Idle essays

The magazine-writing course is now mounted in Canvas and ready to go live. All that remains is to figure out a couple of minor details and then, two weeks or so from now, click “Publish.”

And it only took a couple of evenings in front of the television to get it done!

I’ve pretty much got that online course down to a science, so that it requires only a bit of tweaking to update it each semester. Links die; new sites come to one’s attention; the occasional new pedagogical scheme crosses one’s mind. It helps a  lot, though, that the course is only eight weeks long. From the student’s point of view, it’s probably pretty intense, especially during the first two or three weeks when they need to come up to speed. But from my point of view, it’s sooo much easier to mount than an online course, and so much less work and hassle than a full 16-week course.

What a relief it is not to be teaching classroom sections! I don’t think even I realized how exhausted I was by the end of last year.

Yesterday I spent some time putting the finishing touches on a client’s manuscript and was shocked at the number of typos and misspellings that had slipped past me. Among the things that hadn’t gotten done: Because Word sees almost all pharmaceutical brand names and generic drug names as incorrect, one’s eye goes blind to all the little red squiggles under every other scientific term. Long ago, I should have checked

every.

single.

drug.

name (patented or generic)!

at its manufacturer’s website.

Our heroic author had misspelled two drug names, and I, assuming after all the guy’s a doctor and he must be right, had missed those errors. Also missed a couple of mundane typos of the sort that escape the bleary eye. So tired was I that I was making stupid assumptions and neglecting to do tasks that ordinarily would be routine.

Of course I picked up that nasty cold just before Christmas, hours after the last day of class, and then was pounced by the Index from Hell. No doubt it was sent to Hell in the first place by my overall zombification; a job that should have taken a week morphed into a three-week marathon.

I’m not missing the teaching income (yet): The Copyeditor’s Desk doubled its revenue goal in January and has done OK so far this month. But that’s not going to last, unless serendipity strikes again…we’re almost out of work and nothing new is in sight. I may be forced to get off my duff and hustle up some jobs.

But in the meantime, not working is some kinda heaven!

Having to schlep to a college campus and cope with roomsful of restless, ill-educated, ill-mannered post-adolescents was blighting my life. In the absence of having to devote some part of every day to tasks I don’t much care for, my life has completely changed. Even though this damn back thing makes everything hurt from the waist down, I feel wonderful!

Literally. Every day is downright blissful. Rain or shine, it’s a beautiful day. (Well. The frost we might have done without…) It’s so heavenly to accompany the Queen of the Universe to the park, loaf around watching tiny people play on the kiddie gym and moms push babes around in strollers and carriages, soak up the sun, and just do…nothing.

And it’s so wonderful to have my house be picked up and clean, without my having to find a full day in which to work myself sick to make that happen. I hate living in a pigpen! But that was what my house was, when I was too busy and too tired to take care of it.

Then there’s the magnificent meal in the middle of the day, complete with rather more wine than prescribed. Today: grilled steak, avocado and butter lettuce salad, grilled yellow summer squash swimming in home-made cherry tomato sauce, strawberries with Greek-style yogurt and crunchy sugar, Castle Rock cheap but highly acceptable pinot noir. Coffee.

And an amazing new phenomenon: sleeping seven hours a night, come Hell, high water, or Saturday Night Live. Yes. True that. The four-hour nighttime naps have gone away. When I go to bed, I sleep seven hours, not the four hours on average (range: two to five hours) to which I had become accustomed. Fall into the sack at 9:00 p.m.: wake up at  4:00 a.m. Go to bed at midnight: wake up at 7:00 a.m. Imagine that!

Life is, for a change, worth living.

What is this? The middle of February? It actually has taken all this time — two and a half  months — to unwind enough and rest enough even to become aware of the bliss the new state of affairs brings.

Bumhood.

