Resignation

My Darling Boss,

I’m sorry to tell you via email, but I am resigning as your assistant. I’m sorry it couldn’t wait until you returned, but I want to give HR enough time before I leave to find someone more suitable.

You will roll your eyes and say that I’m privileged, that I've never had to work hard or pay attention. It is mostly true: I’ve never had to work hard for anything, but I have been paying attention. I know the difference between working hard at something you are suitable for and trying to adapt yourself to a position that doesn’t utilize your strengths or tap your interests.

You have been a patient and forgiving boss, but I am not a good assistant. Instead, as you like to say, it’s often the other way around. A few weeks ago you said you wanted to see me fail, and I was surprised because I already felt like I was failing a little every day. There is still plenty I don’t understand about you, but you would never fire me because it is not in your nature. You don’t like to say no.

I see your relationships with people you like but don’t find competent. You let them walk away or someone else lets them go - Executive X resigned long after you told me you were disappointed in his performance. Unlike Executive X however, I don’t have anything else tugging at my attention. The bottom line is someone else can do this job much better than I can.

I don’t flatter myself to think I put a damper on your trip, but I hope you enjoy the rest of your vacation. I’m still here.

Thank you,

Your assistant

-------

I wasn't trying to be cruel, in fact just the opposite. I had wanted to wait until my boss returned from vacation to break the news to him. Having never been in a relationship, I've never had to break up with anyone - I won't venture to say it's the same thing, but to all the heartbreakers out there, the dread you feel, especially when you know the other party, despite their constant nagging and eye-rolling, is on some level quite fond of you - the dread is similar, no? 

Then there is break-up etiquette. We've all been schooled by our media girlfriend's horror stories of some asshole breaking up with them over text message or email (though nowadays email is seen more and more as "well, at least he emailed you") and who can forget Carol Bartz's firing from Yahoo? No one was firing me, but leaving a workplace - especially a cherished one, where you treasure the relationships you have with your coworkers (my darling boss included), is something to be handled with care. 

I wanted to walk into my boss's office, he unsuspecting (or least I hope so - dread smells different from fear), and say as steadily as possible: 

"Boss, I need to talk to you about something." 

I might have lost it and started crying and apologized profusely while saying all the wrong things, but at least my boss would have seen my expressions and known that the decision had not been easy. I had struggled. After all, I had accepted the position thinking that I would stay for at least a year and a half, and as time wore on, slowly whittled it down to a year and three months and finally to a year, though in truth I will barely make it. (My first day was August 8th of last year). Even though my heart would have immediately been ten thousand times lighter as soon as he knew, it still hurt because between us on the table - a gorgeous black leather desk I had been so impressed by when we met for the first time as boss and future assistant - on the table was a good relationship.

The Milk Bath

At the moment there is a bare wall in my boss's office, featuring only small empty sockets of where various nails and screws had been. The framed magazine and newspaper clippings in which he has been featured and that once hung on the wall are now lying patiently on the carpet, waiting to be rearranged and rehung.

A few weeks ago my boss showed me a light that had gone out in his bathroom.

"Fix it," he said.

Simple enough.We emerged from the dim bathroom and he turned, as though just noticing something on the wall. He pointed at a gap between two large framed features of him in local business papers, "When I am away on vacation, I want you to close the gaps. I don't like these gaps."

I raised an eyebrow, "You don't want gaps between the frames?"

"No."

"But wouldn't that look...bad?"

He paused to look at me, clearly thinking that I had crossed some sort of line. He was the visionary, the arbiter of taste around these parts - what was I doing, wasting my breath giving him my opinion on how he wanted his photos hung in his office?

"It won't look bad," he said..

"I think it looks better with gaps."

"That's not how I want it," he said simply, "I don't like the gaps. Rearrange it."

