Coffee heat rising

Angst

Five ways to deal with stress

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Ever have one of those moments when the sky is collapsing on your head at the same time your cat, your dog, your boss, each of your friends, your family members, your banker, a lawyer or two, three doctors, and various functionaries of the police force would like your undivided attention? It’s been kind of like that around here. Every stupid little thing that needs to be tended to plus a number of irrational forces decided to come into play during the week Mrs. Micah and I chose to move my blog and all its bizarre code to a new server. Stress? Let me tell you about stress!

I’ve had all of two full nights’ sleep in something over ten days, and those have come about through liberal doses of Benadryl. Quit dropping a couple of antihistamines before bed-time, and the mental alarm clock goes off at 3:00 a.m. sharp. The internal stress alarm clock has taken to ringing so loud that often pills don’t shut it off. And I’ve now become so sensitized to stress that the most minor hassle has me vibrating like a gong.

Nevertheless, I cling to my theory that pills are not good for you, and that it’s gotta be possible to get a grip without drugging yourself. It worked before, and it’ll work again. So, today I made up my mind to pursue a few fairly simple strategies.

1. Focus on a single challenge or nagging job, deal with it, and get it out of your way.

Select one that’s large enough to make you feel you’ve accomplished something, but not so huge or impossible that you can’t deal with it in a week or so. 

Larger bugabears should be broken down into parts, so that you can address them (to the extent possible) one step at a time. But there’s usually something pestering you that you can get out of the way fairly promptly.

My choice for this weekend is a vast article on the arcane doings of some fourteenth-century French aristocrats, replete with Middle French and medieval Latin: 108 pages of narrative and something over 230 footnotes, many of them archival references. Because I was working on another large, ditzy, and annoying project, I passed it for first edits to our research associate, a young man with a Ph.D. in English who ought to be competent to handle the job. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, our assistant editor in charge of the journal in question sent it back to me, saying the guy had announced he wouldn’t do the job. 

No joke! Quoth he:

I had planned on editing it tonight, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a monograph. It is not even double-spaced. The author set some customized line spacing in this text that looks more like one-and-a-half spacing. Given all the tiny footnotes, this thing is as long as a book.

 

I have to admit that I dread editing this thing. Would you take a look at it and tell me if it’s normal. I don’t want to be a whiner or slacker, but this thing looks like the copyeditor’s equivalent of water-boarding.

If I wasn’t already enjoying the 4:00 a.m. ambience, that did the job. So we agreed that I would edit the first 50 pages and then she (assistant editor) would pass it back to Our Intrepid Hero to read the remaining 57 pages, much of which consists of Latin that he needn’t look at. 

A project like this entails a fair number of global search-&-replace operations, plus you have to pull out the graphics and tables, rewrite the tables so they’re not constructed with hard tabs and spaces, format them to accord with Chicago style, and prepare them for the compositor. Well, of course…since you do that at the start of the job, this will reduce our friend’s workload significantly. Assuming he survives the encounter he will have with me tomorrow morning. 

At any rate: this was a big job. It wasn’t what I wanted to spend the weekend doing, but getting it off my desk makes me feel somewhat better. One headache out of the way = (1 zillion headaches – 1).

2. Try to engineer a break.

Leave the kiddies and the pets with a babysitter and go somewhere else. Ideally, give yourself a weekend (or more) away from the stressful situation. Go to a local hotel or B&B (leave the cell phones at home), go camping, go visit friends in some other town or state. Flee!

Luckily for me, I rarely go on vacation, and so vast numbers of use-it-or-lose-it hours have accrued to my credit. All told, by the end of the year, when I’m to be laid off, I’ll have 32.85 days that must be used or forfeited.

So, this afternoon I decided to give myself a little vacation from the salt mine. I have to go out to the office tomorrow, partly to throttle a certain research associate but also to wrap up a few other tasks. My associate editor can take over the job of riding herd on our crew for a week or two. I have a furlough day next Friday, and so with eight of those vacation days, I can engineer thirteen consecutive days away from the place, during which I intend never to check the e-mail or answer the phone.

This is big. Just staying away from the campus and filtering out everything that has to do with the various hassles and annoyances associated with the job will help a great deal.

3. Spend some time with friends who have nothing to do with the source of your stress.

Don’t discuss your problems with them. Have a good time. 

