Frightening plans

Tonight, the longest Saturday night of the year (don’t forget to “fall back,” y’all), I shall arise from my nest of printouts from JSTOR and manuscript scraps. On my patio table I’ll place a glass containing Halloween-themed pencils and a big bowl containing granola bars I got for free with coupons last week. At some point this afternoon I’ll make a festive, glittery sign directing trick-or-treaters to “take one.” I don’t care if one of them empties the bowl; I don’t care if they shun my treats. The only thing I’m concerned about is that I don’t actually encounter any trick-or-treaters. I won’t even be home.

Instead, thanks to complimentary passes from my landlord, I’m going to my town’s “historic” discount theater to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I didn’t see when it was released this summer and still haven’t seen—until tonight. I never buy popcorn at the movies, since I eat it every day, and thus am too accustomed to making my own and flavoring it more adventurously. Instead, since the proprietors of this theater don’t care if patrons bring their own food and non-alcoholic drink, I’m bringing a box of rosemary Triscuits, which I love, for indeed they put the “crack” in “cracker.” Plus a wedge of drunken goat cheese.

There. A wild night of such wildness that even Emily D could not have imagined it. I love it.

A consumer’s report

There’s a commercial for a big-box office supply store that, to a soundtrack of “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” depicts a middle-aged dude gliding gleefully through the store’s aisles riding a shopping cart, followed by a pair of miserable children dragging their feet in funereal gloom. It’s back-to-school time! For obvious reasons, that commercial always filled me with irritation, especially since it would start airing in July. I’m on leave in the fall, so these days I’m not as bothered by the commercial, which I actually haven’t seen this year, mostly because I haven’t had occasion to turn on the TV.

I know I’m preaching to the choir when I assert that education and consumerism don’t mix. Just ask Trina Thompson. Or don’t. Thompson, who graduated from Monroe College this past May, filed suit last week against the unaccredited, for-profit college, seeking a $70,000 refund of her tuition, plus $2000 for mental distress, because she still hasn’t found a job, despite her 2.7 GPA, attendance in class, IT major, and almost three months of unemployment. What did she expect her alma mater to do about her joblessness? Says she: “They’re supposed to say, ‘I got this student, her attendance is good, her GPA is all right—can you interview this person?’ They’re not doing that.” Readers of the New York Daily News online are unsympathetic. As am I.

Still, I know now that, had I to do it all over again, I would not attend Monroe College in a field whose jobs are notorious for being outsourced overseas. While I’m at it, here are some arguably back-to-school items I’m on the fence about buying.

1. These,

The better to see you with, and because decent vision is, like, an occupational necessity, I get my eyes checked religiously, although my prescription hadn’t changed in ten years. Until this year! So, having read all kinds of online encomia (and diatribes) on Zenni Optical, I sent my canary into the pit. On July 1, I ordered these glasses for $8 per pair, plus $4.95 shipping. For $28.95, therefore, they arrived via USPS on July 11, each pair nestled amid the folds of a lint-free cloth in one of these hard plastic cases:

These were the best-fitting glasses I’d ever worn, and I’ve often had trouble choosing which pair to wear. But when I took them out to photograph them for this post, I discovered that my favorite pair (front—duh) had cracked. After spending enough time on Zenni’s 800-line to proofread a chapter of my MS (and I write verbosely, as you can probably guess), I finally spoke to a customer-service rep who supposedly arranged to send me a pair of replacement frames. Now if only I knew how to change out the lenses.

2. These,

I know white people like these. Is that so wrong? They are Moleskines, but one is not like the other. The one on the left contains my frightening stray thoughts: lesson ideas, budgets, conference notes, recipes, reminiscences about conversations, absolutely terrifying dreams. No, I didn’t say I was organized. But the Moleskine on the left was, until I reached the last page, the latest in a pile of Moleskines that contain dissertation notes, info on job searches, meditations on breakups, and plans for world domination. They were such a pleasure to write in that I filled up two of these a year, on average.

