Who am I and what just happened?

Poor old Google can't keep up. I'm opening and closing several web accounts using multiple log-on identities on two different computers and Google keeps trying to alert me, Oh no, there could be a security breach! As long as I remember my passwords, I'm okay. Worst case, I get a text with a magic number. If I ever lose this phone or get a new one, I'm toast. I've lost one yahoo! identity because of a lost phone number. If it happens again, I'll just have to reinvent myself. 

Reinvention is not new to me. For example, I used to be a person who had a cat. Then the cat died (two years ago today) and I reinvented myself as a person who used to have a cat. Up until a year ago, I was someone with a mother. Now I'm not. I used to be a resident of Portland, and now I'm a resident of Tucson. Personal reinvention is the natural progression of life. Or is it reincarnation? I don't know. 

Speaking of starting over, I asked the universe if it wanted me to live in my car. You know how you sometimes ask the Universe stuff? Or is it just me? Universe, I said, if you want me to live in my car, okay, I'll give it a shot, but if you don't, please send money. 

You can't expect the Universe to do all the work. Sometimes the Universe needs help. Right after Christmas, I got on the Web and looked for a job. I found a job listing for an academic editor, updated my CV, figured out how to upload my documents, and clicked Apply. Whoosh! With that click, I had notified the Universe of my willingness to earn.

The Monday after New Year's, I got an email. The next day, I had a phone screen. The day after that, I had a Zoom interview. Thursday I got a job offer. How about that? I had one day to bask in my job-hunting glory. (They want me! I'm not too old!) The basking was short-lived. On Saturday, parts of my brain stopped working. 

It happened while I was on a Zoom meeting. Maybe I was super stressed out, I don't recall. I had a ten- minute talk, and luckily, I had notes. I think what I said made sense, but I can't be sure. I don't remember much. By the time the talk was over, I was experiencing a phenomenon known as transient global amnesia. Now that I'm more or less on intimate terms with the condition, I think I can snuggle up to it and call it TGA. 

TGA is a sudden, profound, temporary inability to form short-term memories. I know! Who knew such a thing was even possible!? Not me. I thought I'd had a stroke. After the Zoom meeting ended, I ran to the mirror and started making faces at myself and flailing my arms around in the air over my head. Was my mouth drooping? Had I started drooling? Were my arms matching each other in their range of motion? No to the first two questions, yes to the third. Did I know my name? Yes. Could I type? Let's find out.

I consulted Dr. Google and quickly discovered my malady had a name. Transient global amnesia. It sounds frightening, and it was. Transient sounded reassuring, but global? Amnesia? Oh no, who am I? What just happened?

TGA is a strange phenomenon. My mind had wandered out into the short branches and could not find its way back home. Thoughts ran through my brain like water. Once they passed through my mental processor, they were gone as if they had never existed. File not found, file deleted, file corrupt. I was literally trapped in each moment, like a goldfish in a water bubble. I could not reconjure the thoughts I'd just had moments before. I could have a conversation, but I could not hold the thread of the conversation in my mind. Every sentence was new, disconnected from anything that just passed. I attended another two meetings, limping from one sentence to the next, before I could eat lunch and assess the damage. Formats and agendas saved me. I could read, I could follow directions. I just couldn't remember what had just happened. 

The word that kept me calm was temporary. Sure enough, in a few hours, the fog lifted. The websites I consulted indicated I might not remember much about what happened during the episode. I know what I had done because I had notes and my calendar, but I can't recall specifics of what I said or what others said. A few hazy images linger now, but mostly yesterday afternoon is a black hole. 

I have profound empathy for what my demented mother most likely suffered in her final years. It was utterly confounding and disabling to be unable to access my short-term memories. It's ironic that the goal of meditators is to detach from distractions and stay in the present moment. Someone should figure out how to put TGAs in a bottle, Red Bull for Buddhists. Guaranteed to keep you in the here and now.

I don't think I am cut out for meditation. Before this episode, I was neutral on the idea of the here and now. Now I am sure, being stuck in the here and now is not nirvana. It's okay to visit, but don't lose your way back to where you were. 

