Sylvia's Journal

The week that just ended changed the lives of about 70 or so of my colleagues who were laid off in an attempt to bring our overhead expenses in line with our revenues.  Aside from the shock (how did this happen to me), the loss of office camaraderie, and, undoubtedly, wonder about one’s value to the organization, the layoffs are also confronting people with the immediate worry of Trump’s campaign promise to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

It was the third ‘rightsizing’ episode I survived in my 30 years at the organization. How long I am spared is not clear. So far I have been able to bill myself to projects a sufficient number of work days to not be a drag on overhead. But the main projects I do work for will end later this year and there are no replacement projects in sight. It is a little bit like the discussions around sustainability: you can never say something is sustainable until it no longer is – and so it is with my tenure at the organization where I have spent about half of my life. Onwards we go with the understanding that when it is time to go, it is time to go. Hopefully by then Medicare will still look after our health care needs.

To make the departure for a trip overseas more acceptable to Axel we usually eat out the evening before I leave in a restaurant nearby, without worrying too much about the cost of what’s on the menu – a luxury that comes with still being gainfully employed. Last night we ate in a small intimate restaurant in Gloucester (the Franklin) where a jazz band (base, guitar and singer) was playing in a corner while we feasted on oysters, fish and good wine. It is the kind of small restaurant where one easily gets into conversations with neighbors whose table is just inches away (of course only if your table neighbors are as extrovert as Axel). They turned out to be very knowledgeable about jazz and knew the singer as well as the origin of many of the songs (with some help from the Soundhound app). We asked where they worked – ‘the swamp’ they told us, referring to the Washington swamp Trump claims to be draining. But so far we have only seen him populating this alleged swamp with alligators.

I have been busy knitting pussy hats, for Axel, for a friend and myself, all of us planning to march in Boston after inauguration day to show our unhappiness with Trump and his antics; especially as it concerns women (reproductive rights, here and elsewhere, harassment, legal protections, etc.). I will have just come off the plane from Yaounde (Cameroon) via Paris the day before if all goes as planned.

Axel’s pussy hat looks more like a piggy hat or a pink Viking hat as some of our FB friends told us – now, after knitting 3 hats I am getting better and the ears look more like pink pussy ears. One writer who does not agree with the frivolity of the pussy hats, the issues we protest about or not at all frivolous, described the effect of 1000s of pussy hats as a pepto bismol lava stream. I think it will be quite striking on a grey winter day.  I also like the lightness to accompany the seriousness. We have to keep laughing, if only to make a contrast with this new president of us who no one has ever seen smiling.