No treats for you! One year!

It's good to get together with friends during the dog days between Christmas and New Years. I don't consider myself a Christian, but stinky shreds of my family's Presbyterian past still cling to me, even after all the years since the torture chamber I recall as Sunday School. To shake off the dregs of the holiday, yesterday afternoon I met up with Bravadita, my friend and former colleague from the now defunct career college. Last summer Bravadita moved to a hip and funky downtown apartment, an old gem sandwiched between taller, newer buildings, within blocks of the Portland Art Museum, the Central Library, and the Oregon Historical Society. I found a place to park with no trouble, fed the meter machine my debit card, and had $4.80 painlessly extracted from my bank account. (I love this brave new electronic world! Way to go, Target!)

Bravadita and I walked over to the Oregon Historical Society, where residents of Multnomah County are allowed in free (why not residents of Oregon? I wondered). We wandered three floors of glass showcases of old stuff from earlier days plus semi-interactive exhibits. We especially enjoyed the slot machine that lit up and chimed when we correctly answered a question about Oregon native tribes. Winner! Within a short time my back was aching, and I was ready to sit down. We walked a few blocks to an Indian restaurant Bravadita had been to once for happy hour.

The space was dark, narrow, and as far as we could tell, empty of customers. “Two for dinner?” the hostess asked. I looked at Bravadita. We nodded at each other. “Do you have a reservation?” the young lady asked, perusing an undecipherable diagram on a small computer monitor. I thought, huh?

“No, do we need them?” I responded, looking around for signs of life.

She may have detected a note of skepticism in my voice, because she smirked a little. Then she said, “I can seat you right now.” Duh, I thought.

She led us toward the back, where a fairly good sized dining area opened up, previously hidden from the narrow passageway. Few tables were empty. Wow, who knew. As we were led up three steps to the upper level, a large group came in and were seated in a secluded area on the lower level. The place quickly filled up. The staff, dressed in black, hustled efficiently around the tables. The menu was extensive. The prices were in line with what I expected—higher than I wanted to pay. But it felt like a celebration of the season and a reward for accomplishments... a treat. So the meal commenced.

We ordered an appetizer consisting of some hefty baked mushrooms draped in wilted greens. The first bite briefly cut off my air supply—hot! When I could breathe again, I decided I probably would have preferred my mushrooms to be less aggressive. But the chicken marsala, which arrived in a timely fashion, was utterly delicious, creamy, coconutty, not too spicy, just yum, yum, yum. I ate the whole damn thing, because that is what I do (past president of the Clean Plate Club), and I would have eaten more if there had been more. (I rarely know when to stop.) Bravadita ordered some spinach and cheese glop, which she nibbled and grazed like a wild deer, and then she boxed up the remainder to take home. To make sure we were really, really crammed to the gills, we finished the meal with a mug of chai. It was a rare treat, indeed, to spend a Saturday evening, dining fine with a good friend.

Of course, like many treats, there are consequences to indulging. I drove home in a mental fog and laid on the couch for the rest of the evening in a fugue state, searching for crap to watch on network TV, rubbing my tummy, and treasuring the memory of that marsala. It was hard to forget. When your stomach protrudes and gurgles occasionally, it's not hard to remember what you ate, am I right? I was still full at bedtime, but not unhappily so. I went to sleep well satisfied.

Maybe it was the chai, but the night lasted forever. I slept in a twilight state, not quite awake, definitely not asleep. All night, it seemed, I swooped and dipped in and out of a series of what at the time seemed to be amazingly creative dreams about black and white videos. (This shouldn't have been a surprise to me, considering that the day prior I had actually recorded a short video of myself for a web project.) In my dream, as is typical with dreams, there were layers of meaning, unfolding like flowers into each other. Each video vignette was visually rich and full, and no doubt reflected the state of my stomach. In the dreams, I remember being pleasantly surprised to have discovered a new art form.

Today, the other shoe dropped, as it were. I guess I was emulating what happens with my cat, when I cave in to his demand for treats. My hothouse flower of a digestive system, after a calm morning, suddenly took a seismic wrench, the floor dropped out, and I was running for the bathroom. In a matter of moments, all that lovely chicken marsala, all that heavenly chai, and presumably all those forgettable mushrooms, all of it, shall we say... drained away, leaving me feeling empty, boneless, and oddly serene. I don't know if I managed to extract any nutrition out of the food before it exited, stage right, but in my opinion the fantastical dreams conjured by my epicurean bender made it all worth while.

Still, I don't think I will be eating out again for a while. I'm all for the pursuit of art, but I'll give it a year before I indulge again in the culinary path to creativity. Treats are highly over-rated.

A tale of two Christmases

Merry ho ho. With no major disasters or mall shootings to fret about (that I know of), all I have left to talk about is family. 'Tis the season. Today we await the arrival of my mysterious and elusive older brother, who earlier today declared his intention to drive in from the coast to visit us, the Portland contingent (which consists of just my mother, brother, and me, as my sister currently is enjoying the holidays in Munich). The hot line is close at hand, over which I expect to hear my mother's gravelly voice telling me, “He's here.” Or perhaps, “He's not here yet.” Waiting for a visit from my older brother is sort of like waiting for Godot: Maybe he'll show up, but usually it's just a rumor. In the meantime, I'll tell you about Christmas Eve.

Last night I picked my mother up to take her to visit some relatives from my father's side of the family. It was the annual Christmas Eve family event, conveniently located not two blocks from the Love Shack in a once-stylish split-level duplex, wherein reside two sisters (let's call them the Red Queen and the White Queen) and their respective husbands—kings?—and their respective pets. My father considered himself a brother to the pair, although I think technically they were all actually cousins. The family tree is somewhat gnarled on my father's side. I've adored the White and Red Queens since they babysat my siblings and me.

The White Queen and her King had three White Princes, all of whom dutifully married handsome women. Two of the three successfully produced offspring at regular intervals, over the years, thereby doing their part to keep the Christmas spirit bright. Likewise, the Red Queen and her King had a son and a daughter, both of whom had multiple marriages and small armies of children of varying vintages. Thus, I expected to find a full house.

The front door of the the White Queen's side of the split-level duplex was flanked with multicolored lights, which did nothing to illuminate the many steps leading up to it. My mother, looking like a Christmas elf in her red fleece jacket and stompy knee-high black Ugg-like boots, grabbed my hand in a death grip. She has a healthy fear of stairs after a fall down some last year landed her in rehab with a busted pelvis. I gritted my teeth and steadied her as we clomped our way through the shadows to the front door.

We were right on time (because we are nothing if not punctual). I pressed the glowing door bell and heard a voice yell, “Come on in,” so I pushed the door open and led my mother inside, where we found five more steps leading up to the living room. Luckily these were carpeted, with a hand rail, so I left my mother to navigate them herself and went ahead to bear our potluck contributions (Mom, cookies, me, salad) to the kitchen. I scanned the room and found mostly familiar faces and a lot of empty chairs. Were we early? I commenced to socialize (which for me consists of annoying people by taking pictures with my crummy digital camera).

The place soon filled up with sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. The White Queen assisted by her minions (daughters-in-law) spread the table with a buffet of dishes. “Finger food,” she said. “No forks.” I looked bemusedly at my big green salad, thinking, How come I didn't get that memo? The wine flowed at a moderate pace. (About an inch of red wine flowed to me over the course of the evening, along with at least five of my favorite sugar cookies. Another story.) I busily insinuated myself into conversations, camera in hand. The children did their best to entertain, while two perfectly coiffed pure white standard poodles took turns sitting around with perfect posture, then surreptitiously nosed the snacks on the coffee table when humans weren't looking.

After we'd been there for about an hour, the smallest baby had urped all over the couch and the poodles had nudged the brie onto the carpet. The party was really taking off. That's when I saw my mother come in from the smoker's area on the back balcony. She said, “The rest of the party is next door.”

Huh? Next door? I looked around and realized that the people I saw milling around were all related to the White Queen and King. No one from the Red kingdom was present! I was dumbfounded. This had never happened before in my memory of Christmas Eves stretching back over the 16 years I've been back in Portland. The Red and White Queens had never hosted separate events! Was this a case of Hatfields and McCoys, two 60+-year-old queens, I mean, sisters, living in the same building but not talking to one another?

“We need to go next door,” I told my mother. She agreed.

“Are you leaving already?” shouted the White King as we edged toward the door.

“No, we're just going next door,” I said.

“To say hi to the other half,” my mother added.

“Can we come back later?” I asked, thinking of my salad, which I had not yet eaten any of. And my glass of wine sitting forlornly on the counter top.

