film-like coating

Someone made reference today to a film-like coating and it brought me around to a 1970 chromacolor kind of elementary science lab musical cartoon. It made me think of dissection and microscopes and glass slides and being once removed. I visualized opaque tracing paper, not the completely see-through kind but the frosted window kind, only a thin layer but still obscuring, blocking, preventing.

This is what it is like to listen to talking and just wait for it to be over. To be a participant only in the clinical sense of performing a duty, a surrogate bodily function. To carry the message over the border. The telephone game, cans and strings. This is to be an interpreter.

Really, the number one effect my profession has had on me is educational impotence. I can't get my mojo on for workshops, classes, lectures anymore. My instinct when I hear talking is to turn the channel to tune it out. I can't sit through anything oral anymore. I have no desire to take classes. I'm surrounded by free opportunities to learn and yet it feels like a huge chore. I realize it takes all of my endurance to learn anymore even when I want to.

As an interpreter you listen just close enough to repeat but not to understand. You could care but you don't, you shouldn't, you don't have time. You've heard it all before and God people don't know how they go on and on - if there was only an oral word count like on MS Office! But then once in a rare while it's the opposite and someone says something pure and newborn and real. You cringe in the face of your pawed over repetition. Then the frosted tracing paper comes in front of it.

You have no idea how long a string of words can be until you have to account for everyone of them. How about an 8-hour training? You can listen and doodle on your paper, tune out, think about something else, come back, make a phone call, leave the room - and I'm still right here, relaying the message nonstop, until the eye contact breaks. It's my job. Often it's so painfully boring I have to pinch myself to stay focused.

Attempted suicide, I've interpreted those conversations. For a middle aged unemployed man desired, in a deeply depressed and hopeless whisper, and the opposite - a teenager not realizing the power of her words, just the mention of it in school lands her in the psych ward for a mandatory 48-hours.

It is also really awesome work. Despite what I've said, I love my job. But it's true what I said about the drawback being one being only a shadow. You don't have a name or an opinion or backgrounds or closure. It really has ruined my own zest for continuing education because talking just all sounds like blah blah blah now.

I gotta go to bed now. Sorry this isn't the best piece of writing ever.