Trying not to put words in their mouths

Today while I transcribed my sixth interview, a bus tried to cut the corner and clipped a car parked in front of the Love Shack. The neighborhood erupted into activity. Most looked and left. No blood. Ho hum. A couple people rushed around the bus, examined the car, and pounded on my door.

“Is this your car!” shouted a burly man who didn't look like a bus driver. He ran back to the car and held his cell phone up to the fender.

“No, they live down there, in the duplex,” I replied and went back to transcribing. It takes more than an errant bus to keep me from my mission. What's my mission? To finish this wretched dissertation.

Actually, wretched might not apply anymore. I'm coming to rather enjoy this part of the process. Not the recruiting, that still sucks. Not the interviewing. I'd rather be alone. But I really like the writing. The dreaming. The reflecting. The connecting. I don't think I'm very good at it, but I can sense that I have potential. Concepts are coming clearer, like bubbles rising through murky water. Maybe they will surface, and maybe I will be quick enough to grab them and glue them to paper before they pop. And maybe not.

Even though I am not really eager to interview these faculty, I still am enamored with their words. They say such profound things, mostly in very inept ways as they struggle to respond to my questions. And I sit there with the perfect word on my tongue, the word they seek to make their idea crystallize, and I have to bite that rebellious tongue to keep from shouting the word out loud.

It's harder than you think. Conversation is a give and take. I'm not having conversations with these people. I'm conducting interviews. It's a different art. Sometimes the urge to respond helpfully is overwhelming, sort of like the many times I felt compelled to correct a former boyfriend when he kept pronouncing the word chassis as chass-iss. Eventually I gave in to the urge. “It's chassey,” I shouted at him one memorable day. “Chassey!” Of course, after he got over his shock, he never forgave and never forgot. Needless to say, we are no longer in communication.

A few times during these interviews, I admit, I've succumbed to the urge. I can't help it. As a former teacher, it was my job to summarize, to clarify, to helpfully supply the word to finish the sentence, to bring the concept into the light. “Yin and yang,” was one of the concepts I helpfully supplied during my fifth interview. My interviewee's eyes lit up. “That's it!” he cried. As soon as I said it, I was like, oh no, did I just say that? Yin and yang is such a great concept, and I can't use it now, because I put the words in his mouth. Argh. This afternoon I did it again. My interviewee was flailing around for a word, and it just popped out from between my lips, like a bubble: “Trust,” I said.

“That's right, trust. I wouldn't have thought of it, but that is it exactly.”

Just shoot me now. Oh well. This is how we learn.

Summer's last kiss

I took a break from writing to go for a run in the park. Well, I wouldn't call it a run, exactly. More like a shambling trot. I used to be able to run. Then I jogged. Now I trot. As long as I'm not crawling, who cares. Getting outside is good for the brain. And it's the last kiss of summer.

This time of year is always bittersweet. I love the golden light, the warm air, the luscious green leaves. But too soon, it ends. I wax maudlin every year about this time. I got a little weepy in the park just now, as I stood next to a lamppost, creakily stretching my legs and staring into the setting sun. Swallows looped silently overhead, in and around, up and down, snatching at invisible insects. The sky was devoid of clouds, and the sun was huge and red with the ash of Washington wildfires. I soaked it up, wishing I could store that light for later. I'm going to need it in a few short months when I'm dragging with SAD.

It might have been the setting sun, or the fact that I was wearing sunglasses, or it might just have been me waxing weepy, but I kept seeing people in the park who resembled people I knew long ago. I knew it wasn't them, because they looked just like they did when we were teenagers. One was my first official boyfriend, I'll call him Steve. I was 16, he was 19 (can you say underage?). He was a runner, a gaunt young man with a long torso and short legs, and long wavy dark hair that fanned out behind him as he ran. Now Steve could run. No trotting for that boy.

Seeing this modern version of Steve glide by in the setting sun reminded me of how simple things seemed when I was young and stupid. I'm just as stupid as I was, in a lot of ways, and now I'm not young. Being young and stupid is sort of cool if you wear the right clothes, but not if you are old and stupid.

Talking about how stupid I am is stupid. I'm going to stop that now and reflect on other things. Like the homeless person's tent I saw off to the side of the trail, on the flank of the caldera. No wonder I always smell pot when I run past that place. Like the difficulty of dodging piles of dog poop and wandering slugs while one is wearing sunglasses in the twilight. Can't see with them, can't see without them: Be ready to scrape your shoes later. Like the sudden epiphany about how to organize Chapter 4 of my dissertation.

It's not all bad. Neither is it all good. And it's not both, as those who subscribe to yin and yang would have us believe. It's somewhere in between. Yes, today seems like the last kiss of summer, but there will be nice days in the fall, and yes, even in the winter. Life happens, that's all. Good, bad, it is difficult to tell. Today the VP of Whatever emailed me to say that next Friday I can come to campus and interview any faculty who are willing. I think that might be good. But it's hard to tell.

Don't count your chickens before they tear your lips off

This morning I was on hold with the Employment Department to get my PIN reset and thinking that if I had to listen to the same 45-second clip of Kenny G's insipid soprano sax one more time I was going to poke my ear drums out, when I had the inspiration to email program directors at the career college directly to ask them to ask instructors directly to participate in my study. I sent a few emails, and voila! I got two sign-ups today, and the possibility of one more. Very soon, if the data collection gods are kind, I will have seven, maybe even eight interviews. And that is within spitting distance of the goal. In fact, it might be good enough. Sometimes good is the enemy of the best, but sometimes good enough is good enough.

I hate to think I have Kenny G to thank for this. I'd be more inclined to attribute the sudden progress to the depth of my desperation. My new motto is Drill down, baby, drill down! As in, forget the president of the college, forget the VP of Whatever. Go down into the hole and grab those program directors by the scruff of their necks and shake 'em. Say firmly, Look here, Buster, I need to talk to some faculty. Pronto! And watch them scurry. It worked!

So next week I'll scurry to meet them whenever and wherever they decree, no matter if it happens to interfere with my best thinking time (AKA nap time). Things are looking up. And not a moment too soon. I have three months to put this baby to bed or throw myself on the mercy of the university for an extension. I'm sure they will give it to me, if I ask. I've been a good student. (Meaning I've done my work on time and kept my mouth shut.) But how nice it would be to have this done before the end of the year.

I'm already daydreaming about taking the longest nap, the longest bath, the longest geographical. I'm daydreaming about how I'll finally be able to visit my friends (the ones who still remember me).

You know what they say. Don't count your chickens before they tear your lips off. I have a mountain of research to sift through, to make sense out of, to write about coherently enough to gain approval from the dissertation review gods. The culmination of eight years of work is now culminating! Culminating in progress, before your very eyes. It's not really a pretty sight. Actually, it's kind of stinky. I need a bath. The whole place reeks like a gym bag. But who cares. As my sister wisely says, just get it done.

How to blend in to your neighborhood

It's pandemonium at the Love Shack. My new neighbor has the bass cranked up on his stereo, same old story, just like the old neighbor. Sound travels through the old walls and floors like bladdity bla through yadada. I can't think of any metaphor that isn't a total cliche, because not only is the bass rattling my brain, but the neighbors in back are having an outdoor party, complete with music and applause. Closing the windows helps against the applause, but does nothing to block the bass coming through the walls from next door. And then we've got the music and laughter coming from the cafe across the street. There's no escaping it.

After a lovely evening at the Portland Art Museum with Bravadita and her friend Jeff, this is what I came home to. Cacophony. The first thing I did was close all my windows and pull my shades. I considered cranking up my stereo—a little New Order might help. What I really want is silence. There is nowhere to hide from this, except into my mp3 player, my refuge of last resort. If I can fill my head with my own music, I won't have to hear/feel the bass thrumming in my bones through the floorboards. It's a different kind of assault, one of choice.

It's hard to imagine writing anything coherent with all this noise going on. I was going to try. But it's after 10:00 p.m., and I just don't have the brain for it. I have a lot to write. And a serious deadline. I need a miracle. But I don't think it's going to happen tonight.

I collected my fifth interview yesterday. That is the good news. But it doesn't look as though any more will be forthcoming. By now, all my former colleagues at the career college have had time to make their decision: Will I help Carol or not? After two weeks, one person emailed me to express his willingness, and I met him yesterday morning on campus. Yes, on the campus where I used to work.

