Those pesky blue edges...

A long and tiring day today, full of running between meetings, and never quite catching up with myself. Its a feeling of hanging on to control by the fingernails, and I hope it goes away soon...

This morning we had a management meeting, which I won't blog about, for fear of (A) losing my job, and (B) raising my blood pressure. It only just went down to a safe level, and it's 5.44pm. I had to dash out of that to get to the Dubai Autism Center, where I met Mohamed, one of the "High Flyers" at a regional business/financial center, and discovered that none of the meeting attendees from DAC were actual in the center. Mohamed has impaired vision through some earlier injury or birth issue with his eyes, but that has not affected his mental functionality at all, and we had a lively debate about editorial versus advertorial, and the power of marketing messages when displayed through different medium. We had quite different ideas, and I didn't realize I was being argumentative until he said something along the lines of "I am enjoying you challenging my opinions, Aimee" I guess that people don't tend to challenge him, or really listen to him, as his "High Flyer" status confers an element of untouchability, and the stigma with disability is still ridiculously pervasive in this country. Still, it was interesting to get his viewpoint, as an Emirati working on the inside of one of the big government companies.

The tour of the facility was really interesting, particularly in the children's reactions to Mohamed's appearance. They weren't rude, but stared, and reached for his face. He handled it well. Obviously, the students in some classes were functioning higher on the spectrum than others, but our tour guide obviously knew the children well, and was warmly greeted with hugs from many of them, which was really good to see. I have some personal experience with people on the spectrum, though limited, and generally was happy to see a pretty high ratio of teachers to students (2:4) and activities in all of the classrooms with the children engaged and interested in what they were being shown. I need something like this project in my life, to stop me becoming bitter and twisted and eaten up by corporate bullshit.

Joy of joys that conference calls are. I'm stuck on one at the moment.

Other than that - a busy week ahead. More leaving parties for people departing Dubai, one for Argentina to learn Spanish, which seems dramatic, but I'm seriously jealous. What an amazing opportunity. As it stands at the moment I'm about ready to throw my hat in the ring and follow suit.

Right, enough pessmism and gloom for one day. Fingers crossed the management team accept the DAC proposal and let me do some good in the world, and stop micro-managing my every move, ever increasing my scope of responsibility, while including ever more menial tasks in the list of to-do's. Designed to f**k me off.