Coffee heat rising

Angst

Stress Management Redux

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One of this blog’s founding tenets was stress control: Money management hand-in-hand with stress management, as it were. At the time FaM came into being, I was fully employed but tended to obsess over money, constantly worrying about whether there would be enough. And a neighbor situation had led to $10,000 worth of vandalism, probably not optimal for one’s peace of mind.

In retrospect, the money matter looks pretty silly: trying to live on Social Security and adjunct teaching makes the challenge of scraping by on $60,000 look hilarious. But the stress thing? Not so silly.

I made a little discovery a few days ago: Benadryl works a miracle cure on GERD. Why? Because the bellyache evidently correlates directly with stress. And I’ve been enjoying plenty of that, some of it self-inflicted and some not.

Like most old ladies, I don’t sleep well. Older women, and to a lesser extent older men, wake up in the wee hours typically around 4:00 a.m. It’s like an alarm goes off, and you have exactly zero desire to go back to sleep. The solution to the sleep deprivation issue, then, is to go to bed earlier. If you hit the sack at 9:00 p.m., you get the ideal seven hours of snooze time. No matter when you get to sleep, you’re going to wake up at the same time, so if you linger abroad with the younger people, you can expect to pack in many fewer hours of sleep than is good for you.

This works, I guess. Except that lately, I’ve been popping awake earlier. And of course some nights I have so much work that I have to keep at it until 10 or 11 p.m. The other day I woke up at 1:15 a.m., after having gone to bed around 10 o’clock.

After a day of wandering around in a haze of exhaustion, I decided to drop a fake Benadryl, available in army-sized supplies from our favorite purveyor of such goods, Costco. The stuff is counterindicated for the elderly, because it can cause cognitive disfunction, especially when used as a sleeping pill. So ordinarily I resist taking it except for noticeable allergic reactions, and when in extremis. Well, the other day I was unmistakably in extremis after three hours of sleep and a full day of bellyache.

So, consider:

I knock myself into the middle of next week by dropping an antihistamine that reliably puts me into a stupor. I fall into the sack before 10 p.m. and I sleep like the proverbial rock, all the way through until 6:00 a.m. And WTF? When I wake up the next morning, I don’t feel good…I feel great!!!

I’ve been off the omeprazole for a week, with no noticeable difference in the bellyache department. By this point, that drug has pretty well cleared itself out of my system, and the GERD or whatever is no worse, no better. Except that after a full night’s sleep, there’s not so much as a twinge from the gut.

Not only that, but I stay feeling great all day!

Better living through chemicals…

Interesting. What could this mean? If anything?

Reflecting on that question, it dawned on me that the most recent flare-ups—the ones I have some record of, because I’ve been keeping a symptom diary so as to report to the doc’ what’s working and what’s not working—have occurred when I’ve felt very stressed, and that the most recent immediate short-term stresses are overlaid atop some chronic stresses that take the form of long-term pain and long-term unhappiness with the way I’m diddling my life away.

On the day I woke up at 1:15 in the morning for example:

At 1:15 a.m., anticipating another horrid day:

• The pointless class at the impossible hour
• Another confrontation with another idiot student
• A race to Scottsdale to meet a client
• Then another race to north Scottsdale to a Chamber of Commerce meeting.

I hate teaching and I hate driving around this accursed city and I hate trying to find places where I’ve never been. Last CofC meeting took me almost as long to find the damn restaurant as it did to traipse to Scottsdale. One of the projects I’m working on gives me some ethical pause; another is just annoying.

4:00 a.m.

• Have to deal with a failing student
• Have to file 45th-day grades but couldn’t get into the effing system to do so because it’s down in the wee hours
• Have to be up and running by 6 a.m.
• Realize I will net all of $170 for two weeks’ worth of substitute teaching
• HATE HATE HATE my job

 4:00 p.m. Bilious and heartburny while running around. But by the time I get home and unwind, am feeling OK.

Next day:

6:00 a.m. Drugging myself so I’d sleep worked. Awake at 6 and loaf until it’s getting late, and so…

• Have to fly around like a rocket to get out the door in time for my 9:30 appointment in hideous suburban Tempe
• Because of rush-hour no-left-turn rules, have to wend my way through three neighborhoods before I can turn east to reach the freeway.
• Traffic on the freeway exceeds hideous.

