Coffee heat rising

Urban Drama: The dollar, the mom, and the problem kid

by
portia-and-shylock

Don’t you love it when people let it all hang out, in public? One of the joys of living in a big city is that people act up in front of God and everyone, knowing they’ll never have to see any of those folks again. Endlessly entertaining, and it’s free!

This afternoon I drove up to the fancy Costco at Paradise Valley Mall, there to return a couple of things and pick up two or three grocery items to tide Cassie and me over until the current budget cycle closes on the 20th. One of the objects I needed to return was fairly large, so I parked the car and snagged a grocery cart from in front of the store. Under the store’s portico, a woman’s voice reverberated off the concrete walls and overhang. A middle-aged woman with a toddler in a cart and another young child in tow was haranguing a young man, who looked like he was struggling to hold back tears.

Passersby were pretending nothing was happening, chatting and going about their business, as though women with small children holler at young men on the front stoop of Costco every day. Like me, presumably, they were trying not to hear, but it was impossible to block out all of her tirade.

“You’re 26 years old!” she went on. “I have other kids to raise now…”

The 26-year-old looked stricken. The scruffy-looking girl who was with him—the current love of his life?—looked like she was trying to will herself invisible. This child had some mileage on her, part of it over rough roads.

I dodged inside. In due course, the returns clerk forked over $200 and then took the cart with the junk in it. When I walked back into the 110-degree heat to collect another cart for the day’s shopping, the little tableau was still there. The curtain was rising on Act V. The woman, presumably the young man’s mother, continued to harangue. The soft-spoken young man’s words could not be heard, but the older woman’s certainly could. He did not interrupt her as she launched into another tirade.

It’s hard to guess what he did to set her off. Probably asked her for money, or maybe to take him in while he was weathering a spate of hard times. Though he was a clean-cut kid, he had a whiff of the loser about him. Maybe had a drug or drinking problem, maybe out of work, maybe broke, maybe some or all of the above. Maybe she was trying to practice some tough love. Or maybe she was fed up and had decided to wash her hands of him.

On the other hand… How would you turn out if you had a witch of a mother like that?

Moving on, it was back into the store and out of earshot.

Half an hour or forty minutes later, I exited those air-conditioned precincts, pushing a cartful of goods before me. The dragon lady was gone. But the young couple were still huddled on the concrete ledge outside Costco’s front door. He was smoking a cigarette, never a sign of high intellect among the under-60 set.

“Maybe you could find an apartment there,…” the girl was murmuring to the boy, whose expression looked every bit as despairing as it had while the older woman was yelling at him.

Soap opera in real life! The Dumb and the Feckless, episode 12,134. I love filling in the story of these urban dramas. Here’s my theory of the plot:

♦ The woman is the young man’s stepmother. He is the child of her last husband (not the current one) by a prior wife. Her former husband disappeared into the Amazon jungle while on a fling with a Brazilian floozy.

♦ An affable leech, the youth has succeeded in nothing except accruing a spectacular collection of traffic tickets, a few of them for DWI. Oh, and he’s very good at making babies:

♦ The two small children are his, by two loserly mothers. The volcanic woman and her current husband were saddled with the care of these kids when the infants were removed from the parental custody by Child Protective Services.

♦ Having been convicted on one of the DWI charges, our hero finds the felony that now appears on his police blotter makes it impossible for him to get even a minimum-wage job. He therefore has asked her either for money or for free lodging.

♦ She has decided, on the advice of her therapist, to quit “enabling” him. Hence her strident rejection of his request, whatever it may be. She hopes this will push him into fiscal and social responsibility. Maybe he’ll get a job, pay off his debts, settle down, and quit making her crazy.

♦ This is the first time she’s behaved as though she’s seriously saying “no” to him. Hence his shocked and dumbfounded grief.

Several elements remain to be explained. For example:

♦ Why were the two young people still outside the Costco after the older woman was long gone? Did she leave them there to find their own way home, wherever that might be?

♦ Or did they arrive in a different vehicle?

♦ If so, how did they know to find her at the Costco, or when she would be there?

♦ Were they stalking her?

♦ Or did they just accidentally run into her there? If the latter, what would possess him to ask her, then and there, something that would set her off like a Roman candle?

♦ What effect does it have on a toddler to hear his mother (caretaker?) berate his older brother (father?) before a crowd in front of a Costco?

