Less Money, Less Problems?

I received my social security statement in the mail today. Is it just me, or is reading these things more and more like reading junk mail? Supposedly, if I continue working until I’m 70—okay, that thought alone just gave me the heebie jeebies—my payment from the government “would be about 2,278 a month.”

Yeah, right. This is especially bogus given the fine print: “…The law governing benefit amounts may change, because, by 2040 (when I’m 70), the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 74 percent of scheduled benefits.” So, like, if I work till I’m 80 can I get the other 26%? Or am I just better off sending in my Publisher’s Clearinghouse entry form? Because according to them, I may have just won the 10 million dollar grand prize!

Well, anyway. I had my second session with the out-of-town shrink. He said I sounded like I was doing better than last time. I have to admit that this was a little disappointing. I don’t think he understands me and how much the outer façade of my day to day existence belies the inner turmoil of my life. I tried my best to convince him that I really was unhappy and struggling. I don’t think he bought it. Crap! In fact, I had this weird feeling that after my session he might be going to a session with his out-of-town shrink, in which he would complain to her that his patient was doing better at coping than he was.

It’s this kind of feeling that makes me feel confident that there is some truth in reincarnation.

Interesting tidbit: After filling out an online car loan calculator, I was intrigued by the results:

Your Qualified Car Loan Amount*: $-70839.60

You’d think that loan companies would be a little more humane. At this rate...well, you probably guessed it: I’ll be eligible for a car loan in 2040.

Intellectual Posers Unite!

This is just a guess…but the astounding amount of naiveté I have concerning the probability of a pleasant outcome of my life activities HAS to be what keeps me from turning belly up and twitching like the monster cockroach I just caught trying to squeeze his way under the weather stripping in my door.

Whatever, the reason, I came home from the library yesterday with a two foot high stack of books on critical theory, critical ethnography, Foucault, Bourdieu, cultural studies, and visual ethnography. This is largely because, during my first year at this new job, I learned that there are certain areas of the Deep South that are intellectually magnetized to attract French and/or feminist Post-Structural theorists. You know, like Taos and Sedona attract New Age hippy types and aliens?

Trust me, there’s nothing like a French intellectual to make you feel like you are trés stoopeeed. Other than, of course, intellectual-er than thou colleagues who keep referencing French philosophers and using words like post-Neitzschean, transversalist, and ethicophilosophical. Please slap me if I ever start to talk like this in public.

In any case, I’m doing academic cross-training now. I ordered the comic book-style “For Beginners” books on Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, Marx, Saussure. I’ll have to save up for the ones on Barthes, semiotics, and Deconstruction. I’ll work my way through these at home and use websites and more library books to begin to develop a passable level of understanding... I’m thinking of this sort of like night school for the custodian who dreams of becoming an architect. There’s an interesting symmetry in that analogy, since I actually used to be a toilet-cleaning custodian. If only I had been reading Nietsche in my spare time back then, instead of running to the mall with my check to buy clothes for the club. Question to self: How young is too young to begin introducing one’s daughter to existentialism?

I have to admit, there is something inherently sexy about being able to use “post-Heideggerian” in a sentence. I’m just aspiring not to make people shoot beverages out their nose when I do it.

Next Steps

To be doing something. I fancied myself thinking all sorts of romantic and passé thoughts, like “what does it mean to be a writer? A mother? An entity on this planet, in this space, in this time, looking out of the part of my kitchen window that is not obstructed by an unplugged beige refrigerator with wood trim?

I look out at the crusty concrete parking lot in front of my home, at the narrow street that runs by, at the hazy overgrown field beyond it. Two pine trees, one towering and the other squat, look back at me from across the street, with their toes poked gingerly in the asphalt. They wave vaguely in the wind. And this is how I pass my work days at home, with those trees peering at me typing away and me looking back and them and contemplating having peanut butter for lunch.

I finished my chapter yesterday. I’d hoped to be able to say that with the hint of confetti and martinis in my voice but instead I imagine telling my girlfriends and having them reply incredulously “GodDAMN! I thought you’d finished that last year!” However, I love the analogy that my cousin came up with last night—“So your chapter is five months late…that’s like being half an hour late for a meeting, right? At least you called first and you didn’t miss the whole thing.”

It’s 12:17pm. It’s quiet, except for the clicking of the keyboard, ambient music playing on the tv in the living room (I knew there was a reason for directTV), and the white noise of a fan upstairs trying valiantly to circulate air.

So, I’ve been looking at my list of “big deal loose ends.” Another conference proposal due in three days. Another final chapter draft due August 13th. This workshop I’ve been trying to arrange. Ordering books for myself and my students for classes that start in three weeks. The grant report that was due last year and the grant proposal that needs to be done in two weeks. And the emails, the horrid, neverending stream of emails. They are the tapeworm of my professional life.

One step in front of the other, small decisions and small actions. I’ll do some professional reading, some prioritizing of things that need to be done to turn big deal loose ends into smaller ones. I will email until my fingers are numb.

And I will have some bread and jelly with my peanut butter.

Mommy Interrupted

I made an important decision last week. After being away for seven years, I went back to see a psychologist. I’d been “threatening” S.O. with it for a while—testing the waters to see what he thought when I was really trying to figure out what I thought about the idea. The final straw? I remember driving S.O. and A. to their work/preschool drop offs. S.O. was talking with me about something and he asked me a question, something simple.

And I just couldn’t process it. I mean, I heard the words but my brain just wasn’t there. In its place was this heavy fog and I couldn’t see through it. After that I concluded (for the gagillionth time) that life is too short to not take an opportunity to be a better person. A healthier person. A better wife, mommy, daughter, sister, friend.

I’ve been making a lot of jokes over the last couple of years about PMS and being ADD and it finally dawned on me that maybe I should stop trying to make people laugh about my behavior and start listening to myself. So, I made an appointment and drove to the city I work in (there was no way in hell I would see a shrink where I live…)

The out-of-town shrink is interesting. He seems like the type that might dress up as a Klingon and go to Star Trek conferences in Vegas during the summer. Seriously. Dark blue plaid shirt, Slightly disheveled hair, a fairly neat beard and almost untied shoelaces. He scribbled furiously as I told him about my “issues,” filling up blank pieces of paper with notes and, as each filled, depositing the pages face down on the floor by his feet. I told him about the blue moccasins that I started but never finished, about feeling sad, about my perfectionistic and procrastinatory tendencies. I told him that I worried about early onset Alzheimer’s and he thought that was pretty funny. He asked me if I ever had to do something over and over again, like wash my hands and if I'd ever had serious thoughts about killing anyone. I thought that was pretty funny (I almost said that I wanted to strangle my imaginary friend that kept asking me if I turned off the iron, but I figured that would be in bad taste).

At the end of the conversation he gave me some homework—scales for depression, anxiety, ADD. Like a good student, I did them right away. The ADD scale had to be filled out by me and S.O. I was a bit worried about that, but he took it that night and filled it out right away. Cool.

I guess I can add “adventures in mental health” to the list of things that this blog is about.