The other day at work, I was following up with a friend and colleague about a long term project we’ve been working on. It’s one of those grinding, every day, horrible, drudgery-filled things where it’s important but low visibility. Multiple teams have to collaborate. None of them want to. I have no authority over any of the teams involved, but one of my jobs is wrangling them, and making sure that problems get dealt with completely. It involves a lot of what would be called “coordination” if I was of the male gender. Because I am of the female gender it is often referred to as “being a bitch.” Whatever. If they would do their fucking jobs without continual prompting, they wouldn’t need coordination OR bitching.
It is a part of my job that I dislike intensely, but I am good at it.
We were discussing how much progress we’ve made over the last several weeks, and when I told him how glad I would be to get out of bitch mode for a while, he said:
“It takes a lot of irritation and friction to get a pearl.”
I poked him in the eye because, because nobody wants to be referred to as irritation and friction even in a metaphor. Not even the kind of irritation that results in a valuable pearl being created. OK. I didn’t poke him in the eye. I told him to stop being so fucking wise, and he called me Minnie Pearl. I could tell there was no winning, so I went back to my desk.
The birds were all dead. Or dying. It must have been her fault for not feeding them, but how could there be so many dead after only a day? She tried to think. Hadn’t she put seed and water in the cages just yesterday? She was sure she had. She looked down the row of cages each containing several birds. Mostly dead. One clutched at her through the bars, getting talons caught in her sweater. Startled, she yanked her arm away, and the bird’s entire foot came off like a piece of taxidermy. The bird was so dehydrated there wasn’t a single drop of blood spilled.
Some of the larger birds were pecking at the dead in their cages, fitfully. Not like they were hungry, more as if they were trying to figure out what was wrong.
The smell.
She thought it should be worse, somehow. It was pretty bad, but shouldn’t it be worse?
She knew she needed to do something. Help the birds who were suffering. Wring their necks, maybe. Something. She was terrified. She needed to think of something to do.
She ran.
She kept running until she got into the house, slamming the door behind her.
She didn’t notice the very large shadow in the back of the barn. It wasn’t surprising. He was more of a shadow than even the shadows. He walked towards the door she had run out, shaking his head slowly, more birds dying as he passed.
“Not your fault, my treasure, not at all…I’d forgotten how fragile the small creatures are. I shall need to be more careful among you.”
Samael raised a hand slightly, and the birds revived. He wondered if it would please Mara if he freed them all as he walked toward the house. He thought idly that he was glad that he was not so easily damaged as these twittering feathered things around him. “Birds,” he thought, “they’re called birds. Annoyingly fragile things,” and walked towards the house, glad to be near Mara.
He could feel how frightened and sad she was. She would be happy that the birds were alive again.
He enjoyed making Mara happy. He hoped he wouldn’t break her. It was easy to reanimate the small creatures, but people…people were harder.
The other day, a photographer friend posted a picture of a sign on Facebook which I liked very much:
Copyright 2010 Cheryl Hatch
To me, it always seems weird to see “no lifeguard” signs, because there are no warning signs for the things I think are the most dangerous. Sure, we have traffic signs, beware of dog signs, mind the gap signs and such–signs for all of the physical danger we might get into. For situational and emotional danger, there’s nothing. We have to plunge into metaphorically dangerous emotional waters completely unprotected, with only our own skill and wisdom to protect us. For some of us, that means life is much more risky than for others. Yes, I was kind of calling myself an emotional dumbass. Kind of. Again. Yes, I really am trying to be nicer when I talk to myself. I am.
There are people who give us advice, but how often do we listen? I wonder if it’s more or less often than we pay attention to lifeguard signs?
A colleague told me about someone she knows who is about to get a marriage proposal from a man whose character is made up entirely of red flags. He is an unemployed ex-con who just got out of jail for holding a gun to his baby mama’s head during an argument about the fact that he doesn’t pay any child support. Her friend won’t listen to her loved ones when they voice their concerns, but maybe if he had a danger sign stapled to his forehead she’d recognize that there is some truth to what her friends have been telling her. Or maybe not. People do tend to be oddly blind to the faults of people they have been dating for only a few weeks.
I have ignored a lot of excellent advice over the years. Advice from family. From friends. Nothing Earth-shattering. Advice to talk to people more. Advice to eat more vegetables. Advice to brush my hair out of my eyes so people can see my pretty face–thanks, Gramma, my bangs are still in my eyes! Warnings about what happens to girls who date their college instructors. Warnings about men who were not worth the emotional energy I was putting into them. Warnings FROM men that they weren’t worth it.
On a few occasions, I’ve even ignored advice from attorneys. It takes a special person to ignore legal advice, don’t you think? In one case, it was only advice about money, so I still think I did the right thing by not taking the advice. I felt like it was wrong for me to go after money I didn’t think I was entitled to, even if I was legally entitled to it according to a lawyer. In the other case, it really would have been smarter to heed the advice. There were some pretty serious potential repercussions to what I was planning to do, even a very small chance of jail time. It worked out fine, but only because I was lucky. Even in that case, I still think I was morally right for doing what I did. Legally not bright though.
One thing I’m sure of is that I would have been really pissed off if my Mother had been able to tell me “I told you so.”
