Ouch. That Smarts.

"You know," I said to a caseworker in the dictation room this morning, dead eyes meeting dead eyes, "I would never cheat on my wife, but this job can definitely suck my dick."

I've been trying to leave for maybe eight months-- maybe nine.  Maybe it's been since my kids were born, I don't know.  I don't remember.  I've sent out so many emails, it's disgusting.  I've been on Idealist.org so many times it's appalling.  Every time I attach another horseshit resume to another fantastically made up cover letter email, I want to shit studs and puke drywall.  It's repetitive and demeaning and unkind.

The rejection emails do not bother me, not even a bit.  I could care less.  I couldn't care less?  Who cares?

Not me!

I just submitted an excessively and predictably lengthy application to work for the V. A. as basically a mid-level bureaucrat, desk-jockey, paper-pushing, phone-weilding asstriloquist.  And, I've got to tell you, plate tectonics and priorities really must be shifting in this harried little head of mine, because I'm practically salivating at the thought of sitting at a desk all day, answering the telephone, talking to down-on-their-luck, washed up, beaten down, PTSD'd vets about the process of securing, exploring, appealing, and exercising their benefits and horning in on markedly more money than I'm making and sucking at the glorious teat of a federal pension.

mmmmmmmmmmmm...... suck suck suck suck suck suck suck................. moist

But, of course, I'm getting WAY ahead of myself.  The job was open from the 18th-20th, and there are fourteen (FOUR-FUCKIN-TEEN!) positions open in Philadelphia.  Now, because it's the government, they want to make sure you're nice and smart before they hire you, you know, so you fit in with everybody else already on the federal payroll, so you had to submit your transcript(s) in order to complete the application process.

This wasn't easy to accomplish when you work full-time, have two children, and only two days to accomplish this feat.

Muhlenberg, my undergraduate alma mater, made it pretty easy, and relatively inexpensive.  For an unofficial transcript, you fill out the form online, pay $7.25, ($5.00 for the transcript, $2.25 internet service fee) and they email you your grades in around 24 hours.  Done and done.

La Salle, graduate school and true to its staid Catholic roots, is a little bit more rooted in the dark ages.  After tithing $32.50 (don't ask me where they came up with that bizarre number) they will Express Mail you the transcript.  They don't do the eThing.  Fortunately, I had until 11:59pm on the 20th to fax the transcripts to the gub'mint, and I did it by 8:20pm.  And everything was going fine.  What wasn't going particularly fine was looking at my Muhlengrades, which I hadn't really thought about since I graduated back in 2002.

I graduated as prick # 211 out of 450 some other pricks and pracks.  Solidly middle of the pack-- indistinguishable, certainly academically, from one schlub to the next schmeck.  Sure, I wrote, edited, published, promoted and sold a book as an undergraduate, and I was in a lot of plays, and wrote a lot of plays and had one of those plays be a semi-finalist to go to the Kennedy Center, and I distinguished myself as the first Jew on our hallway to have sex with a Catholic girl, (I didn't even have to tithe) and I probably distinguished myself in other ways, too, but, academically, not really very much happening there.

I got a D in biology-- having sex with the Catholic girl didn't help like I thought it might-- and I guess that's because I never went to class.  I guess the biology class I took in high school, where we spent untoward amounts of time coloring in pictures of amoebas, talking about "Power Rangers" and watching "The Money Pit" didn't help like I thought it might.  A cold, hard C- in Critical Thinking, which I think, objectively and non-academically, is something at which I'm pretty adroit.  I bombed a couple other classes, too.  Oh, right.  Intro to Psych.  C-, which is kind of funny, considering that I work in an inpatient crisis psychiatric hospital and I supposedly know my dick from a mushroom.  I did very well in all my theatre courses, but I guess you'd have to be Nicolas Cage on ice and ether to fuck that up.

