Stress control

And as anyone who knows me has realized, “savage beast” is an understatement whenever some fiasco imposed by someone else’s stupidity imposes extra work, extra time-wasting, extra meanders through phone punch-a-button mazes, and extra headaches. Corporate stupidity, in particular, evinces glorious fireworks of savagery.

This weekend I could not get into the “new” credit union checking and savings accounts created by changing the account number. Error message claimed the site was having “technical problems.” By 10 a.m. they were still having “technical problems,” and, since I couldn’t get through on the phone, it looked like I was going to have to make another trip up there to talk with them in person. Given that the Dog Chariot burns about a gallon of gasoline in a round trip to the closest branch, this trip would cost me $3 and another half-day of wasted time.

Meanwhile, I have workmen here and no way to pay them unless they’ll take plastic.

FINALLY I found the credit union assistant manager’s business card, which I had conscientiously put away someplace where it would be safe (read “where not even Sherlock Holmes himself could find it!”). Turns out she neglected to tell me that the account number I was supposed to enter as the userID is not quite the right number….to get in, you have to drop the last three digits of the endless number she gave me.

Anyway, at last I’m in and it looks like everything indeed is just the same as it was in the previous account. They’ve even imported the prior few months’ transactions. The only things we’ve lost, as she said would occur, are the automatic bill pays and the direct deposits.

After a full day of hassle I did get through to a human at Social Security who claimed she changed the direct deposit to the current account. However, I used the number on a form she gave me called “Employer Direct Deposit” and can only assume it’s the correct data. I surely hope so…we’ll know next month. I’m concerned that if the account number that has to be entered for one’s initial online foray into one’s account at the CU is actually three digits shorter than the one she gave me, the next Social Security check will go astray.

In other precincts, the power company said they would move the electric bill on their end. The city water dept and the gas company said “we’ll send you a form.” So far no such form has surfaced from either worthy entity. However, they send statements, so it’ll be easy enough to just bill-pay them whenever the paper shows up.

Last night I went to an amazing performance staged by our church’s music department. It truly was spectacular.

Usually by the end of the day I’m so beat I can’t drag myself out of the house. But on Saturday evening I went to our friend Craig Petersen’s chorale performance — he directs the Mesa Community College choir, which performed at All Saints this weekend — and found that just sitting there listening to the chorale music was SOOO relaxing, it totally unwound all that annoyance stress. Very nice.

So at the last minute thought I’d try for the same last night. For Evensong, the chamber choir — mostly professional singers — sang the Great “O” Antiphons by John Muehleisen. Unbelievably gorgeous!!!!!  This setting of the Advent set of antiphons alternates passages in Latin, sung in traditional chant mode, with their translations, sung in contemporary style — and very beautiful contemporary, not the unmelodic cacophony we too often associate with modern classical music. It was an incredible, spectacular thing to listen to.

The preliminary recital was played by an organist named Curt Sather. He has a Ph.D. now, but…get this! At the age of twelve (!) he was a church organist. He was very, very good — played three pieces by Bach and one by Aaron David Miller.

All in all, it was an impressive performance from beginning to end.

Meanwhile, this morning’s damn hectic.

Yesterday M’hijito’s dog, who given half a chance will run off to Yuma like a rabbit with a coyote on its tail, countersurfed an entire frying pan full of (mercifully cold) cooking oil. This, as you can imagine, had some interesting repercussions.

He’s pretty much stopped barfing. But my son didn’t want to leave him alone all day, so he brought the hound over here. He needs to have free access to the yard, because you can be sure he still has the doggywobbles, even tho’ no manifestations have occurred here. Yet…hmmmm….  Thank heaven for all-tile flooring.

The men are building two French wells and a river of rock in back, to drain rainwater away from the porch and the CoolDeck. The back porch has always been a bit below grade, so when it rains a nice lake comes right up to the back door. And the deceased Devil-Pod tree heaved the CoolDeck on the east end with its accursed roots, and so now that corner floods every time I try to water the plants over there, to say nothing of every time the rain falls.  They’re also replacing the ironwork in front that’s about rusted through. When Pup gets here, I’ll need to wire a little screening on there to keep him from wiggling out, and just now there’s nothing to wire it TO. 😀

At any rate, this activity is driving both dogs nuts. Even Charley, who hardly ever barks, is jumping up every few minutes to sound the alarm, and Cassie has gone absolutely bat-sh!t. She doesn’t have to sound the alarm: she is the alarm.

