I'm not ready to be unemployed

After a hellish first week, the new term at the career college is.... I can't think of any words to describe how this new term might unfold. I can't say off to a rousing start. The word stumbling comes to mind, but that might apply more to me than the term. Not sure that is useful. As a descriptive term, I mean. Maybe the word hopeful applies: I think we may have more students, judging by the voices echoing down the halls. I wonder if any of our friendly, helpful admissions advisers told the new students that our campus would be moving to a new site in a few months.

To be honest, we still don't know if the move is happening. Rumor has it that the lease is up in April, but I suppose the management could decide to rent month-to-month until they found a suitable location. I'm not feeling all that positive about the possibility of moving. Last week I overheard two students say the reason why they chose our site was because it was near their homes. Location, location, location.

It occurs to me that anyone who hasn't read my blog before wouldn't have a clue what I'm talking about. I'm writing as if I'm narrating an ongoing soap opera for a devoted audience, when in actuality I know that my regular audience consists of a handful of people. I mean, I can count the number of you readers on one hand. The rest of you are drop-ins, looky-loos, accidental tourists traipsing through my blog on your way to someplace else. I can tell what you search for when I look in the stats, and I know you won't find it here. Sorry. Thanks for dropping by, though.

If you stick around, you'll get the whole sordid story of the dinky career college for which I work and its imminent demise. Although, now that I think about it, the demise has been imminent for the years. I guess that doesn't qualify as imminent anymore, does it? It's like going into hospice and outlasting your caregivers. People get a bit peeved. Enough already, just die, would you? Jeez.

I'm not ready to be unemployed. I tried to figure out how I would live if I had to work a minimum wage job. (Oregon minimum wage is $8.95.) My lifestyle would be severely impacted. Like my friend Bravadita, I would have to give up my car. I would have to find a house-share situation. I would have to stop eating organic. Any one of those outcomes would make me want to jump off the Fremont Bridge. I'm such a hothouse flower. I remember when I used to drive a school bus. I remember when I packed books in a warehouse for a two-week temp job. I'm too old for that now. And too damn well educated. No one would hire an aging, unemployed Ph.D. from a crummy for-profit online university to work in a warehouse.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, hey, where is that optimist that lurks inside you, Ms. Chronic Malcontent? Here's the deal on that. The Optimist is not chronic. She is both rare and shy. You may not see her very often around this blog, since the Malcontent is a bully. But maybe if you clap your hands three times and say I do believe in magic, I do, I do, I... well, no, maybe not. I don't know. I'm just writing drivel so I can move past my resentment and get on with writing Chapter 3 of my dissertation proposal. That, after all, is what I live for these days. Work is just that interval that comes between sleeping and writing. Maybe someday this will just be a bad dream, and I'll be able to just sleep and write.

And there she is—don't blink!—the shy Optimist, hovering by the water cooler, waving her tiny hand at us.