Stress Control Redux

In another two and a half hours, I’ve got to traipse over to the Mayo to begin a round of what promises to be increasingly invasive testing. What joy.

My doc and his bouncing young resident think what ails me could be any of a number of things: an H. pylori infection, acid reflux, pancreatitis, impending liver failure. Some of the possibilities make being infected with the first bacterium proven to cause cancer look good. Oh, and by the way, there’s this high blood pressure issue…

Whatever it is, I’ve found it seems to relate directly to stress. The more harassed I feel, the more upset the stomach gets, and vice versa. After spending a day hanging out first with KJG and then with SDXB, essentially doing nothing but relaxing and chatting, I suddenly felt a lot better. Then, a couple of days ago, a stress-filled day that included meeting with doctors who kept me sitting in an examining room twiddling my thumbs for almost an hour left me with a volcano in my gut.

Here’s what Dr. Funny thinks: Since the beginning of the summer, I have been so stressed worrying about money and working endless hours for little or no pay, it’s maxed out my ability to cope.

Making it through the summer without enough cash coming in to cover base expenses was very difficult, indeed. From pinching pennies all spring, I had enough saved from teaching to pay the bills in May, June, July, and August, but only just. By the beginning of summer, the account that held spending money had run dry. Although I was assigned to teach three sections in the fall, arranging them in three eight-week sessions (one the first half of the semester and two in the second half) meant that in late August and September, too little would come in to pay the bills. Social Security and teaching income together were simply not enough to live on.

Then when Social Security pulled the stunt of withholding an entire month’s benefit check for the crime of earning $340 more than allowed, that pushed me to the point of not being able to cope at all. You can tear your hair trying to figure out how to get by only so many hours before you go bald.

Add to that the fact that I spend way, way, way too many hours in front of the computer, most of them pursuing sub-minimum wage pay.

Online courses are obscenely time-consuming. I am sick and tired of fiddling with Blackboard, which is about the most cumbersome bloatware this side of Microsoft. Nay! Blackboard makes Microsoft look thin and lithe. At least MS Office works. Most of the time. If I had ever tried to keep track of the number of hours wasted screwing around with Blackboard, by now I would have lost track. To say nothing of having lost my mind.

Yesterday I worked about three hours on blogging—starting at three in the morning, wrote and fiddled around until about 6:00 a.m. This work earned about $9 an hour. The day before yesterday, the site earned $.02. I wrote two posts that day; neither was very long, but taken together they probably took an hour or more to write, edit, and revise. Yes. That’s a pay rate of, at best, two cents an hour. On average I’ve earned $2.25 an hour at blogging over the past two days.

I blog because I like to blog, not to earn a living. So you could say it’s all very nice to earn a bit of pocket change for what started out as a hobby. Still…I’m spending a lot of time on this for very little return.

Teaching, as spotty as it is, comes closer to providing a reliable income than anything other than Social Security. But by its nature, adjunct pay does not cover the bills. It’s irregular and unpredictable. But the worst part of it is, you spend many, many, many hours on the job for which you are flat not paid.

This summer the college kindly paid me a stipend for preparing an online course in magazine writing. The amount was the equivalent of pay for a three-credit course. That was very nice, but I didn’t get the full amount until after I had jumped through endless hoops, some of which were real time-wasters. With the exception of about two weeks in May, I worked almost full-time on this task through the entire summer. It should take about a week and a half of full-time work to do a semester’s course prep for something you haven’t taught recently. Although I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth—pay for course prep is largely unheard-of in academic circles—the fact is that because of the way the money was paid, it didn’t help me when I most needed it. Despite working very hard on a tedious job all summer long, I ended up with little to help me get through that long dry spell.

Because I sit in front of the computer from three, four, or five in the morning all the way through to eight or nine at night, I never get any exercise. Occasionally I walk the dog. I try to do that twice a day, but as a practical matter I’m doing well to get to it once a day. And during the summer it was way too hot to take her out during the daylight hours. In the mornings I was working–I would start on average around 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. and not lift my head until 8:00 or 9:00 a.m., at which point I had to cope with the pool and the yard before it got impossibly hot. By the time that was done and the dog and I were fed, it was impossibly hot. By 10:00 p.m., when I would ordinarily quit working, I often was too tired to drag myself and the hound around the block.

We’re doing a little better now that the weather is cooler. But a stroll around the block does not make it as exercise! I need to get back on the mountain—or, since the city is going to start charging a stiff fee for the privilege of parking outside the public parks, over to a neighborhood at the base of Squaw Peak, where I can walk on hilly streets. The dog will have to stay home, because she can’t keep up with a fast walk of two or three miles.

That’s going to necessitate a major change in habits. Driving across town and spending an hour or 90 minutes charging around, then having to race home and wash the sweat off and fix breakfast will blow away my mornings.

Here are my proposed strategies:

1. Arrange a 3 percent drawdown from savings in an amount that, combined with Social Security, will cover base expenses twelve months a year. That one is already done.

2. Use teaching income solely to cover my share of the mortgage on the downtown house. This allows me to pay for that without having to incur still more taxes by drawing down an extra $9600 a year from my IRAs.

3. Glom onto any leftover teaching income for diddle-it-away change…and use it. Spend some money on concerts, day trips, and yea verily…even recreational shopping.

4. Also with this extra money (assuming there is any), run the air conditioner at a tolerable level next summer. I do not think I can bear the prospect of spending another 115-degree summer cooped up inside a miserably uncomfortable house.

5. Further simplify courses. Make all nonessential exercises ungraded in-class exercises. Reduce the number of papers that have to be read and graded to the three or four required assignments plus their drafts.

6. Quit sitting in front of the computer all day long. In fact, do not even turn it on before about 10:00 a.m.

7. Set MacMail to divert the vast amount of spam that pours in from the community college district by blacklisting offending addresses, thereby reducing the surprising amount of time consumed by deleting the endless irrelevant messages.

8. Find ways to reduce the amount of time spent at blogging, or to write several days’ posts at once.

That’s about it. Not having to worry quite so much about money should help a lot. But to that, I’ve got to add getting some exercise and building a more normal life.