This is the last week of class, so I’d better get to work on stoont papers.

You know, two of my dear friends have arrived at points in middle age where their husbands are…well…annoying. And the men? They seem to have something in common.

I think that as time passes men must experience what we can best describe as holy sh!t moments.

• The kids go off to college.
• The son leaves the city, maybe even the state. Maybe even the country.
• The daughter marries. He doubts the young husband’s suitability. She doesn’t.
• The son gets a job that pays more than he, the father, ever dreamed of earning.
• The daughter gets a job that pays more than he ever dreamed of earning.
• He looks at his wife and realizes she looks younger than he does.
• He goes to his 25th high-school reunion and fails to recognize the girl who had that crush on him all through senior year. He figures it’s not his fault she put on all that weight.
• He looks down at his feet and realizes he no longer can see his dong past his belly.
• The daughter has two kids. He begins to appreciate the son-in-law: at least he’s brighter than the other set of grandparents. Grandparents?
• He needs dorkish-looking glasses from the drugstore to see to read the computer.
• He arrives at the age when his father died.
• His doctor prescribes blood-pressure pills for him.
• He’s working 18-hour days at a job that no longer fires him up the way it once did.
• His doctor prescribes cholesterol pills, and adds that it would be wise to take a baby aspirin each morning.
• He realizes he’s going to have to retire pretty soon.
• He and the wife keep getting notices from the Social Security administration going on about how much they’ll be entitled to, one of these days.
• His wife says his inability to hear the female voice is no longer selective deafness. His annoying doctor agrees and sends him to get hearing aids.
• His sciatica hurts. Most of the time.
• He retires. Now what? Old age is no country for young men!

Well. Into each life some holy sh!t moments must fall. Women probably expect them because we anticipate menopause and see it coming, long before seniority and retirement arrive. Except for a spreading waistline, thinning hair, and maybe having to listen to their wives complain about mid-life changes, men have no sharply delineating physical manifestation to serve as a stepping-stone to full maturity. It’s like not noticing the force-field that surrounds the solar system before running your spaceship right into it.

We’re told men are as likely to experience depression as women — this insight is presented as a news flash! And now it is revealed: men’s depressive symptoms can include “anger attacks, aggression or irritability, substance abuse, risk-taking behavior and hyperactivity.” No kidding?

Much more dire, we learn that veterans, largely  men, are committing suicide at the rate of 22 a day. That’s one self-inflicted death every 65 minutes!

A returning war veteran has a whole set of difficult issues to handle that don’t apply to ordinary working stiffs — although it should be noted that almost 70 percent of suicides among veterans have been men aged 50 and older; most of them, one might guess, back in the country long enough to readjust to civilian life. And retirement is a particularly difficult holy sh!t moment, when a man and a woman who, most of the time, have spent at least 12 hours a day apart, suddenly find themselves facing 24 long hours a day together. Think of it: twenty-four hours a day with a person who no longer looks, thinks, or acts like the one you married and who’s richly accustomed to ruling his or her own domain.

If you weren’t already depressed, that prospect will do it!

What can people — whether male or female — do to forestall or at least ease the depression that naturally must follow from one too many holy sh!t moments?

One strategy might be to avoid going to high-school reunions… 😉

Another — probably more effective — is to try to anticipate, to the extent possible, what sources of angst might afflict us in the normal course of life. For example, it’s pretty obvious that various health problems will arise with age. Some of them can be delayed or avoided fairly simply:

• Quit smoking
• Limit drinking
• Avoid recreational drug use
• Eat healthy foods, by and large
• Get regular exercise

Harder to conceive is the likelihood that one day you’ll have to spend most of your time in the company of your spouse. To make that transition more or less smoothly, both partners will need to work at the relationship over the years. When my son was an infant, a pediatrician remarked to me and my husband that the pair — man and woman — is more important than the parent/child dynamic because the kid will grow up and leave, while the parents will have to spend the rest of their lives together. He advised keeping that in mind over the years. Among the many things you can do to keep sight of that fact:

• Spend time together one-on-one — as a regular thing.
• Develop common interests that don’t necessarily include the kids.
• Build interests with the kids that can continue happily once the offspring grow up and go away.
• Create a social life independent of the office and of child-rearing.
• Commit yourselves, as a couple, to volunteer activities that can continue all your lives.
• Enjoy a sport or activity together, one that you can reasonably expect to continue into your older years — such as hiking, fishing, or golf.
• Also develop interests in things you can do separately, so that when the time comes you’ll have a handy reason to spend some time away from each other.
• Don’t be afraid to take separate vacations now and again.

