Neck deep in palaver

Another Monday with no place to go. I have stopped trying to convince myself I am on vacation. Loose ends conspire to remind me that I am now... how do they say it? Between jobs. Yes, I'm between jobs, which is sort of like how you feel if you accidentally slide down between the bed and the wall and get stuck, and you are too weak to get back up and too fat to fit under the bed. I hope that never happens to you.

Where was I? Loose ends. One big ugly one hanging out there is what to do with my 401K. My pathetic little pile of marbles. I could leave it with my employer's plan administrator, but honestly, I'm hell-bent on burning bridges. Exit, stage right! The human resources director (and I use the word human very loosely) is someone I hope I never have to think about again. The sooner my fully-vested nest egg is out of her domain, the sooner I can exorcise her presence from my mind. I'd rather take it all to Vegas and put it on red than have to look at my former employer's name every time they send me a quarterly update. With that imperative in mind, I filled in the transfer form. Tomorrow my letter will wind its way to the new corporate location and into her hot sweaty hands. She will presumably sign it and send it on to the place that will welcome the new contribution to my traditional IRA. A few more marbles to add to my pile. Not enough marbles to retire on. Just enough to inspire the banker to snicker behind his hand after I hesitantly visit him for advice.

Another loose end is the fact that I am almost completely unemployable. I blame my attitude. I could certainly apply for office administration jobs, if I deleted my Ph.D. A.B.D. designation from my resume (and if I were willing to work for $11.00 an hour). The thought of doing secretarial work makes me want to hurl, if you get my meaning. Hurl. Barf. Whatever. I long ago accepted the fact that I am not secretarial material. Hell, I'm not even sure I'm female anymore, and don't you have to be female to be a secretary? What? Oh.

Well, anyway, the typing life is not for me. Wait, I'm typing right now. I mean, typing someone else's bullsh-t instead of my own, that's what I mean. I can type my own crap all day long. This blog has been excellent training for typing palaver. (That's another term for crap.) If only I could make money typing palaver. I know people do it. The internet is full of palaver.

I called the man who administers the local SEA program. SEA stands for self-employment assistance. For those of us who might be unemployable, maybe self-employment is the answer. Although if no one else wants to hire me, I am not sure I should assume that I would either. In any case, it's a loose end that needs attention, so I called, and he emailed me some forms. I downloaded the file and found a list of questions to answer: essentially a summary of a business plan. I took a deep breath and started filling it out. Partway through I came to the question: How will you market your business? I rubbed my hands together. Well, let's see... I started writing the usual: advertising, direct mail, networking and referrals, website, blog, social media... wait, what? Did I just write social media? Me, the anti-christ of Facebook?

The thought of putting my “real and true name” on facebook makes me want to...you guessed it: hurl. Twice in one day is my limit, so what did I do? Very cleverly, I devised a fake name and registered it with the State of Oregon. I am $50 poorer, but greatly relieved. I would tell you what it is, my fictitious business name, but then this blog wouldn't be anonymous anymore. And where would the fun be in that?

I will email my completed SEA application to Salem tomorrow. In the meantime, I will begin writing a more comprehensive business plan. I also must keep applying for jobs in order to get unemployment assistance. I think I have a strategy for that. Working on the assumption that 75% of all jobs are never advertised, I've decided to ignore job listings and just send resumes to cool places I'd like to work. Who knows, I might get lucky. They might hire me to write palaver for them.

Is it possible for-profit colleges don't really care about quality?

Where's my vampire mojo when I need it? For the past few days, I have been trying to persuade the media relations person at the corporate headquarters of the local career college where I want to conduct my doctoral study that I am a harmless bumbling academic with no malicious intent. My first attempt failed, so I'm sending another letter promising my first born, yada yada. I don't have a lot of hope, but nothing ventured, etc. I am braced for another smackdown.

I couldn't take no for an answer. It's my nature. I can't stop stirring the pot. After the debacle last week with my sarcastic photo blog at my erstwhile place of employment, you'd think I would learn. Managers with guilty consciences don't take kindly to being called on their transgressions, especially on a website that is open to the world. (Too bad it didn't go viral.... sigh.) But once burned just makes me more stupid, apparently. After getting one rejection from the for-profit behemoth, I'm sending another plea. Please, please, please.... Now these corporate watchdogs will probably remember me forever. Yeah, isn't she that nut that kept pestering us to do that ridiculous study of our dirty laundry--uh, we mean, academic quality? Interview our teachers? I don't think so! Who knows what they would say!?

The excuse they gave me is that letting me interview faculty on campus would be time-consuming and disruptive to students. No argument there. I wasn't planning on interviewing faculty on campus. I was going to find some local place like a library meeting space or even a quiet diner and invite them to meet me at their convenience. The corporate VP made it sound like I was some lurking pervert with cooties. No, we can't allow you on campus. You might cause people to realize we don't care about quality.

I suspect that I am going to have to rethink my sampling approach. This could get messy. The farther I stray from my original proposal, the messier I fear it will get. It may be time to break out the rubber gloves.

Who am I?.... Who am I now?

I'm embarrassed to say, I'm having a hard time letting go of my former life as a college instructor. Time and emotions are messing with my mind. It's only been three days. Of course I'm still prickly with anger, resentment, and fear. But I think I should be over it by now. I should be moving on to my next adventure. The problem is, I don't know who I am if I'm not a teacher. Am I a graduate student? A job seeker? An aging unemployable person? How about a lady of leisure (WTF?)

I've been keeping myself busy with various projects (mostly dumping every piece of paper related to my former job), but every now and then the reality of my situation washes over me. For a second, I can't breathe. I have to go drink water and pester the cat for comfort. It's all just needless drama, I know. There's no reason to panic. Things are very different now, compared to the last time I was unemployed. The last time I was unemployed, I had no reserves. I was living on a painful edge, one step from homelessness (or my parents' basement, which at the time was even worse than homelessness). But I still fret.

I've heard the antidote for self-obsession is service. With that in mind, yesterday I gave my friend (I'll call her Valentina) a ride to a naturopathic doctor's office, where she was scheduled to have an intravenous drip for a couple hours. It was one of those weird instances where you should be careful what you offer to do for a friend, because you might get to see a needle going into a vein and hear unsettling technical medical terms like... gas, poop, and pee.

We reclined (me not quite relaxed) in too-small brown leather recliners in the naturopath's little office while clear liquid dripped down a long tube through a needle into her elbow vein. The sun was shining outside the big picture windows. Brilliant emerald trees fluttered in a gentle breeze. (I think the trees are greener in Beaverton. Is that possible? All the vegetation on the east side of Portland seems grayer to me, dustier, somehow. Like dust can't settle on the rich people's side of town.) We chatted for a while, while I tried to avoid looking at the little red plastic bucket full of discarded needles that sat on the floor between our two chairs. After about an hour, the naturopathic doctor came in and sat at his desk for the remainder of the treatment time. Conversation was stilted after that. I was facing away from his desk, toward Valentina, so it was difficult for me to include him in a conversation. I wanted to mention my naturopath, but didn't want to get into a contest over which naturopath was more... naturo. Valentina on the other hand, was facing toward him, and probably found it impossible not to include him in conversation. Whenever I craned my neck to look at him, he was always looking at her.

In this strange setting, time both sped up and slowed down. The time Valentina and I spent talking seemed to fly by, as it always does when I'm with her. Her knowledge ranges wide, motivated by a refreshing curiosity about life. We dig for the delicious irony in every topic. I love to hear her laugh. When she laughs, for a brief moment the weariness lifts from around her eyes. But I couldn't be fully present, because I was fretting about time.

The next event on my schedule was a workshop on developing my social profile (I have no social profile, but you can get a pretty good idea of my facial profile from the image of the chronic malcontent to the right of this post. It is surprisingly accurate, I'm told.) I anxiously watched the clock, then the drip, then the clock, concerned about moving on to my next engagement. I confess, I have a phobia about being late to things. After the treatment, we had a stop to make at New Seasons. (Valentina assured me her list was short.) Then I had to get from Valentina's place to a hotel near Portland State University by 1:30 p.m. with no clear idea of how to get there or where to park.

Fretting doesn't actually influence time and outcomes, I know, yet I can't seem to stop fretting without the aid of some serious metaphysical intervention. Yesterday, circumstances seemed to conspire against me. Things could have gone south in a hurry. I got stuck in traffic on my way to Valentina's, and then I got lost and had to navigate the winding back roads by internal GPS (rarely reliable). I'd like to believe I was led to her house by my continual chanting of the mantra of the lost: oh god, oh god, oh god. Somehow the time gods granted me the gift of punctuality, despite my propensity for missing freeway exits. We arrived at the clinic precisely on time.

