Coffee heat rising

Angst

How Is It Possible? Another Day from Hell!

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The past four or five days, I’ve been enjoying yet another goddamn health quirk: sudden stabs of agonizing pain in the eye, as though someone were pushing a needle through the backside of my left eyeball.

This has happened before, but in the past it’s only occurred once and then it’s gone away. This time, it’s not going away. And, as usual, a visit to the Hypochodriac’s Treasure Chest that is the Internet induces raw panic. Raw panic does nothing for one’s sense of well-being.

Awake at 1 in the morning, after a pre-bedtime jolt that felt like my eyeball was about to rupture. Whiled away the wee hours editing some pretty damned awful copy. Went back to bed around 4:00 forgetting to set the alarm clock so I could get out the door by 6:45. Slept until well after dawn.

And so missed my 7:30 meeting. And, interestingly, for a change there was a reason I was supposed to show up.

Got Young Dr. Kildare’s front office staff on the phone at 25 after 8:00. They suggested I should present myself to YDK at 9:00 a.m. sharp.

He observed that there wasn’t a thing  he could do about it. I needed to be seen by an ophthalmologist. I said I’d tried, but the earliest I could get in is a week from tomorrow. He said that would never do. I needed to be seen right now. He ordered his front office staff to find a practitioner and run interference with his or her front office staff.

They got me in to a doctor located in one of the city’s darkest slums, at 1:00 p.m.

My class runs from noon to 1:15. Said slum is a 40-minute drive from Heavenly Gardens Community College. I fly into campus, planning to dismiss class with a list of things to study for the Phaque Phinal.

I don’t bargain on Ms. Grandmère showing up with a gallon of milk and two packages of cooked-up mix brownies.

Nor do I bargain on today’s batshit craziness.

I appoint Ms. Grandmère as my unofficial substitute teacher and say “If anyone comes in here, tell them you’re the instructor.”

She says, “But I was a college dropout!”

I say, “That’s OK. I was a high-school dropout.”

The party is under way as I shoot out the door.

Run to my car, rocket across the freeway, navigate one of the scariest parts of the inner city, find said doc’s office. I’ve brought my laptop with me, because I have a rush editorial job to do, one that will pay decently, and I just know this last minute cram-me-into-the-schedule business is going to mean I get to cool my heels in the waiting room forever and aye.

When I get there, I turn on my computer and…wait. And wait. And wait. It won’t boot up. Mentally, I try to guess how much this apparent crash is going to cost me, right at the moment at which I decide to quit my job.

(As it develops, the thing was trying to download some new “critical” goddamn Microsoft updates — WHAT IS IT WITH THESE GUYS THAT THEY CAN’T GET THEIR SOFTWARE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME AROUND? — and because it couldn’t access a wireless connection, it hung. So I guess one thing, count it, (1), didn’t go totally wrong today.)

Finally I get in to see the doc. He’s an old guy, gringo but to my delight fluent in Spanish and not the least bit afraid of bureaucratic rules forbidding discussion of health-care issues in the native language of “illegals.” I like him, though I question his skills as an up-to-date diagnostician.

He decides I suffer from episcleritis and keratitis and recommends, in addition to four daily doses of prednisone drops, a hefty round of Motrin. I point out that in the ton of paperwork they made me fill out is mention of my allergy to the active ingredient in Motrin. He is dismayed to learn I am allergic to NSAIDs in general, since that is the mainstay of what he regards as the treatment for whatever I have.

By the time I escape his office, it’s two p.m. and I’ve had nothing to eat all day. I’m hungry. I take the Rx for prednisone and head for the pharmacy at my favorite Safeway, figuring I can pick up some food and a couple of foamydelicious canned beers to ease my general angst.

