Ruminations

Holidays in the City

Flannel fishnets, trendy flak jacket
she wore upturned lips
steady fingers between his
thighs (no subtle
pressure). Geez they're just kids
in this February cold, but Christ
-mas day: ipods and
legwarmers together in the back
seats, train to Union Station.

Billboard and street-snow lights
flick pale chalk razor lines, rolling
shadows that regular intermittent:
like a dealer's draw with the house odds,
a pair of jacks railroading toward each
other. The boy, he squirms some,
his army pants have those
cargo pockets for a reason,
apparently, while across the aisle
the girl's smirking up at me
as if she knows
I saw.

Our morning, yours and mine,
had been cinnamon and hospitality,
gift giving and wine-dosed family laughter
on maple floors woven over with wool
before we caught the 6:40 Metra
home into the city. While we, we had this no
-tion of "close" we'd wagered on,
but then (same train) there were
these two vacant seats between us
unflirted space, brittle like
our frozen eyelashes after mass.

New Perspective

This week I started my new job here, as the "Linkage Specialist": which basically means that I "link" people to housing, employment and/or income, and medical care, among other acute and emergent needs.

After only one week, I have been thrown into what's generally assumed to be "a full caseload" and am loving it. The most refreshing part? Issues or circumstances that I've previously considered difficult or confusing now seem manageable, and that my skills that I've received through training or commonsense life experience, I can utilize to assist others whom we serve that are much less equipped to confront the challenges.

This isn't to say that I didn't need approximately 13 hours of sleep last night to recuperate from a little bit of the exhaustion I'd felt this week from being launched into never-before-encountered situations, which I may or may not have been expected to navigate more or less solo. But all the support from my family this week, and some sleep, and I'm ready for a new work week tomorrow. Ready, and kind of excited. And that has never happened to me before.

(Save when my "work" was attending classes like "19th Century Romantic Literature" and "Feminist Theory," which actually go the other way when money's involved, so it's quite a deal I've got here).

May others also find sustaining and invigorating employment.