I Am Who I Am...

One of my bosses is really pissing me off. I almost quit. But then Alpha asked me to stay. And those stupid glorious kids with all their dreams of changing the world and pioneering something great keep working their asses off.
So I stay.
The thing is...The boss wants me to be something I'm not. He's trying to fit me into one of the boxes he has been able to apply to everyone else he has ever dealt with.
But I don't. I'm not. And I'm far too tired for any new forms of evolution beyond trying desperately not to fall off the very steep learning curve.

In marketing and business, there's always a hook. People have currency--money, success, fame, etc. I don't care about those things. And having a hook in everyone is very important to him. So he tries different approaches with me, and each one is successively worse than the one before. It went from ego stroking (also not good currency for me) to the power play of reminding me of my place in the food chain and putting me squarely in it. Followed with some irritating ego stroking. It was not well received.

I have never made and claims about being driven, about being a business woman, about being successful, about wanting to pioneer new pathways in any industry.
I said, yes--I'm good at this. Yes you need someone to do it. Sure, I'll do it to the best of my ability, but I'm trying to figure this shit out as I go.

I am who I am. Regardless of what you make or who you think you own, who you know or what successes you have had.
I have more respect for the people I run than I do for the random millionaire or politician who trots through--he's sure as hell not working until 10:00 at night with me, and some of these kids will crawl through the trenches with me until they can't even see straight. Because respect is earned.

I have changed a lot over the course of the last year. But I will not compromise who I am for money or recognition, or other people.
I don't quit because Alpha asks me to stay. Because I can't abandon my crew. Because I help to ensure that those kids have a job to come back to every day. Because Alpha asks me to stay.

But I would rather be fired than become, or pretend to become, something I am not. Because I am who I am, and in the end? That is all any of us really gets to say that we have.

Really? I just want to go home and sleep for a hundred years. Home home, not this house we live in home. Home where the stars whisper in your ears and the moon caresses your skin. Where the trees know your name and none of the people are ever trying to be the same.

It has taken me a ridiculously long time to define my currency.
My currency is love and loyalty. They cannot be bought or sold, they cannot be quantified by numbers on a spreadsheet, or defined only by measurable output.
It is there when Alpha asks me to give this thing one more genuine shot. It is there with the girl who puts her head down, never complaining, and works with me until long after the sun goes down. It is in the kid running out the door after a ten hour shift on his way to his second job. It is there when my crew tells me I should go home and get some sleep--not because they want to go home early, but because they know that after their ten hours in a day, I'm already in fourteen.

Why Are You Mine?

It was an inopportune moment for a quiz. Well, for me anyways--he seemed to think that the timing was quite appropriate.
I hate answering questions in the middle of sex. I mean, I'm no good at it during a whipping or other such event, but it doesn't kick me out of my head-space the same as it does during sex.

Why are you mine?

It was a valid question. It is a valid question.

I flailed. If it was a graded test I would have bombed it with flying colors.

The truth, the obvious reason, was there floating on the edges, so close that I couldn't see it.

Because I need to be.

Of course, this becomes 21 questions terribly fast and "Why are you mine?" would morph into "Why do you need to be mine?"

Because of who you are, because of who I am, because of who we are. Because of what we need to be.

That' a slippery slope--each and every one of those answers could easily lead to another question.

Once upon a time, the answer might have been because I didn't know how to be anything else. I have recently learned how to be something else, and I'm not loving it.
That woman who sets a crew down in front of a whiteboard and walks them through compliant logging, that woman who spends hours on inventory, who people seem to think has answers, who spends hours of overtime every week trying to get out the door and back home (I'm an employers dream for salaried employees. Not so great for me).
I have learned to be the woman who runs around plugging the holes of need and compliance in a desperate attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of a multi-million dollar business, on a salary that, while good, is laughable given the position. And I watch him do the same.

I have learned how to be something else.
I know how to be something else. I am still unsure of what that something is, but it is there and it is all-consuming, leaves no room for breathing, no space for simply being.

Simply put, the answer to, "Why are you mine?" is that being his is what makes me happy. The one thing in this world that makes me complete.