At the Safeway pharmacy, I encounter not a pharmacist but an assistant whose backwoods English is so illiterate as to draw notice, even here in lovely inland Arizona. After making me stand in line and then making me stand around some more while she figures out who I am and how to serve me, she announces that the pharmacist is on break and I should come back later this afternoon for the eye drops. I say I am tired, hungry, and in pain, that I have no intention of waiting half the day to get some prednisone eyedrops that no doubt are sitting on their shelves, that I can’t see to drive anyway, and that I want the prescription back so I can take it to the Walgreen’s across the street.

I practically have to throw her down on the floor and wrest the prescription from her fat, sweaty fist to get it back from  her.

Having achieved this, I proceed across the street, where the pharmacist forks over the eyedrops in about 30 seconds.

Starved, I stick some frozen sweet-potato fries in the oven and defrost a tiny piece of steak to throw on the grill. The steak is freezer-burned. Defrost another tiny piece from a newer package; cook both so as to feed the substandard piece to the dog. Phone rings. SDXB. Can’t make him understand that as soon as I’m finished eating and drinking myself into a well deserved stupor, I’m going to bed.  He keeps saying he’ll call me back after I have time to eat.

Administer prednisone, which requires lying down with eyes closed, while listening to SDXB talk. Get off the phone. Fix breakfast/lunch/dinner; overcook steak. Pained eye is so dilated it looks like the eye of an excited cat at midnight. Can barely see through it.

Decide to STET the appointment with the other eye quack on the 14th, since I suspect the old guy gave me a cursory look and had no clue what he was talking about but instead made a quick guess — particularly since I have exactly zero symptoms of keratitis and because he speculated the thing was some sort of allergic reaction, a theory that makes little or no sense. If there’s an improvement over the next day or two, bueno, I’ll cancel. But if not, at least I’ve got a foot in another door.

Never did get to take a nap. It’s almost 6:00 p.m. If I go to sleep now, which I desperately want to do, I’ll be awake at 10 p.m. and that will be that. Dog  hasn’t had her evening feast, anyway. Eyes hurt.

Entire day has shattered into tiny shards like a wine glass dropped on the kitchen floor. I have gotten NOT ONE THING done.

One of Those Days…

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Started at 4:00 a.m. Bathed, painted, dressed, answered emails. Read copy for an hour. Got tired of that around 5:30.

Hungry. Had a breakfast meeting this morning, but a) I wasn’t even supposed to leave the house for another hour and 15 minutes and b) I had to give the dog & pony show for this morning’s chivaree and so would bolt down a pressured restaurant meal around that. Decided to fix my own food and just have coffee at the shindig.

Howcum what used to take minutes now takes half a lifetime? Feeding the dog & then fixing a meal and eating it occupied the hour & something. Late as usual racing out the door.

Hideous traffic. Took 45 minutes to make the 20-minute drive to the Scottsdale meeting. But everyone else was running late, too, thank goodness.

Delivered a half-baked presentation.

Was reminded by a client, who also belongs to this group, that I haven’t done his project yet. He handed me more stuff in a large manila envelope.

I just realized, as I’m sitting here, I think I walked out of the restaurant without it. Shit.

Forgot my checkbook so couldn’t pay this month’s dues. One of the guys was collecting for popcorn, holiday fund-raising for some charity he supports. Couldn’t pay for that, either.

President wanted to know who’s slated to present next week. Would I e-mail him when I get home with the list of the next few weeks’ speakers. “Okay,” I said. Make a note:

• send check for dues
• send check for flicking inedible popcorn
• feed popcorn to students
• email Marshall with next month’s speakers.

Just called the restaurant. They close at 2:30 p.m. Whaaa???? What kind of chain freaking restaurant closes at 2:30 in the freaking afternoon????

Got home. Hungry. Had to eat something more than a snack before doing battle with noon class. Defrosted a small steak and threw some frozen hash browns into a puddle of hot grease while grilling meat over propane. Reheated tea in microwave. Good. Highly satisfactory. Left dirty dishes all over kitchen.

Changed clothes. Raced to campus.

