God, how I hate waking up in the wee hours of the morning! Is anything, anything more annoying and frustrating?
I’m so tired I’m almost sick, and I can. not. sleep. Part of it is worrying about losing a chunk of cash in the mail just when I have to get a new crown…that money would have about paid for the dental work. Now I’ll have to raid savings to cover it. Part of it is worrying about how I’m going to get another raft of papers graded around the mass of choir rehearsals and performances that will occupy the rest of this week. Part of it is being pissed at having to get my teeth crowned as a result of all the bruxing I do out of stress and frustration. (LOL! “Why do the heathen grind their teeth?”) Part of it is worrying whether the IRS got my tax payment, since that went out in the same mail as the lost checks. Part of it is annoyance that Fidelity’s online statements are not current and that there’s no way to figure out which of the several accounts they’ve got up there corresponds to the money fund for which I have a book of checks, one of which I used to pay my taxes. Part of it is that it’s going to rain again, so the air is a little humid and vaguely uncomfortable. Part of it is disappointment that (I think) Funny lost the current March Madness round at Free Money Finance. Part of it is hunger. And part of it is just old-lady insomnia.
Yesh. At 9:30 this morning—now only five hours away—another mountain of muzzy student papers will come to light on my desk. The day will be occupied with classes through 1:45, at which point I have to drive to Costco for gasoline. Then it’s off to rehearsal.
This week the choir had rehearsals last night and has another rehearsal tonight, a performance tomorrow night, rehearsals and performance Friday, rehearsal and performance Saturday, rehearsal and two performances Sunday. When exactly I’m going to find time to read the mountain of student papers, to say nothing of my client’s first two draft chapters, I do. not. know!
Yesterday I didn’t get to his dissertation because I spent the most of the day writing the post that will come online in about two hours and arguing with the credit union and the post office. This morning at three o’clock I was in no condition to edit copy. And still am not: I’ve killed the last hour and forty-five minutes writing posts to cover the next two days.
Let’s see… 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., that’s four hours. It’s now almost 5 o’clock. If by some miracle I can get back to sleep until seven, maybe I could eke a full six hours out of the night before I have to go to class.
{grump!} It’s not like I didn’t have enough screwing around to have to do…
Apparently the Post Office lost an envelope sent to the credit union containing three checks, one for my personal account and two for the Copyeditor’s Desk account. It was a printed envelope from the credit union, so the address was correct, and I distinctly remember checking to be sure each item in the the fistful of mail I stuffed in the mailbox had a stamp on it. So I guess all those checks are just gone. Today I’ll have to call the issuers and tell them to stop payment and send me new checks.
Problem is, one of them came from Google Adsense, where it is dead impossible to reach a human being. The only way to make Google reissue a check will be to go to a particularly annoying, frustrating website and claim never to have seen the thing. Doing that will mean
a) I’ll have to lie, because I most certainly have seen and endorsed the damn thing, and b) it will be another two months before I get another payment.
Problem with using the Google web annoyance is that if I claim not to have received the check and then it arrives at the CU and gets deposited, then it will look like I’m trying to steal from Adsense. Google is notoriously inclined to simply cut off customers it thinks aren’t dealing straight with Adsense. So, I guess the better part of valor is just to eat the $157.
Damn it. The specific reason I did this was that it is a freaking hassle to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus just to deposit a couple of checks. It consumes gas unnecessarily, and it expends pretty close to an hour of my time. The West campus stands in the middle of a down-at-the-heels bedroom community with no commerce where I might get any other errands done while I’m over there. I take that back: there’s a Costco in that general direction, but it’s an extra stretch and more wasted gasoline up the freeway, and a Lowe’s and a Home Depot at the freeway intersection. Not that I shop at either of those places much anymore.
So, to avoid hassle I’ve brought a basketful of extra hassle down on my head.
But the big concern about this is that when I drove over to the nearby post office and dropped that envelope in the mailbox, I also mailed my tax returns. Yesh. Both the personal and the corporate returns. For both the state and the feds. And I sent Tax Lady her payment in the same outgoing mail drop.
It looks like TL cashed at least one of her checks, the one I wrote on the corporate checking account; the second was written on a Fidelity money market account, along with the check to cover the federal tax. So if she got her envelope, presumably the Post Office didn’t lose everything I tried to send that day. I’ll have to get into the Fidelity account online—another fine little hassle—to see if the feds have cashed the check for their pound of flesh.
Where the PO is concerned, I’m afraid I can’t call any kettles black. I add my own extravagant incompetence to everyone else’s. It’s a wonder the human race gets anywhere at all.
