"You work 16 hours and whaddaya get?...."
*looks around his desk, noting the gatering clutter of computer parts, paid and unpaid bills, inch-thick layer of dust, artist's materials, and DVD's of favorite movies past & present, and slowly shakes his head...*
"Wow...I've really been gone a while from here. Maybe I should clean up a little bit."
*grabs a broom, a small plastic bag, and his can of 'DUST-OFF', and begins clearing off a small patch of desk, just wide enough for him to place his mug filled with 4-C Iced tea and his keyboard on a stable surface, then powers up his PC and logs in.*
"Been away for too long...what, over 14 months from this desk alone. So many desks have gone under these hands, so many different keyboards, each with their own respective states of neatness. So many projects: HP-Citigroup, Jiffy Lube, Liberty Mutual, STC-Telecom, law firm moves, all of them transient. All of them underpaying me for my talents, yet I can't get the break I need to find a full-time home.
Resumes get sent off like probes into the Void...Each hoping to find some sign of intelligent life in the hands of an IT manager who can recognize all my past efforts in consulting, and make first contact...Friends try to help where they can, sending back rays of hope in the form of Job leads at companies where they work, only to see opportunity engulfed by the black hole that is the US Job market at this moment. Watching friends see their careers evaporate in the face of corporate layoffs, during especially difficult periods in their own lives, and because of geographic isolation, being unable to be with them, save in spirit and in thoughts and prayers that their lives do not end up like mine...
This week I've begun another project, one for NY State Dept. of Human Services, performing user migrations from one domain to another. I'm already bored to tears with the position, yet I've bound myself to the project on my honor to stay with it until all of the users in New York City are migrated. While at work, three people call with offers of work at significant increases on base salary over what I'm making now...but I cannot leave the project I'm on because my reputation would be rendered forfeit.
It just figures, don't it?
I spoke to a long-time friend, who had recently left a position because of management practices which made little sense. He'd recenty caught flack from his parents regarging his future prospects, and I could see, even through the text I read, the fear and doubt in his heart, something I'd never seen before in him. I'd seen frustration and anger on many occasions before, but never was fear an emotion in his formidable repetoire. He's alot like I was, ten years ago, when I was his age, working for a consulting firm here in NYC...one of the many littering my resume now...Unafraid to speak out and voice his dissent over orders and policies which did not make sense to him, and unafraid to walk away from something he'd recognized as a futile pursuit...
...Amazing how the responsibilities of parenthood can dull even the sharpest and most keenly focused dreams in to a cruel parody of their former selves, especially when the people to whom you entrust your psyche to trample it under the boots of a thousand-thousand waking nightmares - a son so bright his intellect dwarfs that of any ten people I know, yet with so much emotional baggage that he cannot socialize with others...another son whom infirmity has taken all hope of a 'normal life' from the outstretched fingers of his warm and kind-hearted soul...a mate who sees her husband as a foe to vanquish and humiliate publicly, who wields intimacy as a weapon and rewards kindness with cruelty...
...I see my friend falling into the same abyss of self doubt as I fell in so many years before...a crevasse begun in childhood by a cruel father, widened by the ridicule of peers in his formative years, nearly paved over during the early years of adulthood, only to have the fragile scars be rent asunder by a wife more concerned about catering to the whims of a 9-year old than instilling discipline and a sense of self-respect in said child. Rather than endure his rants, she refocuses her gunsights upon me, unleashing a fusilade of rants and rails and jibes on everything from my losing battle with obesity to my "inability to keep a job for any longer than 2 months" (I'm a project-oriented consultant, go figure...)to the fact that my father reneged on a 'promise' he made to my wife and I prior to our getting married that he would help us in purchasing our first home, and everything in between. All within earshot of my sons. All meant to destroy a love I so desperately cling to...to the memory of a women I'd met in a dance club over 13 years ago, a woman who marked the seconds in her day until I came to her and held her in my arms...a woman who treated love as a gift to be given freely and without reservation...the woman I pledged before God that I would love forever, who's auburn hair and laughing green eyes I wanted to be the last thing I saw every night, and the first thing I saw as my eyes clarified in the morning."
I've stopped hurting inside...mostly due to the fact that I've gone emotionally numb, a victim of DPTSS (Domestic Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome). A friend of mine who I love dearly has told me that I should leave, to get out before I cannot remember what joy is...to leave before the person inside me, the person who I USED to be, withers and dies under the weight of years of abuse...
I wonder if it is already too late."