Zen and the art of waiting

I'm becoming a master at waiting. Over the past six months, I've had a lot of practice, what with the starts and stops of the dissertation process. Collect some data, then wait. Collect a little more data, fret, fume, and wait. Submit a draft, and wait. Submit another draft, and then wait some more. Then suddenly... approval! A fleeting moment of triumph and relief. Then schedule the oral defense, and wait. That's where we are now, waiting for the oral defense. Last I heard, it was on for December 9.

I think I can learn something from all this waiting. The state of waiting implies that I have little power to precipitate the condition I am waiting for. I mean, I would like the oral defense to be tomorrow. But I don't have the power to make that happen. No one likes to feel powerless, am I right? We like to think we are in control, of our own lives, at least. The metaphysics of powerlessness are paradoxical: Sometimes we have to give up our illusion of control in order to gain true independence. That's so Zen, isn't it? Ommmm. I'm pretty sure I'm not there yet. My response to all this enforced waiting is to simply curl up in a ball and endure.

Speaking of enduring, today I took my mother to the mall. She wanted to buy some books for the grandchild, who will achieve his first birthday in January. The mall was sparsely populated with customers, being the week before Thanksgiving, but crowded with young and rabid salespeople. They are relentless at that age! Was I ever like that? Infused with maniacal energy and indefatigable persistence? I don't remember all that much of my 20s, but I don't think I was ever that confident or determined, not then or since, now that I think about it. I think I've been waiting for something. But I digress.

After purchasing three Doctor Seuss books, we exited the last bookstore chain that hasn't succumbed to Wal-Mart and meandered down the mall. This is the same mall where last December a shooter killed two people and wounded a third before killing himself. As we passed by Santa, holding a tense little boy captive on his lap, I didn't think about the shooting. I thought about how slowly my mother walks now, two years after her hip replacement and a year after breaking her pelvis in a fall down some concrete stairs.

“Would you like to sample some tea?” I froze. Then I scanned the landscape warily for the origin of the voice. Drat! A salesperson! For a moment, I thought I heard the baying of wolves, just over the hill and closing fast. You know if you hesitate for the slightest moment, you are a goner. Unfortunately, I hesitated, and my doom was upon me. The young salesperson exerted his will and lured me in. (Mom, go for help!) He led me over to two huge containers, apparently filled with two kinds of tea. He filled a dinky plastic cup and held it out to me. Automatically, I took it and sipped. Fruit flavors! (Chemical aftertaste?) Sweet! (Too sweet!) Brain overload.

He was young, a little pimply, skinny to the point of starvation. “Now try this one!” I obeyed. Cinnamon, vanilla, (fake!) sweet... (oh, no, did I just imbibe some sugar?) I felt like I'd taken the bait and lost my soul. Walk away! Walk away while you still can! Too late. Give my books to the Library Foundation! Oh, Rosebud.

I looked around at all the tea paraphernalia, arranged carefully, perfectly, antiseptically... artificially. Everything was too clean, too perfect, not at all appealing to me. Where's the colorful teapots, the big glass bins of delicious loose teas, made with organic ingredients? The realization that I'd just tasted temptation from a minion of satan swept over me. Suddenly I heard my mother's gravelly voice say, “I'm a coffee drinker,” and reason returned. Hey, I'm a coffee drinker now, too. Ever since self-unemployment, the more robust the better. Tea is for wimps!

“It's very tasty, very sweet,” I began, attempting to reassure the kid.

“It does have a little rock sugar,” he admitted.

I headed for the door, my mother in tow. “Enough of that,” I said, wishing I had a big cup of French roast right then, so I could swill some and breathe the bitter fumes back in his face. He thrust a brochure at me in desperation, but we were gone.

We paused to regroup in front of Macy's. “Let's go back to the car,” she said. We hadn't made it halfway to Sears. We both agreed that there was something about aimless mall walking that really sapped one's will to live. We slowly wended our way back to the parking lot. The sun was still shining. It must have been 50°, so strange for late November.

“What will you do with the rest of your day?” she asked when we got back to her condo.

I said I would like to take a walk in the park, but actually, I was feeling a little dizzy, no doubt from swallowing the two little sips of chemical-laced, sugar-infested artificially flavored beverage masquerading as tea. By the time I got home I had a mildly sickening headache, which I cured with ibuprofen and a nap. And some coffee.

I spend my days waiting. Waiting to feel better. Waiting for my mother to trip over a curb or fall down some stairs. Waiting for the dissertation committee to say, oh sorry, we can't make it on December 9, we'll have to reschedule for January. I've spent my life waiting, mostly dreading bad things that never happen, or being so unconscious and distracted that I don't notice when good things happen. I have the uneasy feeling that I'm rehearsing for the real thing, the life that will soon be coming, if I just wait long enough.

How do you know when you're in the flow?

A few days ago I was contemplating the nature of flow. I refer to a state of being where one is so absorbed in an activity that one loses all track of time. If you are a writer or an artist, you know what I mean. But anyone can experience flow. For example, I'm sure my mother is experiencing flow when she plays Castle Camelot.

I often read a book entitled Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I keep it in my bathroom. It shares a shelf with Smooth Move, Trickle Down Theory, and Evacuate! (I'm kidding. Really. Do such books exist? If not, they should.) I've read Flow before, some years ago. Now I am re-reading it, a paragraph or two at a go, so I really have time to ponder the quality of time and the nature of experience.

I wonder, is it better to engage in some engrossing activity—reading, writing, or painting, for instance—oblivious to the passage of time, surfacing in surprise from your bliss hours later, wondering where the day went? Or is it better to be painfully present to the excruciatingly slow passage of time and thereby retain consciousness of every precious second by engaging in some task that you despise—for example, teaching keyboarding to uninterested students? It's a rhetorical question. But think about it. Would you rather be conscious and miserable, or unconscious and happy? Maybe consciousness is over-rated. (Although paychecks are useful, I must admit.)

Today I received approval for my dissertation manuscript. I emailed my sister and attached the slides for my oral defense. She called tonight to congratulate me; I did my best to hold still and hear the praise. She asked for some PowerPoint tips, so I guess she liked the slide show. I'm glad. She and my mother have been my faithful cheerleaders through this entire eight-year journey. It seems a paltry gift to simply name them on my Acknowledgements page, but that's what they are getting for Christmas.

In just over two weeks, I will present my oral defense via telephone conference call, with my stalwart friend and former colleague Sheryl acting as my proctor. She will sit on my couch amid the dust bunnies and hairballs and be my witness as I read my prepared script to an unseen audience. My Chair and the Nameless, Faceless Committee Member will ask me some questions—If you were to do your study over, what would you do differently? How do you think your recommendations could be implemented? What research will you do next? What was the most difficult part of the process? What words of advice would you give to a Ph.D. candidate just starting her first DIS course?—and I will try to answer the questions briefly and succinctly with a minimum of um's. Then my Chair will say, “Okay, Carol, now you will drop off the call while we confer. Call back in five minutes.”

Assuming I enter the right passcode and am shunted into the correct conference call, I will announce myself. Then she will either say, “Congratulations Dr. Carol,” or she will say, “No soup for you! One year!” No, I'm kidding. Ha ha. No, at this point, it's unlikely she will say anything but nice job, Doctor So-and-So, congratulations, upload your final manuscript, so long, thanks for the $50,000, have fun talking to the Registrar, bye now.

Finishing this Ph.D. is going to open up a massive void in my life. The thought of what comes next is paralyzing. Maybe it won't be so bad, though. While I waited for approval for my dissertation, I had a fun little research project for the past week, thanks to a friend's recommendation, analyzing the results of a quantitative survey for a large manufacturing company. It's a different world than academe, that's for sure. Commercial research is less rigorous in some ways than academic research, but you've got all those client demands and interactions. It's the business world, after all: They are the customer, I'm the vendor. I uploaded the files by the promised delivery date, and that was the last I heard. I don't even know if they believe they got what they asked for. I know they got more than they paid for (assuming they eventually pay me). Still, it was a wonderful four days, during which I spent considerable time in flow, oblivious to everything but the task before me.

I need more work like this. Even though the days will pass more quickly, I will be happily unconscious. That is all I ever wanted, anyway, a relief from consciousness. If I can get paid to check out, what more could a chronically malcontented misfit ask for?

