So if you just stay in one place long enough, you start seeing weird shit, right? Everything is Twin Peaks a few years under the surface. That's the thing that makes me most nervous about how much we've moved around - that I'm not preparing the children adequately for the fundamental weirdness of existence, the way the uncanny and unexpected ripple through the day-to-day like the fake-liquorice-goo through pseudo-orange-ice-cream in the great tiger tail of life. It's not just their family that makes me take them back to Canada every summer. They need to be able to watch a place change, and learn to see all the smoothed-over crooked shit, and with four-year tenures everywhere we've been more or less since they were born they haven't been able to do that where we live.
My work, however - I've been involved with this company for a kajillion years now and a kajillion years does give you the time to see weird shit evolve and some of the weirder shit I've seen has been there. I'm too old and indifferent and remote for workplace conflict, but if I had any, it would have been with this long-standing co-worker who, it came painfully clear this weekend, is many kilometres deep into some sort of rabbit hole, to the point of no-further-comment-from-the-hospital-but-they-won't-be-home-for-awhile.
I'm spending some time now thanking God for my oldness/indifference/remoteness. There were a few points where this person was temporarily in a position of slight authority over me, and used it poorly, when I would have been rude if I was less indifferent. I considered being confrontational, needlessly confrontational considering the briefness of the position of slight authority. Pre-motherhood me would have had some choice words that would have felt good to say in that moment and that would have been hard to remember now, now that it's painfully clear any of the punctilious, superfluously demanding or otherwise shitty behaviour this co-worker was showing to me or their colleagues was probably only a dying echo of how shitty they were to themself. Themself is a word. I just made it up. It's all rather discombobulating frankly.