Joking aside (really, it's no joke: I hate that flat affect fuckstick) I was surprised at how saddened I was by my college grades.  I ended with a cumulative GPA of 3.302.  I looked at the scanned transcript and I was disappointed in myself, something I would have bristled at had it came from my parents-- but it never did.  At least, I don't remember them saying they were disappointed in my grades-- certainly not in college.  Where grades were held in extremely, I think excessively, high regard in my wife's family, in my own, they were not really relevant.  Far more weight was given to the overall experience.  I remember my parents being concerned for how I was doing in college on an emotional level, particularly since, mid-way through my sophomore year, I started going to the counseling center for once-a-week sessions and didn't stop until I graduated.  I had suicidal thoughts for the first, and only, time when I was a freshman.  Bullied mercilessly, lost and lonely, and stripped from the tender clutches of my once-adoring mother, I got very dark indeed-- and told no one.  Because, well, why would I?

In grad school, I ended with a cumulative 3.7, because, I guess, La Salle gives out A's like communion wafers.  I got tons of them, and never went hungry.

I guess, if I'd wanted good grades in undergrad, I would have, I don't know-- studied?  I didn't think you were supposed to study in college, so I didn't.  I never really knew how to study anyway.  In high school, I did my homework on the bus on the way to school, and I did fine, so I didn't really know what all those people were doing in the college library all the time.  I went there because there were hot girls there and I liked hot girls.  Now, when I got to the library, there's just mentally unstable people cursing under their breath and blowing air on their notebooks filled with religious ramblings.  I masturbated, a lot, in college-- and my eyesight was always poor and my palms are still hairless to this day, but I guess educational mediocrity is the price for my ambivalence and spilled seed.  And I suppose, in the end, I'm okay with that.

Especially if it gets me a comfy office chair and a G7 pay rate.

Oh, The Humanity

I almost threw up at my new job yesterday.

It wasn't because, as a psychiatric technician and allied therapist in a psychiatric hospital, I am exposed to pee-pee and poo-poo, and patients who enjoy creating mayhem and artwork with both. No, I don't especially mind that. It also wasn't because I am exposed to patients who like to... expose.

"lookatmytitslookatmytitslookatmytitsaforeifuckinkillyoumotherfucker"

I... didn't. And, fortunately, she didn't, either.

I almost threw up at my new job yesterday not because of the patients, but because of the staff. My coworkers. My.... peers.

I almost threw up, but I didn't-- because I couldn't even bear the thought of eating after what I saw and heard today at work. Plus the fact that my day started at 7am and my lunch break was at one. What was the point? My appetite was ruined, as was my outlook on mental health as a profession, and my faith in this facility and my zeal for this job.

Gone. Awesome.

Patients were openly ridiculed by staff, openly insulted, openly... threatened.

Staff Member: "How 'bout I come over there and cut you? I'll come over there and cut you so bad your own mother won't recognize you. I'll fuck your motherfuckin' shit up."

Staff Member: "I'm about ready to shove that walker up your ass."

Staff Member: "Hey, did you know that everybody with your last name is a fuckin' queer?"

Staff Member: "Can you say, 'I'm the turtliest turtle in the turtle pond' while wiggling your head around?"

Staff Member: "Do you even know what your name is? Do you know how to tie your shoes or are you still wearing those retard referee sneakers?"

Staff Member: "You're a homo."

These same staff members would then harshly reprimand patients who exhibited sexually inappropriate tendencies-- which isn't hypocritical at all. They fudge paperwork, they slack off on the ward, they're all related or they're all fucking each other-- or both-- and their inattentiveness and inappropriate actions and reactions led to an outburst of violence today that could have been avoided.

They're mostly tattooed college kids-- one has multiple lip-piercings and, really, I wouldn't mind the lip-piercings if they were on the lips of someone who was even mildly appropriate with the patients. They make fun of patients, imitating the noises that the most severely disturbed patients make, right in front of them. To them, in reply.

When a patient approaches a staff member, the default response is invariably,

"WHAT?!"

or "What the hell do you want?"

