Miércoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol 6.

So I've been at work for about forty-five minutes, and I'm already bored enough to be turning to my blog. Too early for baseball, too soon after arriving to go outside and smoke. And while I found a couple Mercedes Lackey short stories in the Free Library I haven't read yet, the way I feel right now they'd just be one more way to kill time, and I'd rather save them for when I really need to recharge.

I wanted to do a Tuesdays yesterday but ended up not having the time. No complaints about the soundpost, though; it's on my blog, posted on my forum to positive responses, emailed to Dad so he can show it to his friend who's got a viola-playing daughter, and Dave liked it too. For me, that's rave reviews. Woo hoo! I really hope Cheri's client likes it. But so much depends upon (the red wheelbarrow? hehe poetry joke) the monies I may or may not be able to obtain between now and Friday. Or earlier if possible, for maximization of Dave's peace of mind. And mine.

This morning I was sitting there eating my muesli, and Dad was going on and on, rehearsing the pitch he was going to make if he got interviewed for this Google job he applied for by making the pitch to me. He'd been going for a good twenty minutes--and I was actually holding solid, kinda pleased with myself for that--before I thought of a clever way to break it up and smiled my smile of bemused irony. "Can I make a recommendation?" I said. "Sure," he replied, always happy to have input on a sales pitch. "Take a deep breath." We both took a deep breath. "Thank you," I said, "I feel much better now." Then he apologized and said, "Was I going too fast again? I'm too wound up this morning. I'm just trying to, you know, get a little bit of hope." Ahh, Dad's guilt trips are more interesting than Mom's, because his intent isn't to actually crush the spirit. Just to let the misery he makes for himself spill over so you feel sorry for him. "But getting that hope from me first thing after I wake up in the morning is...not always a winning proposition," was my reply. Fucker has three hours to sit there and mentally lash himself into a frenzy of guilt and fear and desperation before I even reach consciousness. Thank dog we switched rooms so he's not sitting there right outside my door waiting to pounce like some sort of brain-eating leech with grasshopper legs. One of these days his mental listening skills are going to improve sufficiently under my tutelage that he'll be able to hear the words "horrible old man" off the top of my mind when I silently bellow them.

[time passes]

Ah, now main boss has given me another reason to want to throttle him. It has to do with money and the payment of people and things like that and relates to other issues about which I have been very angry for a very long time. The solution I was given could be marginally considered to address the most current, urgant issue but speaks nothing to the more underlying long-term causes. And as I was reading the one-line email he obviously tossed off in twelve seconds which will require both myself and the management staff to enact sweeping changes that will drastically affect the lives and fortunes of every employee in the company and take months to calm everybody down and work the bugs out, a thought occurred to me. The thought was, "Maybe I shouldn't bomb this phone interview for a bank job that Mom helped line up for me. Maybe I should try to actually get the job."

Getting paid more, despite the direness of my financial straits, actually is the least of my concerns. Bonds are really important to me, require much effort (not always visible) for me to form. And I have bonds with my coworkers, my bosses, the time of the organization, the taig of the buildings, the taig of the Loop and specifically the areas I move through during the course of my work week. I have a routine and a route and I cling to those routines. I must admit a fact which has always been true but is easy to articulate with the terminology I use now. I actually need a daily routine with a clearly predictable possible-event tree in order to coordinate my mana draws and expenditures in such a way as to keep my personality stable.

Plus there's the fact that Mom helped line this up for me. That there has two edges, both suboptimal. One edge is that Mom would then feel I owed her one for helping me out. Other edge is Mom would feel she had successfully exercised power over me because I needed and accepted her help. So she starts demanding more facetime and if I refuse, she feels justified in rolling a snit. I say rolling a snit, rather than throwing one, because Mom is still very controlled and decorous in her ways of hurting.

I really want to last a year here. But I don't have very much faith that the three bosses will be able to break the curse on this space. They have all fallen victim to it in various ways, by allowing themselves to be distracted, by quarreling with each other, I dunno. I'd have to be inside their heads to know what happened and how, and I wasn't even working here the first few months while the chaos here was becoming embedded. Frankly I don't know quite what to think on the subject of curses. The closest thing I can come to a description at this point is that it seems to be a kind of illness in a taig. When humans interact with their taig without consciously attending the process, they absorb the taig's energy as normal without recognizing the illness. So instead of reinforcing the health and strength of the taig, they reinforce the weakness and imbalance in it, often making it worse when they become imbalanced themselves.

The preceding description is a tentative group of thoughts on curses that does not quite merit the title of rough working hypothesis. Not even close. I've just gotten to the point where I have some awareness of my own individual interactions with the times and taigs with whom I'm acquainted. So I'll admit I have NO clue about the mechanics of interaction for a group or the long-term effects on a taig of particular interaction types, or even how or to what extent it is possible to diagnose the present condition of a taig. And that's the sort of theories one would have to put together to be able to speak intelligently on the subject of curses, like the one on this restaurant space (presumably) or the one on the Cubs (allegedly).

And here I thought this Wednesdays with Invisible Friends was going to be unusually light on invisible stuff. Ah, a true representative of my patronymic (almost typed it out, there!), I always bend the word-stream in the direction of my interests.