A Sad Retreat

This is my last week at this job. I am leaving for two months and maybe – forever.

Looking back, this job came along in a perfect time: I was tired of bureaucracy, I wanted to get back into the field, hubby had lost his job and my salary kept us afloat. I’ve had opportunity to return to my profession, practice my craft – I appreciate it.

I liked working with a team of my friends and I will miss it very much. 

Still, I think it is time for me to move on, to look for new opportunities and to develop new skills necessary for my career.

Both strength and weakness of small organization is that it is like a family. The strength is that family supports you, understands you, lets you go to the medical appointments, gives you days off, and treats you to family dinners. However, the stress of having a personal conflict with family members transcends just the family setting.  You have hard time distancing from it and you take many things personally. You take work home and carry it on you. After a year of being so closely intertwined in personal and business issues, I would like to leave work at work.

Strange cataclysms are happening around me simultaneously. Here I am sorting issues at work and boom, my grandmother (dying of cancer) gets significantly worse. So, I have to leave everything and hurry to Denver to support my real family, watch my grandmother doze off on morphine and stay close to my mother. My uterus keeps resisting our attempts to domesticate it, make it ready for the baby, so tired of all this bullshit, I am just going for the In Vitro fertilization in January. Additionally, I have a second job and other responsibilities, meaning that I have no free weekend, literally, no free weekend till December 23d. I am traveling to the regions and giving trainings on weekends. Every Thursday I pack and every Monday I unpack. I don’t remember the last time I woke up on my own, without an alarm.

Thus, as sad as I am to leave mostly comfortable job, with an OK pay and wonderful coworkers, I need to cast off at least one source of stress in my life.  These are my four last days here. I feel melancholy. I feel relieved. I feel confused. I am bothered by the thought of job-seeking, again. Though mostly, I feel like I escaped the storm and I am ready to clean up the ruins in peace and quiet.

Hey Denver, this is my sad retreat. I am flying to you, too soon, this time

The pic: part of my job involves working with special needs kids. I will miss it.

The Sex Shelter Scandal

“Don’t defend yourself, you have nothing to prove, the truth is on your side. State the facts. Let the viewers see how ridiculous the church is. There is no way for you to loose this argument”, I said to Identity’s director yesterday, as he was getting ready for a live TV show. I was sure that he could just sit back and relax, while priests made clowns of themselves, proving that providing 15 people with a place to live in the winter is immoral.

And clowns they were.  Last night, two priests tried to prove that:

1.       There are unassisted homeless people

2.       NGO Identity, along with several other organizations, schools, theatres, poets, writers, etc is raising money to equip an empty apartment charitably provided for shelter purposes

3.       Thus, it is immoral to help this group of people. Let’s leaving the homeless, well, homeless.

4.       Oh, and they also said it is better to give charity money to church. You know, because millions they get from my taxes are not enough to provide several families with a roof over their heads.

That is what happened. Of course, you may believe in conspiracy theories, you may think that Identity (along with others NGOs, schools, theaters, poets, writers, just charitable people, me) really wants to open a shelter for THE CHILDREN for a sole purpose of beating the shit out of 15 lost souls until they go gay. God knows, an NGO supported by several embassies, staffed with lawyers, psychologists and social workers might even attempt to rape THE CHILDREN, or shoot child pornography films or force them to spit on crosses and piss on icons.  Some of THE CHILDREN may even get crucified upside down on a full moon and orgies will be held on their dead corpses. It all makes sense now, you see, we just have to, must think of THE CHILDREN!

So while I was happy that Identity’s director explained that charity is good because it actually provides home for several families during the winter (he even mentioned other NGOs taking over for professional training and psychological counseling), the whole country caught a stupid virus. Raging over the non-existing CHILDREN (see, everyone just misheard that the shelter was for families, and yes, families do include adults too), zombies started congregating and contemplating of ways to stop this evil-doing, money-donating charity freaks. The Minister of Health declared that letting several families into a privately-owned renovated house is against two (not one, mind you) international conventions. Stupid politicians opposed this initiative, though they admitted that they did not know much about the shelter, since they “did not go into this issue deeper”. Today, Identity got threats from all kinds of people, promising trouble not only for the NGO, but for the inhabitants of the shelter (!)