Men I’ve known have reported they found losing a job or retiring deeply depressing because they so identify themselves with their work that without that work, they felt, as one man said, “worthless.” A way to avoid that sense of loss — of value, of personal identity — is to start building a side gig some years before retirement actually descends on you.

A friend of mine, for example, expanded his interest in metal-working into gun-smithing. He started taking courses in the art of gun-smithing and, in an informal way, began working on friends’ hunting weapons. Recently he established a small corporation, and, as retirement looms, he plans to turn this enterprise into a going business. He’ll be doing something he enjoys — an outgrowth of a hobby — and he’ll earn enough extra income to make himself feel that he’s still got an edge…one that gives him a sense of “worth.”

These represent just a small sampling of the possible depression-avoidance strategies that might help any of us keep a grip. Most of them require some advance planning, though: recognizing that anyone can suffer depression — that it may even be a normal part of life, which truly is infested with holy sh!t moments — and starting early to build structures to help defuse sadness, exhaustion, or frustration.

What strategies to you use to maintain your equilibrium as you journey through your life?

 

One of this blog’s founding tenets was stress control: Money management hand-in-hand with stress management, as it were. At the time FaM came into being, I was fully employed but tended to obsess over money, constantly worrying about whether there would be enough. And a neighbor situation had led to $10,000 worth of vandalism, probably not optimal for one’s peace of mind.

In retrospect, the money matter looks pretty silly: trying to live on Social Security and adjunct teaching makes the challenge of scraping by on $60,000 look hilarious. But the stress thing? Not so silly.

I made a little discovery a few days ago: Benadryl works a miracle cure on GERD. Why? Because the bellyache evidently correlates directly with stress. And I’ve been enjoying plenty of that, some of it self-inflicted and some not.

Like most old ladies, I don’t sleep well. Older women, and to a lesser extent older men, wake up in the wee hours typically around 4:00 a.m. It’s like an alarm goes off, and you have exactly zero desire to go back to sleep. The solution to the sleep deprivation issue, then, is to go to bed earlier. If you hit the sack at 9:00 p.m., you get the ideal seven hours of snooze time. No matter when you get to sleep, you’re going to wake up at the same time, so if you linger abroad with the younger people, you can expect to pack in many fewer hours of sleep than is good for you.

This works, I guess. Except that lately, I’ve been popping awake earlier. And of course some nights I have so much work that I have to keep at it until 10 or 11 p.m. The other day I woke up at 1:15 a.m., after having gone to bed around 10 o’clock.

After a day of wandering around in a haze of exhaustion, I decided to drop a fake Benadryl, available in army-sized supplies from our favorite purveyor of such goods, Costco. The stuff is counterindicated for the elderly, because it can cause cognitive disfunction, especially when used as a sleeping pill. So ordinarily I resist taking it except for noticeable allergic reactions, and when in extremis. Well, the other day I was unmistakably in extremis after three hours of sleep and a full day of bellyache.

So, consider:

I knock myself into the middle of next week by dropping an antihistamine that reliably puts me into a stupor. I fall into the sack before 10 p.m. and I sleep like the proverbial rock, all the way through until 6:00 a.m. And WTF? When I wake up the next morning, I don’t feel good…I feel great!!!

I’ve been off the omeprazole for a week, with no noticeable difference in the bellyache department. By this point, that drug has pretty well cleared itself out of my system, and the GERD or whatever is no worse, no better. Except that after a full night’s sleep, there’s not so much as a twinge from the gut.

Not only that, but I stay feeling great all day!

Better living through chemicals…

Interesting. What could this mean? If anything?

Reflecting on that question, it dawned on me that the most recent flare-ups—the ones I have some record of, because I’ve been keeping a symptom diary so as to report to the doc’ what’s working and what’s not working—have occurred when I’ve felt very stressed, and that the most recent immediate short-term stresses are overlaid atop some chronic stresses that take the form of long-term pain and long-term unhappiness with the way I’m diddling my life away.

On the day I woke up at 1:15 in the morning for example:

At 1:15 a.m., anticipating another horrid day:

• The pointless class at the impossible hour
• Another confrontation with another idiot student
• A race to Scottsdale to meet a client
• Then another race to north Scottsdale to a Chamber of Commerce meeting.