Yesterday SDXB and I did exactly that, driving halfway—no, make that all the way across the Valley to their peaceful, lovely house beneath the White Tank Mountains, where we enjoyed good company, idle talk, and several restful hours. Good thing to do.

Go to church, volunteer, invite friends over, go to a movie with someone new: find ways to be around people who have something else to talk about but your troubles.

4. Exercise

Take the dog for a walk. If you don’t have a dog, go for a walk with a neighbor, a friend, or all by your self. Learn some basic yoga and do a half-hour yoga routine in the mornings and evenings. Join a gym, if you enjoy that sort of thing. Join a softball team. Play some tennis or golf. Run!

5. Get off the caffeine and the booze.

It’s amazing how much caffeine wires you up. We tend to be unaware of this until we shuck off the stuff and notice the difference in the way we feel. Review what you drink and eat (some chocolates contain caffeine), and change your habits to get rid of the sources of caffeine. This includes soft drinks and tea as well as coffee; decaf, BTW, is not completely free of caffeine. Substitute juices, uncaffeinated soft drinks (read the label!), water, herbal teas. 

Kicking a caffeine habit can give you a roaring headache. Try to ease your way around this by switching from coffee and colas to tea for a few days, and then from tea to uncaffeinated drinks.

I find I sleep better after I’ve quit drinking my favorite potable, French-press espresso-roast coffee.

Alcohol has a kick-back effect that can keep you awake. Don’t have a nightcap or a glass of wine thinking it will help you sleep through the night! Because it’s a depressant, alcohol may make you feel like dozing off at first. But a few hours later—along about one or two in the morning—it’s likely to set off that old internal alarm clock. So when you’re feeling too stressed to sleep, get yourself off that stuff, too.

Do indulge yourself in something else: good food. Fix your favorite comfort food; prepare a fine meal; if you can afford it, go out to eat. The better you eat, the better you’ll feel.

There are many other strategies, of course, such as meditation, prayer, and mindful relaxation during panic attacks. If things are really complicated, it helps to brainstorm a list of everything that could possibly be bugging you, assess the results to decide which are important and which really are nothing to worry about, and then write up a strategy for dealing with each of the real issues in a meaningful way. One at a time.

Train: Less than awesome. Blue Funk: Amazing

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Some scientist recently opined that the function of weeping, apparently a behavior unique to humans (or almost so), is to recruit sympathy. So what does it mean when you’re walking down an empty street with no one around but a dog, crying aloud? Who, really, do you imagine will empathize with you?

Well, no one. No news there, eh?

I hate frustration.In my weird little psyche, frustration seems to go hand-in-hand with depression. Today it took just one tiny jab of frustration to tip me into the Slough of Despond, where I’ve spent the entire damn day trying to swim out of the quicksand. It also triggers hot flashes. Note that, young things: when you reach about 52, every idle whim that’s countermanded brings on the sweats and chills.

So this morning I’m really looking forward to another trip on the train to My Beloved Employer’s shabby-looking campus. I figure I’ll read another 50 pages of detective-novel proofs, and my teeth will not be set on edge by the time I reach my destination.

Two or three miles of driving brings me to the park-n-ride. I hike from there to the “station” (I’d call it a “stop”) and order up a day pass. This takes several steps. Come to the step to pay, and up pops a message that says “bank cards not accepted.” By that, they mean no debit cards, no credit cards. Well of course I expected to pay with Visa, which workedjust fineyesterday. I don’t have $2.50 in cash with me, because, strangely enough, I don’t carry cash, having had my purse stolen once too often. After trying several machines, all of which flash the same f***-you message, I give up, trudge back to my car, and make the miserable drive to Tempe, enhanced greatly by having to drive across the city’s single most congested surface street to get to the hideous freeway.

I was mildly annoyed by this all day, while plodding through scholarship on 14th-century Spanish warlords (well, that’s what we’d call them today, if they resided in, say, Afghanistan). Nasty specimens of humanity, those.

A woman looking to hire one of my RAs calls and gives me the third degree about the guy.
—Are you really sure he’s not a rabid nut case who will make everyone in the office crazy?
—Yeah, I’m really sure. {Argh.O lucky man, having the privilege of working for the likes of you.}

Back on the freeway, homeward bound: traffic comes to a dead stop about halfway there. So I have to get off at 24th Street, dodging a sonuvabitch who cuts me off and keeps cutting me off all the way up to Thomas Road. Good thing for him I don’t carry a revolver in the car.

