right of way

There’s a little gnat that found a way underneath my skin and it’s lodged there, irritating the Christ out of me. (Figuratively, of course.) I am really agitated today.

This woman comes in here today, early, in need of prescription assistance. She smells like she’s been chain-smoking in her van, and she looks at me with eyes that reflect years of annoyance with the system. She postures like she’s a fighter, but she doesn’t understand that she’s got no conflict with me. I’m one of the good guys, for chrissakes. Like I said, it was early, and that gnat dug its dirty little heels into my flesh. So much agitation. I had an urge to play the part that she had assigned for me. Make things more difficult than they needed to be, lose her paperwork, and in the end, give her less than she was eligible for.

Of course I didn’t, though. She assigned the role, but that didn’t mean I accepted it.

Immediately after she left a man came in, eviction notice in hand. He didn’t see me at first and so yelled, “hello” loudly, because it was morning and the lights weren’t all on. So we chatted for awhile, he owed something like $132; a figure which seems really small to prevent homelessness, right? But he owed for his back rent and for all the mistakes he had made. We don’t pay for mistakes, government policy. He was upset that he couldn’t get the entire amount, and couldn’t understand why. My office still smelled like smoke from the woman.

And I worry that I’m in the wrong line of work and that I’m a bad person. How does one know if one is in the wrong profession? Because I can never remember being happy to go to work…

Patrick read this quote to me last night that said something like, “people have forgotten that they are capable of doing many things for themselves,” the context of which was home repair, and people calling specialists in to do all sorts of easy things like replacing a switch. And it connected so many thoughts in my mind. We are losing our self-reliance, we are.

If you don’t lose the keys to your apartment, you don’t have to pay to have them replaced.

What I need is a break from all of these mundane details. I would like to sit a course, and never leave the center.

Five clients later since the beginning and my brain is fried. Time for physical exertion and a slowing down of the synapses.