What think you, readers? What’s the real story? And is it a money story?

Images:

Shylock and Portia. Thomas Sully. 1835. Public domain.
Costco in Henderson, Nevada. Photo by Wikipedia user Coolcaesar. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Dramatic masks of Thalia and Melpomene, muses of comedy and tragedy. Booyabazooka. GNU Free Documentation License.

Figuring Out How to Work Smarter

by

Yesterday I had reason to revisit the website of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, a worthy organization where I was a member for some years. Eventually they jacked up their dues so high that I felt I could no longer justify paying them—you probably get value received from $200 a year (plus, plus) if you live in New York, but those of us out here in the hinterlands miss out on much of the group’s benefits.

Nevertheless, I see they have a new refinement in place, a job bank purporting to connect prospective clients with members. As the pitch for membership observes, one or two assignments would more than pay for your dues.

On the other hand, I’ve never had much luck with freelance job banks. Someone’s always ready to underprice you. And given the East-Coast orientation of this outfit, I suspect most of the customers are based somewhere around New York and feel no interest in working with an obscure scribbler out in the Wild West. So, I’m not at all sure it’s worth rejoining.

Come next January, some better ways to earn more cash have gotta be in place. The Social Security earnings limitation will expire then—because I’ll reach so-called “full” retirement age in May, I can earn around $30,000 between January and May, and after that, as much as I can get anyone to pay me.

Truth is, if both of next fall’s classes make, I’ll exceed the earnings limit this year, too. It’s so low, you have to work at not making too much. So, in November or December, presumably I’ll have an entire Social Security check withheld, to be returned to me in much diminished form the following January. That will mean I’ll have to dig into my emergency fund to survive that month.

I’m going to have to find better ways to make money. Freelance editing is not what you’d call a lucrative endeavor. Blogging earns even less—with Funny now bouncing up the front page of the top 100 PF blogs, yesterday it earned all of 33 cents. That would give me a pay rate of about a 50 cents an hour. Clearly, if I’m going to keep blogging, I’m either going to have to come up with a better way to monetize the site or simply quit running ads on it and invest that energy in some other endeavor.

Teaching is bringing in some money, but it’s piddling. The school paid me $2,400 to design and build the online magazine writing course this summer, which sounds great until you figure how many hours I’ve put into it.

So far I’ve attended 15 hours of workshops and spent about 5 hours in other meetings plus about 10 hours in one-on-one training sessions. Over the past 9 weeks, I’ve probably spent, on average, 3 or 4 hours a day, five days a week, in front of my computer building the course, for a total of 27 to 36 hours. (As a practical matter, I work 7 days a week, but let’s err on the side of conservatism.) Drive time to the campus, all told, probably comes to about 5 hours. So what do we have?

15 + 5 + 10 + 36 + 5 = 71 hours
$2400 ÷ 71 = $33.80/hour

Just about what I was earning by the hour at the Great Desert University…except the course isn’t finished. I still have to read god only knows how many hours of lecture into the audio function, and those lectures need to be accompanied by visuals, which I’ll have to concoct with my scanner and then mount online. Probably at least another 20 or 30 hours of prep time remain.

I should be thankful; at GDU all this prep work would be done for free.

Still, it’s far from enough to live on.

Freelance editing brings in about $250 a month, except on the rare occasion when some random client pops up.

Blogging has dropped off from about $200 to about $150 a month.

So, what can I do to “work smarter”?

Foremost on the list: get a job. I’m going to have to start looking for paid work that produces a regular income, to start in January when the government will “allow” me to earn a middle-class living.

At my age, however, it is profoundly unlikely that anyone will hire me to do anything. Other options?

Teaching: Hustle more classes in the spring, preferably at better-paying institutions.

GDU pays a Ph.D. something over $3,000 per adjunct class. Two classes at GDU (the max they’ll hire adjuncts to teach) plus three classes at a community college would yield about $13,200 a semester. Five sections a semester amounts to a crushing workload, meaning I would have to stand down off all other paying work. Total gross would be $26,400; added to the Social Security, I’d earn $41,400, about $2,000 under the median household income in Arizona.

Another possibility: start now sending applications to schools out of state; an online course can be taught from anyplace, and I do have some impressive-sounding credentials. Pay would be very low.