Some years ago (quite a few, come to think of it), an ambitious young fellow got hired as an associate by the prestigious law firm in which my then-husband was a partner. He accomplished this coup largely on the strength of an original scheme he’d come up with as a student: he spent a summer living on the streets with the homeless, and then he wrote a paper about the experience, which he’d managed to get published.

He once remarked that the single fact that struck him most was the overall happiness of the people he’d met. Even though many, he allowed, were mentally ill, by and large they were surprisingly content and not at all grieved by their chronic state of unemployment. They were reasonably well fed and had adapted to life in a cardboard box; by and large they felt they had few serious problems to deal with and were satisfied with their existence.

He came to mind the other day as The Queen and I were wandering around the park. She wears out pretty fast if I make her hike along briskly (after all, one of my steps equals about ten of hers), but allowed to stroll at her own mostly leisurely pace (except when cats and small children heave into sight), she would probably go a long, long way. Forever, maybe. It  occurred to me that if I chose, this dog and I could spend the whole day just roaming around. If I could get her on the bus or the train (and I could, by claiming she’s a “service animal” — one lady brings her poodle to church in that guise), we could explore the entire city on foot. If we so chose.

When my ex- and I lived in the Encanto district (a richly yuppified central-city lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto), several homeless shelters and halfway houses resided nearby. These outfits would take in people about 5 or 6 p.m., feed them, bed them down, and then eject them by 8 in the morning. They had no place to go. And so what they would do is walk, ride the buses, or sit in the city library all day long. One old gal used to walk around the city all the time. No matter where you went south of Indian School, sooner or later you’d see her marching along the streets. And there was a guy who’d make it up to Glendale, walking, walking, walking.

Cassie and I have our own flophouse. We could see the city, for the price of a pair of shoes and a senior citizen’s bus pass.

Bumhood is good. I like it.

Money Beagle has a great post on how one goes about making bail, a reflection occasioned by the discovery that a former friend was accused of embezzling $400,000. It’s really a shocker when someone you thought you knew well turns out to be crooked as the proverbial hound’s hind leg.

First time it happened to me was when an ex-flame of mine was arrested somewhere east of Yuma, ferrying the largest haul of cocaine that had ever been nabbed in Arizona.

Heh. He always aimed high. This was the guy who soured me on Republican party politics. If you think “dirty tricks” were dreamed up by Richard Nixon’s boys, think again. 😉

Never occurred to me, though, that his career ambitions extended beyond sabotaging the presidential campaigns and hustling call girls for visiting big-wigs.

Krantcents, commenting on Beagle’s post, reflects on his experience teaching at the Leavenworth army prison and remarks, “The main difference between a criminal and me is I realize I would be caught the very first time where they think they will never be caught….”

Maybe that’s the fundamental difference between the law-abiding type and the crook. I was always too scared of getting caught to cheat, lie, and steal.

So namby-pamby was I, it wasn’t until I hit middle age that I noticed how much stuff some people get away with. The reason some people think they’ll never get caught is that it’s objectively true that they very well won’t ever get caught. The first time I realized a married couple of my acquaintance was committing what appeared to be insurance fraud — again and again! — I was flabbergasted. The worst that happened (other than the disintegration of their life, more a function of their personalities than their larceny) was that their insurer eventually refused to cover their home or car.

After that I began to notice what people around me were pulling off: outrageous mortgages that of course they couldn’t pay; selling bloated mortgages to people who obviously couldn’t afford them; “buying” a dressy outfit, wearing it to a party, and then returning it with a claim that it didn’t fit right; drinking and driving; buying and selling weed and ’shrooms; shoplifting from clothing and grocery stores with impunity; gaming the FMLA law; collecting from insurance companies for nonexistent neck injuries after minor fender-benders; declaring bankruptcy and then heading off to California for an upscale vacation; embezzling from a law firm and leaving the partners holding the bag; and on and on and on.

It’s no wonder college-age students think they can lie and cheat their way to honors-level grades, given the role models they see. They seem to expect to get away with it.