To Be Great...

I want to be great again.
With him. I want us to be great.

I no longer care about being great at what we do--after more than a month of 60 plus hour weeks with no end in sight, I'll settle for mere survival.

We're okay. But when you know what it is to be truly mind-blowingly great, "okay" is a poor substitute.

I am not who I was. If you asked our employees, all of them would say they think I sleep at work. Some might even claim that I never existed outside of that place--that I was created in those rooms, and am as much a part of the facility as the walls themselves.

Maybe I am, but I was not. And I want to be great again.

People are the pulse of any facility, and you can feel them as they go about their daily duties.
Survival.
I am part of the heartbeat which keeps the pulse going, part of the brain which coordinates all of the moving parts, molecules of blood in the veins through which the pulse is felt. Every day, the goal is survival.

Perhaps one day that crazy organism will be great. Perhaps it will not.

Yet still...

With him. I want us to be great. Him and I.

Toast and the Bathroom

With my face pressed into the bathroom floor I was reminded of the importance of my abandoned beliefs in housekeeping. The defense I offered myself that I had worked 60 hours this week just didn't seem to satisfy me like it should have, as I attempted to contemplate the layers of dust on the baseboards and the hair dye I had obviously missed on the bottom of the sink, accompanied clearly by an unforgivably wide streak of toothpaste.
It was going to be the mother of all orgasms. Right there on the floor of our decidedly dirty bathroom. Until a child wandered up to the bedroom door asking for toast.
Toast.
I may have sunk my teeth into Alpha's shoulder and muttered something about wanting to be one of those species that eat their young.
Maybe.
But it was still good. And hot. And kind of gross because really, I do need to clean the bathroom. But maybe that was part of the appeal and it fed the part of me that thrives on humiliation. Just a little bit.

I found a Space...

I haven't put in this many hours since I was 16, and I've never drowned in responsibility like I am now.
It's kicking my ass. I almost quit, but then I thought about what would happen to the people. Our wonderful, overworked staff who trickle in every morning and work until they can't see straight. What happens to them if people like me quit? The business sinks and they don't have a job to drag themselves to in the morning.
And so I get up and go back for more.
But I still want to quit. I miss my babies. I miss life.

One of the interesting an annoying things about being a manager is that everyone thinks that they know how it should be done. There is an often surprising lack of appreciation for being provided with solutions an a path to follow. It's not as easy as it sounds to choose and provide those paths in an industry that forges its own trails as it goes.

My job has so many facets, sometimes it makes me feel ill...

I am responsible for vaults and the products stored in them. I have had a love/hate relationship with the vaults. The first time I had to open one, it took me an hour. Those vaults were the first thing in the facility to bring me to tears.
In my life, I have found that one forms relationships with places. Mostly those magical outside places that resonate with the soul in some way.
The vaults are old, they have a somewhat unknown history, and before me, they had a keeper. It is likely that they have had multiple keepers in their quiet years of watching over the things which people deem to be of importance, with their limited access and concrete ceilings behind two foot thick doors.
I am the next keeper of the vaults. At the moment, I am one of only a few people who can even access them, and I am the only one working in them. They are quiet in the constant insanity of desperate activity which surrounds them.
These old vaults have a soul of their own, and had many keepers before me. They are silent in their purpose, watching over that which they have been entrusted to guard.
I had a moment yesterday, the kind of moment I have only ever experienced in magical wooded places devoid of people. In that moment, I found a space here where I belonged. That sounds small, but I have never escaped the feeling of not belonging in this not so new place we moved to a year ago.

The vaults watch, silent guardians of valuable things. I became their keeper in more than title alone, and those cold concrete walls with their steel doors and complicated combinations held me in their silence for a moment as their own. For the vaults to be mine, I had to become theirs, like a promise to a place, a small moment in space.
As things settle and staffing becomes less of an issue, and the vaults fill to capacity, I will spend a rising amount of time in them. I'm looking forward to it, that place where I fit. I miss the cage that one feels so strongly when one has time to immerse themselves in M/s. We are still what we have always been, and always will be. But our everything is directed at and given to the world right now.
In a way, those vaults are becoming a safe place for me in the insanity. I will be their keeper and they will hold my secrets, absorbing the quiet, serious conversations within their walls, watching those in charge as we whisper out our issues and fight through the tears that exist because it is all ultimately about people, and people feel and bleed, cry and need, people are people.

