Due to ever-changing school schedules in high school, college, and grad school, I have held a few jobs in my day. I’ve probably been on more interviews than your average 50 year old. Nothing has ever felt quite right. Nothing has fulfilled me more than it drained me.

Until lately.

I, Brett Murphy, have found my lifelong calling. That “if you like what you do, you don’t have to work a day in your life.” The kind of work where I feel energized after I leave.

I went to grad school to be a community college professor. “Don’t you know, Brett, that there are Ph.Ds who can’t get jobs at  community colleges?” they told me. Thanks to my parents, I’ve never allowed myself to be classified into trends. I don’t let that shit apply to me, because if you do, you’re one of the ones sitting at home unemployed talking about how bad the job market is when really you never applied to enough jobs in the first place! Exhale. Phew. Anyways. I knew that I would be able to land a college level instructor position, even if it was adjunct at first. I’m a hustler when it comes to securing my interests. And, I did. Before even receiving my M.A.

However, I didn’t want it anymore. I taught ESL in Boston for a while, and realized that I don’t like classroom situations. I love the one on one. An old professor of mine, and a mentor of mine at that, said to me “But what about being in that community. With like-minded individuals who appreciate the same things you do?”

Eh, I don’t really care. All I want to do is tutor kids one on one. I love it. I absolutely love it. I love the proverbial lightbulb that goes off when you show the student what he/she is doing wrong. I love sitting there watching a student think, and helping them to make better sentences. I love the people I meet, the families I help. I love essays and books. I find patience within my type A nutcase self to explain something to a student 10 million times if I have to, without getting irritated in the least. I love how funny some of these kids are, and how it’s the most privileged part of my day to go help them write. I love meeting with my medical resident student, and seeing  how his patient write-ups are greatly improving. How he’s using the semicolon in perfect places. And how my 6th grader got the best grade in his class on one of his essays that he did all by himself with just a few little pushes.

As people always hear me say when I talk about my students: it’s fucking heartwarming.

Found it, people. I found it.

Church is not a place, Father Toracco told us.

He told us that worship was important, but church was a lifestyle. Who you hang out with, how you act, WWJD. And, realistically, he said, we don’t necessarily need the ten commandments because the concept of natural law, or, ‘right and wrong’ is built inside. With that, I was able to reconcile my problematic feelings regarding organized religion. Maybe I am taking it a bit out of the contextual ‘bigger picture’ of the class, but much of what he said made sense in a timeless sort of way.

Father Toracco has since passed, and I have long regretted a  particular email that danced around in my head a bit, but that I never got around to sending to him. I had a lot of questions, since he seemed to have more answers than anybody else I had ever met. He would tell us to ask the tough questions, question God, ask where He was, etc.

Lately, I’ve found myself asking again, like many of us often do. Where was God when the little children got shot to death? Where is God when the natural disasters strike? How does He stand and watch while people get raped and murdered and tortured? It’s okay to ask.

If you ponder accurately and honestly, the blame blooms on the inside. It’s our fault. We are the ones who forget Him standing up there, and that’s a hard concept to grapple with.

I can’t imagine how upset he must be at what a cataclysm we have made of this world. Sometimes I get this image of God up there, luminescent, radiant, upset. God, with His head bowed. It’s so crushing.

If that visual hits you hard, you see the problem. If that visual doesn’t hit you hard, you see the problem.

Note: If you want to read a book addressing these types of issues that will absolutely knock you on your ass: Half Wits by Gerard Goggins.

But. The interactions with you have cataloged themselves so vividly in my brain. There are none like it. The good, the bad. The smells. The looks. The feeling. Though, the word ‘feeling’ doesn’t quite do it. Maybe, rather, the lucid sensory overload that I am able to recall when I think about you.

I can’t liken it to a metaphor, and I certainly can’t say who you are. It wouldn’t explicate this further anyways. It has been forever and I can’t let it go. You had, logistically, very little significance. You were a centimeter on the ruler of my 20s.

My circulatory system spins words, and as a result, I get frustrated. I type solid, earthly text and it just doesn’t seem to do it justice. I find myself backspacing, saying, no, no no. That doesn’t capture the essence of what I mean.

I am tempted to make everything metaphysical. Everything has to be more than. More than ‘happy.’ More than ‘devastating.’ More than ‘uncomfortable.’

It’s not the words themselves, it’s which one comes after which one. Why can’t I compose the alchemic formula that satisfies me? The one that allows me to say “There, that’s how it was, and you, reader, will feel it too.”

So let me say this.

For being a mere centimeter, you have certainly covered kilometers in my veins, spilling ink that stains, that soaks up in my tissue. Ink that I can no longer shape into proper clauses. Dry spots that stay there. But the memory, it’s the memory that remains.

