There are a lot of reasons why I’m fed up with Benthic Creatures — mostly to do with policies which I find at best misguided and at worst deliberately stupid — and why I’ve made it a top priority to find another job ASAP. There is one saving grace to this job, and that is the fact that I know that I’m helping people, the ones who need the most help. That helps me put up with a lot.

I was all set to put down all my grumbles here in this journal, but I’ve decided it’s best to not do so. There are people I work with that I genuinely like. As people, that is. As a management collective, they’re like any group of people and their collective intelligence drops and they make silly decisions. Everyone makes mistakes in the name of doing what they think is for the best, but there can be patterns of mistake-making which you just can’t work with anymore, since they lead to a feeling of mistrust. You can like someone, but if they keep proving themselves unworthy of trust, what are you going to do but find another situation?

I can’t blame them; the same thing happens to me when I’m in a group, and I’ve made some spectacular blunders in my time. The thing for me to do is just relax, look for another job (a lack of travel is, right now, the top priority — finding something that will lead me into my new career is kind of secondary at the moment) and get on with life.

Anyway, I just watched the film Dogma for the third time, and I’ve decided that this film needs to be put into my Top Ten list of Great Films. All of the View Askew films — Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back — are pretty funny in their own way, but Dogma is really a good film. It succeeds, to me, in succesfully getting the basic tenets of Christianity across without getting bogged down in any specific belief structure. I agree with the theological points of the film — that God made us because God loves us and for no other reason than that; and that anything we humans do to screw up God’s word is done by us, by human beings, and not by God. The film’s been called blasphemous by a lot of people but it really does do a lot to restore my own faith each time I see it. I really must buy a copy of this film for myself.

And that’s the thing. One of the messages you’ll find at the heart of the film — or, at least, in the beginning, in the disclaimer — is that God has a sense of humor. God — whether you conceive God as Jahweh, Elohim, God, Allah, Buddha, a he, a she, or an it, whatever — doesn’t particularly care about religious beliefs or about what church or synagoge or mosque you attemd. What God really wants can be summarized in Christ’s Two Great Commandments (also neatly summarized by Rabbi Akiva), which were basically to love God and to love each your neighbor. And Christ pointed out that your neighbor is anyone, not just the people you happen to like.

Whatever. I should stop before I wax too theological.

The point is, I’ve been fussing in my head over how I can reconcile the fact that I like the people I work with, but I can’t trust them as managers any more. I guess what it boils down to is that I just have to remember that they’re people trying to do the best that they can, just like I am. I can’t afford to get self-righteous because, well, I might be wrong. The best I can do is just leave the situation and to do so with as few hurt feelings as possible.