The White King escorted us down some steps to the lower level, through a door, and into the garage. He pressed a gizmo on the wall and his garage door opened. Out in the foggy dark, he keyed in some numbers on a keypad by the other garage door, which opened, revealing a red Kia Soul. “My son has a green one of these,” my mother said (referring to my brother, Godot, for whom I am still waiting as I write this). The White King ignored her and pounded on the door leading into the house. He was smiling, I saw. Was it an evil smile? The door opened. There stood the Red King, wearing a Santa hat. The White King handed us off to the Red King. We trudged up the stairs and just like that, entered the Red kingdom. Duplex. Whatever.

Instead of watching entertaining young children, the inhabitants of the Red kingdom were watching football on a big screen TV. Instead of finger food, they were enjoying Chinese. About a hundred white paper take-out cartons were arranged on table in the kitchen. The Red Queen and her daughter were looking at something over the sink. Instead of white poodles, the Red Queen and Red Princess stepped over and around a fat brown and black dachshund named Gunny, who spent a lot of time laying on his side in the kitchen doorway.

I looked around and tried to figure out who was who in this new land. “Hi! Have some Chinese!” It was my younger brother. He was taking time out to wave to me while watching the game with the Red King. On the couch sat the Red Prince, a 30-something who seemed to have blossomed... bloomed? No ballooned is the word I'm looking for. It took me a moment to recognize him. He spent the evening on the couch watching the game and eating from white cartons with the other potatoes, I mean, teenagers, who seemed to be a lusty bonus from his new wife's former marriage.

Eventually I got tired of the chemical smell of artificial Christmas that hung like a fog over the group. Or maybe it was the smell of sweet and sour pork. I eased on out the front door and stood outside looking up at the duplex from the sidewalk. In the Red kingdom, I could see the flicker of the television. In the the window of the White kingdom, I saw a tranquil, tastefully decorated fake tree. Fog in the air condensed on my camera, but I took a picture anyway, an image of two kingdoms, two Christmases, through a fine dusting of mist. I went up the dark steps to the White kingdom, entered the door like I lived there, ate salad and cookies, and took pictures as though I'd never left.

How utterly bizarre that two sisters living next door to one another should be so close yet so far apart. Of course, I understand that both families couldn't possibly fit into one living room. And a standing-room-only forest of adults wouldn't be much fun for the kids or probably even very safe. Oh, was that your little leg? I'm so sorry! No, I get it. But the solution is obvious, or at least it was to my mother.

“They need a door,” she said. Yes, I agreed, a door from one kingdom to the other. A bridge between two worlds. And some outside lighting wouldn't hurt either.

The phone just rang. It's my mother, calling to tell me my mysterious brother has arrived. I must fly, before he disappears. More later! Happy Christmas.

Plagued by monkey mind

As my friend in Minneapolis once said, “On a good day, my mind is trying to kill me.” She's speaking of her own mind, but the phrase seems to apply to me this week, too. How do I know? Because my brain is trying to convince me that I didn't actually earn a Ph.D. My brain is trying to tell me that the whole thing—the academic achievement I spent the last eight years of my life working toward—was a colossal... dream? mistake? fantasy? That it never really happened. Poof.

This is bordering on insanity, I know. How can I doubt my achievement? I have witnesses. If reality can be known and understood at all (debatable), I think (most) people I know would (mostly) be willing to accept as reality the fact that after all those years, I finally finished the damn doctorate.

It's not the first time my mind has played this trick on me. One time I got an A-plus on a paper. Within moments I had convinced myself that it wasn't true. It wasn't really an A-plus, my eyes are failing me. Or, it wasn't really me at all, it was someone else, probably that smart blonde girl in the second row, who earned that A-plus. Or, it was a silly grading error; after all, the TA is an imbecile; soon they will discover the truth: It wasn't me. I'm a fraud.

I think this mental condition is related to the Buddhist concept of monkey mind. Sadly, my particular brand of monkey mind leans more toward confusion, indecision, and lack of control, and less toward whimsy, which is too bad, because appreciating whimsy can be pleasurable. On the plus side, monkey mind comes with entertaining visuals: I picture a line of badly dressed flea-infested monkeys wearing tattered red fezzes, dancing on my shoulder and clashing little brass cymbals, right in my ear. Youch. If they weren't so darn noisy, they might actually be funny.

When the monkeys in my mind start dancing and clashing their cymbals, it means my brain is trying to rewrite history. What is my solution to monkey mind? Nap. My solution is to take a nap. Or a bath, or read a book, preferably while taking a bath. And not just any book, but something that takes me far, far away from monkey mind. My current remedy is the old standby, the Otherworld tetralogy by Tad Williams. Each paperback weighs a pound, a thousand pages of virtual reality immersion, and after a few chapters of traveling along the River of Blue Fire, I have no idea what reality is, virtual or otherwise. It's very helpful.

After spending three years working on a phenomenological study, you would think I would be comfortable with the subjective and tenuous nature of reality. Usually I am. The monkey mind is loudest when I fall into the trap of thinking I can ever truly understand or know anything. Hey, did you think that getting a Ph.D. means a person is suddenly smart? Har har, joke's on you. Maybe a little smarter, maybe not, but stubborn, for sure. I think we can agree on that.

How to avoid the holidays: Build a Wordpress website

I'm fumbling around in Wordpress and MailChimp, trying to remember how to change layouts and add mailing list forms... it's daunting. Every time I do this, I'm reminded of my mother, who says (repeatedly) that she can no longer handle technology beyond a non-smart cell phone. Actually, I'm not even sure she can handle a land-line anymore. Last week I think I mentioned we went out to celebrate. When I picked her up at her condo, she came out carrying a plastic bag containing her cordless phone and base.

“I'm not getting a dial tone,” my mother complained. “Can we stop at Radio Shack on the way back?”

She thought it might need a new battery. She was pretty sure “the boys” would be able to figure out what was wrong with it. One of the “boys” waited on her, a young, energetic, patient African American. He took her phone and plugged it into an electrical outlet on the counter. “It's got power,” he said.

My mother put the phone to her ear. “But there's no dial tone.”

The kid and I looked at each other, like, Whoa. You want to tackle this, or shall I?

“Mom, the phone needs to be plugged into the phone jack in order to get a dial tone,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and nonjudgmental. She looked at me blankly. Then the light came on.

“Oh. Right. Okay.”

I assured her I would check the phone when we got back to her place. As it turned out, the phone was fine. It had somehow come unplugged from the phone jack. Maybe she was tidying up cords, who knows, and thought, Here's a cord that goes nowhere important. I'll just unplug it. 

Anyway, I feel a lot like how I imagine my mother feels when navigating new technology. I have tentatively dipped a toe in the new millennium by thinking I can learn to use Wordpress. Yet I sink back into my old technology like putting on an old shabby bathrobe: If you are lucky enough to visit the Love Shack, you will see the analog television, converter box, and unsightly antenna suspended from the ceiling, indicating I have not yet committed to high-def or cable. Every time a bus goes by, the signal shatters into a few thousand pixels, causing me to miss crucial dialog. What did she just say? Darn it!  (Have I mentioned I live on the most frequently traveled bus line in the city of Portland?)

I'm updating my websites, bouncing back and forth between technology and content, probably looking like my cat's tail when he can't decide if he wants to snuggle with my hand or eat it. Form or content, which is more important? People won't remember what I write, but they'll remember what they see. I need photos, I guess. (What does marketing research look like?) I've been told I need a video. Oh, boy. Now there's a scary thought. My former students would cringe. Thar she blows! Stay tuned for the Carol Show.

This stupid cold season

My mother and I went out to celebrate. I'm celebrating the completion of my doctorate. She's celebrating the completion of her stint as co-treasurer on the condo board. We went to brunch at Shari's, her favorite place, not mine. As far as I am concerned, they might as well serve up gravel, dirt, and machine oil, topped with antifreeze. It's all poison to me. But I admit, those pies sure look good inside the shiny glass case.

We sat across from each other in a booth on sky-blue benches whose springs were sagging (broken by years of obese guests, I am guessing). I sat just a little too low. Or the table was just a little too high. We ordered coffee, black, and the young waitress brought a little carafe to leave on the table. My mother ordered quiche, with a muffin. I ordered eggs, with fruit: What can they do to ruin eggs, right? The food came quickly. (It doesn't take long to scramble a couple eggs.) Mom skinned the top of a little container of grape jelly and spread it generously over one of her muffins. She did the same to the other one. She took a big bite of jelly-covered muffin. For the rest of the conversation, she had jelly on her chin. I tried to ignore it.

“I'm really glad to be done with this condo board stuff,” she said. “But some of the residents aren't too happy with the way the board president handled the elections.” She picked experimentally at the little slice of quiche pie with her fork.

“Oh, why is that?” I replied. I was doing my own experimental poking, at my eggs. Scrambled. They looked okay, so I ate a bite. Just about what you would expect of scrambled eggs.

