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Angst

Revanche on the secret joy of unemployment

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Today we have a guest post by Revanche, proprietor of one of my favorite PF blogs, A Gai Shan Life. Enjoy!

VH asked me how I’m dealing with unemployment now that I’m well in, and I had to think about it.

Most notably, believe it or not, is the fact that I was laid off almost six months ago and my head has not yet exploded.

It should have, considering the degree to which I obsessed over every possible detail of pending unemployment in the months prior to L-day (all the gory details of which you can find blogged between the dates of July 2008 and June 2009). But it didn’t.

In all my planning and calculating, plotting and planning, résumé-building and interview scheduling, I utterly underestimated the sheer freedom that comes with unemployment.

Not the freedom of just staying at home all day in my pajamas, if I please. [Don’t ask me if that’s ever happened, please. Let me have some dignity.] The kind of nearly spiritual freedom, relief really, that comes of knowing that my time shackled to that job out of a sense of responsibility to provide for my family, to do the right thing, to be grateful for the job I had in this economy, was over. Out of a job though I am, I’m also free of the company and of the kind of people who believed in lying, cheating and scamming. Not my kind of folk.

Flying utterly in the face of my workaholic tendencies, I’ve discovered an odd and unnatural secret of unemployment: if you have some financial security, it can actually be refreshing. Who knew?

Whether or not you know me, that sounds like crazy talk.

I assure you, I haven’t lost my mind. I hate not having a steady, full-fledged income, I hate not contributing to my retirement accounts, I hate that I haven’t deposited money into my savings accounts in massive chunks in oh-so-long. And this time has been filled with working on projects, seeking out challenging employment opportunities and interviewing.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t admit that I’ve also discovered the wonders of having the time to travel (New York, San Francisco, San Diego), travel (New York), and travel (Hawaii). I haven’t ever had this kind of freedom to hit the road, I could not have jumped in the car and gone to a friend in need while fully employed, and I haven’t ever been able to take classes without wedging it into 12-hour workdays (before, during or after college). These things are important to me, and without this breather, I doubt that my life plan would ever have allowed for discovering new cities, or the commitment to taking care of ill or grieving friends. And with certain health issues, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve realized I’m allowed to rest instead of forcing myself to face another 18-hour-day despite my body’s pleas for surcease.

The cost of this freedom, all the deprivations of earlier years, was completely worth it. That’s easy to say now because 1) I don’t feel them anymore, and 2) I’m practically living in the lap of luxury now thanks to how I lived before. What’s that saying, “Live like no one else will, so you can live like no one else can”? That little truism is absolutely true. It wasn’t easy being sensible about every penny I spent, and I can’t discount the unemployment income and subsidized COBRA, which have both gone a long way in stretching out my savings as well. But I’m able to look for the next best career step, pay my bills, stay out of debt, and still do good things. That is well worth the extra six to twelve months spent in the next best thing to Dante’s Inferno.

So how am I doing? Right now, though VH occasionally twits me 😉 about stacking up enough cash to be the envy of fellow unemployeds, I’m nervous about the future. I’d be a fool not to be—in this economy? With these pseudo-if-not-real hiring freezes? Since last week, I’ve seen three more friends lose their jobs and another floundering to keep his business open. Times remain very tough, economic indicators notwithstanding.

Still, I’m not allowing fear to paralyze me. I’m working hard to find my next new path and get well, and I’m also trying to stay in the moment and enjoy a little of what I’ve earned. We’ll see how I fare in the next six months as benefits start to run out. I certainly hope to have landed a job by that time.

Sleep!

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A miracle! The three a.m. wake-up call has stopped. The day after finishing my last real task for the Great Desert University, I fell into bed at 8:30 and slept all the way through to 7:00 a.m.: ten and a half glorious hours! Most amazingly, without interruption.

Next night, I slept from 9:30 til around 6:30, nine incredible hours, also without waking up.

Last night I didn’t get to bed until around 11:00 p.m. but slept seven hours, again without the mental alarm going off in the wee hours.

It’s been so long since I’ve slept all the way through the night, I truly can’t remember the last uninterrupted stretch of sleep. Seven hours is a long night’s sleep for me—but it’s normally cobbled together, a few hours before 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. and a couple of hours after 4:00 a.m.