The one on the right, as I say, only looks like the old Moleskines. The new one is slightly less shiny. Where the older Moleskines feel like vegan calfskin, the latest feels like plastic. Worse, it smells like plastic. Bitter plastic, if you know what I mean: on bad days the odor makes me swoon. Even worse, the paper feels not like the smooth, slightly thick stock of the old Moleskines, but distinctly like the Mead filler paper people are buying for their kids right about now. (Actually, do kids still use filler paper? I see it in stores, but to hear the creepy morons in my school’s Center for Teaching Awesomeness tell it, elementary school students are Tweeting their notes these days.) No, I don’t like. I started this Moleskine in January. I think I’m ten pages in, maybe fewer.

3. and, as much as I enjoy being a girl, maybe This:

HP Mini clutch by Vivienne Tam

Would you believe I have still not replaced my computer? My moribund iBook is being held together with the e-quivalent of rubber bands and duct tape.

Yep, this post was made with a Mac. MacGyver, that is. And yes, I’ve been dying to write that.

Guess what?

I’m debt free. This fact quite pleases me. Thought I’d let you know. Toodles!

* * *

Just kidding. What I really want to do is shout from the rooftops that I paid off $47,508.63 in forty-four months, having even overcome an eleventh-hour fit of profligate spending on gifts and coffee in April. In fact, I owed substantially more than the figure above if you count what I paid off from three years’ worth of job searching and moving. I have no idea what that number was, because I paid it off sort of haphazardly, but, as I say, I suspect the figure was substantial.

So what’s stopping me from shouting from the rooftops? Well, for one thing, my roof is all pointy, and I’m not exactly gifted with a fine sense of balance. That and no one who knows me in real life knows how much I owed.

I recall reading that most people are more comfortable talking about their sex lives than about their finances, but I suspect academics might be even more reluctant to talk about money. In all my experience on search committees, I can remember exactly one candidate asking about salary. And while whining about our risible stipends was practically required for admission to candidacy in my grad program, no one I knew ever talked about how much they were in hock, despite the ubiquitous unopened credit card statements on everyone’s kitchen tables. Even—or perhaps especially—now, my colleagues downplay their reasons for teaching summer school: they’re doing so to test-drive a different set of assignments or texts, not because their HELOCs or their kids’ student loans dried up. I suspect this reticence is a vestige of the gentlemen’s-clubby origins of academia. The life of the mind is expensive. Aspirants to it must be to the manner born. As for the manor, well, that goes without saying.

I wish I could say I do not regret having borrowed so much. After all, Sallie Mae enabled me to get a delightfully elite education, and really, had I to do it all over again, I would have chosen the same program. Never mind that Sallie Mae reminds me of a character out of Faulkner, one of those grotesque shrews who wear their hair in iron-gray screws.

Moreover, Sallie and her passive-aggressive little friends Amex and Visa have shaped my career in ways I don’t like to acknowledge. In fact, it is partly because of them that I am at JPU rather than a more glamorous place, which had offered a marginally higher salary but was located in the most expensive city in the country. There I would have had easy access to dazzling library collections. Would my second book have lived up to the hopes I’d had for it? It’s impossible to say, of course, and I’m careful to avoid contemplating other people’s greener grass or what could have been. I chose my own adventure. So what’s next?

As the song goes, I-I-I just wanna celebrate. I could call Dave Ramsey, a financial guru whose acolytes call in to his radio and TV programs and announce their debt freedom over the audio from the climactic scene in Braveheart. Women in particular sound endearingly silly. I disagree with Ramsey’s conflation of credit and debt, though I guess for the weak willed or stupid, it’s just better to remove temptation altogether. I can handle credit. It was financing the Profession that I couldn’t handle. So I won’t be calling Ramsey, but I still need to commemorate the present occasion.

How, oh 2.5 readers, shall I do so? In the years I’ve been paying off Sallie I’ve learned I can get by on very little, and I’ve lost the inclination to acquire stuff. Last summer it occurred to me that, for what I was paying Sallie I could buy two new iBooks, an iPod, and an iPhone. Each month. That was a depressing realization. But, then again, what would I do with them? When my next paycheck deposits, I’ll feel rich. Sure, I’ll be kicking the former payments into retirement and house funds, but meanwhile, I can’t decide what else to do. Perhaps blogging about it will suffice. Or maybe I can finally get that pony.

On budgets

At JPU, Spring 2009 ends neatly with the cruelest month. Fearful symmetry, that. You know what else is fearful? Well, that would be me, contemplating my American Express statement. Though a mere thirty days hath April, I blew the crap out of my budget last month. By the time my statement cuts some time next week (and the shifting closing dates are yet another reason I hate Amex), I will owe $638.47.

