[819] The Juggler

Imagine a juggler. Is it a simple picture? 3 balls, the familiar arcs and tosses you’ve seen a thousand times? Or did you go exotic? Chainsaws and a mix-n-match of oddly shaped and weighted items. Maybe it’s still balls, but 7 of them. I don’t know about you, but I see them as red.

This blog is provoked by my kickball. That’s right, I own a kickball. I bought said kickball after trying, miserably, for months to get coworkers to answer emails or provide contact information in the event the weather would allow us to play a game. I got 12-15 to say they’d be interested. I got 2 or 3 to occasionally tell me they’d be busy that, and every other, weekend. After that, the ball no longer looked like this thing with potential to fly and tie together individuals. It stood as another black mark on the concept of community and togetherness, or even just exercise, and the exhausting superficial games and speech we fluidly adopt.

I was asked to bring my kickball to this company “retreat” on Friday. At first, I said yes. After thinking further, I said I’d bring my ball if in the event it got popped, I’d like a new ball. I was told DCS would not be able to pay for such a thing. I said I’d rather have my ball die in service to something I do to it or get-together that comes to fruition because people actually want to be there, and rescinded. One of my bosses said in an email, “You must have a very nice ball!” with all the you’re blowing this out of proportion condescension you could ask for.

My office is like any place you have an array of people. It’s high school. People form clicks. People use their pathological behavior as a more confident manifestation of their take on “adult.” It’s little people with little problems that are elevated to the level of television drama when the actual adults decide to make too many excuses for falling asleep on the job. This high school has no principal, and the array of administrators and school board members that would be responsible for vetting and finding one are merely as qualified to do so by their overburdened years slogging their way to the “top.” They don’t even have to take a test.

I consider my office to be highly mismanaged. Honesty is very easy when you’re jumping between complaints about a client’s stated behavior, and the evidence you present to refute them in court. Interpersonally or professionally? Please. If maybe you talk like a cunt and bring up the wrong topics with the wrong people, consistently, you’ll be talked around for the “learning curve” it would take anyone to straighten out. If you have no experience doing something, and are thrown to the wolves to be of oversight, who cares how long, or if, the meshing and cooling period takes as long as the numbers reflect a certain state.

As such, I don’t feel like I owe them anything. They don’t deserve my good will. They don’t deserve my even theoretical sacrifice of a $20 ball. When I attempt to ask for or negotiate ways I can work more efficiently or competently, I’m denied, every time. When I literally talk to the head of the agency, the feedback is mostly, “there’s always a larger monster to appease.” We’re a mockery of responsibility and the pursuit of as true and consistent a metric under which you could claim “ensuring safety.”

This is a much belabored theme. Why did you get this job? I can tell you, if your first and last answer isn’t “to protect children,” well, dammit, you’re not here for the right reasons. Moreover, when one of your coworkers lapses in judgment and does something irresponsible or in violation of their sacred oath to the office, near tears and veritably screaming it’s WHY CAN’T YOU ALL THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?!? This is the message from our leadership. We don’t explore why an experienced and competent worker would get his dick sucked by a client or client-adjacent. We get his behavior thrown in our face when they don’t know how to account for what’s happening.

My office lost its director to a series of gray-area maneuvers and rumors circling about on-the-clock sexual exploits. What do we think is happening? These haggard civil-servants taking on the lives of hundreds of families a few hours at a time day in and out – do we think their needs outside of work are being attended to? The job pays you just enough to look rich against all of the tragically poor people. It’s a job that will refuse to standardize practice, nor trust your judgment the second someone dusts off an old or forgotten policy. The other experienced heads that the office basically rally around are shifting and leaving their positions as well. The bottom is dropping out, and you’re going to be left with naïve early-20s idealists taking cues from desperate and ridiculous supervisors.

The tragedy is that it can’t get better. It can’t get better because it’s designed so that no one’s really in charge. It’s professional buck-passing. If you’re there for the money, because god-forbid you can be both competent and practical, and you seek anything else, you’ll have to start sacrificing. Take away your individuated voice. Take away your ideas for how things “could” be. Take away the idea that there’s anything to look forward to but stolen time off on redundant “trainings” or a long drive that will eat your entire day.