Getting quit of GDU is doing it, I suspect. That and feeling fairly confident that I can get by in penury next year. Next year, at least: there’s enough to live on through 2010, and that will provide a full year to figure out what to do next.

SDXB, a man renowned for the soundness of his sleeping habits, remarked yesterday that he woke up at 3:00 a.m. just as though an alarm clock went off, and after that he was up for the duration. As it develops, last week Child Protective Services removed all four of his daughter’s children from her home, lodging one of them with her ex-husband (on condition of 24-hour supervision: the kid is in his home, but the father’s not allowed to be alone with him) and disappearing the other three. No one knows where the other three kids are, whether they are together, whether they’re in foster homes, group homes, or an institution, or what the state intends to do about them.

I observed that this would explain the insomnia. He insisted that worrying wasn’t what was keeping him awake. He says he’s washed his hands of the daughter’s problems, experience having proven there’s not a thing he can do about them.

Uh huh.

Pretty clearly, what wakes you up in the middle of the night is stress. Even if you don’t actually pop into consciousness with your brain spinning on the issue at hand, before long you certainly are turning it obsessively in your mind. I often would wake up unaware of thinking about GDU or money or the ailing dogs any of the other various little headaches that have haunted my dreams over the past few years. At a certain hour, I would just awaken, as though it were dawn and time to get up. Occasionally, though, I actually would wake up in a cold sweat, with the angst du jour right there in the front of my consciousness.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, evidently even when you think you have the stress under control, it doesn’t go away.

I’ve been yawning all morning. Expect to get another solid night’s sleep this evening. It looks like the body is going to try to catch up with all the sleep it’s lost over the past few years.

The God of Dreams, from Hans Christian Andersen
The God of Dreams, from Hans Christian Andersen

No end in sight…

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So, I had this fantasy that I’d be done with the last of my GDU work before Thanksgiving and would use my 350 hours of unused vacation time to take the rest of the year off. Nice thought, eh?

Ah, how quickly fantasy morphs to horror! Both of the two projects that were supposed to end my tenure with that place have burst out of their cocoons and revealed themselves to be GIGANTIC CLAWING SCREAMING SLAVERING MONSTERS!!!!!!!

I’m doomed. I will never be free of GDU. It will kill me before I break loose.

More later: it’s off to campus to put in another 10-hour day. Enjoyed the 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. shift no end; now can hardly wait for the next stint.

😯

Tempus fidgets

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Time does fly, and with it our little concerns and mores. When I entered a link to one of this site’s “pages” in yesterday’s post and then had some trouble persuading the software not to link to the old WordPress.com URL, I happened to read over the contents of “The Poison Poppy.” Time adds a great deal of perspective: getting your bowels in an uproar over a $220-a-month pay cut seems pretty silly, compared to a 100 percent cut in pay!

These days I feel a lot calmer about the money situation (among other things). As a matter of fact, where next year’s financial pickle is concerned, I no longer care. If I end up living under the Seventh Avenue overpass, tant pis. I’ll be in good company.

For about three years there, I was in a constant state of uproar; during one of those years, I was in a chronic rage.

The whole flap over the destruction of my swimming pool, which took place shortly after I moved in to my present home, created a great deal of angst and downright fear, particularly after a judge would not let me, SDXB, or my lawyer leave his courtroom until after Mr. B*** was seen driving away from the parking lot. Having two barracuda lawyers urge me to sell my house and flee—and describe in exquisite detail what they imagined Mr. B*** to be capable of—was pretty bloody terrifying.

None of that hysteria died down until M’hijito proved, by installing a phalanx of infrared cameras, that the ensuing pool pump “vandalism” incidents were happening because the equipment was defective, not because Son-in-Law was hopping the fence once a month to fool with it. But overlapping that was the Great Desert University’s ballyhooed partnership with PeopleSoft, which led to five months of incorrect paychecks, missed retirement contributions, an attempt to void 200 hours of accrued vacation time and declare me ineligible for vacation, insane abuses of my staff members, wrong information (surely  not outright lies?) from HR, and a $220 de facto monthly pay cut. And this was superimposed over the slowly but steadily growing issues surrounding My Bartleby, the single most unholy personnel issue I have ever had to deal with—one that dragged out over four excruciating years.

