Exhaling at the speed of life

I'm a living example of efficiently working at being ineffective. I stay busy. I'm proud to say I'm not quivering in a closet, waiting to be hauled away to the poorhouse. For one thing, I only have one closet in the Love Shack, and it has no place to sit except in the laundry basket. I'm not that far gone. And secondly, what used to be the county poorhouse is now a swanky hip hotel, with a movie theatre, a brewery, a concert venue, a 9-hole golf course, several restaurants, and a multitude of bars. I went to a marketing conference there a few months back. I definitely can't afford it. I don't think there are poor farms anymore, are there? Well, there's always the Burnside Bridge. Under it, I mean: I'm not planning on jumping, in case you were worried.

I'm not lazy. I do a lot of stuff. I make long lists of to-do tasks and knock them off, one by one. That's good, right? No skulking in my one and only closet. Something is not quite right, though. I feel like a cartoon character, with spinning circles for legs, tearing up the air four inches above the pavement, going nowhere, fast. My logical left brain says I just need to work smarter, find the right strategy, I need to figure it out. My right brain is twirling in confusion, alternately euphoric at being saturated with freedom and morose at the prospect of losing it.

I feel like I've stopped breathing. For the past few months, with no income, my sense of accomplishment at finally finishing the Ph.D. is slowly seeping away. I'm deflating, a belch here, a hiss there. Nothing is coming in to replace what is trickling away. I say to myself, I'm living on air, and it feels true. Stored up air. Air from last year, when I still had a job. Musty stale air, sluggishly metallic as it seeps out of my checking account lungs.

Over the weekend I applied to three jobs: instructional designer, student adviser, and online professor at an unreasonably snobby for-profit university. In a few weeks I'll receive three politely terse emails (if I'm lucky) stating that my qualifications were not a match for the position.

I also recently published the Hellish Handbasket ebook, Welcome to Dissertation Hell. So far there have been 27 sample downloads. That's cool. But no sales. That's not so cool. That indicates to me that people are reviewing it and not finding a compelling reason to buy. Why does that sound familiar? Everything I've done: close, but no cigar. A-minus: Magna not summa. Vinyl, not leather. Just a few pounds away from thin. Just a little too angry, a tad too bitter.

I know if I just hold out and keep taking action, sooner or later, I'll begin to inhale again, and my blues will brighten. In the meantime, I hoard my stale dirty air.