Calculating how many degrees of freedom I will have after I finish my doctorate

While I wait to hear if my dissertation manuscript has been approved, I am relearning statistics. It's either that or crossword puzzles. I am adept at running statistical tests in Excel—any trained monkey can do that, once it figures out that installing the Data Analysis Toolpack results in beaucoup bananas. I can compare the scores of two groups to see if perhaps their differences are due to the random chance we all face as we flit about our day, or due to the fact that they are in fact really different in some significant way. Like they root for rival soccer teams or something, I don't know, I'm just making this up. Click the button, whoosh, Excel performs its magic, and voilá, you have output! It's like a statistical meat grinder. Of course, like a meat grinder, what you get out of it depends a lot on what you put into it. I didn't collect this data, so I have to accept what I have. (Have you noticed that I've used two French words in one paragraph? Zut alors!)

Today I discovered the equation that calculates the degrees of freedom needed to conduct a t-test on two independent samples. (No, I don't mean I discovered the equation. I mean I figured out how to type it into Excel. I feel like I imagine Columbus felt when he discovered India, that is to say, like an ignoramus.)

There are so many ways to go with this topic, it's hard to pick just one. Like, are you wondering what degrees of freedom are? Tantalizing, isn't it? We like freedom, it's one of our national values, although it hasn't always been applied fairly, but still, we live and die for it, so it must mean something to us, freedom. Degrees of it sounds a little uncertain, but we can always use more freedom, right? Can there ever be too much freedom? Hmmm. Ask any kid who doesn't get a lot of parental attention. Maybe too much of a good thing, like eating ten maple bars when one or two would do? Food for thought.)

The degrees of freedom I'm talking about actually have to do with calculating a specific statistical test to see if two independently collected samples are significantly different from one another. Does that sound like a foreign language to you? Mais non, if you are a statistician, which I'm not. I love statistics, but no matter how many times I study statistics, I can barely grasp the concepts before they slip away. Like anything to do with numbers, statistical concepts just don't stick in my brain, and the older I get, the less they stick, along with phone numbers, birthdays, and what I had for lunch yesterday. It's like my brain is hardening into a slick marble ball. I look on the bright side: When I'm dead, the morgue attendants can go bowling. Miniature bowling. (Do they have such a thing?)

The statistical equation for calculating degrees of freedom in Excel, in case you were wondering, is this:

Where S1 and S2 represent the standard deviations of the two samples, respectively, and N1 and N2 are the sample sizes of the two samples. That's all you need, plus a buttload of parentheses in exactly the right places. (Oh, and don't type the DF part.) No sweat. I guarantee after you type this in successfully, you will feel a strange tingling sensation that can be interpreted as a frisson of freedom. A successful outcome, by the way, will be obvious when you generate a value that is just slightly smaller than the sum of the two sample sizes. Clear signs that you have erred would include a negative number or a ridiculously high number like, oh say, 16,345.2345 when your combined sample size is 40. Ha! Logic prevails, eventually.

What, me worry?

I've been avoiding this moment for six months. This week I was broadsided with an unpleasant realization: No, it can't be! Can it be? How could this happen? I'm unemployed! Wha—? Those... those people! Those people I trusted like family (that is to say, not much) pulled up their big boy pants, put on their management hats, and decided that I was expendable, superfluous, extraneous... and they let me go (along with a bunch of other unnecessary human flotsam but this is about me, as usual). Argh. How could they? And more to the point, how come it took six months for the reality of unemployment to sink into my gasping brain? That's kind of a long lag time, don't you think? What's my excuse, you ask?

Maybe it's because I've been busy finishing my D. Phil. Or maybe it's because I've been intermittently flailing in the throes of an entrepreneurial seizure. I don't know. The warm golden days of October are long gone, and now Portland is drenched in November. Brain fog makes it hard to figure out what I'm thinking. Never a good sign.

This morning I woke up in the grimy twilight of mid-morning and found the electricity was out. I put on my glasses and peered out the window. No lights on in the cafe across the street. Hmmm. A power outage in the 'hood? I found my diminutive lime green camping lantern (no, I don't camp) and used it to look up the power company in one of my many yellow-paged phone books. According to the robot on the other end, I was the 258th caller, and two... thousand... two... hundred... and... twenty... three... customers were affected by the outage, which they estimated would be fixed by 10:30 a.m. And by the way, if I had any information about what was causing it, please stay on the line.

I found the dregs of yesterday's coffee in the bottom of my cup and savored the burned staleness, trying to stave off panic, wondering what the hell I would do with myself until the power came back on. What did people do before electricity? Uh.... read books, talk to each other, go for walks, heat water over a fire, work the fields, die of consumption... I took the lantern back to bed with a book, prepared to wait it out. Five minutes later, the bedside light came on. And that was my short-lived foray into the 18th century. I leaped out of bed and got the coffee going, feeling a little more grateful than usual for the blessings of the modern age.

I'm also feeling thankful that I don't live in a hurricane/typhoon zone. The news from the Philippines is heart-breaking. I'm not equipped to handle a disaster of any kind, natural or human-made, especially during these days when I feel so discombobulated. What a luxury problem, to be so self-obsessed. It's hard to fathom a world where huge waves sweep thousands out to sea. I live on a hill, which means I am probably safe from flooding. But I'm a sitting duck in a raging fire.

In the immortal words of Alfred E. Neuman, What, me worry? Just let me get through the next month. Then I can collapse in a quivering puddle of (unemployed) human-flavored aspic.

At last, a reason to take a moratorium on service

My brain is full of talk talk talk, but little action seems to be forthcoming. While I wait for feedback on the second draft of my dissertation, I am once again in limbo, fretting over my future and avoiding my present. Last Tuesday I visited my naturopath, Dr. Tony, for my quarterly tune-up. I never know ahead of time what diabolical new technique he will want to try out on me, but I never say no. The man saved my life, after all. Four years ago, I was slowly dying of self-imposed malnutrition. He diagnosed me, prescribed clean food and lots of water, and cheerfully signed me up for the maintenance plan. I see him every few months, and he finds in me a willing victim for his latest wacky techniques.

Maybe there should be an annual limit to how much self-improvement doctors can attempt. Every time Dr. Tony attends a class or seminar, he seems overly eager to practice his new knowledge. I presume he is practicing on everyone else, too, not just me. That would be too weird if he said, Oh boy, I can't wait until Carol comes in again, so I can try out my new vertebrae-adjusting gun on her!

Today Dr. Tony looked natty in his white jacket. As soon as the examining room door was closed, he said, “I just took a class on Total Body Modification!” rubbing his hands together with obvious glee.

I grimaced at him. I wasn't feeling particularly perky that morning, what with the low clouds and rain, the piles of mushy wet leaves, and the prospect of spending money I could not afford to spend. He looked so happy. I lay on my back on his table, peering up at his grinning face, and resigned myself to my fate. Another payment on your student loan, dude. He laid a flimsy notebook on my stomach. Then he reached for my arm. I raised it automatically—by now I am a well-trained patient—so he could muscle-test me. He eagerly flipped through the pages of the notebook while pushing on my upraised arm.

“Oh, wow,” he said with excitement. He paused. “Wait, I have to look this up.” He grabbed a heavy book off the little table under the window and paged through it. Then he bent down and grabbed something small from a bag on the floor. He held up what looked like a dinky white test tube. I couldn't see what was in it, if anything, nor what was written on the label. “This little tube contains magnetically charged bla bla that will resonate with your bla bla bla, so we can clear away the bla bla bla. Bladdity bla bla. Hold this right here.”

He handed me the tiny white vial and told me to press it to my chest. I did. He tapped my leg above the knee and I obediently raised it. “Push back.” I pushed against his hand, and my leg weakened and fell to the table. He grinned like a maniac. “See, that blows out. Okay, now sit up. I'm going to adjust the bla bla on your back. Now let me see which ones...” He turned to the book again, musing out loud. “Four, eight, and... ten.” Then he took his little silver gun and pressed the trigger against certain bones in my spine, telling me to breathe in and out.

When I laid back down on the table, still holding the vial against my chest, he tested my leg again. This time I could hold it against the pressure of his hand. Muscle-testing is weird.

“So, what that was, that was the Zeta Virus,” he informed me. “This is to clear you of suicidal ideation.”

I must have looked skeptical. “This is for people who aren't necessarily planning on committing suicide,” he reassured me. “But sometimes they find themselves driving along a road, crossing a bridge, and they wonder what it would be like, what would happen, if they suddenly were to turn the wheel...you know?”

He didn't come right out and ask me if I had entertained such morbid fantasies, but I got his drift. Well, who hasn't, that's what I want to know. I mean, don't we all, aren't we all sometimes drawn to imagine our deaths? It doesn't mean we necessarily want to die, but don't you wonder? No? Well, maybe it's not everyone. Anyway, I've been cleared of the Zeta virus now, so I don't have to obsess for a while about driving my car off a bridge. I wonder how long this cure will last? I forgot to ask.

Oddly enough, as I lay back down on the table, I felt a warm tingly feeling in my torso.