Looking back on it, I realize how close to a breakdown I must have been. It’s no wonder I ended up in the hospital with stress. What is a wonder is that I survived at all.

Well, now that only two months remain in my tenure with the Great Desert University, I no longer feel an irrational hatred for the institution (it’s like hating rainfall or the moon in the sky). True, a trip to Tempe does evince a flinch reflex, and I do look forward to never having to enter that burg again.

In spite of the year of unemployment and enforced penury coming up, I feel comfortable about the future. Money happens, after all. Some things are better than a regular salary. Some things are worse than penury.

Theme Days, Reconsidered

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So earlier this week, I came up with what sounded like a great idea to manage time: set a “theme” for each day of the week and do tasks related to that and only related to that. Once caught up with all the work that’s gotten out of hand, I figured, this strategy would help control the sense of being utterly scattered and allow me to take control of the mounting flood of labor that is overwhelming my life.

Well.

What it does is demonstrate, loud and clear, why I’m falling behind in all the various survival and income-earning tasks: I simply have too much work for any one person to do in a reasonable pattern of waking hours.

Yesterday was to be a “teaching” day. I’d already spent half of Sunday grading papers, that being a “choir” half-day and a “teaching” half-day.

Okay. Yesterday morning I started at 4:30, and I worked all the way through until 9:00 p.m., with one (count it, 1) break for a 40-minute walk around the neighborhood. Food was leftovers, so consuming breakfast and dinner (no time for lunch) took no more than about 30 minutes. The only reason I stopped at 9:00 was the online grading system went down, blocking me from entering grades. At that point I realized I was so exhausted I couldn’t do anything more.

That was 15 hours of grading papers, standing in front of a classroom, fending off e-mailed queries and demands from students, and wrestling with computerized classroom management software. Add the number of hours I spent on Sunday, about 8 hours, and you have 23 hours. And I still have two more rafts of papers to grade and a three-hour class to meet on Friday!

Probably I’ll need to put in at least two more teaching days to handle the remaining work…and, you know…there are only six more days left in the week. Note that we’re counting Saturday and Sunday as “work week” days. The current Copyeditor’s Desk client thinks I’m going to rewrite his CV for him forthwith; page proofs were supposed to have arrived yesterday for one of our GDU client journals, and those have to be turned around instantly; and I haven’t even picked up the page proofs for the novel I’m supposed to be editing—those landed on my desk last week.

To keep up with the workload, I will have to work 15-hour days, seven days a week, non-frikking-stop!

No wonder my house goes uncleaned for two, three, four weeks in a row. And no wonder I feel crazy when I have to drop what I’m doing to fiddle with the pool equipment. There’s simply no time to get to ordinary daily household tasks.

I have no idea how I’m going to cope with this in the spring, when instead of teaching two three-hour class meetings each week, I will have six one-hour sessions and two ninety-minute sessions. That’s right. Yesterday the spring schedule came in: they’ve given me three sections, which is what I need to get by and for which I’m thankful (in a way). The Monday-Wednesday sections will span 5 hours and 45 minutes a day, from 8:30 a.m. to 2:15 p.m.—counting commute time—for a total of 11 1/2 hours a week. The Friday sections will consume another four hours (with commute time), from 9:30 to 11:30. Thus 15 1/2 hours of each week will be spent in the classroom alone. And I’m paid for slightly less than 20 hours of work a week.

By the time I walk out of a classroom, all I want to do is sit down. I certainly don’t want to jump into the morass of grading papers. To grade papers for one section—short ones, not the 2,500-word research papers required of the 102 sections—takes a good 8 hours. Assuming I wait until the day after papers are handed in, I’m looking at spending that entire day just reading, grading, and filing brain-bangers.

