#Hopefully TC can somehow live through this relationship ...

[rachelbigpeep]

"Once in his presence, shall I avert my eyes?"

[canaryatlaw]

It's late and I'm fucking exhausted, but today was okay I guess. It would've been good probably if I wasn't depressed as fuck and just generally feeling like shit. But the good news is I'm going home tomorrow and I'll get to see my parents and my sister and even go on vacation and hopefully that'll help everything get better, for a little while at least (then I come back and start school, and we'll have to see how that goes). Anyway. Today. I was up to like 2 am for god knows what reason, but I was tired AF but of course had to get up anyway, so I did. Got to work to find a mostly abandoned office, which isn't terribly rare, a lot of people will take Friday off or do field work and not come into the office. It was mostly just me and jail phone calls, lucky me. I finished them, though it took most of the day. My total notes from there were a total of 41 pages, although I was kind and highlighted the best parts for the lawyer I was doing it for. I did find what you'd probably consider to be the "smoking gun", of course it was all the way at the end, but he basically said in no uncertain terms that he doesn't plan on ending their romantic relationship and just moved out to supposedly get their kids back, which is pretty much what we needed to prove they lied their asses off to the court when they said they split up (we knew they were lying, we just needed the proof) so at least there was some payoff for listening to all that craziness. I looked through about 530 pages of medical records and flagged important stuff for a case where the baby was born PCP-exposed, but they ultimately didn't take protective custody until an entire year later (they've been doing intact services for a lot of drug-exposed baby cases, depending on the drug anyway) so that was interesting, kind of, but mostly just boring. I did find out that on that TC I sat in on a while back with the newborn and the mom who had a ton of kids in the system but somehow managed to have a child with a decent guy with no system record and the baby got returned home to him under an OP, apparently one of our interviewers went out to see him at 8 am and mom was over "visiting," which of course means she was really sleeping there, which she's not allowed to do under the terms of the OP, so we'll see what happens with that. It's the same family as the child and family team meeting I listened in on the other day for an older brother. I also did a follow up call for the kid I interviewed back in May before he was released from the juvenile detention center, he's now living with his aunt in Texas, and it was a much more pleasant phone call than the one made from juvie, lol, I joked around with him a bit and he was even like "oh yeah everything's good, except I just picked up a capital murder charge" and I was like WHAT and then he was like "nah I'm just kidding" haha (of course in the back of my head I was thinking he can't be serious because he'd never be home if he was charged with capital murder, so I remained a perfectly calm tone, lol). But that was good, I wrote down what he needs DCFS to do and said we'd get them followed up for him, and yeah the whole thing just made me happy. Then I tried to call his caseworker to follow up on getting him a Texas medical card, but ended up going in circles of voicemails and I eventually left one on someone's machine but I'm not at all confident it was the right persons (oh well). And I left more messages on the machines of the people I've been leaving messages on the machines of for 3 weeks now with zero call backs, but I always green sheet that shit so there's a record of us doing our jobs. Other details, I was fairly open about it being my last day and talked to a few people about it. I tried to stop by my friend from my first semester there's office and my supervisor from last semester's office to say goodbye, but neither was there unfortunately. I can talk to my friend on Facebook at least. I did chat with the receptionist/paralegal/idk what his actual job is but he's "support staff" guy I've been low key flirting with all summer and we traded numbers to "stay in contact" whatever that's supposed to mean. We mostly just joked around because it was something to do, but he's kind of cute so hey you never know. And yeah, I didn't end up getting out of the office until like 5:20 because I was trying to get everything put in its right place, but I think I was successful so that's good at least. Took the bus home and actually made quite good time, made it home by 6:30, which made me think maybe it's jus the 5:14 bus that hits such awful traffic and doesn't get me home till 6:45. Interesting. Not that it matters now that I don't work there anymore. For now, anyway. Feeling fairly ambivalent about the fact that I'm done there, probably largely due to the fact that I've been rather miserable this summer and while it wasn't due to this job it definitely played into it. It's not easy work, you know? It's hard and heartbreaking and don't get me wrong I love it, but it definitely didn't help how absolutely burned out I feel, which scares the shit out of me because what if I always feel this way?? What am I supposed to do with my life then?? Sigh. I just don't know. I did used to really enjoy working there, though, and I'll miss that I guess. I did finally talk to my psychiatrist, he didn't do anything for now but wants me to call him on Monday since I'll be with my family by then and he'll probably adjust some things, so that's....idk. It happened. I got home and was generally exhausted so I did nothing for a while and watched Superman, then eventually did laundry and packed, which took longer than I would've liked getting all the little things together to go on vacation for two weeks but I'm confident I have everything and didn't forget anything major (like my medication!) this time. And yeah, now I'm here and I already said I was exhausted and then wrote this entire long post because apparently I had a lot to say anyway and I have to wake up in 5 hours and get on a plane and I'm not terribly pleased about that but oh well. I can always sleep in the car? I guess. We'll see. Anyway. Sleep now, hopefully anyway. I didn't take any zzzquil but like I said, I'm fucking exhausted and I really shouldn't need it. In theory, anyway. Goodnight dolls. Happy weekend.