No good deed
Sep. 1st, 2017 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grammarwomanIt’s actually, properly September now, the Friday before the last long weekend for a while. The husband and kid both have today off, and I am working from home. OK, "working": I’m waiting for the meds to kick in to combat my current bout of cramps, while keeping an intermittent eye on the work queue and fighting off a case of the fuckits.
Things I am grateful for:
The Internet, for providing me such answers as how to hack my CPAP to slightly turn up the pressure, and confirming that the shamelessly manipulative packet I got in the mail is from a charity with a shady financial history.
OTC medicine that can tackle mundane body issues.
My job situation, which lets me work from home whenever I want, and my work team, who are such an improvement from my previous position that my frogskin is almost all the way recovered from the boiling treatment.
My immediate in-laws, who are a band of enthusiastic and affectionate goobers.
My son, who gives me hope every day that he’s on the path to being a happy, independent, self-aware adult, which is my biggest goal for him.
Things for which I’d like to file a bug report:
The failure of the future to deliver robot bodies and instantaneous transporters. I’d even take a mashup of the two, where you rent a remote body.
Local companies that don’t call me back for work I need done, even after I’ve paid them!
My parent company, who in their infinite wisdom decided that the division of the company I work at (as in I have a cubicle in that building) but not for (my boss and team are an hour south of me, but we’re all on the same network) is obsolete, so they’re letting 100 people go in two months and outsourcing those responsibilities to third parties who can do them cheaper. It’s not a surprise - everyone in the building has been seeing this coming, but the timeline was a shock. Most of the people being cut have worked for this company for 15 or 20+ years, so their skillsets are out of date and they're much closer to retirement than most companies would probably like; getting new jobs will be a grim prospect. I am both grateful and guilty that years ago I jumped at a new position in another division when it was offered, but it doesn’t stop me from being angry at the recent decision. Fuck capitalism and its naked greed.
Right now I am also angry at the sheer awfulness of people; the hate playing out in the White House and the US, and across the world, make it really hard to raise a kid with any sense of optimism and belief in the merits of being a good or even decent person. It would be helpful if the positive news came in amounts larger than glimmers.
It’s a comforting delusion to believe that me and mine are insulated and far away from Those People, the racists and white supremacists, even as the local bumper stickers and check-out line conversations would indicate otherwise. But then I run smack dab into people I know, in the family circle, who are unbelievable DICKS, and my brain fugues into WTFery.
Skip this part if you don’t want to be grossed out by familial anti-Semitism.
My husband was talking with his dad last night, and it came up that my mother-in-law’s brother wants to cut his own daughter’s kids out of the family trust because she married and converted to Judaism, so her sons aren’t REALLY his grandsons because they’re Jewish. I just about barfed when I heard that, and yet in today’s political climate, it seems to be par for the course. I fucking hate that far from relegating this shit to the past, it keeps coming around again.
I brought it up with my kid this morning, because it seemed like a responsible parenting and personal thing to do, and it proved to be an illuminating discussion. His first response was "Does that mean I should be cut out too because I’m an atheist?"
…Color me gobsmacked, because we don’t really talk about religion much here at home except in abstract educational and cultural ways; I stopped going to church well before he was born, and have struggled with the ensuing guilt of not having him baptized or Sunday-schooled. I had no idea he considers himself an atheist, and it surprised me enough that a conversation about why will have to wait for another time.
So then he asked me the hard question of why people have such a problem with Judaism, and I stumbled my way through an explanation of history and religious conflict and Othering on a combined racial/cultural basis, and he summed it up with "So they’re a scapegoat?" *sigh* Yeah, kid. Yeah.
…And now my husband just let me know his uncle wants to disinherit his youngest son, too, because of the son’s past struggles with mental illness, so everything can go to his oldest son, the golden child. OMG what a fucking waste of air! FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDES OF MY FACE.
*deep breaths*
It doesn’t help that I’m still angry about something that happened to my son earlier this week. I picked him up from the library, where he hangs out in the teen space after school, and noticed that he was a little bit tense. "Mom, don’t be mad," he started, which never seems to end well, and proceeded to tell me that he had loaned his phone to an older kid who claimed that he needed to call his family. The phone came back to my kid with the battery almost dead, with multiple open tabs of porn and a porn app installed. My son closed and uninstalled everything, but he was worried that I or his dad might think that it was his doing, because he was pretty sure that the other kid had done it to get him in trouble. I had to hug him and assure him that I wasn’t mad at him at all, but I was plenty angry at the other kid for abusing his trust and making him feel bad for trying to be helpful. I also thanked him for being so open with me, and pointed out that being able to trust him meant we would automatically believe him.
I understand that the real world is mean and full of harsh lessons like that, but damn it, fuck that kid for reinforcing that the world will screw you over given the chance.