“Your eyes are brighter already,” he said rather smugly. I felt like smiling, suddenly, so I did.

“The other thing that came up for you is bla bla bla,” Dr. Tony said. He looked sidelong at me. “This is for people who do too much service, people who 'take one for the team,' you know what I mean?”

I could only stare at him in surprise. Service? Taking one for the team? Holy words, sacred words, bite your tongue, young man! I wouldn't be where I am today without intentionally cultivating an attitude of service. (That's a loaded statement, isn't it? Where do I think I am, exactly?) Of course, I didn't say anything out loud. He must have seen something in my face. “This is the self-sabotaging side of service,” he said. “Where you put everyone else's needs before your own. Like not putting on your own oxygen mask before you help your child with theirs.”

Another tiny vial, this time held on my rib cage, another muscle test, and another round of spinal shots from his silver gun, and I was pronounced cured of the affliction of excessive service. Wow. Who knew! My 12 Step compadres might be interested in this little trick.

Thus, in a matter of minutes I was cleared of suicidal tendencies and a penchant for self-sabotaging altruism. My lucky day. And it all happened in the space of 30 minutes. All in all, I received a relatively inexpensive cure for a dreary day's doldrums, plus lots of fodder for thought about the nature of self-destruction and self-sabotage through service. Oh, that wacky Dr. Tony. He's done it again.

Waiting again, and while I wait, I plan my oral defense

I'm waiting again. Waiting is a familiar occupation. Probably for you too, am I right? Today I am waiting for a response to the second submission of my dissertation manuscript. I'm waiting for the rain to cease. And I'm waiting for the Century Link guy to show up and repair my phone line. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Earlier today we had a fall storm, complete with torrential downpour and gusty winds. For a few minutes, it looked like a monsoon had swept over us, but it was gone quickly, a fast moving front heading off to dump snow in the mountains. I looked out the window, watching for the repair truck I'm sure will be here soon, and I saw a patch of pale blue sky. Already the air is lighter, brighter. It looks like daytime now instead of twilight. That makes me feel happier. I am a creature of the light, no doubt about it. If my laptop were functional, I would do my work in my kitchen, where I could bask in the glow of my new shop light. My plants are loving it. After only a few days of bright light, they are stretching greener leaves toward the ceiling. Forget the pathetic window that lets in the few murky rays that manage to penetrate the dense branches of the holly tree. Bring on the artificial light! (I hate that holly tree, and I don't generally hate anything, especially not trees.)

Last night my phone stopped working. No dial tone, not even on the perky lavender Trimline phone I keep for making calls when the power goes out. I tried to call myself, using my cell phone: busy signal. To the outside world, it probably looks like I've been on the phone all night. Not that anyone calls me in the middle of the night, but if they did, would they think I was... talking someone off a ledge, maybe? Or making some extra money by offering phone sex? It doesn't matter: most of the calls I get are telemarketing robo calls. They'll call back later.

I'm looking ahead now to the next doctoral hurdle, the oral defense. I may have mentioned that I attend an online university. I'm not sure attend is the correct word to describe what I do there, but whatever. Anyway, once I find out if my manuscript has been approved, I can schedule the oral defense, which happens via teleconferencing call. Some people use fancy teleconferencing software, probably through their work. I'm sure my teleconference will be of the plain wrap variety.

The oral defense requires a PowerPoint presentation. No problem, I've got that handled, being a PowerPoint wizard from early Windows days. Everyone loves to hate PowerPoint, but I've been able to make some decent money at times in my former life by designing slide shows, usually under the supervision of Macintosh/Adobe gurus who wouldn't be caught dead using a Microsoft product, especially PowerPoint. Blech! Actually, they just didn't want to admit they didn't know how to use it, and so they hired me. So, the presentation part is handled.

To go with the slide show, last night I wrote my oral defense script. I have 30 minutes to present, and if I go over, my Chair will cut me off. So I wrote it all out. No jokes, no fluff, just a straightforward description of the study. I timed it while I read it out loud: 25 minutes. I also recorded it and played it back, trying to ignore how insipid my voice sounded, while I watched the show. Next slide!

To ensure that I haven't hired a trained monkey to give my presentation for me, I must enlist the help of someone (not a relative or person with a conflict of interest) to proctor the oral defense. Some months back, I asked my former colleague (you know her as Sheryl) to proctor for me. She said yes, although she hasn't responded to my recent email reminding her of her commitment. She might actually have found a job. I may have to find another proctor.

The final consideration for the planning of the oral defense is the location. For a while I thought I would rent a meeting room at a local hotel. I planned to invite some colleagues and Sheryl the proctor, of course, and my mother. Lately, though, I've been feeling scared about money: I had to let the University siphon another $794 from my account this week to pay for what I hope will be my last one-credit course. So now I'm thinking I will just invite a few people over to the Love Shack.

If you know me, you know this is a big deal. Nobody comes to the Love Shack. This is my cave, my sanctuary, my castle, my safe house. Plus it's small. I mean, really small. A dinky off-season castle. I'd say my main room is 10 feet x 20 feet. Half of it is office (computer, printer, cat's chair, my chair, shelves, books), half is living room (cat tree, couch, TV, exercise bike, DVDs, shelves, books). The walls are covered with shelves from floor to ceiling, no lie, and whatever bare wall space there is, is covered with artwork. There is barely enough room for one human and one cat. And I think I'm going to invite seven or eight people over here for my oral defense?

I think I've got the logistics figured out. I'm not going to fret about it. Odds are no one but my mother will show up anyway, and she'll only attend if we don't schedule it during nap time. Hey, the Century Link guy is here. He's sitting in his truck, no doubt smoking a cigarette and swilling coffee, uttering affirmations between tokes to motivate him to provide that excellent customer service Century Link is so proud of. Wish him luck.

I'm back. DSL was down while he was working on the problem. It was a Century Link problem. He had to go to the box to switch the line, whatever that means. And now we have liftoff, boom, easy peasy. Now that's what I call service! Eat your heart out, Comcast.

Believe it or not, this doctorate is almost done. Really. I'm not joking this time.

For the past two years, when people asked me how my doctorate was progressing, I told them, “It's almost done. Almost done. Soon.” And when it kept not being done, month after month, people eventually stopped asking. Or paying attention when I said, “Almost done. Just about there.”

Now I can say it and mean it. Truly, the doctorate is almost done. This morning I received the recommended revisions from the Graduate School. I anticipated many: there were few. Only nine comments to address, and seven were in the Abstract. I took my time, spending several hours making the revisions, although I dedicated half the time to trolling for typos. Feeling pleasantly numb, I uploaded the final draft of the dissertation this evening. If there are any more changes required, they will be so minor as to take mere minutes. The thing really is almost done.

My Chair and I talked this morning by phone. I expected her to offer guidance on how to approach the revisions. Instead she said, “This document is yours, now. It's not mine, it's not the Graduate School's, it's yours. So how you want to address these changes is up to you.” I thought, That's so nice. And then I thought, So if there is anything wrong with this dissertation now, it's on me, not my mentors, not the school. Right. Okay, no problem. I can own it.

I'm so unskillful on the phone. “Wow,” I managed to say.

“Here's what will happen now. Make the revisions, don't overthink it. Today or tomorrow, get it done. I'll send it to the Committee, and then to the Graduate School for the final review.”

“Okay,” I said.

“After that, I'll schedule some blocks of time for your oral defense, about two weeks out. You need to send me your PowerPoint 10 days before the day.”

“Uh, okay,” I said.

“Download the proctor form and notify your proctor.”

“Whoa,” I said.

“You're ready. You did a fantastic job. You are a fantastic scholar. We need to keep in touch.”

I managed to thank her. We signed off. I hung up the phone and looked at my cat, reclining on his chair next to me. He opened one eye and looked at me.

“I'm almost done,” I told him. He looked skeptical, stretched, and closed his eye. I wish I could be that cool.

The chronic malcontent twiddles and frets

Today I checked the university course room (as I have been doing at least twice a day for the past 10 days) and found an email from my Chair. She said she has feedback on my dissertation manuscript from the reviewers at the Graduate School. “Not many changes at all,” is how she described it. That sounds promising. Only one problem. The university has failed to set up my next course, a situation that has not occurred in the eight years I've been allowing them to siphon my discretionary income from my bank account. (I suspect it is because I'm technically at the end of my program, no more time on the clock.) So right now I'm not enrolled in any course. Which means the Chair can't upload the feedback. No place to upload to, apparently. She can't just email it to me? Nope. I sent an email to my adviser. Maybe in a few days, they will figure out that they granted me an extension and decide it's okay to set up a new course.