Finished listening to 101 students explain exactly what it is they think they’re going to do in their respective papers. A week ago they were asked to brainstorm ideas for their paper, select an idea that looked feasible, and turn in a note describing that. These reside in my car, because I don’t grade them and have had neither time nor inclination to look at them.

Not one but two students asked me to find their note on their final paper, a stage of which was due at 5:00 p.m. today, because — get this — they could not remember what they thought they were going to write about. So the little twits accompanied me out to my rolling office in the parking lot, thereby to remind themselves of whatever it was they imagined would be the subject of their final flicking paper, which is now due in less than a week.

WTF?

Home again, searched for the calendar with the business group’s presentation dates on it. Couldn’t find it.

Shoveled out the mound of papers that’s duned up on the closet shelves. Threw out a lot of old student papers. Found no calendar.

Rifled through the drawers, searched the car, tossed the mounds of papers on the desk. No calendar. Dug through the file drawers. Found the hanging file for the bidness group; found a calendar: out of date. Wrong calendar.

Edited copy for several more hours.

Fielded a call from financial adviser. Reported that I’d just lost a regular client; doesn’t pay much but I may have to make up the lost editing income with a larger than planned drawdown. He advised that this would be an extraordinarily bad idea. Set up meeting for next week.

Prepared and sent copy to clients; sent bill. Updated billing spreadsheet. Sent a late notice to another client. Figure to see that money about the time I see the lost calendar.

Knocked off around 6:00 p.m.

Fed the dog. Returned call to SDXB while emptying dishwasher and piling more dishes into it. No answer.

Took dog for walk. Beautiful evening, a big fat harvest moon rising up in creamy glory behind a veil of backlit clouds against a black velvet sky.

Followed up the feeder street by two shady-looking males evidently drifting in from the slums across the main drag. Gave them the slip — not a bad trick for an old bat with a small, stubborn dog in tow. Shot up a neighborhood street, running on extremely sore foot, into the light from Pretty Daughter’s garage, where her son was working on a car.

Got mail on the way up the front driveway. Found not one but two notices from the police, still being misdelivered to Manny’s house. {groan!} What NOW?

Remembered M’hijito set a lot of the debris that accumulates on the van’s front seat into a back seat so he could ride somewhere with me the other day. Check back of car. Find calendar.

E-mail Marshall that we don’t have anyone scheduled to speak after this week and so we’ll need to recruit a presenter for next week and then get the rest of the members to sign up for meetings through next month.

Open mail from cops. Interesting. It’s not about Mr. Mejia, the perp who’s allegedly in the slam over the late, great armed robbery. They just arrested another one of these creeps (you may recall that the original heist was pulled off by three accomplices), a Matthew Jason Avery. This is the guy, it appears, that the SWAT team caught in my garage. Mejia may still be in the slam, but this one was not, at least not as of November 25. That’s when they hauled him back to the jailhouse, charged with kidnap, assault and battery, and second-degree burglary.

The latter would be for the theft of my valuable used clothing, gardening hat, and muddy clodhoppers, to use as his lawn-man disguise.

So, you realize what this means?

Well, it means a number of things.

a) Mr. Mejia, the character to whose trial I was summoned, is not the one about which I have anything to say.
b) Mr. Avery is. Therefore, I will also be summoned to his trial.
c) Therefore, it’s not altogether outside the realm of possibility that I could end up testifying at the trials of two of these sh!theads.
d) And while Mr. Mejia may be unavoidably detained in the slam, Mr. Avery has been out on the street. And he knows where I live.

Charming. Here’s what he looks like. Isn’t he a sweetie?

Tomorrow I’m committed to spending the entire day at the Tempe street fair with KJG. Therefore I will not be able to burn a quarter-tank of gas tomorrow a.m. driving to the Scottsdale restaurant to pick up the package my client gave me, assuming they found it and haven’t thrown it out.

That means I get to spend Saturday morning traipsing out there. Assuming they found it and (etc.).