Our conversations often go like that. He says something - the statement or request remarkable in its simplicity and utterly overwhelming (at least for me) in what it takes to bring it to fruition. I stared at the dozens of heavy frames - all different sizes and felt exhausted just thinking about it. It wasn't like a hard math problem - just the energy it took to tackle something that would bring no one any enjoyment (my boss hardly looks at the wall) - I didn't have it. I have a habit too, of staring at him blankly while I try and process the information - my mind is spinning, but uselessly: I spend the first ten seconds thinking, "Oh Lord, how does he expect me to do that?"

Doing well at a job, I have come to learn, comes down to two things: attitude and willingness. You don't need brains - they are quite nice to have, but they don't mean anything if you aren't willing.

My boss said this to me during my first month here, raising two fingers and said, "You can be smart, that is great. But you have to be willing. If you are not willing, you are useless to me." And at the time I thought, "Good thing I am willing."

Well, things change.

I could be petty and petulant and all around unprofessional, blaming my dissatisfaction upon the requirements of the position, but it wouldn't be painting the whole picture. I did for a long while complain about just those things (and on certain nights depending on the drive home, I still do): the many hours I spent on the road running strange, frivolous errands; the ear bending phone calls with his wife, who though generous and appreciative, also wields a rather grating voice with a thick accent; and of course the million of tasks ranging large to small that have to be done around the office because he likes things just so. It's no different, I'm sure, than what other EAs endure and probably a lot less, judging from tales I've heard from other EAs, but all of it together - each grain of sand adds up like at the base of an hour glass until one day you look up and think, "My god my time is up."

At another time of my life I might have approached it all with gusto, but that time has passed. Or perhaps that life has passed. I have more than just one caretaker's bone in my body, but it is not meant to be applied to things that I care little for. I am quick to take care of my boss's immediate needs: hunger, thirst, a headache - but beyond - the pruning of his work and social calendar - I haven't the right tools for all that, nor do I care to hunt around the shed for them.

I have grown out of this position in spirit while the position has outgrown me in its physicality. It needs someone hardier, sharper - a stainless steel scalpel of sorts, one that is not afraid to cut right down to the bone of things, smiling or not, and get the man what he needs when he needs it. She must be more organized, more efficient and, I've come to realize, more ruthless. She can be kind, but at a price - because kindness is often accompanied by softness...the inability to say no, which I think, an EA must never ever succumb to. Most importantly, it's best she possess an obstinacy to match my boss's. I know him well enough to know now that he won't say it outright: "I need you to be more comfortable with bossing me around," but his molding, masked as "mentoring," is not exactly getting him the results he had hoped for.

Some people have said to me,"Don't take it personally," when I lamented that my boss was somehow displeased with me, and I agreed with them at first. Why would I take it personally? It was just a job...nothing to do with me as a person.

But a good EA - a good employee of anyone, I think, would and should take it personally. If you don't take the criticism personally, you disengage your core values from the work - if that has already happened and you are okay with it...then you are not doing what you should be doing.

So I take it personally.

I take it personally when my boss asks me why I'm not thinking. My response is, "I am thinking...just not the way you would hope." I take it personally when my boss points out that I've forgotten yet another task, of course I take it personally! It is a personal shortcoming, specific to me as a person, and it affects my work as a professional. I take it personally when my boss asks me to be more professional at the office because it's a criticism of my personality, which is not so professional. Some people flourish in these types of environments, and if not flourish, at least live quite comfortably. The rules, the hierarchies, the status quo of each corporate bubble, even the fluorescent lights blend together in a warm milk bath designed to soften and soothe. Don't believe me? Argue with those who like their jobs: security is soothing.

The pressure is there of course, and sometimes the milk sours or the bubble bursts or worse, kicks you out into the cold, but for the most part, you'll know you belong if you feel....differently from how I feel.

Density (3)

I didn't tell my father I had been hit by a car until my arm began to hurt. I wasn't trying to be strong; I just didn't want to hear him nag. 