Blogging: FaM is beginning to have some value as real estate. Try selling ads to companies, or selling editorial space to PR reps. Potential income: unknown. Probably not much.

Editorial work: Put more money and effort into hustling business. Try to target some corporations that might have money to hire editors for in-house publications. Potential income: same as above.

We’re brought back to job. I need to get a job. Too bad I’m too old for pole dancing.

Anybody got any other ideas? What can you do to make a steady, respectable living when you’re too old to get a job? And when no matter how qualified you are, 300 people, 299 of them younger than you, are applying for every opening in your field?

The Joy—and Value Received—of Community Colleges

by

Well, I came away from the community college’s four-day-long series of  training workshops feeling quite pleased. Really, I’d call them “courses,” because they were so full of content. A lot of new ideas surfaced, even though the instructor had already introduced me to many of the concepts in one-on-ones over the past several weeks. I also discovered a passle of new-to-me resources, and it was a nice opportunity to meet other faculty.

The faculty support the Maricopa Community College District provides for its adjunct faculty exceeds astonishing. Many of us were actually paid to attend these workshops, unheard-of at the Great Desert University. Not only that, but yesterday another set of paid(!!!) teacher training workshops was announced, coming up this fall.

You have to have worked at a university, where adjuncts are the lowest of the low, to understand how remarkable that is. Of course, it behooves the district to treat adjuncts decently, since 80 percent of its faculty is adjunct. However, the same can be said of any university freshman composition program, and I can assure you, “decently” is not the operative term in those precincts.

From what I can tell, Paradise Valley’s faculty support is outstanding across the board, whether for adjuncts or for full-timers. In the first place, community college full-time faculty are paid a decent wage—significantly more than most GDU faculty earn. But more to the point, Paradise Valley has enough support staff, and their training fits the faculty’s needs.

At this point, GDU West has one lonely (very excellent, very hard-working) IT staffer providing BlackBoard training and support; another who used to help was moved to the main campus. Even before the crash provided an excuse to gut the West campus’s staff, these two women were massively overworked. They could point you in the right direction, but ultimately you learned what you could about the software and about online course design by the seat of your pants. On rare occasions, the university would mount a two-hour workshop, but these were often led by faculty who had no more training than the rest of us in online instruction—it was, in short, the blind leading the blind.

The woman who led this summer’s workshops not only is experienced in teaching college-level courses, she’s completing a Ph.D. in instructional design. And it shows. She has really smart ideas about ways to set up an online course so students can navigate quickly and simply, and she also offered a number of strategies to keep the course academically rigorous without killing the instructor with overwork.

So personally, I’m very pleased about the outcome for the magazine writing course. What I’ve learned from her is going to make the course much more effective, and I’m really looking forward to engaging these ideas.

I can’t say whether this is typical of all community colleges, although I wouldn’t be surprised, since a community college’s mandate is teaching, rather than an amalgam of teaching, service, and research. Lower-division students, in particular, tend to get short shrift at universities: gigantic classes, tyro instructors, and little administrative support. If I had children who were going to attend a state university—or if I were a person who was about to embark on a four-year degree program—I would strongly recommend taking the first two years at a community college and then transferring.

The value received goes way beyond the savings in tuition, which are substantial. The real value: your students will be going to a school where somebody cares whether they succeed.

The Seven Silliest Money Stunts I’ve Ever Pulled

by

What are the silliest things you’ve ever done where money was concerned?

Me, I don’t know that I could count them all. The alliterative “seven” is definitely too few to cover all the bizarre money tricks I’ve pulled over the course of a lifetime. Some were risks I shouldn’t have taken. Some were the result of laziness or inertia. Some were miscalculations or the long-term outcome of misunderstanding. Some were just flicking stupid. In at least one case, better minds than mine made the same error. Here are my Top Seven Silly Stunts:

7. Spent $100 on a lottery ticket for a charitable cause.

6. Spent way too much on fix-up of various houses.

5. Majored in French because the chair of the French department told me, then a 17-year-old freshman, that I wouldn’t have to waste my time in  beginning language courses if I would declare myself a French major (at the time I had no idea this amounted to a financial decision!).

4. Walked from a free ride to graduate school because I was depressed over breaking up with a boyfriend.

3. Later, did the same damn-fool thing again, this time to get married.

2. Failed to anticipate the Great Recession but instead proceeded as though good times would roll forever.

1. Failed to seek a teaching job in the much better paying-community colleges but instead, out of inertia, remained in a comparable but ill-paid job at the Great Desert University.