Driving there, parking, walking into the building... it felt surreal, like I was Rip Van Winkle, gone a hundred years, shuffling through the door with bad eyesight and a beard. Don't you know me? They knew me. They were just surprised to see me. And it wasn't the good kind of surprise, like, Wow, here's Carol! How are you? It was more like, Wow, here's Carol, what is she doing showing her face here? A few students recognized me, too, which was awkward. I couldn't remember their names.

The interview went well; I collected some good insights that will make my study stronger. When it was finished, he was clearly done with me: There was no loitering, hey, how's it going, no chit chat. I went out to the receptionist area and paused, thinking that maybe I could go over to the main building and find someone else to interview. Stupid me. I quickly realized everyone was in class. Everyone had a job. Everyone but me. I got in my car, drove home, and went back to bed.

Once it gets quiet, my plan is to begin writing up my findings, and continue data collection if possible. Qualitative research is iterative anyway. See? It's all good. Somewhere.

Give me your tired, your poor, your faculty sob story about for-profit vocational education

I guess after you work at a place for almost ten years, it's hard to let it go, even if it let go of you. I'm speaking, of course, about the career college that laid me off in May. Today Sheryl called me at 10:00 a.m., and I knew as soon as I saw her number in the caller ID window that something must have happened. She only calls me when something is going on at school.

“You won't believe what I just heard!”

“What?”

“Chandra Friggins just got fired!”

“What!”

I was dismayed, not because I care about Chandra all that much, but because she is my official contact person at the career college for my doctoral research study. What will this mean for me? (Everything always comes back to that important question when one is a crazy chronic malcontent.)

I was going to email Chandra tomorrow and ask her what I should do to motivate faculty to sign up for my study. So far only one person has signed up since the invitation went out to all the faculty last Monday, and she doesn't qualify. I'm panicking more day by day as I piddle around in my dissertation manuscript, making placeholders for data I haven't collected yet. Now I get why scientists make up data! I'm seeing failure looming on the horizon, only a few months away. Where, oh where, are all the faculty who care about academic quality? Am I the only one?

Now with this news, I suspect there's some serious sh-t going on at the career college—again—which explains why people may not be super eager to sign up. The news also makes me think interviewing any faculty who teach there is a really bad idea. What kind of responses will I get from people who are terrified of losing their jobs?

Sheryl just called again. Denny, our former boss, and my ace in the hole at the career college, called and told her that Chandra was fired as part of a “reorganization.” Now, anyone in business knows that reorganize is a euphemism for fire, suggesting more heads will soon be rolling down the hallowed halls.

I'm not sure what I'm feeling. Relief and gratitude that I'm not there, I guess. Imagine trying to teach under the karmic weight of all that negativity and fear. Maybe a little glee that the place is falling apart (See! I told you so!). But mostly I'm feeling extreme anxiety. Who will be my gatekeeper now? Should I contact her male counterpart (I think I've called him Fiend in the past. Maybe I need to come up with a new name!)? Should I contact the president of the college? What if he's being reorgged too? What if the whole place is closing? Can I find some of these faculty before they all drift into the obscurity of unemployment?

After almost eight years and $50,000, to have this doctorate unravel in the last four months seems unfathomable. Unbelievable. Unacceptable. After all the stress of toiling to get the concept approved, the proposal approved, the IRB application approved... Is it, maybe it is too soon to fret...wreckage of the future and all that...? No, you know what, no. It's not too soon to fret. I think it is past time to fret. I've been trying not to fret, but fretting is tearing me a new one much like wild fires ravage southern Oregon.

What I have is a classic marketing problem. I'm trying to sell something people don't want. If I were a celebrity... yeah, what if I were, uh, think of someone who is sexy and charming. Jeez, I don't know, I'm the last person to have a list of celebrities ready to mind. Back in a mo. Ok, got it. I had to Google it. Ok, imagine if I were...Oprah! Or... Clint! Or Cameron! Do you think for one minute that people would hesitate to participate in my study? No. They would be, like, I wanna do it, me, me, me!

Clearly I'm not cool enough, my study's not hip enough. I'm lacking the hipness factor. Oh, man. What about the sheer altruistic joy of helping a former fellow faculty member? What about the good feeling of sharing for a good cause? (What cause, you ask? The cause of saving or destroying for-profit vocational education, depending on what side of the fence you are on, I don't care which. Just tell me your story!)

Free iPod! Free iPad! Free coffee and donuts! The doctor is (almost) in! Tell me your story about for-profit vocational education. I promise not only to hang on your every word, but to lovingly type verbatim all your verbal tics and fillers, and then scrutinize them in detail to wring from your precious words every last drop of meaning, both mundane and profound. When will anyone ever again give you such devoted attention?

The chronic malcontent is a networking fool

I am all over this networking thing. I mean, really, I am over it. As in, done, stick a fork in me, no more, please. Last night I went to a fun hotel sort of place in NE Portland and rubbed shoulders in a too-small room with a bunch of organizational development professionals. Orga-what? you say. Right. Who knows what organizational development is, raise your hand? They have a perception problem.

Still, they are by and large a nice bunch of people who were willing to listen to me blather on about my doctoral study without displaying obvious boredom. How cool is that. I'm getting better at talking about it. I should be, considering I'm almost done with the dang thing. Or I should be almost done with it, but that's another blog post.

I collected five business cards of varying value, from a president of a leadership training corporation to a down-and-out therapist who just moved here from Northern California and wants to sell her services to people who can't afford to pay. What could possibly go wrong? I sent LinkedIn invitations to them and got a few bites, so I'm feeling pretty proud of myself. I'm up to 50 connections. Whoo-hoo, look at me go. Some of these folks have 500 connections... Well, I'm sure they never write, they never call... have I even known 500 people in my entire life? I doubt it.

Today I met a guy for coffee in my neighborhood. I'll call him Bill. I looked him up on the Web beforehand so I knew what I was getting into. Bill has a business selling a product, but his real goal is to sign up distributors. In other words, multi-level marketing. MLM gives me hives, but I went with a researcher's mind. That is, skeptical. As I shuffled blearily down the hill to the coffee joint, I thought the exercise I was getting would probably be the high point of the entire morning.

Bill was in the coffee shop already when I got there, typing on a laptop at a tiny round table. I recognized him right away, a burly bearded guy who looked smaller than I remembered. I got my iced coffee and sat down. The place was crowded and noisy. I settled in, ready to let him sell me.

He launched in on a well-rehearsed series of stories about his experience in the marketing world. I wish I had a good audio memory. Now it has all blended together into one long fairy tale, the essence of which is: I'm a great and powerful marketer, I teach other people how to market, I have a successful business, and you are a somewhat pathetic beginner/novice/loser who could learn from me. That's pretty much what I gleaned from the first hour. The whole time the custom-imprinted logo of his company faced me on the lid of his laptop, white text on shiny red. Upside down to him, right side up to me, like a mini-billboard. When, oh when is he going to get to the pitch, I wondered?

Finally I got tired of waiting and gave him the opening he needed.

“What does the product look like?”

Bill's eyes lit up. He reached down into his laptop bag and pulled out some samples and a price list. I won't tell you what it was he was selling, because I wouldn't want you to feel compelled to look him up and laugh at his tiny head or something. The price list was confusing, as I expected. You subscribe for a monthly fee, you get points, that then allow you to get certain discounts on product. Huh? Why don't you just spell out the price? What's all this nonsense about points? Sounds like a timeshare or something! It made no sense to me, but I just listened and let him get on with the pitch. I knew he wouldn't spend a lot of time selling me on the product, not if he was any good. And sure enough, here it came.

“Down here is the option for people who want to be their own boss,” Bill said, circling a big $395 with a black pen. “Or you can buy in for only $50! But you don't get the website.”

“How many distributors do you have?” I asked.

“I never disclose that information,” he said quickly. “That would be like opening up my bank statement to you. Let's put it this way, I'm making my mortgage—and then some.”