Which leads me back around to this new editing job. It's a part-time remote gig editing dissertation chapters for half a dozen students a few weeks of each ten-week term. I need a functional brain to do the job. I'd like to believe that the Universe has come through, delivering an income source when asked, so I don't have to end up living in my car, but we know the Universe can be a trickster. 

This week the new college is checking out my former employer, a crummy career college that laid off a bunch of teachers in 2013, me included, and finally gasped its last in 2020, thanks to COVID. The defunct career college (of which I have blogged a great deal! See just about any post prior to 2013) is following good camping practices by packing it in, packing it out, and leaving no trace. I had to send copies of my W2s to the background check company to prove I actually worked there. 

The new school might decide I'm a liar. I doubt it, though. They need people like me, people who are intrinsically motivated by something other than money. It's a for-profit institution. If you have read my blog over the years, you know how I feel about for-profit higher education. I know they underpay employees to keep tuition low. I know the hours will be ridiculous, and I will have no say in anything. I know this from experience. If they decide to hire me, I will accept the job with my eyes open. Editing student papers will help me stay current in my quest to be of service to nontraditional graduate students who need support and guidance. It's my thing.  

As long as my brain holds out, I will keep trying to live usefully and walk humbly. 

We gotta have art

The reward for being willing to work for nothing (also known as service or volunteering) is the opportunity to do more work for nothing. Few are called to this level of self-flagellation. Most people volunteer once a year dishing up spuds at a soup kitchen. Maybe they sell wrapping paper for their daughter's scout troop. These smart givers have figured out how to maintain their sense of selves when giving by engaging in some carefully controlled giving. They manage the time, place, duration, and level of emotional involvement. They live to serve another day.

Me, when I jump off the cliff into the great pit of service, I don't hold back. I go all in. Whenever I see that finger of service pointing my way, I almost always say yes. Even when I don't want to show up, I do. Because that is what I have learned is required of me to survive in my own skin. I am no longer a quitter. Well, hardly ever. When I first got vertigo, I quit on a service commitment. I was capsized by the rocking water in my head, not much good for anything for a while.

The vertigo still bubbles up from time to time, but it no longer swamps me. Now, I show up for my service commitments. I show up for meetings, I show up for phone calls, I show up for my mother.

Now I'm showing up for a new volunteer commitment. I'm in the process of being inducted (onboarded, waterboarded, whatever they call it) into a service organization. A request went around by email for someone to co-chair the workshop committee. Prodded by the finger of service, I raised my hand. Most of the work for 2020 has been done, it appears, by the massively overachieving and micromanaging “acting” workshop chair. Probably they just need an ignorant snoid to show up, check names off the list, and make sure nobody inadvertently unplugs the projector when run they their chair over the extension cord. That snoid could be me.

The hardest part of the snoid job is getting to the location in downtown Portland. Parking is exorbitant and scarce. Public transit is slow and expensive. Volunteering means clients pay nothing for service; however, volunteering shouldn't require the volunteer to fork out great sums of time and money. Just saying. Not up to me.

Speaking of trying to help others, at the invitation of one of the artists who took my art and business class at the community college, yesterday I visited an artists' workshop in Northeast Portland. Well, it was really an old concrete brick garage with a massive wood stove flaming against the back wall, uncomfortably close to shelves of tarps and other possibly flammable materials. I tried not to notice.

Three artists from my class had kept in touch. Apparently, taking my class had inspired them to support each others' marketing efforts. I felt a little frisson of pride, completely unearned.

Just inside the big open garage door, I chatted with two artisans I had not met before. The first was a young woman who sat behind a display of hand-pinched clay pots adorned with grotesque cartoonish faces (not unlike some of my grotesque cartoonish faces). I admired them and asked what people typically used them for.

“Rubberbands,” she said. “Paper clips. My Mom has them all over her house.” Yay, moms. We gotta love moms.

“Where are you selling them?” I asked.

“Well, nowhere, yet.”