Feel OK in the late afternoon…again, after the worst of the running around is over and the back and foot pain subside a bit.

And the next day:

Feeling pretty good despite having been jolted awake at 4:00 a.m. by the alarming sound of shattering glass. No burglar: frame fell off the wall and broke apart with a loud crash. Enjoyed spending half an hour vacuuming up shards of glass and, as long as the damn vacuum was plugged in, vacuuming up a houseful of dog hair.

• Nearly got hit by a semi-truck & trailer as the driver changed lanes when he didn’t see me.
• Traffic on the 10 was horrific. My stomach was tense when I got to the client’s.
• Client is not a native speaker, and there’s a cultural divide. He claimed that he hadn’t asked me to do the large job I performed but only wanted a couple of pages revised. Thus $621 worth of work went out the window.  He gave me a check for $315, about half of what I billed.

I seem to feel stress in my gut. The prospect of having to get back on those gawdawful freeways to drive home elicited a sensation that felt like a squirt of acid in the stomach. Uncomfortable and weird.

§ § §

Felt pretty good for a couple of days after sleeping through the nights. But then had to work late one evening; didn’t notice the time and so had to fix dinner at 9:30. Fell asleep shortly after that: highly ill-advised. Next day was truly miserable, lots of pain and discomfort. Resisted going back on the omeprazole; the following day, that flare-up settled down.

Observing that I seem to feel better late in the afternoon, I realized this is when the things that stress me out the most are past. Also, reviewing the garbage above and much more along the same lines, I could see that in many instances—near-death experiences on the freeway, for example…or just the intense annoyance of dealing with fractious students—an almost immediate reaction occurs in the gut. And that anticipation of an unpleasant day, of which there are altogether too many, seems to coincide with early-morning belly misery.

Where is all this stress coming from? Do I really hate adjunct teaching so much it’s making me sick? It never made me sick before…

§ § §

I went to Young Dr. Kildare early in August. By then I’d been suffering with the bellyache, the backache, and the plantar fasciitis for quite some time. I’d gone to the Mayo about two weeks before deciding to find a doctor that would accepted Medicare for the expensive tests the Mayo doctor proposed and a week or two before that was in the ER a week having chest pain diagnosed as dyspepsia.

Therefore, the cause of the stress can not be this semester’s ridiculous class schedule, because it started long before classes began.

However, I in fact was very stressed throughout the process of applying for the AAME program, and the disappointment and anger engendered by the AAME board’s offensive remarks and turn-down were pretty extreme. It’s reasonable to think that episode might have kicked off this flare-up.

From the AAME fiasco I went directly to the start of this semester, which student-wise and work-wise hasn’t been too bad, except for the frustration and annoyance of having to put in four and a half days of unpaid time in course prep. What has been difficult has been the schedule:

• four days on campus, a commute that consumes gas, doubles my fuel bill, and wastes incalculable amounts of time;
• two days a week having to get there and start the performance at 7:30 in the morning, which I truly hate;
• a third day each week of racing to Scottsdale by 7:15 in the morning;
• two other days a week in which three hours of productive time are ripped out of the middle of my day.

And trying to focus on an organized plan to move The Copyeditor’s Desk into the realm of credible business while dealing with the distractions of running these courses at exceptionally inconvenient hours has been especially annoying and difficult. The effect has been gestalt—I can’t focus on anything long enough to get through a single task in any coherent way.

Right now I have four clients’ projects in hand, and I need to be able to work on those projects without having to drop everything and go entertain a bunch of 19-year-olds for three hours, four times a week. Just thinking about this right now is causing an uncomfortable sensation in the gut!

Add to that my having focused sharply enough on my dislike of teaching composition to make the decision that I will quit teaching at the end of this semester, and the devil take the hindmost. In the first place, contemplating how much you hate something that you have to attend to every day is stressful enough. In the second, we have the question of what will happen when I start to draw down savings to live on. And in the third, we also have the uncertainty of whether CED will earn enough to supplement Social Security and drawdowns to keep me from going broke.

These worries entail some very scary prospects.

In addition, pain is another source of stress on an organism. I’ve been suffering plantar fasciitis and back pain for weeks. More weeks than I can count.