I stared at him, thinking, what? Dude, I guess if your mortgage is $10,000 a month, I might be impressed, but you live in Vancouver. I didn't say that, but that's what I was thinking. Like most people who get suckered into an MLM, he's not making much money. He's probably buying his own product, in typical MLM, eat your own leg fashion, while the few greedy bastards at the top rake in the dough. There's a cliche for you!

To his credit, he did ask me a few questions about myself, but like so many... salespeople/guys/self-centered blowhards... the few answers I gave launched him back into storytelling mode, which after an hour and a half was getting a little tedious. Luckily he had another coffee commitment to get to. Whew.

The value in the experience for me was to realize that, while networking has its place, I need to be judicious about who gets my time. Meeting someone to listen to an MLM sales pitch doesn't give me a lot of value. Meeting me was the best use of his time, because he's signing up people. But me, I'm a researcher. I need to do the work, and that must be done alone. Alone, alone, alone.

So, I'm done with networking for the time being. I'll go back to the OD people, because they are interesting folks who aren't interested in selling me anything. They are refined academics. They smell good. I'm the predator in that crowd. I just need to learn their preferences, figure out what bait to use, let them get close. The other kind of networking is like going swimming in a tank full of stinky hungry sharks. I was prepared to lose a little skin. Today was the first bite, not all that painful. I survived to tell the tale.

I sent Bill a short email, thanking him for taking time to meet with me. I checked my email just now and there was one from him (not a reply to mine), an obvious boilerplate marketing email, big bold Arial fonts, with his logo looming at the top, and lots of colorful links to his website. My name wasn't anywhere to be seen. Yep, that's Bill, building relationships, one skeptic at a time. Rock on, dude.

The adventures just keep on coming

This morning I rose before the sun for another adventure in downtown Portland. I still can't believe I did it. I don't mean attending the event, which was a digital marketing “breakfast” at Portland State's Urban Center, no, that was easy. All I had to do was sit there, swill coffee, stare out the window, and draw pictures in my notebook. No, the hard part was getting up at 5:15 a.m. when it is dark as sin outside, preparing a hasty meal, and rushing to the MAX station to park my car and shuffle onto the Green Line... a replay of last Friday's events, except without my trusty companion Sheryl. I always have an out-of-body experience when I get up before it's light out: Is that me getting out of bed? Is that me fixing food at this ungodly hour? Am I really leaving the snug and cozy Love Shack to brave the MAX line journey downtown? Again!?

The show wasn't all that inspiring, and the food was the usual coffee, pastries, and watermelon chunks, but what do I expect for nothing except time and lost sleep? There was no fee to attend. The bus tickets were a gift from Bravadita. It was an experiment. An experiment in adventuring, urban style.

The meeting room was small, but I had a great seat by the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The mini-blind was rolled up far above my head, so there was nothing but glass and the view of the plaza outside the Urban Center. Water in the lovely Joyce N. Furman Memorial Fountain rippled ceaselessly down a cascade of steps. I could only find one photo of the fountain, and the site was a bit funky loading. You can look it up if you want. It is an interesting feature of the all brick plaza.

If you look at this photo, you'll see a little bit of the plaza. Look in the upper right corner, see those big windows? I was sitting the fourth window from the left, just out of camera shot. See that streetcar below? I saw several of those chug along while I was trying to learn about digital marketing. The streetcar was way more interesting to me for some reason. I had no idea there was so much machinery on top of those things. Every time you see cops and villains duking out on top of a train, it's always a smooth surface, good for fighting. Not so with these streetcars. Just in case you were thinking of engaging in a little fisticuffs on a moving train.

My brain has been mush all day, thanks to the early start. There's so much to talk about—the dearth of faculty for my study, the likely ending of unemployment benefits, the looming monster of my dissertation. So much to complain about, worry over, mangle between clenched teeth. But I'm too tired to work up a really frothy sweat. Lucky you! Maybe tomorrow. I've got another networking event planned for tomorrow night—I'm going after the organizational development crowd. They won't know what hit them. And then Thursday morning, I have a coffee date with a guy I met at the networking event I dragged Sheryl to on Friday. He's going to try to sign me up for his multi-level marketing company. I can hardly wait.

A little networking in the morning is good for the chronic malcontent

Early this morning I dragged myself out of bed, fixed some food and shoveled it into my mouth, and dashed out the door to pick up my friend Sheryl at 7:00 a.m. for our great adventure. The weather was perfect, high clouds, blue sky, a cool breeze. No reason to back out and go home.

I parked my car at the MAX station and showed Sheryl how to validate the ticket I gave her.

“That's it?” she said skeptically. She lives in deathly fear of mass transit.

The train came along in a few minutes, the Green line to Portland State. The train was packed with riders. We had to stand up all the way to downtown Portland, hanging on to bars and straps while the train swayed and clattered along the Gulch. We chatted nervously, thinking of what was to come.

We got off at Mill and walked a few short blocks to 200 SW Market. Hey, I know that black cube, the square squat building covered in black glass... I used to work in that building, about twelve years ago, when things weren't going so well. I was a part-time admin for a software start-up company. The job sucked, and to save money, I walked to work from my place in SE Portland, hiking across the Ross Island Bridge, an hour each way. Now there's a commute that will put hair on your chest. Hey, I got laid off from that job, too. Unlike the career college, though, the start-up (should I say, the close-down) actually gave me a little severance.

Sheryl and I went up the escalator. I was worried I wouldn't find the place, but it was just inside the front door, a largish meeting room set up with a huge square made of tables and chairs, with a large projector screen pulled down at the far end and a small coffee service set up to the left of the door. There wasn't a lot of room, except in the center of the table area. That area was big as a prom dance floor and just as empty. About 15 people were milling around along the walls, talking with each other in small groups. They were getting down to the serious business of networking.

“This is it,” I said to Sheryl. To myself, I added, Do or die. I led the way through the door.

A large bearded man wearing a name tag (Jim so-and-so) planted himself in my path. He held out his hand. I automatically put mine in his.

“Are you here for the networking meeting?”

I introduced myself and Sheryl.

“Do you have a business card?” he demanded.

I had some cheesy cards I made myself, the latest in a long line of tentative designs. I whipped one out and handed it to him. Sheryl looked chagrined; she didn't have a business card.

Jim put my card in a fishbowl and explained that there would be a drawing later. The winner would get five minutes to make his or her pitch to the crowd. I think Big Jim was expecting us to look excited and hopeful. Huh. Not a chance. More people were crowding in behind us. Sheryl and I looked at each other and edged past the crowd into an open space along the wall.

My first instinct was to look nowhere but at Sheryl. I quickly squelched it. Eye contact, that was my goal, even if I... I almost wrote barfed, but that is really too extreme a word. I would be more likely to leave than to barf. I do have some sense of social propriety.

I looked around. Bam. Eye contact! A small man wearing big dark-rimmed glasses took the hint and gamely approached us and introduced himself. Steven, an industrial engineer, looking for employment. I got his card and stared at it blankly. Then I gave him one of mine.

Some seats had been staked out with purses and briefcases. Sheryl and I moved along toward the front of the room. We sat down in a row, the engineer, me, and then Sheryl. We found out that seating is everything. The guy at the head of the room welcomed us and then pointed our way. Time to talk! Poor old Sheryl was called upon to introduce herself and explain what she was all about—in no more than 30 seconds. She valiantly stood up and told the room her tale of woe: 20 years in education, laid off, looking for work.

Then it was my turn. I spewed something about my new businesses, making it up as I went, stammered a little, but apparently managed to sound more or less coherent. I know this because Sheryl told me so later. I was having an out of body experience, so I wasn't actually there during those 30 seconds.

But once it was over we got to watch the networking pros do their thing, and some of them were very good. There's a formula to it, we discovered: state your name and business, speak your tagline (enthusiastically), explain what you do and who you do it for, list the benefits, state what you want, and close by repeating your name and company name. Bam! And be ready with a stack of business cards when everyone rushes over to talk to you after the introductions are done.

And that was the gist of the event. A large table of 30 people introducing themselves, one after the other (somewhat tediously at times), followed by a little frenetic speed networking, and then the event was over. Some of us lingered. The employed people went to work. I felt a little like a trick-or-treater with a bag full of candy. My haul was business cards: I got seven, plus one for the East Portland Chamber of Commerce, who apparently have twice-monthly networking events at the crack of dawn, and they are open to the public (thanks, Big Jim).