Or, they're just ignored. A patient can be standing three feet away from a staff member (this is the required distance we're supposed to keep from them) asking a perfectly sane question like, "Do I have courtyard privileges today?" and the patient can be ignored for any number of minutes. But it's the direct verbal abuse that made me want to vomit, and I probably would have had there been anything in my stomach.

Fortunately, there wasn't.

When I took this job, I didn't think it was going to be all peaches and plums, or even apple tart, but I didn't think I would be working with people who exhibit such routine and such open hostility and disdain for the patients supposedly under their care, I didn't think I would be working with the scum of the earth-- disenfranchised people in it for the paycheck and, apparently, the opportunity to fuck with people who have limited cognition, limited coping skills, and unlimited vulnerability.

Yes, the patients are inappropriate-- but they have that excuse of being, you know, crazy. Schizophrenics are supposed to act bonked-up, the psych techs kind of don't really have that excuse. We're not supposed to be the borderlines and the manics and the bipolar.

But, it's not just the patients who get "institutionalized." It's the staff, too.

Management likes to make a bit to-do about the fact that many people who work at this facility have been there for fifteen, eighteen, twenty, even twenty-eight years. And that sounds very nice, but when you see the burn-out, when you see the hostility, when you see brutality-- well, maybe such longevity isn't such a great thing.

It sounds stupid to say this, but I think that the openness of the obscenity-laced, threatening interactions with the patients, which the technicians then tried to manipulate to confuse the patients into forgetting what they had just said, that openness was the most horrifying thing. There are supervisors and nurses and videocameras everywhere-- and, clearly, nobody seems terribly concerned about that. And, clearly, I can't imagine anybody would be terribly concerned or surprised if I reported this to my supervisors.

Hopefully, the state will be both concerned and surprised when I find another job, posthaste, quit this one and report it to the Department of Health and Department of Public Welfare.

Sometimes I joke about being twelve-- when I call my closet's green doorknobs "Elphaba's nipples," I feel twelve. Oftentimes, when I get a new job, I feel twelve, too. I get wooed, positively swept off my feet by lofty mission statements and palaver from VPs and managers about proper protocol and professional conduct and ethical standards, and they pile horsehit lovingly onto my plate until I practically need a bib.

And then.... I actually start the job.

Proverbs 31:10 asks, "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies."

I know it's a rhetorical question. I know it's just supposed to be longing and beautiful. I know it's just a job. But I also know that I cannot permit myself to be counted amongst these people, to wear their I.D. badge, to park in their lot, to swipe at their timeclock, to sign my name on their papers. And maybe that means that I think I'm rubies and they're costume jewelry.

And maybe I don't give a damn if it does.

Sometimes, You're Just a Small, German Child

I just finished writing my first scholarly paper since graduate school. I didn’t enjoy it very much, because, really, there isn’t very much to enjoy about writing scholarly papers-- unless you’re writing them whilst receiving oral sex, which I wasn’t.

I wrote this paper as part and parcel of the process of acquiring a BBJ (Big Boy Job—nothing to do with oral sex anymore, sorry) and, if I get it (God I hope I get it! How many losers do they need?!) it may very well be the first BBJ I’ve held since 2003. Since then, I’ve had a quaint series of jobs, but none of them have been BBJs. They’ve just been, you know, Little J’s, as opposed to the Flying J, which, apparently, is a franchise of highway gas stations for eighteen-wheelers, and not some sort of Jewish person doing avian acrobatics.

You might surmise that, since I didn’t especially enjoy the process of writing this scholarly paper that maybe I’m not applying/vying for the right job. You know, since, if I get hired, that’s pretty much what I’ll be doing, um, all goddamn day long. Well, that and applying for other jobs. And waiting for a satisfactorily suburban police department to announce that they’re holding a written and physical agility testing session. And blogging from work.