Summarize the stress points:

• Chronic physical pain since last June: back and foot
• Commuting to campus, to meetings, and to Tempe client
• Awaking at 4 in the morning; because of workload, not getting to bed early enough to sleep 7 hours before then
• Therefore, insufficient sleep
• Early morning class and business meetings
• Church’s decision to move senior choir to early service once a month, adding yet another predawn wake-up and early race-around to a week with three pre-existing unpleasantly early race-arounds
• Conflict between class meetings and client work
• Low pay for teaching
• Negative outcome of AAME project
• Conflict between teaching workload and large amount of work required in getting the business on its feet
• Two challenging clients
• Chronic worry about money
• Lack of exercise
• Heartfelt dislike of teaching freshman comp
• Difficult student who had to be dragged to the chair of the department for talking-to
• Because of time conflicts, inability to meet weekly goals no matter how hard I try
• Inability to even clean the damn house because of workload and time conflicts
• Sense that things are only marginally under control—and sometimes out of control—because of heavy workload and time conflicts that make it difficult to handle the work
• Concern about relationship with son; worry about son’s unhappiness and future
• Workman waltz, things that have broken, borer infestation of magnificent tree, and endless large unplanned expenses during the summer when I had almost no income; these have drawn down survival savings to barely enough to last through fourth-quarter 2012.

 Twenty sources of chronic stress???? Holy mackerel! No wonder my stomach hurts!

What am I doing to deal with this?

1. Made decision to quit teaching
2. Made appointment for physical therapy
3. Drugged self to sleep all night – this, unfortunately, cannot continue
4. As weather cools, trying to bicycle when possible
5. Made plan for survival without teaching income

 What else could I do?

• Possibly bow out of early-morning choir.
• Deal with most challenging client issues first and head-on. (Mary Kay Ashe: Always take on the difficult stuff first thing in the morning!)
• Shift some editorial work to Tina.
• Schedule specific blocks of time for e-mail, blogging, and CED work around the periods lost to teaching.
• Try to stop thinking about how much I hate teaching; find something else to think about!
• Get up and leave the computer when I’m not focusing on productive things.

Well. It looks sort of like a plan.

♦ I told the chair this afternoon, just three hours ago, that I would not be back to teach face-to-face sections again. He said keeping the online magazine writing course would be no problem, and even suggested (contrary to what he’s said before) that a fully online comp course might be available. I’d druther not, I expect…but in fact, if I could create a really streamlined comp course that was not bogged down with having to find things to fill 32 ninety-minute class meetings, that might be OK. The online course, once it’s up and running, is really very easy to handle. A little bit of student nuttiness comes through the digital ether, but at tolerable levels. If I didn’t have to physically go out there and kill time…maybe. And it would be that much income that CED wouldn’t have to earn.

On the other hand, maybe not, too…

♦ Yesterday I started physical therapy for the back and foot. The therapist thinks I’m going to entertain myself with stretching exercises six times a day. As you can see, I have tons of time to spare at three therapy sessions a week plus six at-home sessions every day.

♦ I dealt with the most difficult client issue a couple of days ago; haven’t heard back from that one. Need to send him a new bill.

♦ And indeed I did foist a bunch of complicated ditz onto Tina last night. In the overworked department, she was as usual parked in front of her computer.

♦ As for the early morning Sunday services…hm. I hate to cop out of those. In the first place, I like singing in choir, and there are only so many opportunities to do so. And it the second place, it seems kind of lâche: wah! I’m too lazy to get out of the sack at 5 a.m. on Sunday! Since they only happen once a month, there are only three more of them between now and the end of the semester. Can I really not live through three wee-hour wake-ups on Sunday?

Oh well. It’s after 6:00 p.m. I’ve spent too long on this. Gotta go read some copy.

More Days from Hell

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Ugh, ugh, ugh! Will this never stop?

Yesterday:

• Up at 4 am.
• Blood test bright & early: H. pylori or not?
• Noon class, the one that takes a gigantic chunk out of my work day
• Take the disruptive kid by the hand, sit her down in a conference room with my chairman, and tell her how the cow ate the cabbage
• Race to the creative writing class for which I’m substituting: another 2½  hours

The day is done by the time I get home. Between 4 and 6:45 a.m., wrote two blog posts, answered e-mail, responded to blog commenters, put issues on paper for unruly student, hustled a graphic artist friend to do our brochure, watered plants, fed the dog, bolted down a chicken sandwich, and flew out the door. After class: too exhausted to move. Ate dinner, fell into bed.

