She Could Fire Me If She Wanted To

She Could Fire Me If She Wanted to
Week 130

I want to write but there’s nobody nothing left in me to write with. Too battered. The latenight sense of self and mastery are gone in the morning. I can barely get out of bed, barely want to get out of bed. So I can’ quit. So I have to go back to be a beta dog show my neck. For a minute there making a scene at the meeting meant I might escape. I could do what Ori did, make them fire him. And maybe I have made X has been telling her people so that it gets back to me that she could fire me if sh e wanted to. But instead it feels like I disgraced myself, showed the world what a powerless beta dog I am.
And I can’t quit. I have a political responsibility to stay (so I’m told), and I have a financial responsibilit y to stay. Even if myinner organs ar e going tohell And I can’t leave because I don’t believe I could get a job anyplace else because I feel stupid. I am stupid.
A said I can’t tell that people come tome for wisdom, think I’m smart. That’s true. If I had a deep sense of my own significanc e the entire scene probably wouldn’t have happened. That sense would have overridden the public humiliation, the semiotics of the scene, the impact of the codification (the tow meeting ulies seated at each end of the conference table performing their hegemony and entrenching it as they did. The tennis match of their bickering, their flirty bickering…you didn’t read it? I emailed it to you. I fell asleep at the computer at midnight. You’ve always lived behind god’s ba c k…The performance of b’s hegemony and bbf’s ascendance. Even being told to be quiet and know my place would not have mattered. But I am still waiting for the world to validate me, to deny the message of my early battering at my mother’s hand. Instead, t hi s is late stage capitalism, advanced o ppression, and there will always be more aggressions than strokes coming my way,

If I had a deep sense of my own significance I wouldn’t want to quit, I’d see it as a momentary knock down in the war. There’s a ch anc e that the b will be kicked upstairs. This is why the bbf is pushing the restructuring so that she is in position to run the whole thing. O who cares about this burocratic shit? It becrazes me to think the b will be my boss and I will have to be accou ntab le to her when she has contempt for me (and I for her).

So tomorrow I have to go to a meeting in which I will grovel. Must grovel. Because now, again, I am in the save my job mode.

I don’t think so. I don’t have to be in save my job mode.
So ther e’s a meeting tomorrow and I don’t have to g o in and grovel.

I can say
I regret getting upset in public.
But I had reason to be upset:
The codification
The dramatization of the code: you are the one to shut up
The representation of my defeat
I am a lite racy worker
Literacy means agency and voice
I have neither
I can’t give what I don’t have

Slapped down
To know my place
Humiliated

I got up because I was about to cry
And couldn’t bear any more humiliation

And because I understood the meeting to be oveer

The others got up in confusion
And solid arity

I take responsibility

Go ahead make bbf’s day quit
(or fire me)

Yes the rest of the meeting was relevant to education
And Yes, education is also a topic in and of itself
That needs direct discus sion

No, I don’t believe we need to be in the busin ess
Of thinking for the sites
But of setting policy
(policy: have contact with participants
Before o&a
Let the programs construct their own process)

I am for deliberately and systematically\
Contradict ing th e thr ust toward centralization
Because I believe in social construction

You say trust
Can I trust you
Not to shut me up?
This is the third time
You do it in a public venue?

Do I want to be where I have no voice?
Where I don’t have even the mini mal
Aut hority to decide
How I do my area report?

It’s a gorgeous day but I’m in th tied up state, not able to imagine what I might want to do need to do that would take me out doors.
Lonely
Isaw an orange cat throught he glass of a deli door and remembered Rusty and M saying after he was gone, “What happene d?” My little boy. Because of me his little life fell apart. I wish. I regret. We came back from vacation and the cat was gone, taken himself off to die. The cat M loved who came into his crib with him. No explan ation. Nobody ever figured out how he got o uf of the house and where he got to when he did. The cat disappeared the way M’s family disappeared.

Lonely and full of regrets.
Do I want to be in this humiliated professional situation at this age? Is this wh ere my mission of voice and agency has taken me?
Is this what I grew up in the revolution for? (A revolution in which scenes like I just endured would have happened over and over. Burocracy is where the stupid get to oppress. Designed for the stup id to ru le. Camels for horses.

I do have to be willing to quit the job in order to survive that meeting.
To say, can I trust you that my voice and agency will be respected?
Because that’s the line I have not to cross.

Lesson: Write about the v ery thing that’s causing you to believe you’re dead and there’s nobody left to do the writing. That will be the thing that needs writing about.

T