Brett Elizabeth Murphy should not take for granted [in no particular order so don't get judgy]:

• Her opportunity to go to graduate school at a prestigious program right out of undergrad. [I complain about it a lot, but I'm a lucky motherfucker]
• That she is almost done with said graduate program
• Her brother
• Her car, which allows her to go to work and school and friends and family in a room temp simulated climate that smells like cinnamon buns and coffee
• Having Celiac, and not a worse health problem
• Her parents
• The love of her life who keeps her from going to the crazy home behind the scenes
• Her nice computer which allows blogging, and projects, and paper-writing
• Having two places to call home. [I complain about having outfits and clothes and socks mismatched at either place, but it keeps life interesting.]
• Her bestest closest friends
• That her aunt is doing so well with her cancer treatments
• Her jobs that cause her to drive all over the f-ing state, but are lucrative in one way or another
• More and more gluten free food that makes life easier
• The people at work who make life bearable
• GF Annies mac and cheese
• Her huge Italian family!

There’s prob more, but that is what I’m feeling for this Thanksgiving season.

I had a conversation with a good friend of mine a while back (male, at that), and we decided that a good amount of what is wrong with this world lies in the injustices towards women, and gender-related problems. Really, you can trace a lot of things back to these. As I’ve written on this blog before, I haven’t really considered myself hyper-feminist by modern standards (that is, the standards that men and women alike have attributed to modern feminism: man-hating, etc.) but I feel strongly about women’s issues.

Here is what I’m sick of.

Pornography. I’m sick of pornography being perpetuated in this society, sometimes masked as advertisement and social media. Thongs for four year olds. Certain types of pornography destroy families, reduce women to objects, and belittle men and women to bodies who use one another. Porn is always something that shows sex as something that gets DONE to a woman in an unequal way. Porn reduces women to holes and hands, and uses her face as a place to put bodily fluids. As if you could ever see that woman as a person with hobbies and goals and interests after that. Tell me the last time you saw a woman orgasm in a porn? Never. Exactly. How do you expect the women you love to maintain a sense of pride, esteem, and self-worth in a society where sexuality is formed by the porn industry? It’s fucking disgusting. It affects you, me, and all of us, if only subliminally. This is part of why sex isn’t looked at as sacred and beautiful anymore.

Beauty pageants. I’m guilty of watching Honey Boo Boo, I’ll admit it, but if you stop in your tracks and analyze what’s going on you’ll see 6 year old girls “losing,” being told they aren’t pretty. At age 6…it’s just so sad. And that since they aren’t pretty, they are less than. It’s absolutely sick, and infects young women like a cancer. There’s plenty of this to be found in society, we don’t need to tell them when their brains are still forming. It’s a nice segue into cocaine, poor decisions, and an unhealthy relationship with dieting.

Gazing. I’m sick of men who believe that they are biologically inclined to stare at and objectify the women who walk by. You are socially constructed to think that it is okay. It’s not, and the women around you notice it. Any woman who says this doesn’t bother her is lying to some degree, and trying to be the relaxed, “cool” significant other. It does bother them. Men and women need to improve their self-respect. Women need to put it all back in their clothes a little more, and men need to stop gawking. “But we can’t help it, we’re guys.” Interesting, I wasn’t aware that you were uncivilized animals with no control over yourselves.

Rape in the media. I’m sick of hearing the atrocities that people we elect into office have been saying about rape, along with Tosh.O, and other social media sites. Rape is not funny, and priveleged white men who don’t know what it’s like to walk through a parking lot and feel vulnerable should shut the fuck up. When you are a woman, you are at the physical mercy of men around you, since, in general, men are physically stronger than women. I wonder if they’d think it was funny, and something to run their mouths about, if their wife, sister, or mother were brutally raped.

I know it’s not everybody, I really do. And I know that women are guilty of perpetuating much of this, too. But lets be honest with ourselves, okay? I, for one, am done being quiet about this shit. It bothers me every day, because most of these have affected my life, and probably yours too.

Women are not their fucking vaginas and I’m sick of them being treated as such everywhere I turn.

Never in my life have I had a stronger urge to go to church than in the past six months. I’m starting to think that only one person has the answer.

Rhythms

“I can’t believe you like this song” he said. “What the fuck kind of band calls themselves ‘The Script’? Like that’s fuckin’ gay.” She smiled a little. He said this every time it played.

Her foot didn’t reach the floor from the barstool, but she was shaking with anxiety as she sat with Derek in the dim lighting of the Savin Kitchen in Dorchester, looking through dressing labels provided to them by the kind, half-black bartender who poured their drinks the last time, too.