On the docket today:

• Feed dog; forget watering plants, forget making bed, forget any and all other routine tasks
• 7:30 a.m. class
• Another confrontation: student who hasn’t shown up for 5 of the 10 class meetings turned in a failing paper; expects to be allowed to turn in a paper she didn’t do several weeks ago, asks to be forgiven for all the absences, and thinks she’s going to pass the course.
• Race from that to meeting with client.
• Race from client to Chamber of Commerce meeting
• Race home, try to work
• Choir practice: 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

I won’t get any work done, of course, because I’ll be too tired. I got up at 1:15 a.m.  Worked, spending part of the time trying to decipher nervy bird-brained student’s incomprehensible paper, 3 pages with no paragraph breaks. Went back to bed at 4. I’m now about to be late for class and haven’t even had time to brew a cup of coffee.

Bathtub’s full. Gotta run!

Report from the Ramparts of Hell

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{moan} I think I’m gunna die but that’s not possible because I’ve already died and gone to Hell, which is where I spent the entire accursed day.

Actually, the day started out OK, but it swiftly went downhill. It was a stressful day whose prospect has been causing frissons of NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO IT all week long. Is it possible that stress could influence the bellyache?

Awake at 3 a.m., unable to go back to sleep. Hungry & headachey; ate a piece of cheese & three figs; had coffee. Didn’t want to have an actual breakfast because I had to go to a breakfast meeting as dawn cracked and didn’t want to be rude by refraining from eating.

6:45 a.m.: raced to said meeting. Knew there’d be no chance for lunch and so ordered a blueberry pancake, bacon, & tea. Stomach was already upset when I got there; this didn’t help. Converted burpy to urpy.

The minute the meeting broke up, flew across the city to the new gastroenterologist’s office; made it on time. Conferred with her. Liked her a lot. She agreed with Young Dr. Kildare that I probably don’t have cancer, probably have developed gastric reflux disease, that it’s unlikely to go away soon, and that for the rest of my life I will be taking a drug that saps calcium out of my already osteopenic bones and is known to cause clinical depression. She also agreed that it made reasonable sense to do a noninvasive test for H. pylori, given my history of living in a Third-World country, before moving forward with an endoscopy. In fact, she felt an endoscopy is unnecessary.

She wants to do a blood test. I said the Mayo doc had opined that a positive result for H. pylori proved only that one was once exposed to the pathogen, not that one was presently infected. She begged to differ: if you test positive, she said, it means the microorganism is still resident in your gut. If you have not been treated with several rounds of antibiotics combined with proton pump inhibitors, then you are still infected. Therefore, in the absence of previous treatment for Helicobacter, a positive result means you are infected. She said she would treat me for H. pylori if she could prove I have it. So…that was reassuring.

Out the door. Not enough time to go home between the doctor’s appointment and class.

Trudged up to campus, a 45-minute drive. Stood (on the sore goddamned foot!) in front of a computer terminal passing another 35 minutes until class started. Steered students to computer commons, for librarian’s presentation.

Had to deal with unruly student (again!). Kid is out of control. She is just completely batshit. DAMN it, twelve more goddamn weeks of this??????

Computers went down. Librarian was unable to do her presentation. She filled time talking about life in China, whence she came. Some students interested, some bored stiff. Afterward she wanted to set another date, so now I’ll have to drag them over there again next week. This screws up my carefully orchestrated schedule, but I think I can do it by killing a busywork assignment.

Tina, trying to cope with her usual overload, sends worried e-mail. I finally escape and get home.

 Stomach royally upset and actually hurting by the time I get back to the house. Significant heartburn. Annoying after ten days of feeling pretty good. Very, very annoying.

Gulp down some disgusting generic Gaviscon. Has no discernible effect.

A plagiarized paper surfaces. I give it a 0 and copy the chair; now will have to deal with THAT next week, god effing DAMN it.

Not hungry but decide to try some yogurt with honey, which sometimes is soothing. Feel marginally better, but not much.

 Exhausted. Field some e-mails, stare glassy-eyed at news sites for some indefinite period. After a while, recover enough to continue working on website, hugely updating it, writing new pages. It now looks pretty good.

It’s after 7 p.m. The dog is whining and nagging at me, I’m sort of hungry but afraid to fix much food because I’m afraid it’ll make me sicker. The dog hasn’t been fed and is running out of food. I have no more meat to cook for her and don’t feel even faintly like grinding up veggies for her, either. Have canned dog food but that stuff always gives her the runs. May have to feed it to her, though.