And probably, most of the time, they do.

By way of clearing out some space here at the Funny Farm, I’ve decided to sell some fine China that my then-young self and my then-young husband purchased in late ’60s or early ’70s.

The most interesting of the two items on offer is an 8-place-setting set of Noritake in the “Trudy” pattern. Apparently Trudy is no longer made, so you have to go to places like Replacements, Ltd. to get it — or find it serendipitously in an estate sale. Here’s what it looks like:

That’s the cup and saucer, and below is the plate:

This is stamped on the back of each  piece:

Proof positive:

Noritake — yes
Trudy — yes

They’re quietly elegant China. Tiring of the heavy, casual-looking stoneware that was the rage when I was married, I bought this set because I wanted something a little more formal for entertaining, part of the job description for a corporate wife. I found them at Goldwater’s, probably in the early or mid-1970s. Was very proud of them until it dawned on me that hand-washing dishes for eight people was not my cup of tea. It’s been lightly used, and as far as I know (I haven’t unpacked the entire box yet), it has no chips or dings. I think some of the plates may have a little wear of the platinum ring around the outside.

Then we have one place setting of this:

I have one, count it (1),  full place setting of Lenox in the Solitaire pattern: plate, salad dish, bread & butter dish, cup, saucer. It’s in perfect condition, having never been used.

When I was a young bride about to marry a corporate lawyer on his way to partner at one of the most prestigious law firms in the Southwest, I did what all the other young brides did and signed up for the registry at every department store in town. For our China, we chose this Lenox Solitaire, which to this day I think is just gorgeous.

Lenox still makes this pattern. Today it’s selling for much less, relative to what Americans earn, than it did back in 1967, when I entered the blessed state of matrimony. The firm bought us a full set of the silverware we craved. But only one person gave us a place setting of this stuff. There was no way my husband and I could afford to buy any more of it — and he made very good money. The company was acquired in 1983; I have no idea whether they made changes in their production or quality control, but one reviewer at Amazon observes that pieces she purchased within the past couple of years don’t compare with Lenox from the 1960s.

Apparently not all the newer products carry the Lenox stamp on the back, which you can see on mine:

I’m going to sell both sets — the eight place settings of Noritake and the single five-piece place setting of Lenox, either through a consignment shop here in Phoenix or through e-Bay. However, first I’d like to ask Funny about Money’s readers if anyone would like to purchase one or both directly from me.

The Noritake has been offered at Replacements, Ltd. for $630 for 45 pieces (eight place settings, of course, will give you 40 pieces); Classic Replacements has had it for $60 for five pieces but evidently has no Noritake in stock; and on e-Bay it has been sold for $55 a place setting (that would come to $440 for the complete set). I’d be willing to sell the Noritake set to a reader for $400, plus shipping.

The Lenox is $90 per place setting at Bed Bath & Beyond, and I spotted it at Amazon for the same price. Replacements, Ltd., is selling it for $70 a place setting. I think $65 plus shipping would be a fair price.

If you would like to purchase one or both of these, please let me know. You can reach me at funnyaboutmoney {at} gmail {dot} com.

Earlier this month Donna Freedman published a winsomely rueful meditation on the way she’s changed over time. Case in point: in her reaction to small mistakes that cost her money.

That each of us is a different person at 40 from the one we were at 18 is a commonplace. It’s a given that we’re going to change. The question is, how much and in what direction?

Recently The New York Times published a report on a study showing that most of us are aware of how much we’ve changed from a “younger me,” but that we tend not to recognize that the “future me” will change just as  much or more from our present incarnation. Researchers dubbed this the “end of history illusion.”

It’s an  interesting idea — that we think the wonderfulness that is us right now represents the height of our personal evolution and so think we’re unlikely to change much more.

I wonder if that’s so. Or if it is true, by knowing this quirk exists, can we overcome it and anticipate or control the changes coming to us?