Ever done anything silly with your money?

Crickets and Bug Spray, Oh My!

by

Spent half the morning paying some more dumb tax. 🙄 Last night not one but two amorous gentleman crickets took up residence in the family room, where they filled the night air with serenades to every lady cricket within miles. At night, when it’s quiet and still, these elegant little bugs sound less cheery than they do in the daytime and more, well…like they’re screaming.

Even with the bedroom door shut, way down at the other end of the house, their shrill fiddling kept me awake. Wide awake.

Interestingly, they can sense you approaching, even if you sneak up on them quiet as a stalking cat. As soon as you get close enough to maybe spot where they’re hiding, they clam up. So I couldn’t find them…were they in the fireplace? in the cracks around the Arcadia door? in the plant pots? They were impossible to find.

Finally I gave up, tromped out to the garage, and grabbed a can of bug spray.

I hate bug spray. I hate the stink of the stuff, hate the way it makes my stomach upset, hate having it anywhere near the dog, hate using it near the bug-eating geckos around the yard, and especially hate using it inside the house. But the hour was growing later and later, I wasn’t getting any sleep, and I couldn’t see any other way to shut the critters up. So I tried to restrain  myself, spraying it only where I thought they probably were ensconced.

Even a little of a bad thing is too much of a bad thing. What a stench!

The dog and I raced to the bedroom and slammed the door, hoping to keep the fumes out. This worked marginally. We were trapped, but at least we weren’t gagging in there. And the noise quieted down enough for me to get to sleep.

Come this morning, though…ugh! The front part of the house still stank to high heaven.

So, by dawn’s early light I was throwing open all the windows and doors, turning the fans to “tornado,” and scrubbing the floor on hands and knees. Scrubbed the floor twice with Simple Green and vinegar but still didn’t get all the stinky stuff up.

The smell still lingers, to some degree. It’ll be a day or two, I suppose, before it’s no longer noticeable to the human schnozz. Who knows how long a dog can smell it?

So annoying. I wish there was a better way to do in a noisy cricket. If you can’t catch it, swat it, or vacuum it, you’re kinda stuck with applying noxious chemicals.

One site I found said diatomaceous earth will kill the little guys. The pool filter uses that stuff. I’m less than thrilled about getting it around the dog—it’s irritating to the nose and dangerous if you breathe it into your lungs. And it’s really messy…sprinkling it around the house seems kinda counterproductive.

Here’s some folksy-sounding advice: pour a little pile of cornmeal in the middle of a glue board, the type you use to catch mice and rats. Comes from the University of Nebraska, so who am I to argue? Still, it takes a couple of days. What does one do for sleep while waiting for the cricket to stroll onto the glue board?

For that matter, Rattie wasn’t fooled by glue boards. Is there a reason to expect a cricket is any less wiley than a roof rat?

Anybody got any better ideas?

Image: Gryllus assimilis (common black cricket), from Robert E. Snodgrass,
Insects: Their Ways and Means of Living. New York: Smithsonian Institution, 1930. Public domain.

I need a vacation from retirement!

by
Is this the future?

It’s getting untenable. I can’t keep on doing this.

Don’t know how long “this” has gone on, but it feels like it’s been forever. I’m working ten, twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Maybe longer than that. It’s 3:30 in the morning. By the time I finish writing this post, it’ll be time to get up and get going. By “get up and get going” I mean feed the dog and myself and then come back to the computer. Don’t know what time I went to bed last night, but it was late. The “workshops” I’m having to take to earn another $2,400 this summer (one of several tasks that have to be done to show I have done the course prep for the online feature writing section) turn out not to be what I would think of as idle on-the-job training workshops, but actual courses.

Yes. Yesterday afternoon I arrived home at 5:00 p.m. with homework! As though I had time for anything above and beyond the four hours a day in the classroom this thing requires. The instructor expects a documented and cited research paper, due today! By the time I finished that and fell into bed, I was so exhausted I didn’t even remember to lock the damn back door. Wouldn’t the roving burglars have loved that, if they’d come a-visiting tonight?

