Two quick "feels"

I do have a lab to set up but two - well, really three, things, because a comment response first:

The dvd is called "Dance x Fitness with Kenn Kihiu." It's a pretty fast moving and surprisingly strenuous (as in, you don't think, "Oh, this is hard" while you're doing it, but you're tired after it and I regularly pull some muscles doing it if I've been away from it.) There are LOTS of different moves in it, some that work the abdomen, some for the shoulders. Lots of things where you have to kind of partially squat down and I think that's what's working the hamstrings.  I don't know if Kenn is Nigerian or from a Caribbean nation or possibly an Anglophone South American - he has a bit of an accent and sometimes phrases things a little differently (and I can't always interpret everything he says, not that you need to understand everything on the video). There are a lot of points where he's going "Sit down for me! Sit down for me!" meaning you need to kind of squat down to work whatever the big muscles on the back of the thighs are.

It has tightened up my legs and definitely my upper abdomen and I think my arms a little bit. And I was in okay shape before I did it because I was using the cross-country ski simulator.

And now, the feels:

1. I found out for sure today that I'm being paid at the adjunct rate. That is, $700 per credit hour taught for the entire summer. (Two classes, four credit hours each: you can do the math). My pay is exactly half of what my normal professor pay is. My take home pay is not good. I couldn't live - not without being painfully frugal - on that for very long.

I know, I can't complain about this too much:

A. I have a job. I fully expect that come fall, regular pay (perhaps less a 10% cut if times are still so bad) will come back for me. My job is as secure as anyone's job can be, pretty much....it's not like I have to go interview with Bob and Bob every year or something like that.

B. I'm still making over minimum wage even based on my net pay. Well, not with my net pay if you peg $15 as the minimum wage as some are arguing for, but I'm still making over local minimum wage. And my work conditions are much better than the typical minimum wage job: I don't have to be around hot grease, or diesel fumes, or loud noises, or sullen/hungover/troubled co-workers.

C. I agreed to this. I could have said, when we found out about the cuts, "Sorry, if I don't get 10 in both my classes [what it would have taken to get full pay, I think....maybe they raised it to 12], I'm not teaching. I don't care if that messes up several people who are planning to graduate, they should have planned better." Instead, I said, "That's an awful option but I don't want to screw over the students so I'll teach even if the classes don't fill." (In the past, I was able to get full pay for classes with fewer than 10 - because usually at least one class had 10, and also we could make the case that other classes in the department were over 10, and money was fungible, so.....well, apparently the money is no longer fungible.)

And yeah. I suppose the main argument here is I'm "too nice" and don't look out for my own self-interest enough but, I don't know. I do feel a LITTLE cheated that the upper admin did not warn us this might happen back when I agreed to teach summer, and back when the first few people signed up. Then again, they didn't know that the price of oil was going to tank and the Legislature was going to freak and squeeze higher ed but. I find I often do things that in the moment I think, "I'm being good and kind" and then when I get into the middle of it I am more like "Ugh, why did I take this on?"

I think of Dr. Thompson, one of my grad-school profs, and his standard comment whenever someone did a thankless task that got them little or no return on their effort: "You'll have another star in your crown." Yeah, great, that's really nice, but it doesn't help me re-roof my house in the here and now.

(All of this would be a lot harder if I had a problem student in either of my classes this summer but I don't. Mercifully, no one that makes my life miserable)

Also doesn't help to learn that some of the coaches at OU received raises that are larger than the full year's salary for an incoming Assistant Professor here. And yeah, yeah: "They bring in money for the school" and "Good coaches are rarer than people who can teach college" but still, it's a little frustrating. I feel kind of devalued at the moment. (A colleague reminded me that they have a huge endowment and those guys are probably paid out of alumni donations. But still: I hate that our world says "celebrity" is the best thing to be and the valuable thing.)

If by some catastrophe (what is the reverse of a miracle? Catastrophe is the best word I can come up with), the decision was made HEY YOU ARE ALL NOW ADJUNCTS AT ADJUNCT PAY and I'd wind up making about $20K before taxes.....well, I'd have to say, bye, sorry, gonna see what else I can do with my life. Being a professor isn't HARD the way some jobs are hard but you do have to deal with an awful lot of people with an awful lot of problems and I'd rather deal with different people and different problems for more money if $20K were my new salary.


