Exceptions:
Ideas aren’t sexy. I wish I had learned that a long time ago. Other things I wish I had learned a long time ago include: incompleteness; that sometimes, or rather usually, it’s the other person acting weird; and to accept disappointments.
When people call me a good soul I correct them. I say that I am just bored. The truth is probably even more reprehensible than that. But suffice it to say, I don’t think of myself as a good soul. I have some other ideas, but when I try to explain them it’s not sexy.
I’ve been trying to figure out what you mean when you say we don’t help people. Isn’t the truth something more like, we help people, but only inadvertently? Or that working with crazy people is just another way of working on myself? We don’t help people, but we are serviceable to them. I told him that I can’t work in an office, because I fall asleep. He told me I was smoking too much weed. What? Me? (How’d he know. I just met him on a plane. I’m wearing makeup!). He told me his job is forwarding capitalism, but he pointed out that capitalism makes the world go round, right? Right.
Would it have helped him feel worse or better if I had explained that this was all my job was doing, too? That is: helping air compress into bottles and helping people behave well are both about fitting diffuse things into obtuse shapes. This is the point where I explain that I find people far more interesting than air, but that I do missing solving problems with objective answers. And that the air in the hospital is stale and smells like death and it’s enough to drive a girl crazy.
I like to call the place I work a mental hospital and the people I work with crazy people. I think its romantic. It’s a fact that the things I have thus far chosen to do with my life are making me bizarre. When academics say that I do things, that’s there way of calling me a good person, but they don’t believe in good, just like you don’t believe in helping. But the truth is, their ideas aren’t sexy and they’re just jealous.
There’s a lot of sex in the hospital, though nobody’s having it. Sex mixed with peeing on the floor. This one patient looks me up and down while sucking on his thumb.
You are the only person who would find this funny, but you and I, we were all about ideas weren’t we? And it wasn’t sexy? Or we were trying too hard to be characters from one of the French New Wave films you showed me and it was just too big a contrast from the dirty business of who we actually are, social workers. Now you are somewhere on the east coast doing home interventions, not helping anyone. It sucks, doesn’t it. If only I could have recognized your incompleteness, that you were the one acting weird and if I could have accepted small disappointments. What I was attracted to about you, though, was that you are so wary of making things overblown, too wary of me, though. For me, I wish you had made an exception.