The car came from behind. Erica and I walked on the right side of the road, the side we always walk on, I on the outside and she inside. We were talking about something - boys, jobs, my frustration with both – familiar conversation on a familiar road, when suddenly a tremendous force struck my left arm and sent me tumbling violently to the ground. I groaned and was dazed - it didn't occur to me that I had been hit by a car until a split second later when I turned to see the car speeding down the road. I heard Erica saying, "Oh my god, oh my god," then when she registered what had happened, screaming, "Hey! HEY! GET BACK HERE!" 

In my dazed state I remember looking up at her from the ground thinking, "I wish she would lower her voice," as it was late and the neighborhood, being filled with elderly folk, was mostly half asleep.

 Erica bent down, her voice now quieter and more hurried, more worried, "Oh my God, Betty. Betty. Are you okay? Where does it hurt? Don't move."

I didn't know. I groaned because I was confused. Everything hurt and nothing hurt. Even though it was dark, I closed my eyes because it helped me concentrate - I had read something about trauma and how adrenaline or shock can trick you into feeling fine and moving what you shouldn't be moving. One bone at a time, the article had said. I wiggled my toes. I moved my knees. I tapped the fingers of my right hand, bent my arm at the elbow, rolled my shoulder, my neck and with my right hand, felt my head. I saved my left arm for last because I was terrified that it was shattered but that I just hadn’t registered it. I didn't look at it. It felt numb. But slowly, very slowly, the sensation came back and I could feel the tips of my fingers - though the left tips felt noticeably duller than the right. But the fact that I could move them - it meant my bones were fine. Nothing was broken.

I got up slowly, then turned my neck left and right. All good. My legs worked fine. And finally the arm. The left arm I let stay at my side - I didn't want to shock the liquefied muscle. Erica stood by and watched silently, shocked that I was standing.

"Betty," she said, "maybe you should sit down."

"I'm fine," I said.

"No. I think you hit your head."

"I most certainly did not hit my head."

"I think you did. You can't always tell when you have a concussion...and then sometimes people just go to sleep and never wake up. Like Natasha Richardson." Even in the dark, I could sense her worry, "Please sit down. I'll get your parents."

"Erica. I'm fine."

We finished the walk and at the door, I assured Erica I wouldn't die in my sleep. There were too many things I had to do. Like check my email.

An hour later, I sat at my brother's desk, wondering how odd it was that I'd just been hit by a car. My parents had greeted me at the door and asked me how the walk went.

"Fine," I said, "Great."

And I went to the computer. I sat and typed something, deleted it, then as my thumb pressed the space bar a sharp pain shot up my left arm. I ignored it and continued writing, but the pain came back stronger and stronger until suddenly, I was fearful of moving any part of my left arm.

I looked at my watch. It had been exactly an hour since I'd been hit - wasn't my response to the pain a tad too delayed? I imagined a hairline fracture splitting and splitting and the bone finally cracking in two an hour later. Is that what was happening now?

I suddenly had to know. I thought about my grandmother enduring severe constipation and stomach pains, not wanting to "bother" her children with her petty digestive issues until one day there was so much blood in her stool she was frightened. The diagnosis was a minute away from colon cancer and she ended up having a giant segment of her intestine removed.

I wasn't going to be so stupid. A little nagging was a fair trade for having my father drive me to the hospital, as my left arm was in no condition now to turn a steering wheel.

I walked slowly into the dining room, where my mother sat typing away at her laptop. My father was in the kitchen, within view and earshot.

"Mom, dad," I said slowly.

"Hm?"

"I have to tell you something, but please don't freak out."

My father stopped chopping the scarlet watermelon. My mother looked up from the laptop. Their worry thickened the air.

"I got hit by a car when I was walking."

My mother gasped. My father put down the butcher's knife with more force than was necessary. He walked slowly into the dining room, as though walking in too quickly would shatter me. He looked me up and down.

"What? Where? Where does it hurt? Are you bleeding? Who? Who? Did you get the license plate?"

I told them what happened, emphasizing that only my arm hurt - and on the arm, only my tricep...but the pain was increasing and I feared I had a fracture.