We found our way back to the train station, waited for the next Green Line, and retraced our route back to the parking lot where my car awaited. I tool Sheryl home. I thanked her profusely for being my companion. She went off to take a walk. I went home to bed.

And that is the story of my networking adventure.

I had a victory moment, one shining glory moment, when it all came together, when I really understood the power of connection. A woman who owns a coaching business came over to me after the introductions and asked me about my business. We started talking about marketing research, and it became clear to me that she thought it was too hard and horrible to do herself. I explained what I could teach her in a one-hour webinar. She started to light up as I described the problems I could solve for her, how it's not that hard, and she said.... where can I sign up for your webinar?

I had to tell her the webinars were still in development. She turned away, clearly disappointed. But I was triumphant. I had one on the hook! I had her hooked, just for a moment. Then I had to let her go, but how cool is that? I almost sold her. And all it took was telling her how my product will help her solve a problem. After I woke up from my nap I sent her a LinkedIn invitation. Maybe I'll get her signed up yet.

Why it's good sometimes to walk toward the thing that scares you

I found out from my academic adviser that I have until the end of November to complete my doctorate. Here's me, eyes rolling back in my head, hands beseeching the universe, in the moment before I open my little pursed lips to scream.

Let me digress for one moment and complain about the spellchecker in Google blogger. The word adviser...I'm used to spelling it with an o, as in advisor. But Google is flagging it as an error. Apparently both spellings are correct, but adviser is more common. Huh. My university spells it advisor. What do they know.

Well, I hope they know that they are most likely going to have to grant me an extension come November, because four months to write a qualitative study seems close to impossible, considering I haven't even collected half my data yet. If I were feeling really perky and optimistic (which I'm not), I would make some inane comment about how great it is to be unemployed exactly when I need every minute to write this paper. Wow, talk about serendipitous timing, right? You'd think I'd be grateful that the career college laid me off when it did. Am I grateful? Well, maybe a little. I feel grateful not to be teaching keyboarding anymore. I feel grateful every morning at 8:30 a.m. when I leisurely claw my way out of bed. I feel grateful that I can stay up as late as I want. Usually.

I say usually because I did something I'm sure I will regret: I agreed to attend a Portland Connect networking event at 2nd and Market downtown with my friend and former colleague Sheryl... at 8:00 tomorrow morning! Argh. I must be nuts. To make things more exciting, I refuse to try to park my car downtown, so I am going to pick her up, drive to the closest MAX station, park, and drag her onto the train. (Sheryl is not an avid fan of public transportation.) This should be an adventure. I wouldn't be half-surprised if Sheryl cancels on me. I wouldn't be all that shocked if I overslept.

A friend of mine makes a practice of doing the thing she's afraid of. That is what I am doing. Networking at any time of day is not a thrilling prospect. Networking at 8:00 a.m. sounds like complete and utter torture. Sheryl will be my security blanket, my teddy bear. When I get anxious I can always talk to Sheryl. And if I'm really brave, I can introduce Sheryl to all the strangers we meet. I can do that for her when I can't do it for myself.

We'll see how it goes. If it goes. I wouldn't bet on it. Stay tuned.

What I have learned about the dissertation journey

Earlier today I logged into the online course room and clicked the Accept button to give permission to the university to suck $794 out of my bank account. This gives me the privilege of earning one more credit and the delight of toiling another 12 weeks toward the goal of earning this wretched Ph.D., which lies somewhere off in the hazy distance where it's been for the past seven years like a ship that never comes to port. Ho hum. After seven years, I'm tired of waiting. The glow has faded. It's just a job, and not one that pays well. Actually, it's sort of like being a slave. A slave to a scholarly pursuit.

This evening I logged into the university course room again, after a technological meltdown resulting from a fight between Wordpress and Mailchimp, during which I inadvertently closed all the windows. Bam. Problem solved! Should have thought of that sooner.

On the university website, there are a handful of discussion folders in which students post questions, concerns, complaints, kudos. The only folder I visit is the one marked Dissertations. There are roughly 300 new posts a month in that folder, mostly along the lines of Oh, no! I'm starting Comps in a week! What can you tell me about Doctor So-and-So? Help! As if Doctor So-and-So is going to help them at all with Comps. Come on, people! It's a test!

I've lurked in this discussion folder for seven years, reading posts from all kinds of people on all kinds of topics. When someone successfully passes Comps, forty people shout out, Way to go! Congratulations! When someone's cat died, a crowd of students rushed to offer condolences. When someone is put on academic probation (which happens regularly), the students rally around with email addresses for the ombudsman, the dean, and the accreditation agency, urging unflagging persistence, don't back down!

I've seen people come and go. Some of them graduate and, before their email is disconnected, they come back to wave good-bye, to collect their litany of congratulations, and to exhort the rest of us to keep moving forward, never give up, we can do it, rah rah rah. Some of those left behind mention these winners in later posts, usually in response to a post in which a lost soul is bleating for help with their wretched concept paper or their confounded dissertation proposal. Call Dr. Nina! Call Doc Crock!

We've had our share of wackjobs. The discussions are like any other comment thread, where people say what they mean without really thinking about it, and other people take offense and retaliate, which provokes another attack... it can be just slightly less vitriolic than the comments I enjoy reading at the end of a Yahoo! article about the latest doings of the White House (but not nearly as entertaining. Just sayin.')

So immersed was I in the discussion folder, I almost failed to notice that my Chair had updated my first assignment. I haven't even posted an assignment, so I opened up the Activities tab to read her comment. The IRB has approved my revised recruiting methodology! Congrats!

Well, isn't that nice. I can now ask the administrator at the career college to forward my email invitation to the cowering, resentful, bitter, fearful faculty that remain after the closure of one campus. If I'm lucky some of them will express their willingness to participate in my study. They ought to have some interesting things to say.

Oh, what have I learned about this dissertation journey?

• You are on your own. No one cares.
• It always takes three times as long as you think it will.
• You can't force anyone to participate.
• Just do what your Chair tells you, don't whine and don't argue.
• If you feel compelled to argue, be ready to cite APA page numbers.
• Don't use their templates, because they don't know squat about styles in Word.
• Don't waste time in the dissertation folder reading the complaints of your classmates. Get busy.
• Don't think about how great it will be to finish. It will just depress you, because you aren't there yet. You still have to write the manuscript and defend it.
• If you have a cat, put your nose in its fur and be here now.
• If you don't have a cat, borrow one. Seriously. It may be the thing that gets you through.

Who is responsible for this crazy life? Uh.. not me.

There is a fly in the Love Shack. Security! The cat in charge of security sleeps with his nose on his paws. Slacker. I can't bring myself to smack the fly. If I wait long enough it will circle lower and lower and eventually die on a windowsill somewhere. A metaphor for life, I guess.

Speaking of life, I had a fun slice of it today. I met Bravadita for coffee in Northwest Portland. Now that she lives downtown in a 3rd floor walk-up, she's taken on an aura of cosmopolitan glamour. She is utterly 100% cool. I mean, she was 95% cool when she lived on the East side, since she was only nine blocks from the River (I'm sixty-nine blocks from the River. At 82nd you are officially in the armpit of Portland. That is coolness of zero percent.) Now Bravidita is 100% cool as she walks everywhere with a stylish bag slung rakishly over her shoulder. So cool she wears a beret!

Time out. The security cat heard me tapping on the keyboard and came over to check it out, spotting the fly on his way to sit on my keyboard. A half-hearted swipe, wait, is that all? Come on! Security!

Well, anyway. Sitting at a wobbly metal table outside along 21st Avenue, Bravadita and I bemoaned the plight of artists and creatives who don't get things their way (us). There was plenty of commiseration to go around. The coffee amped me into high gear. I had an idea every ten seconds, followed by a plunge into darkest depression. Of course, all my ideas were for Bravadita's career, not my own. (Why is it so much easier to fix someone else's life?)

The security cat has failed to capture the fly, which continues to infuriate me by meandering in front of the computer monitor; the cat, however, has slyly captured my chair, so now I must stand while I type. Sigh.