Eight-thirty at night. Phone just rang. The “Attention Power Company Customers” robo-bastard. God, how I’d like to get my hands on the perpetrators of that nuisance scam.

My foot hurts.

 

Freedom Remorse? Short-Timer’s Syndrome and Second Thoughts

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Only about two weeks left in this semester, thank God. That’s five more meetings of each class, and two weeks of interaction with the apparently comatose magazine-writing students. I’m going to be so, so glad to be free of ever having to teach freshman comp again (…i hope). You ain’t seen short-timer’s syndrome until you’ve come to the end of a semester of wrangling freshmen. But as you can imagine, I’ve had predictable second thoughts about walking away from my only steady source of earned income. Well…sporadically steady.

Oddly, though, I haven’t felt as jittery about it as I’d expected. The truth is, over the past few months, I’ve pretty much stopped obsessing about money. Once or twice a month, I go into Quickbooks to log my credit-card charges and the very few checks I write, and that’s about the last of think of it. I expect it’s because living on $26,820 a year, net Social Security and teaching pay, has demonstrated that I really can live on very little money. And my gross annual teaching pay is only about 3 percent of retirement savings. So the truth is, even in the unlikely event that The Copyeditor’s Desk never makes another dime, there’s plenty for me to live on. Modestly, but adequately.

Too, the little revelation that came to me earlier this year, when ex-DH underwent quadruple bypass surgery at about the same time a Mayo doctor was speculating that I had a gastric cancer, has made me care a great deal more about enjoying life and a great deal less about pinching pennies.

In the Insight! department, another little revelation occurred to me this morning. A lovely person purchased the latest of those pretty necklaces I cooked up, and so I set to constructing a third one. It takes about three hours to arrange and string those tiny little beads into a 40-inch “lariat.” That’s exclusive of running around the city in search of the beads, of course.

So let’s say I manage to net $90 on a sale (that would be extremely good, but it could be done if one were making enough of them to buy the parts wholesale). You realize, that’s $30 an hour: exactly what I earned at the Great Desert University when I worked there full-time in a managerial position. Exclusive of the two hours a day, ten hours a week, of commute time.

Yes. I can earn as much as a Ph.D. in an administrative job informed by 15 years of academic experience, 10 years of journalistic experience, and 25 concurrent years of editorial experience…by stringing beads.

{Sumbiche!}

Several small changes will help as things get tighter, if in fact they do get tighter.

Not buying gas to drive from pillar to post four days a week. This month I spent two hundred forty-eight dollars and seventy-eight cents on gasoline!!!  That’s $90 more than in August, when I wasn’t driving to campus.

Not paying the Underlings to provide teaching assistance.

Not passing by an upscale Costco outlet on the way home from campus.

Then there’s the turkey roasting on the grill for Cassie the Corgi, as we scribble. Safeway was peddling the things for 79 cents a pound. It certainly isn’t premium meat — it’s pumped full of saline solution and chemicals — but last year when I got one for her, the meat wasn’t inedible. She can’t tell the difference, anyway, and the meat from one of the things will keep her in food for a good month.

To make things better, one of my friends on the choir qualified for Safeway’s turkey giveaway. They foisted it on her even as she protested that she had no use for yet another turkey. She was trying to find a home for it, and I talked her into giving it to me. That will provide at least two, maybe three months of meat for Cassie.

Meat has become so expensive I no longer can buy  hamburger for Cassie, and the Safeway has stopped putting cheap cuts of beef on sale at affordable prices. Since about half of her diet consists of animal protein (and it probably should be more than that), the cost of feeding her has gone way up. For the short-term future, then, the meat from two fourteen-pound turkeys represents a significant savings.

So, I don’t seriously think things are going to get any worse, financially, than they are. Barring a miracle, they won’t get any better. But with the money situation already about as bad as it’s ever likely to get, I don’t believe I have much to fear.

