing she seemed to consistently like about me, being smart and engaged, she dismissed.

Joss Whedon posted an article talking about 5 lies we tell ourselves about trauma. It's a pretty on-the-nose kind of thing about downplaying and making unfair comparisons. It's the fake aspiration that things will get better without change or acceptance. The line that I've thought most about is the idea of control. The people who wrote the article became unbearable in the amount of things they felt the need to control for. Control became “safety and security.” They were told by a therapist that in reality, they only control about 3% of their daily lives, midnight stomps through the house on patrol be damned.

3%? It's hard to say how the therapist arrived at this number, but I got to thinking. I don't control whether or not I get sick. I don't control the bugs that get into the house. I don't control the consistency of the water in my well or the size of the outside water bin I need trucked in. I don't control when the power goes out or whether a signal gets through to my phone. I definitely don't control any of the people I talk to or the various circumstances under which they are or aren't hurting their children. I don't control how much I get paid, and I even barely control what I eat given the practical reality of pain or exhaustion in not doing so, and being situated next to things that are convenient and taste good, which I also had no control over.

What do you control? How you talk about your circumstances. Sentences are control, even if I can't control if or how they'll hit. You can control how you'll react to your reaction, or if you're really good and paying attention, you'll have allowed yourself to not react until necessary. You control your orientation. You control how to understand your actions in a sea of lateral and superficially unequal circumstances. I can be down about not reaching my poorly understood goals, or I can feel a sense of awe that I find myself doing what I'd otherwise need and prefer to be doing, any time I'm doing it, and it's still happening in spite of the unending amount of words I routinely use to ridicule my experience of the world or air my frustrations. I control whether or not I restart the failed challenge in the video game.

I don't hear a lot about what people feel like they can do. I hear endlessly about “how things are” or how difficult or next to impossible they can be to achieve. I hear about “the pace of the State.” I hear about monsters on “the other side” that need to be de-platformed, vanquished, or otherwise shamed into obscurity. But I don't meet people who feel like they can do anything about it. I feel people who are given a set of instructions or directives and can read and follow, but it's not control. I think I understand religious people a little better now. Belief is control. God will sort it out. He wills, as theirs can't be found.

I can control scanning and sorting books. I can control the next sentence. I can control my legs to take me to my car to go get food. I can't ride a bike with no handlebars, but I can practice. I can make it about the process until it manifests as more resembling the skill I want to have or thing I want to see. I can understand my simplest forms of trauma for the power and resolve they lend themselves to, and I can continue to pick to keep my eye on the larger holistic goals that provoke anxiety and guessing and risk and hope-adjacent or the reason to bother getting up again.

[813] Choo Choo

My mind takes off.

I'm going to try really hard to not let this go to vague and broad.

When I think about something, two things happen simultaneously. One vein pumps full of anxiety, doubts, and questions. The other looks for contradictions, be they in ideas or in autonomic body responses. Let's illustrate by example.

If I text you, perhaps a friend I haven't spoken to in a while, or very long while, and you don't respond, I think that's the easiest thing to empathize with. We all have pending conversations or open questions we'd love resolved, and fuck those who can't see how desperate and longing we remain looking at our screens. Fuck them double if we saw them typing and they still don't come out with it. My other half says, “They're not very good texters, historically” or “Fuck em, you've been looking for an excuse to stop stoking that pitiful flame.” A cold rationalization or apology for their impoliteness or aloofness or clearly all-encompassing drama they're dealing with that trumps you soundly.

When the idea I'm contemplating isn't a dramatic one, the anxiety, doubts, and questions become launching points. I don't know a thing? Have I googled it? Have I googled it ten times and made 200 phone calls? No? Well, there's your answer. Can I pull this off? Did you do analogous extraordinary things already? Yes? Well, not just yes, but mother fucking of course you can do this, you already have, idiot. The anxiety becomes a dare and provocation of a hopeful spirit. It's a challenge to those listening to get in line or get fucked. Does the other half pick out the million ways in which it can fail? Duh. And then you start to see the decisions in my life manifesting as making sense in order to account for the answers I came to through that process.