Actually, come to think of it, since this is a BBJ with an actual, real company, they’ll probably have all kinds of internet filters and firewalls and blocked sites and super-scary Big Brother e-monitoring/iSnoopery going on so that if I so much as try to buy Stan Rogers music on Amazon they’ll probably fire my tight, though distinctly bony ass.

And then I will look for other jobs, and wait for police departments, and blog from home. And, sporadically, observe pornographic still images/moving motion pictures via a computer with no ookie spy shit on it.

Writing the scholarly paper wasn’t hard—then again, maybe I just didn’t do it right—but motivating myself to do it was extraordinarily Herculean. I would do anything before I would sit down to write this paper. I did the dishes, I walked the dogs, I watched clips of Tim Conway cracking Harvey Korman up on “The Carol Burnett Show.” I made obscure Gilbertian references on peoples’ Facebook pages—and you all know I’m not into that.

By the way—did you know that the first lemur ever born in captivity in the United Kingdom was born on Gilbert’s property?

Anyway, I am a hopeless slackass and, really, I ought to be more motivated and zealous about an opportunity to land a BBJ when I won’t have any J or j in almost precisely a month but maybe I’m just not ready for a BBJ. Maybe I don’t want another desk.

Or, far scarier, maybe another desk is just what I need.

Ever get the feeling that you’re the small, ruddy-cheeked German child in any number of Brothers Grimm fairy tales? You know—you’re hopping along through the forest, wearing a red cape or lederhosen or chaps coated in Vaseline or whatever and the woods get all dark and scary and shit, and the trees are all gnarled and twisty-like, and there you are, just standing there with a basket of pastries in one hand and your plump little choad in the other and you’re faced with two paths. One of those paths leads to a precious little cottage, safe and warm with a white damask sleeper sofa from Jennifer Convertibles, all ready for you, and your favorite hot bowl of regurgitated mushflakes, and grammaw crocheting you a facemask or something…

…and the other path leads straight into the lair of your friendly, local clustertoothed, semi-retarded, lascivious wolf or T-Rex or rabid llama who will assrape you with a frozen garden hose until you sing the “Star Spangled Banner” like Stevie Nicks.

Well, that’s kind of how I feel, looking for jobs, and, not to sound too dramatic here but kind of standing on the precipice—making choices, being a small, German child kind of all alone in the woods, on the lookout for drooling, hairy creatures clutching the frozen garden hoses of the world, petrified to bend over to pick up that tempting pastry I just dropped.

A Erranding We Shall Go

"Everybody does it," my wife said last night as we were chatting.

And, no, she wasn't talking about licking ecstacy pills out of a 20-year-old girl's innie on the floor of a nightclub. She was talking about erranding at work.

My wife is an intinerant speech-langugage pathologist. She goes traipsing about to children's homes and store-front daycare facilities and, if you think she can resist the temptation to hit up a fabric store in between appointments, well, then you just crazy, girl.

"One of my coworkers came into the office from seeing clients yesterday carrying bags from Pathmark, which she then put in the work refrigerator until she was ready to go home."

I guess we do all do it. Efficiency experts and corporate Hitlers call this practice "Time-Theft." There was a funny "The Office" episode about it, and it involved stopwatches, fornication, immunity, peeing in soda bottles, and Outback Steakhouse gift certificates. Obviously, it was an episode of the American "The Office."

I steal from my company all the time, and I don't feel bad about it, because my company steals from me. What does it steal? My time. Oh, and my soul, my will to live and procreate, my good nature and countenance, and the best years of my life. So, bearing that in mind, would I feel even the slightest bit guilty about, say, blogging from work?

No.

Why?

Because I work in an office for eight, sometimes nine-and-a-half hours straight without any proper, prescribed lunch break. Is that legal? I don't think so. But I am expected to work through my lunch, with my boss constantly yammering into my ear until I develop tinnitus or aural herpes, mindlessly shoving forkfuls of salad into my mouth while I manage spreadsheets or attendance lists or compose worthless emails.

So, I blog from work-- and IDGAS.

Totes.

