apathy, unemployment and the voices in my sisters head
Approximately 28 days ago, I was laid-off from my job. From the tech industry. For the third time. The first two times I got laid off, I would be panicking around this time. Making cold-calls, finding contacts for development work, updating my resume thinking of “action verbs.”
How do I feel right now? Quite the opposite, actually. I’m apathetic. I’m burned out. As of right now, I simply don’t care.
It’s times like this now where I flashback to my family, to the dinner table.
“An,” says my mother in Chinese. “Did you go to coffee today?“
“Go to coffee” is my mother’s euphemism for “wander up and down the streets of Solano Avenue, talking to the homeless.” My sister is thirty-six years old, mentally ill, socially incompetent even with the heavy doses of medication she ingests daily. (Don’t ask what happens when she doesn’t.)
“Yes. I talked with Larry today.” Larry is either a homeless man, the owner of Peet’s Coffee, or her boyfriend. In her mind, a combination of all of the above, most likely.
“You should find a job,” says my father. He doesn’t look up from his bowl of rice.
“Yes,” chirps my mother. She’s frantically running around in the kitchen, washing dishes or adding corn starch to soy sauce to add to chicken or wiping off the tables, anything to avoid a conversation. “You can work at MaiDangLao!” McDonalds, my mother said. We all throw dirty looks at her and she continues washing dishes.
“I’m NEVER going to work there. I wanna be a street person!” She says “I wanna be a street person” the way a five year old boy declares that he wants to be an astronaut, and I look down and I zone out and swallow big gulps of rice because I know exactly what’s going to happen.
“DOGSHIT!” he screams in Chinese. He doesn’t say anymore but you can tell what he wants to say in his eyes; “how dare you, how dare you insult yourself by saying you will be a street person when I have worked my body until it ached, how dare you insult me because I have provided and pushed and prodded and lectured and demanded the good life for my children and this is what I get in return?”
And this is how my flashback ends. I can’t recall what I do from here, whether I run to my room upstairs and slam the door sobbing or where it’s later in life, where I stare at a spot of the table and disassociate myself from the world at a drop of a hat, a talent I can still master to this day. I simply don’t remember. Or don’t want to remember, I don’t know.
What I would assume is that, like always, nothing would happen. Dinner would resume, my father would leave the kitchen, brow furrowed, off to read the China Daily News or watch the McNeil-Lehrer news hour. My mother would pick up the leftover dishes from the kitchen table. And my sister would probably do what she usually would do — fight the invisible fight with her head between sanity and the fascinating conversations she has between Barbara Bush and Princess Di and then admit defeat at the end of the night to the voices in her head, waves of apathy washing over her.
Apathy not quite different from my feelings towards the world right now.
36 Comments