Are you here?

 "Are you here?"

The question came kind of out of the edges of the universe. I'm standing at the register at Trader Joe's. I handed my bag to the cashier, who started to sort through it and ring up my purchases. Canned tomatoes. Salad. Snacks. Ice Cream. I'm sorting through my wallet to find my credit card. It occurs to me that he's the one that asked.

"Am I here?"

I don't know, really. I am tense.  I take the question as a kind of accusation. Why is he asking me this? What am I doing to make him think otherwise? But I don't know if I'm here.

Work has been miserable. My supervisor is the absolute worst person I have had to work for in my life. That includes the defrocked minister who somehow was still a self-righteous piece of shit who still cheats on his wife and embezzles from his business. That includes the person I called the "Black Hole" because everything I put on her desk vanished, and I'm pretty sure she'd slide into oblivion during every one of our one-on-one conversations. That includes the alcoholic, bipolar stroke victim with heart issues. That includes the toxic positivity gaslighting cheerleader. That includes me.

I took a job in civil rights and I thought it was a way for me to really engage with the content in ways I just hadn't in the last decade of my government service. I certainly had some interesting challenges to tackle, but my heart was never in my last job. It was a video game, a science project, not a lot more. But civil rights! This was something I care about! I could really pull some levers and make some positive changes in the world if I could get into this rocket ship and GO!

But that was naive I think. Even if my supervisor wasn't the fucking worst, the way that civil rights policy works in the government isn't as free-flowing and dynamic as you might think in a Reading Rainbow sort of way. No one really wants to protect civil rights, not really. They think they HAVE to, so they do enough of the things to feel like they've met obligations, but almost always, when the civil rights office shows up, people start looking at their watches and complain that we talk too much. The policy work is fraught, but even in that environment we have done some good. Small things, little tweaks, gentle (or not so gentle) reminders of why we do the civil rights dance. Sometimes it pays off. Not often, but sometimes.

I find it funny how we celebrate our little successes like they're the Superbowl. It's... nice. My team is nice. Mostly.

But due to my supervisor being a goddamned nightmare person, I hate it here. I hate my job. I don't think anyone really cares much about the work. No one above me, anyway. I think they're preening and trying to engineer a world where they look successful and PRODUCTIVE without actually doing anything that matters. It's probably like that in a lot of places, both in the government and private sector, but I kind of long for the days when I had a stack of widgets I had to produce any given day and I could just chew through those. I don't think anyone in my office could describe a pile of widgets if they had to. I sigh.

My stress at work has bled into my personal life. I'm jumpy around friends. I am hesitant to reach out to people. I snap at my kids when they're acting up. I just want to be left alone at night. Thinking up meals is a trudge through quicksand. They won't eat it anyway. Some of this is just my nascent depression acting up, spurred on by all that cortisol. Some of it is my naturally sunny disposition, my inclination to the void. L'appel du vide. But I can absolutely draw the major lines back to the work thing. With an apparently meaningless job that requires I sit and stare at it eight plus hours per day, sucking the joy out of everything else I do, well... yeah, seems to be the cause.

Am I here?

The cashier is a bit odd for Trader Joes. He's an older guy, small in stature. Kind of a funny vibe, like he's being jovial. His movements are somewhat exaggerated, like he's got a pretty good muscle memory for moving things but he's nervous, overshooting the scanner just a bit. Nothing getting lost, but he has to recover. I think maybe he's a little new at this. Second career or third? He strikes me a little bit as an artist, a painter perhaps. I've known his type a lot. He's observant but not necessarily engaged exactly. A person used to being an observer, not always being observed himself. He doesn't mean me harm, that's clear.

My shirt. It's my shirt. It says "You Are Here" on the front, referencing a point on the island of Oahu. I got it at a brewery when we visited last year. It's this mustard yellow thing with blue and orange print. It's outside my normal color schemes. It's kind of a hippy, beach bum vibe. I bought it because it was different than my normal style. I wore it that day because I needed something other than that spinning dark maelstrom at the center of everything. I was buying little ice cream cones in a box.

"Oh, yeah, I guess... I mean, I WAS here. This little dot is a place on Oahu, the Hawaiian island."

"Oh! That's interesting!" says the artist cashier. His nervousness subsides. Mostly. I recommend that he go if he can. I mention that the airfare was a lot less than I expected, considering it was March and whatever. He was clearly thinking about it. Receipt pours out of the printer. I have to be on my way.

Now, I'm not there. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.