I can remember, though, the first time I did a personal errand on work time, and I was practically shitting myself.

Greg and I were working the ambulance together on one sunny June day back in 2005. Greg was a huge black man with puffy, scruffy facial hair that looked phony, but wasn't. He spoke in a gruff voice, but he was actually very kind. He taught me how to drive an ambulance, even though I was supposed to have learned, you know, in a class. He really taught me. Greg had two cellphones clipped to his belt-- one for "family" and one for "bi'niss." Sometimes, while I'd be in the back of the truck tending to a patient, Greg would simultaneously conduct family affairs on one phone, bi'niss relations on his other phone, and handle the EMS radio, all at the same time. It was like watching a circus act, or a symphony conductor at work. Amazing. One of Greg's daughters had become Muslim ("I don't get it-- but if she happy, who cares?") and he would gruffly answer the phone when she called, "BAGEERA?! SALAM ALEKEM!"

Anyway, on this warm June day, Greg decided that he needed a new swimsuit, and he drove the ambulance to the parking lot of JOMAR, a huge discount clothing store for peeps in the hood. I needed a new dress shirt, but I was petrified about going in. I mean, after all, I was on the clock.

"Should we tell dispatch where we are?"

"Man! Are you crazy? Naw!" he said to me, his eyes bugging out of his head, "Everybody does this-- this is the way it is."

And then it hit me: this is how they can get away with paying us $11.00-an-hour for busting our asses schlepping 400-pound comatose bastards around Philly-- because they know that, during downtime, we're picking up our laundry or mailing our letters or going food shopping. As long as we're not in another county or time-zone and as long as we can be reached on the radio, I guessed that it was anything goes.

And so I bought two dress shirts and a tie. For $11.00. One hour's work, and thank you very much.

Two of my other partners on the squad, however, had slightly different ideas about on-the-clock errands.

Tom was a paramedic in his early forties. Coming to work to start his shift on time was like a disease to him, and he avoided it in the way that a germaphobe touches doorknobs with Kleenex and sprays Chloraseptic onto cabinet handles. I only worked three shifts with Tom in my time at this company, and, during each of these shifts some sort of errand or personal recreation was included.

Shift 1: On suspicion that his wife was cheating on him, Tom drove me, in our ambulance, 28 miles away to a hospital in Delaware (where his wife worked) to stalk his wife and see if he could get a look at her suspected lover's vehicle. Tom was driven to this action by his son's statement, "Mommy's boyfriend drives a Mazda Tribute." We saw two Mazda Tributes in this hospital's parking lot.

Shift 2: While not really an "errand," Tom hopped into our truck half-an-hour late for the start of his shift and threw a basketball, a towel, and a change-of-clothes into the ambulance. Ever play "P-I-G?" he asked me. It sounded to me like a game Laura Ingalls Wilder would have invented. "No," I said. He drove us to a basketball court. We played. I lost. Pig.

Shift 3: "We've got to go to Camden," Tom said as he put the ambulance into gear. "Why?" I asked. Tom looked at me and his face twitched everso slightly. "Traffic court." Tom parked the ambulance near the municipal building in Camden. This was a place where you not only kept the windows up and the doors locked, but you prayed in several different tongues that you would go home with no unnatural holes in your face.

"Be right back," Tom said to me. He took the keys to the truck, and the radio. He came back an hour-and-a-half later. His hair was all fucked up, he was covered in sweat, and his pupils were the size of pinheads. He smelled like a German Olympic team's locker room.

"We've got a call," he said, hitting the lights and the siren. He must have driven 80 miles an hour the entire way back to Philly-- illegally, I might add. I was sure I was going to die, and was almost disappointed when I didn't.

"I'm not working with that guy anymore," I said to my supervisor the next morning, "ever again."

"Don't worry about it," the supervisor replied. Two days later, Tom was fired for stealing over $8,000 worth of gas on the company Sunoco card.

