Cocooning

I am balancing checkbooks, Lilly is chewing the ear on her squeaky bear toy and it is raining cats and dogs and since it is California, it’s more like puppies and kittens. The wind is blowing fiercely, the heat is up in the house and it’s, you know, like, maybe 60 degrees outside. For the life of me, ever since I moved here, I just can’t summon up the wintry cocoon that I used to live in during the Midwest winter months. There are whole weekends where you just stay in the house, under a blanket and watch endless movies until you fall asleep. I think the bears call it: hibernation. Or, we call it for the bears hibernation…whatever. I’ve been watching too many animated movies with animals talking. And they really do talk, don’t they? But it seems rather, whimpy and ungrateful, to try the cocoon in L.A. It’s more like a three hour thing here and then you go outside just to regulate the real temperature in the house.

These are not my concerns. It’s a new year and I am continuing my search for employment, rather, meaningful employment. I am very busy with academic work and requirements and am volunteering at a treatment center near my house. I went to interview with the director there and felt a sudden urge to run and also jump for joy at the new adventure. So, as usual, I’m full of confidence and self-doubt, story of my life.

What’s most important about where my life is taking me now is possibilities. I can see a better future, a future where I have options and can continue my creative path on a more stable, yet, flexible, path. Also, a path where I don’t have to suffer abuse for being in a predominantly female occupation where the prevailing attitude is that I am unintelligent, needing constant supervision and have to play the obedient female with no opinion, suggestion, thought, or choice about my work and how it is executed or anything else for that matter. In short, if you’re working for an incompetent boob, you have to play incompetent along with him/her without question and suppress all evidence of intelligence, experience, skill and personality. Don’t be smarter than your boss and quite frankly, there’s always one you’re smarter than or wiser than, meaning you have integrity and values and you have to suppress that as well in order to be the fence for your boss’s negligence, incompetence and sometimes downright malpractice. Bye bye corporate world.

I remember one place I interviewed several years ago in West L.A., a financial corporation, legal department of course, where they provided/catered lunch in everyday and the requirement was that you had to eat lunch inside the offices everyday. They acted like it was such a great thing they were providing you this catered lunch. I guess if this is a third world country, I might find that attractive. Or if I was a homeless woman without a next meal or a starving artist, but I can’t be bought with food. I’m Italian, I can cook, fix my own meals just fine and prefer them to most of the crap you get in restaurants. So if you’re going to offer a meal in return for my freedom for an hour, it better be lobster! Everyday! Then the woman was offended because I questioned the value in that and that I wasn’t that interested in the job. I mean, really, you’re offended because I don’t want a job where I have to basically keep myself chained to the office ALL DAY! like prison, without so much as a lunch break to get some fresh air? When am I supposed to run errands, take a walk, take a break, treat myself to lunch out somewhere, meet someone for lunch? I have a life and it’s not yours for the time I’m given BY LAW to use as I please. These people think because you need a job that you’ll just nod your head and take this crap. And they can do it too because there are people, especially women, who need the jobs and will take it. And it’s because of that and because women don’t know how and are too scared to stand up for their rights against these types of fascist abusive practices that this is allowed to continue in all the so-called professional positions. Pay for my lunch, ha! How about pay for a week in Paris? Then I’ll think about it.

I get so many people telling me how much less I’ll be making working as a counselor than what I was doing and it is true technically. What they don’t understand is how much your soul thrives when it’s happy doing something meaningful and purposeful rather that something that is offensive and soul-sucking everyday. You have so much more energy to do other things that could provide supplemental and eventual double income when you are not using all your energy just to get out of bed in the morning to sit at a desk under a fluorescent light that illuminates nothing, staring at a computer screen, trying to look busy, waiting to obey, raising your hand to go to the bathroom and listening to banal ego stories being told to you so you can provide insincere interest and ego-feeding, oh and driving through exhausting rush hour both ways, and this, on top of the verbal abuse.

Sigh. So, here I sit. Yes, wondering how I’m going to pay bills this month, thinking of all the homework I have yet to do, watching the rain, yet, feeling a sense of possibility in what my future actually will be a year from now, something I couldn’t look forward to a few years ago. Now my only concern is whether the world will implode before then which is also a very good possibility.

MM