Tomorrow is T Day

Tomorrow is my termination day at Sun. I've been "on notification" since November 12. Tomorrow my email, Internet access (through VPN and sun.net) and regular paychecks will end, and my badge will probably be disabled. I have been feeling grief about the impending end to it all for about a week now. Euphoria has kept me going for most of these past two months. Hope that this sadness and fear only hang around briefly.

Today: Walk. Mass. No Office. No Morning Prayer. Talked with Martha, Peggy, and Sunshine by phone. Liberty came in from the garage apt. for a few minutes. He came back later and changed two light bulbs for me, and I helped him bring the recyling and trash and yard waste out to the curb.

My energy is way down. After Mass, I played Solitaire at yahoo games until I went to bed for a nap. I had gone to great lengths to delete all the games on the PC, which kept me off the games for months, but last week I discovered Solitaire at the Games site, and now I'm a helpless zombie again who plays so long that my vision clouds, and my arm even got paralyzed one night.

Tomorrow brings lots to do to figure out about getting unemployment benefits, to mail the waiver that will entitle me to severance pay, sell stock, besides pay bills. The marriage paper has become an albatross around my neck (how's that for throwing in an old cliche in what is intended to be punchy writing?). I have spent at least 40 hours on it. I ended up turning it from a 3 page paper about how to deal pastorally with cohabiting couples who come to Church, and made it into a 15 page paper that could be a running start on a book that I have been only half humorously planning to write for years with the working title: Casualties of the Sexual Revolution. It pulls in Hugh Hefner, the Playboy Philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir, Freud, Cal Thomas, and I think at the end really doesn't address what we are supposed to write. Now that I've done that, should I spend another 6 to 8 hours writing the paper I outlined in the first place? Or should I submit the 14 page paper and move on with my life? Can't decide.

I don't like the fact the ILM treats St. Lawrence Church like a lecture hall. The newest guidelines (don't know if it is Canon Law) expressly forbid that. We were sitting facing the altar with two slide screens hanging down on either side, and behind the altar was the tabernacle -- with the presenter's back to it.

The first part of the day Saturday was a workshop on Sexual Misconduct. The leader is a Catholic, father of two kids. One of his examples was about a youth leader joking with a girl student's friends in her presence about how he couldn't stop fantasizing about the girl, and asking her for a date. The presenter talked about the inequalities of power, all the reasons why a secular teacher or anyone in authority should not try to date a student or subordinate. He didn't allude to the fact that sexual fantasies are immoral and that asking for a date with the goal to have sex with anyone is not something that any Catholic employee of the diocese should be doing. The bishop's guidelines do mention sins against the sixth commandment, thank goodness, among the list of forbidden activities for staff people.

Yesterday, I was late for the start of the ILM day at Lawrence Academy because I was bewildered by how to get closure on the paper. On top of everything the printer would only print two pages and then give me an Error:41. At which point, I would have to turn the printer off and on again. To print duplex I have to turn every odd numbered sheet around and feed it back into the printer by hand . Then there were the paper jams.