And I was early to the afternoon event, which perhaps was not the gift from the time gods I assumed it was, as I was too early to get the free parking offered by PSU and thus spent 15 minutes circling the blocks around the campus searching for a parking space. I finally found a space, but the almighty meter granted me only three hours. If I had been late, I would not have had to walk three blocks uphill to the hotel. Nor would I have had to leave the event early to get back to my car before the meter ran out. I probably missed that one critical insight into improving my social profile, simply because I was obsessed about not being late. Because of that, I won't find a job, and soon I'll be begging my mom to put me up in her spare bedroom. Ahhhhhh.

Three days into unemployment and already I'm insane. The future is not looking good.

Do I look like a risk taker to you?

I'm relieved to say I hit the ground running on my first day of freedom. I could have slept in. I considered it, actually. But I had a dental appointment to keep at noon, made six months ago when I was still employed, before I had a hint I would be laid off. If I had known I might have spent less on vampire romances and put more in the bank. But I digress. I got up, I went to the appointment (covered by insurance until the end of the month, thanks former employer!), and then I efficiently blazed a furrow through my errands, one after another: gas, post office, bank, thrift store (I was only going to drop off a box but I was compelled to go inside and look for said vampire romances. Sigh. Found a few. Yay.), and finished up at the grocery store, where they were out of carts, so I was forced to only purchase what I could carry. Darn. Still I managed to spend a few hundred dollars today, if you count the dentist.

I have many fears about this new regimen. One is that I will spend my days efficiently running errands, briskly knocking items off my mundane to-do list.... toothpaste: check!... while completely avoiding the activities that could generate income. (Like, for instance, job hunting.) I have a to-do list a mile long of projects half-finished: scan family photos, recycle old paper, donate old binders and books, dust my shelves (I have ten million shelves, no lie!), sweep, mop, vacuum... ahhhhhh! Now my true colors shine. I have the time to do these things, and yet I resist. I guess I prefer to live in squalor. I feel like I'm missing an important food group if I don't have cat hair with every meal.

Speaking of hair balls, my next dissertation course started today. I uploaded my first draft of the Institutional Review Board application, which will result in receiving approval to interview human subjects. They can't be too careful with a researcher like me—I might be tempted to brainwash my participants into thinking that for-profit higher education is a scourge that should be banned from the land. Bwahahahaha. My chairperson will probably mosey into the course room in a few days and spy my submittal parked in the corner. Oh, look, she did something. After some back and forth, eventually she will allow it to be sent to the faceless nameless IRB reviewers, who will eventually allow it to pass, after ripping me a new one and sewing it closed with some warnings masquerading as compliments. Then, finally at long last, I'll be cleared to collect data. What does that mean, you ask? That means I will be approved to arrange interviews with ten faculty to discuss their definitions and perceptions of academic quality in for-profit Gainful Employment programs in vocational colleges like the one that just laid me off.

It would be the height of irony, the epitome of poetic justice, the ultimate toothpick in the eye, if I can't find ten teachers who would be willing to talk to me. That won't happen, I'm pretty sure. But it would sure be the height of something, after these eight years of persistent struggle, to have my efforts fall flat in a big ho-hum who cares.

I started out on this academic journey with a pie-in-the-sky, ice cream-colored dream—oh, la la la, I'll just teach marketing and management courses online to students who won't even know I'm wearing my pajamas! I'll make tons of money, write books on the side, and life will be grand! What a dream, eh? More like a delusion. In eight years, I've changed (I don't eat ice cream anymore), but more importantly, the world of online teaching has changed. Something like 70% of all college faculty are adjuncts, working long hours teaching one or two classes for very low pay and zero benefits. Plus the institutions now want their instructors to have current “real world” experience—i.e., a job. Well, of course you'd better have a job, because you won't be able to live on what you make as an adjunct.

Teaching is looking less and less appealing. I doubt I will be hunting for a teaching gig in the near future, even if they wanted a Ph.D. from a for-profit institution (scourge upon the land, etc.). The pajama thing still seems good, though.

Just another coffee-spilling bozo on the bus

Yesterday afternoon I took a bus downtown to meet my friend Bravadita at Pioneer Square. It was perfect weather, warm and clear, a good day to meander to the Library and down to the river. Of course, we didn't realize there were amusement park rides and mariachi bands taking up all the normally peaceful space along the waterfront. Drat. Cinco de Mayo! But that is another story.

Bravadita was an adjunct at the career college where I worked up until last Thursday. After she was cold-shouldered out of the rotation, she was unemployed for a long time. She cobbled together a couple part-time gigs teaching kids to read, but she's currently looking for other work—preferably something where she can use her writing talent and not be continually infected by the latest plague. We have a lot in common: desperation and hope. We talked shop over coffee, which left me hyper-amped with excitement and caffeine when it was time to get on a bus to go back to the Love Shack.

I was buzzing along, enjoying the bus ride in an aisle seat, when the woman sitting next to me stiffened and pointed downward. I followed her finger and saw rivulets of liquid streaming across the black rubber floor. Uh-oh, I thought... is it blood? Is it urine? It was spreading rapidly in little streams in all directions.

At first I couldn't believe my eyes. It looked like the source of the liquid was the leg of the man sitting across the aisle from me. He was a young guy wearing jeans, a button down shirt, and earphones, and he was holding a laptop bag on his lap. A little spray of liquid was coming out a grommeted hole near the bottom of in his laptop bag. Mesmerized, I reached out and touched the source of the leak and then looked at my fingers. Brown.

“You're leaking,” I said to the man, touching his bag gently.

“What?” He took off his headphones.

“You've sprung a leak.” I pointed.

He opened his bag and dug around. He lifted out a stainless steel coffee mug, now almost empty, and held it up, looking chagrined. The girl in the seat in front of me held up her superior stainless steel coffee mug. “You should get one like this,” she said.

“Clearly!” he replied. “My mail is completely soaked.”

I made sympathetic sounds and thought the incident was over, but he seemed compelled to continue speaking, no doubt to assuage his social embarrassment. As the bus rumbled over the Morrison Bridge, he kept talking to me. No one else seemed to be interested in participating. Curious about him, I replied with inanities, thinking sooner or later he would finally be quiet and I would regret the silence. I rarely ride the bus, but in my experience, people usually don't talk to strangers. Maybe it was a measure of how deeply mortified he felt, because he kept on talking. And I kept on replying.

“It was yesterday's coffee,” he informed me.

“Ah, the best kind,” I said.

“You'd think I would have noticed the coffee spilling on my leg.” He pointed to the coffee stain on his thigh.

“Tepid, was it?” I asked.

“No, it was about the temperature of my office.”

“Oh, about 70°?”

“More like 67,” he replied seriously. I thought, is this really happening?

“But why didn't I notice it?” he asked in a slightly anguished tone.

“Perhaps you were having an out of body experience,” I suggested, motioning at his headphones, which were wrapped around his neck. You can tell a lot about a person as soon as you make a comment about having an out-of-body experience. That's why I mention it frequently. I always smirk a little when I say it, though, so they don't think I really believe in that stuff.

“No, that can't be it,” he mused with a frown. “Although I've often thought it would be better not to be in my body on the bus, with all the people...”

“I've often felt that way myself,” I said soothingly, thinking of how many times I've wished to be a discorporate intellect, floating through the universe free from the burden of this sagging, wrinkling, aching body. I'm not sure that is what he was thinking. He was younger than me, in pretty good shape from what I could see, although he probably has a desk job. He looked a little nerdy, like a 30-ish computer geek, a little soft around the edges, but hip enough to wear trendy jeans.

“Then I could escape all the crazy people on the bus, like the ones who spill coffee.”

I couldn't help laughing. “I rather like the bus,” I said, because at that moment I was enjoying it very much.

We were at about 20th when he got up suddenly and moved toward the front of the bus. He came back with a handful of paper towels and started mopping the now-drying coffee trails.

When he resumed his seat, I said, “All these people will get off and no one will know it was your coffee that spilled.”

“You're right. I could blame it on them,” he said. Then he looked sideways at me. “I could blame it on you!”

“That you could,” I laughed. “Feel free.”

He was quiet for a time. Then he said something else about how embarrassed he was over spilling his coffee.

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “It will give me something to blog about tonight.”

He got off somewhere before Cesar Chavez Boulevard. He said goodbye to me, waved at the bus driver, and as the bus pulled away I saw his face for the last time, intently gazing into the distance. He did not look into the bus, just a nondescript guy who lives in the trendy part of Southeast Portland. I doubt I would recognize him again, unless he was carrying the same laptop bag and wearing earphones. And spilling coffee.