I hate teaching and I hate driving around this accursed city and I hate trying to find places where I’ve never been. Last CofC meeting took me almost as long to find the damn restaurant as it did to traipse to Scottsdale. One of the projects I’m working on gives me some ethical pause; another is just annoying.

4:00 a.m.

• Have to deal with a failing student
• Have to file 45th-day grades but couldn’t get into the effing system to do so because it’s down in the wee hours
• Have to be up and running by 6 a.m.
• Realize I will net all of $170 for two weeks’ worth of substitute teaching
• HATE HATE HATE my job

 4:00 p.m. Bilious and heartburny while running around. But by the time I get home and unwind, am feeling OK.

Next day:

6:00 a.m. Drugging myself so I’d sleep worked. Awake at 6 and loaf until it’s getting late, and so…

• Have to fly around like a rocket to get out the door in time for my 9:30 appointment in hideous suburban Tempe
• Because of rush-hour no-left-turn rules, have to wend my way through three neighborhoods before I can turn east to reach the freeway.
• Traffic on the freeway exceeds hideous.

Feel OK in the late afternoon…again, after the worst of the running around is over and the back and foot pain subside a bit.

And the next day:

Feeling pretty good despite having been jolted awake at 4:00 a.m. by the alarming sound of shattering glass. No burglar: frame fell off the wall and broke apart with a loud crash. Enjoyed spending half an hour vacuuming up shards of glass and, as long as the damn vacuum was plugged in, vacuuming up a houseful of dog hair.

• Nearly got hit by a semi-truck & trailer as the driver changed lanes when he didn’t see me.
• Traffic on the 10 was horrific. My stomach was tense when I got to the client’s.
• Client is not a native speaker, and there’s a cultural divide. He claimed that he hadn’t asked me to do the large job I performed but only wanted a couple of pages revised. Thus $621 worth of work went out the window.  He gave me a check for $315, about half of what I billed.

I seem to feel stress in my gut. The prospect of having to get back on those gawdawful freeways to drive home elicited a sensation that felt like a squirt of acid in the stomach. Uncomfortable and weird.

§ § §

Felt pretty good for a couple of days after sleeping through the nights. But then had to work late one evening; didn’t notice the time and so had to fix dinner at 9:30. Fell asleep shortly after that: highly ill-advised. Next day was truly miserable, lots of pain and discomfort. Resisted going back on the omeprazole; the following day, that flare-up settled down.

Observing that I seem to feel better late in the afternoon, I realized this is when the things that stress me out the most are past. Also, reviewing the garbage above and much more along the same lines, I could see that in many instances—near-death experiences on the freeway, for example…or just the intense annoyance of dealing with fractious students—an almost immediate reaction occurs in the gut. And that anticipation of an unpleasant day, of which there are altogether too many, seems to coincide with early-morning belly misery.

Where is all this stress coming from? Do I really hate adjunct teaching so much it’s making me sick? It never made me sick before…

§ § §

I went to Young Dr. Kildare early in August. By then I’d been suffering with the bellyache, the backache, and the plantar fasciitis for quite some time. I’d gone to the Mayo about two weeks before deciding to find a doctor that would accepted Medicare for the expensive tests the Mayo doctor proposed and a week or two before that was in the ER a week having chest pain diagnosed as dyspepsia.

Therefore, the cause of the stress can not be this semester’s ridiculous class schedule, because it started long before classes began.

However, I in fact was very stressed throughout the process of applying for the AAME program, and the disappointment and anger engendered by the AAME board’s offensive remarks and turn-down were pretty extreme. It’s reasonable to think that episode might have kicked off this flare-up.

From the AAME fiasco I went directly to the start of this semester, which student-wise and work-wise hasn’t been too bad, except for the frustration and annoyance of having to put in four and a half days of unpaid time in course prep. What has been difficult has been the schedule:

• four days on campus, a commute that consumes gas, doubles my fuel bill, and wastes incalculable amounts of time;
• two days a week having to get there and start the performance at 7:30 in the morning, which I truly hate;
• a third day each week of racing to Scottsdale by 7:15 in the morning;
• two other days a week in which three hours of productive time are ripped out of the middle of my day.

And trying to focus on an organized plan to move The Copyeditor’s Desk into the realm of credible business while dealing with the distractions of running these courses at exceptionally inconvenient hours has been especially annoying and difficult. The effect has been gestalt—I can’t focus on anything long enough to get through a single task in any coherent way.