“She nominated and elected people who weren't even there!” my mother complained.

“Wow, you mean people were elected in absentia?” Having served on a board before, I understand some of the shenanigans that can go on when chairpeople start feeling their power.

“That's right! And some of us are not going to stand for it!” She took another bite of muffin. Purple jelly sprayed gently across the table.

“Uh-oh,” I said, sipping the weak brown coffee. “Mom, what are you going to do?”

“A group of us are getting together to decide our strategy,” she said, popping a grape in her mouth and looking smug.

After a moment's reflection, I interpreted her comment. “You mean, you've formed a cabal and you are planning a mutiny of the condo board.”

She looked a little abashed. “Well, when you put it like that...”

I tried to explain to her what would happen when the board found out that a group of residents had gone outside the committee/board process to express their grievances. It would look like the condo equivalent of a military revolution. I pictured a horde of old folks shuffling along the condo walkways toward the chairperson's unit, pitchforks in hand, mumbling, “Get her,” and “No guts, no glory” and “Slow down, ooh, my back.” With my mother leading the pack. She'd be a holy terror with a pitchfork.

I sighed. “You are a lightning rod for trouble,” I said.

She grinned. “I know.”

We ate in silence for a minute or two. I thought longingly of my lovely Trader Joe's Bay Blend coffee waiting for me at home. Even cold, the stuff will put hair in places you've never seen hair before. Delicious. Oh well. Shari's does the best they can, with what they have. It's not Starbucks, after all.

“She won't even call on me anymore in the condo meetings.”

I looked at my mother with some perplexity. My mother, this scrawny woman with the wrinkled skin and flyaway halo of gray hair, with her squinty eyes hidden behind chunky trifocals, this skinny little person with her elastic-waist blue jeans, old white sneakers, and dentures... somehow my mother has managed to intimidate the board chair to the extent that the chair will no longer let her speak at the condo meetings. Way to go, Mom.

I think I figured her out. Tonight as I avoid watching the re-run of the Sound of Music and some country music Christmas special, as I wait for Saturday Night Live to put this stupid cold season into perspective for me, I have some time to think. After all the photo scanning I've done over the past week, I have a visual sense of my mother from her earliest days, through teenhood, into marriage and motherhood, into middle age and retirement, and into widowhood. I think I have her pegged. My mother is a rabble-rowser. She's a pot-stirrer. Oh, my! She's a... she's a chronic malcontent!

I guess that old saying about apples and trees might actually be true.

Is there life after doctorate?

This week I'm wrapping up the loose ends of the doctoral journey. The University wanted a pdf file and a hard copy of the dissertation. First, I took my flash drive to Office Depot and had them print one copy (plain paper, no color, 391 pages [Can you bind it? No, are you crazy, it's 391 pages! That will be $31.28]). As I leafed through the massive wretched tome, I noticed the images of the rich pictures looked like blurry crap. Argh. At home I opened up the Word file and tried to sharpen and color correct the images to reduce the blur. It sort of worked, poor man's Photoshop, lame tools in Word. My challenge was to minimize the file size but maximize image quality... sort of like eating a gallon of ice cream and hoping I will still fit in my jeans. Whatever. I reprinted all the color pages using my own old leaky inkjet printer, inserted the new pages, and stuffed the whole thing in a box. The next day I went to the post office, bought a money order for $160 (I'm choosing Open Access, so anyone could potentially find it, should they choose to search on something so esoteric as academic quality in for-profit vocational programs), put it in the box with my Proquest order form, and shipped it off to the University. (Picture me wiping my hands.) Done. Stick a fork in me again, this time, it's really done. As long as I didn't get the pages out of order, or accidentally skip some pages, or fill in the form wrong, or put the wrong amount on the money order, or mail it to the wrong address...

Today I celebrated my new life as a Ph.D. by applying for an adjunct teaching position at a clone of the college that fired my compadres and me last May. No, not fired, we weren't fired. Laid off, is what we were, laid off when the campus closed. No fault of our own. Repeat after me. It's not a moral failing to be laid off from a job, although it sometimes feels like it.

The job I applied for today was for an adjunct Business instructor, three years of experience required. As I read the online application process, I realized they didn't want the cover letter I had so painstakingly taken time to customize just for them. How times have changed. They wanted the resume, but only as a means to fill in the online registration form. Nowadays, it's all about online tests. Before you can apply, you must take a battery of tests. Tests? Really? Just to apply?

Yep. The first one was a 10-minute timed test of math, logic, and vocabulary questions, all mixed together. As I looked at the practice page, I could feel my heart rate start to soar, my typical response to being timed or tested. Being both timed and tested launched me into overdrive. My hands began to shake. My mouth suddenly grew parched. Do I want this stupid adjunct job badly enough to go through this torture?

I took it one question at a time and soon began to realize that whatever capacity for logic my brain used to have must have been beaten out of me over the past eight years of doctoral drudgery. Here's a series of numbers; which one comes next? 15  32  486  2587 24. Hell, I don't know. Ask me another. Okay, a monkey is to manager as a centipede is to a _________ ? Oh, come on. Really?

I'm exaggerating. They didn't really ask those questions, but they asked ones similarly as incomprehensible to me and my tiny tired brain. But that wasn't even the best part. (Best, meaning, worth mentioning.) After ten minutes of this electronic waterboarding, I was allowed to move on to the next section: 12 pages (12, I kid you not!) of psychological questions about my working style, personality, attitudes, and beliefs, which I was to answer using a five-point scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. Oh boy, Myers Briggs meets the DISC Assessment! I can do this. I'm the survey queen, after all!

I answered the questions honestly, all 12 pages. What could I do? There were so many similar and repeated questions, they were bound to trip up any carefully devised strategy within three pages. You know what I mean? Hey, wait, I know I've answered that question before, but I forgot how I answered it! Darn it! So I answered honestly. They will no doubt find out I'm an introverted (but highly educated) wackjob clinging to a tiny shred of optimism, nursing a slight mean streak, and presenting vast unplumbed depths of depression, probably due to an inability to manage and control outcomes. Har har har. Story of my life.

In the meantime, I'm still scanning family photos, a hundred or so a night for the past week. It's tedious work, but I am noticing a remarkable byproduct: I'm falling in love with my family. Near and far, alive and dead, I'm savoring the images of the people who inhabited my childhood. I've discovered the holidays are the perfect time to look at old photos. I don't care about Christmas and any of that hoopla; I do care about the people I've known in my life. Could be the season, could be the below-freezing temperatures, could be the completion of the long dark doctorate. Whatever it is, I'm feeling sentimental. I'm missing my sister, missing our dead father, missing the old calico cat, the decrepit farmhouse, the overgrown yard, the funky furniture covered with gaudy hand-made afghans... I'm not judging. I'm appreciating. I'm appreciating the good stuff and forgiving the bad stuff. I may be a party of one, self-unemployed, chronically malcontented... but tonight I'm celebrating.

Stick a fork in me

This morning I successfully defended my dissertation.

Sorry. I'm trying to figure out what to write next. Do I mention that my good friend and former colleague Sheryl braved 19° temps to sit with me, serve as my proctor, and be my only witness? Do I tell you how it went, how nervous I was, how I stumbled over my words? Should I tell you that my cell phone beeped during my presentation as it received a texted photo of my brother's girlfriend's old black dog, holding up a hand-written sign that read, “Good luck, Carol!”? Should I try to identify what I felt after it was over (a wintry mix of relief and nausea), or should I talk about how I am now? (Post-dissertation blues, already?) Should I even mention how my brain is already trying to rewrite history in a bizarre attempt to convince me that none of this happened? No, best not, perhaps.

After Sheryl left, I called my mother. Her line was busy. I called my brother: He wasn't home. In desperation, I emailed my sister, my most trusted advisor: Bless her heart, she called within minutes from her job in Boston. Finally. Someone to help me understand what I was feeling.

“Do you have any plans to see people next week?” she asked.

I looked at my calendar. Does taking my car in for an oil change count? “No,”I replied.

“You need to stay connected,” she said. Hmm. Is there a high suicide rate among new Ph.D.s?

I promised to make plans to do something with people. She said, “Congratulations, Dr. B.”

“Thanks, Dr. B.” I replied with a smirk.

I emailed a few people, ate breakfast, and went to bed, too saturated and weary to stay awake any longer. I dreamed of burned onions. (19° outside means no windows open in the Love Shack.) Finally I couldn't stand the smell and got up to find a smattering of congratulatory emails in my inbox. That was nice. My mother called. We talked about her condo board meeting.

I stood around for a while, looking at things. I cleaned out the drawer I had devoted to academic files for the past eight years. I cleaned up my desk. I filed papers I want to keep, for what, I'm not sure. As I stacked paper and filled the recycle bin, the phrase eight years kept rolling around in my head. Eight years, $50,000. Now what? What's next? Who am I, if I'm no longer a struggling grad student? Who am I if I can no longer complain about the wretched massive tome, or the timeline, or the waiting?