Yesterday in my senility I utterly FORGOT that the 101 students were supposed to be at the library hearing a talk from our most accomplished and lively librarian! We blew away an hour and a half chatting about research methods in the classroom, and none of us, not a one, remembered that we were supposed to be elsewhere. That was because…
a) I had totally spaced any memory of this appointment; and b) When I posted an announcement to the young things in BlackBoard, I forgot to hit “e-mail to all recipients,” and, as usual, none of them checked the class announcements board.
So, this truly wonderful librarian showed up in the computer classroom and stood around for half an hour wondering where the hell we were.
Arghhhh!
Yesterday, too, I had such a blinding headache I began to wonder if I was having a stroke. It actually made me dizzy…felt like I was listing to the right as I was trying to drive and walk. Wasn’t, though; it just felt that way.
And of course in this general state of misery I had a meeting before classes and then had to drive from North Phoenix to South Scottsdale after spending four hours in front of classrooms full of late-stage adolescents. There Poisoned Pen Press gratefully accepted the novel I’d just finished editing but had no new work for me.
Fortunately I have some paying work to do today…though I will say, I don’t feel like doing any work, much less of the paying variety.
Driving from pillar to post yesterday, I was regaled by Tony Judt’s unholy tale of his trials with ALS on NPR’s Fresh Air. It’s a gut-wrenching story. You’d like to say you can’t even imagine what it would be like to live through such a horror and then die of it. But you can: Judt describes it with vivid clarity.
It’s one of those moments that brings to mind one’s own mortality. Please, God, let me drive my car off a cliff, let me die in a plane crash, let me drop dead of a heart attack. I think if I received a diagnosis like that, the first thing I’d do is pick up my father’s pistol and blow my brains out. Judt at least has his family around him and apparently has the resources to hire in-home nursing care. I have no one but my son, who has to work and could not devote three to ten years to caring for a dying woman. He would have to leave me to waste away alone in a nursing home.
Having chosen not to exit pursued by a bear, Judt—an eminent historian—has written a new book addressed largely to young people, Ill Fares the Land. The NPR site features an interesting out-take from its introduction. Says he:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.
Just so.
The news of the day continued with reports of crazed right-wingers planning to murder police officers and foment a rebellion against the federal government. That, to my mind, is far scarier than anything our enemies among the fundamentalist Moslems can do. IMHO, unless something is done about the growing schism in this country, within 20 to 50 years we will be looking at civil war.
To top it all off, I got a truly nasty e-mail from someone on the choir informing me she doesn’t know who I am and does not care to hear anything from me. F*** you very much.
Okay, I know that in some ways this isn’t funny, but… hee hee HEEEEE! Just thinking about it reduces me to incoherence.
Especially the part where the reporter says, “The Associated Press could not locate a home telephone number for Wolfe.” Thank heavens! How would you like to have the AP call you for comment on that antic?
Yay! It’s spring break! One of the little blandishments of teaching that I’d forgotten about, it having disappeared in a fog of 9-to-5 overwork quite some time ago.
Mountain Laurel in bloom
Remembering it, however, after Departmental Chair kindly gave me three sections to plan for this semester, I set things up so that no student papers would sit on my desk and demand to be read over this lovely 70-degree week. The last raft came in on Wednesday, and I finished reading them and posting grades around 10:30 Thursday night. So…we’re looking at a whole week with no work!
The weather’s incredible and a mountain of household, yard, and computer chores have backed up and demand to be done. So there’ll be plenty to keep me busy over the next seven days. The question, however, is how idleness will play out not now but over the summer, when the community college hires no adjuncts (the plummy summer jobs go to full-timers) and even if they did, Social Security prohibits me from earning any more than a few classes in the spring and fall will pay.
Even though we didn’t work much around the editorial office during the summer, we were employed and I did have to traipse out to the campus several times a week. A lot of that traipsing amounted to time-wasting, but it did at least occupy time, if fruitlessly. Before I took on the administrative job, I always used to teach during the summer. Full-time faculty members earn a percentage of their salary for each summer course, amounting to a nice slab of cash—far more than adjuncts are paid for the same work. It was enough to fund a vacation, if I wanted to travel somewhere, or (more to the point) to cover some new improvement or purchase for the house. That’s where the dollars came from, for example, to buy things like the gorgeous sidebar from Crate & Barrel and the leather sofa and chair in the living room.
Next year, when I can earn as much as anyone will pay me, I may ask for a section or two at the West campus, which pays almost a thousand dollars more than the junior colleges pay. Probably to no avail: the university is hemorrhaging students as it raises tuition and fees while cutting services. The community colleges’ summer enrollment, we were recently told, jumped 17 percent over last year’s, which itself showed a significant rise. Thus it’s unlikely the university will have any summer sections to farm out to adjunct faculty…particularly since the Board of Regents just announced that, as a sop to students and parents enraged by the latest 20 percent (!!) tuition hike, they’re cutting university employees’ salaries by 2.75 percent. To make up for it, everyone will be trying to teach a summer section, and of course there will be far fewer sections to go around.