For all of Tom's peculiar erranding, my partner Mitch, though, takes the cake and pawns it. Mitch was always being threatened with litigation, termination, extermination-- anything that ended in "ation" really. Consequently, he was always in need of a buck. As a medic, he made double what I made, but half his money went to child support, so we took home the same amount each week, which was sad for both of us. One day, in need of some fast cash, Mitch, 300 pounds and resembling a shaven yeti, turned to me and said,

"We gotta go to my place and take care of something."

He always wore mirror-tinted sunglasses and not seeing his eyes scared the bejompers out of me.

He told me to back the ambulance up to his front door, "so no one will see what we're doin'." It was 6:30 in the morning. As I put the ambulance in reverse, the "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" warning signal that alerts playing schoolchildren that an ambulance is about to run them over rang out into the chilly morning air.

"TURN THAT MOTHERFUCKIN' COCK OFF!" he roared at me. And I did.

I sat in the driver's seat of the truck for maybe fifteen minutes. I heard his front door shut and I looked in the side mirror and saw him carrying two very long objects, wrapped in blankets. I distinctly saw a muzzle sticking out from one of the blankets. Oh, good, I thought, so this is how my life is going to end. At least I know. It was almost comforting.

"Get out of the driver's seat," he told me. And I gladly did.

"I need some fuckin' money-- the landlord's after me, so I'm selling some of my guns."

Some?

"Rifle and a shotgun-- should get me some decent cash."

And he drove us to a pawnshop and he went in through the back door. Mitch was a back-door kind of guy. 10 minutes later, he came out with a wad of cash in his ground-chuck fist. He lunged into the truck and shut the door.

"Three-hunnert," he said to me in his trademark Cro-English, "not fuckin' bad, eh, bitch?"

When it came time for me to get Mitch fired, I read up on Pennsylvania law and EMS statutes. Who would have thought it was a felony to transport firearms inside of an ambulance?

Time-theft, though, ain't even a misdemeanor. Bitch.

Speedwagon Rides Again

If I understood everything that went on in my brain-- every calling, every craving, every interest and every inclination-- I think I'd be a goddamned genius. Either that or I'd be a twitching, incomprehensible, foul-smelling, eye-booger-eating societal reject who finger-paints on the walls of his cell with his own diarrhea.

Fortunately, I'm neither a genius or a... that.

I made the decision that, when my contract at my small non-profit is up in August, I will return to the streets as an emergency medical technician.

Last night in the kitchen, my wife, looking very nonplussed, I am relieved to say, said in reply,

"Can I ask why?"

"It's been calling to me," I said with a shrug and an assuredly earnest look in my eye. "It's been calling to me ever since I left."

And it has. And I don't know why.

She looked at me with the same love that has been in her eyes since we 2003 and said,

"Then you need to do what you need to do. And I love you."

There are so many things that I miss about the job-- the pride of putting on a uniform. Being of service to an organization and to a people. Taking charge and taking care. Driving an ambulance, lights on or off. The back-and-forth with dispatch. The indescribable feeling you get when it's time fo flip on the auxillary battery and turn those red lights on. The smiles people give you when they see you come in for a cup of coffee, that coffee sometimes free. The feeling of importance, of meaning. Of applying knowledge that I have, of getting my skills back. Of being able to say, "I am an EMT" without having to add, "but I don't work on the street anymore."

I worked from May, 2005 to February, 2007 and they were some of the best months and worst months of my entire life. I remember the day my first steady partner threatened to kill me, throwing a clipboard at me in the front of the ambulance, shattering the windshield instead of my face. I remember the day I got him fired. I remember transporting suicidal alcoholics and paranoid schizophrenics and homeless people with City Paper underwear and cardboard shoes. I remember bringing leftover slices of my wedding cake to my co-workers at base. I remember educating my Ukranian coworker about the Holocaust in the parking lot of a hospital. I remember busting my supervisor's balls, moving his van while he was inside the base taking a leak, and changing the radio station from country to classical, and placing a male urinal on his gearshift lever. I remember sitting next to the same man in the same ambulance every single day for thirteen months. I remember the patients-- the obese ones, the severely malnourished ones, the diabetics, the congestive heart failures, the addicts, the prisoners, the women in emergent labor. I remember the one neonate I transported, and I remember how petrified my partner and I were that we would kill it. I remember driving down I-95 with my lights on, going 40 miles per hour, fearful that every pothole would break its brand new ribs.

