Scut Job & Its Discontents
Feb. 26th, 2005 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThis was a bad week. The scut job has been making dangerous inroads on my soul.
Bartleby Inc. shares an old abandoned hospital on Fort Ord with the Defense Language Institute. The layout is identical to the Oak Knoll Hospital where I served out my last three years as a nurse, so there's a very palpable sense of going back in time, of being trapped in a drudgery that I thought I had escaped. Ghosts hang in the air – dormant pseudomonas strains, the screams of dying soldiers. Plus the janitorial staff has been recruited from the local Project Hope. They're all developmentally disabled. While this may seem like a kind gesture on the part of the military overlords – not to mention a money-saving device since these people, quite literally, would work for peanuts – it's also creepy. Yesterday I watched a guy with a squashed head furtitively sneak a couple of cigarette butts into his mouth while he was emptying the ashtrays outside the loading docks. Lemme tell you, those butts are disgusting; they've been rained on, peed on by marauding raccoons and God knows what else. He was savoring them like Hannibal Lector with his fava beans. And then last week I was vacuumed into a corner by a drooling pinhead crying, "Whoo-oop! Whoo-oop!" He wouldn't let me out! Just fixed me with his crazy eyes, growling whenever I tried to sidestep his giant, ancient Hoover.
Also yesterday, I found myself pacing and muttering to myself. Well, okay, whispering to myself but it was pretty scary to discover that I had sunk so deeply into my dissociative state that I was completely oblivious to my surroundings, even if those surroundings were only the outside pagoda by the loading docks where the smokers have been exiled to. I kind of suspect a lot of people talk to themselves these days, but most of them have the presence of mind to use their cell phones as props. Not me, though. I was too far gone.
Here's the substance of my imaginary conversation:
I do not forgive you. Please do not send me any more money since the temptation to cash the checks is very great as we are really struggling financially to keep our heads above water right now. But I have come to the decision that I want nothing more to do with you or Annie, my mother's sisters. I'm sick of being "Poor Patty" the loser, condemned to failure by that House of Usher childhood. I'm sick of being used.
The imaginary person to whom this diatribe was being addressed was my eccentric Aunt Jane. Now. My eccentric Aunt Jane is hardly a looming presence in my day-to-day life. Long ago, when I was around five years old, she threw me down a flight of stairs because I had mouthed off to her, told her my cousin David, her son, was "stupid." That's actually my most vivid memory of her: crawling back up that flight of stairs, sobbing and bleeding and whispering again, "David's stupid." Bam! Back down the stairs I went. These days it would be considered serious child abuse and questions would be asked when I showed up at the Emergency Room. Not then, though. It was a more innocent time. I don't even think I was taken to the Emergency Room.
As a young adult I used to dream about her a lot in the guise of Snow White's evil stepmother, a very Jungian archetype. She was very nasty to me. One summer I tried to take refuge with her in Ithaca and fell in with a group of young dramaturges who apparently didn't like me very much. "You know what they said about you?" Jane hissed. "They said, 'Patty can take care of herself.' What did they mean by that?"
I was completely mystified. I was a survivor, God knows. And I did what it took to survive. But why was that a bad thing?
In the last twenty years or so, eccentric Aunt Jane has been a remote, mostly benign presence who sends me checks and nightgowns at random intervals. Common sense dictates that if you have a kind relative who sends you money you don't ask for that you do what it takes to sustain that revenue flow, possibly make it even more predictable. A regular stream of kitten and puppy postcards. An occasional 1-800-Flowers delivery. You certainly don't lash out in madness.
Obviously, I'm losing it.
Also this week Max turned 18. Much angst about the birthday celebration. I was at the store last weekend when the phone rang. Celeste. "I'm calling to ask about your plans for Max's birthday."
"My plans for Max's birthday," I echoed. Actually, I had none. Most of my planning abilities had been diverted into making the rent and the PG&E bill. I'd bought him an IPod. I was planning on giving it to him with a little sentimental note: I couldn't be prouder of you…
"Maya and I want to do the party at my house. I'm just calling to see if that's okay with you."
A wave of hurt washed through me.
What am I, chopped liver? Maya could at least have gone through the motions of planning the party with me.
"Fine," I snarled and slammed down the phone.
But actually not fine. As faithful readers of this journal will remember, Celeste had been letting the guys drink at the poker parties she hosted last year I confronted her about it. She refused to stop. "They're gonna drink anyway," she told me. "This way they're drinking in a safe place."
"That's called enabling, Celeste," I pointed out. "They're underage. You know and I know the culture we live in is ridiculously puritanical when it comes to alcohol and drugs, but that's besides the point. It is the way it is. It's illegal for them to drink. Period. You could be looking at charges yourself. Not to mention the fact they're driving home afterwards."