Mwa ha ha! How glad am I that I’m not working there anymore? Let me count the gladnesses…
At any rate, back on topic after that digression: What to do this summer? I’ve never had an entire summer break with nothing to do—even as a student, I went to summer school. Adding to the problem is that summer weather here is as oppressive as an Upper Peninsula winter. Instead of getting snowbound, though, people get heat-bound: it’s so excruciatingly hot you just don’t want to stick your nose out of the refrigerated cube that is your house.
I’ve thought about shutting the place down and going somewhere else over the summer. In 118-degree heat, it costs so much to run the air-conditioning and water that the cost of decamping to Yarnell probably wouldn’t be that much more than staying here. The problem is, though, that when you have a pool and a bunch of trees and plants, you can’t just shut the place down and walk away. In the summertime, when monsoon winds fill the chlorinated puddle with debris from the devil-pod tree and from every palm tree for miles around, you have to be here to clean the damn thing every day. And anything in a pot that’s not watered first thing each morning is fried by noon.
Back in the day when I was married to the globe-trotting lawyer, never once did we leave town but what we came home to some baroque new mess, crisis, or catastrophe. Yea verily, even before we owned a house with a pool, going out of town simply dictated that some fiasco would happen when we were gone. Dead cats, fires, thieving house-sitters, house-sitter killing himself and three young women in a drunken car crash, painter painting the black cat white, father doing battle with house-sitter’s wannabe burglar boyfriend, dogs retrieved from the kennel sick, ohhhhh god. I got to the point where I just. did. not. want. to. leave. town.
So. My enthusiasm for batting around the countryside all summer is about nil. Some things are worse than being hot.
This leaves: what to do next summer?
One possibility is to try to wring a book out of Funny about Money. I think there’s more than enough copy to pull together something coherent. If I finish off the “Financial Freedom” series before the semester ends, that can be the core of the thing. Anything that’s vaguely related can serve as support material, and a few entertaining irrelevancies can be thrown in as frills and flounces.
The question remains, though, whether I can sell something that’s already been done. Too many PF bloggers have already taken their (somewhat hackneyed) advice to press. Who is gunna buy a FaM book and how much are they gunna pay up front? I suppose I could go back to William Morrow. But both my agent and my editor there are long gone. No one at that house knows me anymore. And my inclination to seek out another literary agent is about as lively as my inclination to pack up and leave town for the summer.
The ancient book published through Columbia is still selling, though weakly…I might be able to persuade someone there to buy a FaM spin-off. It’s not very academic, though. On the other hand, in these times university presses need to stock their lists with at least a few items that will sell. The recession could work in my favor there.
Another possibility is to try to write a detective novel and peddle it to my favorite client, Poisoned Pen Press. These things are such a hoot! And I know I can write the stuff. I’ve done two novels, neither of which I’ve tried to publish. Though they are unpublishable, they did provide plenty of practice building characters, plots, and scenes. One of them, IMHO, is pretty damned good—certainly better written than some of the stuff I’m seeing.
PPP’s advances are very low: from what I understand, only about $1,000. The way you make money off the things is to get out there and peddle them yourself. Obviously, if I’m teaching classes every day I’m not going to have time to junket around the country signing books and schmoozing with bookstore buyers.
Still, in a Bumhood setting, where we see that we really don’t need extravagant amounts of cash to live quite comfortably, a thousand bucks of money happening is, well—not unacceptable.
Speaking of PPP, just now I’m reading a wonderful thing by a writer named Judy Clemens,The Grim Reaper’s Dance. It’s due out in August. This is an amazing piece of writing! In the first place, Clemens is a fluent and graceful stylist—the astonishing characterization and plotline aside, her prose is a joy to read. And then we have the fantastic magical-realist story…what a tour de force! The conceit that takes this mystery novel way above the level of genre writing is the protagonist’s companion: Death.
Yes. That would be him: the Grim Reaper himself. Our heroine Casey is shadowed by the very Personification, who, materialized in the form of an amusingly creepy eccentric, follows her around and generally watches out for her. Along the way, he collects this and that soul. Visible only to Casey, who herself is pretty postmodern, Death may or may not be a hallucination. That very ambiguity makes the story strangely credible and highly entertaining. It’s a great piece of summer reading—highly recommended!
A third possibility is to volunteer to commit some good works. Trouble is, most everything around here closes during the summer, and so there won’t be much to do. Nor, really, am I fond of working for nothing. I’ve never been much of a joiner, alas.