Tomorrow, another doctor’s appointment, lunch with friends, all of which will put me behind even further on the various to-do’s I’ve set up for myself.

Of this week’s to-do’s, I’ve done ten of the twenty projects & tasks I listed. Some of them didn’t get done because the website needed to be updated and improved before moving on to things that would entail posting links at various networking groups’ sites.

Done:

• Joined Local First Arizona.
• Fixed Tina’s CE Desk e-mail.
• Reorganized and rewrote entire website for client.
• Downloaded Google Contacts into Excel; used that to start a database and start preparing a hard-copy address/contacts book for CE Desk.
• Revamped the CE Desk website.
• Started building files for new contract workers.
• Cleaned out space to hold files for the same.
• Compared costs of Business Networking International (BNI), National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO),  & Trustegrity vs. probable marketing value; decided NAWBO is the best bet.
• Got in touch with two previous employees, schmoozed.
• Sent receipt to client.

NOT done:

• Look into Scottsdale Airpark business publication, for ads & possible PR opportunities.
• Come up with articles ideas for the same, for Phoenix Business Journal, for Scottsdale Chamber’s publication.
• Call Chamber’s director to discuss publicity; try to volunteer as ambassador.
• Set up a calendar on the iPad and try to get into the habit of using the damn thing (but realized that’s not going to happen…I’m unlikely to fiddle with that).
• Join NAWBO.
• Track down the third former employee who, I think, would be good to keep in touch with.
• Finish the database.
• Write this month’s newsletter.
• Bill website client for 5 hours of work. And, come to think of it, three earlier hours of work.
• Scan and e-deposit two other clients’ checks.

 Pending:

• Volunteered for Habitat for Humanity; have to meet them at 5:30 a.m. Saturday.
• Choir director thinks we’re going to show up at 8:00 on Sunday morning.

I don’t want to. I hate racing around at dawn and hate this stupid schedule with two 7:30 a.m. classes a week and a 7:30 meeting in Scottsdale and do not want to fly out the door at 7:30 Sunday morning and I. need. a. BREAK!

No wonder my stomach hurts.

Life Is Short. Eternity Is Long.

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So another attention-getting life-shaker just happened. M’hijito called to report that his dad was going in for an angioplasty Thursday evening. Forthwith, though, they decided he needed a quadruple bypass and scheduled him into an operating room the first crack out of the box Friday.

Needless to say, my son was (and remains) alarmed. To say nothing about how ex-DH and his present wife must be feeling. Apparently the surgery went well. But it’s disturbing. Very disturbing.

For one thing, no one expected XDH ever to be anything other than extremely long-lived and healthy. His mother is still living—she’s pushing 100, and the only physical issues she has are macular degeneration that has made her blind and a lifelong hearing problem that has left her stone deaf. Her father lived to the age of 96, quite well all the way to the end. XDH is only 72, same age as SDXB, who underwent the same experience a couple of years ago. Whether XDH recovers as quickly and as completely remains to be seen: he’s nowhere near as fit as SDXB—never has been a fan of strenuous exercise—but he sure does enjoy good food and wine. And he has some pesty ailments that do not afflict SDXB, two of them potentially life-threatening over the long haul.

We are nearing the end of our journey, we who are on the leading edge of the baby boom. Most bypass veterans survive at least five years; the 15-year survival rate is about 55 percent. That, of course, means 45 percent reach the end before then.

And y’know…the perspective from here sure is different from what it was, even five or ten years ago!

Yesterday I shocked a few readers by proposing to spend an outrageous amount on some overpriced dishes. And by admitting this was a want, not a need…but still persisting in a plan to diddle away money on the junk, anyway.

It’s an apparent about-face, of course. This scheme contradicts everything I’ve advocated at Funny about Money. But it’s a manifestation of a new line of thinking that’s been ticking away in the back of my mind ever since that Mayo doc suggested that the current bellyache could very well be a symptom of a cancer that will carry me away in about six months. Should it really be that.

As I was driving away from that meeting, a haunting thought came to mind, one I haven’t been able to shove back under the rug:

I am making myself miserable trying to preserve capital so that I can support myself during some future time when I expect to be miserable.

Over and over, the same question returns: WTF am I doing????? Making myself miserable so I can be miserable? What is that?

