under the bed

Sir Hal and I went on an expedition this weekend to the dark under-regions of my bed. I suspect that His Excellency went along mostly for the stray pillow feathers and dust bunnies, but I was on a real mission. Eventually, he gave up hunting entirely to curl up into impossibly tiny spaces in my storage bins while I raised my eyebrows and asked questions like, “You can’t really be comfortable, can you?” And “If you see anything labeled Emotional Wreckage from High School, let me know, okay?”

I was searching for Cringe material. I’ve been promising Sarah that I’d get up and bare my post-adolescent soul for a while now. Unfortunately, it seems I didn’t really get a proper grasp on journal drama until after college (and by then, it was called blogging), so nothing I had in the under-bed territory was even remotely Cringe-worthy. Even the poems to ex boyfriends seemed a little too poignant to be funny. I could just picture the audience shifting uncomfortably in their chairs as I read, and then, as the show got out, remarking to their companions, “Well, no wonder she’s like she is. My god.”

I don’t need to be that understood. Ever.

What I did find, was a pile of spiral notebook papers torn from my college journal, a folder labeled PERSONAL! from my first real job in Boston and a pile of photographs from ages I seem to have forgotten I’d ever been.

A week or so ago, while in the park with Torrie and her husband, I told them a story about the Bird Man — an autistic savant who used to buy these enormously expensive ornithology volumes at the bookstore where I worked. I couldn’t remember the exact wording of our exchange, and so as funny as it was, I felt like something got lost in the translation. Well, lo and behold, I was just as nutty then about writing down conversations as I am now. It’s good enough to be it’s own post, though, so look for it tomorrow.

In the PERSONAL! folder was every quarterly review I’d received while working for the architecture/monkey firm over three and a half years. Reading those was certainly cringe-worthy. For the first two years, each review said basically the same thing. Smart, but not aggressive or assertive. Good worker, but not fully accepted in the department. I remember those years. Of course I wasn’t aggressive. It was a job and I didn’t care about being anything more than a marketing assistant …ever so long as my bills were paid, my feet clad in cute shoes and my freezer properly stocked with Ben & Jerry. And no, I wasn’t fully accepted in the department. The politics of that place didn’t interest me. So I stayed an outsider.

Then something happened. I got a bit of ambition. I got a promotion, a raise and a new smart black suit. The reviews changed. Suddenly I was the most under-utilized talent at the firm! A star! A creative genius! Well, all but one changed. The president of the company (by virtue of a recent coup d’etat) had written a comment that sent me rocketing back to 2003, right smack dab into the fury and frustration that accompanied every single interaction I had with him.

Lacks follow-through.

The details of the story (he was referring to a specific incident with a fax) are not worth the finger energy to type them. But I was reminded of exactly the kind of person I never want to work for again. And of the kind of corporate hell to which I will never enslave myself again. Seriously, if I saw that guy on the street, I’d push him in front of traffic. And never feel bad for one second.

Okay, maybe right before I died. But only for a heartbeat and only because all dying people are just a little bit afraid of jesus.