Wait, wait, there's more (Edited to Add): I think the frustration I am feeling is that there are people around - some of them commentators so they have the veneer of seeming to know what they're talking about, some of them just regular folks - who essentially take the stance of "Except for maybe Harvard and Yale for the lawyers, and maybe a few seminaries, and maybe Harvey Mudd, let's shut 'em all down. What do people need an education for? Education is useless, just go start up a business!" Or similar arguments. And it makes me tired, especially with the low summer pay, because right at the moment I feel kind of like my life is a giant mistake and I went into the wrong field and no one gives a care about what I do and it's my own fault, anyway, for not choosing something actually useful to do with my life.


And yeah, I know last week I was praising the "Not the best, but still good" mentality and talking about how I still loved and valued a 30 year old plastic toy horse that had faded and had imperfect hair, but right today I feel like that nightmare My Little Pony with the faded body and  screwed-up hair and the bad stain and the worn-off cutie mark. I know part of it is that the Black Dog that visits me every summer has been sleeping on my chest at night and is huffing its damp breath on my right hip as I walk down the hall....but right now I'm feeling pretty insignificant and what's worse, I feel like if I had done something different in my life (married and had kids, become a medical professional, become an engineer, opened a business....) maybe I'd feel like my life meant something. If I had kids I'd at least occasionally hear an "I love you, mommy" and if I had become a doctor at least a few times in my career I might have the satisfaction of having saved a life. Right now I feel kind of useless. I suppose some would say that's a message I need to, I don't know, go to nursing school RIGHT NAOW and then hop the first ship for the Congo to try to help fight yellow fever or something.

I don't know. The world's in a mess and there's literally nothing concrete I can do to make things better, and the "at least you're not making things worse" I used to comfort myself with isn't enough any more.

2. This afternoon is a retirement reception for someone on campus. This is someone I was in a group with and who worked closely on some stuff so I SHOULD go but I really feel like I don't want to. My lab, if it runs the full time, lets out at 5 pm. The reception is from 4 to 6 and I know you don't have to stay the full time but honestly, at 5 pm, it's hot, I'm tired, I just want to scram and go home, and anyway, tonight I need to do my Sunday school lesson because tomorrow will be taken up with the trip and Saturday I probably need to do some stuff in here.

But I SHOULD go. So I will. This is the thing that I dislike most about adulthood: how often I do things I don't want to but know I should, and how many times I don't do things I'd like to because there's no time or energy or money for me to.

I wonder if they'll even have cake, or if that's off the budget now. (Now I think of that bit from A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge is seeing how he would have no mourners if he died, because one of the men, upon asked if he was attending the funeral, said something like, "Only if they will feed me")


And yeah, I'm still going tomorrow, and still buying yarn or books or patterns if something catches my fancy. I went to the bank yesterday and got some cash out of my savings account - which is where my tax refund still (mostly) sits, and where the couple hundred bucks I made reviewing books last year sits. And I do have enough in there to cover most minor household catastrophes (just not, if they all happened at once, like the stove melted down and the washing machine and dryer quit and I needed a new roof and my car got badly damaged in some way insurance wouldn't cover...). And in happier (?) times I might have paused about extracting money from SAVINGS (rather than taking less from Checking and going, "this is all you can spend because this is all the flex money you have for this month") but seeing as my money in Savings is earning a grand APY of 0.15%, it's losing value faster than interest accrues (inflation). So, eh meh.

And I've decided anyway, my Zombie Apocalypse skill is (a) making hats and socks and the like out of wool and (b) having tons of wool on hand to be able to do that. On ITFF, there's been some talk of Zombie Apocalypse Teams, as in, what is the skill that would make you valuable to a team....oh, I have more skills than that: I'm a good planner, I'm generally good at cobbling up fixes for stuff even without the right tools or raw materials, and I can cook good food out of cheap ingredients, and I'm pretty strong and I bet I could roundhouse kick well with a little practice.... Heh, and one of the people who posted about it said that one person she knew had taken on the nickname "Bait" after failing to come up with any other useful skills.