Recently I’ve become aware of a number of fairly abrupt changes in my own thinking and attitudes.

Number one change:

Yes, I’m afraid it’s true:
I’m no longer “funny” about money.

Not only have I lost the obsession about money, I hardly even give a damn.

Whence this bizarre new attitude? No idea.

It may have something to do with the decision to quit teaching and the realization that even if The Copyeditor’s Desk never earns another penny, there’s enough in savings to support me and pay my share of the Downtown House. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it wouldn’t do much harm, either.

Or it may reflect the fact that the business actually is meeting its revenue goal, at least for the moment: this month I billed twice the 2013 monthly goal.

The January AMEX billing cycle ended yesterday. Because I put all my discretionary spending on the card, that means the December/January discretionary budget cycle just closed, too. I figured I was going to have to borrow from savings to pay the bill, because I spent myself stupid this month: a pair of hiking boots, a new All-Clad stockpot, a couple hundred bucks on gardening supplies and plants, a dentist’s bill, three lunches out, even a dinner out (!), a new pair of Costco jeans, a prescription not covered by the Medicare Part D rip-off…holy mackerel! Expected to be about $300 to $400 in the hole.

But no! At the end of the day, I’d run the AMEX budget just $91 into the red. Because the checking account has $300 left over from last month, I won’t even have to take money out of Diddle-It-Away Savings to cover these indulgences.

That’s nice, but it doesn’t explain why I wasn’t worried. Other way around, actually: because I’ve quit worrying about money, I spent money on things that the Old Me probably wouldn’t have.

Another big change that’s occurred recently is that I am sick and tired of sitting in front of computers all day. Really. The realization that oiling the furniture and kitchen cabinets felt better than parking myself at a desk amounted to a revelation. I don’t wanna do this anymore! I want to go outside and play.

That’s not very practical, of course…I still do have to earn at least part of a living. However, the housekeeping task-a-day scheme represents a manifestation of that impulse. It gives me a reason to get off my duff and move around for an hour or so, even if it’s only around the house.

Not only does it provide an excuse to move about, it’s actually working to keep the house clean. With the house no longer looking like a dank cave (who knew light would come in windows if you clean them?), I find I want to be in other parts of the house. The bright, clean kitchen now invites me to cook better and more elaborate dishes, and to eat better. The uncluttered, undusty living and family rooms want me to sit out there and not hole up in the office.

Now that I’m not teaching and so not filling the hours with a stress-inducing activity, I’m sleeping better. Like amazingly better: seven or eight hours a night, without a little help from my friends! Maybe not coincidentally, I’m also drinking less.

The question is, can we anticipate or direct these changes in outlook or character?

To do so, we’ll have to shuck off the illusion that we’ve achieved the peak of our glory as of today. Dan P. McAdams, a Northwestern University psychologist, speculates that the end-of-history effect reflects “a failure in personal imagination.” To get past it, then, we would need to jump-start our imagination.

That would require first thinking about how personality traits shift with age. One thing is for sure: our quirks get more exaggerated as we grow older. A little stubborn at 20, were you? By 60 you may be downright pig-headed. Our opinions may become set in stone. Or they may flip completely — in my 20s I was a Goldwater Girl and so staunch an anti-Communist that I used to read John Birch Society publications. Today I vote for the likes of Barack Obama, regard my state’s right-wing legislature and its appointees as a kookocracy, and spend a fair amount of my time hanging out with homosexuals, lesbians, and people of color.

But that could also reflect a social change: in the Republican Party of 2012, Barry Goldwater would be a moderate. To consider how we might change in the future, we would need not only to imagine how our own personality traits might evolve, we also will need to consider how the culture around is is likely to change and how our personal circumstances will change.

To imagine how you might change over time, you’d almost have to imagine all of the future: what will the world be like in twenty years, and how will you adapt to it?

