Sadie

Sit, children, and I'll tell you of the time I was a dog owner for three days.

My last essay mentioned my excitement in becoming a dog owner.  I come to you today as a former dog owner.  

My last picture: Sadie, as happy as ever, on our car trip to her new home.

It wasn't Sadie.  She was wonderful in those few days she was with me; in fact she was a better dog than most humans deserve and a tribute to dogs as a species. She was loving and gentle and happy: always happy.  She could bust out of any enclosure, but instead of chewing on the furniture or playing with the knives after doing so, she would lie on her spot on the couch and wait for me to get home.  I wish anything in this world gave me the joy she experienced from a simple belly rub.  We could walk four miles and instead of crashing when we got home she'd thrash her stuffed elephant with reckless abandon. When she was excited to see you her tail would break the sound barrier and when she disagreed with your decision her "side-eye" would make a teenager proud.  

It wasn't my facilities.  True, my house was far too small for a 48lb bundle of high energy, and my lack of a fenced-in yard made both exercise and going potty more labor intensive than it should have been.  Those were challenges, but challenges that time and love could overcome.

It was me.  It didn't take me long to learn that Sadie deserved far better than I could give her.  I'd never had a dog, and even growing up we'd never had an inside dog.  I had been caught up in the "idea" of a dog, and this had separated me from the "reality" of being a dog owner.  Sadie, as wonderful as she was, soon became a chore.  I wasn't ready to be the center of another being's world.  I wasn't ready to change everything in my life so that she could be happy and healthy in hers. I was a great owner those three days out of obligation, not out of love.  Such obligation is the road to resentment.   Sadie was far too good of a dog to be resented; I had to give her up.  

Sadie and I made our final 90 mile drive yesterday, and as befits her character, she was an angel.  You can see photo evidence above: this ball of energy was crammed into a passenger seat and her "luggage" meant there was no room for her to move.  She smiled the whole trip, sitting up to see the sights, or lying down with her head on my right arm like a pillow. Sadie is now at her (human) maternal grandparents, long-time dog owners, in a house three times as big as mine.  She's now lord and protector of a fenced-in yard the size of a football field.  

You can argue that I did the mature thing, realizing even after a short period of time that dog ownership wasn't right for me.  You can argue that I did the immature thing, giving up so easily.  This much I know: I learned a great deal about myself in those three days, and I experienced a slice of life with a tremendous canine.  I will miss Sadie for sure, but she's happy, in a wonderful home with wonderful people, and when I got home last night I felt no regret, only relief.

Joy at the return of my collaborator

This blog has been quiet for sometime, my collaborator took an extended hiatus, and I have been only episodically engaged.  However, the internet is forever, in a manner of speaking, and so, perhaps we are now at the dawn of a new period of activity here at Workaday Dream.

Glad to have you back my friend, glad indeed.

Giving Thanks

It's been 21 months since I posted anything to this space.  That's the kind of consistency that builds an audience :-).  But here, on a rainy Thanksgiving Night, I feel like writing.  This is a holiday for giving thanks and for reflection.  So here I go, reflecting.  And stuff.

2015 has been complicated.  In a less contemplative mood, I would describe it as the worst year of my life: in fact, I have done so.   In September 2014, my paternal grandmother died. She was 88, in pain, had 11 healthy adult children, and by all metrics had led a full life.  It could always be worse, right? Two months later, my maternal grandfather is in intensive care, knocking on death's door.  While his convalescence has been long and not without bumps in the road, he is still kicking.  Two months after that, in early January 2015, his youngest child, my aunt Joy, died of a MRSA infection after surgery, age 48.  Two weeks later, Joy's mother, my grandmother, passed after several years of dementia.   

Whether I acknowledged it or not, these all too frequent visits from the grim reaper impacted me a great deal.  I coped with a winter of loss and existential angst by playing video games and eating everything in sight.  When I returned to my normal pattern of exercise in the early spring, I found that I was more than out of shape: my left chest began to hurt nearly all the time and exerting myself seemed to make it worse.  At times I was out of breath for no reason, sighing constantly in an attempt keep up with the demand for oxygen.    Heart palpitations the evening of May 9th placed a visiting friend in the awkward position of taking me to the Emergency Room.  High blood pressure they said, but no other signs of heart attack.  Still the chest pain, the high heart rate, the occasional shortness of breath persisted.  Two weeks later my GP used the term Angina.  That's a fancy medical term for the pain and shortness of breath caused by clogged coronary arteries that are unable to supply blood to the heart muscle.  Angina is a sign of heart disease ... and of future heart attack.  I was referred to the Cardiologist ... at 33 years old I was going to a specialist to verify that I had heart disease.