I didn't blog about it last night because I wanted to capture the essence of the last surreal day at the career college before it faded from my mind. I imagined that guy going home and searching the blogscape for a blog about a nerdy klutz who spilled coffee on the bus and had a conversation about it with a middle-aged woman. What keywords would he use, I wonder? Idiot on Belmont bus spills coffee. I hope he was able to laugh about it with his significant other when he got home. It sure made my day.

When a good idea goes bad

If you are just tuning in, here's the story to date. For the past ten years, I worked for a career college at its campus in Clackamas, a city near Portland. On April 1, we received notice from management that our site would be closing at the end of the term. Students were invited to transfer to the main campus in Wilsonville. On April 9, full-time faculty were notified individually if they were being asked to transfer or if they were being laid off. Three people, all program directors, were invited to stay. The rest of us were given notice that our last day would be May 2.

For the past three weeks, in an effort to cope with my shock and grief, I documented the closing of the campus with my funky old Sony Cybershot and posted the photos on my faculty webpage.

I took pictures of packing boxes. I took pictures of people I have grown to love and admire (and avoided others). I photographed the flyer that a posse of outraged students plastered the halls with in a futile attempt to save a teacher's job. I documented the stairs our boss Denny fell down. I captured a teacher's tattoo and and another teacher's glittery flipflops. Everywhere I looked I found people that deserved to be honored, moments that needed to be acknowledged, objects that deserved to be recognized. Some images were meaningful only to me, but some of the images seemed to sum up the bittersweet last days at our special campus. It was slipping away so fast. I wanted to preserve it, for me, for us, so every day I took more pictures and expanded my webpage.

Sheryl's filing cabinet, for sale for a day to the highest bidder, now left behind.... A whiteboard decorated with a student's scribbled love notes to a teacher she would never see again.... An accounting teacher on his shiny three-wheel motorcycle.... Classrooms, stairways, hallways, the lobby, the smoking area.... The view of the empty parking lot from the third floor computer lab.... A bizarrely shaped coffee cup imprinted with a tagline so astoundingly apropos I could hardly hold the camera still for laughing: There's a better life out there.

When I look back through the photos, one thing strikes me: everyone I photographed was smiling. Big, wide smiles. There were no sad faces, no moping expressions, no defeated postures. We all looked happy, despite the fact that our lives were being turned upside down, inside out. Even I looked happy.

The last day came. I finished my grades and had Denny sign off on them. I made arrangements to have the bookkeeper mail my final paycheck. I cleaned out my desk drawers. I posted the last photos on my faculty webpage. I prepared auto-replies that would activate at midnight, stating that I was no longer with the college. I packed up my book bags with my binders, my stapler, my post-it notes, my scissors. And finally, I drafted a goodbye email.

I addressed the note to everyone in Wilsonville and Clackamas. In it I described my gratitude at having been a part of the organization for ten years and how I was certain what I learned would help me in my new career. I entitled it Happy trails from Clackamas. At the end of the note, in a postscript, I gave the URL to my faculty webpage.

I finished the letter and then sat there with my mouse poised over the SEND button.  I had a gut feeling it might not be a wise thing to do. I re-read it, trying to imagine how it would be received. Should I take off the URL to my webpage? Should I delete the letter altogether? Should I fade away quietly without a protest, without one final poke, one last prod? I wanted to say, Hey, look at us, you stupid college, look at what you did with this bonehead move, you disregarded the needs of your students, you disrespected your faculty, you destroyed your brand. You thought by cutting off our campus, you could save yourselves. You thought you were abandoning us on the part of the ship that was sinking. Ha.

I predict we will survive, we will flourish, our ship will sail on, and in the end your top-heavy boat will sink into obscurity. Because you can't treat people disrespectfully forever. Sooner or later, you will find out what happens when you sail too close to the rocks. The next thought running through my head was, What have I got to lose? What are they going to do, fire me? That made me smile. So I hit SEND and sat back to wait.

Within moments I got my first response, oddly enough from the Compliance Officer, wishing me farewell and giving me his personal email address. (“Let's link up on LinkedIn.”) I was pleasantly surprised. In another few moments, two more responses wishing me well from employees who were former students (“I learned so much from you!”), then another from the program director in Wilsonville (“I never really knew you, but good luck!”). A few minutes later, Denny came into the office, checked his email, and said, “Your link doesn't work.”

“What? No, are you sure?” I said. I quickly typed in the URL. Sure enough: Error 404: File or directory not found. We looked at each other. I turned back to the computer, opened Expression Web, and tried to load up my site. And there it was, the message, spelled out in black and white:

There is no site named http://blablablacollege.info/myname.

It was dead. My faculty website was gone. I had been well and truly spanked.

I responded the way I responded to every interesting incident at the college over the past three weeks. I got out my camera and took a picture of it. A simple image to commemorate the end of ten years of service to a for-profit career college. There's a better life out there.

Reality takes a holiday

Last night, with two days to go until I'm officially unemployed, a student looked at me and said, “You don't look so good.”

I know she was trying to offer me some sympathy for my plight. She's young, not even 21, and not all that skillful a communicator. Under normal circumstances, I would just let a comment like that slide. But now, operating on the premise that any moment can be a teaching moment, I bit back.

“You are assuming you know how I feel by looking at me,” I said. Actually, I wasn't feeling all that bad. No worse than normal anyway, and certainly not as bad as you might expect considering I'm losing my job in two days.

“Oh, sorry!” the student exclaimed. “I didn't mean...”

I almost started to explain how I have a permanent frown line between my eyebrows that makes me appear as though I'm always scowling or perhaps like I'm about to hurl. But my enthusiasm for the teaching moment deflated as fast as it had bubbled up, and I just let it go. Nobody cares how I look or how I feel. Everyone is completely preoccupied with how he or she is experiencing the closing of our campus and the prospect of what is to come.

Mella came to work with a new attitude yesterday, after a hard weekend of mourning the loss of her job. She apparently was in denial about the finality of the layoff. Now I'm wondering, maybe she really did incite students to post those flyers: Save Mella! Maybe it was a last ditch effort to manipulate the school into taking her back. When the flyer ploy failed to do anything except raise the wrath of Mr. Freeper, the awful reality became too real to ignore. She said she cried all day Sunday. But the new Mella is funnier than hell. She wasn't moping anymore. She snickered at our snarky jokes and bitter jibes and delivered some jabs of her own. If only Mr. Freeper and Ms. Sic-em could have been here to hear our futile naughtiness. Har har har.

We rebel in small ways. For example, we are dressing down. Sheryl wears denim to work now, although her version of denim is embroidered with flowers. Way to go, Sheryl, that's rebellion against the dress code! I'd love to see her in a pair of hole-riddled, dirt-encrusted Levis. (I'd wear mine if my ass wasn't too big to fit them.) Mella has a wardrobe of school-logo polo shirts in pastel colors. I'm going to encourage her to set them on fire on the smoker's patio. Maybe we can trigger the fire alarm. That would be a treat during finals week, eh?

No, not really. I like to think I'm such a rebel, such a chronic malcontent, past hope. The truth is, I fear people see me more clearly than I see myself. Maybe. Maybe not. Dave, our extroverted security guard (Oh! My! God! Carol's in the house!) said he would miss me. I think he might have felt obligated to say that due to an awkward moment when I asked him if he was looking forward to going to Wilsonville. He didn't want to appear too chipper, since he remains employed while do not, so I'm guessing he felt compelled to say something nice.

And then he experienced an escalation of commitment and said, “I'm going to miss your positive...” He trailed off, at a loss for words, maybe hoping I would fill in the blank for him, like my students do when taking tests. I just looked at him. I could have said, my positive...ly snarky attitude? My positive... ly scowling expression? I didn't. I just thanked him and moved away down the hall, so he didn't feel obligated to continue to dig up platitudes that neither one of us believed.

Look at me! What did I just say? I am assuming I know what he was feeling. Ha. (We know what happens when we assume, yada yada.) Actually, now that I think about it, knowing Dave, I could be standing over a dead body with a bloody hammer in my hand, and he would choose to believe in my innocence. That's Dave. He assumes the best. I assume the worst. Somewhere in the middle is reality, but who cares anymore?

If your life could speak for you, what would it say?

My family reunited for a brief few hours today. My older brother drove in from the Oregon coast for the day. My sister came in from Boston for the weekend. My little brother pried himself away from his menagerie (two dogs, umpteen cats, a rabbit, and a pigeon) to traverse the endless block between his house and our mother's condo. I set aside my weekend for family stuff. The weather has cooperated nicely so far. And we haven't killed each other, which is good. In fact, we haven't even argued.