Do we know anything about the future? Well…

We can be pretty sure most Americans will have less as a very few continue to gather more. “Most Americans” applies to virtually all of us here at this blog.

Almost certainly our children will have fewer opportunities than those of us who are over about 40 had.

Education will continue to grow more costly, so that middle-class adults will be mired in debt most of their lives.

Medical care may (or may not) become more widely available but at the same time will become even less accessible than it is now, and quality for the average person on the street will continue to degrade.

Pay rates will continue to move toward Third-World levels as American companies continue to offshore work, including white-collar and “professional” jobs.

Laws governing our movement and behavior in public and in our private lives will become more restrictive.

Surveillance of our movements in public and in private will become more pervasive.

The impetus to get rid of “safety nets” and other forms of collective altruism will never go away and may in the end triumph.

Global warming will affect urbanized societies, pushing populations away from ocean shores but also stressing cities with drought and extreme weather events. Power grids may be affected for longer periods over wider areas.

If these things come to pass, the average American will have to continue learning to get by on less; attitudes toward frugality that have developed after the crash of the Bush economy will become more permanent.

Concepts of family and familial duty may change, as adult children will be expected to provide care for elderly parents who formerly were covered by government programs. More families may seek collective housing that will accommodate three or even four generations.

Ideas about personal health care and eating habits may change.

Just those few possibilities may cause individual personal shifts like these:

If you’re still in your working years, you may start to feel that caring for yourself and your family is far more important than career.

You might become more open to the idea of housing that would let your parents live under the same roof with you. Or you might conceive the idea of housing your family in a compound of small dwellings on the same lot, allowing several generations to live together not just now but far into the future.

You might lose interest in saving for the future, as it becomes increasingly difficult or even impossible to do so on a low salary under a heavy debt load.

Or you might become obsessive about saving for old age, to the point of becoming miserly in your present day-to-day life, knowing that any old-age support system that survives will do nothing to keep you out of poverty.

You might change your attitude about living with your kids, and you might start priming them to expect that they will have to care for you to some extent when you reach advanced old age. You or your spouse may decide to be a stay-at-home parent.

You could become more open to “alternative” healthcare strategies that are not science-based, as it becomes more difficult to get in to see medical doctors and as doctors have less and less time to listen to you.

Your political thinking could change as changes in the way government functions affect you positively or negatively.

Your thinking about the distribution of work within a family might change, as changes in education, pay, and access to medical care continue.

Seeing that the trend to convert higher education into voc-ed produces a nation of ignoramuses led by a small elite with more sophisticated intellectual training, you might change your thinking about the purposes of higher education.

Pretty complex, isn’t it? I think it’s not so simple as a “failure of imagination.” Change happens slowly, not only within us but all around us, so that often we’re not even aware of the change happening. To envision yourself ten or twenty years on down the line, you have to envision not just yourself but a lot of things and a lot of people as they may be in the future.

How do you imagine the Future You?

Garrison Keillor was in town today. Tina, M’hito, and I bought tickets to the late afternoon show, which we prefaced with a splendid meal at our favorite fancy restaurant in Tempe. The recent cold snap has done snapped and gone, so we were able to sit outside in the restaurant’s pretty garden.

While we were there, Tina spotted her favorite Suns player. 🙂 On the way out she had to stop and tell him how much she admired him, and to our amazement he agreed to let M’hijito take a picture of the two of them together. LOL!

So that was a high point.

We all enjoyed the show. It was a good thing we got out there three hours early and loafed around the restaurant after lunch. The place was packed. Gammage Auditorium, a sort of a wedding cake created by Frank Lloyd Wright in his dotage, holds more than 3,000 people, and every seat was sold.

The weather is back to its balmy self: 70ish during the day and mid-40s at night. Too late to save our plants: M’hijito says his lemon tree got the coup de grâce, another icing too much for it after the freeze we had two years ago. All of my citrus are also freezer-burned; to what extent they’ll be permanently damaged remains to be seen, but I’m pretty sure the lime will lose about a third of its canopy.

