I have been feeling inept over the last few days and weeks. My hair is unkempt and I look like I take less care of myself than many a student. Over the last few days too I have been thinking over the opportunity of stopping work for a while to write. This is what I have wanted for years and I have been offered it. I should be jumping at the chance, but instead I hesitate.
I was at the doctor’s today with a student.I almost took the wrong one, one with a similar name, and I don’t know yet if that was my mistake or one of my superior’s (both of my bosses regularly get names wrong, which makes the work very difficult at time when you have to constantly make allowances for typical mispronunciations and slips: I sometimes think almost all of us in our department have our own neurodevelopmental disorder, and I’m not the only one who things so). On the way to the vehicle I rang up my boss. His phone is the on-call phone and as such has to be reconfigured every morning to ring him rather than the manager assigned to on-call for that night. It went through to the new manager I have in recent reveries referred to as Ned Flander’s from Flanders* He went in on his own. I wasn’t sure if I should go in with him. He was having his ears syringed. I asked him as he stood up, having been called, but he didn’t respond and I sat there waiting, thinking, observing. I have retained no idea of what I was thinking about, but I was deep in thought. It was some ten minutes or so before one of the guys sat there waved after me. I was being shouted. I was being called up by the nurse for a dressing down. She had been trying to syringe the lad’s ears and had got nowhere. The lad had been given cotton wool to put into his ears after taking olive oil. The nurse trying to do the syringe told me that our nurse didn’t have a clue how to do this correctly. No cotton wool should have been put in his ears because it only soaks up the olive oil. She gave me a leaflet on ear care and sent us packing.
Coming back down in the lift I was very much aware how I looked - dressed in an old army surplus jacket that I used to wear fifteen years ago and which I have taken to again with the winter coming on and having been working off site more than I used to both at the woods and on the farm, sometimes going down in unsuitable clothing. With my hair in the state it has been for the last few weeks I didn’t look much smarter than the student. Indeed, when asking if I was a support worker, the nurse could well have meant that I didn’t look much better than a student. I was conscious too that many people must look on our place as a fringe institution, and be aware of its cultish Rudolf Steiner vibe. It may even be that, when I am visiting the doctor say, people make assumptions about me when I turn up saying that I work there. I remembered either then or later that one of the two nurses we once had quit, saying that he could lose his licence working the way they asked him to there. I like the nurse, and get on with her quite well, but find it difficult that she is so into her homeopathy.
I must have been quite depressed in my thinking on going back to the car, reflecting on my own limitations, but in any case, I am still fairly incredulous at what I managed to do. Walking up to the car, I pressed the button to unlock it and stepped in. The student was hanging around beside me as I was closing the door and so, assuming that he was, like many students, going to jump into the back thinking he wouldn’t be allowed in the front, I told him he could jump in the front. He continued to hover and so I told him again, and motioned to him to go to the other side. Again, but he still hovered, which threw me a little because I hadn’t thought him to be that kind of student. Finally, I gestured again, and this time took in the steering wheel in front of the seat opposite! I jumped out and muttered something about how I was used to driving in Prague in the Czech Republic. I haven’t lived there for two years, and though I walked round to the wrong side of cars there numerous times, never drove there. I got in and he got in. I drove back and felt like a fool.
Inevitably, I have had numerous reveries since then, such as bringing up an issue in a peer supevision group: that I am a retard. Something I talked about humorously.
I haven’t done anything quite so bad for a long while. It may be that the Capryllic acid is having its effect. Certainly I am very restless now. But I don’t how to quantify this or compare it to previous states of mind. All I know now is that it is intolerable.
* We had a meeting about a peer supervision group that really pissed me off. These are groups which meet every second Thursday [thinking about this has led me on to a reverie about these groups, unloading to one of the groups about how I have an issue, that I am a retard no better able to cope with the real world than our students] and are intended to help us deal with problems that arise in our line of work by discussing them with our peers. The problem is that problems often involve management and discussing them with others on our level can at times heighten them since the group’s findings are never passed on to management.
My problem with the group is that I can’t deal with large groups, and they have decided to increase the size of the groups. On Tuesday they chose the new groups, and, as I intend to write, Ellie chose by asking what group I was in and picking the appropriate piece of paper from the basket, something that really touched me.
The meeting descended into the usual angry mutterings when the idea of debriefing was raised, as the groups are thought to be useful for this purpose. Billy Thomas, an old manager who has now left, was raised as someone people would willingly approach with a problem to debrief. Fritz, in contrast, was not. Somehow this captured my imagination and I had a few reveries slagging him off as, for example, Ned Flanders of Flanders, to the inevitable titters and laughter.