"We'll go to the hospital right away," my father said, and in the car and in the emergency room, I had to hear it: the long, drawn out "I told you so" about walking with a flashlight or a reflector vest. It was an old warning, often heard, never heeded.

"I'd rather walk in asphalt camouflage," I'd say.

He'd shake his head, "Once is all it takes."

And it's true. Once is all it takes.

On the drive to the hospital I studied my father's headlights and the area they covered - there was no way the driver did not see me. Perhaps he was inebriated and had slow reflexes. I imagined how - or how I hoped - he felt: filled with remorse. Hitting a pedestrian and driving away. Did he think I was a garbage can? I had bounced loudly off the side of his passenger side car door - a discovery I made later in the bathroom when I discovered a chunk of skin missing from my left hip. I wonder if the thud rang in his head as he tried to sleep that night, not knowing if it was a garbage can or a human. Either way, he had left something toppled over on the side of the road.  

We drove quietly with the Chinese radio playing softly in the background – my father driving jerkily, as though he couldn’t decide between speeding up or slowing down. I held my arm gingerly – trying not to think about the pain and worrying if I would have energy to go into work the next morning. My father finally spoke.

“He didn’t stop at all?”

“No.” I thought about the noise I heard, “I think he sped up.”

My father grunted. I turned to see his face glowing in the dim light of the dashboard and brightened intermittently by the pale yellow street lights we drove past. There were bags under his eyes. He seemed even more tired than I, but here he was, driving me to the ER at midnight. His expression was more disturbed than I had seen it in a while – in fact, he seemed angry.

“Look Bah,” I said, “I know I’m stupid. I should have been holding a flashlight or wearing a reflector vest. I will start walking with both.”

He snorted, “I’m going to buy you a neon reflector body suit. But you didn’t get a license plate? Nothing? Did you see him at all?”

I wondered why he was asking me – I had told him already. I didn’t see anything that could help me identify the driver – just the car from a distance as he sped down the hill and then nothing.

“No, Bah. I didn’t see anything.”

“He just drove away?”

“Yes!” exasperation crept into my voice, “He just drove away! What do you want me to do? I wasn’t exactly in a position to go and chase him down.”

My father shook his head.

“Dad, are you okay?”

 “Okay?” The car swerved slightly, “Of course I’m okay! I didn’t get hit by a car! But I didn’t just raise a perfectly good daughter for 26 years so that some....some... (and here my father said something quite shocking - a Chinese expletive I have no idea how to translate)... could run her over!”

I wonder if I had gotten a license plate or even a vague description, what my father would do. I don't know. He is not vengeful, but I had never had occasion to see my father act protective. So charmed is my life. He is nearing his mid-sixties, which nowadays is not so old, but at that moment I sensed a strange desperate helplessness. True, HE was driving me to the hospital, not the other way around, but I felt sorry, suddenly, that I had brought this unnecessary stress upon him. How could I take care of them if I didn't even have the sense to walk at night with a flashlight? But it was the light- the sallow, dingy yellow of the streetlamp that cast more shadows on my father's face than necessary. It was the light and the time of night and the fact that he was driving me to the ER, something he had never done, and something he hoped he would never have to do again. 

I was still conscious and in one piece, still healthy, but we both knew it had been a close call. An inch closer to the left and I’d have been paralyzed, my spine the central point of impact. Now behind the wheel, he was in control. But there were times during which his daughter, under her own simple volition, would climb too high and out of his reach or step into a darkness into which he (and a others) could not see. 

The Gargoyle

The times, they are a changin'.

It is no surprise - at least I hope not - that my brother is now an engaged man, 'engaged' pronounced how I imagine old British men pronounce it, with the 'ed' pulled out. It happened some two weeks ago in Paris, and though my brother has yet to tell me the details, in my minds eye it happened along the Seine around the same time time of day this photograph was taken:

From my brother's postcard.