I feel like I’m tethered to the computer. I’m not getting any exercise at all. Not that I would get much if I could break free from the keyboard for any length of time: ten minutes ago, when the dog went out into the wee-hours darkness, it was 90 degrees out there! In this heat, even a walk around the block is more than I can contemplate, to say nothing of climbing hills (not that I can afford $2 a day to get into the city park) and riding bicycles.

At least for godsake when I was schlepping to GDU I had to hike a half-mile in to the office and climb up a couple flights of stairs.

When I wake at three o’clock in the morning after three, maybe four hours of sleep, what’s roiling through my mind is the scalding question of what on earth I’m going to do when I can’t keep working like this. I can’t get by without the piddling income I’m earning. Financially I’m barely making it. But this can’t go on forever.

“Forever” is likely to be a lot shorter eternity than I planned: sooner or later this is going to make me sick.

And what am I doing it for? For fourteen flicking thousand bucks a year?

This is insane. I’m working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a poverty wage? I’d do better cleaning house! At 80 bucks a day, I’d  make $20,000 a year, much of it under the table. And get some exercise in the bargain. Figure in the state’s tax increase, and the 14 grand a year I’m earning now puts a munificent $10,780 in my pocket!

Or maybe this?

I guess what I’d better do is see if I can get some sort of menial job. That would gross $12,000 or $14,000, but I’d only have to work 8 hours a day at it, a big improvement on 16 hours.

Problem is, I’ll have to dumb down the résumé. How do I explain the kind of work I was doing at GDU without admitting to an advanced degree or two? No one is going to hire a Ph.D.—or even an M.A. or a B.A.—into the kind of job that earns minimum wage or less.

What do I have to show for all these health-crushing hours of work?

Yesterday, Funny made all of $10. Day before, it made something like 8 cents. Over the past week, it’s made a grandiose $52.23. Before we bitch too much about that, we must say that it hits the goal. To get me out of one section of freshman comp a year, FaM has to earn about $50 a week.

But to make it do that, I’m working a good six to eight hours a day on it! Eight hours a day to earn $2,600 a year?????

Editorial work earns a helluva lot more than that, but there’s almost none of it out there. By the hour it pays more, sure. But by the job? It pays about the same: I’m earning around $250 a month reading detective novels. Little other work to speak of is coming in.

Teaching a few adjunct courses, which believe me can easily absorb eight or ten hours a day, pays the 14 grand. So if you add up the teaching, the editing, and the blogging income, you come to something like $19,600. Gross. Cut 23% out of that and you get a take-home of $15,000. Since that exceeds the Social Security limitation, it’s a liability: it means a chunk of my Social Security income will be taken away, cutting the total gross to something more like $15,000. Even with the contract income going into the S-corporation, the teaching income alone exceeds the SS limitation.

Still, add the teaching and freelance income to the 15 grand of Social Security, and it’s almost not bad. But in a major American city, $30,000 is not good. It’s poverty-level income. I’m getting by, but just barely. All it will take is one major expense—replace the air conditioner, replaster the pool, reroof the house—and I’m screwed big time. And if something happens to to put me out of commission, like the fall that wrenched my arm out of its socket, the result will be the same: screwed, screwed, ge-screwed.

I’ve got to get a break from this grind. Last night I couldn’t even take Cassie to her agility training (there’s a break for you: running around a field with a dog in 100-degree heat!), because I had to write a research paper. Sunday I couldn’t go to church (again!!) because I had to finish a rush job for the detective-novel publisher. And work on the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Tomorrow Today (!) before the workshop, I have to drive across the city, to the tune of a quarter-tank of gasoline, to deliver the edited page proofs. With any luck, the detective-novel publisher have another book for me to read.

Speaking of books, these workshops put the eefus on my plan to wring a book out of FaM this summer. There’s plenty of content to do that, but nothing like enough time. I figured I’d better take the money from the college, because it’s a sure thing…who knows how much an obscure e-book would earn?

But though there’s some money coming in, it’s a dribble of pay compared to the amount of work I’m doing.

The problem here is I’m working about as unsmart as it’s possible to work. I’ve got to find a way to make a living that will pay the bills without expanding to fill every waking hour, including those insomniac hours that take place in the middle of the night. Even if it means waiting tables.

Images:
Waitress Taking an Order. Alan Light. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License
“I Should Like to Make My Own Living.” William Thomas Smedley. Cabinet of American Illustration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.