That sum may not seem like much, but if I pay it in full—and because I hate Amex, I refuse to revolve a balance—I may not be able to pay off Sallie Mae once and for all in June, as I have been planning to do for the past three years.

As my choice of profession might suggest, I’ve never been great at handling money, but one of my dumbest financial decisions, spread out over four years, was to take out student loans. While my program did fund me, our funding was risible. Most of us took jobs in addition to our TA or RA stipends. Others were supported by significant others who earned decent incomes. Well into their thirties, many were accepting money from their parents. All three of these options would have been so distracting to me that I suspect I would never have finished had I accepted any of them.

Cue Aunt Sallie. I guess I was somewhat conscious of the rule about not taking out more in loans than you expect to earn in your first year on the job, because across the four years, I took out “only” $34,000. With fees and interest, this number blossomed miraculously into almost $45,000. (I kept all my documents, do not fear math, and am therefore convinced there was an error in calculating the balance, but no one will cooperate with me—and now that I’m so close to paying it off, there’s no incentive to cooperate with me.) The latter number was, in fact, only a little more than my gross income as a VAP at Notwilliams, but moving twice more; furnishing new apartments with non-studenty furniture; buying clothes for different climates; and going on exotic vacations each winter to San Diego, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC (that’s MLA, for those of you playing the home game) swelled my credit card balances to five digits, which I did not pay off until a little over a year ago.

Since then I have been running every possible expense through American Express, just for the cash back, even though I know I’ll never earn back the interest I’ve paid those fuckers. (It would have been Citibank, but I never felt right about them; I wasn’t surprised that they failed their stress test.) I’ve also been paying every spare penny to Sallie Mae, who according to my spreadsheet should be out of my life on June 1, which is a vast improvement over my original spreadsheet years ago, which had forecast my extrication from debt in 2010.

In the mean time, I have secretly become one of those smug frugalistas who are now exploiting their fifteen minutes on every talk show and blog. I seldom drive; I don’t eat meat and seldom eat out unless the meal is somehow subsidized; I grow my own herbs, frequent farmers’ markets, and split a share in a CSA; I replaced all my light bulbs with CFLs; I clip coupons for things like shampoo and toilet paper, for which I pay pennies on the dollar, if I pay for them at all (the last time I “bought” shampoo, I was paid 49¢ before tax to take two bottles of Garnier Fructis out of the store); and, as I’ve blogged often, I live in a crappy apartment. For my troubles, I am closing in on the freedom not to send each paycheck to someone else.

This regimen worked well enough for three years. However, April found me restless. Like a weary dieter, I just let myself go. For a couple of weeks, the only way I could get any work done was to make myself a spectacle (in my own mind) at the local coffee shop. I also seem to have become a magical fairy of love and fertility, because I’m suddenly surrounded by people celebrating weddings and babies, and accordingly have spent the month buying gifts. May promises to be more of the same.

Just as there are budgets for money, so there are budgets for time, and mine has just quit working. In April I have crossed little off my longer-term and even some of the short-term to-do lists. Not that I’m that surprised: I’ve had this problem since January if I’m being honest. They say that debt is slavery, but I find that metaphor more than a bit melodramatic, though I can relate. Still, debt is certainly a drain on one’s finances. For me, stress has been the drain on my time. My third-year review was such a stressful experience that I would come home after my classes and spend the evening scrubbing out the grout in my kitchen when I had planned to revise a gnarly chapter whose argument I just couldn’t put in order. Manual work was somehow therapeutic, whereas writing just convinced me I was a fraud, the silliness of whose “research” would be exposed by committee-wide scrutiny. Clean grout is a tangible, visible outcome; a less-atrocious paragraph is a result visible but unseen by me. Besides, part of me really believed that the university would find some reason to can my ass—we’re in recession, dude; bureaucratic procedure be damned!—and I’d better get used to manual work.

I needn’t have worried, having sailed through my review, but I haven’t accomplished what I had intended, and now I’ve run clean out of April. It’s just as well. I’ve been ready to shake the dust of April off my heels for some time now. Get ready, May. Here I come.

Because academics in the humanities are such experts on these things. . .

