Downward mobility

So, after waiting the entire day for the heater guy to show, and then being told, and I quote, "there's nothing [he] can do," we managed to fix the heat situation ourselves, by putting on our detective caps and figuring out where the pipes froze (duh!) and then attacking it with a hair dryer, which did the trick in a matter of minutes.

But that's not what I want to write about today. Today's post is about my very first taste of what it feels like to be an "adjunct" as opposed to a tenure-track professor. And let me tell you, it does not taste very good.

Today I met with the English department chair the college that currently employs my husband (a college which as a rule does not do spousal hires), hoping to have a conversation about my quite extensive experience as a teacher and scholar, and whether I might fill a niche in the department and do some part-time teaching there. Instead, we skipped the conversation part as he very quickly offered me two courses for the fall, one being composition and the other in a subject that I actually find interesting (a course he presented as "a great opportunity for me"), for a total salary of $5,000 for the semester. He did not ask me any questions about what I've taught in the past, what my research is in, what I'm working on now--nothing, in other words, about who I am as a scholar, but was interested only in my understanding that he could give me only one or two courses a semester (if that), and pay me $2,500 a course.

Now, it's not as if I didn't expect this. My husband was an adjunct back home, and I have long been aware of the generally sucky conditions of adjunct work. I went into this meeting fully expecting to be offered precisely the kind of thing I was offered (though perhaps for more pay). But it wasn't until I actually experienced being treated like an adjunct--like someone, when it comes down to it, who is only useful if she can fill the scheduling gaps at the last minute--that the indignity of it has hit me full force.

And my feeling is, while I might enjoy teaching a course here and there on a subject that interests me, there's no way I'm going to become the PhD-on-call who teaches whatever needs teaching.

Academia is a very hierarchical place, and it sucks to back near the bottom of the totem pole. I'm just saying.

Baby it's cold outside

We woke up today to a -10 F reading on the thermostat outside our kitchen window, and to a 51 F reading on our living room thermostat. We turn the heat down at night pretty low--to 56, in fact--but not that low. It seems that the radiators in the living room and study somehow stopped working during the night. The furnace, on the other hand, is working like its life depends on it, and so the rest of the house, particularly the bedrooms upstairs, is toasty.

We live in a rental, and the maintenance guy is married to one of my husband's colleagues, which in some ways is nice, but also can be awkward, like when he repeatedly promises to do things he never, in fact, does. One can only hound one's colleague's husband so much. Now the heating problem of this morning is not, as far as I know, related to anything our maintenance guy has put off doing. Indeed, he got the landlord to put in a brand new furnace last fall, and the old one hadn't even broken yet (though it did seem to be on its last legs). But it may be related to something else that drives me crazy, which is his insistence, in spite of the landlord's willingness to spend money for upkeep, to doing things on the cheap.

For the installation of that new furnace he hired a retired guy who apparently was quite inexpensive and who also, quite clearly to us at least, didn't really know what he was doing. It took him many trips to the hardware store, and two days beyond what he'd anticipated, to install the new furnace. Even though we've had nothing to complain about since then (until now), we've been somehow suspicious about this new furnace and sort of waiting for something to go wrong.

And one more thing. Neither the maintenance guy nor the heating guy seems to know how to install a programmable thermostat. We asked them to do so a year ago, and finally they did, but it doesn't really work. (It keeps resetting itself, and basically only works if we use the "hold" function and so we have to manually set the temperature whenever we want to change it.) We've been promised it would be replaced, but it never has been. I'm too embarrassed to continue complaining, and so we've adapted. Both guys, by the way, don't really understand what the big deal is about programmable thermostats. Didn't the old kind work just fine? (Energy conservation, anyone?)

So, I've now been waiting several hours for this same semi-competent but inexpensive retiree to come take a look at our current heating problem. And I'm in a tizzy, unable to focus on anything that I should be doing. (Which I suppose is why I'm blogging about it--at least I can get a blog post out of this tizzy!) I hate not being able to depend on our heating system in a place with such cold winters. I hate feeling as if I must always be polite and restrained with a maintenance person who doesn't really do his job. But most of all, I hate that I let all of this get to me so much!!

Is this thing on?

Testing 1, 2, 3...

Long break, that. I'm clearly never going to become one of those impressively consistent bloggers, on whom I, for one, depend for my daily fix of humor, insight, charm. Me, I post only when the mood strikes, which seems to come in waves. Can't promise that this is the beginning of another wave, though. We'll see.

Random Bullets of Things I've Been Thinking About, and Hope, Someday, to Blog About in More Depth than a Bullet Point Allows:

• Can I get the intellectual stimulation I need outside of academia?
• What, exactly, is the "intellectual stimulation I need"?
• Why is it so hard to get my book club to talk about the book we all read, beyond "what I liked, what I didn't like"? Why isn't this enough for me? (Well, I know why. But I want to think more about the difference between what I value in fiction vs. what "regular people" value.)
  
• Why won't my mother visit me? Doesn't she like me anymore? Doesn't she want to see her granddaughter?
  
• Do I really want to have only one child? What difference will it make for my daughter not to have siblings? Will she one day resent us?
  
• Does my desire to build a hay-bale home in the country (after selling our small but still way-overvalued Bay Area house) reflect my growing environmental consciousness or my desire to be perceived as having an environmental consciousness? (Ditto, buying a Prius.) Does it matter?
• Phantom recently wrote an insightful post--which I can't seem to locate, sorry--about what it means to be a writer, and got me thinking about how I conceive of my own writing. Why is it so hard for me to identify as "a writer"? What is it about academic writing that feels, to me, as if it's not real writing? Is it that one isn't paid directly for it, but only indirectly? Is it that one's audience is so specialized and tiny? Or is this just another instance of Margi's refusal to value/legitimate her own work?
• Is it possible that half of the lowest recommended dose of Zoloft is actually making a difference? I began with the lowest dose, 25 mg, and felt incredibly jittery and manic; the 17.5 mg dose has no apparent side effects, but I'm quite certain I'm feeling significantly better. Placebo effect? Does it matter?
• Obama or Clinton?