My guess is we are feeling too old to pick a fight. Memories fade. Old rivalries evaporate. I hazily recall that my older brother broke my nose when we were kids. (The statute of limitations has long since expired.) I doubt if he remembers. It takes too much energy to hold a grudge. I've come to terms with my crooked nose. If I ever got it fixed, no one would recognize me. I'd be another Jennifer Gray. Who, you say? See? I rest my case.

The high point of my day was a conversation I had with my sister as the afternoon was winding down. High clouds streamed over Portland, filtering the sun we've enjoyed all weekend, but it was still bright in the little coffee shop we found a block away from the famous Powell's City of Books. We sipped our fancy coffee beverages from tiny white porcelain cups and talked about turning points, crossroads, and intersections.

I may have mentioned in previous posts that in a week I will join the ranks of the unemployed. I'm thinking of starting my own business, and every time I think about it, a burning wave of fear rushes up from my stomach out to my fingertips. Prodding me toward self-employment is the suspicion that I am very nearly unemployable, due to factors beyond my control: age, introversion, and chronic malcontentedness.

My sister has her own big decision: move to Europe or stay in in Boston. I've always felt she was a European at heart. Somehow she was inadvertently dropped into a lower middle class suburban household in Portland, Oregon, when she should have been raised in Paris or London or Rome. To me, hearing her talk of moving to Europe is sort of like hearing someone talk about moving home after being away for many long years.

This special time of turning points is a fertile time. My sister and I stand together on a cliff, metaphorically speaking, peeking anxiously toward a new future. It's in the air. Several of my friends are also standing on the same cliff. Who can say if it will turn out to be a leap of faith, or a leap of foolishness? At our backs, nudging us toward the edge, is the prospect of a lifetime of boring jobs working for companies that don't appreciate our unique gifts in industries that don't nurture our souls, where we earn just enough to sustain our sorry unfulfilled half-lived lives, until finally we die withered and bitter with our stories untold.

Well, hell, when you put it like that! Even though we don't know what will happen (and who ever does?), I think we would all agree there will never be a better time than now to take the chance, to bet on ourselves. If not now, when? The alternative is unacceptable. For half our lifetimes we have half lived. We know what that is like already. And nobody else cares if we die as grouchy, dissatisfied malcontents. It's up to us to claim our future.

All together now!

Save our jobs! ...Uh, on second thought...

Yesterday I arrived at work at the career college and found the faculty office in an uproar. Apparently some students, upset about the termination of their favorite teacher Mella, designed a flyer, printed multiple copies, and posted it around the hallways. According to my sources, the HR person who lurks on the third floor somehow saw a flyer and called Freep the Education Director. I believe Freep called our resident Fairy Godmother of Fun (and Academic Coordinator, also soon to be unemployed, we'll call her Jiminy today) and asked her to find all the flyers and take them down.

I managed to procure a sample of the flyer, thanks to some dumpster-diving on the part of our fearless leader Denny, and documented it photographically, like I have documented last moments since I found out our campus is closing on May 2.

The flyer exhorts “Save Mella!” (This is a fictitious name, of course, so don't bother Googling it.) The writer goes on to claim that Mella doesn't deserve to be terminated and should be allowed to keep her job. I yucked it up with Denny—how sweet, the students think they have some power!— and thought it was over, just another bizarre blip in the ongoing implosion of one dinky career college.

Last night, however, my three Word students were talking in those hushed tones that indicate something is up.

“I know who did it,” said Minnie, a round-faced girl who used to be a Medical Assisting student and now is... I have no idea what she is. I just know she's been around for what seems like forever.

I said nothing, not knowing at first what she was talking about and not wanting to get involved, like a true introvert. Minnie's friend (I'll call her Axella) took out her earplugs to ask who.

“The two people who did it are denying it, and two other people have been accused of doing it, and now have a write-up in their permanent record from Mr. Freeper,” said Minnie, milking her moment.

I did my best to ignore her, although I was starting to suspect this had something to do with that flyer.

The third student (I'll call her Lela) waited until Minnie and Axella left for their next class, and then she said to me, “I saw Mella making those copies last night.”

“No way,” I said skeptically.

“I saw her.”

I let it drop and went to my next class. But I thought, wow, Mella, right on, sister. I didn't think you wanted this job anymore, but I support you, whatever radical subversive action you might take. Bring on the spray paint! I'm right behind you!

Later I saw Mella in the office.

“I heard...” I began and told her the whole story. Mella listened. After a few moments, I trailed off when I noticed she was looking at me like I'd grown a second head. She seemed to be trying to generate interest in responding to my unspoken accusation. I thought to myself, She doesn't care. She's already gone.

She didn't say it, but I don't think she would want her job back, even if management came to her on their hypocritical knees and begged her to stay. She's seen the dirty red underbelly of the place. Of all the layoffs, I would say hers is the most cruel. She re-arranged her life for this school. She donated tons of extra time, not to mention her heart, to the students and to the faculty. You couldn't have asked for a more committed and loyal employee. Management took what she gave them and when they were done with her, they discarded her like an used tissue.

“I was making copies last night,” Mella finally said. “But it wasn't those flyers. I saw a copy of one, though, and thought, ok, so what.”

I don't know if this incident is evidence of the greedy nature of for-profit career education or if it is simply evidence of a failing institution run by self-centered, short-sighted, abusive individuals. Maybe the two are related. Maybe you can't have one without the other, I don't know. I just know it's sad that a good employee has been callously discarded. It's sad that the only way students can grieve the loss of their campus and their favorite teacher is by posting flyers exhorting the school's invisible and uncaring management to save Mella's job, as if their futile expression represented anything than more than an embarrassing annoyance. Instead of giving students a place and time to grieve, our management did what management does when backed into a corner: threaten, punish, and terminate.

We are so out of here.

Unemployment, public speaking, and coffee

In two weeks I will be unemployed. I have mixed feelings about it. When I imagine not having to use obsolete technology to teach keyboarding to bored students, I feel ecstatic. When I think about not having to work a split shift, working in the morning and then again until 10:20 p.m.—and then being back first thing the following morning, as if I could actually function and do a good job with only five or six hours of sleep... when I think of not having to do that, I feel profound relief. But when I think of not seeing my colleagues Sheryl, Mella, and Denny, our little cabal in the Business/General Education department, then I feel really sad. And when I imagine the final paycheck I will receive on May 2, I feel sick.

Mixed feelings. Happy and sad. Excited and terrified. I'm so disconnected from my body I have no idea what stress might be doing to me. Something is going on, I'm sure, but my brain hasn't caught up yet. I'll probably realize the toll stress has taken when I wake up on May 3 with no hair. Or covered in hives. One doesn't skate blithely unscathed through life-changing events. Death, divorce, and loss of a job rank high on the trauma scale. And public speaking, don't forget public speaking.

Did I ever tell you about my public speaking debacle? It happened in 1991, I think. Here's my suggestion for overcoming one's fear of speaking in public. Join Toastmasters, sign up for a speech contest, and then stand up unprepared in front of 100 people and forget your speech halfway through. To really get the full effect, slink off stage in abject shame. If the ground doesn't open up and swallow you whole at that point, if the hand of god doesn't smite you for being an idiot at that moment, then you realize you can live through anything. You've pretty much survived the worst social humiliation you will ever experience. If I were completely honest, which I sometimes am, I'd say that forgetting that speech partway through was worse than living through the two and a half weeks of my dad dying. Proving again that for the chronic malcontent, self-obsession is the word of the day. Every day.

I've started drinking coffee again. That is one sign that I'm going crazy. Just one cup per day, so far... one very strong cup of French Roast with nothing in it, no milk, no sugar, nothing. There's a joke here, which I will attribute to the great poet and performance artist Linda Albertano: She said she likes her men the way she likes her coffee: cold and bitter. I always chuckle when I think of that joke, which is pretty much every time I drink coffee. It's only funny because I have no interest in being in a relationship with anyone, bitter or otherwise.

Back to the unemployment tornado looming on my horizon. I signed up for unemployment online, although there were some questions in their online tool that didn't quite fit my situation, so I expect I will get a phone call or email from some irate underpaid Oregon Employment Department representative, who will rip me a new one in the process of signing me up. Oh well. I'll bend over and take it. Desperation makes people put up with a lot. Poor people don't argue: they know not to bite the hand, etc. I will be one of them soon, so I'm practicing now. Yes sir, no ma'am. Sorry, sorry. My error, my mistake.