The second artist new to me was a long-haired scruffy man named Tim who sat at a power machine sewing leather tags on pieces of pillow ticking for a custom order of bags. I admired his hand-dyed, one-of-a-kind backpacks stacked on a big table behind him. Ever the marketing critic, I gave Tim my signature eye-roll when he was unable to produce a business card: In lieu of a card, he gave me one of the tags he sews into his packs. Today I visited his website: clean design, perhaps a little too clean. Lots of nice photos but no verbiage to romance me into paying $114 for a clay-colored book bag.

Next, I stopped to chat with Cherise, an artist who I vaguely remembered from my class earlier this year. She stood next to a colorful display of hand-made cards encased in clear plastic wrappers, arranged in a little twirly rack on a table. Next to the rack were a few small paintings set on easels. I liked her images.

“How are your marketing efforts going?” I asked.

“If you had a class to help people post their art on their website, I would totally take it,” she said, looking embarrassed. Hmmm, I thought. An unfilled need. Could I fill it?

Today, I looked up her website, a drag-and-drop Go-Daddy affair that looked good to me. She had a page of digital art that people could buy, download, and print. I don't know what she was complaining about. Looked like she had it handled. Maybe she was having tech-swamp brain, like I often do. It's the inability of my brain to recall technical skills I previously learned, even the day before. She may have forgotten she knew what she knew. Or maybe she enlisted a niece to create the shopping page. I need more information.

Next to Cherise, was a card table showing a sparse collection of handmade embroidered patches and ... well, bigger patches, or maybe they were wall hangings? Heidi, the artist who invited me to the show, huddled under a laprobe behind the table. Heidi is an embroidery artist, I guess you could say. She takes tiny pieces of denim, embellishes them with microscopic cross stitches, attaches a minuscule fabric tag with her name on it, and safety pins a dinky price tag to the corner: $85. Yipes. She also had a dish of about twenty denim embroidered buttons for $35 each. I mean, buttons that you pin on your lapel, not buttons that go through buttonholes.

My eyesight is pretty bad, especially for closeup work, so I had to lift up my glasses to appreciate the fine detail. Even up close, though, I don't think I fully grasped the appeal. Now, if she had turned one of those miniature denim masterpieces into a huge wall tapestry or a rug . . . well, I guess I like my art over-sized. And functional. The way I like my brain. But I digress.

The third artist from my class was Marge. Marge works with wood. She does custom decks and fences in her outdoor life. Indoors, she builds wooden boxes on legs or wheels to hold things of various sizes, including stringed instruments.

“Is this where the magic happens?” I asked, patting the beat-up workbench shoved against the wall under a window and thinking, wow, this is really primitive. The lack of space and paucity of tools possibly explained why her work could best be described as rustic. I was reminded of the day many years ago when I showed my attempt to sew a leather outfit (turquoise lamb suede) to a professional seamstress who used to sew couture for Galiano. I'll never forget the look of withering pity she bestowed upon me as I wrapped up my amateurish effort and slunk out the door. I took a vow not to do that to anyone. I admired Marge's photos and patted her boxes.

I don't know if any of the artists sold anything but they didn't get any money from me. I'm in downsize mode. Cognitive dissonance kicks in when I imagine the hordes of artists around the world cranking out art that few people will see or buy. How is all this production helping the planet? But we can't tell artists not to create. That would be saying, dancers, stop dancing; singers, stop singing. Fish gotta swim. Artists gotta create. And we need art, even if we are running out of places to put it.

Is there a human in this room?

In the past year, I've walked down the hall from the back door of the retirement home to my mother's room almost three hundred and sixty-five times. (I missed a few evenings in the past year.) Every night at about 6:15, I park my car in the cul-de-sac under a tree that drops detritus on my windshield. I admire the tall fir trees overlooking the unkempt garden, hoping when they topple in the next winter storm, they will fall toward the empty field. I punch in the code and pull open the heavy door, doing my best not to let it slam behind me in case the residents in the first two rooms are snoozing. People go to bed right after dinner at the retirement home.

