Train: Less than awesome. Blue Funk: Amazing

Some scientist recently opined that the function of weeping, apparently a behavior unique to humans (or almost so), is to recruit sympathy. So what does it mean when you’re walking down an empty street with no one around but a dog, crying aloud? Who, really, do you imagine will empathize with you?

Well, no one. No news there, eh?

I hate frustration.In my weird little psyche, frustration seems to go hand-in-hand with depression. Today it took just one tiny jab of frustration to tip me into the Slough of Despond, where I’ve spent the entire damn day trying to swim out of the quicksand. It also triggers hot flashes. Note that, young things: when you reach about 52, every idle whim that’s countermanded brings on the sweats and chills.

So this morning I’m really looking forward to another trip on the train to My Beloved Employer’s shabby-looking campus. I figure I’ll read another 50 pages of detective-novel proofs, and my teeth will not be set on edge by the time I reach my destination.

Two or three miles of driving brings me to the park-n-ride. I hike from there to the “station” (I’d call it a “stop”) and order up a day pass. This takes several steps. Come to the step to pay, and up pops a message that says “bank cards not accepted.” By that, they mean no debit cards, no credit cards. Well of course I expected to pay with Visa, which workedjust fineyesterday. I don’t have $2.50 in cash with me, because, strangely enough, I don’t carry cash, having had my purse stolen once too often. After trying several machines, all of which flash the same f***-you message, I give up, trudge back to my car, and make the miserable drive to Tempe, enhanced greatly by having to drive across the city’s single most congested surface street to get to the hideous freeway.

I was mildly annoyed by this all day, while plodding through scholarship on 14th-century Spanish warlords (well, that’s what we’d call them today, if they resided in, say, Afghanistan). Nasty specimens of humanity, those.

A woman looking to hire one of my RAs calls and gives me the third degree about the guy.
—Are you really sure he’s not a rabid nut case who will make everyone in the office crazy?
—Yeah, I’m really sure. {Argh.O lucky man, having the privilege of working for the likes of you.}

Back on the freeway, homeward bound: traffic comes to a dead stop about halfway there. So I have to get off at 24th Street, dodging a sonuvabitch who cuts me off and keeps cutting me off all the way up to Thomas Road. Good thing for him I don’t carry a revolver in the car.

Long, miserable drive across the city.

During this drive I ruminate on a remark that emanated, yesterday, from my ex-husband, a man whom I occasionally (in moments of sentimentality) regret having left. I’d called him—the guy is a corporate lawyer—to find out if I could shelter income from my freelance escapades by forming a corporation that would hold income and pay my sidekick, leaving my share of the money untouched as corporate capitalization until I reach 66. Would this keep Social Security from confiscating my SS benefits in proportion to the amount I earn that exceeds a piddling $14,000 a year between ages 64 and 66?

He thinks so.

Then I needed to have him explain one of the niceties of my astonishingly complex 2008 income tax statement, so I could fill out Paradise Valley Community College’s W-4 form correctly.

Do you ever feel that you’re speaking with someone who thinks he’s talking to someone like you who is not actually you? Sometimes I think the man is talking to a ghostly sister of mine, a woman who really isn’t me at all. After 25 years of marriage, he never seemed to get to know me. He got to know a ghost-sister, maybe, but whoever he thinks I am, she’s not me.

The instant he hears I’m signing up to teach freshman comp, he goes (pompous as Hell), “Ho ho ho! Well, you’ll find that sometimes you’re better off in a job that’s not so prestigious.”

You understand: I am so slow on the uptake that it takes a full day for me to register an insult. Not until I’m plodding through the miserable homeward-bound surface-street traffic do I start to think…
W…
T…
F…????

“Prestigious”? He thinks I think the jobs I’ve held all these endless underpaid overworked years have been “prestigious”? Does he think I taught four-and-four in an untenurable position, working 60, 70, 80 hours a week for freaking prestige?

Could he possibly think—really, seriously?—that I imagined hacking away as a freelance journalist was somehow prestigious? Does he imagine that I saw myself as magically endowed with some elevated status working as an assistant editor on a crass city magazine, best titled The Chamber of Commerce J, where I was expected to work six and seven days every week, with at least one overnighter a month, for $12,000 a year at a time when $24,000 was on the low side of middling pay?

Is it possible—really, seriously?—that he doesn’t remember I took that shitty job because he was canned from a senior partnership at one of the “most prestigious” law firms in the American Southwest just a few weeks after we moved into a house that tripled our mortgage payments? That while he sat stunned in the living room I had to go out and find a job to keep food on our table? Did he really think that I left my six-year-old son in daycare for fu*king prestige? That I had a taxicab pick my child up at school and drive him to the care place because I wasn’t allowed to leave the office long enough to pick him up from school, because I so loved the fu*king prestige?????

Could it be—really, seriously?—that he never noticed why I came to develop such a strong distaste for teaching freshman comp that I said I’d rather go on welfare than ever do that again? Does he not recall the trips to Mexico when I had to haul along a suitcase full of student papers, the days and nights of our “vacations” when all I could do was grade papers? Papers in Guaymas. Papers in Hermosillo. Papers in Tucson. Papers in San Francisco. Papers in Colorado. Papers in Washington, D.C. Papers in Atlanta. Papers in New York City. He thinks I don’t relish doing that again because it’s beneath my patrician little standards?

Possibly I fly too far off the handle, to suspect he understands what he’s saying and contrives to be insulting on purpose. It’s as though he makes a set of assumptions about you, but those assumptions are so far off base that in fact he thinks he’s talking to someone who is not the person he is talking to.

On the other hand, he’s alarmingly smart and capable of great subtlety. He certainly could be doing it on purpose.

Who is this man? And why did I waste 25 years of my life with him?

Sometimes I feel like about 90 percent of my life has been an utter waste.