Another particularly stressful week in the public sector, as one would certainly expect if you’re paying attention to the news at all (though the DeRP/”Fork” offer is being addressed only tangentially on a lot of mainstream media sources, especially the more right-of-center ones). Still, when uncleared, unelected Techbros and their minions start taking down whole agencies and scraping citizen’s PII from Federal payment systems, such stories are hard to ignore.

Even amongst all the crap, I’ve managed to get myself lost in the work enough to not break down too much these last few days, and I even kind of enjoyed the two day class I did about “Problem Solving and Decision Making in Changing Organizations” early in the week (scheduled months ago), where I got to meet some people in the organization from other areas and disciplines, and share stories, frustrations, and perspectives. I think I made a couple of friends, and we all kind of discovered we have the same issues with organizational culture and are all stressed as hell given the current waves hands around gesturing to, well…everything.

That whole Fork/Deferred Resignation Program/totally-not-a-“buyout” business, which is still so ridiculously vague and illegal as I understand the law (which as someone who spent more than a decade working contracts and finance, I understand more than most people, though IANAL), was supposed to close at 11:59pm on Thursday, though based on the union lawsuit temporarily blocking things, the deadline got pushed out to Monday, after they actually have the hearing.

That the unions and my Senator and all kinds of other reasonable people are challenging it is all good, though to be honest, I’m kind of disappointed it got pushed out, as now we have another weekend to agonize over what fresh hell is next, given that they aren’t getting nearly the level of acceptance of the “once-in-a-lifetime!” offer that they would’ve liked (last I saw was about 50,000 people, less than 3% of the federal workforce). It’s just going to get worse, with terms like RIF being tossed about, threats to summarily fire all the probationary employees, and of course, the current budget resolution expiring in five weeks, after which everyone is expecting a long, protracted shutdown, if for no other reason than to drive more nonpartisan professional public servants out.

If they’re really serious about gutting the public service sector (and like everything else, that goal’s spelled right out in the Project 2025 manifesto), I’d honestly rather they just yank the bandage off and get on with it so can start coming up with concrete plans about what my life’s going to look like going forward rather than all the theoretical scenarios I’m stuck spinning.

But, in the meantime, I’m going to sit here doing the good work fueled by spite, and hoping the outrage crowds out the sense of existential dread.

So that’s where my head’s at; it’s tough to think about anything else, honestly. I mean, I am doing fawm this year, as I always do, and am actually on track so far to finish (even if I haven’t recorded anything), though after knocking out one of the best things I’ve ever written right out of the gate, I’m doubting whether the rest of it’s going be worth pursuing further. I am letting off some steam writing protest songs which is not nothing.

…and speaking of tunes, here’s this week’s baker’s dozen that came out of the streaming algorithms this morning. Admittedly, I did feed it some different suggestions to build from when it kept spitting way too much 70s prog and butt rock (I honestly have no idea where that came from), but some neat stuff (like #3 – highly recommended!) came out of the experiment, and I think I’m going to be going down the rabbit hole on the artist at #13, because I’m really digging it:

1. “Love Is Only A Feeling” – The Darkness
2. “Big Love (live)” – Lindsey Buckingham
3. “Golden State (live)” – Eddie Vedder and Natalie Maines
4. “Showdown At Big Sky” – Robbie Robertson
5. “The Weight (live)” – Mavis Staples (and a ton of other scary talented people I like)
6. “Tuesday’s Gone” – Metallica
7. “Aqualung” – Jethro Tull
8. “Because The Night (live)” – 10,000 Maniacs
9. “Mother Mother” – Tracy Bonham
10. “Red Rain – Peter Gabriel
11. “Abacab” – Genesis
12. “Blue on Black” – Kenny Wayne Shepherd
13. “Sucker” – Chloe Slater