i need a place to share this and i have to be careful not to spill the story to too many local friends, as this really is gossip far too juicy for this town.
story time: the pastor and the film curator
so, my boss (aka the film curator) came into this town about 1,5 years ago and was kind of alone with her big ideas and her ~intellectuality~ but this one guy she vibed with quite well: he's the local pastor, not too church-y, former literary scholar, i believe. Likes to sail, has (i have to admit) pretty light grey and very intense but nice eyes. (Is 20+ years her senior but hey ho.) they can talk about films, they can talk about culture, she programmes films he suggests, he does favours like showing off his church to our guests while it's being renovated and no one can normally enter.
yes, they vibed very much. yes, she has a flirty nature and is outrageously charming as well as gorgeous (i did not say that, she's my boss). but he's a married pastor, right?
Then, at the end of last year/ beginning of this year something shifts. It takes me some time (obviously my boss doesn't spill the whole story) to catch up but it's about the pastor's wife. She mad. This is the point where I realise that something miiight have been going on between the two. I will probably never know for sure what happened. But he is not supposed to be in contact with her anymore. there where instances where he didn't took part in meetings (there is an overlap with an event we organised together/ were supposed to organise together) and she was visibly upset. Like close to tears. Which really shocked me in these moments. at the day of the event he 'had to be' out of town for a dogy reason.
One time, he was on vacation on his own and they scheduled a call. She was stressing about it while we where still in the office together. She started the call while leaving and i’ve never heard her voice sound so gentle. Like. There is feelings involved. She also did a radio interview and the radio guy told us that some people requested the recording from the archive–on of them a pastor. He wanted to hear her voice. i cannot.
In two instances, the wife harassed my boss in public. I wasn't present both times but she was physically cornered by her and threw insults at her. pastor knows about both instances. atm, he seems to be retreating from positions where there might be an overlap with our work/ my boss. seems to be 100% doing the wifes bidding.
had to drop all of this here. this takes up way too much of my brain capacity atm. and to some degree i carry my bosses emotional labour (it's just the two of us and in the past months this whole story has been affecting my work too!) which is difficult to navigate if i don't know the full story. at the same time i don't really want to know. and yet i do. In the end, i want what is best for her; which is not an (emotionally) unavailable pastors, it seems.
i already had some rough patches with my boss (i try not to think about the two people leaving bc of her too much) but she is also really good at what she does and i do like her a lot! maybe in a toxic way, i guess. But this job is kind of consuming me, taking up waaay more time than the paid 20 hours/week and also mentally consuming. And today was rough again. Had a tiny breakdown this morning and keep spiralling a lot more than i'm used to. this job really fucked with my self perception as an organised, detail-focused and honestly capable person, lol.
"You could get up early and do it before work" I could also wait for a magic beanstalk to start growing in my living room LMAO. Let's focus on things that happen in the real world
I would say Irish culture is killing it at the moment because we are all a bit traumatised, we have a lot of generational weirdness going on, we have some post-colonial problems, we have a huge housing crisis, the government is a sack of spuds. Also we’re just really funny people who are very creative. It’s really bred into our culture that being creative, being funny, and making the best of a bad situation is the key to survival. We’ve needed to have a lot of survival instincts over the last 800 years, so I think that’s probably why. It’s come into fruition now, but we’ve always been brilliant.
The censored version of super graphic ultra modern girl that plays at my workplace is actually superior because they censor the word “fugly” so Chappell just goes “He was wearing these……. Jeans.” and it sounds way more devastating