While making a somewhat extensive appearance in my job description, the vaults are only a facet of what I do. Yet somehow, in some small moment, I found my place and an unwritten title which fits me. I am, and will indefinitely remain, the keeper of the vaults.
Vaults are like M/s. They are a space of their own, almost outside of time. Safe, quiet to the depths of their soul. A space inside the storm.

50 Shades of Grey

So I never did read the books, but I finally got to watch the movie. Normally, I'm a book girl all the way, but I have realized that my life's reading is going to consist of state codes and SOP's (for me, that admission was tantamount to accepting that the sun won't rise tomorrow).

I don't know what I was expecting, but I was disappointed. Maybe I was looking for it to rekindle something in me, and it certainly did lead to some realizations, just not in the manner I had thought that it would.

Since I like to file my complaints before anything else...

Could they have picked any two characters with less chemistry? I mean seriously, the spark between them was tantamount to my attraction to the pile of dirty dishes in the sink--c'mon baby lets get it on, you know you want to do me!
With a playroom that cool, how come they're hardly ever in it?
On what planet does a dom spend that much time going down on a sub and she never ever ever reciprocates??
Who was really supposed to be in charge? From where I'm standing, it sure looked a hell of a lot like her.
Where exactly was the D/s? Hottest moment in the whole thing was when he made her eat. Seriously.
Her character made me want to beat her myself, and normally that's just not my bent--she was a raging brat.
According to Alpha, "Mr. Grey is a pussy with consistency issues and a serious lack of self control"...His commentary would have been quite annoying if I hadn't agreed with him.
What exactly is with the implication that Grey is the way he is because there's something deeply wrong with him, due to past abusive experiences? I found her mission to fix him painfully annoying. For me, that is one of the attractions of a dominant--you don't "fix" them, you don't change them, you don't make them what they're not. They are who they are, they want what they want, and they do what they do. As a sub, you accept that and allow yourself to be molded to fit whatever shape they take, somehow fitting the acceptance of that molding into the knowledge that nobody else will accept you for who you are in quite the same way.

For me, a big part of D/s is that acceptance of who someone is beyond all the trappings of what people think that we should be.

I wonder at the mass appeal the story seems to have. I was a bit shocked by how tame it was.

Enter realizations...

Tame. 50 Shades of Grey was painfully tame, and dare I say, not far beyond the borders of vanilla. I get that maybe it was a whole, "introduce her gently" thing, and it seems to have been somewhat of an awakening phenomenon for a lot of women, but still...I don't really get it.

Maybe I was disappointed in what I perceived as a distinct lack of actual D/s in the story and maybe I was hoping for it to spark something in me that has lain quiet through these last months of insanity. It didn't do that. But it did show me that maybe I'm not as far gone as I feel because there's still more D/s in a moment of my life than in an hour of that story. So for that, despite my disappointment, I do have an appreciation for 50 Shades of Grey.

The Great Online Cookie Exchange Extravaganza!

I have not become so detached from the things that really matter in life that I have missed Jz's recent announcement. 

Please do join up and play with us! I am sadly down on the whole cooking front and could seriously use some new recipes!

Directly from Jz~

"Dust off your baking pans, because on Wednesday, December 9th 2015

The Great Online Cookie Exchange Extravaganza returns!

Won't YOU please join us?

It's easy to play along. 

Just post a recipe that day for a holiday goodie -- any goodie. 

It doesn't have to be for cookies… or even be sweet.

We do not discriminate against any goodie.

(We are equal opportunity consumers around here.)

That's pretty much all there is to it.

The single catch is that there's only one way to get your name in the official list of participants: You have to contact me (Jz) by Monday, Dec. 7th with both your name and the address of your blog."