To Be Continued if I ever find the time…
Bartleby Inc. shares an old abandoned hospital on Fort Ord with the Defense Language Institute. The layout is identical to the Oak Knoll Hospital where I served out my last three years as a nurse, so there's a very palpable sense of going back in time, of being trapped in a drudgery that I thought I had escaped. Ghosts hang in the air – dormant pseudomonas strains, the screams of dying soldiers. Plus the janitorial staff has been recruited from the local Project Hope. They're all developmentally disabled. While this may seem like a kind gesture on the part of the military overlords – not to mention a money-saving device since these people, quite literally, would work for peanuts – it's also creepy. Yesterday I watched a guy with a squashed head furtitively sneak a couple of cigarette butts into his mouth while he was emptying the ashtrays outside the loading docks. Lemme tell you, those butts are disgusting; they've been rained on, peed on by marauding raccoons and God knows what else. He was savoring them like Hannibal Lector with his fava beans. And then last week I was vacuumed into a corner by a drooling pinhead crying, "Whoo-oop! Whoo-oop!" He wouldn't let me out! Just fixed me with his crazy eyes, growling whenever I tried to sidestep his giant, ancient Hoover.
Also yesterday, I found myself pacing and muttering to myself. Well, okay, whispering to myself but it was pretty scary to discover that I had sunk so deeply into my dissociative state that I was completely oblivious to my surroundings, even if those surroundings were only the outside pagoda by the loading docks where the smokers have been exiled to. I kind of suspect a lot of people talk to themselves these days, but most of them have the presence of mind to use their cell phones as props. Not me, though. I was too far gone.
Here's the substance of my imaginary conversation:
I do not forgive you. Please do not send me any more money since the temptation to cash the checks is very great as we are really struggling financially to keep our heads above water right now. But I have come to the decision that I want nothing more to do with you or Annie, my mother's sisters. I'm sick of being "Poor Patty" the loser, condemned to failure by that House of Usher childhood. I'm sick of being used.
The imaginary person to whom this diatribe was being addressed was my eccentric Aunt Jane. Now. My eccentric Aunt Jane is hardly a looming presence in my day-to-day life. Long ago, when I was around five years old, she threw me down a flight of stairs because I had mouthed off to her, told her my cousin David, her son, was "stupid." That's actually my most vivid memory of her: crawling back up that flight of stairs, sobbing and bleeding and whispering again, "David's stupid." Bam! Back down the stairs I went. These days it would be considered serious child abuse and questions would be asked when I showed up at the Emergency Room. Not then, though. It was a more innocent time. I don't even think I was taken to the Emergency Room.
As a young adult I used to dream about her a lot in the guise of Snow White's evil stepmother, a very Jungian archetype. She was very nasty to me. One summer I tried to take refuge with her in Ithaca and fell in with a group of young dramaturges who apparently didn't like me very much. "You know what they said about you?" Jane hissed. "They said, 'Patty can take care of herself.' What did they mean by that?"
I was completely mystified. I was a survivor, God knows. And I did what it took to survive. But why was that a bad thing?
In the last twenty years or so, eccentric Aunt Jane has been a remote, mostly benign presence who sends me checks and nightgowns at random intervals. Common sense dictates that if you have a kind relative who sends you money you don't ask for that you do what it takes to sustain that revenue flow, possibly make it even more predictable. A regular stream of kitten and puppy postcards. An occasional 1-800-Flowers delivery. You certainly don't lash out in madness.
Obviously, I'm losing it.
Also this week Max turned 18. Much angst about the birthday celebration. I was at the store last weekend when the phone rang. Celeste. "I'm calling to ask about your plans for Max's birthday."
"My plans for Max's birthday," I echoed. Actually, I had none. Most of my planning abilities had been diverted into making the rent and the PG&E bill. I'd bought him an IPod. I was planning on giving it to him with a little sentimental note: I couldn't be prouder of you…
"Maya and I want to do the party at my house. I'm just calling to see if that's okay with you."
A wave of hurt washed through me.
What am I, chopped liver? Maya could at least have gone through the motions of planning the party with me.
"Fine," I snarled and slammed down the phone.
But actually not fine. As faithful readers of this journal will remember, Celeste had been letting the guys drink at the poker parties she hosted last year I confronted her about it. She refused to stop. "They're gonna drink anyway," she told me. "This way they're drinking in a safe place."
"That's called enabling, Celeste," I pointed out. "They're underage. You know and I know the culture we live in is ridiculously puritanical when it comes to alcohol and drugs, but that's besides the point. It is the way it is. It's illegal for them to drink. Period. You could be looking at charges yourself. Not to mention the fact they're driving home afterwards."
To Be Continued if I ever find the time…