I remember careening down that same stretch of road with my siren wailing, in a desperate attempt to get a fire-fighter to the hospital after he had collapsed at the station of a heart attack while lifting weights. I remember his wife in the seat next to me, sobbing and thanking me as I drove, sweat pouring down my brow.

I remember a lot. And perhaps I remember too much, and perhaps I remember it in that skewed way in which we remember unpleasant things after some time has passed. I remember reading "The Passing of the Armies" which is a memoir written by Brevet Major-General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain about his time rising through the ranks during the Civil War. He writes about war in a sympathetic, eloquent, flowing, almost romantic way-- the battles long cleansed of the blood and brains, smoke and horror over thirty or forty years. Maybe that's how I remember life on the street.

Maybe.

But, after a long time being chained to a desk, I find myself longing for an opportunity to jump into my car and roam, even if it's just to go to the post office to pick up mail from the P.O. Box. I would never call myself a wanderer, but I know now that I need to be out there, whatever "out there" means.

And, oh, I'm out there alright.

But I think you know what I mean.

For years and years I've struggled with what it means to work. Does a job need meaning? Does a job need to align with your perceived status or education level? Do you have some sort of familial or religious or societal obligation to seek a white collar job if it's what your parents sought, or your wife's family sought? Does being in possession of a Masters of Education degree obligate you to teach? Well, no-- just as my undergraduate degree in Theatre doesn't obligate me to whore myself out in the world of off-off-off-off Broadway or appear in local car commercials smiling while receiving the keys to some piece of shit Ford Focus.

I've come to understand that you've just got to do something, and it might as well be something interesting, engaging, rewarding, and maybe a little bit fun, even if it doesn't pay the best and you may run into elderly ladies who tell you they're going to "fucking kill" you as you're strapping them snugly into a stretcher and covering them with a blanket.

The Schmuck With the Really Big Problem

I've got this really big problem in my life.

See-- my wife actually likes being with/around me.

Ain't life a total bitchskies?

I work with/around lots of middle aged women, and I know many others who talk shit about their husbands non-stop. They join gyms and clubs and Alcoholics Anonymous and Gilbert & Sullivan societies and book circles and knitting trapezoids just so they can get away from their husbands for an hour or two each week.

They regale each other with stories of their husbands' ineptitude, skullduggery, and affiliated moronia to any other cluck ol' hen who will listen, nodding her head appreciatively while she bends down to peck and pick at some birdseed on the ground, stopping only to adjust her feathers.


My wife doesn't do that. Maybe it's because we're sweet, cute, young 20somethings. Maybe it's because our relationship was founded and is grounded in mutual respect and admiration. Maybe it's because we recognize what's good in each other, and accept each other "with our lumps."

We're lumpy, as people go. Everybody has lumps-- even seemingly perfect people like Sean Connery, Michael Bubblie, and that bitch on TV-- you know-- whatsherface. After four years of datery and three of marriage, my wife and I are intimately acquainted with each other's lumps, and we acknowledge that we falter and fail at certain things-- in certain ways, we don't measure up. But, that's life-- and mature, compassionate, in love people know that, and keep on loving anyway.

'Cuz we're good like that.


Recently, though, I feel like one of my lumps has been growing larger, to goiter-like proportions, and that lump concerns my job. I work at a small non-profit and, because I'm such a fucking cracker-jack at relating to younger folk, I teach on certain nights. I'm also in stage plays, because I've been known to assert my cracker-jackery at onstage antics, too. To make up for the fact that I often am here until 8 or 9pm, my boss allows me to come into work late, sometimes at around 12pm. This, of course, is no help to my wife or my marriage, as my wife is on her way to her job by 7:30am or 8:00am at the latest. To add insult to injury, I do not get paid for the teaching component of my salary, when other per diem teachers make $30.00/hr.

