The Husband

My husband does social type work, looking after the disenfranchised youth of Blandberra. The other day one of his regular clients, a rather colourful person, arrived at the service and demanded to know "is it fucken' true what they say about you?". My husband, not being one to ever admit ignorance shouted back "FUCK YEAH!". The young person responded "yeah, I fucken' thought so!" and promptly left. My husband is now left wondering who "they" are and what he has just admitted to. The array of crimes or personality traits to choose from are mind boggling. The punishment for being a smart arse.
One of his favourite jokes is…what do you call a youth worker who wears a full length leather coat and drives a Mercedes? A drug dealer. Hee Hee. (He's not, by the way. He looks very cute in his leather coat and the Mercedes is 33 years old).
He does an incredible job, deals with traumatized young people all day, five days a week, looks after them, solves problems. Then comes home to a basket case wife and a demented four year old and continues to take care of us.
Back in the olden days when I worked for a living I would be having a bad day at work because I'd misplaced a data file. He would ring, listen to my ranting and moaning. Eventually I would get around to asking how his day was going and he would tell me about a teenager who he just had to have admitted to the psych ward, or a girl who wanted an abortion because she had been gang raped. I would be instantly humbled; it is so easy to become self absorbed, to think your problems are earth shattering. More often than not they are trivial and not really worth getting so upset over.
At the end of my first year at uni, a year of drinking, drugging and shagging and not very much study I was faced with the prospect of failing. I was scared, upset, mad at myself and worried about disappointing my family. One of my housemates gave me a book of writings by Krishnamurti. I read it cover to cover in a single sitting. It wasn't earth shattering revelations or the secret to the meaning of life – just a reminder that life goes on regardless. It actually didn't matter if I failed Uni or if my local chemist stopped stocking my favourite lipstick colour – life goes on. I stopped worrying. I didn't fail, not very badly anyway and I was able to sit supplementary exams over the summer. I did fail physics, getting a measly 38 to be exact, so I needed to make up a subject. I ended up doing English Lit, quite an unusual thing for a science student to do, in fact the admin computer had to be adjusted to accept my enrolment. But it was brilliant and probably one of the better things I ever did academically. It never paid any bills, like biochemistry ended up doing, but it got a few of the cobwebs out of the right side of my brain, made me grow a few creative neurons. It was the silver lining. What was the point of this rant? Oh yeah, my husband is ace.