So, the bad news is, the paper was not approved. The good news is, it sounds like the revisions might not be massively substantial. The bad news is I can't see the feedback until the university enrolls me in the next course. The good news is... I guess I get a few more days of thumb-twiddling.

I've cleaned everything I feel like cleaning. Other than laying around watching rom coms and eating bon bons, there's not much to do except fret over how long my savings will last. With the fear monkeys on my back, I've felt inspired to gingerly poke my toe back into my self-employment adventure. I forget what I was working on, though: it's been three months, my brain is a sieve, and information is water. I have a jumbled to-do list, and every time I try to sneak up on an item—update PayPal account, for example—I find myself sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee and reading vampire romance novels under the soothing glare of my new shop light.

I'm sneaking up on my to-do list while I wait to revise my dissertation. I'm starting slowly, with the easier stuff. For instance, I redesigned my personal website. One Wordpress page, displaying a photo of me, plus a terse explanation of who I am and what I do. That sounds so simple, doesn't it. Not. It's hard to write about oneself. I'd rather write about you. Who are you, by the way?

I also peered (through my fingers) at my two business websites, afraid for some reason that they stop functioning when my attention is elsewhere. I saw some formatting problems (I need to update my themes). Mostly I lack of content. There's a reason for that. It's because I don't know what I'm marketing to whom. It's hard to write spot-on content when you don't know your audience. Lack of clarity leads to ambiguous messages. Sigh.

On top of all that, I find I have forgotten how to do technical things I don't do very often, like uploading files to the server in the sky. How do I...? Oh yeah, I have this little ftp program, I remember now. But what's my password? Where do I upload the...? Oh, nuts. I don't want to admit that I understand why my mother has opted out of the modern technological age. At 84, she regresses a bit more every year. She gave up email and then the internet. Soon I fear she will give up her computer all together. Too expensive, too much trouble. Next to go will be her (nonsmart) cell phone. Back to rotary phones, coffee percolators, black and white TVs, letters written on paper and sent through the postal system, and—dare I say it?—face-to-face conversations, replete with body language, cigarette smoke, farts, halitosis, and hugs. Yikes!

When you get done with that two by four, pass it over here

While I wait for the verdict on my dissertation, I am doing a lot of resting, as per my Chair's directive (“Get some rest!”). You could call it thinking... planning... strategizing. You could call it sloth, too, and you wouldn't be wrong.

Although, in my defense, I will say that another restaurant-induced migraine laid me low for a day. I blame the jasmine-flavored iced tea: It smelled like perfume and tasted like chemicals. I don't know why I think I can get away with eating like other people do. You'd think I would have learned by now. My mother thinks I should eat out more often. Her diagnosis is that I treat myself like a hothouse flower. I need to expose myself to more toxins to build up my tolerance. Kind of like getting a cat when one is allergic to cats. I get it. Makes sense. It's the muscle-building theory: Use it or lose it.

However, Dr. Tony (the naturopath who saved me from self-induced starvation) says I should make every effort to avoid toxins. Apparently I have enough toxins. In fact, he says my liver is overloaded with toxins. I picture an overworked liver, huffing and puffing up a flight of stairs, dragging a huge suitcase full of dripping chemicals. It's not something you build an immunity to, it's something you gradually recover from, as long as you don't do any more chemical-ingesting.

That's harder than it sounds. Socializing usually involves eating and drinking. Meeting friends over a meal or a beverage is probably coded in our DNA. It used to be campfires and mastodon steaks. Now it's beef and broccoli over rice with jasmine-flavored tea. And flavor-enhancing, shelf-life-extending chemicals. Yum. Do we even know what is in our food? I read labels very carefully, but I suspect it's often the ingredient benignly labeled natural flavors that sticks in my craw. Lately I'm having trouble with anything that is not organic. Too bad pesticides and herbicides aren't listed as food ingredients on labels. It sure would help me avoid problems at the grocery store. But what do I do about restaurant food? I'm doomed.

Migraines for me are not so bad. An aura that blinds me for 20 minutes, followed by a nauseating headache that usually goes away with an ibuprofen and a two-hour nap. Lucky me. It could be worse. That's two migraines in just over two months. The last one was on September 11. I know because I blogged about it, real-time, as it was happening. I blamed non-organic curry powder for that episode. I stand by my accusation. This time, I blame chemicals in tea, but I don't really know what caused it. Maybe someday they will make an app for the iPhone that allows us to scan our food before we eat it, sort of like a mobile electronic poison-taster, to suss out the presence of MSG, sulfites, nitrates, and GMO ingredients. I'm not cool enough to buy Apple products, so I'll wait for the Windows version. If I live that long.

Climbing the mountain, but slowly, slowly

I'm back in waiting mode, waiting for the Graduate School to give a thumbs up/thumbs down on my dissertation (first draft). If I'm lucky, and if all the planets align, and if (contrary to some reports) there is a god, then the draft will be approved with minimal revisions. Then I'll sail on into the oral defense and graduate to the next adventure (self-unemployment, I guess you could call it). But if I'm not lucky and the planets do not align (how would I know?), and there is no god (as most days I suspect), then there will be ten gajillion revisions, from missing words to lack of logic, and I'll have to dive back into the swamp.

Well, maybe swamp is too strong a word. It's really pretty fun to write a research report, and I think I'm pretty good at it. But I'm sort of sick of this one, know what I mean? It's been years in the developing, months in the making, and at times it seems like it will never end. Lately, though, it is starting to seem like I might actually finish. I don't want to count my chickens before they tear my lips off. And it can't go on indefinitely: I do have a deadline. But every hurdle (and there have been many) has melted away—not without effort on my part, but it seems to prove the old adage that persistence wins the race. Or as Kobayashi Issa once said (who?), “O snail, Climb Mount Fuji, But slowly, slowly!”

Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest is enjoying phenomenal weather, and I have time to enjoy it. Days on end of glorious sunshine, some early morning fog, but mostly delicious sunshine until the shadows lengthen (too soon!). Our local Mount Fuji (Mt. Hood) is covered with a pristine layer of fresh powder. Not deep, though. After the wettest September on record, we have had only five days in October with measurable precipitation. Wack! Our average rainfall for October is 3 inches. We are at 0.84 inches now, but I don't hear anyone complaining. Well, maybe those fish that got left flopping high and dry after the State of Oregon decided to hold back some water in the Wickiup Reservoir for next year's growing season. Oops. Too bad fish can't unionize.

Dare I say it, maybe I have become a half-hearted believer in the... what would I call it? The rhythm of life? I won't go so far as to say that god has a plan—that's a little too woowoo for me—and I don't know how to fit massive fish kills into the overall scheme, but in my tiny snail-like existence, the timing of certain events certainly has seemed charmed at times. I'm thinking specifically of my getting laid off after almost ten years with the career college, at the almost-precise time when I needed every moment to work on my dissertation. Would I have had the courage to quit that job? Probably not: Unemployment is one of my great terrors. Clearly, this was a case of the universe doing for me what I could not do for myself. If I hadn't been laid off, I doubt the president of that college would have felt compelled by guilt to give me permission to interview my former colleagues about a sensitive topic like academic quality (of which they have little, my opinion). If I hadn't been laid off, I wouldn't have been able to complete my data collection. I'd still be flogging the bushes for suitable and willing candidates! 

If I really let myself believe that life has a rhythm and a flow, what would that be like, I wonder? Would I be more serene? Would I have more trust in the process? Would I complain less and smile more? Of course, being the chronic malcontent, my next thought is, be careful what you wish for. When the rains come, as they inevitably will, for this is Oregon, after all—when the rains come, and the east wind howls, and full daylight (let alone sunlight) is a distant memory, and my fledgling start-up is wilting from lack of income, then I might find myself cursing the timing of the universe. While I morosely peruse the want ads. 

Well, wreckage of the future and all that hoo hah... In the meantime, I'm soaking up the sun.

Take a deep breath, be here now, eat some pie

On Tuesday afternoon I received a list of revisions from my Chairperson, eleven items, some very small, some on the substantive side. Eleven items. I took a deep breath and pulled up my big girl panties, dug in, hunkered down, and bulled my way through that list. I didn't leave the Love Shack for three days (except once to take out the stinking pail of compost. And I refilled the bird seed buffet in the back yard.) I did eat and sleep. I'm not crazy. I did bathe once, I think. And in the evening, when my eyes were crossed and I couldn't see to type, I stopped and zoned out in front of the television until bedtime. So, it's not like I spent the entire 72 hours writing. But it smells like it.

Yesterday was Friday, the sprint to the finish line. I crossed every t, I dotted the i's and j's and anything else that looked better with a dot over it. And when it was as polished and shiny as I could make it, I launched the 380-page monster up to the cyber course room. My hands started shaking as I checked to make sure the document had arrived intact. I sent along with it an explanation of how I had addressed the eleven comments.