Every evening, I stride down the hall and pass a certain door. The door displays a large sign: Happy Birthday, Rudy! Last year, pasted around the sign were colorful stickers that said Happy 100! A few months ago, the stickers were changed to say Happy 101!

In all the times I've walked by that door, I have never seen it open. I have not heard a peep from beyond that door, not a radio, television, or murmuring pastor. I have not smelled poop as I passed. Is there a human in that room? Who, I wonder, is Rudy?

Tonight I saw an aide enter the room carrying a large garbage bag. That means someone is in there. I picture a stinky wizened man in a bed, gnarled and still, waiting for family that never comes. Well, I'm making up that story, for sure. They probably come on Sundays after church like normal people.

A few nights ago, Mom told me she was awakened from a nap on her couch to find her neighbor Dan's hand on her forehead.

Mom's neighbor Dan is a thin, long-faced grizzled man who has severe dementia and doesn't talk much. Normally, Dan gets around very slowly in a wheelchair. Apparently, nobody knew he could walk. When I mentioned my mother's story to an aide, she said, “Yes, we saw Dan in your mother's doorway. He's walking!” I told her Dan had paid a visit to my mother as she slept on her couch. “It's a miracle!” the aide said.

I sat next to her on the couch in my usual spot and switched the channel from the Flintstones to Love It or List It. I looked at Mom to gauge her level of concern.

“You could take him, I think,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she said promptly. “I could take him.”

It isn't hard to imagine Mom and Dan ending up on the carpet in a slow-motion tangle of fragile limbs. Nobody will win that match.

“If it happens again, you can push him away or yell at him,” I said. “Then ring your call button.”

“It will be five minutes before anyone shows up,” she said.

“Well, punch his lights out, then.”

“Okay.”

I turned back to the TV. “All-righty then. What do you think, are they going to love it or list it?”

Yesterday I caught a bus downtown just after dawn to attend a five-hour workshop on business basics for small business startups. Five of the twelve attendees, me included, were volunteer mentors-in-training. The remainder were a motley group of hopefuls seeking information and advice. We packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a tiny room that alternated between stifling hot and freezing cold. The woman sitting by the projector kept bumping it, knocking the image askew on the screen.

I sat by the wall and sipped homemade coffee from a little cup, trying desperately to stay awake as the speakers droned on about business plans, banking, finance, record-keeping, and marketing. A lot of the material was familiar to me. I could teach most of it myself, and I have. I imagine I will volunteer to present something in that tiny stifling room at some point. They really need some PowerPoint help. In between drawing funny faces in my notebook, I reconfigured the tables and chairs in my mind.

At noon, I ate my homemade lunch of toasted oats, apple, raisins, and soy milk alone in a small break room down the hall. People who went out of the building came back and reported having a disappointing experience at McDonald's. At two-thirty, we were released. I gathered up my rain gear, made a pit stop in the restroom, and hiked a block to the bus stop.

The bus home was a long time coming but the rain held off until I was a few blocks from home. I shucked off my rain gear, fed my annoyed cat, and burrowed into my couch until it was time to visit Mom.

Service is the path to happiness, she says [cue eye roll]

I'm taking a break between sneezes to record yesterday's networking adventure. (My sinuses are combusting from ragweed pollen. Welcome to allergy hell.) As part of my endeavor to trick the universe into rewarding me for my paltry attempts to be of service, I applied to join a nonprofit organization that helps small business owners succeed in business. I figure, why not. If I'm going to live on air, I might as well be of some use to someone.

Yesterday was my first opportunity to meet other members of the organization. Let's call this organization the Oldsters. I drove to Tigard in lovely sunny, windy, cold fall weather, puttering in the slow lane while trucks and SUVs dodged around me. As a former school bus driver, I have learned highway patience. When some large vehicle is snuffling up my tailpipe, I try not to make any sudden moves. Eventually if I slow down slowly, they will dart around me and floor it. I'm happy to see their dust. I don't compete while driving.