As if I didn’t have enough distractions, I half-heartedly follow a discussion board whose topic is tangentially related to my research. The board is populated primarily by non-academics. Lately some folks have mentioned incidentally that they’ve received their tax refunds. Rut-roh, I say, Scooby-like. I want mine, too, but I’m waiting on my 1099-INT’s. It’s only a formality, since in 2008 I lost more money than I’ve ever seen in person via TIAA-CREF alone. I know we can’t file for capital losses, but my never-to-be-diagnosed OCD tells me to wait until I have all my documents. So I ask you all out there in teh intarwebs: have you received your 1099’s? Shall I procrastinate from grading by filing my taxes? Hmm?

Hooked on demographics!

I hate American Express with the heat of a nova. Like apparently thousands, if not millions, of cardholders, I received an email last November informing me that my credit limit had been slashed by tens of thousands of dollars, down to a bloody nub. To justify such draconian financial punishment, the message cited the “poor repayment history” of “other customers” who shopped where I shop. Unlike this man, however, I haven’t set foot inside a Wal-Mart since 1997. In my defense, I wasn’t the one driving, and my iron bladder had reached capacity (TMI: sorry). Chez Wally oozed such bad juju that I have never returned.

Anyhow, I continue to use American Express because I’m a whore for cash back—all 1% of it—on groceries and gas. My account probably got flagged for my patronage of the Piggly Wiggly, where unfailingly I run into students and get hit up by panhandlers. But AmEx, if you have such a problem with the Piggly Wiggly, then, for Diety’s sake, just don’t service the Piggly Wiggly. Oh, but that would be redlining, which is, like, ILLEGAL. At any rate, I’ll never spend enough to get the 5% touted in AmEx’s adverts.

So I was trying to pay my grocery bill online this morning, and the site wouldn’t load. It’s an absurd site, crammed full of baroque scripts and popups that take forever to load on my geriatric Mac. The front page even has a jingle to keep you amused as you watch a Flash montage that recently included Ellen Degeneres in a gold lamé tuxedo. As a taxpayer, I am just so tickled (do I mean “ticked”?) that our bailout rescue funds are being used so judiciously. Nudge nudge “bank holding company” wink wink. Such smart decision making. Not unlike giving a grad student a credit line more than three times her annual income. Bwlarhahahahahar.

Right. The page wouldn’t load, and I couldn’t remember the URL for the site that shows whether a site is down for everyone or just me (which, by the way, is downforeveryoneorjustme.com). I turned to Google. From there I stumbled onto Quantcast, which, because I live under a rock, I had never seen before. The site provides eerie “rough estimates” of the sex, ethnicity, income, and education level of people who visit a site. Let’s just say that the average visitor to americanexpress.com can buy and sell me.

For the next twenty minutes, I couldn’t stop plugging in other URLs. Recent political campaigns. Shopping sites. Yawn. The Chronicle of Higher Education, whose users apparently fit this profile:

Click to embiggen.

Though I barely passed my last statistics class well over a decade ago, I’m not under the illusion that the CHE’s 424,000 online users are all highly educated, poorly paid, childless African American women. Still, as much as I love the red “X” over the child’s face, I find this profile depressing. Which of these tendencies are correlated to which others? Why are users of historians.org apparently more fecund than those who visit mla.org? I’m sure the data—rough estimates though they be—are skewed by students, who, as my university’s PR office likes to boast, are increasingly “diverse” and female. But are these the same attributes that make academics “less affluent,” that force them to resort to the plastic when their funding has run out?

I did eventually wade through all the applets and managed to pay AmEx what I owed them, without triggering finance charges. (Nothing against Swiss chard, but I’d really hate paying interest on it.) But my speculations over this impromptu foray into the intarwebs’ other algorithms prompted recollection of the days, not at all long ago, when I subsisted on this card. Those days will never return: to “minimize risk” in this economic climate, the owners of americanexpress.com do not want any cross traffic from the undesirables who visit chronicle.com. Besides, anyone who can subsist indefinitely on a bloody nub’s worth of credit is a better woman than I.

The takft that keeps on taking

I’ve done no research on the subject, but my impression is that many a pedant has weighed in on the abominable use of “gift” as a verb. Reader, I too dislike it.

