Four months later, my supervisor has returned from maternity leave.
Four months ago, I didn’t think I’d ever be typing the words my supervisor into the Substack post editor during my lunch break again. I didn’t think I’d avoid walking into her office, hearing her voice, or seeing photos of her cute infant daughter smiling in a crib with waves of black hair, lying beside her newborn cousin who looks Chinese but is actually Mexican.
Four months ago, things were the same as they are today, but I didn’t want them to be. What did I do wrong?
As of this writing, it seems I will always be typing my supervisor into the Substack post editor. It feels like my supervisors will become younger and younger until my supervisors become Spanish speaking toddlers, their demands devolving into baby talk. Will I ever become a supervisor? No. I am neither Mexican nor female enough. I’m in the queue behind the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans.
Before she left, my supervisor warned me: “You’d better have the book reviews completed by the time I get back.”
Naturally, because I had four months to do it, I started them today.
The voice that told me, you should work on the book reviews, as I scrolled Substack notes was met with another voice that said, you have four months. I didn’t listen to either of them. I don’t listen to good advice from others, and when I miraculously generate good advice myself, I ignore that too. If I don’t feel like doing something, I won’t do it.
What would happen if I did the opposite of everything I currently do?
The effort it takes to remain this useless is roughly the same effort it would take to become six hundred pounds.
I probably won’t get fired. It might take months before my supervisor realizes I didn’t do the book reviews during her absence. If my supervisor catches me it will be six months too late. If she doesn’t catch me, the auditors might.
But they won’t catch me either. I can fake my way through any audit. The auditors can’t get access to my phone records or emails or office security cameras. The audit is not court-ordered so I won’t go to jail. Worst case, I’ll be fired. Or maybe I will go to jail for Medicaid fraud... I forget. That could be why we had those mandatory trainings on Medicaid fraud, waste, and abuse…..that would make sense…..
Right before I sat down and fried my eyes staring at a screen and cooking 16 book reviews at the eleventh hour, I read a Bryan Caplan piece about why he doesn’t read the news. He wrote: If I want to increase my factual knowledge, I read history—or Wikipedia. Bryan gets it! And now, so did I.
The news is like twitter; a waste of time. I was not going to read anymore culture war posts on Substack. I’d scroll past tweets and memes about the current thing. I wouldn’t even know what the current current thing is. Perfect, blissful ignorance. I’ll be above the news.
Then I thought: Well… maybe I’ll still read local news stories. Or local news headlines, because I’ve never read local news stories. Reading headlines doesn’t count as reading the news, right? It’s harmless anyway.
Then: Okay, maybe I’ll still read the local news headlines occassionally, just to know what directly affects me, and also occasionally read those edgy10,000-word right wing essays about slop and racial reckoning, that’s not the real news.
And then: Maybe I can still check Revolver or AmRen for dopamine when I’m bored at work and don’t have the bandwidth for longform. Just a little hit. Just a taste. Maybe I can stop on a meme as I scroll substack.
Eventually: Maybe I should start reading the news again?
Finally: Wait… do I even read the news now?
This circular logic began with the invisible desire to feel superior to the Trump-deranged and the Jew-hating news slaves. And yet, I found myself wanting to comment on Caplan’s post, only to realize it was from 2011, a simpler time when I neither read the news nor questioned whether or not to read it.
Doing nothing—whether it’s work-related or news-related—doesn’t cultivate a rich inner life.
My repetitive excuses for failure is that I am “cultivating a rich inner life.” Sloth, envy and pride are like the shower mildew in the guest bathroom in mansion of the soul. I’m still fighting the lizards at the drawbridge of the soul, and can’t escape inside the mansion to scrub the mildew and vacuum the rugs….
The trans intern is listening to a podcast that is apparently so funny, it gives him permission to burst into random fits of laughter while wearing a dress. I yell at him to shut up, that’s his laughter is distracting. He is in an office, not his dorm room, and he should stop wearing a dress to work because he looks ridiculous.
He obeys, but he doesn’t care. He will be gone in a month, to live up to his potential, as some freak that people only tolerate because they are afraid of the legal ramifications of telling him the truth.
Not me. I won’t be fired for that, I think. He will sue the agency, not me. That lawsuit might make the news.
I need to have a new job before the audit in December. That’s plenty of time.