I arrived calm and intact thirty minutes early for the 11:00 a.m. meeting. I try to find the balance between being too early (pathetically overeager) and just early enough (casually confident). Achieving this balance sometimes requires sitting in my car watching the clock. It's a skill I have gained after years of fine-tuning. I'll send you the syllabus if you are interested.

Anyway, at the precise moment, I skittered to the front door, buffeted by blowing leaves. First stop, the restroom, of course, because, you know. I found the meeting room around the corner. The tables were set up lecture-style, with a clear space in the center for the speaker. A generic PowerPoint title slide glowed on the screen at the front of the room. A dozen or so oldsters, mostly men, milled around chatting.

An older gal with glasses and fluffy gray hair rushed over to me and introduced herself as Veronica. I extended my hand and she took it and kept it. I tried to get it back, but she had a firm grip. I grinned and nodded as she looked deeply into my eyes and told me how nice it was to meet me, so nice, awfully nice, great, in fact, so great. Later, after her plaintive pitch for volunteers to help on understaffed committees, I realized her enthusiasm wasn't about me specifically but about the prospect of having more help.

Another young woman came in immediately after me. I'd like to think I qualify as a young woman, but actually, I was probably old enough to be her mother. Since I turned fifty, I rarely look in the mirror. Humor my delusion. I found a spot in the front row and she took the seat next to my right.

“Hi, I'm Jane,” she said loudly. I introduced myself. She said, “I'm a business banker at the downtown branch of [Bank]. What do you do?”

Gah! That dreaded tell me about yourself question gets me every time.

A super-old oldster shuffled in the narrow space between desks to claim the seat to my left. I noticed he wore hearing aids like the ones my mother wears. He parked his cane against the desk and took off his plaid newsboy cap. He turned his entire body to smile at me. The banker reached across me to shake his hand. “Hi, I'm Jane!”

“What?” said the oldster, whose name we learned later was Lenny.

True to my nature as an overachiever, a few days earlier, I had found my way to the group's local Google Drive and downloaded the day's agenda, after reformatting it to fit on one page. I was the only person with a printed agenda. Thus, I was ready for the moment when the five new members were to be granted one minute each to introduce themselves. In my car, while watching the clock, I had tested different approaches, remembering my Toastmaster days. Should I write it out? Tell three things about me? Tell a joke?

When the moment came, though, I did what the two women ahead of me did: I stumbled through a brief biography and warbled about how glad I was to be there. Marty the co-chair was apparently timing our responses. I got a thumbs-up for coming in at fifty-seven seconds. Thanks, Toastmasters. Everyone else introduced themselves and reported how many years they had volunteered with the Oldsters. The years of service ranged from zero (us newbies) to over twenty-five years.

Minutes later, about twenty-five people swarmed two tables of food. One table displayed pizza, the other stacked boxes of Panera sandwiches. My preferred lunch time is about three o'clock, but I can eat anytime, especially when stressed, although in company, I tend toward the ascetic side. I hide my binges. Accordingly, I swarmed with the rest and grabbed a veggie sandwich box, but ate only the potato chips, saving the hideously decorated cookie and mysterious wrapped sandwich for later when I could pig out in private.

Someone fetched a sandwich box for Lenny so he didn't have to get up. On both sides of me, my seat mates ate noisily. My misophonia kicked in big time when the presenter had to compete with crunching potato chips and crackling sandwich wrappers. To remain calm (and to prove my status as a self-proclaimed artist), I doodled stupid caricatures in my journal.

Eventually the two-hour meeting dragged to a close with Veronica's plea for more hands to help on committees. If I stay with this group, I predict within two years, I will be running it. Not because I can do a better job, not because I'm so desperate to be in charge, but because everyone else who qualifies to lead will be either burned out, retired, or dead. Leader by default. Last sucker standing.

I escaped into the breezy afternoon sun, feeling a lot more depleted than when I walked in the door. My people alert had been blaring silently since I got swallowed up by Veronica's iron grip. The first thing I did when I got into my nice warm car, you guessed it, was to open up that cookie. It didn't make me feel better, and I knew later I would regret it, but the combination of butter, sugar, and flour took the edge off so I could drive home with some semblance of serenity.