Next spring I’ll have three sections. So grading represents an additional 8 hours of work a week, bare minimum, if papers come in from just one section; 24 hours if all three sections turn in papers, as they do at the semester’s end. So: for 49% FTE pay, we’re proposing that I work 23.5 hours, bare minimum, or 39.5 hours in a week when all three classes are in full swing. That’s before the syllabus, assignments, and class schedules are written for these classes, large tasks I have to complete before the paid job starts.

What we’re looking at here, with three sections of freshman comp, is five full days of unrelenting work each week, and that’s before I get to freelance work, before I water the plants, before I clean the floors and dust the furniture and scrub the bathrooms and degrease the kitchen, before I clean the pool and repair the pool equipment. And before the usual unbelievably time-consuming crises, exceptions, and wackinesses associated with teaching take place.

Yesterday’s 15-hour day of brain-numbing work was not this week’s first such marathon. By 4:30 yesterday morning (when I awoke wondering how the hell I’m going to get by financially next year and how on earth I’m going to handle the workload), I had barely recovered from a similar 15-hour day of editing a psychologist’s reports, articles, and C.V.

I fail to see how these “theme days” are going to work next spring, when four of every seven days will be largely occupied with standing in front of a classroom. That will leave three days and scraps, of which half of one day and one full evening are already committed, in which to do as much as 24 hours of grading, an unknown number of hours of editorial work, plus all the shopping, housework, yard work, car care, dog care, and everything-else care. Forget having a social life: there just won’t be time for idling.

{sigh} Pretty clearly, I’ll have to drop choir again. Damn it. I love singing…it’s the only break in the drudgery I get. But I guess I won’t have time for that, either.

And I’ll have to dumb down the classes even more than they’re already dumbed-down, which is majorly dumbed. The only way to survive this will be to cut incoming papers to a bare minimum. Even now, I’ve succumbed to the “rubric” technique, in which you lay out a set of low-level standards you’re looking for and simply ignore every other error and f**k-up the students commit. Thus a C paper can easily earn a B or even an A, because you simply don’t have time to sift through, mark, and explain every single illiteracy in every single paper. It helps you to get through the stuff a little faster, but the result is less than satisfactory. IMHO. To coin a sentence fragment…

At any rate, this little experiment reveals why I feel like I can’t keep up with my life. I feel that way because it’s objectively true: I can’t keep up with my life.

Image: Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory. Wikipedia Commons.

Fair use rationale:

  1. Its inclusion in the article adds significantly to the article because it shows the subject of this article and how the image depicted is familiar to the general public.
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Weekend pool frolics: Soda ash edition

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At some point along the line, Frugal Scholar remarked in passing that the swimming pool sounds like a royal pain. And there’s something to be said for that.

But it also has to be said that if you like to swim and you live in a hot climate, a pool has so many redeeming qualities that you can see why people build them. At this time of year, I’m in the pool two or three times a day, every day. And I’m so spoiled to it I can’t remember how I managed to get through an endless succession of 115-degree days without a puddle of Clorox water to dive into. Every time I jump in the pool, I think aahhh! this makes it worth all the work and hassle.

However and on the other hand… When something happens to render the pool unusable, one’s memory is jogged; especially when dealing with the “something” requires a great deal of work, worry, or both.

The acid level in the pool’s water has been slowly climbing since the middle of last winter. I haven’t added any acid since early spring (normally one adds acid pretty regularly to a plaster-lined pool), but the pH keeps dropping. You recall high-school chemistry, right? Low pH = high acidity. Well, the pH has been at 7.2 for quite a while; that’s on the far low side of sort of OK. In other words, the acidity was a bit too much but nothing to panic over. The Leslie’s guys said if I just left it alone, eventually the pH would rise.

Wrong.

Au contraire, by Friday the pH had dropped to 6.8, the “add pH stabilizer” level. It was low enough that even the Leslie’s guys had to allow that the acid level was out of control.

So, come Saturday morning, Biker Phil, the Harley-ridin’ Leslie’s sales guy, says to me, “You need to add 30 pounds of soda ash.”

“Give me a proverbial break,” say I. “I can’t lift 30 pounds!”

“Well,” says he, “then add 20 pounds, wait four hours, test the pH, and if it’s still too low, come back and get another 10 pounds.” With that, he sells me two 10-pound containers of soda ash: that’ll be $48, thank you very much.