And thus, while I was blissfully thinking that the church actually helped promote the cause and that we have nothing to prove, I mean literally we are collecting money to prepare an apartment for homeless people, while I was telling my colleagues to check out yesterday’s TV show and laugh at the clowns, Identity issued a statement that it will refrain from further activity, since it is not safe for them or for the future shelter.

Fuck this country. For real, fuck it. I feel like the Dark Lord has risen and death eaters apparate everywhere, jinxing good deeds, destroying Turkish restaurants and strip clubs, offending people of different races, putting spells on people and feeding them lies. And as I desperately cling to my Hermionies, Rons, Dumbledores and others, unicorns are slaughtered all over the dark forest.

Thank you, dear secretary of the patriarchy for killing my last hope. I have nothing left to offer this county. Nothing. It does not deserve me, my friends at the Identity, or anyone who wants to make a difference in this stinking mess of a country. I am leaving. Your loss, not mine.

P.S. Click on the logo to see the statement.

Breathe Me

Like a time lord, I am lost in time. I forget dates, days, my friends' birthdays. Every night, after work, I am working on one goddamn thing or another. Clean dishes never leave the dishwasher – they are gradually replaced by dirty ones. Unfolded laundry clutters every chair. My cat constantly purrs and tries to steal my attention by sitting on my laptop, but I am bigger, and stronger, so I just grab her and move her, like an inanimate object.

Mu husband retreats to our study. He has his shit to do. We all have shit to do. Thank god, we have no children. We couldn’t just grab them and move them.

Last night I drafted a sample project for my job interview. Here was my chance to write anything, anything I wanted to do in my field of work. I sat stuck and wrote banalities, until I erased it all and wrote something new 1 hour before going to work.

I woke up and stared at the ceiling today. I have an interview in 3 hours. I need to present this project.

Stuff to do at work, but my motivation is so low, inertia moves me to finish things I’ve started, but mostly I just want to be alone.

Last week, I finished watching “6 feet under” – a film about mortuary, death, grief, brief lives…and I have been thinking, for so many days, what can I do, how can I ensure that I am buried the way I want to? I am thinking, do I have any legal rights after I am dead, can I force people to do what I want?

Basically, I want to be cremated. That’s a problem, because such service is unavailable in Tbilisi. Then, I either don’t want to have a place of burial, or I want to be buried somewhere I love and not in the cemetery ground. Thirdly, I absolutely refuse to have three-day crying gatherings which burden the family. One day is enough. If people can’t make it, well, it’s fine, we won’t hold that against them. How many times have I gone to somebody’s grandmother’s panashvidi, just to be polite, barely knowing the person I was supposed to comfort, let alone his dead grandmother.

And finally, and most importantly, no kelekhi. Husband’s relative died last year and we had to organize the whole restaurant -grieving-party. It is costly, no one really wants to be there and basically, we are keeping this old and meaningless zombie of a tradition alive for no logical or emotional reason. At times when people travelled on horses and it took them 3 days to get to a burial site, they had to be fed. Those times are long gone with the wind. Let them be. I have absolutely no desire to force people awkwardly eat and drink for my memory, just because mustached chokha-wearing crowd used to.

 So that’s that. I can’t die yet – they won’t burry me the way I want to. I need to find energy and keep going on and maybe I will locate myself back on Earth again. Because I am very, very far right now.

P.S. Poster for one of the best TV series I’ve seen

P.S.S. Soundtrack for final Scenes in 6 Feet Under:

Sia Breathe Me 

Help, I have done it again
I have been here many times before
Hurt myself again today
And the worst part is there's no one else to blame

Be my friend, hold me
Wrap me up, unfold me
I am small, and needy
Warm me up and breathe me

Ouch, I have lost myself again
Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found
Yeah, I think that I might break
Lost myself again and I feel unsafe