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Idle essays

Connectivity: Is Twitter a sign of poverty?

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Have you read Virginia Heffernan’s article, “Let Them Eat Tweets“? In a flight of metaphoric ecstasy, she suggests that a craving for virtual connections reflects an individual’s real-life social poverty (citing Bruce Sterling’s remarks at a South by Southwest technology conference). People who have real wealth, whether of soul or of lucre, feel no great need to be linked in. “We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of [cyber-]overcrowding because—it suddenly seems so obvious—we can’t afford privacy.”

Be still, my swelling ego! This explains it all: I don’t do Twitter and I don’t do cell phones and I don’t do text-messaging because of my status as a member of the richly endowed elite!

I knew it, I just knew it.

LOL! Actually, what I know is that Twitter forgot my password, I couldn’t get in, and it’s taken the proprietors a month to answer my appeal to their “help” line. And I can’t afford a cell phone. And if I could, I can’t imagine where I would find time for texting. I haven’t even had time to open the message from Twitter responding to my call for help.

It’s an interesting rumination, though, one that poses über-questions like “what is wealth,” “what is poverty,” and “WTF”?

The real reason I don’t have a cell (when people who live on welfare certainly do) is that I resist having everyone and anyone calling me wherever I am and whatever I’m doing. An ordinary land line is intrusive enough. Why would I want people jangling me up while I’m driving the car, sitting on the train, walking around, dining at a restaurant, working at the office?

Far from a sign of “a strong soul or a fat wallet,” that turn of mind strikes me as a kind of psychic self-impoverishment: surely if I were nicer, more generous, a better person I would be open at all times to the tendrils of everyone around me. I don’t have a cell because I don’t want one, and I don’t want one because of a certain social miserliness. That’s a long hike from spiritual strength.

And while the whole idea of Twitter intrigues me, it strikes me (more strongly than it intrigues me) that Twitter represents a gigantic hole into which to throw time. A space-time warp, so to speak. As I would not fling myself into a black hole to see what’s on the other side, so I feel a bit dubious about Twitter.

My guess is, though, that the poverty metaphor doesn’t apply. If you can find the time and energy to build virtual relationships, you probably have more social wealth than those of us who would rather not, thank you, tweet.

Check out Twistori, BTW. Interesting, in a hypnotic way.

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.

Laughingstock postscript

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Our Beloved Leader has circulated a memo about the Obama snubbing. It contains this wording:

Since my appointment [as president of the Great Desert University] we have not awarded honorary degrees to sitting politicians, a practice based on the very practical realities of operating a public university in our political environment. We have not offered degrees to our sitting Senators or our sitting Governors as many universities do. We have not invited them as university commencement speakers either.

In this case, the historic election of Barack Obama, we invited him as our university commencement speaker, the first in recent memory. We did that out of recognition of his unique achievements and his deep connection to our mission as a university committed to excellence and access.

If that’s the reasoning, why didn’t we say so instead of emanating the PR double-talk that went out to the Associated Press Friday?

Heee! It gets better and better.

GDU Defends Status as Champion Laughingstock of North America

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LOL! You have to be here to appreciate how ludicrously typical this is. Colleagues are still hooting with ecstatic hilarity (heaven knows we have little enough to laugh at around that place) over columnist Gail Collins’s choice words:

Obama’s round of spring events will culminate in appearances at graduation ceremonies in Notre Dame (where the local bishop is ticked off about the abortion thing) and Arizona State University, where he is not going to receive an honorary degree. A spokeswoman for the university explained that it was withholding that honor from the president because “his body of work is yet to come.”

Tough standards, A.S.U.!

Snark! Gasp…catch your breath, pick yourself up off the floor, and tool on over to CNN, where Our Beloved Employer’s p.r. staff can be seen digging us in even deeper:

The university says that the president’s achievements have yet to rate the honor, and is directing reporters to use a statement given to the Associated Press. “His body of work is yet to come. That’s why we’re not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency,” Media Relations Director Sharon Keller told the AP Thursday.

The university’s guidelines say the degree is merited by “significant contributions to education and society over the course of a person’s career,” though Sandra Day O’Connor and Barry Goldwater — both Arizonans — received the honor after the latter had served just over one term in the Senate, and the former was roughly three years into her Supreme Court tenure. Also honored: activist Cesar Chavez, legendary Arizona senator and former presidential candidate Mo Udall, and broadcaster Walter Cronkite.

Here in the blogosphere, one wit notes that the Great Desert University adjudges Erma Bombeck’s opus sufficient to merit an honorary degree, to say nothing of Jerry Colangelo’s and Steve Allen’s. Backs against the wall, administrators personfully stick with their decision to withhold an honorary degree from the President of the United States but instead will name a scholarship after him.

Mighty white of ’em, eh?

Meanwhile, the highly educated products of our elite institution, patriotic young entrepreneurs steeped in the significance of their nation’s history and place in the world, have made themselves busy peddling their tickets to the graduation ceremony. Entrée to hear the first African American President of the United States in person comes cheap at the Great Desert University: $60 to $100 a seat.

God, what an embarrassment to be associated with that outfit! How can I count the ways I love the prospect of exiting, pursued by…whatever?
MORE!

Laughingstock Postscript
Funnier and funnier!

Was Dorothy Parker prescient?

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Remember this Dorothy Parker poem?

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

The title is, hilariously enough, “Résumé.”

