It's been a lot to take in, my conversations with my coworkers about the guy who got shot in the foot, the kids who step out to get high and then try to come back in, and the various warnings that one dude was given before he was thrown out for good. I don't work very much with the older guys--theater is understandably not their thing--so I am significantly out of the loop when it comes to their stories. The sudden influx of information last week coupled with a walkover re-routing (too many Latin Kings live on one of the streets we used to take, a middle school contingent of whom once started to throw ice at one of my coworkers) threatened to coalesce into a full-fledged Friday night freakout when I got stuck behind one car that refused to exit the alley I use to leave the Center parking lot. After a bit I glanced in my rear-view mirror to find another car idling behind me.
I honked politely and was released, my heart hammering.
Have I ever felt personally singled out and threatened? Absolutely not. Have I found myself in combustible situations? Absolutely. My biggest fear is probably being swept up in something over which I have no control.
It doesn't help that I've been continuing my way through the fourth season of The Wire. This re-watching is taking longer than all the others, for reasons I have already talked a little bit about here. There's no doubt in my mind that it's my favorite of five excellent seasons, that it's a masterpiece, and that it's brutally uncompromising in painting a picture of, to use a technical term, the crap-shoot that is inner city education. Only one of the four students featured in this season is granted an almost-sure-thing future, and it's the one you were least worried about to begin with. Great.
I've had weeks on this job that were emotionally difficult. I've had weeks on this job that were physically difficult. Last week was the first week that has been psychologically difficult and I think it's no coincidence that it was the week that, in all other respects, was the easiest on record. With time and breath to think, I found myself coming up against the undeniable fact that I'm not cut out for this kind of work in the long term. I can do anything for a year, but a year is all they're getting.
If I stay in Chicago (which is looking more and more likely), I'll definitely come and volunteer. These are the best coworkers I have ever had, even (especially) the one who leaned over to me during a staffing with the family support specialist (who had just finished filling us in on the fourth of four kids with significant emotional problems) and asked me under his breath, "Are you straight with this?"
My coworker must have seen something in my face, just like that guy who made me a pain au chocolat very much not on the menu after I cycled for miles to his bakery on a false promise, and just like my high school theater teacher who took one look at me curled up on the floor during tech rehearsal and told me to go home with my walking pneumonia. When people call you out like that, when they see that unless they hand you dough with chocolate on the inside you're going to pass out, it's just one in a series of great ways of saying, "I see you." Indeed: "I'm watching you, just like you're watching everyone else. And you thought you were the only one."
In college, I told Roommate J that I could read people, herself included, like books. She called me out on that once, too, and after that we would both occasionally refer to me as a hefty tome, in the right hands just as easily read as everyone else. It's a complicated emotion, but I think that, ultimately, it's comforting to know that, even if ignorance is bliss, there are people who refuse to remain ignorant about what my feelings are and that if, one day, everything falls so far short of okay that I need to talk it out, there will be people to listen.
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