Biker Phil advises me to administer the entire 20 pounds of this stuff to the pool by walking around the perimeter and sprinkling it in, as evenly as possible. He says it will cloud the water, but in four hours or so the water should clear and be swimmable.

Okay. I go forth and do likewise.

Instantly, and I do mean instantly, the filter pressure gauge shoots over 20 psi.

Sumbitch. I backwash; recharge the filter with diatomaceous earth; go on about my business.

An hour later, I look out the window and notice a glass-smooth surface on the pool. “That’s odd,” think I. “The pump must have shut down.”

Oh, nooo. The pump was laboring away. Filter pressure had topped 30 psi! The filter was so clogged the pump, which is one tough little fellow, couldn’t move any water at all through the plumbing system.

The water, so lately sparkling like a mountain spring in a Coors ad, is opaque. Shut down. Major backwash. Recharge filter. An hour later: PSI is up to 30 again.

On the phone to Biker Phil. He can’t figure out the problem. “It can’t be the soda ash,” says he. “It’s dissolved. It can’t clog the filter.”

Phil. Phil, Phil, Phil. Were you not paying attention in your chem class? Or were you, like me, gathering wool from the clouds outside the window? What’s happened here is that when we deposited 20 pounds of soda ash into 18,000 gallons of water, we got a supersaturated solution. Think of the time you added several spoonsful of salt to a glass of warm water, to gargle your sore throat: what you got was a glass of salty water with a layer of salt crystals on the bottom. That. is. what. we. have. here.

Soda ash dunes.

Soda ash dunes, precipitated out of the saturated water, cover the steps, the seat, and the floor of the pool. I do not know how many pounds of soda ash is not dissolved, but I’ll bet it’s a lot. And, I figure, that’s what’s clogging the filter. Since Bob the Wonderful Leslie’s Guy was over here last week to disassemble, clean, and reassemble the filter, and since it was working so well the effervescent pool could’ve been used as an ad for Leslie’s Swimming Pool Supplies and Service, I associate the soda ash episode with the gagged filter.

Having followed Biker Phil’s instructions and met fiasco, I belatedly google  the function of soda ash in pool chemistry. At site after site I learn that one should never, ever, nooo never add more than two (count’em, 2) pounds of soda ash to a pool at a time. Biker Phil has had me add ten times the standard amount to the pool. Is there a question why the system has run amok?

The specific scientific details of the problem explained and comprehended, Phil recommends that I “bump” (a very short backwash) the pool every time the pressure threatens to move into the 30 psi range and says he thinks in time the problem will dissipate.

This requires me to do a minibackwash, illegally into the alley, every twenty minutes all day Saturday! In 114-degree heat. Sunday was cooler: a mere 110 degrees. Started with a full backwash at 5:30 Sunday morning. Opted the junket to church, where I wanted to hear the new pastor address the assembled masses for his virgin sermon, in favor of backwashing every twenty minutes. Around 11:00 a.m., reach Phil’s boss on the phone—the Phil himself being out until next Wednesday.

Seemingly unsurprised at the extravagant dosage of soda ash, Manager Jay speculates that the frequent full backwashes—which by now have added up to four in two days (one normally backwashes a DE filter about once every three months)—plus the three-times-an-hour “bumps” may have drained out most of the DE. He observes that when filter pressure jumps suddenly, one normally suspects too little DE. He recommends that I add five pounds of DE to the filter.

Refraining from observing more than once that the system was working fine Before Soda Ash, I feed 6 1/2 pounds of DE to the filter. This works pretty well: slows the process so that it takes an hour or two to reach a “Clean Filter” level of 20 psi. How long it would take to reach 30 psi, I do not know, not having enough nerve to overwork the pump to that degree. Probably another hour or so.

This adventure obviously is going to require another service call. Since I just paid to have Bob the WLG spend an hour working on the system, I am less than thrilled at the prospect of paying to have him come by again. I think Leslie’s should pay for whatever needs to be done to undo the mess that’s resulted from their advising me to add 10 times the recommended amount of soda ash to the pool.

Stay tuned! This promises to turn into an entertaining comedy of errors!