Mood:
downTopic: Noz Update
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Hello Nozfans,
I’ve been neglecting you as of late. I’m sorry about this. It’s been a very difficult last few months for me. I’d have to flip through my blogs to even remember how I was doing before about 6 weeks ago, but in retrospect, I see it as the rosy days of my youth compared to the last few weeks.
I didn’t blog about it at the time because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but my father had a serious stroke earlier this summer and I spent a week in Toronto visiting him and my family. It was a difficult week, and has been a very difficult period since around that time. I still don’t know exactly what to feel – there’s a potent impotence of being the one remote in a situation like this. I can’t really do much other than ask any of my friends in Toronto who can, to please drop by the hospital to visit him when you are able. What he is really lacking is human contact that isn’t a nurse or a doctor, or a rehab person. His persona has returned and is snared in a broken shell, and it is very frustrating for him. He’s been very appreciative of Roxanne’s visits, and I think that if anyone of the home-crew can go by to just say hi, even for 15 minutes, it would brighten his day significantly.
I can’t really bring myself to write much about my feelings about my father’s situation. I’ll avoid the question – hey, I’ve been in Britain 5 years, I’ve learned all the tricks – by talking around the issue: It’s a very difficult situation for my family. Logistically and emotionally we’re pushed to work together in ways that, like most families, we’re not especially good at. I myself am thinking often that I have for 10 years been avoiding any emotional interaction with my father, due to the rift that grew between us in my adolescence, and now, when I would like to connect with him, I find I no longer know how. The funny part is that I knew this would happen, but at the time, I didn’t think I would care so much.
Basically my Dad’s always been a big nut-job, and now he’s a nut-job that is suffering, and that’s very different. Also, the fact he’s being regularly medicated means that he’s in many psychological ways, being restored to being the man he was before the diabetes made him such a morose cantankerous old curmudgeon. He’s interactive and funny again, and tragically, has a certain vibrance that he’d been lacking, but it’s a vibrance that’s confined to a bed or if he’s lucky, a wheelchair.
I’m torn by the fact that this man, who so disappointed, failed, and in my mind, betrayed me as a father, is now in need, and I am driven to help and support him. After 10 years of anger, and 5 years of ambivalence, now I’m trying to reconnect with feelings of love. The ironic bit is that he doesn’t seem to have a clue that this rift has existed. My family is similarly torn by varying levels of drive and availability. Everyone feels justified in their position, and in these situations there’s little ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and so everyone has a constant sense of righteous indignation combined with bitterness, tempered with the underlying reality that our individual concerns and squabbling have to be set aside occasionally to check on my dad in the hospital. It’s a bit of a mess really, so it’s both frustrating and relieving to be five or six timezones away from the whole situation. I’m left to feel guilty that I’m not able to do more, and guilty that I’m happy about not being able to do more.
I guess I talked a bit about my feelings. I’ve learned the theory of the stiff upper lip, but I’m pretty shit at maintaining it. Gotsta keep keepin’ it real, I guess.
Work continues to suck like a cavernous shotgun wound to the chest. They have finally, after nearly 18 months, gotten around to calculating our commission payments for 2005. (God knows what happened with 2004). Lo and behold, they’ve figured out that not only do I get no commission, I owe them several thousand dollars. How this happened I won’t detail here, but I want to add it to the stack of hideous travesties perpetrated at this monkey-house chicken-shit outfit. I’m starting to realize that it’s simply the case that no one agrees with what I think, and to “define my own destiny” as it were, I would have to “step up to the plate” on a lot of “challenges”.
Frankly, I’m freaking tired of stepping up to the plate. I have been pushing through ridiculous workloads, laughable objectives, and clueless management for a very very long time, and I just don’t care to help anymore. I’m tired of fighting against a company just to get the chance to help it. Everyone I talk to fundamentally disagrees with me, but says that if I set aside even more of my evenings and weekends to put together the business context and supporting arguments, then they’ll at least hear me out. Fuck it. I’m exhausted, bitter, disgustingly underpaid and undervalued, unsupported in an infrastructure or personnel investment sense, and constantly treated as if I’m lucky to even be employed. Screw that. Whatever happens, send me an email. I’ll be in the john masturbating to gay porn. Business Develop that, bitch.
