"Calm down, Crazy!"

"Calm down, crazy!"
My friend John likes to quote that from Silver Linings Playbook, and I say it to myself sometimes when I'm all wound up.

In the movie, Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) says it to Pat (Bradley Cooper). They are extraordinarily attractive, but their characters are fairly realistic--they do not stop being "crazy" (he's got bipolar disorder, she's been crazy with grief) through the power of positive thinking. But falling in love while working together for a shared goal does help them untangle their knotted thoughts.

Reading Crash (J. G. Ballard, 1973) last night did help me calm down.
I should say, skimming Crash. It would be better as a short story--one graphic sex scene between people who have mutilated themselves through car crashes for pleasure makes the point. I got bored, like you do with porn--it's too mechanistic to hold your interest, once it's delivered its load.

It's well done though, well written and impressively imagined, throughout. For instance, the main character says a car engineer could tell the kind of car he was in by deciphering the injuries on his body, and  Ballard has a bizarrely gifted imagination in the realm of body fluids.

It's so over the top, I ended up being weirdly cheered by it. No one in the book has much more personality than a car does, so you don't feel involved in their pain, or even the pain they cause.

It's so outrageous but so deadpan, by the end I was suspecting, Wait, is this supposed to be funny? Like eating babies to solve food shortages is?*

Come to think of it, perhaps it needs to be novel length, needs to go on and on, for that suspicion to dawn.

It's a cruel book. It takes how I feel when I'm utterly disgusted with humanity, and amps it up. That's why I was weirdly cheered:
oh, here, this is like me at my most disgusted, and it's just too ridiculous!

By the end of Silver Lining Playbook, Tiffany has helped free Pat from his obsession. He says to her,
"The only way to beat my crazy was by doing something even crazier. Thank you."

Crash was a corrective like that for me. 
I'd been feeling outraged and despairing about our human limitations that I see at my job, 
and this book took that to its ill-logical extreme.
"Oh, you think people are stupid and self-defeating? Well, look at this!"

Well, OK, then, we're not that bad. (Or, ha––we're not that clever.)

Back to the Lab

I said from the beginning that I was going to treat this job like a spiritual psych lab. 
Lately all my familiar distresses and discomforts and disgusts with work/life are appearing, as I'd expected, but in new, unexpected disguises. (They're crafty that way.)

This workplace's culture is different, but my frustrations are much the same as they were when I worked at the college art library or in-house at the publisher's.
No matter where I've worked, the bosses by and large have not been up to the task of good management.
(I wouldn't be either!)

It's like college professors. PhD programs don't teach how to teach. You're just supposed to... I don't know, intuit it?

So. I don't know. I'm not talking myself out of my distress, but trying to attend to it thoughtfully and lovingly––and with a little levity?
Is it as bad as a car crash?

I could certainly find a job that paid more money, but could I find a job I liked as well as this one?

Coming home on the bus yesterday, I saw a woman with a book from my Cool Old Books shelf––an old copy with a distinctive dust jacket of a book by John Buchan (author The Thirty-Nine Steps--though it wasn't that one).
The woman looked physically burdened, disheveled. Poor? Ill? 

I suppose anyone could put that book out at the store, but the case is, I did. I felt happy to see it going home with her. 
More than happy--I felt useful.

A job with a purpose. That's worth a lot. 

___________
* I googled, "Is Crash satire?" and found this article at the British Library site that says yes:
www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-crash