It's time to reinvent myself. I'll give it a few days, though, before I tackle that challenge. I need more sleep.
 

Cold remembrances of someone else's past

Self-imposed house arrest, in limbo, waiting for Monday, oral defense day. I made it to the store today, yay me. I had to go; I was out of eggs. Can't live without eggs. It's cold. The temperature almost made it above freezing, but I'm not going to complain: Minneapolis barely made it to 8° before the mercury plunged back down to 5° above. 20° I can handle; 8° would drive me under the covers. After a long hot bath.

While I wait for the waiting to be over, I am building shelves. As if I didn't have enough shelves already, you would no doubt say, if you've ever been lucky enough to see my place: The walls are papered with homemade wooden book shelves, which sag under the weight of books, binders, and more books. Most of the shelves are full. But you can never have too many shelves. The simple wooden shelves I build now will receive my journals as I continue to fill the pages and discard them, one per month, year after year since 1995. The boring story of my life, literally. It takes up a lot of space. Physically and otherwise.

And while I wait for the loden green latex to dry, I scan old family photos. I have only myself to blame. My mother wanted me to look through a stack of musty photo albums one day, and I made the mistake of saying, Hey, we need to scan these! Thus, I volunteered for this self-torture. The albums sat around my worktable for a few months while I wrote the massive tome we call my dissertation. Last week I realized now would be a good time to start clearing up the clutter (considering my compulsively neat friend Sheryl is coming over to be my proctor for my oral defense). Hence, scanning.

It's a mindless, tedious task involving removing old black and white photographs from little paper corners that someone painstakingly positioned 60 to 80 years ago. The album pages are dirty, dusty black paper, and reek of ancient cigarette smoke. It's fairly gross work. While I place five or six images on the scanner bed, I can see if someone wrote something on the back. Sometimes there are useful comments: Ray, Ruth, and me. (Me is my mother.) There are many pictures of my mother and her brother as children, fewer of them as teenagers, and hardly any of them as adults. I'm guessing by then my mother was the one behind the camera. My uncle was behind a glass of wine.

Other annotations were less helpful: This is a picture of the loading dock. Where, Grandpa? When? My mother's father was a sailor and then a longshoreman, first in San Francisco and then in Portland. I didn't know him well, although I could have if I hadn't been so nervous around him. As a very young man, he sailed on the Moshulu, a merchant sailing ship that went from the States to Australia and the Philippines. Some of the photos are obviously taken from the rigging, looking down on decks awash with ocean. Yikes. Now the Moshulu is refitted with fake masts and sails, serving as a restaurant in Philadelphia. And Grandpa is long gone.

Looking at all these photos of people I barely knew or didn't know at all, most of them dead now, makes me feel a little sad. It's a year-end kind of sadness, the sadness you get when it's garden-to-bed time, when it's fleece hat, electric blanket, and rice-filled foot-warmer time. Every summer there is a moment when I stop what I'm doing and think about how I will be feeling in six months, when I'm bundled in cat hair-covered fleece. When the electric baseboard heater is clicking and clacking as it churns out warm (ish) air. When I don't go outside for three days in a row and only then to refill the bird feeder and break the ice on the bird bath. Every summer I drag my feet on the paths of Mt Tabor, hoping I can make summer last a little longer, trying to postpone the horrible moment when there are more leaves underfoot than overhead. Time passes so quickly. Even though this week seems endless, next week will speed by, and the week after that, until all that is left of me and everything and everyone I love is a bunch of old photos in a stinky photo album.

The chronic malcontent supports Buy Nothing Day

As I count down the days to my oral defense, I have done my best to take each day as it comes, free from expectations and judgment. That Zen-like approach does not come naturally to me, as you might imagine, considering I sometimes call myself a chronic malcontent. Malcontents have lots of expectations, which means when things don't go their way, which is often since that is how life is, they end of with a buttload of judgment. This week I found myself whining about all sorts of things... Christmas, waiting, weather...

I know, really? Weather? It's the height of ego to take weather personally, I know, but I still do it. I don't want to look outside, because it is probably snowing. Ugh. Snow. Still, knowing me, I would find a reason to complain about something, even if it were 85° and sunny. That's what malcontents do. We complain. Unfortunately, incessant complaining has consequences, as I discovered this week when I caved to the urge to spew my vitriolic viewpoint over my hapless friend Bravadita.

We ate pizza at a tiny pizza/pasta joint in SE Portland. I added coffee to my meal, because I knew wheat and dairy wouldn't quite be enough to send me over the top into utter mania. As I tried not to moan with indecent pleasure at the rare taste and feel of cheesy pizza in my mouth, I felt the urge to express myself. And because both Bravadita and I are frustrated creative souls stymied by forces beyond our control (our perception), that is of course what I focused on: my frustration. I'm not sure I knew what I was frustrated about, but it was something to do with art, writing, dating, unemployment, body image, poverty, and Christmas.

Looking back on it now, I would guess my frustration was fueled by the endless waiting for my doctorate to be over and the overwhelming terror of what comes after, peppered with fallout from a conversation I had with my sister about why I always wear clothes that hide my less-than-svelte figure. The spark that set off the conflagration was the time I spent the day before scanning dusty slides of wearable art projects, paintings, and fashion illustrations from my former lives as a painter, illustrator, and costume designer. (So much creativity. So much crappy art.) Stir all that into a big a potful of fear that I've spent eight years and $50,000 on a doctorate from a less-than-stellar university and what do you get? A big steaming pile of frustration.

Then Bravadita tentatively offered up her own dark frustrations, no doubt in a futile attempt to make me feel better, and suddenly I felt like marching on Washington in protest against the injustice of a society that judges women by the size of their ass. How can it be possible for one so gorgeous and talented to be so miserable? It defies logic and reason! But wait, am I talking about Bravadita, or am I talking about myself? Oh, I'm so frustrated and confused! And then, insult to injury: It's Christmas! That horrid music is everywhere! And did I mention plummeting temperatures! I'm using too many exclamation points!

I know what you are thinking: It's a wonder I'm even functioning. However, lest you fear for my sanity (Sis), truly, no worries. I've got a program to help me get through the holiday season. My strategy is this: Lay low, drink water, blog, and buy nothing. And when I lose my sense of direction, I will bury my face in cat fur. It's all good at the Love Shack.

After the pizza dinner, Bravadita and I walked across the street to the Clinton Street Theater, an old somewhat crusty neighborhood theater that boasts the longest running midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show in the nation (Who knew! [Who cares?]). We weren't there to see that. We were there to see opening night of Monkey With a Hat On's production of The Noir 10-Minute Play Festival. Ten slightly bizarre, sometimes funny vignettes that were presumably created to represent the concept of noir. Not surprisingly, there were many seedy PIs in trench coats. But there were also some quirky stories: a moment in the life of a suicidal family of ghosts, a sci-fi intrigue complete with a silver-faced female robot, and a depiction of a finishing school for call girls. Between each vignette was a unique musician playing piano or guitar or drum machine or muted trumpet. I think I liked the musicians better than the plays, except for the last vignette, which featured singing, dancing FBI agents. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that dancing FBI agents is exactly what I needed to help me get through this wretched holiday season. Thanks, Bravadita!

Thanks from the Hellish Hand-Basket

Today I enjoyed my privileged American life. Today, under amazing blue skies, my family motored to a restaurant and exercised our god-given right to eat anything we wanted. Yep, that's right. No cooking, no cleaning, just good food in good company. (Thanksgivings would have been a lot more pleasant if my family had figured this out when I was a kid.)

My mother and I met my brother and his girl-friend at McMenamin's Kennedy School, a former elementary school in North Portland, converted to a funkified hotel. The walls are decorated with panoramas of the early 1900s. The auditorium is now a movie theater. A janitor's closet is the Detention Bar. We met for brunch in the restaurant. My mother had French toast, I had eggs. My brother and his girlfriend had omelette-like concoctions. We swilled some coffee, took a few cellphone pictures to commemorate the occasion, and called it good. The rest of the day has been devoted to laundry and other creative endeavors.

It occurred to me last night that I have never drawn a basket. You'd think I would have, considering the name of my blog is the Hellish Hand-basket. So, last night while watching a compilation of Saturday Night Live Thanksgiving-related skits, I sketched this drawing. My intention was to express my gratitude to you for reading my blog for the past year and a half. All 5,000 of you. Yes, that is how many hits I have attracted in that time. Not enough to monetize, ha. Considering this is an anonymous blog, though, and only about five friends and my sister know about it, I think I'm doing pretty good. So, thanks.