But what really grinds my gears today is that there isn’t an equivalent for the opposite action: taking. Sure (and I’m not going to do any research on this, either), “gift” probably derives from an antiquated past participle (now superseded by “given”) of “to give,” itself probably Anglo-Saxon enough to warm the cockles of George Orwell’s cold, dead heart. The past participle of the equally Anglo-Saxon “to take” is, of course, “taken,” which functions just fine as a noun. However, I want a word that immediately conveys its materiality. Hence, takft.

Now, while it’s been a long time since I took Old English—a child born at the time would be shaving by now, I suspect—I know takft doesn’t jibe with any real verb forms. I just find its unwieldy concatenation of consonants expressive of something that someone takes from you.

Today’s takft involves an annoyance that I blogged about at the beginning of the week. My rent hadn’t posted, and the property management company that owns my apartment charges a 10% penalty per day the rent is late. Given the possibility of “owing” over $1000 in penalty “rent,” I worried about it for five days, before the bookkeeper called me, on a Sunday, to tell me all was well.

Well, folks, my rent still hasn’t posted. Yesterday, the bookkeeper called me and told me she couldn’t find my rent check. When she talked to me on Sunday, she was sure she had seen it, and it may have been stapled to another document and misfiled. Or maybe it went to the wrong account. She hadn’t handled the rent checks since before she left for the Hamptons. Blah blah blah blah. The upshot is that I had to stop payment on the original check, and that I’ll have to submit my checking account statement showing that I did stop payment before I’d be reimbursed for the charge. You’re an excellent tenant whose rent is always early. Yet for bookkeeping purposes she needed documentation for the stop-payment fee. So sorry. Of course we trust you. And did I mention I spent my fourth of July in the Hamptons? So yes, my replacement check needs to be for the full amount of the rent. And lady, the Hamptons weren’t fabulous even when the Sex and the City crew summered there. Just my opinion.

To her credit, she brought over a SASE yesterday, and on a Post-It told me I could just drop the new check in the mail; there’s no hard date due, and she couldn’t say when she’d be going into the P.O. again, anyhow.

Well, I’m off to the P.O. now with the replacement rent. I have to post stuff for Amazon, anyway. (More on that later, perhaps.) While I was writing it out, I also wrote out checks for the August bills I’ve received that don’t accept online payments. Among these was August’s rent check, which I’ll be “mailing” next week. And you know what I will be including with it? A letter terminating my tenancy when my lease expires next June. That same month, barring any catastrophes, I should be bidding a fond farewell to Sallie Mae. To celebrate that much-anticipated occasion, what better gift could I give myself than to declare freedom from the takers?

Bloodsuckers!

Home again, home again, with, oh, thirty souvenirs from Interesting City: thirty mosquito bites, more or less evenly distributed, on my legs. But one standout stands out from the rest, ruining my uniformly poxy pattern of calamine patches. Yeah, calamine. I’m old school. On my right calf, one welt is so engorged that my leg would be worthy of a portrait of aristocratic manhood from that long heyday of men in tights, when a “finely turned calf” signaled what a very fine physical specimen you were, even though you belonged to such a stratospheric social class that the physical exertion required to develop such a muscle was beneath you.

Oh, the conference and the trip were fabulous, though I’ll have to rethink attending a conference with a long-lost buddy again, because doing so may have prevented me from circulating as much as I would have liked among People I Should Know. I am a crappy friend, but can’t I blame the profession, just a little? So much of what we do is about cultivating a reputation. Just as we will always be writing recommendations, so we will always need one from someone more powerful than we are. After all, the reason my university guarantees travel funding only during the probationary period is that that is when we need to be developing a reputation, not least by networking.

And it was in fact while networking that I achieved my even-more-than-usually ridiculous state. We were enjoying an incredible dinner in a gray eminence’s back garden. Citronella candles guarded the table, but they did not prevent the mosquitoes from feasting below. Among the party of a dozen, I got the most bites! That means I win! Heh. As a feminist, I suppose I should defend the little critters. Only the females bite, needing protein in order to lay their eggs. Parturition costs, and every creature does its part to keep the planet in balance. Om.

Just kidding: if I could make them infertile extinct, I would. DIE, BITCHES!