Summoned by Sheriff Joe

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Sonovabitch! The late, great garage invasion is about to cost me even more money and stress. Comes a summons in the mail from the sheriff’s office: my presence is requested (nay, demanded) at a trial for the sh!thead who caused all that flap.

Over the summer I drew down my survival savings by about $7,000 to install new Arcadia doors that actually latch (two of the old ones couldn’t be latched at all), replace the last of the windows that could be opened simply by pulling off a length of rubber weatherstripping, install a new security door in back, and install (expensive!!!) hardened locks on all three security doors. This seriously impoverished me, requiring me to spend money that should have supported me for the better part of another year and making it impossible for me to to replace my 13-year-old car anytime in the near future (or, more likely, ever).

The summons is for the 20th, a Tuesday. That means I’ll miss the noon class on that day, and very probably this trial will go several days: I may miss class on Wednesday and maybe even more than that. You have to sit there in the courtroom until they call you and until the judge decides you can be dismissed.

I do not get paid if I’m not in class. So unless I can quietly put someone up to standing in for me, I’m going to get screwed royally here. And, given my plan to quit teaching at the end of this semester, I really can’t afford to do without several days of pay.

Just to complicate matters, I donated money to the church during the silent auction, which obviously I should not have done. And during a recent art studio tour, I purchased an interesting necklace, first because I wanted it and second because I realized that if I could study it closely, I could create something similar and sell the things myself. Neither of these was radically costly in the large scheme of things, but taken together they drained this month’s budget. If several hundred dollars of income are sucked out of said budget, I won’t have enough to make ends meet either this month or next.

Nothing gets your attention like a summons from Joe Arpaio. It’s like getting a summons from the Gestapo or the KGB…this is a cynical and irrational fellow. So add that little jolt to the stress of wondering how I’m going to eat and pay the bills.

It is, however, as nothing compared to the content of this subpoena.

As the “victim,” my address is not published in the public record, as if our boy and his pals don’t know where I live…

They’re charging the perp with armed robbery, kidnapping, and aggravated assault.

This represents a real problem.

In the first place, the guy did not kidnap me and did not assault me. He never got close enough to see me, much less lay his hands on my dainty little person. The cops told me that where the garage invasion was concerned, they were going to charge him with criminal trespass and burglary—the latter because he grabbed a shirt, a tattered old sun hat, and a pair of muddy clodhoppers to create his disguise as a gardener. So this means either they’ve trumped up the charges (not at all unlikely in the Arpaio regime) or that he actually did grab and attack someone.

And in the second place, as a witness, I’m instructed to call the “Gang Bureau” on the 19th to confirm that the trial is actually on for the following morning. Charming.

Pretty clearly this character is a dangerous thug of long standing. Not only that, but pretty clearly he’s a member of a violent gang. That means that showing up in court and testifying against him could put me at serious risk, not just from him but from his pals. And that risk may not only be immediate, it may be long-standing, as these guys take their time waiting for an opportunity to inflict revenge on me.

There’s no way I’m going to testify on phony charges, no matter how richly the guy deserves to be taken off the streets. So if the charges of kidnapping and aggravated assault stem from his adventures in my garage, we’re looking at a huge waste of everyone’s time and about $500 that I will lose for nothing.

If, however, the charges had to do with the armed robbery of the pawn shop he and his pals stuck up or with some other caper, then these gents truly are dangerous and could do me some serious harm.

Hm. Come to think of it… This casts a different light on a wacky little incident that took place a couple of nights ago. The doorbell at the front gate rang, after dark. Cassie went batshit. Looked out the front window and couldn’t see anyone, and the motion-sensitive light was off. A few minutes later it rang again: still no sign of a person out there.

The kids across the street at Pretty Daughter’s house were banging around across the street; she also has one of these battery-operated doorbells. I installed mine because Satan or an even more previous homeowner removed the hard-wired doorbell to the house. I had to jimmy it because hers rang on the same preset frequency, causing mine to go off every time any of her many relatives and friends would show up at her door. So I thought she must have adjusted the settings on hers and one of the kids’ friends rang it.