Yesterday I scanned some family photos. I examined each picture, front and back. Some were of people I never knew, or didn't know well: great-grandparents, grandparents, friends of my parents, cats my parents had after I left home... lots of history was made without me, apparently. (Hard to imagine.) There was an entire album dedicated to my older brother, the special firstborn baby. Then there are a bunch of snapshots of me, mostly with him. I'm the sidekick, later the punching bag, but those moments were never caught on camera. (See Mom, that was the time he broke my nose!) Then bam, along came my sister, and one year after that my little brother, the bonus baby. With four children to herd, my mother lost her mind for a decade or so, resurfacing after everyone but the bonus baby had scattered across the continent.

Thanksgivings were tense affairs when I was growing up, mostly due to the power struggle between my mother and her mother. The men watched football, the women duked it out in the kitchen. The kids laid low. The best Thanksgiving I ever had was when my sister and I lived in Los Angeles at the same time. My boyfriend went off to eat turkey with his family, and my sister and I watched a movie and ate popcorn. Then there was an earthquake and a rash of fires in Malibu, and she couldn't wait to high-tail it out of L.A. Anyplace must have looked good after that. No Thanksgiving since has been so satisfying for me. Thanks, sis.

Zen and the art of waiting

I'm becoming a master at waiting. Over the past six months, I've had a lot of practice, what with the starts and stops of the dissertation process. Collect some data, then wait. Collect a little more data, fret, fume, and wait. Submit a draft, and wait. Submit another draft, and then wait some more. Then suddenly... approval! A fleeting moment of triumph and relief. Then schedule the oral defense, and wait. That's where we are now, waiting for the oral defense. Last I heard, it was on for December 9.

I think I can learn something from all this waiting. The state of waiting implies that I have little power to precipitate the condition I am waiting for. I mean, I would like the oral defense to be tomorrow. But I don't have the power to make that happen. No one likes to feel powerless, am I right? We like to think we are in control, of our own lives, at least. The metaphysics of powerlessness are paradoxical: Sometimes we have to give up our illusion of control in order to gain true independence. That's so Zen, isn't it? Ommmm. I'm pretty sure I'm not there yet. My response to all this enforced waiting is to simply curl up in a ball and endure.

Speaking of enduring, today I took my mother to the mall. She wanted to buy some books for the grandchild, who will achieve his first birthday in January. The mall was sparsely populated with customers, being the week before Thanksgiving, but crowded with young and rabid salespeople. They are relentless at that age! Was I ever like that? Infused with maniacal energy and indefatigable persistence? I don't remember all that much of my 20s, but I don't think I was ever that confident or determined, not then or since, now that I think about it. I think I've been waiting for something. But I digress.

After purchasing three Doctor Seuss books, we exited the last bookstore chain that hasn't succumbed to Wal-Mart and meandered down the mall. This is the same mall where last December a shooter killed two people and wounded a third before killing himself. As we passed by Santa, holding a tense little boy captive on his lap, I didn't think about the shooting. I thought about how slowly my mother walks now, two years after her hip replacement and a year after breaking her pelvis in a fall down some concrete stairs.

“Would you like to sample some tea?” I froze. Then I scanned the landscape warily for the origin of the voice. Drat! A salesperson! For a moment, I thought I heard the baying of wolves, just over the hill and closing fast. You know if you hesitate for the slightest moment, you are a goner. Unfortunately, I hesitated, and my doom was upon me. The young salesperson exerted his will and lured me in. (Mom, go for help!) He led me over to two huge containers, apparently filled with two kinds of tea. He filled a dinky plastic cup and held it out to me. Automatically, I took it and sipped. Fruit flavors! (Chemical aftertaste?) Sweet! (Too sweet!) Brain overload.

He was young, a little pimply, skinny to the point of starvation. “Now try this one!” I obeyed. Cinnamon, vanilla, (fake!) sweet... (oh, no, did I just imbibe some sugar?) I felt like I'd taken the bait and lost my soul. Walk away! Walk away while you still can! Too late. Give my books to the Library Foundation! Oh, Rosebud.

I looked around at all the tea paraphernalia, arranged carefully, perfectly, antiseptically... artificially. Everything was too clean, too perfect, not at all appealing to me. Where's the colorful teapots, the big glass bins of delicious loose teas, made with organic ingredients? The realization that I'd just tasted temptation from a minion of satan swept over me. Suddenly I heard my mother's gravelly voice say, “I'm a coffee drinker,” and reason returned. Hey, I'm a coffee drinker now, too. Ever since self-unemployment, the more robust the better. Tea is for wimps!

“It's very tasty, very sweet,” I began, attempting to reassure the kid.

“It does have a little rock sugar,” he admitted.

I headed for the door, my mother in tow. “Enough of that,” I said, wishing I had a big cup of French roast right then, so I could swill some and breathe the bitter fumes back in his face. He thrust a brochure at me in desperation, but we were gone.

We paused to regroup in front of Macy's. “Let's go back to the car,” she said. We hadn't made it halfway to Sears. We both agreed that there was something about aimless mall walking that really sapped one's will to live. We slowly wended our way back to the parking lot. The sun was still shining. It must have been 50°, so strange for late November.

“What will you do with the rest of your day?” she asked when we got back to her condo.

I said I would like to take a walk in the park, but actually, I was feeling a little dizzy, no doubt from swallowing the two little sips of chemical-laced, sugar-infested artificially flavored beverage masquerading as tea. By the time I got home I had a mildly sickening headache, which I cured with ibuprofen and a nap. And some coffee.

I spend my days waiting. Waiting to feel better. Waiting for my mother to trip over a curb or fall down some stairs. Waiting for the dissertation committee to say, oh sorry, we can't make it on December 9, we'll have to reschedule for January. I've spent my life waiting, mostly dreading bad things that never happen, or being so unconscious and distracted that I don't notice when good things happen. I have the uneasy feeling that I'm rehearsing for the real thing, the life that will soon be coming, if I just wait long enough.

How do you know when you're in the flow?

A few days ago I was contemplating the nature of flow. I refer to a state of being where one is so absorbed in an activity that one loses all track of time. If you are a writer or an artist, you know what I mean. But anyone can experience flow. For example, I'm sure my mother is experiencing flow when she plays Castle Camelot.

I often read a book entitled Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I keep it in my bathroom. It shares a shelf with Smooth Move, Trickle Down Theory, and Evacuate! (I'm kidding. Really. Do such books exist? If not, they should.) I've read Flow before, some years ago. Now I am re-reading it, a paragraph or two at a go, so I really have time to ponder the quality of time and the nature of experience.

I wonder, is it better to engage in some engrossing activity—reading, writing, or painting, for instance—oblivious to the passage of time, surfacing in surprise from your bliss hours later, wondering where the day went? Or is it better to be painfully present to the excruciatingly slow passage of time and thereby retain consciousness of every precious second by engaging in some task that you despise—for example, teaching keyboarding to uninterested students? It's a rhetorical question. But think about it. Would you rather be conscious and miserable, or unconscious and happy? Maybe consciousness is over-rated. (Although paychecks are useful, I must admit.)

Today I received approval for my dissertation manuscript. I emailed my sister and attached the slides for my oral defense. She called tonight to congratulate me; I did my best to hold still and hear the praise. She asked for some PowerPoint tips, so I guess she liked the slide show. I'm glad. She and my mother have been my faithful cheerleaders through this entire eight-year journey. It seems a paltry gift to simply name them on my Acknowledgements page, but that's what they are getting for Christmas.

In just over two weeks, I will present my oral defense via telephone conference call, with my stalwart friend and former colleague Sheryl acting as my proctor. She will sit on my couch amid the dust bunnies and hairballs and be my witness as I read my prepared script to an unseen audience. My Chair and the Nameless, Faceless Committee Member will ask me some questions—If you were to do your study over, what would you do differently? How do you think your recommendations could be implemented? What research will you do next? What was the most difficult part of the process? What words of advice would you give to a Ph.D. candidate just starting her first DIS course?—and I will try to answer the questions briefly and succinctly with a minimum of um's. Then my Chair will say, “Okay, Carol, now you will drop off the call while we confer. Call back in five minutes.”

Assuming I enter the right passcode and am shunted into the correct conference call, I will announce myself. Then she will either say, “Congratulations Dr. Carol,” or she will say, “No soup for you! One year!” No, I'm kidding. Ha ha. No, at this point, it's unlikely she will say anything but nice job, Doctor So-and-So, congratulations, upload your final manuscript, so long, thanks for the $50,000, have fun talking to the Registrar, bye now.