The other thing that made my trip less pleasant than it should have been was a less literal, but more insidious, bloodsucker. I’m referring, of course, to my property management company, what most other people would call a landlord, because they can actually name the person responsible for the property. The 2.5 readers of this blog may recall that I live in my own third-world country. Sure, it’s charming and close to campus, in a neighborhood that has an enviable walk score of 90, which is so convenient that I haven’t filled my gas tank since the ides of March! Also, I have my own washer and dryer to myself, plus the rent is about $200 below average for the location. The students afford the neighborhood by living in apartments populated like clown cars.

As of today, 14 July—allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé, btw—my rent check, due 1 July, has not posted. It’s not even pending. I first discovered this fact the Wednesday before I left for Interesting City, while I was checking my checking account (heh) to determine just how interesting a time I would be able to have. Imagine my horror when I discovered that my rent check hadn’t posted. OK, maybe the fourth of July had caused the delay. Still, according to my past bank statements, the latest any of my rent checks had ever posted was the 7th.

The reason an unposted rent check is problematic is that I do not trust these people, who keep their street address so secret that they must have lots of enemies, or at least reasons to hide. The September after my arrival in Funky City, my rent was supposedly late, though I had put it in the blue USPS box outside my department’s building a week before the check was due. Two weeks later I received a letter informing me that my “September 2005″ (the year was 2006) rent had arrived on the 2nd, and that, according to the terms of the 24-page lease on which I was required to initial every paragraph, I would need to add 10% to my October rent. According to ¶46b, the penalty counts as rent, and omitting it would prolong my delinquency, resulting in damage to my credit and possibly eviction for nonpayment. When I called the business office inquiring about the error in the date and seeking evidence that my rent was indeed late, I had to leave a message. (No one ever answers the phone, I would learn.) Three days later, the bookkeeper replies with a patronizing yet nervous, giggling, hemming-and-hawing voicemail explaining that I should send my rent at least a week before it is due, because they’ll never deposit our checks before the first of the month, so we need not worry about checks bouncing before payday. She didn’t understand my confusion about the date. I don’t see what’s the problem. Heehee.

Whatever. I was in a new job and didn’t have time to consult a lawyer or extract evidence of my “delinquency,” so I paid the penalty. Since then I have been bringing my rent checks to the post office that houses the management company’s P.O. box, where I buy a stamp that a clerk cancels before walking the envelope ten feet. It’s absurd. I guess I’m glad to do my part to support the USPS, though my efforts will not be enough to prevent postal rates from increasing again next year.

Since Wednesday I have been leaving a message each day asking someone at the management company to get back to me about my rent check. I received no reply. Until yesterday, at Interesting City International Airport, as I was about to shut off my phone. It was the bookkeeper, apologizing profusely for not returning my (and dozens of other tenants’) calls. She had wandered into the office on a Sunday, and goodness gracious, what were all these messages about? So my rent had arrived on time, and everything was just fine. See, she had to depart at the last minute for her fourth of July holiday in the Hamptons, and in her hurry she didn’t get a chance to deposit the checks. Oops. So sorry!

If I could have reached through the phone and strangled her, I would have. Instead, I hung up, went to the airport bar, and bought myself a watered-down margarita, followed by a surprisingly decent martini. Then my flight was called.

As relieved as her call made me, I couldn’t help wishing there were some way to exact restitution for the anxiety her delay had caused. The prospect of owing over $1000 extra “rent”—and that’s if I got back to Funky City on time and the bookkeeper received my check today—weighed on me, distracting me as I tried to pay attention to what should have been an exhilarating, perhaps career-changing conference. Instead of hanging out with Amanda and other colleagues till dawn, I went to the hotel business office to check my bank balance and find contact info for JPU’s and Funky City’s renters’ rights organizations. Instead of brainstorming how to incorporate into my book what I had learned that day, I was plotting my defense. I would need to get an affidavit from the clerk who had canceled the postage and whom I had trusted to deliver my check to its destination ten feet away. Would she remember? I was drafting an email to one of the university’s lawyers, when it occurred to me: I had done nothing wrong.

All the same, I cringe at all the mental energy I wasted on trying to protect myself from being scammed. I imagined that the management company needed to raise revenue to recoup whatever they may have lost in other real estate by charging some quick late rent of their more high-maintenance tenants. (In the past year, both my bathtub faucet and water heater exploded, and my bathroom ceiling caved in. Twice.) Until my lease ends, would I have to get signature confirmation on rent checks sent from and to the same post office? Could I ever be safe from worry? For five days I was frantic.