Tell me she didn’t foresee the joys of entering résumé details into online job application forms.
😀

Well, yesterday afternoon I learned another way to get quick access to medical care: say (or even just imply) that you’re considering offing yourself. I called to make an appointment with my favorite medico at the Mayo, by way of trying to wangle some antidepressants from the guy. I’m wrecking my jaw and hearing with the tooth-clenching, which has returned with a vengeance; some sites say antidepressants sometimes will cause that quirk to back off. To get in to a Mayo doctor, you have to wriggle past a gatekeeper with the melodramatic title of “triage nurse.”

So I’m explaining the situation and trying to persuade her that the stress level is such that I do need to see my doctor. She asks me if I’ve been considering suicide, and without thinking I answer that the thought has crossed my mind (which indeed it has: sure would resolve a lot of problems!).

Hee hee! Freaked her right out. So now I have an appointment this afternoon. This, despite my having reassured her that I was not serious. Maybe I could’ve gotten in yesterday afternoon if I’d remarked in passing that the birds were mightycute out there on the window ledge.

Spending big before the layoff

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In a deliciously Kafkaesque moment,yesterday noon I was fêted for my fifteen-year longevity at Our Beloved Employer: lunch out; a fine piece of paper with maroon and gold print on it, suitable for framing; and another cheap maroon-and-gold pin with a chip of a semiprecious stone in it.

LOL! I could hock my whole collection of cheap GDU pins for enough to buy about an ounce of Starbuck’s coffee.

What the heck. I ordered the most expensive meal on the menu: three sea scallops and a spinach salad.
w. 0. 0. t.

Next door to the overpriced restaurant, however, is an overpriced shoe store, the one whose clutches I evaded when Frugal Scholar clued me to Footprints. That outfit carries some very fine purses, none of which I have found for sale on the Web. Of late, I’ve been carrying a canvas shopping bagas a purse(a nice canvas shopping bag…). It’s getting a bit tatty. I really needed a new purse, all my old ones having surpassed the shopping bag’s state of tattiness. Realizing that after I’m laid off, a plasticene-leather tote from Target will be about the best I can afford, I ran in there and grabbed a mighty fine piece of style. Two hundred fifty buckolas! But I’ve got it in savings, set aside for exactly this sort of indulgence. And since the budget is $425 to the good, anyway, I can afford it out of cash flow.

Having that little gem sitting on the floor next to me was a bit of a comfort as I was pretending to be polite while sandwiched between Her Deanship and two of the institution’s most ruthless vice-presidents.

This is one of about a half-dozen items that need to get done or purchased while I still have some money. Videlicet:
-New close-up glasses
-Composter
-Security door for back entrance (or at least a decent screen door)
-Solid-core door for office, with strong deadbolt
-Painting the Investment House
-Resuscitating the yard at the Investment House

Glasses:In August we’ll have an open enrollment. At that time I could sign up for the university’s vision plan (assuming it’s still offered). If I delay getting glasses till fall, this would allow me to pick up a cheap pair before I’m canned in December. They use one of those nationwide chains of optical stores, which has a bad reputation. In Arizona you’re prohibited from buying a pair of glasses without getting an eye exam, which is not covered by health insurance and which I can’t afford just now (read, “because I highly resent that!”). All I need is a back-up pair, so I suppose they don’t have to be the best in the world.

Composter: I dearly miss the wonderful composter drum La Bethulia gave me. Smith & Hawkin has a similar bin, only it’s on wheels. That would be convenient. The one drawback to the deceased was that getting the compost out and hauling it across the yard to the various gardens and gigantic pots could be a chore. Problem: Smith & Hawkin wants more than $200 for this wonder.

Security: The kitchen door is the most vulnerable entrance to the house. To break in, all you need to do is tap out a glass pane, reach in, and unlock the door. The vinyl screen door is a flimsy piece of junk that won’t even keep out the flies. The locksmith suggested that if you use a room as an office, you can keep all your computer gear in there plus a safe with other valuables, and then put a deadbolt on that room’s door. Every time you leave the house, lock the door. Since the Mac is the only thing I own of any real value, that strikes me as a good idea. The interior door, however, is an airy thing that I could punch through myself with one swift kick, and so it will have to be replaced with a sturdier model.

Paint: I probably could paint part of the investment house myself. But I don’t have the physical strength to do the eaves and back patio. Greg the Handyman wants $1,500 to do the job, about $600 more than Bila the Bosnian Painter’s bid. I’m thinking we need to call Bila and get that done while we can afford it.

Yard: With Gerardo’s help, I probably could do a fair amount of upgrade to the Investment House’s wrecked landscaping myself. Gerardo would need to regrade the driveway and lay new gravel. Ideally, we should jackhammer up the pathetic walkway, but I think I can pretty that up simply by laying a bed of river rock next to it. For not very much, Gerardo would till and seed the front lawn, a major improvement. I think some blue fescue or something along those lines would grow under the carob tree, and a second tree strategically planted near the unhappy walkway would cast enough shade on the front window to save a few air-conditioning dollars. In the back, I intend to build another vegetable garden for my use, since I’ve run out of growing space at my own house. As long as I’m gardening back there, I might as well build a couple of brick-on-sand or flag-on-sand patios, too.

Taken together, these will add up to some bucks. But if I string them out over the next few months, I should be able to afford most of it without having to raid savings. Especially if, as hoped, Scottsdale and Paradise Valley community colleges hire me and max out the number of courses I can teach for the district next fall: the net of about five grand will go directly into savings, easing the need for me to pinch pennies between now and the New Year’s Eve layoff.