I was going on about what I want to do on the land today. I was talking to adults who are comfortable. I was talking to the only people who have consistently come out bowling or drinking and who think of different things we should do together. I mentioned wanting to brew beer, and one of them perked up. I explained the philosophy of having several concurrent reasonably priced experiments running from which to poke your head into different entrepreneurial worlds. My mind took off, as it does, and now I'm here, trying to temper my enthusiasm because I've been here before.

The usual response I get when I speak about things is a kind of polite listening. You can't talk about a cloud of ideas. You need to be passionate about something specific. You need to be describing the trim you'd have on your storefront's bathroom windows. You need something people can conceptualize, and if you have a spreadsheet, they'll plotz over your initiative. I've pulled back. I've built trees before, but I want a forest. Society is something of a forest, and it's on fire. To me, if your focus is so...selfish...say the mere enrichment of yourself that some gadget or idea may get you enough, you'll be repeating the larger mistake we've made as a species to “get mine, get comfortable.”

I want the ethos and method to shine. Am I going to sell all of these books? Highly unlikely. But, what if I did some creative marketing thing that highlighted what makes them worthwhile? What if I started a countdown clock with the next book that would get burned if it wasn't sold and started a viral sensation about the ethics and importance of preserving knowledge and stories well-independent of our personal taste? Is that a thought you have when you look at a book you don't care about and decide it means nothing? I got the books for free. I can list them for free. I can store them for free. I can thumb through them at my leisure, and maybe open myself up into a new world I never would have otherwise. I can contemplate a dozen ways to get them sold, or how to draw attention to myself and store. I can have a large enough inventory that I overlap other industries I want to be involved with. That is a complicated intricate web of relationships and thoughts because I suspect the deep potential of having two thousand books for sale.

Two things came to mind on my drive home today. One was a teenage card magician I saw on Penn & Teller Fool Us. She watched cardistry videos and said, “I can do that,” and in, I think it was less than 2 years, she was performing in Vegas. Kids are simple like that. “That's cool, I think I can do that.” That's all I want to keep believing about myself. I want to believe I can get the formula right, keep the plants alive, master the technique, or create my mind's eye of what something should look like. I want the fun of experimentation, the hard truths of failure, and the spillage of lessons and learning to influence everything else I touch. I want people to feel their own motivation and perspective as it bleeds into what we're each trying to create. I want “my” enthusiasm to be what used to be the spirit of bothering to be alive striving for things in the first place. I forgot the other thing.

I never get more excited than when I see that I've made someone think about what they could pull off. I already know I'm going to get everything I want. That's been the story of my whole life. There's no surprise that I'm the kind of person I am with certain inevitable conclusions. You? Hoards, masses. You otherwise forlorn and forgotten who've gotten fat off the land and put away childish things? What can you do? Because, in my experience, it's next to nothing but fluff your proverbial pillow. You don't believe, you haven't helped, and your next modest, affordable, mature goal will be quite enough, thank you. Just okay is just okay.

 

We need more. We need something akin to the kind of indomitable faith that the religious zealots peck at. I budget. I don't have faith I can afford a bourbon barrel. I don't have faith I can grow micro greens. I don't have faith I can 3D print a tugboat. I don't have faith I can dig a pool, fix my moving truck, or get a mobile coffee van up and running again. I have the strong indication that working towards and gaining perspective in pursuing those things are going to contribute to the self-affirming message that goals for their own sake, just beyond what you can reach without the appreciable effort, are always worth having and at the base of everything. There is no riding out the storm without degrading before your own eyes. There is no “you” without the new and improved version staring at you from the future.