But now I want my pound of flesh. Oh look, there’s one on my right leg. It, too, is unduly distracting. Sucks, I tellya.

This one goes to 11

The other day I posted about my hellacious recent journey to Weird City via Greyhound. When I booked the ticket, I congratulated myself for my frugality in saving more than $700 in airfare, not to mention the immeasurable hassle of driving. But 54+ hours aboard the Chariot of the People made me think twice: I had always believed I was frugal, but had I now crossed the line into being cheap? I needed an answer.

Thank goodness Time Out New York came to the rescue with a cheapness quiz. My cheapness quotient was 11, with the following explanation:

You steal cable from your neighbor and buy day-old bagels, but you’re not as bad as you look. Like Luther from Coach, you’ll spring if you really have to. You just hope that never happens.

Perhaps the quiz would be eerily accurate if I were in NYC. I don’t have cable, and I make my own bagels. I’ve never seen Coach, and I hope I never really have to. Meanwhile, I’ll just have to assume that Luther is a junior faculty member and not the show’s (unless it’s a movie) eponym. At JPU, the last coach’s salary I noticed went into seven figures. I didn’t even know those were allowed here.

Don’t do it!

After months of ratcheting up fares to keep up with fuel costs, the airlines are now contritely rescinding their most recent increases. Such was not the case two weeks ago, when I realized I had no choice but to go to Weird City to inspect some papers at one of the world’s most gloriously excellent and greedily acquisitive libraries. Not only was I up against a deadline, but I also had to see the papers firsthand, because I couldn’t quite articulate what I was looking for, so I couldn’t direct anyone I knew on site to look for it. I did find it, as well as the celebrated much much more, but at what cost?

Two weeks ago it was still May. Remember how young and carefree we were then? Yeah. And the cheapest airfare kayak.com could find to Weird City was $839. Fine: I had spent so many hours in airports in the past nine months that, I told myself, I was relieved not to be flying.

After all, my favorite way to travel is by train. Though Amtrak seems to be perpetually trimming its itineraries while raising its fares, I remain smitten with rail travel and would choose it at any opportunity. As “evidenced” by that episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie and Samantha suffer the indignities of showering over a toilet and sharing a club car with children as well as paunchy Midwestern dudes sporting wedding rings and unironic facial hair, trains are emphatically not fabulous. However, they are civilized: passengers can get up and walk around; they are all but forced to relax, an activity that may or may not include using one’s laptop or reading. (On a smaller scale, I remain convinced that cities with extensive mass rail systems have better-informed and -educated populations. Sure, you’ll see Blackberries sprouting up in every ear, but many passengers are also reading; even if they’re not, they necessarily demonstrate an awareness of etiquette unknowable to freeway drivers who risk offending no one but themselves.) What is more, trains take us through an America that we wouldn’t otherwise see: the back yards of Appalachia, eerie rocks once submerged in the ocean along the Pacific coast, graffiti sprayed apparently just for us in Chicago.

This past year, I had to arrange my eight (yes, eight) trips around my teaching schedule, and since I’ve never been on a train that departed on time—after all, they figure if you’re traveling by train, time is no object—I flew each time. Not surprisingly, then, I had fallen out of the habit of seeking out train schedules. By the time the train crossed my mind (heh), it was sold out.

Never mind, for what came to my rescue but the Chariot of the People, the Big Gray Dog? Yes, folks, I voluntarily took a bus on an overnight trip, twenty-seven hours each way.

My unsolicited advice to those seeking to save a few shekels by going Greyhound? Don’t do it!

When I was a grad student all of, um, four years ago, I used not to think twice about taking a bus on fairly long trips. It could be that I’ve become too old to sit still for that long, deprived of sleep. It could be that life on the fringes of the professoriate has finally coaxed my inner snob out into the open. But this last bus ride was my last, because hell really is other people.

