Yay! It’s spring break! One of the little blandishments of teaching that I’d forgotten about, it having disappeared in a fog of 9-to-5 overwork quite some time ago.
Remembering it, however, after Departmental Chair kindly gave me three sections to plan for this semester, I set things up so that no student papers would sit on my desk and demand to be read over this lovely 70-degree week. The last raft came in on Wednesday, and I finished reading them and posting grades around 10:30 Thursday night. So…we’re looking at a whole week with no work!
The weather’s incredible and a mountain of household, yard, and computer chores have backed up and demand to be done. So there’ll be plenty to keep me busy over the next seven days. The question, however, is how idleness will play out not now but over the summer, when the community college hires no adjuncts (the plummy summer jobs go to full-timers) and even if they did, Social Security prohibits me from earning any more than a few classes in the spring and fall will pay.
Even though we didn’t work much around the editorial office during the summer, we were employed and I did have to traipse out to the campus several times a week. A lot of that traipsing amounted to time-wasting, but it did at least occupy time, if fruitlessly. Before I took on the administrative job, I always used to teach during the summer. Full-time faculty members earn a percentage of their salary for each summer course, amounting to a nice slab of cash—far more than adjuncts are paid for the same work. It was enough to fund a vacation, if I wanted to travel somewhere, or (more to the point) to cover some new improvement or purchase for the house. That’s where the dollars came from, for example, to buy things like the gorgeous sidebar from Crate & Barrel and the leather sofa and chair in the living room.
Next year, when I can earn as much as anyone will pay me, I may ask for a section or two at the West campus, which pays almost a thousand dollars more than the junior colleges pay. Probably to no avail: the university is hemorrhaging students as it raises tuition and fees while cutting services. The community colleges’ summer enrollment, we were recently told, jumped 17 percent over last year’s, which itself showed a significant rise. Thus it’s unlikely the university will have any summer sections to farm out to adjunct faculty…particularly since the Board of Regents just announced that, as a sop to students and parents enraged by the latest 20 percent (!!) tuition hike, they’re cutting university employees’ salaries by 2.75 percent. To make up for it, everyone will be trying to teach a summer section, and of course there will be far fewer sections to go around.
Mwa ha ha! How glad am I that I’m not working there anymore? Let me count the gladnesses…
At any rate, back on topic after that digression: What to do this summer? I’ve never had an entire summer break with nothing to do—even as a student, I went to summer school. Adding to the problem is that summer weather here is as oppressive as an Upper Peninsula winter. Instead of getting snowbound, though, people get heat-bound: it’s so excruciatingly hot you just don’t want to stick your nose out of the refrigerated cube that is your house.
I’ve thought about shutting the place down and going somewhere else over the summer. In 118-degree heat, it costs so much to run the air-conditioning and water that the cost of decamping to Yarnell probably wouldn’t be that much more than staying here. The problem is, though, that when you have a pool and a bunch of trees and plants, you can’t just shut the place down and walk away. In the summertime, when monsoon winds fill the chlorinated puddle with debris from the devil-pod tree and from every palm tree for miles around, you have to be here to clean the damn thing every day. And anything in a pot that’s not watered first thing each morning is fried by noon.
Back in the day when I was married to the globe-trotting lawyer, never once did we leave town but what we came home to some baroque new mess, crisis, or catastrophe. Yea verily, even before we owned a house with a pool, going out of town simply dictated that some fiasco would happen when we were gone. Dead cats, fires, thieving house-sitters, house-sitter killing himself and three young women in a drunken car crash, painter painting the black cat white, father doing battle with house-sitter’s wannabe burglar boyfriend, dogs retrieved from the kennel sick, ohhhhh god. I got to the point where I just. did. not. want. to. leave. town.
So. My enthusiasm for batting around the countryside all summer is about nil. Some things are worse than being hot.
This leaves: what to do next summer?
One possibility is to try to wring a book out of Funny about Money. I think there’s more than enough copy to pull together something coherent. If I finish off the “Financial Freedom” series before the semester ends, that can be the core of the thing. Anything that’s vaguely related can serve as support material, and a few entertaining irrelevancies can be thrown in as frills and flounces.
The question remains, though, whether I can sell something that’s already been done. Too many PF bloggers have already taken their (somewhat hackneyed) advice to press. Who is gunna buy a FaM book and how much are they gunna pay up front? I suppose I could go back to William Morrow. But both my agent and my editor there are long gone. No one at that house knows me anymore. And my inclination to seek out another literary agent is about as lively as my inclination to pack up and leave town for the summer.
The ancient book published through Columbia is still selling, though weakly…I might be able to persuade someone there to buy a FaM spin-off. It’s not very academic, though. On the other hand, in these times university presses need to stock their lists with at least a few items that will sell. The recession could work in my favor there.
Another possibility is to try to write a detective novel and peddle it to my favorite client, Poisoned Pen Press. These things are such a hoot! And I know I can write the stuff. I’ve done two novels, neither of which I’ve tried to publish. Though they are unpublishable, they did provide plenty of practice building characters, plots, and scenes. One of them, IMHO, is pretty damned good—certainly better written than some of the stuff I’m seeing.
PPP’s advances are very low: from what I understand, only about $1,000. The way you make money off the things is to get out there and peddle them yourself. Obviously, if I’m teaching classes every day I’m not going to have time to junket around the country signing books and schmoozing with bookstore buyers.
Still, in a Bumhood setting, where we see that we really don’t need extravagant amounts of cash to live quite comfortably, a thousand bucks of money happening is, well—not unacceptable.
Speaking of PPP, just now I’m reading a wonderful thing by a writer named Judy Clemens, The Grim Reaper’s Dance
Yes. That would be him: the Grim Reaper himself. Our heroine Casey is shadowed by the very Personification, who, materialized in the form of an amusingly creepy eccentric, follows her around and generally watches out for her. Along the way, he collects this and that soul. Visible only to Casey, who herself is pretty postmodern, Death may or may not be a hallucination. That very ambiguity makes the story strangely credible and highly entertaining. It’s a great piece of summer reading—highly recommended!
A third possibility is to volunteer to commit some good works. Trouble is, most everything around here closes during the summer, and so there won’t be much to do. Nor, really, am I fond of working for nothing. I’ve never been much of a joiner, alas.
And finally, there’s the possibility of actually learning something. La Maya is always engaged in one painting class or another; she says her teachers are open to taking on rank amateurs. These cost rather more than I can afford, however.
One of my students teaches piano. Once she’s out of my class, no conflict would be entailed in hiring her to teach me to plunk away. That would be useful for choir: I do need to how to read music a great deal better than I can now.
Or I could take yoga or dancing classes at the community colleges. Tuition is amazingly low for several weeks of entertainment. Who knows? Maybe I could take piano at the college.
Speaking of doing something, it is, I’m afraid, time to get up from the computer and go kill some of the exuberant weeds that are trying to take over the front yard. Onward!