Right now I have four clients’ projects in hand, and I need to be able to work on those projects without having to drop everything and go entertain a bunch of 19-year-olds for three hours, four times a week. Just thinking about this right now is causing an uncomfortable sensation in the gut!

Add to that my having focused sharply enough on my dislike of teaching composition to make the decision that I will quit teaching at the end of this semester, and the devil take the hindmost. In the first place, contemplating how much you hate something that you have to attend to every day is stressful enough. In the second, we have the question of what will happen when I start to draw down savings to live on. And in the third, we also have the uncertainty of whether CED will earn enough to supplement Social Security and drawdowns to keep me from going broke.

These worries entail some very scary prospects.

In addition, pain is another source of stress on an organism. I’ve been suffering plantar fasciitis and back pain for weeks. More weeks than I can count.

Summarize the stress points:

• Chronic physical pain since last June: back and foot
• Commuting to campus, to meetings, and to Tempe client
• Awaking at 4 in the morning; because of workload, not getting to bed early enough to sleep 7 hours before then
• Therefore, insufficient sleep
• Early morning class and business meetings
• Church’s decision to move senior choir to early service once a month, adding yet another predawn wake-up and early race-around to a week with three pre-existing unpleasantly early race-arounds
• Conflict between class meetings and client work
• Low pay for teaching
• Negative outcome of AAME project
• Conflict between teaching workload and large amount of work required in getting the business on its feet
• Two challenging clients
• Chronic worry about money
• Lack of exercise
• Heartfelt dislike of teaching freshman comp
• Difficult student who had to be dragged to the chair of the department for talking-to
• Because of time conflicts, inability to meet weekly goals no matter how hard I try
• Inability to even clean the damn house because of workload and time conflicts
• Sense that things are only marginally under control—and sometimes out of control—because of heavy workload and time conflicts that make it difficult to handle the work
• Concern about relationship with son; worry about son’s unhappiness and future
• Workman waltz, things that have broken, borer infestation of magnificent tree, and endless large unplanned expenses during the summer when I had almost no income; these have drawn down survival savings to barely enough to last through fourth-quarter 2012.

 Twenty sources of chronic stress???? Holy mackerel! No wonder my stomach hurts!

What am I doing to deal with this?

1. Made decision to quit teaching
2. Made appointment for physical therapy
3. Drugged self to sleep all night – this, unfortunately, cannot continue
4. As weather cools, trying to bicycle when possible
5. Made plan for survival without teaching income

 What else could I do?

• Possibly bow out of early-morning choir.
• Deal with most challenging client issues first and head-on. (Mary Kay Ashe: Always take on the difficult stuff first thing in the morning!)
• Shift some editorial work to Tina.
• Schedule specific blocks of time for e-mail, blogging, and CED work around the periods lost to teaching.
• Try to stop thinking about how much I hate teaching; find something else to think about!
• Get up and leave the computer when I’m not focusing on productive things.

Well. It looks sort of like a plan.

♦ I told the chair this afternoon, just three hours ago, that I would not be back to teach face-to-face sections again. He said keeping the online magazine writing course would be no problem, and even suggested (contrary to what he’s said before) that a fully online comp course might be available. I’d druther not, I expect…but in fact, if I could create a really streamlined comp course that was not bogged down with having to find things to fill 32 ninety-minute class meetings, that might be OK. The online course, once it’s up and running, is really very easy to handle. A little bit of student nuttiness comes through the digital ether, but at tolerable levels. If I didn’t have to physically go out there and kill time…maybe. And it would be that much income that CED wouldn’t have to earn.

On the other hand, maybe not, too…

♦ Yesterday I started physical therapy for the back and foot. The therapist thinks I’m going to entertain myself with stretching exercises six times a day. As you can see, I have tons of time to spare at three therapy sessions a week plus six at-home sessions every day.

♦ I dealt with the most difficult client issue a couple of days ago; haven’t heard back from that one. Need to send him a new bill.

♦ And indeed I did foist a bunch of complicated ditz onto Tina last night. In the overworked department, she was as usual parked in front of her computer.

♦ As for the early morning Sunday services…hm. I hate to cop out of those. In the first place, I like singing in choir, and there are only so many opportunities to do so. And it the second place, it seems kind of lâche: wah! I’m too lazy to get out of the sack at 5 a.m. on Sunday! Since they only happen once a month, there are only three more of them between now and the end of the semester. Can I really not live through three wee-hour wake-ups on Sunday?

Oh well. It’s after 6:00 p.m. I’ve spent too long on this. Gotta go read some copy.