.These other people were, I’m not proud to admit, truly other to me. My route to Weird City took me through the Deep South, where I had never been before. (I know: I’m as pure as the driven snow.) The bus seemed to stop at every little town, pop. 525, where teenaged mothers would board with their newborns—that is, if there was space. What with exorbitant airfares and unprecedented gas prices, Greyhound was (un)surprisingly popular. Every other leg (and there were many) of the trip was oversold, and a second bus had to be called into service, involving a delay of up to five hours. Not once did I have a pair of seats to myself. Indeed, I arguably never had a single seat to myself, since the person who plonked herself or himself down next to me inevitably either weighed upwards of 300 pounds or was laden with baggage. One particularly memorable seatmate was thus burdened in both senses of the term. This young woman had apparently brought the contents of her entire apartment with her and spent the whole five-hour journey with a blanket over her head as she sobbed into her cellphone at the boyfriend she had just left.

I had learned long before then not to ask anyone to mind the boundaries of their seat. Some ten hours before, a woman of robustly ample figure got in the seat in front of me and promptly reclined it as close to 180° as possible. She was practically in my lap, and since her head was only three inches away from mine, I thought I might as well ask her to move her seat upright just a smidge. She replied, not to me but to no one in particular, “If she bothers me again I’ll turn around and knock the shit out of her. I need my rest and I need my space.” Were I more certain of her grasp on civility, I would have retorted, “And if you do so I’ll have you arrested for assault.”

Of course she could have been bluffing, but then again she could have knocked the shit out of me before I could dial the authorities, who may or may not have taken seriously a call from a bus, so I wasn’t taking my chances. Throughout the trip I had overheard multiple passengers—all male—talking on cellphones to or about their parole officers, and I had sat next to one very young Army reservist on her way to her base. She was sobbing not because she was being deployed, but because it was her first bus trip ever, and it was frightening her. I tried to reassure her, though I couldn’t help being frightened about the frightened, inexperienced kids we are sending out to fight.

But then I couldn’t fault this young woman for her fright. It turns out that the police do in fact heed calls from buses, and for good reason: one man kept fondling his seatmate, so the driver pulled over onto the shoulder of an abandoned, possibly unmapped highway, where the police boarded the bus and arrested Mr. Hands. Astonishingly enough (well, I was astonished), this was not the only instance in which the driver was motivated to throw passengers off the bus. As we were pulling up to yet another bus station, a shouting-and-shoving match erupted between a skinny teenager with a bad complexion and a heavy-set, mullet-coiffed woman with a large, gelatinous forehead:

Skinny Teenager with Bad Complexion (STBC): Move the fuck over!

Mullet-Coiffed Woman with Large, Gelatinous Forehead (MCWLGF): You move the fuck over!

STBC: It’s not my problem your ass is so big.

MCWLGF: I’m not in your seat. Just put your bag on the floor. Then you’ll have more room.

STBC: No, then you’ll be sitting on me. Move the fuck over or I’ll beat the shit out of you.

MCWLGF: You move the fuck over, crack whore. I’m not your bitch.

Then the driver switches on the light and asks what’s going on, as if he couldn’t tell. The women reiterate their complaints in almost identically elegant language, except in the third person, and he threatens to throw them off the bus if they cannot behave themselves. Meanwhile, a voice from the back of the bus chants, “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” to widespread snickers. I assume he was alluding to the Jerry Springer Show, which until then I had believed had gone off the air. (Note to self: there’s a pop culture tidbit that might prove useful in livening up a lecture on dull material, like scansion. Thus, “While ‘Jerry’ is an example of a trochee, ‘Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!’ is a series of spondees.” Yeah.)

It is hot out there. Heat makes people cranky. And smelly. Just ask the babies with sodden diapers. The crankiness and smelliness increase geometrically with the number of people. But these annoyances weren’t what dismayed me most. People were so inhumane to each other, and to my great surprise, I was. . . surprised. For years I’ve cultivated what I thought was a vivaciously curmudgeonly persona, but I wasn’t prepared to teeter off into full-blown misanthropy. Sure, I’ve encountered plenty of asshats on flights, but flights are relatively short, and not once has a flight shaken my defense of the so-called working classes. As if I didn’t already know, poverty is not ennobling. My fellow passengers may have fancier cellphones and handbags than I do, but these just exaggerated their performance of class. When brought beyond the abstract, I found my fellow passengers to be so irrevocably strange. The bus saved me more than $700, but at the cost of my liberal ignorance, my (yawn) faith in humanity.