Ever feel like you look funny when you walk? Like your limbs and brain aren't quite in rhythm; your foot falls are awkward, your gait unnatural and self-concious? That's how I feel right now, too aware of myself to be myself. In my mind's eye I'm like Vincent D'Onofrio in Men in Black once he was merely a skin suit for the alien, trying to appear aloof and completely normal, but very obviously not so.
Things here are as I feared they might be. Like most daydreams that I have indulged to justify purchases of items I would ordinarily find useless, my party clutch collection remains pristine and un-used. I had this vision of meeting interesting people, making interesting friends, practicing my hard fought minimum language proficiency discussing capital punishment, globalization, mass media, and religion and family, all while being smartly attired and rocking a series of classy clutches. I'm not sure who I transform into in my daydreams, but that person does not exist. But if she did, she would have some achingly cute clutches to sport at receptions. What I've done instead isn't even worthy of describing. Neither is my attire. I'm pretty much ready to attend a funeral at a moments notice. My attire is almost always appropriately somber. People I barely know have commented on it. People of this culture can be blunt in ways we would consider rude. Whatever haters, I rock black.
There are some special circumstances here that didn't exist in previous stretches but in all other ways, it is a reboot of every other place I've worked. The only thing so far that I've found different is that time just melts away like I wish the pounds would. Every time I blink, another month is peeling away. This is a good thing-I'm actively counting down living in this apartment and dealing with some of the folks here I'm not going to miss. But it is a bad thing as well as it gives me less time to really accomplish anything.
I have moments when I wonder how infectious I could be in creating the kind of office I want to work in; perhaps I think too highly of myself and suppose I have power that I do not, indeed have. I have struggled with this a bit and I realized that I'm done being a worker bee. I set myself back from where I could be because I wanted to fill in some experiences that I wanted to get out of the job just in case I decided to leave. I recognize I was amazingly lucky to inherit the team I did, but when I was calling the shots, we knocked it out of the park. It's been hard since that validating experience leading a team, to work for shitty managers. I have an idea about how things should be done, and I see the impact when things are not done that way. I see people comparing work to prison, people tearing one another down, people stove piping to avoid someone they don't like and whose judgement they don't trust, people jockeying for position if they are so inclined, people distracted from the work by the faculty required to navigate the personalities. It's insulting to spend any part of the long days employing stratagem for how you're going to ask someone a question.
Possible this is textbook (circa 1990) group dynamics with the storming, norming, forming, boring...and six months from now I'll be sobbing at my keyboard as the first wave starts to depart from this place because we were so awesome as a group. Who knows. I'm still keeping my sights set on just getting out of here without getting bit by a stray dog (Baloo either).
non sequitur Epilogue: For old boyfriends stopping by the blog on a summer evening (apologies to Robert Frost)
Not long before I left the U.S. (two days in fact), I heard from someone that for lack of a better term I'll call an ex boyfriend (it was never terribly well-defined but managed to take some years to be done with). He stumbled across my blog in the way that most people do, googling my last known e-mail address and landing here from the old blog. Happens all the time (insert sarcasm here). He was wondering about me as I have wondered about him, as we have all wondered about someone we used to date, and he started commenting on this blog in a way that could be construed as either clever/funny or creepy/scary. It quickly moved offline and we had a brief e-mail reunion before I declined to stay in touch on the grounds that I felt married men should not be pen pals with other women they once suggested marriage to, even though it was nice to know his rock-solid marriage could support such a relationship. I was proud of myself, proud that I didn't even get an ankle caught in the rabbit hole that would be opening back up to him.
What was interesting other than him looking for me and finding this was that he really tucked in and *read* this blog. Not sure if he read it end to end (though if he did, bravo) but it was flattering in a way, perhaps an unhealthy way, but honestly, if anyone reads for (almost) any reason, and keeps coming back, I'm happy as a writer. Why he was thinking of me, what he hoped to get out of re-hashing our decade past relationship, whatever all of that was, I don't know. I just know he kept coming back here for a time. I know at times I wrote about him, I didn't bother looking for those things to hide them from him, they are what they are. We were what we were (at least for me). Either way, it was nice to be sought out. Feels like I won the silent game of chicken between exes who wonder if the other one ever thinks about them. Yep, I'm petty like that.
And I totally won.
After what my pride suffered in knowing him, I hope he won't begrudge this hollow victory I claim, after all, he's happily ever after, right? There's a happy dance associated with that empty victory but the league may penalize me a down if I insist on doing it (is that how it works? I don't know sports).
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