There's No Such Thing As An Original Sin

I go back and forth with this blog. As a person who made the impractical decision to devote my life to the study of history at the age of 20, I'd say I know better than most the value of a journal as a primary document, a "first draft of history" recording the invaluable insight of not just what happened, but the ephemeral and inconstant context in which it occurred. There's a reason why a middle-class functionary like Samuel Pepys is a name still known to some people 300-odd years after he died: he was blessed/cursed with the compulsion to write shit down. For years. Lots of quotidien bullshit about bladder stones and what he had for lunch, like some kind of proto-instagram asshole. But to quote a famous French and famously-French archaeologist of some note, you take some old garbage and lose it for long enough, it becomes priceless.

I don't really have that kind of expectation for what it is I've been doing here and here for the past 16-plus years. I'm sure the economy of historico-archaeological valuation is going to be skewed by the unkillable dump of static noise exploding forward in time in what is underwhelmingly called the Information Age, when the limiters of physical degradation are cast aside; Pepys is important because his work didn't die to fire or mold or mud or any kind of particularly destructive indifference. That diary as a single volume holds its worth in contrast and in context of the losses of the Great Library of Alexandria and every other worthy thing that might have helped us as humans know more about being human than we do when we have to make it up from scratch all over again with every generation. Every lost text is another line of illiteracy forcing us to duplicate the effort made to conjur it in the first place, but at the risk now of missing out on a right conclusion circumstances may never present us again with achieving.

To be fair though, sometimes all you risk losing are like 700 words about a karate TV show. But a thousand years from now, who is going to know what karate or TV are? In many ways the historicity of my work is not dissimilar to my courtship strategy: all you really have to do is hang in there long enough to outlast the others.

It turned out, though, that "devoting my life to history" only lasted until I dropped out of graduate school at the age of 24. Since then it's been all child rearing and this cavalcade of triviality and dick jokes. So free of the burden of making sure any of this bullshit means anything, I sort of hate being tied to the news cycle. I'd rather sit here and write dirty limericks, but a) I can't shake the spectre of This Moment in Time, when we can't get all kinds of TOTALLY MOMENTOUS SHIT to just take a fucking break for five minutes and b) I still can't find a good rhyme for "vulva." So we'll talk about the last presidential debate.

It was tonight, by the way, October 22, 2020. If you're a numerologist, 10-22-2020, of course, means... haha, just kidding, fuck off, hippie witches. If you want to be useful, cobble together a voodoo doll of Donald Trump's scrotum and set some fleas at it.

Besides, numerology would be an attempt to assign meaning to any of this stuff, which, Far Future Readers should be made aware, we don't actually do at this particular historical moment. The only emotional safety lies in either denial, self-medication or pure nihilism. We're past the point of even pitying the hopeful. They're met with the weary incredulity we used to reserve for multi-level marketing assholes and Scientologists. It was cute once, but honestly, who even has the time? We've all got full schedules sitting home alone devouring the minutes until death.

That's my assessment of the political moment after this, the second-second debate,* the one that actually happened: I mean, who really gives a shit? Nobody said anything that was going to change anyone's mind. When one of the two people up there just start spewing things that aren't remotely true from the second he opens his mouth, what's the value to public discourse, to politics as an act, to the polity as a whole? At a certain point it becomes kabuki theater, but with less subtle makeup.

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*The first-second one was cancelled because the president is a baby AND had a little bit of plague.

Our Lips Are Sealed

It's hard to know what the office rumors about yourself are since, if they are operating correctly, they are the thing everyone stops talking about immediately whenever you enter a room. They exist in a negative social space that manifests in the inverse of your actual physical presence, like the ghost of you that exists before you've had the courtesy to die.

Since I've been a supervisor, I've always assumed someone somewhere was saying something about me. I certainly bitched about my boss when I had a supervisor and continue to do so to this day, only now it's about a vice president of something or other. There are certain superficial aspects of your working life that will change depending upon your level within the bureaucracy, but there are some things that are comfortingly constant, like how 100% of the people you talk to are some combination of overworked/underpaid/unappreciated/the font of all solutions if only they were listened to in proportion to their prodigious ability. I have full confidence that Mr. Vice President that I report to has a daily surreptitious eye-roll or three at the expense of the president above him, and who in turn will on occasion have zero minutes to spend giving a fuck about whatever it is the company owner/CEO won't just get to the goddamned point about already.

We, all of us, work for idiots. It's as certain in American life as taxes, death and the Dodgers losing in the Division Series. It doesn't really matter what your level of respect is for your boss or how much you genuinely enjoy working for him/her,* man, if they'd just get their shit together on this one/a couple important/all aspect(s), your life would be so much simpler. Of course we have the option of pointing out exactly what that/those aspect(s) is/are, but the only thing worse than being annoyed by someone is knowing that they know exactly how they annoy you and them then actively deciding to make no effort to change or fix it. To be fair, though, it can be a tall order as usually the only feasible solution offered is "become a completely different person, please."

So I assume the people I supervise bitch about me, if/when I'm a topic of conversation at all. Or at least that whatever choices I make have left a kind of social and professional residue that others are able to pile up into a snowman version of me. But it's part of the understood contract between us that they pretend they're not saying it and I pretend I didn't hear any of it.

One of them broke the code last week, though, and gave me a little bit of a glimpse of what I look like from the outside. It's not something you always want to know. It's like seeing a picture of yourself that someone else took (people used to do that!) from an unfamiliar angle and being genuinely confused about who the fat bastard with the receding hairline, undeserving of human love is before realizing oh yeah, he's wearing my shirt and HEEEEYYYYyyyy...

When I started eight years ago, at minion level, I was part of a group that was six men and one woman. Since I became a manager (and hiring official) four years ago, we have evolved to the point where we are about to be seven women and four men (myself included). So the big rumor/conclusion that's been reached about me is: I don't like men. I find them intimidating, apparently.

I have to say, I feel pretty good about that.

I'm sure there are other rumors or characterizations to be discovered. And I guess if I pressed I could find out, but that feels a little thirsty to me. All I know is when the inevitable gynocracy gets here next year and they start to divide the men up into breed slaves and wine mules, I may have enough votes amongst our overladies to have my preferences considered.

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*Yeah, statistically still probably him.