To say that the human brain is a mystery is akin to saying that the universe is big.  It just doesn't do it justice.  My brain, presented with the possibility that it might be riding the good ship Matt to the bottom of the ocean, did not take it all in stride.  In the span of just a few weeks I sent WebMD to record profits.   I can't describe health anxiety any better than this: at some time between the end of May and the end of August 2015 it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that not only might I have heart disease, but also very possibly Multiple Sclerosis, Lymphoma, Lung Cancer, Multiple System Atrophy, and ALS.  It seems so silly now, but at the time I was dead serious.  I lost 30 lbs in a few weeks, motivated purely by fear. So fervent was my obsession with my left calf being smaller than my right one that I lost sleep over it, and asked multiple coworkers if they saw it too.  I was miserable and I was miserable to be around.

Thousands of dollars in tests later, the picture is clearer.  I don't have heart disease, not yet anyway.  A heart placed under strain by anxiety, excessive caffeine, and intense exercise? that I do have.  Acid reflux?  That I do have.  A left rib that is prone to pop out of place and cause mild pain?  Check.  Mild carpal tunnel in my left wrist?  You betcha.  Tight fascia/muscle knot in my left calf, and a dominate right calf to begin with?  Guilty.  

Compounding my health anxiety was work-related stress.  In April I interviewed for a job, obsessed over preparation for it ... and then didn't get it.  I decided to stifle my ennui and return to my current position with a promotion (which I am grateful for).  Then, we had 6 (eventually 7) new staff members who needed to be trained and ready to go out and crush it.  Then, in late August I learned that I'd need to be covering our recruitment travel in Chicago this fall, which sent me as close to a nervous breakdown as I've been.

Fast forward, and now I sit here on Thanksgiving 2015 as happy as I've been in a long time. In the late Summer I went to a professional counselor a few times, and it was tremendously cathartic.  The Chicago travel was greatly inconvenient, but I believe that the change of scenery, the delicious food, and the sheer fact that I made it through the semester helped me. October was a huge month: I turned 33, I saw my first professional stage show (Wicked, a show I am unhealthily fond of), the Royals won the World Series, and I bought a PS4, a $350 investment that has been worth it 10 times over.  

Even more, about a week from now I'm getting a dog and I couldn't be more excited. Sadie's her name, and she's coming from great owners that, although heartbroken, simply can't have her anymore. I've never met her, and she has no idea that in 10 days her doggy dogg world will turn upside down, but I know that we'll be perfect for each other.  Maybe we'll even have crime fighting adventures like Turner and Hooch.  

I don't know what lies ahead for me in the next few months.  It's entirely possible that Sadie may be the third or fourth most substantial life change for me in the coming year and that's exciting to contemplate.  I won't miss 2015, but I'm certainly happy to be here.

Going Forward or Dying Slowly?

I am getting antsy, professionally and personally.  I am in a rut on both accounts and this should be understood quite broadly.  The advantage of this blog is that absolutely no one is reading it aside from me, perhaps not even my collaborator at this point, so I feel a certain freedom here that I lack elsewhere.

I no longer have the fire of teaching, part of this is a consequence of the lack of variation.  I teach the same three classes over and over again, one class I teach two sections every semester, and it is exhausting to see the same errors over and over again.  I often simply don't care enough to prep because I can do the lectures in my sleep now.  I have difficulty looking at twenty-five or thirty more years of this, nor do I relish the thought of more pointless meetings.

I want out of southern California, weather aside there is little else to commend the place.  At some point one has to decide for whom one is living, right?  Is the job more important than quality of life?  This is more than an academic question (haha!) for me.  I am the job, in both the best and worst readings of that phrase.  I have made some terrible personal decisions based on the assumption that I am the job, that I have worked for years to be the job, and that has led me to break off relationships or allow others to wither on the vine (in retrospect).  What has this yielded me thus far?  Long hours, two professor of the year nominations, no spouse and no children.  And perhaps I am losing that love of the job as well.  Is that a reasonable yield?

Freshman, ah hum.

In what now I can only assume was a fit of misguided duty and intrigue, I agreed to teach a Freshman Seminar (although we now call these First-Year Seminars) this fall.  Although I am trained as a historian I do not teach in a history department, so I viewed this as an opportunity to return to my training.  As anyone who knows who follows the academic hiring market, jobs, especially tenure-track positions (heck, even permanent, decent full-time positions that allow for something resembling a decent life) are rare, so rare, that I was forced to look outside my training, and luckily, found a good school and a good department that appreciates the training I worked so hard to acquire. 

However, that opportunity came with a price, and that was teaching business ethics, and a quasi-history course on US business history, but only between 1860 and 1932 (a curious cut-off, no?).