After I uploaded the file, I noticed she had sent an email saying essentially, Don't spend a lot of time fixing this thing, let's just get it done. I appreciated that sentiment. However, one of the eleven items was a request to change present tense to past tense in Chapters 4 and 5, which took a long time. I'm sure I missed some verbs, and some could go either way, but I combed through the monster, line and line, changing is to was about twenty billion times, until I got to the end. Well, not that many: I exaggerate. If you make it all the way through spellcheck, Word will give you a report of the grammar check: number of characters, words (93,939), sentences (4,986), and paragraphs (2,802), reading level (grade 13), and percentage of passive tense (13%, which is not bad for an academic scholarly document). I had to put myself in this document: You can't avoid saying I when you are the data collection method (interviewer), interacting with the data sources (human subjects). It always feels so stilted to read The researcher collected the data instead of I collected the data. Don't you think? Let's practice being here now, people.

This morning I checked the course room and found an email from my Chair. She reported that she had sent the manuscript to the Graduate School for review. And she added, Take a rest, you deserve it. Fantastic work! Exclamation point. She uses the word fantastic frequently, so I don't read much into it, but still it's nice to hear. I think I am turning into one of her successes: I don't complain, I do my best, and I get it done.

So now it's waiting time again. Up one more step on the increasingly shaky ladder toward the pie in the sky. But I'm starting to sense that this 8-year journey will soon be over. I have evidence: The Chair sent me instructions to prepare for the oral defense.

There's a moment in every one of my favorite rom com movies where the hero finally bows to the inevitable. When running from love, success, creativity, whatever, no longer works. When the hero has to turn away from the past toward an uncertain future and engage fully with the nemesis he/she has been trying unsuccessfully to avoid for 80 minutes. The tone of the music changes from confrontational to wistfully bittersweet, sort of poignant, as the hero realizes that to reach for a new identity means giving up an old identity, one that might have been comfortable and familiar, but now seems increasingly small and confining. It's a leap of faith. As the saying goes, it takes courage to live life.

So, I'm living life, letting go of an old identity to reach for something new and bigger. Probably when I get it, whatever it is, it won't be quite what I expected, but what pie in the sky goal ever tasted like anything you've tasted before?

The chronic malcontent caves to the imperious creative urge

My Chair tossed me a shred of good news today. She's “touching bases” with the Nameless, Faceless Committee (which I believe consists of one person, the subject matter expert, AKA the SME), and so far, she's found only “minor” revisions. Now, her idea of minor may not match mine, but still, in my world, any hint that I might not have a total rewrite ahead of me is excellent news. I hesitate to offer prayers to the Universe for fear of jinxing the whole thing: along the lines of What you resist, persists, or You attract what you focus on... as if we had that much power! But I'm not taking any chances. If there is the slightest possibility I can jinx it, I must take steps to counterjinx it.

Counterjinx isn't a real word. Blogger doesn't like it, and I'm sure Webster's doesn't like it, but I like it, so I'm going to use it. That is how language grows, right? Because some idiot somewhere said he was going to post some funny pictures of his cat, now we have cat bearding. And twerking? Really? I went Googling for some other words and got caught up in reading an essay about unusable words. I was reminded of earlier days when I had a fairly good sized vocabulary. Earlier days, like the 1970s. When my brain was young and pliable, and I loved words for their own sake. Now I'm down to a menu of about twenty-three words and phrases, used on a rotating basis. It's sad, really. But I just had a birthday. What can one expect? The chronic malcontent is getting old.

Back to counterjinxing. You know what I mean, right? I mean, admit it, you have a pair of lucky socks, too, I bet. Am I right? I was born on October 13, so for me, the 13th has always been an appealing number. But some people get nervous when the 13th happens to fall on a Friday. How do you feel about black cats, ladders, and mirrors? Maybe you have a ritual you do to help your team win? I don't subscribe to common superstitions. But if turning around seven times will undo any bad ju-ju I may have inadvertently attracted by focusing too intently on my desire to receive “minor” revisions, well, gimme the rabbit's foot! Sorry, Thumper!

Today I cleared away some wreckage from my past. In fact, I didn't even go out of the house. As I was cleaning, I opened a dusty plastic tote box and found some heavy wool knitted fabric, which I had purchased years ago at a thrift store, mainly because of the delicious tweedy green color. I like green. So, in my best DIY fashion, I fashioned a jacket from it, sans pattern. I just started whacking with the scissors. As I worked, I found a handful of moth holes, as well as some knitted-in flaws. That didn't stop me. I was indulging the imperious urge of my creative muse, whatever the hell that is. Similar to indigestion, I think. Anyway, you can probably guess that with no pattern, I ended up with some unexpected results, which required the insertion of some gussets. I'll let you look up that one yourself. No, it's not contagious.

Many years ago, in another life, I lived in Los Angeles, where I operated a custom clothing design business for about ten years. I did a lot of sewing. After I shut it down, I swore I'd never sew again. It's hard to keep an oath like that; buttons fall off, hems need rehemming, you know, so I've done a little bit of sewing, here and there, but nothing like today. Today was like... cooking with no recipe. Today was like painting with your fingers—with your eyes closed. It's guess-and-by-golly creativity, the most free-wheeling—and freeing —kind. But of course, when you jump off a cliff, creatively speaking, you don't always have control over crosswinds and landing places. In other words, you get what you get. What I got was a super warm jacket crafted from a fabulous greenish knitted wool, with one sleeve sewn inside out, and a few moth holes. What can I say. My eyesight isn't what it used to be.

I don't know that I'll finish it. It needs a hem and some buttons. And I'm allergic to wool. One thing for sure, though: The day reminded me of why I hate to sew. And it proves the old adage, just because you are good at something doesn't mean you should spend your time doing it. Especially if you don't like it all that much. And when you aren't that good at it anymore.

De-cluttering the chronic malcontent

My apartment, which a former friend once sarcastically named the Love Shack, has one closet, and it is in the bedroom, just inside the door. I would say it is a smallish closet, based on my 50+ years of experience with closets. Not big enough for a Murphy bed, anyway. It's about six feet long, just over two feet deep, with a clothes rod at eye-level, and it has two shelves above the clothes rod. I can just barely reach a box or basket on the top shelf. It has a regular-sized door, not a sliding door, which limits the width of things that can be stored. So, it isn't exactly a huge closet. A normal size person could lay down on the floor and take up all the space.

Still, it's amazing how much crap I have managed to store in that small space. In anticipation of the ARC truck driveby scheduled for next week, I decided to declutter the Love Shack. I feared it would be futile, since most of the clutter consists of books, and I'm not ready to part with my books. However, I tried. I worked my way from room to room, seeking trash that could become another man's treasure, and eventually ended up in the bedroom closet.

A couple days ago, my Chair sent a message to all her hapless victims, oops, I mean, all her students, letting us know she is unexpectedly out of the office until Monday. Maybe it's a ploy to buy more time to review my massive dissertation. Maybe she's got some job interviews lined up. Maybe she has moved to Florida. No, wait, she already lives in Florida. Well, who knows? I hope she is okay. In the meantime, I am trying not to dwell on the millions of problems I expect she and the committee will find with my dissertation. I am trying not to think about time passing, tick tock. Instead, I continue my housecleaning blitz.

I took all the clothes off the clothes rod and piled them on my bed. Some of the garments are wrapped in old crinkly clear plastic cleaner bags. The cat immediately freaked and ran, I assumed to hunker down under the couch. He hates the crinkly sound of plastic bags.

Once the clothes were out, I could see the closet much better. Most of the floor was occupied by a small shop vac, purchased from Sears about 12 years ago, rarely used because of its unbearably loud roar. I think I've vacuumed my car with it twice, assisted by a two-mile long extension cord running from my back door to the gravel parking lot where I park my car. Twice. In 12 years. What would my life be without a shop vac, I wondered? Poorer, maybe, if I had any desire to vacuum my floor mats. But after a minute of contemplation, I realized I'd trade the prospect of toothpick-free floor mats for some empty floor space in my closet in a heartbeat. I packed up the accessories, found the owner's manual, stuffed it all inside the belly of the little beast and taped it shut. I rolled the machine out to the front door and parked it next to two paper shopping bags standing ready to accumulate other castoff clutter. Take my vac—please!

Next I tackled the shelves. Some festively colored plastic baskets held a variety of junk I hadn't looked at in years, judging by the pristine layer of dust coating everything. I dug under the dust and found things I have no memory of buying: shower curtain liners (two unopened packages! I only have one shower, and I never use it!), plus three unopened packages of suction cups with little hooks attached. Wha—? Maybe I was planning on covering the hideous beige Formica shower stall? I can't remember, but it sounds like something I might have done about ten years ago when I first moved into the Love Shack. When the walls were bare, when there were no cat seats or curtains or furniture, other than a refrigerator and a stove, and I don't think those really count as furniture, do they?