But later when I took the dog for a walk I realized you can walk right up to the gate and not turn that light on—I actually had to enter the gate before the motion sensor kicked on last night. However, the gate was hanging open when I went out…you’d think if someone had entered the gate, it would have turned on the light. If you were careful and savvy, you could, suppose, approach the gate without triggering the motion sensor by keeping your head way down.

A common strategy for burglars and home invaders around here is to ring your doorbell either to see if you’re home or to try to get you to open the door so they can push their way in. Usually they unscrew the lightbulbs in motion-sensitive lights around the doors, so that you can’t see them. But my light bulbs were in place and intact.

It’s mighty unlikely that Pretty Daughter has installed a new battery-run doorbell and, for unknown and highly unlikely reasons, fiddled with it in exactly the same way I’ve fiddled with mine. She’d have no reason to do so, and it would be a pretty weird coincidence if she flipped the same set of switches in the same order that I’ve flipped mine.

I don’t open my door to strangers. But there’s nothing to stop a vindictive sh!thead from shooting you through the door. Or through the window. Or, with the kind of arms gang members carry, right through your block wall. Or from throwing a pop bottle full of gasoline through your window.

So. This episode not only is going to cost me still more money, it may put me at some risk and certainly is going to cause additional worry. And cause me to revisit the question of whether I should sell this house and move.

Why?

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Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer. . .

William Shakespeare
Richard III, Act I, Scene 1.

Alone this afternoon I stood in the empty classroom amid the thoughtfully designed seating, sunshine flowing through the ceiling-high windows, and I wondered: Why do I hate teaching? Am I making a neurosis of this? Or is there some reason I should hate what I’m doing so passionately? And if so, do I exaggerate that reason?

It wasn’t always thus.

Although I will say I’ve disliked teaching freshman comp since the first day I set foot in a roomful of sullen nineteen-year-olds as unhappy then as their children are now at being forced to take a hoop-jump course, nevertheless after I went to work at the Great Desert University’s west campus, I enjoyed teaching.

But then, our typical student was quite a different creature. When I started at West, it was an upper-division and graduate-level campus. The average student was a 32-year-old woman.

Teaching was great for six or eight years. You could even go so far as to say I loved my  job. Working with adult students was a joy, and I never taught composition. I taught upper-division courses in workplace, technical, and scholarly writing and advanced courses in editing. Pay was comparable to that of tenure-track people with the same number of years on the job, but because the full-time job was nontenurable, I didn’t have to worry about publishing (not that it mattered: my book was already published; had they seen fit to  hire me on the tenure track, I would have achieved tenure quickly) and when it came to academic politics, I could keep my head below the line of fire. This was good. Very, very good.

But then morale on the campus began to sag. Tenured and tenure-track people felt the effect of President Michael Crow‘s hostility to the Westside campus, which he regarded as a red-headed stepchild. Things became so bad that our department fractured in two. During one memorable faculty meeting, our chair and the instigator of the palace revolt almost came to blows; the only thing that kept them from physically engaging was two rows of tables that had been pushed together to form a barricade between them.

As things political went from bad to worse, the Crow administration decided to convert West into a four-year campus, despite the fact that we didn’t have enough faculty to handle an influx of lower-division students and that the several two-year community colleges that fed our campus opposed it.

Suddenly, everyone had to teach freshmen, trained in rhet-comp or no.

Certainly the faculty who had no rhet-comp training were abhorred by the idea. And those of us who were trained in rhetoric and composition were equally disgusted: if we’d wanted to teach composition, we would have sought jobs in the junior colleges or gone after teaching certificates and taken (better paying!) jobs as high-school teachers. If most lower-division students intuit that freshman composition is a fraudulent waste of time, Research One faculty know it is.

