Day 1345: Where the living dance (with the dead)

[nagi_schwarz]

This last week was rough, no lies. A day of court, a day of meetings, half a day of rushed and complicated court, and then driving north for the work conference. It started at noon but they didn't give us lunch. Good thing I put a cereal bar in my car. The second day of the conference was all day, then a half day Friday, followed by me zooming south to make a committee meeting, and then just cutting out and going home.

Those conferences are emotionally draining. I do child welfare work. For the most part (and this is going to sound terrible) it's pretty run-of-the-mill, mentally ill and emotionally immature parents in stressful living situations and who have poor coping skills making poor parenting decisions (surprise, surprise). Once in a while we get one of those cases that ends up on the news or made into a Lifetime movie. Once in a career do we get one of those cases that becomes an episode of SVU or Criminal Minds.

Take all of those once-in-a-lifetime cases and show them all for three days, gory pictures and all. (For reals, by the time we got around to the pictures of dead naked children, I was pretty dead inside, and instead of being horrified, I was just like, If you leave these slides up for too long, people are going to see and call the police, even though this room is full of cops and detectives.) Also throw in people's painful personal experiences, and videos and transcripts of children describing horrific abuse, and it makes for some pretty warped brain time.

I learned some groundbreaking new stuff about forensic interviewing (although I jokingly call it interrogating children). Also we had a couple of intense case studies that, blessedly, had closure. In one case one of the perps committed suicide rather than face trial, and he did it by jumping, so I leaned over to my coworker who'd seen the courthouse jumper a few weeks back and said, Hey, you know what that's like and she laughed. Oh, this job. We watched bits of an interview of a man who'd raped a little girl, and his excuses/explanations were increasingly implausible and hilarious, and he had all kinds of crazy stories for how his DNA ended up at the crime scene, and he said, I don't want to talk about it, it's embarrassing and the detective said, Worse than raping a child? and that was pretty hilarious.

The upside to this conference was that I got to hang out with my friend sherlockian_syn and watch an ep of SGA together, and squee over kpop together, and have food together, and in general have a fun time. It was awesome. Her husband's cool, too, and I think by the end of my stay her cat was willing to tolerate me, so that was good.

Cody and I went out for a date on Friday night, had lots of good sushi, and then we had to swing by the lab and get some stuff, and then we came home and got him packed for his business trip to Texas. I went to the movies with sherlockian_syn and two of my other college BFFs. Finally saw Infinity Wars. Might have been a bit too dead inside to really appreciate the emotional impact of the film.

I hung out with the dogs after the movie, doing laundry, and just lazing.

Went to church today, taught a lesson. Not sure I was really qualified to be teaching anything spiritual after just kinda emotionally being dead inside (and also being woken up at five by Dingo puking in the corner of the bedroom), but it went well. Also, one of the new neighbors disclosed that he's a registered sex offender and described the requirements of his probation/safety plan. Kudos to that guy for his courage. It's going to be a lesson for me, to not say horrible things about the sex offenders I work with in his hearing, and also being supportive of my friend, who's married to him after being widowed for decades.

Check-in:

Fitness! Haha, nope. Gotta do more cardio. Hiking up the hill from the lodge to my car was embarrassing, even if it was at a much higher elevation than usual.

Writing! Also really not great, given how much that conference always takes it out of me, although doing a text RP with brumeier and sherlockian_syn has rescued my word count a couple of times.

Spirituality! Better, especially since I worked to prepare a church lesson. Needs much improvement, of course.

Work! Well, no progress on studying for that test, but that conference was enriching in a professional sense, so...

Here's to surviving this week without my husband.