I hate teaching freshman comp with every fiber of my being. After I’d taught two sections a semester (just two sections!) for about four years in graduate school, I walked away with the Ph.D. in hand and this vow in my heart: “I will go on welfare before I ever teach composition again.”

And now here I am, approaching the end of my life, and I am on welfare—collecting Social Security. And I’m spending these last few reasonably viable years doing just that: teaching freshman comp.

I loathe it more than I can express. It’s such a waste of time and energy, such a pointless exercise, and so intensely frustrating that it makes you feel every moment you spend on it is simply wasted. And wasted in ways that are not fun. This is not playing World of Warcraft here. It’s not diddling away your time in front of a movie screen. It’s far from playing with New Yorker jigsaw puzzles. It is hard goddamn work, and it is stupefyingly underpaid.

Time wasted: students’ and instructors’.

• The students have been over all this ground many, many times. We misapprehend when we assume they can’t write a simple sentence or a coherent paragraph, and they can’t formulate a topic for a diddly little 750-word essay because they were never taught this stuff. Trust me: they have been told this stuff. Time and time again. Among the fine young nimrods who couldn’t even begin to come up with a focused idea for the next 102 essay were two students who have been in my 101 classes…and I know I taught the 101s how to focus an essay topic. You wanna know something? If they haven’t learned this grade-school stuff after thirteen years of K-12 education, they are never going to learn it. It is an utter waste of their time to make them spend another year going over the same old stuff they’ve ignored all their lives.

• The instructor spends hour after hour, many of them unpaid hours, devising original and engaging strategies to instill grade-school knowledge and skills into young adults, to no avail. Many more hours are pointlessly spent reading, commenting upon, and assessing piles of student papers equivalent in mass to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. All of that person’s time, all of that person’s effort, and all of that person’s creativity are just wasted.

So why am I doing this?

Because I’m scared? I am. I’m scared unto paralysis by the prospect of living to advanced old age, utterly alone, and not having enough to provide even halfway decent dotage care for myself.

But of course, there’s no guarantee—or even great likelihood—that I will live into decrepitude. None at all.

The real reason I live like an anchorite, trying to scrabble together enough to barely live on so that I can avoid drawing down a very modest 4 percent of retirement savings, is that I’m in the habit of crimping my life for no other reason than to admire the bottom line in a spreadsheet.

In a word, I’m a tightwad.

I allow my life to be constrained to the point of entropy because I don’t want to spend any of my precious dollars. And yes: I am making myself miserable at a joke of a “job” (which is what adjunct teaching is: a cruel, exploitive joke) so that I can live on something well under $30,000 a year so that I won’t have to spend any part of $550,000 sitting in brokerage accounts and mutual funds, which are merrily averaging 6 percent to 8 percent per annum. For chrissake, the big IRA earned ten grand last month! That’s well over half, in one month, of what I earn in an entire year of making myself miserable in the classroom.

This returns us to that question: WTF am I doing?

Maybe I abuse the whole idea of money. Maybe my ex- is right: Money is to be spent. Not admired.

Hence, dear readers, the impulse to spend a little something on myself. On a want, not a need.

Yesterday, more or less in response to Remy’s and Frugal Scholar’s and Mrs. POP’s surprised comments, this whole train of thought came into sharper focus for me. And I realized: I have simply got to stop teaching composition. As endeavors go, it is just too crushing. It’s interfering with my life and blocking me from being able to build a business that I actually do like and that does not feel futile.

But how?

Well, the train of thought continues.

About 18 months ago, a friend in a business group suggested, with a straight face, that I quit teaching altogether for a year or at least for a semester and spend all the time thereby rescued on developing and marketing my editorial enterprise. Naturally, I smiled; murmured sure, sure; and went on about my misbegotten business. I was dead certain that I couldn’t earn enough at editing and ghostwriting alone to make put food on the table.

Recent developments, however, suggest that is no longer true. With a very minimal amount of marketing, a small but steady stream of commerce has come our way.

If I were not distracted with teaching—if I were not preoccupied with wasting the remaining hours of my life—but instead spent those hours on making my business visible to the kinds of people who would hire us and on persuading said people that they need us more than they need whole-wheat bread and sex, we would have more work than Tina and I could handle together. I don’t think that’s a “maybe.” I think that’s an “absolutely so.”