Several years late and many dollars short, I finally had a little insight that will remove a great deal of hassle from the potted plant freeze protection frenzy.

Usually I drag all the outdoor potted plants inside, which gets them out of the deep-freeze but makes a mess in the house and also makes it difficult or impossible to water them. Usually we get rain when temps drop into the 30s and 20s, but the drought continues — not a drop of precip for weeks. The freezing nights lasted a week this time, so by the time the plants could be safely dragged back outside, they were pretty parched.

You’ll recall my white-trash scheme to protect the potted ficus from last summer’s broiling dawn sun, which came pouring onto the back patio after the Devil-Pod Tree was cut down? Looked tacky but worked.

Well, it struck me that with the addition of just a few more cuphooks screwed into the beams holding up the back patio roof and the westside deck roofs, I could simply hang a few of the 87 gerjillion old sheets and defunct curtains (never throw away a piece of fabric!) to enclose those two spots. Many of the plants are already on tho patio or the deck; the others aren’t far from them. So with the help of the dolly, it would be easy to tuck all the potted plants inside a curtained space. Then get a few halogen shoplights, set them inside the “tents” — making sure they’re a good long way from anything flammable — and plug ’em in.

This would almost certainly protect the plants from the kind of light freezes we get around here; and since no fabric would be directly in contact with their foliage, they should escape the kind of freezer-burn they get where frost touches their covering.

Brillyant, eh?

When the weather’s better, strings of lights could be draped along the hooks, creating some nice decorative lighting.

Coming home to a sparkling clean house was also mighty nice, for a change. The scheme to break up the tiresome and tiring housecleaning project into small, once-a-day tasks is working in a big way. It’s so much easier. This morning the bathrooms were clean before I was even out of my nightshirt.

In addition to allowing you to keep the house clean without having to dedicate a half to a full day each week to unpleasant work, it can also let you devote more time to a given task to do a job more completely and better. Yesterday was “clean-the-kitchen” day. After the routine sink, stove, and countertop polishing, I cleaned the oven manually, something that’s been pending since the discovery that the self-cleaning function is unusable.

So that leaves me with a clean warming oven that can’t be used for much else. Anything that might splatter grease or drip juices will have to be cooked in the grill. Pisses me off, but at least if I ever put the house on the market, I won’t have to stick my head in a metal box full of Easy-Off fumes.

The furniture that got oiled earlier in the week still looked great, so I decided to take the English oil to the kitchen cabinets, too. That was a big job. Though there aren’t very many of them, rubbing oil into woodwork that goes all the way to the ceiling and then polishing it off isn’t much fun. But it worked. The damn kitchen practically glows in the dark!

What an incredible sensation, to walk into a kitchen in the morning and find it completely, totally clean!

All this cleaning and gallivanting and wrestling with yardwork has kept me away from the computer, not an unwelcome development.

Lately I’ve come to feel mighty sick of sitting in front of a computer monitor. It’s no wonder my back hurts — who knows how many of this year’s little ailments have been brought on by spending hour after hour sitting at a desk? When scrubbing toxic oils into cabinetry and furniture feels like a welcome break, you know you’ve been sitting on your tush way too long!

This morning I walked away from 104 unread e-mails, several of them from clients and from FaM’s ad agent. Just couldn’t bring myself to deal with them.

This afternoon I deleted every blat from Twitter and Facebook and routed future messages from those sites into the trash. Deleted every blat from Google Calendar, figured out how to make it quit sending “notices” saying “you have nothing doing today,” a constant annoyance. This cut the urgent e-mail chores to only 30. And they will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m not workin’ on that stuff on a Saturday night.

Really. E-mail has morphed from a convenience to a nuisance. No wonder the young people decline to use it in favor of texting.

Image: Garrison Keillor. Jonathunder. GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.