If getting to know older people has been any indication, it's that you'll always feel it. You'll remember what you were like. You'll know what's still plaguing you as something to do. Why are there a million micro-breweries with 40 and 50-somethings recycling each other's themes and being weirdly smug for someone so unattractive? They're getting to be the go-getter 20-something again. They're getting to translate the years of their lives of sacrifice and savings into the freedom or ownership they didn't pursue earnestly and early. I've written from this exact mental place every year of my 20s. I haven't been able to run from the ethos and example embedded in my head, and at least I can say I'm talking about it from my house in my field a mere 2 months away from having an irresponsible amount of expendable income. Every spider bigger than the last I have to kill will testify to what it's taken mentally, physically, and financially to get here. Every mud hole I've stepped in, excuse I've heard, and feigned enthusiasm I've parlayed into a mocking line of a blog will pave the way as well.

The train's coming. Are you getting on or getting hit? Because we're certainly suffering the concussion of taking considerably less responsibility for ourselves.

[812] Subject to Change

A dumb interaction is kicking up more thoughts than I anticipated, so let's talk it out.

I called the child abuse/neglect hotline on a mom who was letting her son pee bare-ass naked on a tree planted outside of City Hall. The only information I had on them was a license plate. If this arrived on my plate, as an assessor, it would be one of the dumber ones I would be asked to go out on. I was fully prepared to just let it go and keep about my walk about town. I excused myself to the mom, introduced myself as someone who works for the department, and said, “Just a heads up, this is the kind of thing people call us about, and if you'd like to avoid flak (under the presumption this may not be the first or last time) consider finding a bathroom. She was illegally parked with her hazards on, another kid strapped in the backseat with her tail-end sticking in the street. This was a parking maneuver she could have achieved in front of a restaurant, you know, on the square where a dozen were as close an option.

What made me call was her response. “Can you please leave me alone? You're create a memory for him right now. He's potty training.” The largest part of me says fair enough, when you have to go, you have to go. The kid wasn't pissing in the street just outside of the car or on the wall. He had the temerity to hold it until the top of the steps. I didn't go in guns blazing slinging accusations or calling the decision to let him pee there one thing or another. I politely suggested a way to not catch shit in the future, and it was thrown in my face. As someone who has to assess people's dispositions and speculate whether that's lending itself to neglectful situations involving children, the lesson, “Proudly piss on the tree in public, and then lash out at anyone mildly nodding to how that might not be the best” trigger a red flag.

There's a solid chance it will get screened out and no one will come knocking on her door asking safety questions or figuring out what the seemingly insane helicopter-parent regime is in a household where mom's first instinct is to say, “You're making a memory for him!” as though there's trauma in the idea of anyone politely approaching his mother. But I want to press on to the larger point.

All sorts of calls are fielded and sorted until they make it to individual counties. Then they get screened by supervisors and decided upon whether we actually need to go out. From the kid left in the car or kid pissing on a tree, to the ten paragraph tale of drug abuse and violence that has allegedly permeated a family's history. It's not just up to one person to say something is abuse or neglect or rises to the threshold of sending someone out. It's a discussion and team effort. There's guidelines and trigger words that will get flagged like a knife in your bag at TSA, but every family and situation is different. Sometimes, defensive cuntiness is just how someone is. Sometimes, they're high right then, and hoping you don't notice the needle on the couch from the doorway.

On the drive home, I got to thinking about personal responsibility. It's been something of a theme of my latest discussions with my dad and is not thrust into the limelight as my supervisor seems like she's going to be a hurdle in toning down what she thinks it is I'm supposed to do as an assessor. I've been the person who's been turned to and “politely engaged” to varying degrees about how I'm talking or carrying on. In those moments where my instinct is to bite back and escalate, I usually shut up. I'll never guess who's going to bother speaking out or about what, but I have to read the room and be responsible for me. The theater or the porch at the bar at the grocery store (the 2 instances that come to mind immediately) are not the time to kick up more dust.

And let me be clear, I've drunkenly pissed on walls or trees and been inappropriate as well. This isn't about the act in and of itself, it's how you respond to a challenge of your internally superior decision making, and what impact that has on your children or the culture at large. If we played the “What if everyone does it” game, we don't want a hundred kids pissing on our community plants, but I've never liked that kind of thought process. I just remain skeptical that your response to someone who introduces themselves as someone who works for the department that gets calls about this sort of thing testifies to your judgment as a caregiver. Like, if you pushed a cop who pulled over to help you change a tire. What are you thinking? I'm not a cop, but I'm something of a literal authority on what stories manifest as assessment-worthy for neglect.