But even if it were a “maybe,” the truth is, at what we’ve learned is the fair rate for our services, I would not have to work anything like full time to earn enough to make up for the absence of teaching income.

Let’s say, for example, I keep the magazine writing courses, which are easy to prep, easy to teach, relatively low in enrollment, and mounted 100 percent online. I dump the spring and fall comp courses. And during the summer, when more skilled and motivated students show up, I teach one composition section. In that scenario, assuming blog income stays steady and my one regular customer keeps paying me to read detective novels(!), I would have to earn only $700 a month to make up the loss of the composition income.

At $60 an hour, $700 represents 11.67 hours of work. A month.

A single customer routinely gives us more work than that.

And does it or does it not bring us back to the eternal question: WTF am I doing?

Before the end of this semester (only 13 weeks to go!), I am going to tell my honored chair that I would like to keep the magazine writing course but drop the spring comp courses. And I will ask him if he would be kind enough to allow me to teach one or maybe two comp sections in the summer. Then I’m going to work on building The Copyeditor’s Desk:

• Attend at least two CofC meetings a month.
• Take full advantage of all the Chamber’s many marketing and advertising opportunities.
• Volunteer with charitable groups that are favored by the local movers & shakers. Get to know these folks.
• Join the Better Business Bureau.
• Join Local Arizona, a coalition of locally owned businesses.
• Start an advertising & PR campaign.
• Step up the communication with former clients.
• Approach major textbook publishers for project management contracts.
• Approach genre publishers in an attempt to get more of them to pay us to read light fiction.

And if that doesn’t generate seven hundred bucks a month? Welp…$700 a month is 2 percent of retirement savings. Somehow I think I can afford it.

Somehow, I think I can afford to have a life.

Images:

Still Life with a Skull. Philippe de Champaigne. Public domain.
Proto-composition paper: shamelessly ripped off the Web.

Why Can’t Life Happen at One’s Convenience?

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Nice relapse yesterday. Felt amazingly terrible all day. Damn it, this (whatever this is) couldn’t happen at a worse time. We have two projects in house and yesterday a potential new client called to inquire if we could work on his business’s entire opus. Since he’s been around for a while, there’s a lot of it.

This is exactly the kind of customer we’ve been praying for: a business whose needs can occupy us for a long time, and that’s likely to bring in enough revenue to contribute significantly toward our goal of having The Copyeditor’s Desk generate an income that both of us can actually live on.

Yesterday I called Young Dr. Kildare’s office and described the continuing onslaught of symptoms, which are not really helped significantly by large doses of meds. The only thing that helps is not eating, the result of which has been that I’ve lost seven pounds in seven days. That’s nice, since I’ve never been so fat in my life. But I’d kind of like to have more control over the process… He immediately had his underlings refer me to a gastroenterologist for the dreaded endoscopy. So obviously I’m not going to get out of that, and since they have to knock you out for the light-show, it will consume an entire day of my work schedule. And if they find anything significant, of course, it will consume the rest of my (not very lengthy) life.

YDK called last night after working hours, obviously concerned. I observed that one of my complaints is consistently listed as a symptom of gastric cancer and never as either of the two other possible ailments. He asked me to stop reading Internet sites and said indeed that particular part of the bellyache also can manifest itself with GERD and with peptic ulcer. Or a hiatal hernia.

My mother had a hernia. The resulting surgery was not minor. Had her in the hospital the better part of a week (true—that was in the day when we actually took care of surgery patients, which we don’t anymore), and it took about three months for her to recover. She never did fully recover, come to think of it. From that point on, it was pretty much a long, slow, downhill slide.

To complicate matters, the urchins turned in a raft of in-class diagnostic essays that I have to turn around before Monday, and another client sent a wad of copy to read. I don’t even know which one to try to move first. Guess I need to write a to-do list to keep this sh!t under control. As best as anything can be brought under control. Which isn’t very “best.”

Why do we labor under the illusion that life ever is under control?

Hm. I suppose it’s a survival adaptation. If we fully appreciated how random and pointless it all is, we’d go mad. What creature would put out the amount of energy and work required to stay alive if it thought food and mates and shelter came its way more by chance than by its own efforts?

I wonder if an amoeba believes it has some control over the environment it swims through. Probably does.

Well, it’s already after 5:00 a.m. Since I’ve got to arrive at an office halfway to Casa Grande by 9:30, I’d probably better try to work on at least one of those projects before any more time passes.