Finishing this Ph.D. is going to open up a massive void in my life. The thought of what comes next is paralyzing. Maybe it won't be so bad, though. While I waited for approval for my dissertation, I had a fun little research project for the past week, thanks to a friend's recommendation, analyzing the results of a quantitative survey for a large manufacturing company. It's a different world than academe, that's for sure. Commercial research is less rigorous in some ways than academic research, but you've got all those client demands and interactions. It's the business world, after all: They are the customer, I'm the vendor. I uploaded the files by the promised delivery date, and that was the last I heard. I don't even know if they believe they got what they asked for. I know they got more than they paid for (assuming they eventually pay me). Still, it was a wonderful four days, during which I spent considerable time in flow, oblivious to everything but the task before me.

I need more work like this. Even though the days will pass more quickly, I will be happily unconscious. That is all I ever wanted, anyway, a relief from consciousness. If I can get paid to check out, what more could a chronically malcontented misfit ask for?

Calculating how many degrees of freedom I will have after I finish my doctorate

While I wait to hear if my dissertation manuscript has been approved, I am relearning statistics. It's either that or crossword puzzles. I am adept at running statistical tests in Excel—any trained monkey can do that, once it figures out that installing the Data Analysis Toolpack results in beaucoup bananas. I can compare the scores of two groups to see if perhaps their differences are due to the random chance we all face as we flit about our day, or due to the fact that they are in fact really different in some significant way. Like they root for rival soccer teams or something, I don't know, I'm just making this up. Click the button, whoosh, Excel performs its magic, and voilá, you have output! It's like a statistical meat grinder. Of course, like a meat grinder, what you get out of it depends a lot on what you put into it. I didn't collect this data, so I have to accept what I have. (Have you noticed that I've used two French words in one paragraph? Zut alors!)

Today I discovered the equation that calculates the degrees of freedom needed to conduct a t-test on two independent samples. (No, I don't mean I discovered the equation. I mean I figured out how to type it into Excel. I feel like I imagine Columbus felt when he discovered India, that is to say, like an ignoramus.)

There are so many ways to go with this topic, it's hard to pick just one. Like, are you wondering what degrees of freedom are? Tantalizing, isn't it? We like freedom, it's one of our national values, although it hasn't always been applied fairly, but still, we live and die for it, so it must mean something to us, freedom. Degrees of it sounds a little uncertain, but we can always use more freedom, right? Can there ever be too much freedom? Hmmm. Ask any kid who doesn't get a lot of parental attention. Maybe too much of a good thing, like eating ten maple bars when one or two would do? Food for thought.)

The degrees of freedom I'm talking about actually have to do with calculating a specific statistical test to see if two independently collected samples are significantly different from one another. Does that sound like a foreign language to you? Mais non, if you are a statistician, which I'm not. I love statistics, but no matter how many times I study statistics, I can barely grasp the concepts before they slip away. Like anything to do with numbers, statistical concepts just don't stick in my brain, and the older I get, the less they stick, along with phone numbers, birthdays, and what I had for lunch yesterday. It's like my brain is hardening into a slick marble ball. I look on the bright side: When I'm dead, the morgue attendants can go bowling. Miniature bowling. (Do they have such a thing?)

The statistical equation for calculating degrees of freedom in Excel, in case you were wondering, is this:

Where S1 and S2 represent the standard deviations of the two samples, respectively, and N1 and N2 are the sample sizes of the two samples. That's all you need, plus a buttload of parentheses in exactly the right places. (Oh, and don't type the DF part.) No sweat. I guarantee after you type this in successfully, you will feel a strange tingling sensation that can be interpreted as a frisson of freedom. A successful outcome, by the way, will be obvious when you generate a value that is just slightly smaller than the sum of the two sample sizes. Clear signs that you have erred would include a negative number or a ridiculously high number like, oh say, 16,345.2345 when your combined sample size is 40. Ha! Logic prevails, eventually.

What, me worry?

I've been avoiding this moment for six months. This week I was broadsided with an unpleasant realization: No, it can't be! Can it be? How could this happen? I'm unemployed! Wha—? Those... those people! Those people I trusted like family (that is to say, not much) pulled up their big boy pants, put on their management hats, and decided that I was expendable, superfluous, extraneous... and they let me go (along with a bunch of other unnecessary human flotsam but this is about me, as usual). Argh. How could they? And more to the point, how come it took six months for the reality of unemployment to sink into my gasping brain? That's kind of a long lag time, don't you think? What's my excuse, you ask?

Maybe it's because I've been busy finishing my D. Phil. Or maybe it's because I've been intermittently flailing in the throes of an entrepreneurial seizure. I don't know. The warm golden days of October are long gone, and now Portland is drenched in November. Brain fog makes it hard to figure out what I'm thinking. Never a good sign.

This morning I woke up in the grimy twilight of mid-morning and found the electricity was out. I put on my glasses and peered out the window. No lights on in the cafe across the street. Hmmm. A power outage in the 'hood? I found my diminutive lime green camping lantern (no, I don't camp) and used it to look up the power company in one of my many yellow-paged phone books. According to the robot on the other end, I was the 258th caller, and two... thousand... two... hundred... and... twenty... three... customers were affected by the outage, which they estimated would be fixed by 10:30 a.m. And by the way, if I had any information about what was causing it, please stay on the line.

I found the dregs of yesterday's coffee in the bottom of my cup and savored the burned staleness, trying to stave off panic, wondering what the hell I would do with myself until the power came back on. What did people do before electricity? Uh.... read books, talk to each other, go for walks, heat water over a fire, work the fields, die of consumption... I took the lantern back to bed with a book, prepared to wait it out. Five minutes later, the bedside light came on. And that was my short-lived foray into the 18th century. I leaped out of bed and got the coffee going, feeling a little more grateful than usual for the blessings of the modern age.

I'm also feeling thankful that I don't live in a hurricane/typhoon zone. The news from the Philippines is heart-breaking. I'm not equipped to handle a disaster of any kind, natural or human-made, especially during these days when I feel so discombobulated. What a luxury problem, to be so self-obsessed. It's hard to fathom a world where huge waves sweep thousands out to sea. I live on a hill, which means I am probably safe from flooding. But I'm a sitting duck in a raging fire.

In the immortal words of Alfred E. Neuman, What, me worry? Just let me get through the next month. Then I can collapse in a quivering puddle of (unemployed) human-flavored aspic.

At last, a reason to take a moratorium on service

My brain is full of talk talk talk, but little action seems to be forthcoming. While I wait for feedback on the second draft of my dissertation, I am once again in limbo, fretting over my future and avoiding my present. Last Tuesday I visited my naturopath, Dr. Tony, for my quarterly tune-up. I never know ahead of time what diabolical new technique he will want to try out on me, but I never say no. The man saved my life, after all. Four years ago, I was slowly dying of self-imposed malnutrition. He diagnosed me, prescribed clean food and lots of water, and cheerfully signed me up for the maintenance plan. I see him every few months, and he finds in me a willing victim for his latest wacky techniques.

Maybe there should be an annual limit to how much self-improvement doctors can attempt. Every time Dr. Tony attends a class or seminar, he seems overly eager to practice his new knowledge. I presume he is practicing on everyone else, too, not just me. That would be too weird if he said, Oh boy, I can't wait until Carol comes in again, so I can try out my new vertebrae-adjusting gun on her!

Today Dr. Tony looked natty in his white jacket. As soon as the examining room door was closed, he said, “I just took a class on Total Body Modification!” rubbing his hands together with obvious glee.

I grimaced at him. I wasn't feeling particularly perky that morning, what with the low clouds and rain, the piles of mushy wet leaves, and the prospect of spending money I could not afford to spend. He looked so happy. I lay on my back on his table, peering up at his grinning face, and resigned myself to my fate. Another payment on your student loan, dude. He laid a flimsy notebook on my stomach. Then he reached for my arm. I raised it automatically—by now I am a well-trained patient—so he could muscle-test me. He eagerly flipped through the pages of the notebook while pushing on my upraised arm.

“Oh, wow,” he said with excitement. He paused. “Wait, I have to look this up.” He grabbed a heavy book off the little table under the window and paged through it. Then he bent down and grabbed something small from a bag on the floor. He held up what looked like a dinky white test tube. I couldn't see what was in it, if anything, nor what was written on the label. “This little tube contains magnetically charged bla bla that will resonate with your bla bla bla, so we can clear away the bla bla bla. Bladdity bla bla. Hold this right here.”

He handed me the tiny white vial and told me to press it to my chest. I did. He tapped my leg above the knee and I obediently raised it. “Push back.” I pushed against his hand, and my leg weakened and fell to the table. He grinned like a maniac. “See, that blows out. Okay, now sit up. I'm going to adjust the bla bla on your back. Now let me see which ones...” He turned to the book again, musing out loud. “Four, eight, and... ten.” Then he took his little silver gun and pressed the trigger against certain bones in my spine, telling me to breathe in and out.

