Me + Richard Armitage

Happy New Year to those who are celebrating. Shana tova tikateyvu!

Part of me wants to stop there, but I’ve wanted to revive my writing here for a long time, too. The last few weekends I’ve sat in front of a white screen and thought about just about anything else. So if not now, when? Although I’m done making promises.

Big change in my life as of a month ago: those who read between the lines could tell that the previous job (looking for work for people struggling to find it) was taking a big toll on me. I’d been thinking of it as “social work without a license,” but perhaps more importantly, without the tools to deal with the emotional level of it. Besides the worry about my clients, there was the low pay, and the driving (450 miles a week, regularly) and the overall negative outcomes. There were some big victories. At the same time, so many of my clients left the jobs we found together after a very short time, or re-offended and went back into custody, or simply refused to do the hard work they needed to do to be hired. The last straw was the phase of contract re-negotiation and the way the state and my employing agency dealt with it, which was what made me look to jump ship. It was good to have the push — the reminder that my work was drastically undervalued — because I had been having the feeling that the job was going to grind me so far down that I wouldn’t have the energy to leave.

Which I did about a month ago, when I began a position teaching GED / HSED in a medium-security state prison not far from here. I’m teaching “low” reading (essentially: 3rd grade), GED Social Studies and “employability,” which comprises tips for getting and keeping a job. I got a 40 percent raise and I do a fifth of the driving. My hours are entirely predictable. It’s another task that I won’t be able to write much about for reasons of confidentiality. However, a month in now, I can feel a lot of the stress of the previous position evaporating. I’ve stopped dreaming about work. I’ve gotten some compliments, and there are also some difficulties I am having / areas for personal improvement.

Of course, the atmosphere “inside” is no joke. The difficulties are not just about interacting with inmates (or persons in our care, as we now say) or making sure not to break a rule, ever (which is hard, because there are a lot of them). I think the kicker is that “inside,” everybody including employees watches everybody all the time and reports on each other’s actions, and the beginning of the training I am taking explicitly concedes that a prison is a totalitarian society–for the watchers as well as the watched.

At the same time, it’s work I can leave at work. The work hours are rigidly defined; what doesn’t get done today doesn’t come home as homework either. I no longer have a state phone or laptop and I can’t check my work email from outside the prison. And the level of instruction I have to prepare for — well — the challenge is more figuring out how to communicate something than understanding the material that I am communicating.

There’s just a lot more emotional space now, and slightly more time.

So in other news, I am now on the synagogue board and the ritual committee and I maintain the calendar and I am much more involved a year in than I had initially planned to be. I hit a deer with my car back in June and replaced it with a different one (a ten-year-old Chevy Cruze). I finally got the gutters on the house replaced; next week, a contractor is pouring the remainder of my driveway that was unpaved when I got the house; and I am paying a young lady to sort through stuff, unpack it, and organize it.

Prognosis: optimistic.

What is everyone up to these days?

Posted in Richard Armitage
Tags: life, me, Rosh Hashanah, work