Bitterness

People have begun to mention (in very quiet voices) that this blog is a tad bitter of late.

I believe that they are using very quiet voices out of fear that I might, at any moment, explode into teeny weeny bits.

I'm not going to actually rule this out as a possibility, because the icy rage that consumed my body this afternoon could very possibly have been, instead, liquid nitrogen. If this were the case, any sharp tap or even a loud noise might send bits of me scattering like the end of a particular sequel to a particular 80's movie.

I'm pretty sure that I'm being punished by someone up there, so I will type fast lest lightning strike me and fry this transmission along with my computer.

You see, today sucked, if possible... more than yesterday.

Because today I was financially exploited by the college. One of the programs for which I teach - let's call it, er, "Locus of my white-hot anger" or "Hot Locus" for short - is a full-year gig.

This is the first time that Hot Locus is being run, so there are some bugs with the system and things are generally being made up as we go along. Now, I worked with the Hot Locus program all summer and things went exactly as I was told that they would.

But now the administrator of Hot Locus has decided to change the rules. We'll call her Betty.

Now Betty calls me up months after I have asked her to meet with me and let me know what she expected of me this year and says "let's meet".

"Cool" say I, "I'll see you tomorrow"

Then Betty starts trying to get myself and my partner - let's call him Bob- Betty asks Bob and I what days we are free. So we tell her. Betty is displeased with what she hears and asks us if we are free any other times. Wanting to indicate to Betty that I haven't been issued the university be-in-two-classes-at-once-device but also realizing that is a bad idea, I say "sorry, Betty - those are the times that Bob and I are free"

Betty then asks if we can teach on Sundays.

Sundays?

Betty is clearly not hoeing beans in the same university fiefdom where I hoe MY beans.

Bob and I dodge this question and then agree to meet with Betty later.

Betty then starts concocting strange schedules for meetings with students that will take about, oh, 3 times the number of hours that Betty, Bob, and I agreed that we will be working this quarter.

We say "Betty - we didn't think that we would be working this many hours"

Betty seems confused "But you don't want to teach these students for 25zillion hours a week?"

No Betty, we don't - "We want to teach these students for the 4 hours a week we agreed on at the beginning of the summer"

I believe that Betty is getting bitter. We eventually agree on something vaguely close to reasonable.

Bob checks on how many, er... sacks of grain... we are supposed to get for all this teaching. We believe that we are supposed to get 7500 sacks of grain for the year. Betty says - "nono, you are only getting 6250 sacks of grain".

I'm sorry?

This is when I had a hallucination of jumping across the desk and killing Betty.

"Are you telling me that there is some "mistake" by which we are missing 1250 of our SACKS OF GRAIN? We were promised SACKS AND SACKS OF GRAIN."

Apparently, Betty informs us, we were misinformed at the beginning by someone else - not her of course, because she would never lie because Betty isn't like that...

And then Betty says "You know, I was a grad student once too and I know about being exploited. Do you feel like you are being exploited? Because I want you to tell me if you feel like you are being exploited."

Gee, Betty - you just asked me to do more work that I was supposed to do for less pay than you promised me. I NEED THIS GRAIN SO I CAN EAT THIS WINTER, BETTY. I’m feeling just a touch angry with you sitting over in your desk with a nice red leather jacket talking to me about exploitation. 1250 sacks of grain don’t mean much to you, Betty, but they mean a lot of ramen to me.

Yeah, this sounds like exploitation. Apparently there was some kind of grain blight and the program just doesn't have as many sacks as they thought they would have. Now if Betty had a sack at all she would go over and request the grain from the head of her department. But Betty has no sack.

So Bob and I are officially exploited by the University fiefdom.

I would quit, but I really need the sacks of grain (such as they are).

I promise I will post something nice the very day when nothing APPALLINGLY BAD happens to me, really.

It will be about rainbows, kittens, sunshine, and lollipops.

Poorness

Yeah. I've got a little of ye olde frustration going on with the absurd pay schedule in HP.

Because I have, currently, FOUR jobs and I am still not getting paid until THE LAST DAY OF OCTOBER!

Now this, my friends, is a serious problem for me because this means that for the entirety of October I am going to be utterly poverty-stricken in the same way that I was for all of September from school / hospital bills, etc. Except with the difference that if new bills come this month I will have Jack Squat to pay them with.

Now how terrifically difficult would it be for them to pay us sometime in the month that isn't the last day of the month, i.e. the day before rent is due every single time. I'm thinking that the 15th or so would be far more reasonable - or even *gasp* getting paid bi-weekly instead of once-a-freaking-month.