The slippery slope to slovenly behavior

Tonight I'm breathing a sigh of relief after a day of good news. My car doesn't need front end work. My chairperson sent my dissertation proposal on to the Graduate School for review. The Boston police caught the bombing suspect. I got the upper hand with the ants in my kitchen. All around, things are looking up. I hope we won't have to go through another week like this one any time soon. It's been rough.

Last week at the career college, I noticed I was engaging in many last times—activities I will do at work for the last time and never do again. Like discussing chapters from the Business Management textbook with the two Human Resources Management classes. Never have to do that again. (Maybe there is a god!) Printing reviews and finals for all the computer applications classes. One last time, never again. Writing a final for a new class I'd never taught before and never have to teach again. (I found myself thinking as I wrote and formatted the test, Why bother doing a good job? Who will know? Who will care?)

Ah, the slippery slope to slovenly behavior.

Speaking of slovenly behavior, I skyped my sister tonight. We both agreed, it's time I got a new look. I've been doing a pathetic Johnny Cash (circa 1980) impersonation for almost ten years—black pants, black jacket, black hat. It's almost time to clear out the closet and start over. Top to bottom. I do have hair, believe it or not. We both spend a small fortune on coloring our hair. My sister wants me to start wearing dresses. She tried to persuade me by telling me that a dress can hide a multitude of figure flaws. I have no doubt she is right. The problem isn't finding the right clothes. The problem is the whole idea of figure flaws. We don't chastise men for their figure flaws.

Besides, it won't matter what I look like, because in two weeks I intend to retire to my cave and never see anyone in person again. I call it self-employment. If I do it right, I can work in my pajamas for the next fifteen years. I'll have my groceries delivered. I'll put aluminum foil on my windows and an antenna on the roof. I'll sneak out in the dark of night to empty my trash and recycling. I'll contribute to blogs about conspiracy theories.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, (kiddding!) last night I went to a Portland State University alumni/student event at Bridgeport Brewery. It was a presentation by a local recruiter on how to stop sucking at your job search. Her name was Jenny Foss. Job Jenny. She's an attractive, petite woman with an annoying habit of speaking too close to the microphone. She talked for an hour to a packed room about using Linked In to network. Puh, puh... I wanted to rush over and smack her with the mic. Her PowerPoint slides were sparse: black text on a white background, no animation, nothing to keep my attention. I got bored watching her mundane slide show, so I wrote a lot in my journal. I didn't learn anything new, although I came away with copious notes and a few drawings. (One little moment of self-satisfaction: Everything I have told my Professional Development classes over the years aligned very well with Job Jenny's advice.)

Finally she opened up the show to Q&As, and things got more interesting (to me). The second question was from a man who said he was 56 and having a hard time getting a job. I sat up in my chair, trying to get a look at him across the dimly lit room. Did he look old? Do I look as old as he does? Job Jenny said something I didn't want to hear. She said, “You might consider cutting your hair and investing in a new pair of glasses. And dressing younger.” Ahhhhhhhhh!

Hey, Job Jenny gets $1,000 to write a resume, according to one of my tablemates. She must be doing something right.

Well, at least that guy doesn't have to worry about concealing his figure flaws.

I remember reading an article about an older guy's job hunt. He was having no luck, getting interviews but no offers, until finally in desperation he went to an interview wearing red Converse sneakers and a baseball cap. He got the job. Hmmm. Maybe I should try that. Or maybe I should try charging $1,000 for writing resumes. I could live on that.

The end of the world... again

How many times must we go through this? I'm speaking, of course, of the tragedy at the Boston Marathon yesterday. I'd rather be ranting about how my Chair has neglected to send my paper on to the Graduate School, or what a student said today, or what I ate for lunch...  anything but this. But how can I ignore the elephant in the room? I go through my day pretending it's not there, it didn't happen, it's not real, and I end up with a nauseating case of surrealism.

Everyone processes a disaster in his or her own way. Some avoid the topic, some talk about it incessantly. Because it happened on the other side of the country, some may not even care. We came close to having our own Boston bombing a few Christmases ago, when a crazy young man was all too willing to plant an explosive device at the Pioneer Square tree lighting ceremony. Lucky for everyone, the FBI was on to him: The “bomb” they gave him was a dud. It could have turned out differently. It could have rained body parts.

My coping method involves seeking out news accounts and reading them compulsively, over and over. I feel compelled to watch the raw video, as penance for surviving the day with my limbs intact. I spent Monday in a daze, awash in unshed tears, going through the motions of my job (I'm not a real teacher, I just play one on TV). My face still sags. Smiling is an effort. I'm also running low on patience.

Last night a female student in the Human Resources Management class said something about how difficult dating was these days, how her current love interest wasn't working out the way she'd hoped. Her best friend said, “You need some new eye candy.” The first girl laughed and repeated it. “Yeah, I need some new eye candy.”

“People are not eye candy,” I shouted. “It's rude and disrespectful to refer to people like they are objects!”

“Men do it to us,” she countered gamely, appealing to the group for support. The other two women concurred by nodding vigorously.

“I know!” I yelled. “And that is no excuse. People are humans, not objects, and they deserve respect, no matter what gender they are.”

Everyone contemplated me in shocked silence. I think I know that look. I think that look was on my face when my mother, breaking under the weight of caring for four bratty children, finally lost control and started screaming. Just screaming. Loudly. With anger, with frustration, with fear. Those screams lasted a lifetime in my little magic world. Reality as I had known it suddenly took a dip and dropped out from under my eight-year-old feet. Last night I think my students felt the same way. Like, uh-oh, Mom's gone crazy.

Now I am remembering another incident, one evening last week. The three female students in the Word class started trading Mexican jokes. As their laughter escalated, so did my blood pressure, until finally I shouted, “Enough with the Mexican jokes!”

So, I'm treading on a thin edge, it appears. An incidence of violence doesn't help, but Monday's horrible event isn't what has prompted me to suddenly start speaking my mind. The truth is, I don't care anymore what my students think of me. I don't have to care. I can be myself now. I can say what I want. If I could fit in my Levis, I would wear jeans to school everyday. F--k the dress code. F--k the school. F--k the student evaluations.

I'm exiting their lives in less than three weeks. They will forget me. I'm already forgetting them.

Do what you love and you'll probably starve... or not

The last time I had an entrepreneurial seizure, it did not go well. That was a long time ago (1981) in a galaxy far far away (Los Angeles). Now that I am staring down the barrel of unemployment, I remember my past self-inflicted self-employment massacre, and my terror is compounded. I wish they made bullet-proof vests to ward off attacks of idiocy. Maybe that is what aluminum foil hats are for.

Time out. My neighbor sounds like she is giving a fashion show to her dog. She's strutting back and forth on her hardwood floors in what I suspect is a pair of chunky-wood platforms. I'm too sexy for my shoes. I hope she is getting ready to go out.

Last night I heard her growling in the basement. I couldn't tell if she was just angry, or hurt and angry, so I ran down there to see what was going on.

“There's a quarter stuck in the washer,” she groaned, banging on the coin slot. While she ran to get a knife from her kitchen, I peered at the coin slot. Yep. Jammed good and tight. Wouldn't go in, wouldn't come out. No laundry tonight, Pumpkin. While she poked at the slot with the knife, her little gray poodle patted me repeatedly on the backs of my thighs with his front paws. I ignored the dog, and wondered if perhaps the human might use the knife on me, considering I interrupted her noisy coitus a couple weeks ago by pounding on the wall that separated my angry hammer from her headboard.

We both agreed the coin slot was a lost cause. I suggested she call the landsharks. We adjourned to our respective corners, if not friends, then at least no longer adversaries. Well, her dog likes me. That is a start.

I emailed the landsharks today, just in case she didn't, and earlier today I saw George in the basement, talking on his cellphone while he dismantled the coin box. I was leaving. He didn't see me. When I came back, he'd left a stack of quarters, and a note pointing out the one coin that wasn't actually a quarter. I don't know what it was. It looked like funny money. Maybe Canadian. I left it all there on the washer. I am content to be an observer. I only engaged last night because I thought she might have been injured. Or that she might have destroyed the washer. Actually, I don't know why I engaged. I guess it was a way of expressing my chagrin at interrupting her lovemaking.

Back to the main topic—me. My pending entrepreneurial experiment. I'm having some brain trouble. I can picture actions I need to take, and I've got lists in triplicate, but my brain can't seem to translate the actions I plan to take into actual income. In other words, I can imagine a bank account full of cash, but I can't see how my actions will put it there. I think I have a mental block placed there by years of flogging a business I hated. I used to sew clothes for a living—you could call me a former fashion designer or you could call me a former seamstress, and both would be accurate. The problem was that I hated to sew (still hate to sew), and thus I learned to associate earning with doing something I hated.

