That Must Be Hard

If you want to know the actual reason this blog exists (and all that David Copperfield kind of crap) you'll just have to blame/thank my neighbors' lousy wireless connectivity. I was writing an entry on my private blog, wherein I whine about my life primarily, and then I hit publish*, and it vanished into space. Just this morning on the subway I read in Harpers about the star that would currently be recieving Orson Welles' broadcast of War of the Worlds if they happened to have radios, because radio waves go on forever, so it comforts me to think that my blog entry is out there, somewhere. Well, maybe not.

So anyway it was gone as far as the earth and its inhabitants are concerned, and I thought: maybe this is not the right place to write about work anyway. Maybe I should see if there is a place out there in the big, wide blogosphere for talking about social work. Yes, it'll be slightly tricky because it's basically an act of exhibitionism constrained by an ethical concern for anonymity I do put stock in. And no, it isn't a sure bet, because in my experience, there's not a huge overlap between the kind of people who go into social work and the kind of people who blog and read blogs.

But...it's what I'm gonna do. And if nobody reads it, may it be enjoyed or tolerated, as it merits, on that same star where they will have been so keen on Orson Welles and, 72 years hence, will have been wondering what else humanity is up to.

Oh, but the title. "That must be hard." Part of me wants to assume this needs no explanation to any social worker who may end up reading this. In moments of frustration with my career choices**, I've told people I want to be in a profession where, when someone at a party asks what you do, their response upon learning the answer is to slip you a key and say "I'm in Room 917" instead of "oh, wow. That must be hard."

So tomorrow, or maybe just later after I publish this introductory post and maybe do a promotional tour with my agent since I'm all published and shit, I am going to try to reconstruct the lost account of my day at Rikers Island and the way it illustrates something I consider vaguely interesting about this line of work, namely: what people think is hard about social work vs. what is actually hard about it. My friends have already heard this one, so I thought I'd bore the internet.

*Publish! "Publish." Get a load of us. The internet has made us all published authors. This is among the top 1200 rotten things it has done.

**"career path" I started to type, and then it seemed a touch romantic. Path, indeed. All paved with stars.