Long, miserable drive across the city.

During this drive I ruminate on a remark that emanated, yesterday, from my ex-husband, a man whom I occasionally (in moments of sentimentality) regret having left. I’d called him—the guy is a corporate lawyer—to find out if I could shelter income from my freelance escapades by forming a corporation that would hold income and pay my sidekick, leaving my share of the money untouched as corporate capitalization until I reach 66. Would this keep Social Security from confiscating my SS benefits in proportion to the amount I earn that exceeds a piddling $14,000 a year between ages 64 and 66?

He thinks so.

Then I needed to have him explain one of the niceties of my astonishingly complex 2008 income tax statement, so I could fill out Paradise Valley Community College’s W-4 form correctly.

Do you ever feel that you’re speaking with someone who thinks he’s talking to someone like you who is not actually you? Sometimes I think the man is talking to a ghostly sister of mine, a woman who really isn’t me at all. After 25 years of marriage, he never seemed to get to know me. He got to know a ghost-sister, maybe, but whoever he thinks I am, she’s not me.

The instant he hears I’m signing up to teach freshman comp, he goes (pompous as Hell), “Ho ho ho! Well, you’ll find that sometimes you’re better off in a job that’s not so prestigious.”

You understand: I am so slow on the uptake that it takes a full day for me to register an insult. Not until I’m plodding through the miserable homeward-bound surface-street traffic do I start to think…
W…
T…
F…????

“Prestigious”? He thinks I think the jobs I’ve held all these endless underpaid overworked years have been “prestigious”? Does he think I taught four-and-four in an untenurable position, working 60, 70, 80 hours a week for freaking prestige?

Could he possibly think—really, seriously?—that I imagined hacking away as a freelance journalist was somehow prestigious? Does he imagine that I saw myself as magically endowed with some elevated status working as an assistant editor on a crass city magazine, best titled The Chamber of Commerce J, where I was expected to work six and seven days every week, with at least one overnighter a month, for $12,000 a year at a time when $24,000 was on the low side of middling pay?

Is it possible—really, seriously?—that he doesn’t remember I took that shitty job because he was canned from a senior partnership at one of the “most prestigious” law firms in the American Southwest just a few weeks after we moved into a house that tripled our mortgage payments? That while he sat stunned in the living room I had to go out and find a job to keep food on our table? Did he really think that I left my six-year-old son in daycare for fu*king prestige? That I had a taxicab pick my child up at school and drive him to the care place because I wasn’t allowed to leave the office long enough to pick him up from school, because I so loved the fu*king prestige?????

Could it be—really, seriously?—that he never noticed why I came to develop such a strong distaste for teaching freshman comp that I said I’d rather go on welfare than ever do that again? Does he not recall the trips to Mexico when I had to haul along a suitcase full of student papers, the days and nights of our “vacations” when all I could do was grade papers? Papers in Guaymas. Papers in Hermosillo. Papers in Tucson. Papers in San Francisco. Papers in Colorado. Papers in Washington, D.C. Papers in Atlanta. Papers in New York City. He thinks I don’t relish doing that again because it’s beneath my patrician little standards?

Possibly I fly too far off the handle, to suspect he understands what he’s saying and contrives to be insulting on purpose. It’s as though he makes a set of assumptions about you, but those assumptions are so far off base that in fact he thinks he’s talking to someone who is not the person he is talking to.

On the other hand, he’s alarmingly smart and capable of great subtlety. He certainly could be doing it on purpose.

Who is this man? And why did I waste 25 years of my life with him?

Sometimes I feel like about 90 percent of my life has been an utter waste.

Applying for Jobs Online: Isn’t technology supposed to make our lives easier?

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Today I applied for three jobs, around our clients’ e-mails and the phone’s jangling and the staff’s worried questions. Two of them, I’m probably not qualified for (but nothing ventured, nothing gained). One, I could do with exceptional panache, but the language in the posting subtly suggests they have in mind a twenty-something, or at worst a crotchety old thirty-something.

And therein lies the most discouraging element of my post-layoff prospects: age discrimination. There’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that anyone is going to hire a soon-to-be 64-year-old woman. The sense that I’ve got to keep trying anyway, even though I don’t have even the remotest shot at getting hired, is agonizingly frustrating. To say the least.