But that was years and years ago, way back in ancient times. Surely my brain has evolved since then? Or disintegrated? Or embarked on a new tangent? It's a new millennium, for crying out loud. Nothing is the same. Still, how I handle earning as an entrepreneur remains to be seen, and I know, don't call me Shirley.

Ten years of working for someone else has meant no hassles with invoices, collections, complaints, or worries about when the money will appear. Working for the career college is a different kind of earning mystery, where performing my teaching job has been totally disconnected from receiving my direct-deposited paycheck. Magic. As an entrepreneur, I will have to get my hands dirty again. I will have to initiate invoices, follow up with statements, ask for deposits, handle cash, figure out PayPal... it's all so... messy.

Well, the good news, I am strong enough to handle it, according to Dr. Tony, my ebullient naturopath. Yesterday he dosed me with some white pellets, yanked on my right leg (really!), and pronounced me whole, see you in two months, you are on the maintenance plan. And to really put a shine on the bright side, in three weeks, there will be no more commute to Clackamas, no more in-services, no more split shifts, no more nutty professors, no more whining students, no more outdated textbooks, no more clogged toilets, no more mismatched clocks, no more mind-numbing graduation ceremonies... No more. The few people I've grown to love, I will still stay in touch with after we leave, and the rest, all the rest of it, I am content to let go with my blessing.

May we all be free from suffering, and may we all find peace. Now let's break out that champagne!

How to survive a campus closing

I'll give you a hint: It has to do with spraypaint and glitter. No, not really. I'm just kidding. I know I sound obsessed with expressing my feelings with a can of orange spraypaint, but I'm not stupid. I know that would be vandalism. These days I try not to do anything for which I have to make amends later. Spraypainting you guys suck in 10-foot tall letters on the lobby wall would probably qualify.

The students from the soon-to-be defunct Clackamas campus of our sagging little career college have been invited to visit the mothership in Wilsonville, to meet the faculty and get acclimated to the stuffier air. Many aren't attending due to transportation challenges, which I'm sure will be compounded come next term, when they will be expected to show up at 7:50 a.m. Or at 5:40 p.m. for those night students who get off work in Portland at 5:00 p.m. Rotsa ruck making it on time in rush hour traffic.

Everyone is universally unhappy about the closure, for a variety of reasons. Some students are worried about teachers. Others are fretting over transportation. Some teachers are frantically searching for other employment. Some are feeling guilty they still have jobs. I think I might be the only one who is actually anxious for it to be over. I'm so ready to be done I told a student today that we had only two weeks left in the term. Ooops. We really have three. My bad.

I'm processing my feelings by turning my faculty website into a photo blog. I'm taking pictures—last looks—of all the things that made our campus unique. The dingy front lobby. The mailroom. The worn out classrooms. The odd barbeque we found parked on the roof outside the emergency exit door in the third floor computer lab (What are those corporate sneaks up to on Fridays, when teachers and students aren't around? Planning how they will save their own jobs, with a side of steak and brewskies, no doubt.)

We are situated in an old three-story office building next to a shopping complex and across the street from the Clackamas Town Center Mall, which made the news last December as yet one more (ho-hum) site of a random shooting. Our building is a two-tower faded orange stucco box with angled facets that must have seemed modern and edgy back in the day and now just look cheesy and amateurish. Moss grows on the shaded patio areas that divide the two towers, the smokers' hangout.

Inside, the carpet is old and worn, especially on the stairs. Many feet trod those stairs over the past ten years, mine among them (I rarely take the elevator). The front lobby atrium ascends to the third floor, an echoey cavern of light. Any day now, I expect someone, a student or a teacher, to fling themselves over the second floor railing in a fit of despair. I can't be the only one who has contemplated it. Unfortunately the drop probably wouldn't kill me, so I would just have to lay there while swarms of medical assisting students practiced taking my blood pressure and draining my veins of blood.

Hey, on a lighter note, my committee returned my proposal with three, count 'em, three minor grammar suggestions, which I fixed throughout the paper in less than an hour. I resubmitted the paper with the hope and expectation that my Chair will send it on to the Graduate School for review. That will take another two weeks or so. I will brace myself for their comments, but in the meantime, I will begin preparing my application to the Institutional Review Board, the group that approves applications to interview human subjects. I also found out who my committee member is, inadvertently, because her real name appeared in her comments. I immediately Googled her and found out she's a proud alum of the University of Phoenix.

It's strange how there seems to be two tracks of academe these days: traditional and for-profit. This will have to be a topic for another day, because it is almost midnight, I am missing Letterman, and I'm too tired to think anymore. Stay tuned. And start stocking up on spraypaint, because you're invited! Mark your calendar, May 2.

It's official... life sucks

After almost ten days of jacking us around, not telling us anything, we finally got the news: when the Clackamas campus closes on May 3, we all lose our jobs. Oh, except for the three program directors. And the dozen or so corporate people who lurk on the third floor. I guess when I say everyone, I mean all the people that matter. The faculty, the academic coordinator, and the receptionists. What the hell do they think they are going to be managing now, I wonder? The ship is sinking while they fight over cubicle space.

I know I sound angry. I am. Not for me, but for my colleagues, Sheryl and Mella. Sheryl is a few years from retirement. How easy do you think it will be for a 66-year-old woman with a stale Bachelor's in International Business to find another job? And Mella! Mella transferred from Wilsonville to Clackamas a few terms ago, even though she recently moved to be near Wilsonville. She demonstrated loyalty and commitment to the organization, and it lifted its leg and peed all over her. Sheryl and I have known for a long time that the company wasn't our friend. I think Mella was still hoping for a miracle. It's hard to accept that the company you gave your heart to has ripped it to shreds.

As I drove away from campus this afternoon, I saw Mella pacing the sidewalk. I pulled my car up next to her. She got in. Her chin was quivering.

“This totally sucks,” I said after a long, long moment of silence.

“Yes, this sucks,” she agreed.

We sat with that for awhile.

“How are we going to make it through the next few weeks?” I mused.

“Suck it up.”

We pondered that for a bit. Then she sighed and got out of the car. She went off to find food before night classes (did I mention she works four splits?), and I went home to take a nap, exit, stage right. On the drive home, I was a little numb, not fully present. I'm not sure how to feel. My eyes feel like they've been weeping, but I don't remember any tears. I'm not sure if I'm happy, sad, or just really, really, really scared.

Part of me is, like, you got what you asked for, Carol. Time to finish your dissertation, time to work on starting a business, time to clean up the Love Shack, time to sleep, time to read, time to rest. But at what cost? I don't want to be unemployed. No, let me be more clear. I don't want to not be earning money. That doesn't have to be the same thing as unemployed, right? Time and money are inverses for me: When I have one, I miss the other. I'm too old to do this again. It wasn't pretty the first time around. Moving in with my mother is not an option. Wreckage of the future! Aaaaagh!

The Director of Education flaked out, couldn't stick around to tell me to my face (I remember when you were an adjunct, Freep). Our boss—I'll call him Denny—(who is going to Wilsonville next term, and who is keeping his job title and pay rate, and who, by the way, is receiving training in online teaching tomorrow [I know, like, WTF!?]) gave me the news. I could tell he felt terrible. Survivor's guilt. The next three weeks will be interesting. He's on the lifeboat, floating further and further away. We three faculty are clinging to the rail, going down with the ship. We aren't bothering to bail, what's the point? (I am already saying cynical things about the organization to my students—we were discussing leadership in the management class today, and I likened our president to the Invisible Man. Har har.)

The next few weeks will be awkward. The chasm between those who are surviving and those who are sinking will grow daily. On that last Thursday, as we faculty sink out of sight, out of mind for the last time, poor old Denny can finally draw a deep breath of relief. Whew, that was hard, glad that's over. Dude. I don't blame you. I might even miss you. It's been fun. In parts. Sort of. A little.

What would be really fun would be to bring some spraypaint on that last day and do a little decoratin'.

Catching the disease of chronic malcontentedness

Everyone is unhappy, mostly about work. Does it seem that way to you? My sister, a published author and expert in her esoteric field of art history, hates her admin job so much she is ready to jump off a bridge. (I told her she would be missed.) Bravadita, my former colleague and now friend, is a talented writer/photographer wasting her creativity teaching bratty, germy children how to read. My friend in Minneapolis, I'll call her Chica, is itching to start her own digital marketing business. And then there's me, of course, on the verge of unemployment, hoarse from complaining about the unfairness of it all.

