UnpleasantlySexy

Well, after a solid two months at this new job, I think I'm ready to say what I think:

I really like it, despite its massive faults, and it is absolutely worth the effort every day.

There's a TON of thought that went into that, however, because this job does have a way of suckerpunching me and generally making me feel lousy on a fairly regular basis. One of the difficulties I've encountered is that, out of every three people you walk by in a hallway, the first will ignore you, the second might smile, and the third will hate you, your family, and your clothes. Silly as this may seem, it's true and remarkably unsettling, because any one of my coworkers/bosses is fully capable of being any one of those three people in the hallway, and I just don't understand it.

My immediate supervisor, for example, is a wonderful person that seems to just love me to pieces. Until, that is, I do something that triggers a flash of either anger or super-sensitivity from her, and my comfort level regarding my job is thrown instantly out the window. Granted, if I upset anyone, I want to be able to fix that right away, but there is a sort of sixth-grade emotional bumper car arena at this place that I really hope to never succumb to. Mass schizophrenia is not something I'm accustomed to, but it's very real here (perhaps not in a literal sense, but I never know which version of my boss will be at work on any given day, and that is a new and difficult kind of stress for me).

On top of all that, I'm working with people who are, on the whole, much smarter, much more opinionated, and much more privileged than the majority of people with whom I have worked at other jobs. It's occasionally frustrating however, particularly with the other editorial folks, because they all sustain a rather bumptiously rationalistic view of things - that sense of privilege pervades their every action and, as I've seen in other scenarios, when you have a bunch of like-minded people hermetically sealed in a bubble with only each other to feed off of, well...it's certainly not a healthy environment for some people, including myself, if I'm not careful.

Regarding that privileged sense my coworkers wield - personally, I feel lucky to be in the place I'm in, and I think a lot of them have lost touch with reality if they think things are bad at this place. I'd like to see any one of them have to tackle shoplifters for ten bucks an hour just to pay the rent. Taking that into consideration, I don't have to carry that giant sack full of privilege and pretense that they do, and thus, I am much less vulnerable to the little, dumb things that seem to so easily overshadow all the pleasantries the folks around me would otherwise enjoy. This all aligns with something I believe in fully: "Save the drama fo' yo' mama." There's better things afoot.

One of the cool things about my job is that it makes my brain work harder than it has in a good while, and a measurable side effect of that is that I'm reading three books all at once now, plus my monthly allotment of comics. Two of the books I'm reading are, coincidentally, drastically opposing views of the world in a religious sense - one is a literal exploration of the textual history of the Bible, and the other is a starkly existentialist argument about how the Divine exists in the midst of the Mundane (but our understanding is so heavily filtered by logical reason and nurture that we are unable to see things as they truly appear). As exciting and yawn-inducing as that may sound to you guys, I've found a small blurb that describes God in a way that I like - "totally, infinitely present in all particulars."

That six word phrase has been an utter delight to contemplate over the past couple of days, and is in large part responsible for my coming to terms with this job. Next time you walk outside, think about that phrase. Memorize it. Recite it while you look at things you normally ignore. It's astounding. Doing just that over the last few days seemed to set everything right back on track for me.

Damn, I sure can write about nothing and still use a whole lotta words.



S