I was reminiscing on the drive today about the day I first saw my first yin yang symbol necklace. This was before I knew what it was called or really represented beyond this image of balance. I’ve started allowing myself to better-achieve my internal balance. I’m not going to lose my voice or my standards, as they will be vitally important to restoring my path forward when my mind isn’t subsumed by State pedantry and faux civility.

My balance requires my direct, angry speech as it is paramount I see as many honest representations of the world as I can conjure and translate. I was criticized by a supervisor for doing my job for money, then in the next breath told people weren’t even approaching my high-achieving numbers. Then I was told she doesn’t even give a shit if the numbers are that high, in a moment of honest exhaustion, she just really wanted to drill into me the abstraction “child safety,” which in practical adult terms translated to, “I wish you would have asked for help getting this one case in particular started earlier.” The reason it wasn’t initiated owing to its own series of persistent oversights and raised concerns of course also ignored.

How do you end up on the receiving end of another, well what I was trying to say!...conversation? You just have to honestly interact as yourself with someone who’s put up pleasant defenses against accessing where they’d really like to be emotionally or socially. You ugly? No no, you’re now a “take charge” type who thinks citing errant statistics to your mouthy, deeply frustrated, out-performing underling is a wise thing to do. What you were trying to do was be encouraging? You did a shit job. You know you’re not really qualified or liked in the position you hold? Better hammer away at the catch-phrase “My door’s always open!” You know, because that makes everyone begin to understand how “likeable” you really are. We’ll just breeze past whether your advice lends itself to a solution.

I think about balance as it pertains to books and TV shows. Did that book need to get written? Does that show have anything new or worthwhile to say? But they exist, and continue to grow and exist, well-beyond your opinion and musings about their value. I have over a 1000 books I intend to put up for sale and 95 percent of them I’ve never heard of nor would have any interest in. I’m an uninteresting book to the vast majority of people in my life. What I do on each page will look precisely like this blog, as reflections and justifications for what can perhaps be considered a life worth living verses a life merely lived. It means writing the book in the face of all the others. It means protecting the voice that sees your bullshit and counters with an excruciating ability to make you actually start to feel bad about it.

I’m looking forward to the circus. In less than a month, it’s back to being evenly broke. Then what will I juggle? Then how much more of my voice and intention do I let bleed into my diminishing sense of obligation? I haven’t even cracked the surface of the kind of consequences I could bring, good or bad. I’m in an environment that’s begging me to be vindictive and crush its fledgling soul. Is a person who talks like that really one you want to bank on his bleeding heart not to do so? Because it would probably hurt the children, but in the interim, would also hurt my paycheck. I’m asking, don’t you think you deserve the fallout equal to the unnecessary pain you inflict by not being honest and taking responsibility? When is it your turn?

In the purest form of fascism, The State obligates you to protect its image. If this blog had my name attached to it, and the wrong person read it, I could get fired for criticizing. We’ll do heinous things, ignore explicit and deliberate obvious courses of action to fix something, and then fire the groundlings when the heat intensifies. Do this for 25 years and you might just get the chance to bitch that you’ve got too much on your plate to the people whose day you’re interrupting putting out their own fires! We’re a microcosm for the broad lack of leadership modern trend. Trump doesn’t get elected because leaders are paying attention to the right things. States don’t go red after being blue because individual party chairs gave a damn about the effort it really takes. Agencies don’t build into their ethos that people will always be coming and going unless they’ve no interest in what it takes to retain the kind of talent that wants to be appreciated and grow, but who literally can’t be seen for the engines that keep the whole thing running that they are.

You want the best argument ever for why it’s imperative for you to be honest with yourself and what you’re doing in life? The agency tasked with taking your children can barely keep its shit together for longer than 3 months at a time. It’s not that people doing the work can’t or are deliberately malicious. The people in charge are stuck on party lines and lies about the nature of the job and what constitutes working. When things go wrong, they find a scapegoat. When a concern is raised, the conversation transforms. You need a smart, honest, genuinely forgiving and simultaneously ruthless and observant person on the ground willing to fight from both ends to keep things knitted together. You think those types are just lying around, or willing to take a grand every two weeks for the privilege of a constant shit storm?