At about this time, I started looking for another job. I applied for three openings with the community colleges, figuring if I had to teach composition, I might as well be paid decently for it (starting pay for me would have been about 15 or 20 grand more than I earned at GDU West). One job was made for me, and I had contacts there who were pushing for me; however, an internal political conflict over whether the candidate had to be a person of color led to the position being taken off the market. Another job was promising but they called and asked me to create an elaborate PowerPoint dog and pony show just as final grades for four sections were coming due; overwhelmed with work, I simply couldn’t get it done. I applied in the business world, coming close to landing a corporate training job for an outfit that later proved to be even more fraudulent than the freshman comp scheme.

As the psychological and political clouds filled the sky over the West campus, I came to dislike my job more and more. Like everyone else in the department, I went to campus to meet my classes and, if forced to it, for the occasional departmental meeting; otherwise office hours were “TBA” and I stayed away as much as possible.

Despair was setting in when an opportunity arose to build and direct an editorial office at the main campus. Here, too, I had spies, and this time they served me well.

This was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. It was great.

Or…it was until, university-wide, steadily collapsing morale took its toll on the main campus, too. My main supporter retired early and fled the state. Her mentor and my office’s most powerful supporter fell ill with cancer and died. The administration’s ham-handed leadership and obsession with corporatizing the university devastated the faculty, shot tuition rates through the stratosphere, and set the stage for disaster.

Meanwhile, the economy was flying high. As I became increasingly dissatisfied with GDU as a place of employment, I conceived the idea that it wasn’t teaching I disliked: it was working. Period. With a phantasmagoric net worth of over a million dollars, I  considered simply quitting. When word got out that I was serious about walking, some issues that had to do with administration of my office were magically resolved from on high.

So I stayed, none too happily but nevertheless wisely, until the collapse of the Bush economy and a rabidly right-wing legislature openly hostile to education devastated the university. Funding dissolved and the administration was forced to can many hundreds of employees, among them me and all five of my staff.

As legislative madness targeted education and funding evaporated, the administration fired thousands, including me and all my staff. On the one hand, I really couldn’t afford to “retire” eight years ahead of schedule. But on the other, my joy at leaving was an ill-concealed secret. In a matter of months, I went from being financially comfortable to wondering whether I could afford to stay in my paid-off home, with no hope of ever seeing fiscal “comfort” again, as long as I live.

Do I really hate teaching? I wondered as I stared at the ten-feet-high and fifteen-feet-wide map of the world glued to the wall of the empty classroom. Maybe what I hate is working. Or, I thought, maybe I exaggerate this stuff with all the negative self-talk, which naturally is exacerbated by writing it into blog posts.

Maybe.

But maybe not. We have, for example, today, a bitch of a day crowning a string of days that made up a bitch. of. a. week.

No. I don’t think I’m aggravating myself into an irrational neurosis. It may very well be true that I hate working. But of all the kinds of work I’ve done in my life, academic and otherwise, I hate teaching freshman comp more than any of them. I hate putting up with this kind of garbage. And even though the chair was highly supportive when I described today’s Eng. 101 antic and said I figured the girl was laying groundwork to come back and beg me to let her turn in a paper two and a half weeks late; even though he urged me to refuse any such request, I hate dorking around with anything that is so stupid, so time-wasting, and so pointless.

I truly do hate teaching freshman composition on an adjunct basis, as I think anyone with a shred of self-respect and a particle of sanity would hate it.

And I’m so glad I’m not going to have to put up with it after December 13. Assuming I live that long.

Ever so much better to take up residence under the Seventh Avenue overpass.

Image: Portrait of Richard III of England, painted c. 1520, after a lost original, for the Paston family, now owned by the Society of Antiquaries, London. Public domain.

Dressed, Stressed, and Messed!

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Messed up, that is. Why is it that after you’ve been overworking your idiot self for way, way too many weeks on end, when you finally get a few days of peace and quiet, you feel nervous, edgy, and…well, stressed?