Is it something in the air? I'd say yes, but there are always exceptions. My friend E. has figured out the secret to happiness: condense your life to a 35-foot motorhome and hit the road. I dream of bundling my mother and my cat into an RV and heading south toward the warm desert air of Arizona or New Mexico. A silly dream: My cat would hate it. He would reward me by upchucking all over the linoleum. And my mother would probably die on the journey. I'd have to strap her coffin on top of the rig and head back home. We'd sail through little American towns trailing a stench behind us, sort of like a modern day Addie Bundren. I don't think my sensitive nose could handle it.

Well, we can't all take to the road in massive rolling living rooms. There wouldn't be enough room. Or enough fuel to keep us all moving. We'd have to hunker down, butt to nose, wherever we sputtered out of gas. We'd slide out our slide-outs and roll out our awnings all along the shoulders and gullies of the interstates. We'd have to live off of stuff people threw to us as they drove by. Here, catch! A bucket of the Colonel's extra crispy and some coleslaw, if you think fast.

I'm just yammering. It's a day for yammering. I'm waiting for my dissertation proposal to be rejected or approved. I'm waiting to find out if I will have a job when the term ends. It's a day for expressing my malcontentedness. It appears I'm in good company. With the exception of E., everyone I know seems malcontented to some degree or another, from mild to extreme, from resigned irritation to raging fury. I'm somewhere in between. My mother, though, is edging toward the boiling point. She's laid up with some weird swollen ankle disease, bored out of her mind.

“You need a new hobby,” I suggested when we talked on the phone.

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

I pondered, but couldn't come up with anything that she hasn't already done: knit, write letters, read books, do crosswords, play computer games. Maybe I need to get more creative. What if I could get her hooked on World of Warcraft? Or even Farmville. That always worked on our students. But Mom's Internet connection is too slow. (She's the only person on dial-up left in Portland. It takes 12 hours just to download an update to her virus program.) Hey, maybe she could open a phone sex business. Or be a phone psychic. That could be fun. (Hmmmm.....)

I know what she wants. What she wants is go outside and root around in her garden. It's spring. Things are blooming. The air smells like fragrant candy. There are about a billion shades of green going on. But it's been pouring rain off and on all day. I reminded her that we need the rain, that we are six inches below normal. She whined like a child: I'm booooorrrrred! Man, I'm glad I never had kids. I don't know how parents do it.

Change can be good

If you follow this blog, which is unlikely unless you are Bravadita, my sister, or my friend E., you might have noticed that I haven't been complaining a lot lately about the career college and how it is failing on so many levels. That is because the management stopped talking about 45 days ago. When we asked what was going on with “the move,” we were told that no one was allowed to talk about it. I should have realized that for the massive red flag that it was. I was immersed in my dissertation proposal, head down, not paying attention. I should have seen this coming. I was blindsided with the rest... yes, me, the student of management.

On Monday afternoon after morning classes we were called on short notice to a staff meeting. We speculated: news on the so-called move, perhaps? Our invisible president, looking shaky and pale, materialized for the three minutes it took to tell us the Clackamas site will be closing on May 3, that all students would be invited to transfer to Wilsonville, and oh, BTW, all you Clackamas instructors, we'll know if you have a job sometime in the next two weeks. Stay tuned. And no, this is not an April Fool's Day joke. Then he faded away.

Within a very short time, we all knew that the three associate program directors had been invited to transfer to Wilsonville, although two will be demoted to instructor. (They were, like, yay! No more meetings, no more paperwork!) Our boss will retain his position, lucky him—I guess. I heard this from the mouths of the people affected. Still, I'm skeptical. I wouldn't be surprised if we all got to work on Monday to find the doors locked and moving trucks pulling away in a cloud of dust. I don't think the place is long for this world, frankly. Change can be good. Maybe it's time for this school to die. Survival of the fittest, and all that. We have proved time and again our unfitness for purpose.

Sheryl, my indefatigable colleague, at 66 is not ready to retire. She made some calls, sent a few emails. Efforts to find her new employment were launched immediately on her behalf. Even while she whined, she scrambled her network, thereby demonstrating her ability to multitask. Take note: You are never too old to... to.. what? look for a job? She'll play the age card if she has to. Our other colleague—I'll call her Mella—normally an easygoing, optimistic woman—expressed her anger with some choice cuss words. Right on, Mella. Me, I processed my anger by watching everyone else process theirs. I have no cards to play.

On Monday night and into Tuesday and Wednesday, students were informed by management of the coming change. The fallout was swift and vehement. Students who are graduating May 3 had looks of profound relief. Others, especially new students, were furious that the admissions reps hadn't told them that going to Wilsonville would be a possibility. The panic subsided after students were told they would receive $100 Visa cards to help them with gas expenses. Car pool lists circulated. The frothy anger calmed down into a general discontented malaise that permeated the campuses. Students came to class, but no one felt like doing anything.

I kept on teaching. I wrote notes on the board. I covered the chapter. I facilitated the discussions. I answered questions. I encouraged them to focus on their education.

“You are going too, right?” they asked me.

I said I didn't know.

“What will you do?” they wanted to know.

I said I didn't know.

Sheryl's students, weeping at the thought of moving to an unfamiliar campus without her, joined together to write her a batch of recommendation letters. I heard one student even called Channel 6 news. (This could get interesting.)

So now it's Thursday. We irascibly await the news—do we stay or do we go? Mella quietly started packing her gear. Taking her cue, I cleared the miscellaneous bits of paper... pictures, notes, phone numbers, calendars, reminders... off the walls around my desk. I removed the course materials I had created from the shared file folders (take that, you future adjuncts). I recycled stacks of student work from last term. As I rummaged through drawers, I pondered what I will do if management offers me a job. I'll probably take it. But a big part of me wants to say no thanks and walk away.

Postscript: The phone just rang. It was Sheryl, calling to tell me that tonight when she went to school for night classes, she saw our elusive president in the parking lot. He asked how she was. “How do you think I am?” she said. “Not happy!” He tried to explain. Sheryl said she straight out asked him if she and I would have jobs next term, and he wouldn't look her in the eye. He told her he had delegated the task of deciding who stays and who goes to his management team (I'll call them Mr. Freeper and Ms. Sic-em). And no severance package, not that I thought we would get one, but it would have been nice, maybe a month of pay for every year of service? Nope. We'll be paid through May 15 and our insurance will last until the end of May. And that, as they say, is that.

Win a few, lose a few

Good news (at least to some, not sure who exactly, maybe just my mother). I just uploaded the massively wretched tome, the first draft of my dissertation proposal, all 172 pages (counting front matter, references, and appendices). The courseroom swallowed it with a slightly longer than normal gulp, and now it's there, posted in cyberspace, visible evidence of my willingness to take the next step in the process of earning this doctoral degree. I'm not sure what I pictured these days would be like, way back in 2005 when I first started this endeavor. I think my original goal was to teach online in an adobe hut in the desert. And to be a more valuable employee to my career college employer. Foolish girl, you say? Well, life was simpler back then, when I was naive and uninformed.

For the past 2,677 days (counting much?) I have lived in the fretful fog of the moment, just trying to get the writing done, take care of my students, eat good food and drink water, live in the present, do the next right thing. I haven't thought much about what comes next, after this journey is over. (I used to say if, but it's starting to look likely that I will finish, barring something unforeseen, like a party bus or an asteroid). Except for a general sense of anxiety and some hazy... I won't even call them plans.. I don't have a clear picture of a future. This is not a bad thing.

Unexpected events happen. Like today, for instance, the maternal unit called to ask me to take her to urgent care. She suspected she got bit on the ankle by a malevolent critter on her back porch, a spider, perhaps. This happened last Tuesday. Her right ankle swelled up like a sausage. Since then, she's been hobbling around in slippers with her walker, not driving, not eating much, popping quarter-tabs of oxy and hoping it will go away. No such luck. So today we spent three hours on a gorgeous Easter Sunday morning getting her through urgent care and over to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for an anti-inflammatory. And pick up a box of generic cheerios, so she would have something to eat tomorrow.

That is what I mean. You can plan all you want, but life does what life is going to do. Other people are busy living, and sometimes their lives collide with my plans. I have no control over events, in my life or anyone else's. In some ways, this is frustrating, but in other ways, it is strangely liberating. To accept the invitation to give up the illusion of control is a rare opportunity to appreciate the moment. To be here now, something I've been practicing for the last seven years. It's easier to accept the gift when the sun is shining like it is today. It's 72°. Rain is on the way, but right now the air is golden and ripe with the scents and sounds of spring. A stellar bluejay stole some moss from my back porch. Nest building time.