Now I'm not sure about your opinions on the matter, but there is something highly wrong with a system where I have four jobs, am a full time student, and I am seriously thinking about the cash benefits of plasma donations, selling off pieces of furniture, and possibly starting a cottage industry in the department making customized laptop bags.

Or maybe I can set up a card table in the quads and draw people as comic book characters.

Or maybe I should just apply for a retail job and fuck all of this training that I've gotten, because, hey I can make WAY more than $1500 in 3 months at Target.

sheesh.

C'est la vie.

I didn't get the Assistant director of the writing program job.

And so now I don't have the qualifications to apply to the job I want in Madison

And I am wretched.

New School Year, odd people, and a noisy cat.

So the school year is starting to gear up.

All of a sudden there are presentations to give, meetings to attend, faculty to contact, schedules to arrange, and various pots of soup to make.

And also, all of the creepy people are loose in Chicago.

I think that this has something to do with the weather. Pretty much no one looks particularly creepy in a t-shirt and shorts, but as the wandering bands of people around my apartment layer up with their winter gear, they start to look just a little more sinister and a lot more insane. The boy has also noted that psychiatric admissions go down at the VA just because of the misty and unpleasant weather that we have been having. Reasons for this are - as yet - unknown, but conjecture suggests that either it isn't worth going to the hospital and pretending to want to kill yourself in order to have double portions of cafeteria food for a few days if it might be chilly and inclement outside on the way there, or (to our best guess) all of the rain in Chicago is actually methadone and would-be patients are merely laying face-up in the middle of parks everywhere soaking up the goodness.

In either case, fewer potentially odd people in there means more potentially odd people wandering around and I believe that they have all decided to hang out on my street. While walking to the Walgreens yesterday, the boy and I passed:

(1) a strange man with a plaid jacket over his shoulders and disheveled hair who kept stooping down by the front right tires of cars in order to touch them and look at them. He followed us most of the way home.

(2) a large old man in a checked shirt and suspenders who held up the line at Walgreens making an impulse buy of a tiny futuristic-looking back massager that was vibrating on the shelf, giving the distinct vibe that this vibe was not for it's intended upper-torso use.

(3) a rail thin man wearing a tan fedora and tan trench that was tied together at the waist, clutching a bag of some alcohol or other and having a distinctly distant expression and a distinctly Nightmare on Elm Street appearance.

Taken separately they were simply the random odd people of Chicago, taken as a group all out in the twilight wandering the 2 blocks between my house and the Walgreens to the absence of all other human beings, it was a little spooky. It's also possible that the gothic fiction has simply gotten to my head.

I'm currently reading the Woman in White and I have to say, there are few totally-repressed-lesbian-love-stories-of-the-19th-century that can shock me, but with my understanding of the euphemisms and social codes of the time, this story is the equivalent of the older lady tossing the younger across the harpsichord in Madame Aristocrat's well-attended salon and fetching the strap-on for the general amusement of the guests before dinner.

Also, there is ugliness and plainness and hideousness, which is the justifiable reason why I get to put this charmingly raunchy work in my dissertation - I love literary studies.

This aura of gothic that has been hovering in my head also led me to assume that someone was dead in my building. You see, there is this cat that has been meowing in what can only be described as a yowl for two days pretty much nonstop, really loud, although it has never made a noise before. So the boy and I decided to take up a minor snooping role and wander around the outside of the building to determine from which window this unholy noise was issuing. I, of course, assume that we're going to find a cat in a window with bloodied red mouth from eating its master (who suddenly fell and hit her head and expired of natural causes). In my over-heated imagination, this would be something out of Poe's The Black Cat, and I would probably have to offer to taken in the cat a-la-Scully and Queequeg in the second season of X-files. After locating the cat, who was, coincidentally, raven black and seemed really upset and yowled at us continually when it saw us from the darkened apartment, we got the landlord and she went to check.

Apparently the cat had been locked up with food and water and such as if the owner were on vacation and it was sitting in the window (thoughtfully open a bit for it) letting the entire world know that it was simply lonely and that it's master was gone (in the leaving sense, not in the dead sense). So, my adventure was ultimately not particularly adventuresome but worked out ok, and the cat has stopped making so much noise so that's ok too.

So, no dead people - only creepy people and my over-active imagination. This probably means that I am now in the proper mindset for proposal writing.

Summer, Fall, and musings on my future.

Currently I am sitting in Dollop, one of the more exquisite coffee shops on the graduate school hierarchy of priorities. It has, (1) Metropolis Coffee (2) Is far North enough that usually people I know aren't here (3) Free wireless (4) on-street parking (5) comfy couches.