I've conveniently chosen to prune the artistic part of my life so that it fits into a tiny box: this blog. I draw while I sit in meetings. If anything funny comes out of it, I scan the images and upload them here for your amusement. That is the extent of my art life. There was a time when I was positive, beyond any doubt, sure as only a ten-year-old child can be, that I would spend my life writing, drawing, and painting. And to a large extent, that has been my reality. What I didn't foresee, though, was that I would have a great deal of difficulty getting paid to do those things.

Hence... the jobs. Long jobs, short jobs, fun jobs, depressing jobs, I've had many jobs. I can say truthfully that there is not one job I would willingly go back to if I had a choice. Not one that I can say, wow, that was a really great job. The fault, I admit, lies more with me than with any of the jobs. A few were bad because of a particular person or a few people, but mostly they weren't bad at all. It was me. I didn't fit. I wouldn't let myself fit. Because there was somewhere else I wanted to be. Always somewhere else.

I feel lucky now that I've chosen to pursue a self-employment field that interests me. No, it's not art, but it's still interesting. I'm not a victim. I'm choosing it. I don't know if that will make it any more successful than any of the other jobs I've had, but if it fails, I'll know who to blame.

There goes that pesky fly again. Should I let him live? Or is it curtains for the fly? Text your vote to 3330 within the next seven minutes to determine his fate.

The chronic malcontent has a close encounter with the Mall of America

Greetings from the Chronic Malcontent. There is more than one of us, as you may have discovered. I'm the one that illustrates her prolific whining. I may not be much of an intellectual, but I can illustrate the crap out of malcontentedness.

I returned from a weekend in Minneapolis, vacation capital of the world... well, maybe not of the world. But you got your Mall of America there, and that counts for a lot. I stayed in a hotel right across the street from the Mall. It was a very wide street, too wide to walk across. The hotel provides a shuttle to and from the Mall every half hour. I did not make the trip, but I did take a photo of the giant Mall of America sign to commemorate the moment the shuttle from the airport sped by on the way to the hotel. In my photo, the three-story sign is barely discernible, lost against the massive edifice of the Mall.

Time divides into two time streams when you travel. Do you find that to be true for you? There's the home stream, where life carries on in the usual routine. Back at the Love Shack, the cat dozes on the window seat. The cat gets up, stretches, jumps up the strategically placed chairs to the food court, crunches some kibbles, licks a paw. Looks around, wonders what is missing, slurps some water from the jug, jumps down, goes to another sleeping spot, curls up, and falls back into a doze. That's life at the Love Shack.

The other time stream is me, moving and being moved through the world of transportation. Parking the car in the Economy Lot (remember Red Lot, F9!), waiting for the bus to the terminal, looking back with some melancholy at my largest asset, hoping it will start when I return. Hoping someone will find and reclaim it if I die somewhere en route.

Falling into line at the security checkpoint, hoping I don't look so eccentric I am pegged as a suspicious character. Shoes off, hat off, jacket off, boarding pass clutched between dry lips, stand on the footprints while they take an x-ray of my naked body. She's clean! Not even an underwire bra! Rushing to grab my shoes, my hat, my backpack as the crowd shoves from behind.

All of that just to be allowed to the gate. Continual fear that I will lose my identification, my boarding pass—oh, no, where's my boarding pass? On the floor of the restroom, where I dropped it. Whew. Still there. (One thing you can count on is people don't pick up anything that doesn't look like money.) The flight to Phoenix was delayed 20 minutes. I'm late! There was just enough time to hit the restroom and rush down the hot gangway onto the plane. I would have liked to have stayed in that warmth, that light, but no, gotta go!

I arrived Friday evening, met my friends, ate horrendously expensive hotel food, slept in a fabulously comfortable hotel bed, and then repeated the entire journey in reverse and in the dark on Sunday evening. The plane lifted off into the setting sun at about 8:50 pm. I wondered if we would keep up with the turning of the earth, speeding along at a standstill like Alice and the White Queen, but no, it got dark. I was barely awake, but I couldn't stop watching for the clusters of lights far below, all the little towns in the middle of nowhere. How can they... what do they do out there, so far from anyplace worth mentioning? Gather string and make it into large balls, I guess.

Back through Phoenix at almost midnight. The place was lively, packed with travelers, like a galactic hub, so much activity. I found my gate. We boarded. We taxied and taxied and taxied, clear around the huge terminal, and back to a gate. Wha—? Something's wrong. Passengers began to mutter when they realized we had been diverted from the runway. Eventually the pilot fired up the intercom to tell us an “alarming” passenger had been removed, and all is well, we are cleared to depart. Yikes.

We leaped into the darkness, headed for Portland, and two and a half hours later, we landed so softly I wasn't sure we weren't still airborne. It was 2:00 a.m. The Portland terminal was deserted except for cleaning crews, vacuuming in circles. A far different picture from lively Sky Harbor. We shuffled en masse through the empty terminal, beyond weary. The bus to the Red Lot arrived, driven by a maniacally cheerful driver, who commented after her third joke fell flat that we must be very tired. Someone muttered, “Plane...an hour late.”

My car was waiting where I'd left it, looking strangely desiccated in the fluorescent light. The air inside was dry and flavorless. The engine started with a hesitant cough. After a detour or two, I found the place to pay the $30 that would allow me to exit the parking lot, and I wended my way home through empty streets. I pulled into the parking area at 3:00 a.m. I staggered to my door in the dark, wondering if someone would hear me mumbling and come out to shoot me. My cat met me at the door, like he'd been expecting me.

And that's the story of my weekend. The reality show of my life began again on Monday morning, with calls to the career college, resubmissions to my Chair and the IRB committee, laundry, shopping, rent... life picked up almost where I left off. But I am not the same. I've seen the Mall of America. I've seen a real Minnesota potluck. I've seen the half-moon and the brilliant stars from 36,000 feet. I know my place now, and it is good: I am a speck on the skin of a big, mysterious, and beautiful planet. It's not a bad place to be.

Feeling terminally unique

I can't really dredge up much enthusiasm for this doctoral journey when the pace of it ebbs and flows so much. I'd like more flowing and less ebbing, but at this point, I am almost past caring. Every now and then I feel a spark of interest, like, oh, yeah, I remember why I chose this topic. But mostly I'm beyond both frustration and enthusiasm. At each roadblock, each obstacle, I shrug: Whatever. I have a similar reaction to each success. Yeah, whatever.

I checked the course room every day this week, hoping for word from the Institutional Review Board that they have approved my revised recruiting method. It's a small change, how hard could it be, people? Instead of an approval notice, I got an announcement that my Chair is out of the office until July 29. Because the IRB keeps us at arm's length, communicating to us only through our Chairs like we are cootie-infested members of a lower caste, I can assume I will hear nothing this week. Oh well. Maybe next week.

It doesn't matter. I will be out of town this weekend myself. I'm going to Minneapolis for a reunion. So, if the plane goes down somewhere between here and there, let me just take this opportunity to say it's been a blast writing this blog. I hope this isn't the last post, but then do we ever really know what will happen when we walk out the door? I'm more likely to get decapitated in a car wreck caused by some texting teenager than die in a plane crash. But I've always wanted to be special.

Speaking of feeling special, I probably mentioned I have a new neighbor. Joy is gone, replaced by a young man named Everett. Everett moved in and then disappeared for a while. I feared he might have drowned in his tub. But no, I saw him last week, said hi, made a connection. It's sort of that connection you try to make with your kidnappers, so they won't kill you, you know what I mean? I kicked myself later for not mentioning how thin the walls are at the Love Shack. Because now I am suffering.

He's got something in his bedroom, some kind of a machine with a motor. Does this sound familiar? Wasn't I complaining about Mary having something that intermittently whined on and on? This is not a whine, it's a rumble. It's right on the other side of the wall. I can hear it when I watch my television. I can hear it when I take a bath. Imagine your windows are open to a summer night, and off in the middle distance, you hear the grumble of a freight train slicing through the night, rushing along the Gulch toward Hood River. It's like that. Only it never stops.

Air conditioner is my bet. An exotic guess would be an aquarium pump—maybe he has tropical fish in his room to help him sleep. Maybe it is a refrigerator, for his beer. No, it doesn't go off, it just keeps rumbling, a low, low vibration that I can feel in my chest. Annoying as it is, it isn't as bad as Joy's music. So I'm going to just live with it. I will pretend it is a freight train, heading east out the Gorge, carrying coal. No, not coal. Carrying art supplies and yarn for hungry artists and knitters. Yeah.