Part of me is clapping-back though. I hate when people try to weaponize DCS, but I do have a touch more sympathy for how confusing it can be to discern when you should and shouldn't call. In morning safety staffing it often comes up, “Well, why didn't they call 2 weeks ago?” Even working there, my first instinct isn't to call us, let alone if I never had any interaction with us except through horror stories in the news. Had she even been flustered and hurried and politely waved me off I would have let it go. My point and the potential for the call and assessment would have still remained and been true. I qualified to the hotline worker why I was calling and the confusing headspace I was in. I don't feel guilty, I just wish it wasn't so hard.

Moving into the piled-on thoughts the interaction provoked. It's the thousand little indignities that take the oppressed into the lashing-out killer categories. When I complain about my job, beyond the hijacking of my time and focus, the interpersonal negotiations, the extra words to try and lock in and very basic and obvious point, or the feeling of dread and exhaustion at the idea of moving or reading one more line speak to the decision to power through or get exploratory. When life is going generally well, those thousand indignities shrink. You can write someone off as having a bad day. You can stub your toe and notice how good they still look after a recent pedicure as you hop up and down in pain. The idea of lowly peon “going postal” affirms the lore of the ticking time bomb getting it from all angles with no way to balance the scale.

I think a lot of us are in that “dare me to lash out” place, even if it looks different for each person. I think a lot of “entrepreneurship” and “live your dreams” mantras put in overtime to mask what modern poverty and chronic stress look like. I think people forgo obligations to each other and indulge, and have been indulging, like a quintessential glutton for punishment. Guilt feeding guilt. Self-smug cycles of reinforced opinions. To a huge extent, the world “out there” doesn't exist. The shadowlands where kids in cages, environmental holocausts, and all-things fascism is but a fantasy where everything you don't like and can't deal with also doesn't exist. An interjection into your world is the height of a betrayal of the new cultural contract. “You're making a memory for him right now!” Sure, lady, and many more actual ones you should be concerned about are coming.

I started thinking about what it means to take responsibility. There's feeling that way and taking action, which is a good portion of my underlying pulse. There's shouldering the fallout of people forcing things upon you, like the isolation and judgment after the bait-and-switch of their good will or intentions. A colleague I asked for advice from said, “Some people here want to be managers” referring to the way that being an FCM can lead people to be intrusive and dominating in a way that's wholly inappropriate with a holistic appreciation for the nature and limits of the task. This would be a kind of irony in putting upon yourself the burden to be an unduly dick because it's easier than adopting the larger task of challenging your biases and finding resolve in your patience and broader appreciation for the circumstances we find our families in.

This is me trying to take responsibility. Part of me is genuinely concerned for those children's welfare with a mom “like that.” Part of me feels petty. A large enough portion of my time has literally been paid for to go and question people who've behaved like her or made decisions to let their children do, at least questionable things, in-line with their conception of good parenting.

The Hotline says they will inform professional report sources if their recommendation to assess or not is subject to change. The stories get filtered, get eyes, and get discussed. When you're in the business of exercising your judgment to make up or down calls for varying degrees of “official involvement,” you want different perspectives and specialties to lend their guidance. So it goes for life generally. So springs forth sentiments about respecting elders. We can pretend until we suffocate and drown that we live in bubbles and can never be questioned, or any and every intrusion into our precious memories is practically an affront to the selfish God we consider ourselves, but in reality, we need to do the work, have the discussion, and understand ourselves in the broader contexts in which we live.

The music of defensive and fearful tones is as familiar to me as anything. She was defiant. She was raging against the larger broken points about mutual respect, shared space, and self-reflection. Whether The State could ever (it can't) manage to put that into a codified trackable metric of neglect indicators and their consequences or not, that's what she was doing. I would have accepted basically any other kind of response to my interjection and left it alone but that one.