"That's included in your salary," my boss says-- a salary that is about on par with an entry level position at any comparable non-profit organization-- a salary that any 22-year-old living in his first apartment and getting his car and health insurance paid for by Daddy Warbucks-- would be very happy with.

But, let's face it, motherhumpers-- I'm going to be thirty soon (May 12th-- love me!) and, not to fucking brag, but I'm a published author and have a Masters degree and I'm getting kind of tired of working around the clock till my chapped ass bleeds for mostly peanuts and the occasional cashew. And my wife is getting tired of it, too, and I don't blame her.

So, after finishing work at 7:30 tonight, I went over to my parent's house to talk about it, as my wife had chorus rehearsal tonight and I had the "night off." It wasn't a particularly productive conversation, but it did bring me hurtling back in time to other trauma-ramas in my life that had their airings in the living room before my parents. At least my father, on this particular evening, politely refrained from doing sit-ups on the living room floor while I spilled my empassioned guts out. He did let out some extraordinary farts, but extended the usual courtesy of offering me foods I didn't want.

"Mummy-- do you want... eh.... prailine and vanilla diet ice-cream?" This receives an icy stare from me.

"What about Veggie Straws-- they are from Don Juan."

For some reason, my father refers to "Trader Joe's" as "Don Juan." Don't ask me why, I have no answers. He's Israeli, that's the only answer I can give you and, if you've ever lived with an Israeli, that's all the answer you need.

They basically told me that what is happening to me at work is purely my fault, and that I need to keep track of my hours and show my boss that I am working like a slave, and that I should refuse to teach, act, or direct or help in any way after five o'clock.

"And, if she wants to fire you, say, 'Hey, that's fuckin' great!'" my father says. My mother, for the most part, sits pensively, wrapped in a soft, white blanket, staring at the careworn, peach carpet beneath her slippers, quietly blaming herself for everything that goes wrong in all three of her children's lives.

"Daddy and I went to that new park today, the one they just spent all that money on a few years ago, and took a nice walk," she says to me while my father's in the kitchen making me coffee I don't really want.

“Yeah?” I ask, “was it romantic?”

“No, it wasn’t romantic. But the weather was nice—it’s a beautiful park.”

I look at her.

“What do you talk about, when you’re alone—just the two of you?”

She laughs at me.

“We’ve been married for thirty-six, Jesus—thirty-seven years—we have plenty to talk about.”

I find this intriguing because the avowed stereotype of ancient, married people is that they have nothing to talk about.

“Well,” I press, “what do you talk about?”

“We talked about Aunt Mickey (you remember her—she’s barely clinging to life in Florida), we talk about our children and what’s going on in their lives. Why—why do you want to know?”

“I just want to make sure that you have some uplifting things to talk about every now and then, too.”

She laughs at me again, this time shaking her head as she smoothes out a piece of already smooth carpet with the toe of her slipper.

”Jesus,” she says, “you really kill me.”

And that may be true. But I suppose, despite all of our troubles and travails, there’s something uplifting about all three of her children. My eldest daughter may be a prematurely, physically ill geriatric and an emotional infant—but she’s easily the most financially successful of all of us—and she’ll be able to make the payments on the Maserati she’s going to buy herself for her fiftieth birthday with no sweat at all. My middle sister, though she may be married to a failure, and makes $11.00-an-hour busting her ass behind the counter of a café, has a beautiful, giggly, lovely son.

And me? While I might be miserable in my job, utterly directionless and haphazard in my daily affairs, with the anxieties of life keep me awake from 2:00am-6:15am when the alarm goes off-- my wife actually misses me when I’m gone.

And what could be more uplifting for a mother to know about her son than that?