I put the curtains and the hooks in the ARC bag and went digging for more junk. Hmmm, lots of electrical stuff, odds and ends. An unopened kit to hang a swag lamp. I obviously didn't know I had that in the closet, since a couple years ago I purchased a kit from IKEA and installed it over my desk area. It's got one of those balloon-shaped white paper shades on it. One swag is all I have room for, so in the bag goes the old swag kit (much better quality than the IKEA version, I might add, but oh well). What else? Let's see. A glass-less, cardboard-less black and gilt picture frame, no doubt a gift that used to hold some certificate or other that someone at my former job thought I would be proud to receive. Probably a certificate testifying to the fact that I am qualified to teach keyboarding. Was qualified. My teaching skills are rusty after almost six months of non-use.

But wait, there's more: An electric socket kit; a black nylon zipfront jacket I bought to wear to the freezing cold gym and then dropped my membership but kept the jacket and never wore it once (too tight!); an electric alarm clock (two alarms but no radio, replaced several years ago by a similar alarm clock, with two alarms and a radio); a black shirt with too-short sleeves, made of 1970s Indian cotton gauze, the sort of fabric that looks like a wrinkled mess even after you iron it; an unopened spool of speaker wire; a 2-foot under-cabinet fluorescent light; and a cheesy backpack, the kind you get when you donate to the Sierra Club.

What else is in the closet? A box of paint cans. A wooden easel. My huge brown leather portfolio, with it's broken handle and carefully incised etching of a leaping naked man (Hermes, I think), and which contains all the illustrations I made when I was in my fashion illustrator phase, circa 1979. I have no idea what to do with all that stuff. No one could possibly want it, but I can't bear to throw it all away. And at the back of the closet, wrapped in a dingy off-white flannel blanket and wrapped with bone-dry masking tape: probably the most valuable thing I own, to me anyway. The painting that inspired me to become a painter.

It's a landscape, about 26" x 32", of some dark clumps of autumn trees separated by a slow-moving river, which reflects a lowering sunset. The paint is thick, the style impressionist. There might have once been an artist's name inscribed in the lower right corner, but if there was, it is unintelligible now. The back of the painting is covered in very old paper, which is cracked and peeling. A bit of cardboard peeps through, but there is nothing written that I can see. I'm tempted to peel up the paper, to see if there might be a clue.

The painting has been in my closet since my mother sold the house where my father died and moved to her condo. That was what, 2005? She didn't want the painting, or more accurately, she knew I did. She's in jettisoning mode, too. I think that is what happens to some people when they get old: They start giving stuff away, in preparation for their departure. Me, I just want to recycle some of my clutter. But not this painting. Someday I will have it appraised and if I can afford it, I will have the years of cigar and cigarette smoke carefully removed from its surface. Maybe someday I will be privileged to see what it looked like when the unknown artist first painted it.

I hung it up on my wall, half over one of my own paintings. It's nothing like my paintings, and yet, this dark landscape is encoded in my artistic DNA. I don't know why I didn't hang it up sooner. Probably for the same reason I never knew I had a swag lamp kit, two shower curtain liners, and 24 suction cup hooks. The Bermuda Triangle of closets.

The last task was to sort through all the clothes on the bed. I found myself wondering what the Style Makeover guys would have to say if they saw my wardrobe. Almost all my clothes came from Goodwill or Value Village. Mostly I am talking about jackets and flannel shirts. They all have that musty, dragged in the mud, then washed in cold water look to them. A few things stand out: the men's cashmere coat I found at Goodwill for $20 (warm! disintegrating!); a periwinkle blue linen suit I made back in the late 1980s, when I could still see well enough to sew, when I used to sew for a living (another story); and my black polyester bachelor's graduation robe, which I wore twice a year for almost ten years to my former employer's graduation ceremonies, along with the un-hoodlike hood and the flat mortarboard cap. Should I keep it? I couldn't decide, so I kept it. If nothing else, it could make a good Halloween costume.

The chronic malcontent feng shuies the crap out of the Love Shack

The umpteenth time I checked the course room today, there was a message from my Chair: “Unexpectedly out of office. Back Monday.” After a stab of disappointment, I felt oddly relieved. For the rest of this week, I don't have to fret about receiving feedback on my dissertation submission. I mean, I can fret if I want to, but even I am able to recognize the futility of fretting. So I did what any self-respecting adult would do when faced with an unexpected delay: I feng shuied the Love Shack.

I mean no disrespect, and I'm sorry if I offend you, but it's the perfect time to take my housecleaning one step further. I've vacuumed, I've dusted (in places), I've washed the curtains (you know that is a big deal if I keep mentioning it in post after post). I started really looking at the amount of crap I have on my shelves (and I have a lot of shelves)... I mean, really looking. Wow, there's a Microsoft Office 97 book. Really? PowerPoint 2002? Two copies! Who knew!

One thing led to another and the next thing I know, I'm looking up feng shui on the Internet. Score! I found the Bagua, that diagram that divides a space into nine zones. I sketched out a floor plan. Wait, should I make my back door the entrance wall or my front door the entrance wall? Hmmm.

While I was pondering this mystical question, someone pounded on my front door. I froze. Curiosity almost made me go move the curtain to see who was there. But I held very still, like a rabbit in a burrow, and whoever was there went away. People who know me know to come to my back door. The only time I open my front door is to collect my mail. Okay, that answers my question. The back door is the entrance wall.

I returned to my diagram. Darn, it's not to scale. Oh well, close enough to find out what my feng shui condition is. Uh-oh. Looks like Zone 4, Wealth, is in the empty space by the front door. That's not good, is it? Maybe if I switch the diagram and let the front door be... oh, no, that's even worse. Now Wealth is in the bathroom! I'm flushing my prosperity down the drain! I knew it! I switched my perspective back to the back door as the entrance wall. Maybe I can put a money tree by the front door or something. Or a mobile made of Monopoly money.

My analog TV, converter box, antenna, and old-fashioned DVD/VHS player circa 2005 sits in Zone 9, the Reputation sector. This zone also contains the cat tree, a wondrously shaky multilevel contraption I built myself. Wonder what that has to do with Reputation?

Love and Marriage (Zone 2) is in the bedroom. I guess that isn't so bad, except I've been happily single for 10 years. Maybe this refers to my cat. He's sacked out on the bed right now. We're like an old married couple, mostly. He sleeps a lot, farts occasionally, and I do all the work. Yep, sounds about right.

Health and Family (Zone 3) is occupied by a long stretch of heavily laden lime green bookshelves. I wonder what that means. Maybe it means I will get a good workout if I get rid of some of these books. And whatever is left will go to my relatives when I die? I fail to see how that is helpful.

Uh-oh. Creativity is in my bedroom closet. I guess that explains a few things. What goes in the Center? Some of the Bagua maps put Health in the middle, some just say Earth. Get it straight, you feng shuists. Hey, the center is where I sit right now, typing this post and trying to figure out what the center is all about. Oh, man, this is getting too meta.

Zone 8, Knowledge, is where the cat food sits. Career, Zone 1, is where the back door opens. There's nothing there except a fire extinguisher and an umbrella (not to be used together, I don't think). The last zone is Zone 6, Helpful People and Travel. And that is in the bathroom. Well, the bathroom has to go somewhere. It's better to put Helpful People in the bathroom than Wealth, right?

I don't know what it all means, but I'm pretty sure my feng shui score is crap. No wonder my life is shite! I need to boost my feng shui rating. Okay, what should I do? Going to the Internet again... okay, according to one site, in my living room, I need to have family photos (check), harmonious colors (check), and a comfortable chair for every family member (check). The cat has an abundance of comfy places; in fact, the whole damn house is decorated for his pleasure. Seriously. I don't even take showers so I don't have to move his favorite window seat in the bathroom. Uh-oh, the feng shui tips say to hide my TV and electronics. Then how would I watch Scandal and Once Upon a Time? Nope, the TV stays put.

The tips for the bedroom warn us not to have photos or religious icons “watching” us while we sleep. I don't know why not, I don't do anything interesting while I sleep, do you? Avoid cluttered views. Oh dear. The walls in my bedroom are covered with shelves, no lie. Books, tools, sewing crap, clutter. And yes, the closet door is open and you can see piles of laundry and mismatched, outdated, thrift store clothes hanging on wire hangers (I know, I know). Let's see, what else am I doing wrong? Don't put your bed under the window. Nuts. Well, it's only the Love and Marriage zone, who cares? Not me.