And here’s an even more elegant frustration: technology that wastes my time and ultimately wastes the employer’s time.

All three prospective employers asked that applicants first upload a résuméand then retype almost every line of the résuméinto online forms, often in a format that makes it difficult or impossible to copy and paste.

What is the point? If you’ve already got the whole résumé, why have the applicant keyboard all the information in again, line by freaking line? What a crushing time-waster! It took a good three hours to perform what should have been three 30-second tasks.

And imagine the time wasted on the other end! Someone has to plow through all those dreary, redundant lines. Probably more than one someone: at most colleges and universities, search committees have at least three people, and often an admin assistant runs interference by reading and screening applications first.

So what we have here is a procedure that unnecessarily wastes at least five people’s time!

Other than limiting the number of job applications any one supplicant can send out in a day, what, really, is the point? And how does this permutation of technology make our lives better?

Income stream sighted

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Thar she blows!

Landed an interview with the chair of a nearby community college’s English department. I’m begging for part-time work, and it looks more than moderately hopeful.

A friend from a previous life is teaching there full-time. She got me in the chairman’s door, and he expressed interest. Those two say that though the community colleges have had some budget hits, too, the situation is nowhere near as dire as the university’s. My friend said the colleges are overrun with students, meaning they’ll need adjunct faculty to handle the endless stacked sections of freshman composition.

Horrible, but better than starving, eh?

The community colleges here are part of the county and are supported by property taxes still hugely inflated by the real estate bubble. Taxes are based for two or more years in a row on a single evaluation. This year we will pay artificially inflated taxes on property valuations that now grossly overstate the real value of most houses in the county.

Because community college tuition costs a fraction of the universities’ (which have been soaring the past few years), many university-bound students take their lower-division courses at the community colleges, saving a bundle on college costs. And of course, if you’re a out-of-work cabinetmaker or drywall hanger hoping to learn accountancy, it would behoove you to get the best price you can on your general-studies courses. So it’s not surprising that laid-off workers are flooding into those schools. Their tuition helps to keep the smaller colleges afloat as the Great Desert University and its two sister institutions sink like a fleet of Titanics.

If I’m extraordinarily lucky and can pick up two courses in the fall, before GDU cans me, I can bank the net, which will help ease the way into poverty. It should more than cover COBRA, leaving me all of Social Security and a little more than half of investment income to live on. And, unless I’m mistaken, it’s not gross but net income that’s counted against your Social Security benefits, so I should be able to take on a few editing projects, too. All told, I could end up netting about $700 less than I earn now. I think I can live on that.

I hope.

How IT put “apps” into job applications

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LOL! Just went over to the Maricopa County Community Colleges job applications site (where, BTW, precious few openings are to be found). If I’m to teach part-time, I’ll have to get into their HR system.

They’ve updated their electronic job application system. In some ways, it will be convenient, because you used to have to fill out a pages-long application over and over and over and over, one for each opening you addressed, and you had to send your transcripts with every job application. The community college district would advertise 87 gerjillion openings, and you had to jump through all these hoops for each one. Now once through will do you.

But…wow! Instead of sending a transcript, you now have to fill in a form that asks you to list every. college. course. you. have. ever. taken. No lie: check out the form.

For the love of God. Do you know how many courses it takes to get a Ph.D.? This is going to take hours!

And to make things perfect, the online part of the system doesn’t work with a Mac. When you get to the form to enter your Social Security number, it won’t let a Mac enter anything, nor will it save your data UNTIL you’ve entered the Social Security number.

My laptop (ASU’s, actually: another thing I’m going to have to buy sometime in the next nine months) has lost its connection with the modem’s router and will not reconnect. So that means I will have to do this from the campus.

To give you an idea how long this is going to take, they have an online tutorial to show you the obvious: instructions on following the instructions to fill out the forms. They estimate it will take you 15 minutes just to plow through this tutorial.

That’s for the privilege of earning $2,400 a course.

You can teach a maximum of three courses a semester, which would come to just about what I need to survive in the post-layoff world.

However…there are no ads for P/T faculty advertised.

Well, at any rate, I need to get this form filled out, which I’ll have to do this week.

