When the cocker spaniel and the Boss start to piss you off...

Nothing can prepare you for the changes that you undergo while being pregnant. Of everything that I've experienced thus far, I can say that the one thing that shocked me the most are the mood swings and hormonal fluctuations that you experience from a minute to minute basis.

Early on, EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING pissed me off. If you were a kid I wondered why the heck you were so small and midgety. If you were really and genuinely piss-off worthy (like my boss) then I wanted to kill you (seriously). (Sorry Jesus.)

If my husband told me not to eat a chocolate fudge sundae then I wanted to tell him just go somewhere and lift some weights for both of us because (at the moment) I would choose the sundae over him if I had a choice.
(Sorry Pat.)

Now the insanity that I was feeling wouldn't be healthy in the best situation but I just so happen to be in a dead-end job with an arrogant and pretentious bullsh*ter who thinks because he was the Executive Director of a two person not-for-profit that he doesn't have to do any work. I can't decide which makes my situation worst, the fact that I foresaw how much I wouldn't like this job before I left my last job or the fact that I let him convince me that this opportunity was the best opportunity that any young policy professional could ask for.

The job started out great for about a month and a half and in retrospect I think it was really the joy of the holidays that made me think that I was content. I'd sit in meetings while he spoke about grand plans to bring new industry into the disinvested community in which we located, then I'd hear him talk about plans to redevelop the southside community and would be inspired. I wondered practical questions like "where are we going to get the money to redevelop Washington Park into a Central Park-like attraction?" or "I wonder which political officials gave us the okay to move ahead on these plans?" but I initially assured myself that surely any man who spoke with this amount of promise and certainty had this figured out. Yet slowly but surely after each "election speech" that he gave, I noticed that he'd ask me to develop the plan to implement his far-flung dreams and that the words that came out of his mouth were based on nothing more than his flights of fancy and political wetdreams that he'd been having since high school.

Initially, I embraced developing the plans for his "INNOVATIVE" AND "ENTERPRISING" ideas, but after hearing him promise everything from millions to dollars into the neighborhood to a new trolley system that would roll through the "hood", I began to call bullshit. For one, I didn't want to be associated with someone who was a snake-oil salesman and two, I didn't want to do the work for something he had no plans in seeing  through to implementation.

Daily, I hoped that my boss would end up in a non-life threatening coma that would render him helpless until my due date in October. But to no avail, everyday he'd slump into the office at 11:00am and sit in his office, go for numerous smoke breaks, surf the web until he left at 4:30pm.

Everything came to a head when I developed a workplan for a community garden initiative and while sitting in a meeting he told the group how he'd reflected long to come up with a plan for the gardens. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for "we" and "our" and "us" lingo that naturally comes along with being apart of an organization but its another thing entirely when a bastard begins to take full credit for your work.

Slowly his misrepresentation of my work increased and I soon realized that his lack of integrity permeated into his dealings with other organizations in the community -- organizations that we were supposed to be helping.

Soon people from every organization in the community began to confide in me that my boss had claimed the successes of their organization's work in the past. All I was left wondering was how could someone who was so young develop such a reputation as being a butthole. I mean, I assumed that it took years for people to develop that type of engrained bullsh*tability, no?

Obviously not...

So here I was working for the devil and my skin truly begins to crawl whenever he walks past. Even when he asked where I went to church I hesitated to respond because I didn't want to witness anybody bursting into flames in the sanctuary - no matter how awful of a person that they are.

So walking into the office everyday has become more and more of a struggle. I'm going to revival at my church everyday this week, I begin yoga next week, and I am just going to hope and pray that I don't catch a case.