Energy

I don't know what's wrong with me; if it's the heat or something else, but I've been incredibly low on energy over the past several days since returning home. It's not that I'm tired enough to go to sleep, it's just that I feel...drained. Like, sort of weak. Not weak in a sick way, but weak in a "I just don't have the energy to get up and move around and do any more than I absolutely have to" sort of way. If you can, imagine being constantly fatigued, tired, and feeling really heavy and useless, but not sleepy. That's how I feel.

Usually when I feel like this, the best medicine is to actually get up and start doing stuff, supplemented by a healthy dose of coffee. That has, somewhat remarkably, helped a bit today. Today it's not the heat that's bothering me; it's only in the 70s outside this evening (thanks to some hellacious thunderstorms that blew through in the overnight hours and kept me awake, knocking out the power twice), and to continue to keep it cooler in here I've had the AC on for about three hours. You may ask why I'm running the air when it's in the 70s outside, and to that I respond that it was in the mid-80s earlier this afternoon, and last night after I turned the air off, it went up to 96 in my room in less than an hour. Again, greenhouse.

But, back to my point -- to combat this lack of energy, I cleaned the cat box/room, filled and ran the dishwasher, and gathered all of the trash and recycling to take out tonight. And I felt better. Sort of.

I think a large part of it is re-adjustment from being in Omaha in a house that is climate-controlled to 74 degrees at all times, to returning home to a house that I can barely keep below 90 regardless of the weather/temperatures outside during the summer. Even with the cooler temperatures outside (78 right now), it's 88.7 in my room, and that's after the AC has been running all day. Greenhouse.

I need to go do some shopping tonight, regardless of whether it continues to rain or storm -- being in Omaha for a week means that what little I had in the house before I left has now been almost completely exhausted several days after my return. This is also why I ordered pizza a few nights ago instead of going grocery shopping. Now it's gotten to the point where I cannot really avoid going out and doing shopping for much longer; the cats are out of litter, I'm almost out of toilet paper and coffee, and as I actually have a little money to spare at this time, I can afford to go get some groceries and the like. I need to fill the gas tank of my car, too, which is getting pretty close to the red "E" on the dash -- I've not filled up since the week before graduation, because it's not like I go anywhere in the summer that I don't have to. My trip meter, which I use (more than anything else) to gauge when I need to fill up, is also stuck -- its numbers are fucked up until I reset it. The car's been pretty inactive for most of the summer; some of the gas in its old-ass tank may be beginning to evaporate in the heat.

After a certain hour of the night, I've found that they shut off the gas tanks at the gas station I usually fill up at, too; this means I'll have to go out a little earlier than I normally do if I want to fill up tonight. That's probably a good idea anyway -- if I get a call tomorrow from my editor at the paper asking me to go cover a story, it's probably best that I have gas in the car.

As for the paper itself, I haven't heard anything since Friday. My editor told me to think up some ideas for feature stories, and I came up with a few that could be written relatively quickly, and sent off said ideas to him last night, though as it's the weekend and the paper doesn't publish on weekends, I doubt I'll hear from him until at least tomorrow morning.

Last night, when I sat down in my computer chair, it basically broke in half.

No, I'm not kidding.

Mind you, this is an old chair -- it came from my ex's mother about four years ago, and it was probably fifteen years old before that. Pete destroyed one of its two arms well over a year ago, and last night, when I leaned back in it, the back detached from the bottom of the chair. The back was then only held on by its one remaining arm, making the chair basically useless -- if I can't sit in it without falling off the back of it, I can't use it. I had to go into the spare room and get the spare computer chair, one that again once belonged to my ex, clean it off, and bring it in here to use. I took the broken one in there to use the same way I'd been using the spare one -- as a coat rack.

The spare chair isn't as comfortable in the least as my old one was, but I'll get used to it. I don't really have a choice -- it's not like I can spend close to $200 on a comfortable chair for my desk right now. And if you think that's a high dollar amount, you obviously haven't shopped for computer chairs recently.

 

So, for the moment, I'm stuck with what I've got.

Daisy and I had a long talk about jobs and job prospects last night, specifically about how she doesn't want me to have to adjunct until May, for fear that I won't find anything else, and then end up being penniless (again) right before our wedding.

"Obviously," I told her, "I don't want to adjunct both semesters if I can avoid it. I don't even really want to do it now, for the fall, but I really don't have any other options."

I don't, really. The money I'd make adjuncting this fall would be comparable to what I'd make as a fast food worker -- except I wouldn't have to work 40-hour weeks and wouldn't want to put a gun in my mouth every night after work (well, no more than usual, anyway). The fact remains, however, that at this point my "backup plan" has unfortunately become my "actual plan," as nothing else has panned out -- and I can't live on $30-40 per-article newspaper stories alone. What's even more depressing is that adjuncting isn't a sure thing and won't be until I'm actually assigned classes for the fall -- enrollment is down, according to the department chair, which means I could be teaching as few as one or two classes, or, perhaps, none at all.

"If they only offered you one or two classes," Daisy asked me, "would you still do it?"

"Of course," I replied. "I have no choice, really, at this point."