What’s freaky is that I thought it was a departmental thing, but since I’ve started to be more vocal about my frustrations, it seems I’m a carbon copy whiner. Everyone I speak to, regardless of role, has all the same complaints: no one listens to me, those who do can’t get any momentum behind their words, and the companies internal workings are a shambles so pathetic, if there was a license to employ people, it would be revoked. And through it all there’s this atmosphere that if you’re not happy you A) are a trouble maker spreading lies and will get your boss in trouble with their boss, so shut up B) are a greedy lazy failure of an employee, and want get paid seven figures to lay in the sun all day masturbating to gay porn C) are an ungrateful bastard who just doesn’t ‘get’ why you’re lucky and should seek professional help to remedy your inherent stupidity. It’s like everyone has their fingers in their ears and is playing the Flintstones theme song on 11 while great employees resign and projects spiral into disaster so that they don’t look like ‘a downer’.
If it weren’t for the staggeringly wicked teams that we all work in, I think everyone would’ve just walked. We love each other, hate our company. Such a waste of personnel bursting with potential the world has truly never seen. It disgusts me to the deepest recesses of my soul.
What keeps me here is the relationships I’ve developed with my coworkers and the various partners around Europe. Internally, we are a great team, and I love the people I work with. Externally, we have people I’ve developed both personal and professional relationships with, and furthermore, to whom I have made promises. I have said “We’re going to do X and Y - together” and now they expect me to keep my word. I take that very seriously. I see it as an obligation that I’m not quick to walk away from and I am to a great extent honour-bound to work through our internal “challenges” to make good on what I’ve promised to deliver. They have earned a hell of a lot more of my loyalty than my company has. They have invested in me.
Thank god very few people from work read my blogs…
And my teeth are rotting out of my head! I’ve needed a root canal for a month, and it’s so painful that I am having constant headaches and have to take painkillers just to sleep and get through the days. I went to the dentist in Canada, he said he couldn't do anything that day because I was leaving. I went to the dentist as soon as I could when I returned from Canada, and they opened up the worst of the three endangered teeth, told me the problem, and then said they couldn’t do anything until the next time I came to see them. That was a week ago. It’s going to be another week at least before I can get it looked at, as I’m in on the road in Germany all week immediately after I leave the Netherlands.
And I don’t do any music anymore... I will, but I haven't in ages.
And then there’s my back, which caused my mother to swoon with woe over msn describing my “curved spine”, “hunched shoulders”, and “hanging rib cage”. “What’s it all about?” Jesus Christ. There’s nothing I need more as I rush on towards thirty and spend my 5000th day bent in front of a computer screen than to be described as if I’m the hunchback of Notre Dame. Everything except Lo is going to hell in a hand-basket, and I’m supposed to find additional time in my gapless schedule to search out and then take Pilates classes in Amsterdam, Welwyn, London and Paris. Christ. Everyone wants me to do everything all at once, and with a bright smile on my face while I do it.
My saving grace, if somehow still stressful: Elodie is now less than two weeks from moving to the UK on an indefinite basis. This is great. This is also scary. I want to be more excited for us, and I want to be upbeat and supportive, but everything else in my life is so difficult right now, that it’s hard for me to have the attitude I’d like. I am excited, and I’m of course scared to crap at the same time. Elodie is able to be a lot less anxious than I am, and she’s lucky. I am in a sense the passive one in all this. I am committed to our plans, and I am looking forward to living them out, but in the end, she’s quitting her job, has left her house, and is couch-surfing so that she can come live with me in my country, where she would never otherwise live. That’s hard to live with without feeling fear and guilt. Lo’s sweetness, patience and support is making it easier, and really, I think if it was anyone else in the world, I’d have given this whole thing up long ago. Wish us luck. With finding a job, and a home, and moving, and taxes, and all the rest, we’re in for a lot in the next few months. We’re very lucky to have found each other, and I think with the strength in our relationship, we will do fine. We balance each other’s insanity nicely. That’s everything that I could want in a partner.
It's been very hard for her for me to be so totally embroiled in my own dramas when we're just two weeks from moving in together. When you're at a distance, when things are bad it is the most stressful. I have been absent and distant and not as supportive as I would've like to be these last weeks. It's an awful thing to love someone but be too weak to show it. I'm trying to give my share into things, but I have been failing. Although periodically she can lay a guilt trip so good sometimes I think she's a closet jew, I can only thank her for putting up with me. In the end, when we really need each other, we come through.
My Dad is at the Baycrest Hospital
Floor 3W
Room 28, bed D
Hiis telephone number is
416 785 2500 extension 3876 (better to call him after 8 in the evening as he
usually is away from his bed