What not to do if you are a career college

I know I said I was going to let go of the career college and stop wallowing in the past. It's hard. Recently I whined about the linen truck that goes by several times a day, driven by one of my former students—oh, dear, will he make it to class on time, oh dear me. It's hard to ignore the screaming transmission as he wrestles the truck around the corner, but I'm trying. Mostly I've been focused for the past few weeks on my shaky recruiting strategy, wherein I struggle to wrangle faculty to interview for my dissertation project. More on that topic later. I'd like to say I've left the career college behind, but every day or so, someone, usually my former-colleague-now-friend Sheryl, calls me to update me on the latest insanity she's heard from “reliable sources.”

More than once I have contemplated writing a sitcom based on life at the career college. I wouldn't have to invent a thing. The truth would be way more entertaining than any fiction I could create. The characters are already there, a bizarre cast magically assembled by a quirk of fate. At the top you've got the invisible absentee college president and the two eccentric owners, one a former educator (so I've been told), the other a bankrupt real estate developer (this I Googled). This cabal rules from the shadows off-stage; you never see them. Running things from day to day you've got the uptight VP of Academic Affairs, a former office-manager-turned-administrator, micromanaging via scathing emails. Then you've got a little clutch of Program Directors, hopping around with varying levels of competence, trying to please the VP of Academic Affairs and keep the students from escaping, complaining, or suing the college. Toss in a few neurotic instructors and a swarm of demanding students, and you have the perfect script for a darkly morose comedy.

Even before I left, one of the program directors had started demonstrating odd behavior. I don't know if I've ever blogged about him before. I'll call him Wally. He is the Associate Program Director for one of the more popular programs, but not a healthcare program. (I should say was, not is. More on that in a minute.) Some time back, Wally got in trouble for showing pornography to some students. So I heard. Now, I'm sure it was probably done in the context of a discussion on free speech, but apparently the females in the group did not appreciate the educational nature of the presentation and complained to other students, other instructors, and eventually to other program directors. By the time the campus closed in early May, everyone knew about it. We all wondered how and why Wally managed to be one of the three lucky employees invited to transfer to the main location.

Enter Denny, my former boss, also one of the three invited to keep his job. Denny stormed into the office of the Human Resources Director (who doesn't rate the bestowal of any name, fictitious or otherwise) and proceeded to loudly lodge a complaint against both Wally and Wally's boss, Velma, who had repeatedly failed to display backbone, despite knowing about Wally's indiscretions for some time (and despite being thin as a stick). Are you getting this? I know, really?

Do you remember a 1960s show called Peyton Place? Probably you are too young. (I have to keep reminding myself that I am now older than a lot of people. I still feel like I'm about twelve.) Maybe you've heard people murmur in awed disgust, “Wow, what a Peyton Place!” and wondered what they meant. The phrase is now part of the vernacular, and I would say it is synonymous with soap opera, in case you haven't Googled it yet. Well, if you've ever seen a soap opera, you will understand the nature of life at this career college. It was always fraught with drama—I could tell you stories!—but now, according to reliable sources, the place is nuttier than a fruitcake factory.

Each term ends on a Thursday, which means Friday is set aside for teachers to grade papers, prepare final grades, and attend teacher training at the in-service. That was today. Reliable sources have reported (Sheryl heard it from Denny, who may have witnessed it with his own eyes) that Wally was informed this morning that he was being terminated. He retaliated by proclaiming, “I'm going to kill myself!” while walking by an open door to a classroom filled with new students attending orientation for the new term which starts on Monday.

Now do you see why I mention Peyton Place? It seems too deliciously entertaining to be true, doesn't it? Surely someone wrote this script! But knowing Wally (a fellow chronic malcontent who has seriously lost his hold on reality), it probably is true. From my lofty perspective, ten weeks after being let go, ten weeks into self-employment, I can look on the whole sordid episode with righteous glee. Didn't I predict the place would implode!? Vindicated! Validated! Today I laughed loudly and long, maybe ever so slightly guiltily, when Sheryl told me the news. All of which just affirms my conviction that I did the right thing by turning Denny down earlier this week when he offered me three classes for next term. As an adjunct, of course. Should I feel insulted or appreciated that they thought of me when they needed someone to teach the 10-key calculator class?

I turned him down not out of pride, but out of practicality. I will be conducting my faculty interviews at that location. Yep, I am happy to say, I got permission from the college president to have access to the faculty. I pleaded via email. He tersely granted it and handed me off to the VP of Academic Affairs (oh yay, lucky me). While I wait for IRB approval for my revised method, I contemplate the slow-motion meltdown of the career college that used to employ me and wonder what effect all this will have on the perceptions of faculty who will soon talk to me about academic quality. I am going to have to document the conditions at the college for my dissertation. I can do that. The hard part will be resisting the temptation to turn my description into a soap opera. Fade in...

If you don't bring forth what is within you, what you don't bring forth will destroy you

Today I dug out some old art supplies and started making a gift for a friend. The gift has two parts. Part of the gift is old art, two little paintings I made 14 years ago in a painting class. The other part consists of a wooden frame, a panel of quarter-inch particle board, and some modeling paste. How does it all go together, you ask? Well, we have yet to find out. I am hoping a coat of paint will cover the flaws. Isn't that the story of my life, eh?

I think the real story here is the fact that I dug out my old art supplies. I haven't painted since about 2003, when I got the teaching job at the career college. That job represented a turning point for me, a new direction toward something stable and respectable. Away from my so-called art career, the unstable and not-so-respectable path I've trod since childhood. But even as I embraced my new career, I kept my paints, stored in a box on a high shelf. I kept the jug of modeling paste, part of a group of paint cans enlisted to support a book shelf. I kept collecting wooden frames and other art-related paraphernalia, tucking them away into nooks and crannies, waiting for some day when I'd be ready to paint again.

So today it felt good—odd, but good to sand the dried gunk off my old palette knife. I popped the top on the jug of modeling paste with a screw driver and found the paste fresh and lovely and white as sugar frosting. I smoothed it on the frame with the palette knife like I was decorating a birthday cake. It is my friend Bravadita's birthday this week. I hope my gift is dry by the time I visit her at her downtown digs.

Fooling around with modeling paste makes me think about making art again. That thought makes me wonder if the past 15 years have just been an aberration, a detour away from my true calling. That thought makes me feel a little sick, because I've invested eight of those years and about $50,000 in a frustratingly stalled doctorate. Luckily before I could stick my head too far down that mental garbage pail, I remembered that there are always more than two choices. It's not either-or, it's and, and and, and and—as many ands as I want, as many as I've the guts to pursue.

Maybe I'll paint again, who knows. Although I'd have to give the stuff away: I have no room in the Love Shack to store paintings. And no room to store any more furniture, should I decide to convert my art to shelves and end tables like I did with my last batch of paintings. Art that became functional, I guess you could say. I don't even notice them anymore, old wooden paintings screwed together and obscured by stacks of t-shirts, books, the collected detritus of my life.

I was thinking about pleasant art versus... would I call it unpleasant art? What would you call it, the kind of art that makes you cringe or feel uneasy or squint? The kind of art that makes you work a little bit, or maybe a lot. Compared to the art that looks really nice over a couch or hanging in a stairwell. If I had stuck with making pleasant art, I would probably have had an art career selling stuff to interior decorators. Instead I made unpleasant art that was a little too... raw? Picture in-your-face nudes with no heads, arms, or legs. Yep, 'fraid so. Sadly, not what people wanted hanging over their couches. At least not people in my circle of family and friends.

Some part of me thinks that if I had just kept painting what I wanted to paint, I would eventually have succeeded in making a respectable art career. I wouldn't have felt compelled to sell my soul to stay alive. It's a small part of me that believes that. A much bigger part of me knows it's likely that if I had tried to paint what I wanted to paint, I'd be dead of starvation by now. But one thing I know: if I had tried to paint the pleasant stuff, the butterflies and flowers and rippling brooks, I'd for sure be dead by now. Rest in peace, Thomas Kinkade. I live to paint another day.

What do I do? Uh...