Medical Overkill?

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So a fine flare-up of a chronic bellyache sends me to the Mayo’s ER with chest pains. Six hours of idling around that place in some discomfort yields the discovery that I have not ever had and am not now having a heart attack. The ER doc diagnoses GERD and a probable ulcer, and urges me to make an appointment with a regular doctor.

Now, the problem is, the part of the Mayo that houses its doctors’ offices is halfway to Payson from my house: twenty miles one-way, an hour’s drive through thick traffic.

Anyway, concerned about the possibility of an ulcer, I present myself to yet another new-to-me doctor (you never see the same doctor twice out there). She decides that I need an endoscopy with biopsies for H. pylori and cancer. This unpleasant test entails knocking you out, stuffing a tube down your throat, and cutting a sample out of your stomach lining.  Obviously, since they drug you into oblivion, you can’t drive home.

So I start searching for someone to drive me out there. La Maya is in full crisis mode just now. KJG lives halfway to Yuma on the other side of the valley; asking her to drive to the Mayo would be like asking her to drive to Albuquerque. My son has a difficult time getting off work; besides, I’d just as soon he doesn’t find out about this until I learn what the hell we’re talking about. I call the church and at first am rebuffed, but then reach the head of the health-care ministry, who launches into a full-bore search for someone to make the 40-mile drive with me.

Time passes. Eventually, I calm down enough to think this through.

Item: The Mayo does not take Medicare assignment. This means that Medicare and Medigap will only reimburse—me, not the clinic—for the amounts they unilaterally decide services and procedures are worth. The Mayo will send the bills to Medicare but will not accept reimbursement. This means you have to pay the up front and then collect whatever Medicare and a Medigap insurer will disburse, which comes in little dribs and drabs of $30 or $40 over a period of several weeks, always long after the bill is due.

I figure an endoscopy and two biopsies are going to be bloody expensive. I also despair of finding someone to drive me out there, and I sure as hell can’t afford a taxi, which at best, with the senior citizen discount, would run over $80. A Mayo phone lady seriously suggests I rent a room at the Marriott next to the hospital, for a mere $100 a night, two-night minimum.

So it now occurs to me that really, if I need this procedure, there’s no reason to have it done at the Mayo. Why not find a provider who will accept Medicare assignment and then just have them send the results over to my doctors? Besides, wouldn’t it be better to have a doctor close to hand who can see me for routine issues, rather than having to drive all the way out to Taliesin West for every sniffle and bellyache?

At Angie’s List I find one, count it one, medical practice that’s universally lauded and is not in Scottsdale or way over on the far west side. Make an appointment. Get in forthwith to see a brand-new young doctor. He’s a DO, not an MD, but the old guys who do have MDs aren’t taking new patients, and since he’s the new kid in the practice I figure he’s probably consulting with the bosses, at least until they’re sure he’s not going to kill anyone.

Young Dr. Kildare, as it develops, is an absolute charmer about my son’s age. We discuss my various complaints.

He expresses surprise that the Mayo doc even brought up the prospect of cancer with me, much less went into detail about staging, surgery, and chemotherapy. Gastric cancer, he says, manifests several other symptoms that I don’t have, such as swollen lymph  nodes, bleeding, and weight loss. He says he’s certain that it’s GERD, about which he knows quite a lot because he suffers with it, too. It is possible, he thinks, that an ulcer is forming and suggests doubling up on the omeprazole, which he says needs to be used for three or four months to get the situation fully under control. At this time, he says, an endoscopy is unnecessary. Instead, he thinks it would be better to continue the drug treatment for a few weeks, especially since the ailment is starting to settle down. If, however, break-through symptoms persist, he will want to do an upper GI series or an endoscopy. But not now. Come back in six weeks.

Meanwhile, he suggests I stay off the sauce, refrain from eating large meals, never eat late in the evening, lose weight, and get some exercise.

Huh. Whaddaya make of that?

Sure sounds like I was about to be subjected to some serious medical overkill, doesn’t it? Anyway, the tests are off until we find out whether the omeprazole (which is generic Prilosec) kicks in and and gets this thing under control. There may yet be a tube down the throat in the future, but at least now I should be able to keep the cost of it under control.

And so to the pool, for some of the prescribed exercise…

Image: Flexible endoscope. de:Benutzer:Kalumet. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Who was young Dr. Kildare?