"Can you survive on that, though? As in, pay your bills and start paying back your loans?"

"...theoretically," I said, "yes."

I'm not sure what the university pays its adjuncts per credit hour, but the average of what I've seen around the country is something like $875. Even teaching two courses at $875 per credit hour each equals $5,250 for sixteen weeks of work. That in itself is $1,000 more per semester than I made as a GTA, and that's if they pay $875. Could be more, could be less -- I don't know. Even if it's less, I can't fathom that it would be much less than that, especially as I have friends who have adjuncted at the university after graduation who said with three classes, they were making double per month what they made as a GTA. That gives me hope, at least for the time being.

"But you'd still be losing money, right?" Daisy asked.

"Well, yes, but at a much, much slower rate than I am now," I replied. "Even adjuncting but two classes, if it's somewhere around that pay scale, I'd be able to use those paychecks to cover most of my bills every month. I'd still be using what I've saved, but much more slowly. Adjuncting also doesn't count as full-time work, so if necessary I'd be able to defer my student loan payments or go back in and change the amount I'd pay per month. I'd get by okay."

Honestly, I'd probably be able to save up a bit more as well, depending on my monthly expenses and those student loan payments, but I wouldn't be able to do much else.

"I just don't want you to get to January and be in the same situation, and then have to adjunct again in the spring just to keep that money coming in," she added.

"Well, if that's what happens, I can't really help it, honey. I don't know what you want me to say."

I really don't know what to tell her. I can (and will be) applying for all of the teaching jobs I find that I could do for the spring semester, regardless of how busy I am when it comes to this fall, but it's not like I can put a gun to an employer's head and force them to hire me, even if my credentials are far and away better than other people who have applied for the same position. Likewise, as I told her, I can't just up and leave in the middle of the semester if a business or other higher learning institution offers me a job someplace -- I simply can't. Once I'm scheduled to teach a class and I'm teaching it, I'm locked in there until December. I really just am. There's nothing I can do about that but say I couldn't start until January. On some level, Daisy thinks this is ludicrious, I'm sure, because I wouldn't just up and go, but when I'm teaching I have a responsibility to my students and to the university, which I've written about before. That's not narcissism, that's not a me-first attitude -- it's being respectful and responsible about things I've committed myself to, and realizing that more is at stake than just myself. In fact, it is the exact opposite of being narcissistic and selfish.

Regardless, I will be applying for a lot more positions, teaching and otherwise, as the fall rolls onward, whether I'm adjuncting this fall or not. I have little choice there -- I must find something so that I can continue to survive. Adjuncting this fall, if I get to do it, would be simply a stopgap measure -- something to stop me from continuing to horribly hemorrhage money -- but it's not something I can live on indefinitely, and certainly not something that's going to allow me to really save enough money to move with and/or help pay for a wedding in less than a year. Daisy knows that as well as I do, but the really scary part of that is that I may not have a choice in the matter -- if I can't get anything else, if nobody else wants to hire me or will even give me the courtesy of a rejection letter, call, or email, there is literally very little else I can do to improve my station in the world and be able to survive. Again, it's the "can't hold a gun to an employer's head and force them to hire me" scenario. That station in the world gets even worse if I don't get to adjunct this fall, which will fling me into full-on "panic mode" as what money I have will even more rapidly begin to dwindle. This time around I don't have a safety net of "oh, well, my loan money will come in once August rolls around," or "well, I'll start getting paid when I start teaching again in the fall," because neither of those scenarios exist anymore. I'm on my own, and that's completely fucking terrifying. It's no longer a matter of months until I get a guaranteed paycheck again -- from this point forward it's a daily fight for survival.

I can't tell you how tired I am of having to fight for absolutely every little thing. I've been doing that my entire adult life now, just trying to keep my bills paid and keep my head above water. I desperately just want some security, desperately want an ability to relax without having to worry about how much I have to budget for every item I buy at the grocery store, or how often I can run my air conditioner when I'm sweating through my clothes because I don't know if I can afford it. It's so incredibly tiresome. Normal people don't have to worry about this stuff as much as I do, because most of them are employed and, whether or not they actually enjoy their jobs, they're relatively safe in them and don't necessarily have to worry about every little monetary responsibility. I've never lived a life like that. Even when I've had full-time work in the past, it was never worry-free work; I've always had to claw through everything and fight tooth and nail to pay bills and feed myself and the cats, and I don't even have a lot of needs, monetary or otherwise. I've never been comfortable. I don't care about being happy or opulent; I never have. I just want to be comfortable, and to be able to stop caring about every little thing because I can cover the basics without putting up a fight, without worrying if I'm going to be able to break even for the month or for the year. And really, I can't remember a time I've ever been comfortable in that sense. For people like me, I'm not sure an opportunity like that actually exists -- which is the most depressing thought of all.

Regardless, I assured Daisy that I will be continuing to do everything I can over the coming months in order to secure more stable employment, but she also knows that I can't make her any promises, because the results of those efforts are all out of my hands. I can only do so much -- I have to be met at least halfway. If there's nothing I can do or nothing I get interviews for (at the very least), then it's going to be a sad state of affairs, and I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.