I'm more concerned with the Wealth zone. Let's see. I need to correct the subliminal messages in my home that are detracting from abundance. And I need to start a gratitude journal. Really? Argh. And I need to stop feeling and acting needy. Ahhhh. I knew it! It's all my fault! If I just weren't so damn needy, everything would be hunky-dory! Abundance and prosperity would easily and effortlessly flow to me and through me... if I weren't such a greedy, grasping self-centered loser!

Okay, I've had enough of this feng shui shite. I don't need my furniture and accessories berating me for my bad attitude. I'll just get one of those laughing buddhas or something. Wait, is that a different religion? Is feng shui a religion? Now I've probably offended the feng shui gods. Oh man. Let me hunker down in Zone 6 (the bathroom) and wait for some helpful person to come along and rescue me. I'm so screwed.

The chronic malcontent deals with it

Waiting sucks. I don't know what to do with myself. I've washed just about everything in the apartment, except the cat. I've checked the course room twice a day since last Wednesday. I'm spending too much time surfing news sites, looking at pictures, reading about the government shutdown, wondering how many revisions I will have to do, how long it will take, how I will find the will to dig in deeper.

Today I went out in the rain to renew my car registration. Every two years we have to take our cars to a Department of Environment Quality test station so they can make sure our carbon footprint isn't too big. My old Focus passed the test, no problem. Yay. A car that fails DEQ implies a moral failure, I'm pretty sure, so I was feeling smug. I was out of there in less than 15 minutes, $143 poorer and wondering, if I can't find work A.D. (after degree), will I have to park the car and start transiting with the masses? I'm not afraid of mass transit like my friend Sheryl. But mass transit is a devious invention cleverly devised to keep poor people poor.

Where would I be transiting to, though, is the question? Sheryl hasn't found work yet. I doubt I will be any luckier. No one wants to hire old women. Not when there are so many chirpy young people around who are eager to do the job. Maybe we should do what they used to do in Japan: take the old folks up the mountain and shove them off a cliff.

Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill are my heroes: two older gals who are still tearing up the airwaves. The only waves I can tear up are the ones in my microwave oven, and even that is iffy sometimes. Sometimes pressing the button gets you nothing but dead silence. The monster is old and tired. I am referring to the microwave.

After the rain stopped, the sun came out and the temperature dropped. I yanked on my (tight! ow!) spandex jogging gear and trotted up to Mt Tabor Park. I shuffled carefully along the slippery leaf-strewn roads, avoiding the muddy trails, very aware that one slip, one fracture, would change my life forever. There were about twenty Canadian geese honking and pooping happily in the reservoir. Big gray clouds intermittently hid the sun. These clouds are the storm cells that come in with colder air. I can see Bruce Sussman's weather map in my mind...yep, these are those patchy storm cells that can dump cold rain at any moment and then trudge on toward Mt Hood to lay down some snow. I hate snow. Not that you asked, just sayin'. It's 48° right now in Portland, and 83° in Phoenix. Enough said.

A boring day. I've lost my momentum, my mojo, waiting for feedback on my personal albatross. I might actually have to get out the sewing machine and start—gasp!—mending or making things. If you knew how much I hate to sew (long story), you would realize what a big deal this is.

I could start working on my business again. It's there, in the back of my mind, all the time, like an unhealed wound. No, that's a terrible metaphor. Let's say... the idea of working on my business is like having a grain of kitty litter stuck in my sock. A nagging irritation difficult to ignore (especially while I am trying to jog). I have some ideas, I have some half-formed plans, but I have no enthusiasm while waiting for feedback on this dissertation. I am frozen in time, like a decrepit bug stuck in amber.

The chronic malcontent grudgingly admires her clean curtains

I'm waiting for comments on my first draft of my dissertation manuscript from my Chair and the nameless, faceless committee. As I wait, I'm noticing how my mind is trying to kill me. For example, my mind has convinced me that my document has developed a plague of typos, grammar errors, and formatting problems. When I uploaded it, it was clean, sparkling, shiny, as close to perfect as a first draft ever gets. Two days later, it had lost some of its luster. Four days later, it is shredding around the edges, tattered and stained. Every day I wait, my mind brainwashes away my enthusiasm and hope. Now I am starting to believe the paper will never pass muster. What was I thinking? Yada yada yada.

You see how my mind rolls? Nuts. I'm completely nuts. Nothing has changed. The paper is the same paper I uploaded last Tuesday. It can't develop issues. Unless my Chair or the nameless, faceless committee person pokes around and inadvertently deletes a style. That could be somewhat disastrous. (My Word skills are above average. I don't trust their Word skills.) But in any case, the content should remain intact, right? The words are not morphing into Pig-Latin when no one is looking. My errors are not proliferating like bacteria in a petri dish.

My mind is also trying to convince me that all the work I've done the past week to clean up my decrepit hovel is worthless activity. I guess that means unless I'm writing the dissertation or working to drum up clients for my frozen-in-time research business, I'm slacking. Washing the heavy linen drapes (made from paint dropcloths) doesn't count, apparently. Vacuuming the hairball infested rugs doesn't count either. I only vacuum twice a year, so this is a special occasion, yet I am unable to rejoice. Five loads of laundry in two days! Do you know how many quarters that is!? Surely that must count for something. Nope. Even after the curtains are rehung (looking two shades lighter!), I am consumed with feelings of inadequacy. What the–?

Well. You can probably tell what is happening. It's all this waiting. Waiting is upsetting my already unstable mind. I daydream about some future day when I don't have to do this anymore. My mind, though, refuses to let me believe it will ever come to an end. Maybe my mind is trying to protect me from disappointment. Like, don't think about how it will feel to succeed. Just keep your head down and keep slogging. Don't think about what you will do when it's done (take a nap, take a bath, take an art class). Sooner or later, one way or another, someday, it will be over.

You know something is wrong when ants gather on your toothbrush

I suspect consumer products firms are making products that require the purchase of more of the same products. What do I mean? Well, vitamins come to mind. How do you know they actually work? What if they make you feel lousy, which inspires you to buy more vitamins? Ever think of that?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe humans can ever get along long enough to conspire on anything more complicated than texting a vote to American Idol. Something has happened to make me consider changing my mind.

Every day this week, I've found a little cabal of ants crooning in a daze on the bristles of my toothbrush. I shudder to imagine how many times I've brushed my teeth without checking for the presence of critters. (Ant-flavored toothpaste, anyone?) So, what would you think if you found ants gathering on your toothbrush? Wouldn't you think there was something in the toothpaste that ants found attractive? Like, maybe, sucrose, sucralose, or some other ingredient that by any other name would be just as sweet as sugar? Eew. I'm officially grossed out. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that dentists are in cahoots with Proctor and Gamble.

This isn't the first time I've had misgivings about consumer products. I've long suspected facial tissue manufacturers. It seems to me that every time I blow my nose, I feel compelled to sneeze, which means—you guessed it—I must blow my nose again. I have allergies to a lot of stuff in the Love Shack, for instance, dust, hairballs, mites, pollen, cat hair, and did I mention dust? I sneeze a lot, especially on special once-a-year occasions like vacuuming days. Sneeze, blow.... a-a-a-choo! Blow again. Well, a genius brain like mine eventually spots the connection between sneeze and blow... hey, maybe there is some sneeze-inducing compound on the tissue! Their slogan oughta be Pollen-infused Softness. Or how about, Fresh as a Stamen. Or maybe, Carpals and stamens, for those personal moments.

While I wait for feedback on draft one of my dissertation, I decided to clean up the apartment. I started in the bedroom. I washed the curtains. I folded the laundry and put it away. I stripped and flipped the mattress and replaced the summer percales with winter flannels. I swept up the little drifts of diatomaceous earth that I used a few months ago to barricade the cat's water bowl from the ant hordes. I moved everything off the carpet and vacuumed up the ankle-deep layer of dust, detritus, cat litter, and hairballs. I stopped every 15 seconds to sneeze, blow my nose, sneeze, blow my nose. My sinuses quickly swelled to fill up all available space in my cranium. Eventually I had to breathe through my mouth, and thus was able to stop sneezing for awhile. I don't clean very often, and this is why. It's an ordeal that lasts for about three days after I stop cleaning. The nights are especially long when one cannot breathe.

I'm not counting, but I'm pretty sure I've sneezed at least 20 times since I started typing this post. The mountain of used tissues takes up much of my desk. (I like to use them twice before tossing, you know, really get my money's worth.) Now my eyes are swimming. I'm having a hard time seeing the screen. It's time to find a drawing to illustrate my misery. And then I'm going out for a walk. The pollen in the park can't be any worse than the dust mites in the Love Shack.