When I laid back down on the table, still holding the vial against my chest, he tested my leg again. This time I could hold it against the pressure of his hand. Muscle-testing is weird.

“So, what that was, that was the Zeta Virus,” he informed me. “This is to clear you of suicidal ideation.”

I must have looked skeptical. “This is for people who aren't necessarily planning on committing suicide,” he reassured me. “But sometimes they find themselves driving along a road, crossing a bridge, and they wonder what it would be like, what would happen, if they suddenly were to turn the wheel...you know?”

He didn't come right out and ask me if I had entertained such morbid fantasies, but I got his drift. Well, who hasn't, that's what I want to know. I mean, don't we all, aren't we all sometimes drawn to imagine our deaths? It doesn't mean we necessarily want to die, but don't you wonder? No? Well, maybe it's not everyone. Anyway, I've been cleared of the Zeta virus now, so I don't have to obsess for a while about driving my car off a bridge. I wonder how long this cure will last? I forgot to ask.

Oddly enough, as I lay back down on the table, I felt a warm tingly feeling in my torso.

“Your eyes are brighter already,” he said rather smugly. I felt like smiling, suddenly, so I did.

“The other thing that came up for you is bla bla bla,” Dr. Tony said. He looked sidelong at me. “This is for people who do too much service, people who 'take one for the team,' you know what I mean?”

I could only stare at him in surprise. Service? Taking one for the team? Holy words, sacred words, bite your tongue, young man! I wouldn't be where I am today without intentionally cultivating an attitude of service. (That's a loaded statement, isn't it? Where do I think I am, exactly?) Of course, I didn't say anything out loud. He must have seen something in my face. “This is the self-sabotaging side of service,” he said. “Where you put everyone else's needs before your own. Like not putting on your own oxygen mask before you help your child with theirs.”

Another tiny vial, this time held on my rib cage, another muscle test, and another round of spinal shots from his silver gun, and I was pronounced cured of the affliction of excessive service. Wow. Who knew! My 12 Step compadres might be interested in this little trick.

Thus, in a matter of minutes I was cleared of suicidal tendencies and a penchant for self-sabotaging altruism. My lucky day. And it all happened in the space of 30 minutes. All in all, I received a relatively inexpensive cure for a dreary day's doldrums, plus lots of fodder for thought about the nature of self-destruction and self-sabotage through service. Oh, that wacky Dr. Tony. He's done it again.

Waiting again, and while I wait, I plan my oral defense

I'm waiting again. Waiting is a familiar occupation. Probably for you too, am I right? Today I am waiting for a response to the second submission of my dissertation manuscript. I'm waiting for the rain to cease. And I'm waiting for the Century Link guy to show up and repair my phone line. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Earlier today we had a fall storm, complete with torrential downpour and gusty winds. For a few minutes, it looked like a monsoon had swept over us, but it was gone quickly, a fast moving front heading off to dump snow in the mountains. I looked out the window, watching for the repair truck I'm sure will be here soon, and I saw a patch of pale blue sky. Already the air is lighter, brighter. It looks like daytime now instead of twilight. That makes me feel happier. I am a creature of the light, no doubt about it. If my laptop were functional, I would do my work in my kitchen, where I could bask in the glow of my new shop light. My plants are loving it. After only a few days of bright light, they are stretching greener leaves toward the ceiling. Forget the pathetic window that lets in the few murky rays that manage to penetrate the dense branches of the holly tree. Bring on the artificial light! (I hate that holly tree, and I don't generally hate anything, especially not trees.)

Last night my phone stopped working. No dial tone, not even on the perky lavender Trimline phone I keep for making calls when the power goes out. I tried to call myself, using my cell phone: busy signal. To the outside world, it probably looks like I've been on the phone all night. Not that anyone calls me in the middle of the night, but if they did, would they think I was... talking someone off a ledge, maybe? Or making some extra money by offering phone sex? It doesn't matter: most of the calls I get are telemarketing robo calls. They'll call back later.

I'm looking ahead now to the next doctoral hurdle, the oral defense. I may have mentioned that I attend an online university. I'm not sure attend is the correct word to describe what I do there, but whatever. Anyway, once I find out if my manuscript has been approved, I can schedule the oral defense, which happens via teleconferencing call. Some people use fancy teleconferencing software, probably through their work. I'm sure my teleconference will be of the plain wrap variety.

The oral defense requires a PowerPoint presentation. No problem, I've got that handled, being a PowerPoint wizard from early Windows days. Everyone loves to hate PowerPoint, but I've been able to make some decent money at times in my former life by designing slide shows, usually under the supervision of Macintosh/Adobe gurus who wouldn't be caught dead using a Microsoft product, especially PowerPoint. Blech! Actually, they just didn't want to admit they didn't know how to use it, and so they hired me. So, the presentation part is handled.

To go with the slide show, last night I wrote my oral defense script. I have 30 minutes to present, and if I go over, my Chair will cut me off. So I wrote it all out. No jokes, no fluff, just a straightforward description of the study. I timed it while I read it out loud: 25 minutes. I also recorded it and played it back, trying to ignore how insipid my voice sounded, while I watched the show. Next slide!

To ensure that I haven't hired a trained monkey to give my presentation for me, I must enlist the help of someone (not a relative or person with a conflict of interest) to proctor the oral defense. Some months back, I asked my former colleague (you know her as Sheryl) to proctor for me. She said yes, although she hasn't responded to my recent email reminding her of her commitment. She might actually have found a job. I may have to find another proctor.

The final consideration for the planning of the oral defense is the location. For a while I thought I would rent a meeting room at a local hotel. I planned to invite some colleagues and Sheryl the proctor, of course, and my mother. Lately, though, I've been feeling scared about money: I had to let the University siphon another $794 from my account this week to pay for what I hope will be my last one-credit course. So now I'm thinking I will just invite a few people over to the Love Shack.

If you know me, you know this is a big deal. Nobody comes to the Love Shack. This is my cave, my sanctuary, my castle, my safe house. Plus it's small. I mean, really small. A dinky off-season castle. I'd say my main room is 10 feet x 20 feet. Half of it is office (computer, printer, cat's chair, my chair, shelves, books), half is living room (cat tree, couch, TV, exercise bike, DVDs, shelves, books). The walls are covered with shelves from floor to ceiling, no lie, and whatever bare wall space there is, is covered with artwork. There is barely enough room for one human and one cat. And I think I'm going to invite seven or eight people over here for my oral defense?

I think I've got the logistics figured out. I'm not going to fret about it. Odds are no one but my mother will show up anyway, and she'll only attend if we don't schedule it during nap time. Hey, the Century Link guy is here. He's sitting in his truck, no doubt smoking a cigarette and swilling coffee, uttering affirmations between tokes to motivate him to provide that excellent customer service Century Link is so proud of. Wish him luck.

I'm back. DSL was down while he was working on the problem. It was a Century Link problem. He had to go to the box to switch the line, whatever that means. And now we have liftoff, boom, easy peasy. Now that's what I call service! Eat your heart out, Comcast.

Believe it or not, this doctorate is almost done. Really. I'm not joking this time.

For the past two years, when people asked me how my doctorate was progressing, I told them, “It's almost done. Almost done. Soon.” And when it kept not being done, month after month, people eventually stopped asking. Or paying attention when I said, “Almost done. Just about there.”

Now I can say it and mean it. Truly, the doctorate is almost done. This morning I received the recommended revisions from the Graduate School. I anticipated many: there were few. Only nine comments to address, and seven were in the Abstract. I took my time, spending several hours making the revisions, although I dedicated half the time to trolling for typos. Feeling pleasantly numb, I uploaded the final draft of the dissertation this evening. If there are any more changes required, they will be so minor as to take mere minutes. The thing really is almost done.

My Chair and I talked this morning by phone. I expected her to offer guidance on how to approach the revisions. Instead she said, “This document is yours, now. It's not mine, it's not the Graduate School's, it's yours. So how you want to address these changes is up to you.” I thought, That's so nice. And then I thought, So if there is anything wrong with this dissertation now, it's on me, not my mentors, not the school. Right. Okay, no problem. I can own it.

I'm so unskillful on the phone. “Wow,” I managed to say.

“Here's what will happen now. Make the revisions, don't overthink it. Today or tomorrow, get it done. I'll send it to the Committee, and then to the Graduate School for the final review.”

“Okay,” I said.

“After that, I'll schedule some blocks of time for your oral defense, about two weeks out. You need to send me your PowerPoint 10 days before the day.”

“Uh, okay,” I said.

“Download the proctor form and notify your proctor.”

“Whoa,” I said.

“You're ready. You did a fantastic job. You are a fantastic scholar. We need to keep in touch.”

I managed to thank her. We signed off. I hung up the phone and looked at my cat, reclining on his chair next to me. He opened one eye and looked at me.