“So wait, would this one work or no?” Derek asked her, squinting. “Here,” he handed it to her gently, and ran his hands through his light blond hockey hair. “Maybe you want to check. I don’t have my contacts in, and I don’t wanna kill you or nothin’. “

She took the dressings and started to tap her knees against the wall of the bar, hoping to put in the order for dinner, get a glass of wine in her, and move on with the purpose of this get-together.

“Uhmm this one looks fine! No peanuts to note.” she smiled and handed the jugs of dressing back over to the bartender.

“So Cobb salad with grilled chicken? That gonna be it for you two?”

“Yeah, we’ll just do that and the drinks for now. Thanks.” Derek looked down, took a deep breath, and then faced her. She looked at him with big blue eyes, trying to read him, waiting for him to say something.

“So, you brought me here to give it one more try?” he asked with a hint of slight suspicion.

“Okay so, yes. I mean, I feel like I didn’t give you a long enough chance. I feel like…the way we met, the way we saw each other in class and immediately hit it off…I don’t know. I’ve never really been in this situation before, where I’ve gone on dates with more than one person in a short span of time. It’s weird. I felt like I had to pick or something. But I really like you, and I’m sorry, and I want to keep seeing you.”

She could tell he was fighting the smile that began to spread across his face.

“Well I mean…” She could see his teeth now. “Not gonna lie, I was pretty bummed…I mean, not like I was cryin’ in my pillow over you yet, but when you texted me that you were like, all set or whatever I was bummin’ because I haven’t really met anybody quite like you. I was really diggin’ ya and it’d been a while, ya know?”

“No, yeah, I understand and I’m so sorry I texted you like that. I really really like you, and I hope you’ll give me another shot.”

He put his pale hand over hers, rubbed it anxiously, and left it there.

“I think I can give it another whirl.”

Three dates later it was all over again. For good. She told him the same “let’s just, uh, be friends.” He deserved it this time, though, for that drunken comment. But the end was inconclusive, unsettling, and felt a little wrong as time went on, because the two of them had that chemical pull toward one another. The pull that rests in your blood.

She moved to Connecticut for work, away from Boston, away from the memories of kissing in the movies, the Sunday morning weed and pancakes, and how he would kiss her neck and hold her hand on the loveseat of his townhouse condo in Medford where the window was always open. He stayed here, working as a social worker, away from the girl who cried at the restaurant that time talking about abandoned dogs, who ate peanuts and went anaphylaxis on their second date, who he told his buddies was “a total sweetheart, mad quick, mad clever,” who he never really forgot about. Now anytime someone comforts her by rubbing her hand, she pops up in his day as a text message, asking “hey how’s things?” and “how’s your girlfriend?”

And he picks up his phone when he drives down Savin Hill to work. Everyday. Mostly he just holds it, limiting himself to only pop up on hers for three reasons: remembering her birthday, commenting on peanut-related occurrences, and when he hears that song by ‘The Script’ on the radio. But only if he catches it when they prompt, “if one day you wake up and find that you’re missing me.”

But, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve run out of space. No longer can I delete and cut, expand margins, or make the font any smaller without demeaning the sections, causing the printer to print on itself, or requiring a magnifying glass for proper comprehension.

How do we feel about legal size paper? Pros are that your obnoxiously bolded name sticks up and out of all regulation pocket folders. It’s also got a nice document-y feel. As though you’re holding a scroll, or perhaps the Declaration of Independence (more like DEpendence, in this case, since you’re actively seeking to sign your life away to corporate American cubicle life).

On the other hand, in this fackin’ economy, in this fackin’ shitty job mahhhket, there’s always those people who go all edgy, writing crazy cover letters and resumes in hopes of getting noticed. That’s always an option too. Perhaps “Experience,” “Education,” and “Other” are radically outdated. Maybe I’ll replace it with “Life Experience,” “Street Creds,” ”Personality,” and “Skillz.”

I mean, surely your future boss wants to know, more so than  your “detail oriented” personality, how well you take 12 hour days, how much  he/she can yell at you until you cry, what you’re happy to do to get the job done, how willing you are to work on Christmas, how important a future child’s birth is if it occurs on a weekday. I mean, lets cut the bullshit, right? It comes down to that.

Haha, but you’re not supposed to ask about salary, at first. IT’S ALL SO BACKWARDS!

In one of the sections, the researchers say that once you read the description of your personality type, you should probably get the chills.

Truth.

They are confident, but have the goods to back it up. And they have PhDs and shit. Even further, check out the compatibility once you and your significant other know ya’ll numbahz. It’s crayy.
http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/dis_sample_36.asp