A woman who lives at the end of the gravel driveway was walking by as I went out to dump my kitchen scraps in the green compost bin. She hurried over to me, pointing at the back of the Love Shack.

“Did you know you have a rat living under your back porch?”

I started to feel some shame, because yes, I know we have a rat living under the porches, and I don't particularly care. Hey, wait a minute, I said to myself.

“Yes, we have a rat,” I said. “We also have birds, squirrels, possums, and sometimes, raccoons. And moles!” Implying that it's a regular zoo in our six-foot-wide strip of nature, and how cool is that? “Do you have moles down there on your corner?” She forgot that she believes that a rat is a bad thing to have lurking under one's porch.

“We don't have moles, but my neighbor does,” she replied. “And she keeps her yard perfectly manicured. The moles drive her crazy!”

Now we were rooting for the moles. Long live wildlife. Yay for fat rats who live under porches. Yay critters, in general. I'm happy to fatten up a rat with spilled birdseed. Why should this little piece of the planet be exempt from harboring god's myriad creatures? (If there is a god, yada yada yada.)

And the plot thickens. Now I hear the sound of running water. Back in a mo. Ok, I'm back. I peered out my back door. The basement door is open, and there are two short, scratched-up surfboards propped against the fence. It looks like the quiet weekend at the Love Shack is over. My neighbor has returned. Now if I'm really lucky, I'll get to hear her making out with her boyfriend till the early hours of the morning.

Get on down to the spiritual axiom

As the teachers left yesterday after day classes, they wished each other a happy Easter. One said, “Have a happy Easter, if you celebrate Easter,” leaving room for those of us who might be pagans, wiccans, heathens, addicts, non-Christians, and generic ne'er-do-wells.

I said nothing, my usual response to all things religious. I have no opinion on Easter, one way or another. Isn't this the day that Jesus was supposed to rise from the dead? Likely story. More likely the guy just looked dead. What a shock to wake up buried alive in a cave. Roll away the stone, let me outa here! From there, it's not too hard to picture the responses of the locals to his unexpected resurrection: It's a miracle! And the rest is history.

I have memories of some Easters in my history. Well, not really memories, per se. I've seen black and white Kodak photos of my sister and me, sitting on the backyard swing-set squinting into the sun, ages about three and five, attired for church in pastel dresses, flowered bonnets, white patent leather shoes, and little white gloves. My sister displays all her baby teeth at the camera, while my smile is somewhat more circumspect, bordering on insipid.

I remember an Easter procession at the church, in which all the children carried daffodils to the alter, to create a big dazzling yellow cross. I think I've blogged about this before. My daffodil had yet to fully open; I was mortified. That feeling of shame is embedded into my genes.

I'm happy that this Sunday is Easter because the callers that usually call me on Sunday afternoons will be off doing their holiday thing with family, and I will have time to work on my dissertation proposal. Yeah, the massive beast is still hanging around, like a overfed, lazy cat, hogging the blankets and polluting the air with dust and dandruff. No, wait, that's me... huh? The good news is, after 150 pages and at least that many sources, I think I've almost got a good first draft. I hope to finish it and upload the monster into cyberspace sometime on Easter Sunday, if I can keep my neck away from the spiritual axiom.

This weekend the temperature should hit 70° for the first time this year. Everyone is excited, of course. All over town, Portlanders are breaking out their shorts, tanktops, and flipflops, bicycles, skateboards, walking shoes. Overnight my sleepy little village corner will turn into a pedestrian-infested, car-congested carnival of park-goers and cafe-mongers. Their music, their voices, their cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes will all waft into my windows on the not-quite-balmy spring breeze. What can I do, I have no defense. I have to open my windows: My place smells like an old gym sock.

Speaking of people who smell like old gym socks, what is with my obese female students smelling like mold? Really? Is it an environmental problem or a hygiene problem? What would happen if I asked them, “Why do you smell like mold?” They would probably look at me and reply, “Why do you smell like an old gym sock?” Then I would try to explain how I haven't vacuumed in a year because I've been working on my doctorate. They would retort, “Well, I work full-time, and I have three kids, no husband, and I live with my mother!” Okay, enough said. Forget I said anything. I won't ask about your stinky body odor if you won't mention mine.

I imagine all my obese female students wearing pastel mini-skirts, low-cut tops, and platform spike heels, tottering off to church this Sunday to celebrate the rising of an almost-dead guy. I'll be celebrating, too, in my own way, by typing a lot of incoherent words and phrases into pages and pages of white space. It's a religious experience, in a way. Especially that moment when I upload the wretched tome and cry to heaven, “Thank god almighty, free for the 21 days it takes my Chair to read and destroy my paper—at last!”

Even a rabid introvert needs human contact once in a while

My phone rarely rings during the week. When it does, it's almost always telemarketers. Despite the fact that I am registered on the national Do Not Call list, I occasionally get calls from people trying to sell me something. Usually they start out by thanking me for my past support.

“Thank you for your generous contribution to the Oregon Republican Party,” the caller, usually a man, will gush. “How are you this evening?” When I hear that opening, I know I am not the droid he is looking for. I know this because I am not a member of the Oregon Republican Party. Also, I know he is probably calling from Atlanta, the call center capital of the western world, because it is inevitably 4:02 p.m. Pacific time, not quite evening yet, here on the west coast.

“Oh, I'm sorry, I think you want the person with the same name as me who lives on the West side of town,” I say apologetically. The rich, white, conservative contributor-to-the-opposition-party person whose name comes up when I Google my own.

“Oh, I am so sorry!” the polite man with the southern accent will say contritely as I am hanging up my phone.

Those are the telemarketing calls I like, the ones that are obvious cases of mistaken identity. Or the ones that go something like, “Are you looking for new siding?” That one is easy to terminate, too. “No, sorry, I'm a renter,” I say blithely. Bam! Ten seconds, tops. My all-time favorite calls are marketing researchers, of course. What do you mean, will I take a 30-minute survey on Minute Rice? Of course I will! Oh, you mean you want me to actually be a user of the product? Oh, sorry. (Thank and terminate. Click. Buzzz.) Darn it. No, I don't smoke. No, I don't watch cable television. No, I don't use mayonnaise. Argh! No one wants someone who spends all her time writing a stupid dissertation!

Sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes not. Today the phone rang at 4:02 p.m. I picked it up and responded with my usual wary drawl. “HELLLoh.” When I didn't hear my mother's smoker's tenor: “Hello, Daughter,” I knew it was a telemarketer.

After some clicks and some brief pockets of dead air, a woman finally said, “This is bla bla calling from Life bla bla bla bla. How are you this evening?”

Because this was the only human contact I've had all day, I felt an urge to connect. “I'm doing great, thanks for asking! How are you doing?”

There was a long moment of silence as she processed the maniacal tone of my voice. “I'm fine, thanks for asking.” I suspected she thought I thought I recognized her voice. My Aunt Sally, maybe. I could practically hear her brain chugging away: Will this nutty prospect freak out when she realizes I'm not her Aunt Sally?

“What can I do for you this evening?” I said eagerly, anxious to hear the marketing message. I am a student of marketing, after all.

She launched gamely into her spiel. “Have you heard of Life Alert Systems?”

“Life what?” I said with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

“Life Alert Systems is a medical alert system specifically designed to help seniors remain independent—”

“Hey wait a minute!” I interrupted. “How old do you think I am?” I admit my voice had just a hint of belligerence. And a touch of wounded vanity. And a teensy weensy bit of righteous indignation.

“Uh... This is for seniors 65 and older?”

“Sorry, that is not me!” I declared decisively. I didn't tell her my age, of course. Telemarketers are like squirrels: You shouldn't feed them if you want them to go away.

“Do you have anyone in the household over the age of—”

“Nope, sorry, there's just me.”

“Well, okay.... good-bye.”

Wait a minute. What? She gave up? She didn't even try! Well, admittedly I was working up a frothy case of buyer's resistance, she could probably hear it in my voice. But isn't that what she's been trained to overcome? If she was a really good salesperson, she would have done her best to sell me, despite my objections, even if it seems at first that I'm not in the target market. Everyone my age has an aging parent. She never asked. I actually think my mother should have something like Life Alert (“Help I've fallen and I can't get up!”) She could have asked me a few well-placed questions, I would have answered, I would have let her ramble on a long time before I eventually let her go. No matter how much I wanted to connect with her, though, I wouldn't have committed to a purchase over the phone. I never do, because to me that is debting. But that doesn't mean I didn't want to talk! Hey come on, where are you calling from? What's the weather in Atlanta? Don't go!