ARGH. I’m happy that it’s a long weekend; here’s hoping that everyone gets a restorative break. With enough deep breaths and restful sleep, I might even move past anger for a while.
Things I am grateful for:
The Internet, for providing me such answers as how to hack my CPAP to slightly turn up the pressure, and confirming that the shamelessly manipulative packet I got in the mail is from a charity with a shady financial history.
OTC medicine that can tackle mundane body issues.
My job situation, which lets me work from home whenever I want, and my work team, who are such an improvement from my previous position that my frogskin is almost all the way recovered from the boiling treatment.
My immediate in-laws, who are a band of enthusiastic and affectionate goobers.
My son, who gives me hope every day that he’s on the path to being a happy, independent, self-aware adult, which is my biggest goal for him.
Things for which I’d like to file a bug report:
The failure of the future to deliver robot bodies and instantaneous transporters. I’d even take a mashup of the two, where you rent a remote body.
Local companies that don’t call me back for work I need done, even after I’ve paid them!
My parent company, who in their infinite wisdom decided that the division of the company I work at (as in I have a cubicle in that building) but not for (my boss and team are an hour south of me, but we’re all on the same network) is obsolete, so they’re letting 100 people go in two months and outsourcing those responsibilities to third parties who can do them cheaper. It’s not a surprise - everyone in the building has been seeing this coming, but the timeline was a shock. Most of the people being cut have worked for this company for 15 or 20+ years, so their skillsets are out of date and they're much closer to retirement than most companies would probably like; getting new jobs will be a grim prospect. I am both grateful and guilty that years ago I jumped at a new position in another division when it was offered, but it doesn’t stop me from being angry at the recent decision. Fuck capitalism and its naked greed.
Right now I am also angry at the sheer awfulness of people; the hate playing out in the White House and the US, and across the world, make it really hard to raise a kid with any sense of optimism and belief in the merits of being a good or even decent person. It would be helpful if the positive news came in amounts larger than glimmers.
It’s a comforting delusion to believe that me and mine are insulated and far away from Those People, the racists and white supremacists, even as the local bumper stickers and check-out line conversations would indicate otherwise. But then I run smack dab into people I know, in the family circle, who are unbelievable DICKS, and my brain fugues into WTFery.
Skip this part if you don’t want to be grossed out by familial anti-Semitism.
My husband was talking with his dad last night, and it came up that my mother-in-law’s brother wants to cut his own daughter’s kids out of the family trust because she married and converted to Judaism, so her sons aren’t REALLY his grandsons because they’re Jewish. I just about barfed when I heard that, and yet in today’s political climate, it seems to be par for the course. I fucking hate that far from relegating this shit to the past, it keeps coming around again.
I brought it up with my kid this morning, because it seemed like a responsible parenting and personal thing to do, and it proved to be an illuminating discussion. His first response was "Does that mean I should be cut out too because I’m an atheist?"
…Color me gobsmacked, because we don’t really talk about religion much here at home except in abstract educational and cultural ways; I stopped going to church well before he was born, and have struggled with the ensuing guilt of not having him baptized or Sunday-schooled. I had no idea he considers himself an atheist, and it surprised me enough that a conversation about why will have to wait for another time.
So then he asked me the hard question of why people have such a problem with Judaism, and I stumbled my way through an explanation of history and religious conflict and Othering on a combined racial/cultural basis, and he summed it up with "So they’re a scapegoat?" *sigh* Yeah, kid. Yeah.
…And now my husband just let me know his uncle wants to disinherit his youngest son, too, because of the son’s past struggles with mental illness, so everything can go to his oldest son, the golden child. OMG what a fucking waste of air! FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDES OF MY FACE.
*deep breaths*
It doesn’t help that I’m still angry about something that happened to my son earlier this week. I picked him up from the library, where he hangs out in the teen space after school, and noticed that he was a little bit tense. "Mom, don’t be mad," he started, which never seems to end well, and proceeded to tell me that he had loaned his phone to an older kid who claimed that he needed to call his family. The phone came back to my kid with the battery almost dead, with multiple open tabs of porn and a porn app installed. My son closed and uninstalled everything, but he was worried that I or his dad might think that it was his doing, because he was pretty sure that the other kid had done it to get him in trouble. I had to hug him and assure him that I wasn’t mad at him at all, but I was plenty angry at the other kid for abusing his trust and making him feel bad for trying to be helpful. I also thanked him for being so open with me, and pointed out that being able to trust him meant we would automatically believe him.
I understand that the real world is mean and full of harsh lessons like that, but damn it, fuck that kid for reinforcing that the world will screw you over given the chance.
ARGH. I’m happy that it’s a long weekend; here’s hoping that everyone gets a restorative break. With enough deep breaths and restful sleep, I might even move past anger for a while.
