Just a face in the crowd? April 19, 2013

 


An off the cuff response to a comment to her latest photo posted on Facebook may supply a bit of information about her motivation, helping to fill in some of the gaps her personality profile.

She cropped her picture out of a group shot in the office to use as her profile picture. When several family members commented on how pretty she looked, she responded that it’s easy to look pretty when she is surrounded by love.

By implication, she is saying that the people around her are offering her protection and love.

This is an odd comment considering the fact that mayor’s office is known for its internal conflicts, back biting and office politics.

As savvy as she is, she is also naïve. And tends to become a true believer, much as she sounded when I spoke to her on the phone last fall about RR.

Whether he current faith is a carry-over from back then or not, I can’t say.

More than once over the last few months, she has made it clear that she sees herself as a good soldier in a good cause, something she seemed also to reflect when working in our office.

She always starts out that way, and then seeks to trickle up, and to find a position of authority, something she has only particularly accomplished in the mayor’s office, although it is clear she may never get the position of power she believes she deserves.

My best guess is that she has been allowed access to the inner sanctum, and does their bidding – digging up dirt on political enemies and such, while also serving as the photographer and other roles.

But there is a glass ceiling – not based on her gender, but on the fact that those who have power covet it, and she may not be able to easily rise up through the ranks as she had in other places where the internal mechanisms were much simpler.

She is one of the group, but has yet to rise above it.

At our office, I was a little scared that she might end up my boss after she managed to trickle up. But she was forced out by The Small Man and others before she could accomplish that.

(I still wonder how life might have turned out at our office had she become the boss, and what tasks she would assign me as punishment for having offended her during her rise to power).

While she seems to paint a picture of a perfect world, and apparently is willing to do just about anything to maintain her place in it, ultimately it is an illusion, because she really doesn’t want just to be one of the boys (or girls as the case may be), but to be someone of distinction (which she probably deserves, being smart, beautiful and clever).

As I have said before, there is not room for her at the top in that world. She is may be savvy enough to survive, may even have an aspect of ruthlessness needed, but ultimately, she’s not the kind of snake that thrives in such a world, and if she wishes to get distinction, she will have to move on to some world where she will find an easier way to trickle up.

 

   2012 menu 


email to Al Sullivan

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Take me to the river July 7th, 2013

Image
  I'll go into the possible inspiration later for this poem she posted today for now she is once more delving into the concept of a row isolation and the struggle to retain strength during several years of adversity her geography is located next to a river named after Henry Hudson as she draws on an important metaphor for life as she lives it similar to an earlier poem that had her kneeling beside the sea in order to let things go, she can no longer retain in her life the wide Hudson with its never ending ripples sits on her doorstep a safe place she goes to breathe new life into her war worn bones and hot raw nerves she goes to the river side to keep from bursting what she is full to spilling and to avoid leaking out and wasting the essence of survival she cannot afford to lose the last few years she says have been truly deep and rough like the storms that rip across the river at times I'm strong she writes but sometimes I'm tired on the shore she watches the ships...
Read more

Hoping for the best June 24, 2013

Image
        I feel sorry for everybody involved in this trickle up game, not just the so called victims (we walk into    these things with our eyes open and are taken advantage of only because we have our own lusts we can’t control), but also our poet, who knows no other way of life, and must abide by the rules of a game she finds herself stuck in – and must do what she needs to do in order to retain any sense of self-worth. This is what she is, and this is what she must do. But even at her worst, her poetry suggests she is hardly the rascal the congressman’s PR person makes her out to be. She plays the hand of cards she gets dealt. She sometimes misreads the deck, such as assuming that her chef friend in New York was competent, when he was anything else but that. She also leaped onto the bandwagon when it came to our former temporary boss, assuming he could do more for her than it turns out he could, his temporary condition making him of little more use than a...
Read more

Ships that pass in the night July 9, 2013

Image
  A mentioned yesterday, there is more going on in regard to her latest poem than just the content. Again, we come to the possibility that our posts are somehow some kind of secret communication, wishful thinking on my part, of course, because I know she really hates me. I suspect I am deluding myself with hopeful thinking that she has maintained this one thin thread of communication between us, though this poem adds increasing evidence to that illusion – since I posted a poem that in some respects foreshadowed the one she posted this week. My poem included a video of me wandering a small beach in Jersey City near Liberty State Park, and was intended as a response to even earlier poem about borrowed lives. The poem goes I find no path among these river stones, so I make my own, turning this way then that, side steps that lead me nowhere, then back, my life made up of clumps like these small eddies filled with seaweed and people I need, but never see again when I move ...
Read more