The f***ing struggle is real.

I’m reinventing myself yet again.

No, I’m not changing the very core being that exists within. I’ve worked long and hard at perfecting her, and while she may never be everyone’s cup of tea, she is genuine and honest and capable and strong. She kicks ass and takes no prisoners when she gets involved in something. She’s street-smart, book-smart, and life-smart. She’s one awesome bitch. She’s an ever-evolving work in progress, and she will never, ever be “finished” until she is cold and dead and laying on a slab in a morgue, awaiting the flames of the crematorium oven. Even then, she will flicker and flare in the afterburner of electricity that some call ghosts and that I call after-energy. Nah, I am not reinventing her. I’ve grown to like her a little bit.

This time, I am reinventing what it is that I do for a living. Since the medical issues are still prescient, I have to adjust and modify. I’m fluent in more than a few vocations, but a master of none of them. This time, I am taking those that I know are marketable and that I possess some talent for and I am throwing them all together. I have taken on a job as an independent contractor for a Remote Call Center company. You bring the equipment and the skills and they place you with a client who needs you. You make your own hours and deduct your own taxes. You follow the company’s guidelines and rules and you get to operate from your home. It’s freelance work, if you will. I am being paid pretty well, and the best thing about it is that I don’t even have to leave my house. I can “show up” in my pajamas if I want, and my looks don’t matter at all. For a tatted, pierced, crazy-ass hairstyle person with a penchant for black, gothic clothing and band t-shirts and who also deplores most of the human race and craves solitude, this is a fucking dream job. It actually takes a lot of self-discipline to commit to something like this. The tendency to procrastinate and lay in one’s bed, bemoaning the unfairness of having to get up? You can’t do that if you’ve contracted yourself to show up and log in from your home office to provide services for callers. Not if you want to make a paycheck. So, you can be a slug, but only a partial slug. A slugling, if you will.

 

This is a stock photo of me if I were 20 years younger and more professional-looking.

 

Now, I can follow rules pretty well. I don’t tend to go rogue unless it’s really justified and necessary. We don’t have to follow a script; we are simply expected to speak in a professional manner and to handle ourselves in the way in which our company can be proud. I can do this, but there’s one aspect that worries me. It worries me whenever I work, actually. It worries me whenever I am in an unfamiliar or “proper” setting or circumstance.

It’s my fucking potty mouth. It’s as bright as the entire color spectrum. It’s a plumage of decorous and audacious feathers of every brilliantly-decked bird on the planet, including the extinct ones. It’s outrageous as an 80s-inspired Halloween costume. It is brash, bold, sarcastic, murderous, and rancorous in a way that I don’t think I ever envisioned it becoming when I was but a 5 year-old child being taught Pig Latin curse words by the big kids in my neighborhood.

Me: Mommy, what’s uckfay ouyay mean?

My Mom: I don’t know. Where did you hear that?

Me: Just the kids at the playground.

My Mom: Hmmm, well, we live in an Italian neighborhood. Maybe it’s Italian. I’ll call your Aunt Rose. Her parents are “off the boat” from Italy. (Picks up the phone and dials) Hi Rose. Your goddaughter has learned some new words and I think they’re Italian. Here, Lori. Tell them to Aunt Rose.

Me: Hi Aunt Rose. What’s Uckfay ouyay mean?

Aunt Rose: Well…..I don’t know what that is, but it’s not Italian. Maybe it’s German? Or Swedish? There’s lots of Swedes around here.

I swear like a trucker who’s been to prison and made someone his bitch. I swear like a sailor who’s been out to sea for 14 long months. I swear like a pirate who’s out to pillage and plunder and who drinks all the rum and then bemoans its absence. I swear so much that I think it probably sounds bizarre to hear me put on my professional voice and actually manage a customer or another human being with that Polly Purebread personality. I don’t apologize for it, never have, and never will. My mouth is legendary and lascivious and blunt, and I am well-known to have come up with a few curse words that no one else has ever heard of.  I will likely swear on my deathbed, driving out the Padre who comes to administer the last rites. (Note to my children: Nix the Last Rites. I will not fucking need them where I’m going, which is Nowhere. And if I’m wrong and it isn’t Nowhere, don’t worry. I’ll go where I belong. I’ve earned it.)

Usually, after I become used to a workplace, I learn when I can curse, where, and who I can curse around. Swearing isn’t as verboten as it used to be. I had a coworker who refused to use the F word (but everything else was fair game) because she claimed it showed “a lack of intelligence on the part of the the person using it”. I call bullshit. Moreover, I call fucking bullshit. What other word is more descriptive, more elegant, more colorful, than the word FUCK? It’s a noun. It’s a verb. It’s an adjective. It’s simply fucking brilliant, fuck is, and it cannot be fucking denied. There is no fucking substitute for fuck. It just fucking rules. Anyway, I am pretty good at getting the lay of the land and being professional.

This job, though, is another kettle of fish. Since I am in my home, the rules are somewhat lax, shall we say? Hell, if my cats could talk, they’d be the sweariest cats you ever met. I’m amazed their meows don’t sound like fuck, shit, and damn (and every other word George Carlin said you can’t say on TV. He would be both gratified and upset with the colorful language you get to hear on TV nowadays. He’d have to redo that list and change his bit.) at mealtime. My coworkers and I connect to each other via Skype and some other inner-office chats. We also have email. There are quite a few who run neck-and-neck with me in the cursing department, but the thing is, I have to take them at their word. Because we are prohibited from cursing in our chats and personal emails between each other. We can say “frick” and all the other white bread words, like crap, darn, flippin’, freaking, and whatnot. Outright swearing, though? It’s off the table.

In short, I’m in uncharted fucking territory here. I have to tightly wind my shit together and be professional even when on Skype, so it’s going to be a whole lot of reigning myself in, especially when I get the inevitable douchebag tool customer who uses up my last fucking nerve. Where do I go to piss and moan? My cats? They’ve heard it all, trust me.

I think I can pull this off. It’s going to be hard. I’ve often joked with the husband about installing a speed bag in the house so that I can take out my aggression on it. I’m thinking that I will ask for one for Christmas this year. He can install it in my office, and I will not only refine my ability to act and speak in a more professional manner, but I will develop some serious fucking guns in the process.

Wish me luck.