I'm so proud of myself. I networked today! Me, the rabid introvert, the chronic malcontent with nothing good to say, I actually managed to show up to a group event and interact with a table full of strangers without spitting up or hiding out in a corner. I wore appropriate clothing, I sat up straight, and I didn't roll a toothpick around in my mouth. (My sister will be pleased.) All in all, I think I did pretty well.

Also, to my credit, I didn't try to be something I wasn't. I didn't wear clothes that weren't my style (like, you know, a crop-top, hot pink skinny pants, and platforms). I wore a tasteful monochromatic palette of black, gray, and white. I wasn't embarrassed to put on my black knit cap and fingerless gloves (former socks) when the air conditioning kicked in. I wasn't too shy to draw pictures in my notebook as I was taking notes during the presentation. The one thing I almost did, but didn't, was pull out my bright blue stainless steel water bottle, the one that says, Holy Water: Tap into it. Redeems parched sinners on the front. You never know who might not think it was funny. I wouldn't want to irritate any of the people in this group, because I hope among them will be my future clients.

I was early, as usual. The registration person was stuck in traffic, so I sat at a table and got a preview of the slide show as the presenter struggled with her technology. A tall man in long shorts and a gorgeous shirt in a splashy green and orange plaid sat down next to me.

“Hi, I'm Dan.”

“Hi, Dan. I'm Carol.”

And then the dreaded question. “What do you do, Carol?”

My shoulders spasmed up to my earlobes with nervous tension. What do I do, what do I do? As my brain spun in circles, I realized, omigod, it's another version of the most dreaded interview question on earth: Tell me about yourself. Well, I flunked the answer to the question, What do I do, I'm sorry to say. With my eyes darting around the room, I stammered some disconnected sentences and chanced a glance at his face to see if I was sunk. He looked a little nonplussed. I took a breath. I'm sure I looked manic at that point.

Eventually I clawed my way to the metaphorical third floor, but not after I crashed the elevator into the basement. You get what I'm saying? The elevator pitch? I'm sure you have one, a lovely 30-second speech about what you do. Right? A little blurb that rolls trippingly off your tongue when someone asks you, What do you do? I actually have an elevator pitch, believe it or not, but it needs some work, especially after today. This morning I met with my business advisor from the SBDC. She did a little niche reconstruction on me (it's not as painful—or humiliating—as it sounds), and now my elevator pitch needs revision.

He could have got up and joined people at another table at that point, but Dan stuck it out the entire evening. Maybe he was taking pity on me, trying to be nice, trying not to be rude. It's possible, I suppose. It's more likely he forgot my disjointed introduction immediately and got busy with his own thoughts. Like a normal person.

The blonde woman who sat down on my left smiled and introduced herself.

“Hi, I'm Kim.”

I introduced myself, relieved to have someone else to be the focus of Dan's attention. But, no, what she said was, “So, Carol, what do you do?”

What is with these people? Don't they care about who I am? Or how I feel? All they want to know is what I do! Like what I do will explain everything. Like what I do is the clue to understanding me. Clearly they don't realize that what I do changes every week! Ten weeks ago, I was a college instructor. Then I was an unemployed loser. Followed the next week by a frustrated doctoral candidate. Then suddenly I was a small business owner! And then I was a website designer, that was a laugh a minute. Now I guess I'm a researcher, although the niche reconstruction is still going on, so I'm not sure if I'm a marketing researcher or what kind of researcher I am, exactly. And I think I have more roles planned for next week.

So what do I say when they ask what I do? It sounds like a metaphysical question, one of those questions whose answer is in the question, or whose answer is a journey not a destination, or whose answer is inside me, like god. (You know what they say about god dwelling inside us, right? That he'd better like enchiladas, because that is what he's getting. Har har har.) Anyway, I'm going to revise my elevator pitch. And I'll tidy up my mission statement and my personal life philosophy, too, as long as I've got the rock overturned. And maybe I'll do some laundry and clean the cat box. At least I'll have something to say the next time someone asks me, What do you do?

If you can't make a decision, it means you don't know who you are

I once overheard someone say, “If you can't make a decision, it means you don't know who you are.” I chewed on that idea for several years while I floundered my way out of a disintegrating relationship. Should I stay or should I go? All those years invested, all that crap to box up and move... but no more companionable TV time together, no more sex...on the other hand, no more snarky comments, no more walking on eggshells, no more of that peculiarly profound loneliness you only get when you are in a relationship... weighing the pros and cons of uprooting the status quo in favor of embracing the unknown.

Breaking up is a big decision. I don't know how you make the big decisions, but I have to roll around in the muck for a long time before all of a sudden my perspective shifts, and I wake up. It's like someone turns on a light switch. One moment I'm in the dark, the next moment, things are bright and clear as day. All that remains at that point is logistics. My heart and mind leave long before my body walks out the door. By the time I carry the last box to the car, I've been gone for months. Each partner (I was always the one to leave) accused me of being cold and callous, of leaving with no advance warning. What can I say? The time for tears passed ages ago. It just took time for my body to catch up to the rest of me. Bye-bye.

I left my last relationship ten years ago, Independence Day weekend, 2003. My only regret is I waited so long. Decision making takes as long as it takes. You can't rush it. It's a process, it's organic, like mold growing on bread. Like yogurt, like beer. Like growing a garden. When you are in the middle of the process, it seems never-ending, a nail-scraping eye-gouging eternity of frustration. Why can't I decide! Clearly we aren't happy! But we used to have so much fun together... But now it sucks. Why can't I just leave? But how will I pay the rent on my own? Argh!

I have an acquaintance who telephones me regularly, presumably to witness her chronic indecision. She (I'll call her Kaylee) has elevated indecision to a high art. The simplest decisions—where should I eat? Should I go out with my friends or not?—are torn apart into microscopic moments that must be examined and discussed in excruciating detail. Kaylee does not enjoy this process. Frequently she weeps. Each decision has the weight of life or death behind it. The wrong decision really feels like a death sentence to her. Me, I'm like, just make a decision already, who cares? Either way you learn something. But she can't; she's paralyzed with fear.

Twice in the past year I've persuaded her to flip a coin to make a decision. The first time was a big decision. She was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to break up with her partner, a man who lived in her basement. (I know, really?) They hadn't had a real relationship in years, yet she was terrified to let him go. For months she told me she didn't love him, she wanted him gone, she just needed to gather courage to ask him to move out. Then she found out he had been seeing someone else. Finally, I thought. Now she'll be happy to see him go, but no! Suddenly her love for him revived. She declared her desire to marry him, to have his baby, to commit to him forever, because she loved him so much. Oh, why hadn't she seen it before, while she kept him relegated to the basement!? Oh, woe, alas, alackaday! She wept, she gnashed her teeth, she went without sleep and food.

I'll be the first to admit, love can make anyone nuts. Leaving a relationship is not for the faint of heart. It's advanced decision making, a 400 level course. It requires guts. So I let her wallow in her indecision on the boyfriend. I witnessed. Hey, it can happen to anyone. Love is a battlefield, right?

The second time we tossed a coin, though, she was trying to decide if she should drive to the coast for a vacation with her friends. The problem was, her cat was sick. Should she stay with the cat, or go on vacation? Hmmmm, a classic dilemma. Should she apply a Kantian approach? The good of the friends would surely outweigh the good of the measly cat. On the other hand, you could apply the Golden Rule: if you were a cat, what would you want? Walk a mile in my furry paws.

I always ask, when confronted with what appears to be two obvious options, are those my only choices? Like, when I go to a buffet, I scope out the whole thing, from lettuce to pudding, before I choose my entree. I like to know the whole picture. Kaylee sees only two options, and both are fraught with the danger of making a wrong decision. I suggested she let the universe decide. She flipped a coin, and it came up heads: go on vacation.

“Great,” I said. “The universe has spoken. Have a good trip.”

“No, I can't go, I can't leave Tippy!”

“Ok, then don't go, stay home.”

“But I really need a vacation!”

“Ok, so go on vacation.”

“But what if Tippy dies while I'm gone!”

“Tippy's a cat.”

“Tippy's like my child! If something happened while I was gone, I'd never be able to live with it.”

“Ok, so stay home with Tippy.”

“But my friends are going to be there!”