There is a rule: it is not a postcard from Paris unless there are at least 2 of the following:

1. The Eiffel Tower
2. The Seine
3. A barren tree along the Seine
4. A bridge.
5. A Baguette
6. A typical Parisian apartment building with the slanted roof and long, narrow windows.
7. A cloud in the sky (contrary to popular belief, photographers dislike the saying, "There wasn't a cloud in the sky," because clouds, like villains in a good story, create drama.)
8. A gargoyle - the starved, angry, muscular kind.

You doubt me? Go on, go through your shoe boxes of postcards from Paris and examine them. Oh, no one has ever sent you a postcard from Paris? My darling, I am sorry.

As a photographer you can choose to compose the shot however you like, but the photographer of this postcard, which my brother lovingly sent me, included all the aforementioned elements (even the baguette - c'est juste tres tres petite) yet chose to place the gargoyle in the forefront. He made a stylistic decision to dwarf La Tour Eiffel, the people, the river, the bridge, and the buildings, and yes, even the thin barren branches of the Linden trees that line the Seine. It is as though the gargoyle is scowling at Paris and saying, in thick, gravelly French: "Poo poo, Paris! Poo poo!" 

Lest you think I am a pessimist reading the glass half empty, let me share something else with you:

Before I received the postcard, I did indeed feel like a gargoyle. The City of Lights, my brother, his fiancee (and my future sister-in-law), all felt very, very far away, not just geographically, but spiritually, metaphorically, and however else things and people can feel far away. People have the odd ability to do so both tangibly and intangibly. (I know there are too many adverbs in this paragraph). 


I have a bad habit of taking analogies too far, but the postcard, the longer I studied it, seemed like a small paper mirror with some sort of cryptic solution on the back. My brother is no sage, and certainly he did not intend to see it this way - just like a writer's voice I know my brother's tastes - but kindly, unknowingly, my brother sent me a photograph of myself. Albeit less lean and muscular...


He has always been there for me. Having a younger sister like me and having seen me at my most unstable and tyrannical nadir (2004-2008, essentially) was as trying for him as it was for my parents. But he heard me out many times, for hours at a time until the sun was nearly up and through it all, listening to me while I wavered in and out of this and that, wailing to him about my future, my legacy, my long stalled writing career. And when he finally met the love of his life I repaid him with more whining and wailing, telling him that he could do better and calling my future sister in law a crazy. 


Well.


Looking back I think my brother knows crazy because for years I gave him a bona-fide grade-A example of crazy. It didn't matter whom you met first - when people found out we were siblings it was always, "I can't believe you're related." My brother knows better than anyone just how deeply Jackie Chan and Spielberg's ET run through my veins and how both inform my facial expressions and aspirations. Jackie Chan is an entertainer. E.T. just wants to go home. And, at the same time, there is another half of me my brother doesn't understand at all. And there is more than half of him I don't understand. If he were a poet I would compare him to Carlos William Carlos and be constantly asking him: "What is your motivation?" But some things are meant to remain mysterious. Both he and I are completely OK with it. 

So maybe it's crazy and a little desperate that I'm reading so much into a simple postcard. Maybe it's crazy that I'm pretty much set on this decision - prepared to sail away from rough waters into calmer waves - at least for the time being before those waters again, turn rough, but a different kind of roughness. A roughness that I, a lonely sailor with a masochistic but ultimately rewarding relationship with Karma, asked for. The oceans are all connected on our round earth. Things, events, life - all are cyclical. I know how it goes, but I am trying something new.

In a few months' time (or perhaps that is too generous an estimate... perhaps it could take years! Years!) when I return to the postcard, I will see the gargoyle but look at it fondly, like an ornery old friend I have since lost touch with but remember very very well. I'll identify more with the birds in the air or with the small figures on the street along the Seine, the figures representing couples like my brother and his fiancee, holding hands, taking photographs, smiling, eating baguettes that are too small for the holder of the postcard or even the gargoyle to see, but the presence of which even the most cynical specimens of man would find difficult to deny. The baguettes are there. It is Paris, after all.