And finally, there’s the possibility of actually learning something. La Maya is always engaged in one painting class or another; she says her teachers are open to taking on rank amateurs. These cost rather more than I can afford, however.
One of my students teaches piano. Once she’s out of my class, no conflict would be entailed in hiring her to teach me to plunk away. That would be useful for choir: I do need to how to read music a great deal better than I can now.
Or I could take yoga or dancing classes at the community colleges. Tuition is amazingly low for several weeks of entertainment. Who knows? Maybe I could take piano at the college.
Speaking of doing something, it is, I’m afraid, time to get up from the computer and go kill some of the exuberant weeds that are trying to take over the front yard. Onward!
Of course, we know one of us is perfect in every way, right?
Do you find it difficult to be patient with people whose foibles are really not significantly worse than your own? I have to keep reminding myself to be kind. Sometimes. Like, f’r example…
When the friend who likes his wine calls on the phone three sheets to the wind (again!) and drones on, on, and further on about nothing very much. Invariably he calls when I’m in the middle of something I’d like to get finished with now, not later. So his interrupting me while I’m struggling to get through some involved or laborious project does nothing to enhance my gracious personality. And then he bores me stupid with an endless monologue rehearsing all the uninteresting trivia of his day as though these were earthshaking matters of state. The entire one-sided conversation, which groans along until I tell him to get off the phone because I’m busy, concerns one subject and one subject alone: himself. The only responses that are expected or allowed are “uh huh,” hmmm,” “how wonderful,” and “isn’t that interesting?” Even those are hard to wedge in edgewise.
I hate listening to drunks on the phone. Even amiable drunks.
True, we should give thanks that at least he sleeps well at night. His perennially shit-faced cousin used to call at 2:00 in the morning and natter on in exactly the same way. On and on. And on.
Today when he called I managed to blurt out that a mutual friend has sold her house and is moving to his neck of the woods.
“Well, don’t give her my phone number!” said he.
“Don’t give her your phone number? Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to listen to her go on and on about hummingbirds. She’s the most boring person I’ve ever met!”
Heeeee!
Then he proceeded to tell me, for the third time, about the glories of his startling discovery that you can put an egg in bread dough.
Yes. Did you know you can put an egg in bread dough? You can. You can put an egg in bread dough.
The Times didn’t arrive at the usual hour this morning (nor, I notice, did the Arizona Repulsive, delivered to the neighbors). It finally did show up, around 9:00 a.m.: it was reclining in a puddle of rainwater when I went to drive out of the garage.
A paper that gets to me after breakfast is a paper that arrives too late. I won’t even open the thing. I won’t have time to look at it, because I’ll be fully engaged in the hectic round of time-consuming, repetitive, can’t-be-neglected activities that is my daily life. And my life isn’t even especially busy, compared to most people’s.
As newspaper subscribers realize they’re paying to have half-a-forest of pulped wood delivered to their front doorstep that they have no time to read, they cancel their subscriptions. Revenues fall and management cuts back on the delivery of news. We get less content, less serious reporting, less of value. More readers cancel. In due time, the paper falters and then fails.
That’s about where I am with the Times just now. The only reason I haven’t canceled is that I got a smokin’ deal while I was on the ASU faculty. If I cancel the paper and then decide I want it back, that incredible bargain won’t be available again. I certainly can’t afford to subscribe to the New York Times at its full price. In addition, the Times is instituting a scheme to limit readers’ access to its online edition unless they’re already subscribers to the paper version (huh?) or are willing to pony up some cash for the privilege of cruising the web version. So…it’s either keep the paper subscription, continuing to abet the destruction of forests, the contamination of the environment in the production of ink, and the transport of wads paper smeared with ink that go directly into the recycling bin, or (since on principle I do not pay for Web content) forgo reading the Times altogether.
It sets up quite the internal conflict. I’d like to support journalism. It’s one of the pillars of democracy. Without good reporting—real reporting, not Play-Nooz—citizens cannot know what their elected leaders are doing (or not doing) and can’t know when it’s time to throw the rascals out. The long, slow demise of journalism has traced the long, slow demise of education in this country, and in fact when solid journalism no longer exists, the American republic will soon cease to exist.
But still… Sometimes I feel like a fool, continuing to pay for something that’s fading away like the Cheshire cat.
Image: John Tenniel, The Cheshire Cat. Illustration for Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Public Domain
. It’s due out in August. This is an amazing piece of writing! In the first place, Clemens is a fluent and graceful stylist—the astonishing characterization and plotline aside, her prose is a joy to read. And then we have the fantastic magical-realist story…what a tour de force! The conceit that takes this mystery novel way above the level of genre writing is the protagonist’s companion: Death.