And I am contemplating my life.

So I'll chat at you about it for awhile, get everyone caught up, and perhaps get myself out of the little funk that I am currently in (not to mention avoiding work for yet another half-hour).

School:
-Dissertation proposal is going forward-ish, after a long standstill. I was so frustrated when the second iteration was rejected at the end of the Spring quarter that it took a long time for me to be able to really look at it again. I have yet another idea for yet another revision / compression of yet another angle of this damn thing, so I'm going to try and get a draft written before school starts (that’s 4 weeks, folks). I'll show it to my chair at the very beginning of the quarter and see if I can get him on my side this time.

I would show it to the entire committee at the same time again, but really - I can't handle that kind of rejection right now and last time it was beyond brutal. I've taken all their advice and restructured my ideas to be generated specifically from 19th century gothic texts and I really think that I have something this time.... Of course, last time and the time before I thought I had something too.

So yeah, I'm a little bummed about it. It's hard to get worked up about something you know will be eviscerated.

Work:
- As my method of avoiding said dissertation and making sure that I can, you know, eat this year now that my fellowship has expired I am working on 5 jobs.

(1) CAAP instructor for the incoming freshmen
(2) Preceptor for undergrauate English honors BA theses
(3) Writing intern for humanities core
(4) Hopefully a second session of writing interning for the humanities core
(5) Hopefully assistant director of the writing program (keeping fingers crossed)

With 5 jobs I just might be able to pull off a living wage and keep the wolves at bay. Ah, grad school. Of course, only one of these jobs has started as of yet, so I'm still experiencing end-of-summer-graduate-student-cash-flow. Sigh.

I'm also looking at another job out-of-state for next school year. I'll let you know more if I get it.

Home:
- Our apartment is a mess. I'm refinishing / restructuring the coffee table, painting a jewelry box for my sister, framing pictures, painting lamps, refinishing a trunk, and putting wheels on the heavy furniture. Most of this is already done, and now everything is about 2 days away from reasonability, so living in squalor is about to end. This has all been, I believe, an elaborate system to keep me from getting work done on my dissertation and allowing me a chance to unwind a bit before the year starts up again.

Health:
- But I'm still really burnt out and pretty depressed. All that hospital time served to prove that I don't have seizures, however, it still didn't go anywhere near saying what the problems I'm having may actually be. So for now I am back where I started with just a little more knowledge of what it's not and a lot of bills. If I'm going to get this figured out, I have to do it by the end of October before my insurance resets my deductible. While I'm in there I should also see someone about my feet because they hurt like a bitch all the time. I have, however, dropped a pant size and that, my friends, is a very good thing. My goal is size 10. Can we reach it? I have no idea. Will we try? Yes we will.

Family:
- My mom seems to be freaking out, again, about the fact that she and I don't have a good relationship. I find this rather strange because she was the one who wrecked it in the first place. My sister and I, on the up side, are getting along great and we are finally getting to see one another without mom. I'm really starting to get along with the boy's mom, which is a great thing - except that it's making my mom jealous and then I have to field another barrage of well-intentioned-but-ill-executed attempts to "understand me" through point-blank questioning. I really have no idea what to do about this. She's started pumping my sister for information which is turning out to be a frustrating thing, and so I'm going to have to have a conversation with my mom soon - I've just been putting it off because I'm a sissy. My boy is also depressed and very grumpy from the massive amount of work that he is doing and hours that he is putting in (and also the apartment squalor - see above), but I think (hope) things will be getting better soon.

Wedding proposal?
- nothing on the horison, I'll let you know if anything happens. I've given up on the bridal magazines now - I mean, what's the point?

So yeah, I'm floating out to sea right now, but I will be back in the race just as soon as I can navigate this rip tide, and those shoals, and ah... I see... sharks.

Ok. I need to list something good. Some good things. er....

(1) I get to get new school supplies.
(2) having lots of jobs structures my time
(3) they might like my dissertation this time
(4) having a better relationship with my mother could be... nice.
(5) It's not like the boy is leaving me, he is just taking his time.
(6) Soon I will have a lot of nice things in my apartment
(7) I have 4 weeks to get the proposal done, and I've been reading primary sources all summer so it will be ok
(8) Although some friends are going overseas, others are coming back soon.
(9) I'm healthier than I've been in awhile.
(10) it's not seizures.. I get to keep my drivers license.
(11) my sister is cool.

There, I feel better. Time to read "Plain and Ugly Janes: The Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction" and finish my coffee.