Where I am

Content or coasting.
 
Right this minute, I’m at my computer and I want to write an entry just to record a good work week. Trouble is, good weeks are boring to anybody else; I thought about making a private entry for that reason, but it’s not the same somehow. So be bored. 
 
I met with a senior colleague who has given unqualified praise and support to ‘my’ young people’s project. They’re developing a “Safe House Party” resource pack, they raised the funding themselves and have worked with the police, the county drug and alcohol service, a first aid trainer and other professionals. They’ve pulled together some brilliant content and are consulting with a designer on presentation.
 
So that was good. The same group also attended a film screening to present the prizes and awards to the winners of a “Consider the Consequences” (of underage alcohol drinking) short film competition. The films submitted were fantastic – although there were occasions of unreality… somehow watching the actors drinking from empty bottles didn’t really ring true! A couple of them showed young people stealing bottles of booze from home and shops and it was fascinating to see what they got up to and how they avoided getting caught. The young film makers must have drawn from experience….
 
So that was good too. Then another group had a social meal out with the senior management team. Myself and the other youth worker sat separately from the young people and the management (who were busy making awkward conversation and trying to find some middle ground). So we got paid for eating a paid-for posh meal and keeping a vague eye on our young charges – but as they were outnumbered by the management team (aside, why are so many managers necessary in local authorities?), that was really only tokenistic.
 
That was also good. Yesterday, I had to try and sell an induction pack to other workers. Not really sell; not for money. Just get them to accept it. I expected lots of resistance because that is what youth workers do. Resist for the sake of it. But they were surprisingly amenable and I’m hopeful that some of them will trial it for me. I tried to pitch it as asking for their opinions instead of saying, “this is what we’ve got to do and the only flexibility is in how it looks, not what it does.” Fingers crossed I get away with it!
 
So that has the potential to be good and that is much better than I expected. Today, I won an argument. Of course, it wasn’t really an argument; I don’t argue. But I had a different view on something to someone else and my opinion won through. Naturally it did! Mine was the better opinion! It must say something about me (and probably something not very nice) that I got as much satisfaction from this as from any of the other good stuff that went on this week.
 
And… I saved the best ‘til last. Still at work, I got chatted up! By a social worker who understands about the weird hours I work, because he works even weirder ones. It’s a real ego boost to be chatted up.
 
Content and coasting. I’m not actively seeking to change how life is right now and I feel quite content with that. And this leads me on to a question that someone asked me, “What do people mean when they say “Get a life”? Does ‘a life’ need to be exciting or radically different to the norm? Is having ‘a life’ having more good times than bad times? Can you have ‘a life’ if you’re content and coasting as I am at the moment?