August Doldrums
I just sat at my desk and realized that my New Yorker calendar was still showing June. How did that happen? Well, I guess that means I’ve had a busy summer and while it has involved a lot of work of many types, it has mostly just sort of slid by without me formally sitting at my desk and keeping things refreshed, like my calendar. Today is Thursday and that means trash day (buckets are already at the curb) and the day when Isabel and her gang of young Mexican girls descend on the house for several hours of intensive team cleaning. I wonder what they think when they see that my calendar still shows June instead of August? I bet that if they think about it at all, it is to think that I am retired and play at having a desk set up like I am still a working guy.
The truth is that my work these days is more often than not done on my iPad at any of ten spots around the house depending on how I am feeling and what I have to do. An iPad (especially a Pro series that is really an Apple version of an instant-on laptop) is a versatile tool that I find indispensable for work and life in general. I use it for everything. I review and sign important documents on it. I write and publish blog posts like this. I do spreadsheet work. I look into my numerous files on Dropbox. I shop. I track deliveries. I design spaces like my new garage or even my new garden on floorplan and layout apps. I’m not sure what I would do without my iPad. Well, one thing I would do is spend more time at my desk like I am doing right now, and use my laptop more. That would probably cause me to glance at my New Yorker calendar more often than once every two months.
I might ponder that ignoring my New Yorker calendar has vast symbolism. Maybe it means that New York City really is distant in my rearview mirror, but that would cause me to overuse that old adage that “objects in the rearview mirror may appear closer than they are.” Thank you, Meatloaf. I was last in NYC on March 10th, the day I had dinner with Gary & Oswaldo at Antica and the day I chose not to have dinner with Bruce, who had, unbeknownst to me, contracted COVID-19 and would probably have infected me at some upper West Side bistro. Since then, the number of times I have thought about NYC are few and far between since it has been a virtual ghost town due to the extended pandemic lockdown. That was where I earned my livelihood and spent my life for forty-three years, and now I don’t. Now my connection to NYC seems to be an old vestigial paper calendar sent as a promotion by a wonderful vestigial publication that I still read religiously almost from cover-to-cover every week. I will say about the New Yorker that they have managed, with their wonderful reporting, to remain relevant in this time of multi-media online news. I’m not sure their calendar is all that valuable, but it is one of the few, with its compendium of cartoons, that I would bother to use…or perhaps not use except for a monthly glance.
It is early morning here in Northern San Diego County. The sun isn’t even up yet. I have given Handy Brad the day off since he seemed to need a break and I am literally running out of projects to do at the moment. The garage is now completed (except for one slatwall that gets installed tomorrow). The shed and its pathway is done and looking very tidy behind the garage. The roof is done. The garden is planted and irrigated regularly. Nephew Jason has finished his fabulous Otami wall mural depicting the hummingbirds, quail and flowering vines that now occupy the West side of the garage as our new garden. And our new dog, Betty, is still wandering around trying to acclimate to her new surroundings. In other words, it’s a new normal COVID pre-2020-election day here on our hilltop.
Late August is that time when anyone you want to get in touch with is off somewhere at the beach or catching up on their work from their earlier vacation, glad that everyone else is off at the beach. I have had a busy August so far, but today is the first day when I have little to do except one errand to go into San Diego to prove to the people at University of San Diego that I am a legitimate United States citizen by showing them my passport and swearing out my I-9 immigration form. That will allow me to teach a course there next month which will consist of fifteen hours of lecture, preceded by about seventy-five hours of preparation and ten hours of commuting, and get paid $3,250 ($32.50/hour) using my vast forty-five years of accumulated work wisdom. That is truly a labor of love and not an economical use of my time (which I currently bill out for expert witness work at $850/hour). If you do the math, assuming a normal executive workweek of at least 50 hours, that means I am worth something like $2 million per year, which is somewhat consistent with the realities of Wall Street. As an academic, if you assumed I would normally be paid a full-time salary to teach three courses per semester and one in the summer, I would be worth about $70,000 as an adjunct and twice that as a full-time professor. It’s hard to reconcile that all, but that is why I say it is a labor of love to teach and not an economic choice.
And here at the end of August, during the season of doldrums out in the vast Southern Pacific Ocean, the $2 million people are lounging at the beach, steeling themselves for the back-to-school financing season and the academics are actually already back to school indoctrinating their students so that they can go out there and become $2 million players that hang out at the beach in August rather than spend their days preparing lectures to teach people how to make $2 million per year. Did I say that all correctly? I am confused now because daylight is breaking and I am wondering what I should do today, not so much to fill my day, but rather to fill my psyche with the thought that I am doing something valuable and accomplishing something productive.
When my friend Steve reads this he will think that I am still not yet comfortable with retirement and that I need to let go of all those feelings about being productive. Maybe that’s the difference between being sixty-six, as I am, and being about to turn seventy, as he is. Maybe when I am about to turn seventy I will be wagging my finger at sixty-six year-olds telling them to chill out and don’t worry, be happy.
In the meantime, my preoccupation for the moment is whether the weather will break from the heat spell we have been having so that I can do more work out in the garage and outdoors. At least that keeps me out of earshot of all the pre-election jockeying that the DNC and soon the RNC are going through to show us all that they have the better path for the country. I know how that story should end, but it’s like the heat of August and the summer doldrums, you have to just get through it and there is usually a crisp cool Autumn awaiting you. But then again, maybe not this year since San Diego may not do Autumn. The election may steal our crisp and our cool. And the August Doldrums may turn into the Fall Doldrums, followed by the Winter Doldrums. At least there is always Spring…unless….