I think GDU is paying $3,000 a course. That would make it possible for me to hit the $14,000 mark by teaching 3 and 2, instead of 3 and 3 with the community colleges. And GDU hires (uhmm…maybe: in better times) adjunct faculty to teach the upper-division Writing for the Professions course, which is slightly less onerous than freshman comp. On the other hand, GDU’s classes are much larger than the community college’s, and the attrition rate is lower. In a community college course, by the time everyone has dropped who’s going to drop you can end up with just 12 or 15 students, which is manageable. The last time I taught Writing for the Professions as a side job, GDU doubled the enrollment of two courses and I ended up with 80 online students! In a writing course!!!

I keep telling myself there’s nine months to find some sort of work. But it’s damned scary: there is nothing! You can’t get a job when no one’s hiring.

La Maya, who still subscribes to the local paper, said yesterday’s edition reported that to make up its enormous budget deficit, among other things the state would have to close all three universities. On the one hand it’s hard to believe anyone actually said that; on the other, this is Arizona.

Augh! There oughta be a law against three o’clock in the morning!

What’s that light at the end of the tunnel?

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Earlier this week I spoke with Audra, the loan origination officer at the credit union who helped us refinance the so-called Investment {snark!} House at a very favorable rate. Called her because I’m beginning to feel a little frantic about the drop in value in that neighborhood, and because M’Hijito, who presently occupies the place with a roommate, has expressed interest in going to graduate school in another city.

Our Realtor came up with an estimate of the house’s current price, which I will not repeat here because M’Hijito reads this blog now and again. If he knew what the guy said, he’d keel right over and we’d be sending him to Bottimer’s Funeral Home instead of graduate school. Realtor Dude thinks we could rent it for about $300 a month less than the mortgage payments, which would be OK, I think, because that amount would post as a loss on our income tax. So I expect we would survive. At any rate, these are among those factoids that grow horns at night and flutter out of the Night Closet to haunt your moments of insomnia.

Audra said their appraisers’ experience is showing that homeowners who can hang onto a property for a while should not worry about comparables based on large numbers of nearby foreclosures. That in fact is exactly the situation: the bank-owned house directly behind ours is on the market for a handful of peanuts, and a house on the corner has been in foreclosure twice since we bought our place. La Maya and La Bethulia bought a doll of a house for their nieces a block away and paid under $200,000 for it. Audra reported that when a cluster of foreclosures occurs, property valuations based on comparables start to creep back up about nine months after the last foreclosure sale closes.

She added that she’s confident centrally located real estate, especially houses located fairly close to the new light-rail line, will increase in value. She believes the house will recover its value within five years, although she agreed it’s unlikely our losses in the stock market will recover in that time frame. She thinks real estate, especially in-town real estate in reasonably healthy neighborhoods, will recover faster than we pessimists expect.

Wait, she said, about nine months before believing any Realtor’s estimate of the house’s value.

Hope she’s right! It’s true that the value of my house, which cost about the same as the Investment House, is still higher than what I paid for it. Despite the foreclosure of the house across the street, we’ve had many fewer repossessions here than in M’Hijito’s neighborhood.

Meanwhile, though, she said that the credit union did not yet have guidelines for how to deal with the economic recovery legislation, but that she would call when she finds out anything. And she advised that if either of us loses our job, we should call her immediately and the credit union will make temporary changes in the loan terms so that we can hang onto the house.

Well… Since the kid is running a bit late in his graduate school applications and so probably can’t start a credible program in the fall, nine months would just about work out: we’ll have a better grasp of where we stand, and if he wants to go to Tucson, by then maybe unemployment will have dropped enough that people can afford to come up with the security deposits and rent payments we’ll need to extract. It’s an awfully cute house in a very convenient neighborhood, and so I expect we’d do OK renting it.
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Speaking of the foreclosure of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, yesterday a Sears delivery truck pulled up in front of the place. What should be trundled out but a VAST, expensive-looking, stainless-steel side-by-side refrigerator.

This I take as proof positive that the new owners intend to live there and not rent the place out to another Biker Boob. BB’s absentee landlord tricked that house out with the cheapest, chintziest appliances he could get his hands on, as most of the the real estate “investors” around here do.

The former junk-heap is still vacant, but the owners are keeping it maintained—nary a weed in sight, and all the trees and ornamentals are green and happy.