“I'm almost done,” I told him. He looked skeptical, stretched, and closed his eye. I wish I could be that cool.

The chronic malcontent twiddles and frets

Today I checked the university course room (as I have been doing at least twice a day for the past 10 days) and found an email from my Chair. She said she has feedback on my dissertation manuscript from the reviewers at the Graduate School. “Not many changes at all,” is how she described it. That sounds promising. Only one problem. The university has failed to set up my next course, a situation that has not occurred in the eight years I've been allowing them to siphon my discretionary income from my bank account. (I suspect it is because I'm technically at the end of my program, no more time on the clock.) So right now I'm not enrolled in any course. Which means the Chair can't upload the feedback. No place to upload to, apparently. She can't just email it to me? Nope. I sent an email to my adviser. Maybe in a few days, they will figure out that they granted me an extension and decide it's okay to set up a new course.

So, the bad news is, the paper was not approved. The good news is, it sounds like the revisions might not be massively substantial. The bad news is I can't see the feedback until the university enrolls me in the next course. The good news is... I guess I get a few more days of thumb-twiddling.

I've cleaned everything I feel like cleaning. Other than laying around watching rom coms and eating bon bons, there's not much to do except fret over how long my savings will last. With the fear monkeys on my back, I've felt inspired to gingerly poke my toe back into my self-employment adventure. I forget what I was working on, though: it's been three months, my brain is a sieve, and information is water. I have a jumbled to-do list, and every time I try to sneak up on an item—update PayPal account, for example—I find myself sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee and reading vampire romance novels under the soothing glare of my new shop light.

I'm sneaking up on my to-do list while I wait to revise my dissertation. I'm starting slowly, with the easier stuff. For instance, I redesigned my personal website. One Wordpress page, displaying a photo of me, plus a terse explanation of who I am and what I do. That sounds so simple, doesn't it. Not. It's hard to write about oneself. I'd rather write about you. Who are you, by the way?

I also peered (through my fingers) at my two business websites, afraid for some reason that they stop functioning when my attention is elsewhere. I saw some formatting problems (I need to update my themes). Mostly I lack of content. There's a reason for that. It's because I don't know what I'm marketing to whom. It's hard to write spot-on content when you don't know your audience. Lack of clarity leads to ambiguous messages. Sigh.

On top of all that, I find I have forgotten how to do technical things I don't do very often, like uploading files to the server in the sky. How do I...? Oh yeah, I have this little ftp program, I remember now. But what's my password? Where do I upload the...? Oh, nuts. I don't want to admit that I understand why my mother has opted out of the modern technological age. At 84, she regresses a bit more every year. She gave up email and then the internet. Soon I fear she will give up her computer all together. Too expensive, too much trouble. Next to go will be her (nonsmart) cell phone. Back to rotary phones, coffee percolators, black and white TVs, letters written on paper and sent through the postal system, and—dare I say it?—face-to-face conversations, replete with body language, cigarette smoke, farts, halitosis, and hugs. Yikes!

When you get done with that two by four, pass it over here

While I wait for the verdict on my dissertation, I am doing a lot of resting, as per my Chair's directive (“Get some rest!”). You could call it thinking... planning... strategizing. You could call it sloth, too, and you wouldn't be wrong.

Although, in my defense, I will say that another restaurant-induced migraine laid me low for a day. I blame the jasmine-flavored iced tea: It smelled like perfume and tasted like chemicals. I don't know why I think I can get away with eating like other people do. You'd think I would have learned by now. My mother thinks I should eat out more often. Her diagnosis is that I treat myself like a hothouse flower. I need to expose myself to more toxins to build up my tolerance. Kind of like getting a cat when one is allergic to cats. I get it. Makes sense. It's the muscle-building theory: Use it or lose it.

However, Dr. Tony (the naturopath who saved me from self-induced starvation) says I should make every effort to avoid toxins. Apparently I have enough toxins. In fact, he says my liver is overloaded with toxins. I picture an overworked liver, huffing and puffing up a flight of stairs, dragging a huge suitcase full of dripping chemicals. It's not something you build an immunity to, it's something you gradually recover from, as long as you don't do any more chemical-ingesting.

That's harder than it sounds. Socializing usually involves eating and drinking. Meeting friends over a meal or a beverage is probably coded in our DNA. It used to be campfires and mastodon steaks. Now it's beef and broccoli over rice with jasmine-flavored tea. And flavor-enhancing, shelf-life-extending chemicals. Yum. Do we even know what is in our food? I read labels very carefully, but I suspect it's often the ingredient benignly labeled natural flavors that sticks in my craw. Lately I'm having trouble with anything that is not organic. Too bad pesticides and herbicides aren't listed as food ingredients on labels. It sure would help me avoid problems at the grocery store. But what do I do about restaurant food? I'm doomed.

Migraines for me are not so bad. An aura that blinds me for 20 minutes, followed by a nauseating headache that usually goes away with an ibuprofen and a two-hour nap. Lucky me. It could be worse. That's two migraines in just over two months. The last one was on September 11. I know because I blogged about it, real-time, as it was happening. I blamed non-organic curry powder for that episode. I stand by my accusation. This time, I blame chemicals in tea, but I don't really know what caused it. Maybe someday they will make an app for the iPhone that allows us to scan our food before we eat it, sort of like a mobile electronic poison-taster, to suss out the presence of MSG, sulfites, nitrates, and GMO ingredients. I'm not cool enough to buy Apple products, so I'll wait for the Windows version. If I live that long.

Climbing the mountain, but slowly, slowly

I'm back in waiting mode, waiting for the Graduate School to give a thumbs up/thumbs down on my dissertation (first draft). If I'm lucky, and if all the planets align, and if (contrary to some reports) there is a god, then the draft will be approved with minimal revisions. Then I'll sail on into the oral defense and graduate to the next adventure (self-unemployment, I guess you could call it). But if I'm not lucky and the planets do not align (how would I know?), and there is no god (as most days I suspect), then there will be ten gajillion revisions, from missing words to lack of logic, and I'll have to dive back into the swamp.

Well, maybe swamp is too strong a word. It's really pretty fun to write a research report, and I think I'm pretty good at it. But I'm sort of sick of this one, know what I mean? It's been years in the developing, months in the making, and at times it seems like it will never end. Lately, though, it is starting to seem like I might actually finish. I don't want to count my chickens before they tear my lips off. And it can't go on indefinitely: I do have a deadline. But every hurdle (and there have been many) has melted away—not without effort on my part, but it seems to prove the old adage that persistence wins the race. Or as Kobayashi Issa once said (who?), “O snail, Climb Mount Fuji, But slowly, slowly!”

Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest is enjoying phenomenal weather, and I have time to enjoy it. Days on end of glorious sunshine, some early morning fog, but mostly delicious sunshine until the shadows lengthen (too soon!). Our local Mount Fuji (Mt. Hood) is covered with a pristine layer of fresh powder. Not deep, though. After the wettest September on record, we have had only five days in October with measurable precipitation. Wack! Our average rainfall for October is 3 inches. We are at 0.84 inches now, but I don't hear anyone complaining. Well, maybe those fish that got left flopping high and dry after the State of Oregon decided to hold back some water in the Wickiup Reservoir for next year's growing season. Oops. Too bad fish can't unionize.

Dare I say it, maybe I have become a half-hearted believer in the... what would I call it? The rhythm of life? I won't go so far as to say that god has a plan—that's a little too woowoo for me—and I don't know how to fit massive fish kills into the overall scheme, but in my tiny snail-like existence, the timing of certain events certainly has seemed charmed at times. I'm thinking specifically of my getting laid off after almost ten years with the career college, at the almost-precise time when I needed every moment to work on my dissertation. Would I have had the courage to quit that job? Probably not: Unemployment is one of my great terrors. Clearly, this was a case of the universe doing for me what I could not do for myself. If I hadn't been laid off, I doubt the president of that college would have felt compelled by guilt to give me permission to interview my former colleagues about a sensitive topic like academic quality (of which they have little, my opinion). If I hadn't been laid off, I wouldn't have been able to complete my data collection. I'd still be flogging the bushes for suitable and willing candidates! 

If I really let myself believe that life has a rhythm and a flow, what would that be like, I wonder? Would I be more serene? Would I have more trust in the process? Would I complain less and smile more? Of course, being the chronic malcontent, my next thought is, be careful what you wish for. When the rains come, as they inevitably will, for this is Oregon, after all—when the rains come, and the east wind howls, and full daylight (let alone sunlight) is a distant memory, and my fledgling start-up is wilting from lack of income, then I might find myself cursing the timing of the universe. While I morosely peruse the want ads. 

Well, wreckage of the future and all that hoo hah... In the meantime, I'm soaking up the sun.