I did a lot of eye-rolling while she raved and wept in anguish. When we finally ended the call, I heaved a sigh of relief that I didn't have the disease of indecision. When I decide, I just go with it, whatever it is, if it seems right at the time, I just go with it. I let the universe take care of the outcome. I don't always make the right decision, but I always learn something. Isn't that one of the purposes of living? To learn? Maybe it means I finally know who I am. Or maybe it means I'm ok with not knowing.

Leaving the old world behind

Every day, several times per day, I hear a certain truck drive by the street in front of the Love Shack and make the turn to go west on Belmont. It's a big white box truck with a distinctive whining transmission, easily differentiated from the hordes of buses, cars, and other trucks that make the turn. The last run of the day happens about 5:00 p.m. I always look at the clock. I'm checking how many minutes after the hour. If it's only five after the hour, the driver takes the turn in an efficient but leisurely fashion. If it is ten after the hour, the howl of the transmission as the truck careens around the corner indicates that the driver is beginning to panic.

What does all this mean? I'll tell you. The driver of the truck is a former student, a young man I used to teach at the career college where I worked until May 2. He drives linens and laundry from a local hospital to their off-site laundry facility. Back and forth, over the shoulder of Mt. Tabor, he drives the big white truck. I think I've written about this student before in my blog. I called him Roger. He's the one that Dr. WhizzKid, my naturopath, told me was causing me some digestive problems. (Well, to be accurate, my envy of Roger was causing my digestive problems.)

Because the Clackamas campus closed May 2, Roger is now finishing his studies at the Wilsonville campus, which is a good 40 minutes away from the Love Shack, on a good day, no traffic. Evening classes begin at 5:40 p.m. The later his last laundry run, the later he is to class.

So, I check the clock. I worry for him. I am trying to leave the old world behind, but every time Roger drives by in the big white truck, I think of him and wonder how he is doing, how he will get to class on time.

It's just chance that he hasn't yet seen me. Sometimes I'm out in front of the Love Shack, poking at the weeds. I hear the distinctive whine and wonder, is this the day he will see me? Is this the moment where I have to interact with the old world? And what if he does see me and recognize me? It's not like he can stop in the middle of the street. No, he's got laundry to pick up and deliver. He's got a schedule to maintain. He's got a class to show up late to.

Odds are, even if he did glance my way, he wouldn't recognize me. He's never seen me in my civvies. I look like a homeless person these days. No more black slacks and jacket, my dour uniform of the past ten years. I predict when the moment comes, his eyes will slide right past me. Just another middle-aged decrepit digging in the dirt and wearing her pajamas in public.

I'm looking forward to the day when Roger graduates from the career college and gets a better job, one that doesn't require him driving the truck past my house four times a day. Then I won't have to worry about him getting to class on time. Then I can stop thinking about my old life, the old job I am so thankful to be rid of, and I can focus on building a new life from the ashes.

Catching bullets in my teeth

Tomorrow I will interview my first participant for my doctoral study. I thought this day would never come. I also thought it would easier than it has been so far to recruit faculty to interview. I thought they would be clawing their way into my sample, desperate to tell me how they feel about academic quality in the for-profit vocational programs for which they teach. Clearly I need to get out more. They may have opinions, but they also have lives, apparently, and those lives take precedence over my study. I know. I can't believe it either.

Tonight I attended the last class of a 4-class How to Write Your Business Plan series. I walked down the hill to Portland Community College from the Love Shack, a good half hour walk down (40 minutes coming back, that last hill is a doozy). The first night I twisted my ankle not 20 yards from my back door. That was challenging. The second night, a week later, I had such a stomach ache, I walked bent over like an old woman. By the third week, I was feeling pretty good, although I knew I wasn't going to get a whole lot from the class. Never let it be said that I am a quitter. Of four students, I was the only one who actually produced a business plan.

The adviser never even asked to see my plan, which I thought was odd, until I realized that she doesn't expect us to complete a business plan in four weeks. She expects we will show up with a completed plan when we visit with her one-on-one next month. She made July appointments to meet with all of us individually. She is our official adviser. Apparently we are bonded for life. I presume she gets paid for her time. For us, her services are free. I can't help thinking, hey, I could do that. Why am I not doing that?

Tonight while I was walking home through the neighborhood, I fantasized about what I could do to earn money while I flog my marketing research business to life. The challenge of earning is one of my least favorite topics to fantasize about. Probably fantasize is the wrong word. Fantasize makes it sound like I'm thinking of signing on with a cruise ship or selling myself into a harem. Both fairly unlikely, although never say never. For now, I'm leaning more toward signing on with guru.com or someplace like that. Harem pants optional.

But I need to finish this pesky Ph.D.! It hangs around my neck like the legendary dead albatross, getting heavier and heavier and stinkier and stinkier. With every obstacle hurdled, another follows. Why can't it just fall easily and effortlessly into place? Why aren't faculty beating down my door to be interviewed? Why aren't my friends recruiting for me? I know why, it's because I don't know anyone. I am connectionless. Connectionless in this day and age is like being blind, deaf, and dumb. And stupid. I have, like 18 Facebook friends, and hardly more than that on LinkedIn. I'm not even on Twitter! The idea of Twitter makes me want to hurl. I'm an introvert! I can't help that people think I'm a snob. Nobody knows me, because I won't let them know me. And now when I actually need people to help me.... well, I guess you get what you give, Carol.

I will continue to beg my few friends to beat the bushes for a few more elusive faculty members, who will deign to shower me with their pearls of wisdom and then meander back to their important lives. Eventually this dissertation will get written. And approved. And defended. I will still be an introvert, though. That won't change. And I will resist social media until my last breath.

Worse than herding cats

Signing up faculty to interview for my doctoral study is worse than herding cats! Worse than wrangling medical students to do timings in keyboarding! Worse than listening to some idiot pound on a bongo drum in front of the yoga studio across the street! Argh. So far I have two legitimate subjects who have indicated interest in participating in my study by filling in my web screener. They gifted me with their contact information. I emailed them the instructions on how to make their rich picture. And now they are silent. Maybe they are immersed in drawing their masterpiece. Maybe they are out of town. Maybe I should just chill out and not make it all about me.

I did a dress rehearsal with my former colleague, Sheryl, who took time out from the grueling and mostly discouraging task of applying for administrative assistant jobs at age 66. We sat at her dining room table. I brought out all my gear: timer, audio-recorder, script, and when we were ready, I pressed REC and proceeded to interview her about her perceptions of academic quality in vocational programs at for-profit career colleges.

Considering we were both recently laid off from such an institution, it isn't surprising that she had a lot to say. She proudly displayed her neatly penciled rich picture, an orderly diagram of a system in which students enter, are transformed, and exit presumably better for the experience. The system breaks down, she said, when there are problems with management's lack of willingness to commit resources on behalf of students. Sheryl pointed out the dainty bomb image she used to indicate the presence of a problem. I had to look hard to see it, a neat and tidy explosion at the corner of the edifice of education. It warmed my heart to see she had taken the assignment seriously. There's nothing like seeing a 66-year-old ex-teacher drawing little pictures of bombs.

Afterward, I went home and transcribed the file, which I have to say is the most tedious, time-consuming task I can ever remember voluntarily undertaking. I set the transcription software to play at half-speed, so we sounded like Cheech and Chong. Hey, man, getting students to do their homework is a drag, man. Yeah, man, I know what you mean, man. I had a hard time typing, I was laughing so hard. Sheryl at half-speed conveyed the impression of a thoughtful drunk after a couple glasses of wine. I at half-speed, on the other hand, sounded like I'd been drinking for days, and smoking anything that came my way. I haven't done either in a long time, so it was a little disconcerting to imagine that I used to really sound like that. Whhh.. uh.. whar..? Back when I was about 19 or 20. But I had nothing of interest to say back then, anyway, so I doubt anyone noticed or cared.

Now I'm a lot older and supposedly smarter. Look at me, working on a doctorate. I must be smart, right? Unemployed... maybe unemployable, but really, really smart.

I am impatient with my interview subjects. It would be nice if they would step up briskly and submit to my study willingly and with enthusiasm. Maybe that is too much to expect. At this point, I'd be satisfied if they would just respond to my emails.