Cafe Hitch-hike

2022-02-27

Looking for Cloud 9

Rafael was out of town these past few days, so the weekend was pretty open and free. I drove out to my friend's nursery, parked my car in the employee lot, and then took my walk for a couple hours. I then stopped at a gas station chain that doubles as a quick order food stand for sandwiches and even sweet coffee drinks; I was unfamiliar with them but their panini was pretty good. I then went home and slept for 12 hours.

I was really tired. Then again, I think 'tired' is synonymous with my age. I got the last of the pre-surgery clearances including the heart scans. I'm glad to say that I remain remarkably healthy, so that was something that made me feel assured.

I wrapped up my week with the national ____ month activities that I did at work, since their topic is under my watch. I didn't have to do these, but I had my reasons (to be described below).
The performance expectations will be low probably until July or whenever we get a new grand pubah to rule over our faded empire (?) of a building. My colleagues are a bit nervous about what may happen, but the majority of people there have only worked there, I'm different because I've worked for multiple entities and had seen changes of the guard. I haven't said much about my opinion to not spook others, though I say it in confidence to those I trust. New GPs usually fall under the following:

1. Clueless and bit off more they could chew. Or, they are true academics with lots of lovely ideas and probably wrote a lot of articles or even books, but usually can't get much off the ground.
2. Female GPs (this is terribly sexist of me and I'm a female, my bad) are to be feared. It's a combination of ineptitude, getting low support/ regard from the larger organization, and a rage/ fear combination that make their job very difficult.
3. Ball-busting crushers from some high-achieving institution who expect their staffs to be brilliant, which often results the employees cow-towing to him (it's usually a 'him') and then competition rises among everyone. He turns the building into a snakepit.

One thing I've consistently seen in the leadership of my profession is leaders tend to pick those they like and will fit in with their mindset. Since I don't fit into much of anything (and it usually takes a while for people to get to know me), I'm doing the extra work and showing what I can do with the hopes of buying favors from the new GP (or at least sweeten my resume).

Of course, seeing the unprovoked invasion last week was very concerning. So Ukraine disarmed their nuclear arsenal (or at least their bigger guns) in a do-not-attack agreement with Russia years ago, and now they're being invaded? Then, there's the humanitarian crisis that's to come for those who stayed in their country and those who fled to others To me, it shows the decreased strength of my nation because we often led diplomacy processes and worked with N@T0 and others in the past to stop or slow these from happening.

Of course, we can't step in with our own forces because we're already splintered here. I'm sure some yahoos in various states or regions would use the opportunity of a large-scale armed conflict abroad to declare themselves a sovereign nation apart from the US. I'm absolutely disgusted that people of certain persuasions are rooting on Russia's leader and what he did; it was unheard of 40 years ago, but obviously things change and a critical mass wants autocrats to keep people in their place like it was before the 60s.

My poor office neighbor saw a SpaceX launch a few weeks ago and got terrified. He thought it was missiles heading our way like The Day After over the Atlantic, and pondered if he should call his wife and daughter until he heard a passerby say, "hey, did you see the SpaceX rocket?" Others stopped and watched in the sky until it faded.

So, we got to see the bad guys win an awful lot these past few years, to live through what is an ongoing pandemic and its awful handling, and to have people who want to completely censor America's troubled history in our schools. History doesn't always perfectly repeat itself, but it's full of times where someone took more and more until an even worse intervention had to happen. It's entirely possible that nukes will be used. If a virus doesn't kill us off, we'll do better by killing each other.

Ok, now I see why I felt kind of bad. One of my social media friends posted something like, "when you notice things, you feel bad more often than people who don't." I just wish I could be like some people I know who can blissfully and just about ignorantly hopscotch through life's difficulties and never get burned. They don't worry about things and it seems like they don't have to very often because for whatever reason, it all rolls off their back.

My problem is no matter what I did to numb things, they usually found their way back to me.

All I know is I wish for some sort of fun and levity to come back to me. Yeah, there's times where I relish the alternate reality I often felt with Huck. Yet, I know real life managed to poke back at me while I was dazed from the company, sex, or dreaming of him. Our relationship was definitely like an opiate for the both of us. I'm not on Cloud 9 anymore and haven't been much lately. I wouldn't mind a slice of it sometime soon.

downwind | upstream