"Do you know what it feels like to be exhausted and energized at the same time?"
Rhetorical question.
I'm into my third week on my new job after three weeks of training. Rather than explain, I'll just throw out random bits from the experience...
"We're going to make you the Group 10 Primary."
"Who are they?"
"Well, they're the group that makes all the therapists quit working here."
"Are you trying to get me to quit?"
"No, but they will. Go work your magic."
"You worked two years with oppositional-defiant teenage females? Are you crazy?"
"Crazy? I also lived with a bipolar suicidal cutter at the same time."
"You might actually be overqualified and I've never said that to anyone."
"Maybe I'm just crazy."
"Everyone who works here is."
"Excuse me. These aren't my underwear. These are someone else's underwear."
"Okay, give me a minute and we'll go get your underwear."
"These are definitely not my underwear. My underwear is Hanes 32. These are boxers, size 46. These are definitely not my underwear."
"Dude, are you Rain Man?"
"What? What's a rain man? I want my underwear. My underwear is Hanes 32."
"Do we have to go to K-Mart in Cincinnati?"
After a night where a non-verbal autistic kid with serious anger issues required me to restrain him seven times, where on different occasions he punched me hard in the junk, punched me hard enough in the nose to make me see stars, and elbowed me in the ribs with enough force to spin me around, the therapist in the group next to me said, as we were walking to our cars at the end of the night...
"Did you get the shit kicked out of you tonight or what?"
A mentally retarded kid asked me to help him write a letter to a female staff member he has a crush on. When I asked him what he wanted to say to her, his first response was...
"I like to think about you when I am in my bed at night and I'm jacking off."
"Dude, women don't like that much honesty."
And, with special note to annola, I have convinced an autistic kid who has refused to eat anything green before coming to our program to eat lettuce and green beans. When we go to the dining room for dinner he actually rushes over to the cook and asks, "I want some lettuce!"
It is more amusing if you knew that he talks in a voice that sounds like a cartoon character.
His mother thinks I'm a miracle worker. She's going to be very disappointed when she meets me on Thursday.
At times it becomes difficult to hold to the belief in the goodness and value of every human being. I did overtime at the group home that houses sex offenders last weekend. The majority of sex offenders are developmentally disabled and unable to reason on their own why what they do is wrong. It falls along the lines of someone seeing a person who gets them aroused and going directly to the impulse to do something about that directly without the usual negotiations that happen between people. The majority of criminals of all colors have this problem, and I could go on about that for hours. Fear drives us to want to punish those who cannot reason the way we do, so on and so forth. Fear is a horrible motivator. It causes us to lose our reasoning skills.
So, there I was, in this group home with an individual who was almost as old as I am and who has a history of molesting and raping young girls and boys. His impulse control is very limited because of what is roughly diagnosed as mental retardation.
And, because I have a lot of experience and exposure to the other side of the coin, dealing with young girls who had been molested and raped by older men, I was very uncomfortable talking to this man. He wanted to talk to me. He wanted to talk to me about music. And so we did. And during this discussion about music, I would redirect him every time he started to talk about something else, which usually took the form of, "I want to get myself a little slice of... pie..." with a look in his eyes that was creepier than anything I've ever seen before, and I've seen a lot.
"There ain't no pie."
"I didn't mean..."
"No, man. There ain't no pie. You might see the pie and you want a slice of that pie, but you can't just get the pie. You have got to talk to the person who has the pie and ask if they want to give you the pie. And what happens when they don't want to give you the pie?"
"There ain't no pie."
"Damn fucking straight man, there ain't no pie." | 