Last week I arrived at a point where at last, for the first time in longer than I can remember, nothing remained that had to be done right now, if not sooner. Yes, there are a few things I should’ve done before this. I’m getting to them one at a time, slowly. But for a change, there’s no hurry and nothing that’s going to make us or break us hangs on any of these few bits and pieces of ditz.

You’d think this would lead one to unwind and unlax, right?

Well, no.

For the past few days I’ve been having heart palpitations (no joke! sounds just like a neurotic old lady, doesn’t it?), headaches, and even migraine auras. Damn! Dragged in to see Young Dr. Kildare this morning, because the nonstop pitter-pat of my little heart won’t quit.

He thinks it’s Return of the Anxiety Attack, but that theory notwithstanding, he’s sending me to a cardiologist to be jumped through all sorts of hoops, and he wants to test for kidney and liver issues.

I don’t know: as a practical matter, this doesn’t feel like the anxiety attack that sent me to the Mayo’s ER thinking I was having a heart attack. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m going to faint or cause such extreme lightheadedness that I can’t drive. And it doesn’t come and go. The monster anxiety attacks came and went suddenly. This doesn’t stop, or at least not for any length of time. Yesterday I woke up with it and went to bed with it. This morning I felt OK till I had to leave for class (hmmm…). It’s after four and the sense that my heart is beating too fast that started around 6:45 a.m. continues unabated.

Oh well. It hasn’t kilt me yet. Maybe it won’t. Or, with any luck at all, maybe it will. 😉

So…what could be making me feel soooooo stressed that it’s giving me phantom cardiac symptoms?

High on the list of possibilities: Extremely drawn-out short-timer’s syndrome. I told my honored chair that I wished to quit teaching composition what…two, three weeks ago? Sometime in the foggy past. Another eight weeks remain in the semester. It feels like forfuckinEVER to me.

Probably, too, dwelling on the ludicrousness of one’s job and how much one hates it is not good for one’s mental health. Possibly I should try not to think about the joys of teaching.

I must say, though, that I’ve managed to extract some pretty good blog posts from it. 😀 Matter of fact, I’m thinking I’ll make an e-book of Adjunctorium’s count-down to freedom. Try to peddle it through that guy who has the big Spreadsheet in the Sky documenting exactly how scandalously adjunct faculty are paid and treated.

Next on the neurosis list: money. The usual. Money.

I do not know why the prospect of starving to death under the Seventh Avenue overpass freaks me out. But it does.

As a practical matter, just this month I’ve billed enough to cover the first quarter of The Copyeditor’s Desk’s contribution to my 2013 upkeep. And as a practical matter, even if CEDesk earns not. one. more. penny this year and next, it has enough in its bank account to support me for a year.

If in fact the business continues at this rate (maybe it’s this quiet spell that makes me nervous?), one month can pay for a quarter’s drawdown and the other two will pay for overhead. But as yet another practical matter, the quarterly budget includes a monthly set-aside for major expenses like computer and printer hardware; pay for subcontractors comes out of the earnings they bring in…and the rest of it is small change.

I don’t know why it’s nervous-making…it just is.

Well. Possibly it’s that there’s no other source of income, absent the hated teaching job, that credibly can keep the wolf from the door.

What else?

I hurt. I’m tired of being sick. Very tired of being sick.

The other day I realized I’ve been sick nonstop for a full year. It started last fall when I took that accursed double-whammy flu shot, which brought on the respiratory infection that led to the horrible bronchitis, which the pulmonologist treated with antibiotics and Prednisone, which led to the bellyache that lasted for months on end, and then I did the job on my back and leg tendons, which led to the sciatica and the plantar fasciitis, neither of which will go away, which led to my drinking two bourbons and waters as I have been writing this, which has not stopped the busy heartbeat but which most certainly has made it a great deal more tolerable.

And so…being duly cocktailed up, to throw a steak on the grill…