[811] Work Quirk

I'm annoyed. I hope this will be quick, because I feel it is a justified annoyed. I got a new supervisor. She's been with DCS 1 year longer than me. She's never assessed. I've had 2 previous supervisors, with something like 9 and 12 years experience. They loved me. Today, I'm working through the kinks of different asks and expectations and getting things nit-picked. It's tweaks I can make, despite their relative pointlessness, but that's not the problem.

I work for one of the most distrusted and outright hated agencies that doesn't get immediately influenced by the destruction of Trump. We walk an incredibly fine line between compliance, and stoking a spiral of fear and anger that, ultimately, creates a more dangerous environment for the children we allegedly protect. I, as not the police, not your probation officer, not on my moral high horse, and not with a poor person or idiot bias I'm going to let affect how I do my job, want to do everything in my power to make you like me, work with me, and be a part of the changes that may need to happen so your kids maybe don't turn out like society.

If I show up at your door, and you've previously had “history” with us for a marijuana positive baby, and ask, nay insist, that you drug screen because even though I'm here now because your door doesn't close right and your kid got in the yard, do you think that's fair? I've heard, not once, but several times today things like, “Well, she said x, but she could have been high! Oh, she declined to drug screen, that means she's using! I know we don't want to hold people's history over their head, but let me staff her right to refuse with another supervisor about if there's a way we can continue to harass her.” The last one might not be a direct quote, but it's what the sentiment amounted to.

This shit is HORRIFYING. We're supposed to be nosy. We're supposed to try and get a big picture look at your life, and ensure it stays safe enough for your children. We're not your parents. We're not, especially as assessors, your managers. I've been told to drug screen parents who don't live in the home, no evidence was observed or smelled, are already on probation and screening for probation, but because maybe just maybe the ridiculous vindictive horror story is true (that smoke was smelled), we should step in and try to be a pseudo-probation officer for a few weeks as well? This family who's home I was just in a month ago for the exact same nonsense call from the exact same nonsense source needs the extra special attention?

What this amounts to, is that I'm actually going to have to start cutting into how I do my job. I'm going to have to preface much of my interaction with, “Hey, I have an overly-aggressive supervisor who's going to want a record of me being an asshole to you. Let's get that out of the way. Here's my perspective and how I'm going to work, here's how I'm going to guide you through the inappropriate things I'm being asked to do.” That's a problem for me. One, I'm vocal. I'll be able to do this right up until the point I can't. Two, I should never have to be made to do it in the first place. I refuse to turn into the unduly punitive dick because you have some really bad concept of liability.

We get insane stories to try to parse through every day. Some “concerned” asshole or family member drags up years of history or some speculation they heard from someone who heard from someone. My summary was criticized because I didn't include a description of “mom's rotten teeth.” Is rotten teeth illegal? Do almost all of the poor people around the world have shitty teeth? Your teeth description only matters when you're itching to use it as indicative of drug use, no matter the accusations, and in unduly burdening the current assessment with their past. Context is important, but again, we're not your long-term life coach and accountability partner. Many, many, of our people have used or continue to use drugs. If I don't find evidence for it, best of luck to you.

Our legal system as a whole is moving away from child removals. The underlying philosophy is children are better with their parents, or at least family and friends, than they are with The State. As with most things, that's complicated, and there will be kids that die because we loosened the reigns too much and perhaps some families that really beat the odds because we didn't beat them over the head so hard. It's very cynically about the budget and these “case managers’” inability to manage. Most people don't have the kind of leadership and people skills to effectively mold or direct people. Simple math is going to give you the result of throwing cohort after cohort at the wall and seeing who sticks it out for a year more. While the ship is slowly turning, we're still battered by the waves of our misdeeds and current aggression. This job is hard enough for me to swallow conceptually, I'm not going to turn every day into a refutation of my ethic and wisdom that has people happy to work with me when I inevitably show back up at their door a few months later. I'm not going to dismiss their good will because I'm being asked to forgo mine.