The chronic malcontent feels resentment at a sorry-ass data entry snoid

While I wait for my Chair to chew up and spit out my dissertation draft, I have the pleasure of doing... nothing much. I wasn't going to blog today; I have some important things on my to-do list (clean tub, take nap, put away laundry). However, something happened today that I need to whine about. I have spent the last hour pretending that it didn't affect me. But I can't seem to focus on getting anything done, so clearly it affects me some. After all, when you decide to clean the tub, you must have laser-like focus, otherwise someone could get hurt. Know what I mean?

So, here's my rant. I checked email this morning, like I always do, and found a terse note from my big megabank, which has hosted my money since it took over Security Pacific back in the early 1990s. I have never had a problem with big megabank, and I still don't. But imagine my shock and horror when I read the email telling me that my account was now at $0.00. Yep. Not even any pennies. Zip. Zilch. Empty. All gone.

Hoping it was a phishing error, I logged into my account. Nope. Zero. And the culprit was in plain sight. September's rent check (which [full disclosure] was a replacement check [minus a $30 stop fee] for a check that had gone AWOL, not my fault!)—Septembers' replacement rent check had been posted in error: instead of $695, some drunken data entry snoid probably somewhere back east had added an extra zero, causing $6,950 to be extracted from my checking account. Well, I don't know how you roll, but I don't normally keep that much in checking, so bam! That misbegotten nameless bank hoovered out all my funds and then proceeded to tap my savings account to make up the difference.

After a few tense moments, I found an 800 number. I wrestled the voice mail system into providing me with a live person by shouting “Fraud! Help! Help! Help!” into the phone. The neighbor probably thought I was being robbed (although he never showed). Finally a polite young gal got on the phone and calmed me down. She could see immediately what had happened.

“I'll put in the order to reverse the transaction,” she said sweetly. “And I'll credit back the $10.00 overdraft fee.” Ha. Like I cared about a lousy $10.00 when $6,255 of my money had been siphoned out of my accounts in the blink of someone's bleary hungover eye.

“How long will that take?” I asked, thinking of all the October automatic payments that will soon be hitting my account. Please tell me a few hours.

“Up to five business days,” she said cheerfully. “And now, if you have ten minutes, would you like to talk to a financial advisor about how to invest that money in your money market savings?”

I almost said, what money? Seriously? You are trying to sell me more services, when I've just been electronically violated? Jeez, it hurts to sit down, and she's telemarketing me! God grant me strength. Well, I had a good excuse to refuse her offer: my breakfast was overcooking. In my freaked out haste to alter my circumstances, I had forgotten that my veggies were sweltering on the stove. Oops. Well, at least I hadn't cracked the eggs yet.

So the remedy for my tattered bank account is “pending,” and I'm realizing that living in an electronic world has its curses as well as its blessings. But we've always been at the mercy of data entry errors. It can happen to anyone at anytime. Banks track their error rates. If they are really good, they keep it to 2%. That's why they have fancy validation procedures, to make sure this doesn't happen. Imagine if I had had a business, with irate employees and bounced payroll checks and vendor payments. We would lose all trust in business. Not that we had much to begin with.

And I can't even register my phone number on the Do not call list, because the darn government is on holiday in Tahiti. So I keep getting robocalls from the credit card consolidation companies. What is up with that? If they did a little homework, they would find out I haven't had a credit card in years. Well, what the funk. Enough ranting. Am I sufficiently calm to begin the task of scouring the tub? I wouldn't want to try it when I'm tense with fear and resentment. I might do something crazy.

The chronic malcontent slogs through another day

Some days I have a hard time making eye contact with people. I thought today would not be one of those days. Today I uploaded draft one of my dissertation manuscript. Yep. All 12.5 MB, all 382 pages. Of course, that includes 50 pages of back end stuff, but still, it's a hefty gulp of... something. I was going to say something snarky at myself, like I usually do. For some reason, I changed my mind. I realize I should feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe that sense that I should be celebrating just prevented me from downgrading my achievement to a modest 4 on the Richter scale of self-denigration. Whatever.

Anyway, my refrigerator is empty except for four apples, one zucchini, a bottle of olive oil, a jar of mustard, and some maple syrup. Maybe you can figure out a recipe from that, but I'm a lousy cook. So I just went to get food. If you know me, you know that is not as simple as it sounds. First, I don't eat normal food. By normal, I mean regular food that someone like my mother would eat, for instance. Yogurt. Kraft Mac n Cheese. Pudding from little cups. Me, I aim for organic everything, all fresh, nothing processed, no dairy, no wheat, no soy, no sugar, no corn. That limits my options; on the upside, it keeps things very simple. But I always feel this undercurrent of resentment frisson through my body when I walk past the ice cream case.

Second, I'm not earning much money since I got laid off from the job in May. I get an amount every week from the Tuition Unemployment Insurance program, until the end of November, when my doctoral program officially runs out. So, the whopping $84 grocery bill made me sob a tiny bit. Finances always make me want to cower under the covers.

And third, and here's the clincher for me, the well-meaning older lady who commandeered the bagging operation at the store was inept and... well, she seemed just plain not present. Rather than show compassion for a kindred spirit, I felt compelled to show her the proper way to bag my groceries, all the while being completely unable to look her in the eye. The best I could do was focus somewhere over her shoulder.

Now, in my defense, I will say that my eyesight for objects three feet or closer is none too good when I am wearing my out-of-door driving glasses. She would have been blurry anyway, even if I were able to look her in the eye. The pressure of other customers coming through the line, the $84 grocery bill, and her inability to properly bag my groceries... on a good day, I would be able to sail through it. I thought today would be a good day. Unloading my dissertation off my plate and onto my Chair's plate should feel pretty damn good. Especially considering the long hours I've been putting in on the darn thing.

I applied for an extension to my program a couple weeks ago. The powers that be at the online university granted it to me yesterday. That's good news. My new drop dead date is June 2014. If I am not done with this thing by then, then I might as well quit on it. I will have no excuse. Unless I drop dead. I guess that would be an acceptable excuse.

The bagger lady wasn't looking at me, either, by the way. She was gazing off at the checker, maybe hoping to be rescued from the insane customer who pulled all the groceries out of the bag to rebag them properly. (That would be me.) I have a lot of experience bagging my own groceries. You could say I'm an expert at it. I buy the same crap twice a week and I always go through the self-service checkout. If they had a self-service checkout at this store I went to today, I would have used it. They have organic gold beets, organic green beans, and organic crimini mushrooms. For those things, I put up with the human-operated check out line.

The box of organic salad (washed three times!) goes on the bottom. The two dozen eggs go next, side by side. Then other stuff can go on top. The bagger lady didn't want to understand. I know that feeling. She was checked out, just hoping the horrible customer would go away. So she put the second egg carton in the bag, but didn't take the time to lay it flat. I was like, wha? No more, like what the funk, lady? Really? How can you possibly think that would work. I managed to simply say, “It's got to lay flat.” I could have gone on. But I stuffed the other crap in the bag, grabbed it, shouldered the other bag, got my receipt, and stomped out the door.

If I could, I would never go back there again. But that's just plain silly. It's not them. They are not at fault. Inept employees are everywhere. Mentally invisible people are all around. It's not them, it's me. For some reason, I'm on edge, and I wasn't expecting it, not today. I was blind-sided by my own insanity. Again.

The past month has been hard. We had the wettest September on record. I have been writing long hours every day, every day of the week, hunched over my computer in my gloomy dank dusty cave. I drink way too much coffee, a really crappy, cold, black, bitter brew. I forget to eat. My friends are leaving me alone. My mother lets me call her. It's like I am encased in a bubble. A ridiculous Ph.D.—A.B.D. bubble. All but dissertation. An eight-year slog.

My little fledgling business is frozen in time. My websites are neglected. I have a comment that needs moderating. Email that needs returning. I can't remember the PIN to my business bank account. It's like I had a dream that I was self-employed. It seems so far away, after these weeks writing, writing, writing on this massive document that represents something I stopped wanting six years ago. But like all amusement park rides, once you get on, you cannot easily get off. There are consequences if you try to get off a roller coaster early. Free fall being one of them.

I just got a robo-call from “Jessica” from Cardholder Services telling me that I need to do something about my credit cards. Sigh. It's time to put my number on the Do not call list again. Thank god I have no credit cards, else I'd be booking a flight to sunny Scottsdale right now. Thank god I have paid cash for this doctoral adventure, so I will owe nothing when it is finally done. And it will someday be done. Maybe that is what is bothering me. I've been doing this so long, I am fearful of what comes next.

Ah, well. The slog continues, one day at a time. Today I am doing what is on my list. I'll worry about tomorrow's slog tomorrow.