my latest painting

My latest painting is up on the wall in my mother’s house. It is the wall in my mother’s house. Whenever I arrive in Tampa she has a list of chores for me. I would say I don’t mind, but I kind of do. I do them as best I can. Her chores are not things like, “change those lightbulbs” or “change the smoke detector batteries.” I mean, for sure those will be on the list. But they’re things like, replace all the rain gutters, install a new faucet in the bathroom, go through seven years of taxes and scan all the receipts for me. Like really complicated impossible tasks. Also, I don’t have experience as a contractor. I have watched some episodes of This Old House but I’m not sure I should be installing a dishwasher as I just did this week. Her old dishwasher died and leaked all over her kitchen so I had to pull out the molding, pull out and patch drywall then paint everything. Then, and I am not kidding, my mom complains to me about how I didn’t do a very good job of matching the paint color. All this while teaching remotely and getting ready for my pitch meetings when I get back to Tampa. Also, my mom can absolutely afford to hire a contractor, it’s not about money. She needs me to do manual labor for her. It means something. She doesn’t ask my sister to do these things. I guess the thing about me is I have always understood that I have to do everything myself and that money is meaningless. For example: if you need a Doctor in Los Angeles. Well who do you know? It’s not about your ability to pay. There isn’t enough service to go around. You have to know someone to get you access to care. So I rarely go to the doctor even though I have health insurance through the Writers Guild and through my teaching job. Annual check up. Two dental visits. Unless I’m bleeding to death, I’ll look that up on the internet and figure it out myself. I fixed a herniated disc in my spine and figured out how to treat my OCD and depression. Or if I want something done on my house, why bother trying to hire a contractor. I’d have better odds of winning the lottery. Contractors were hard to get in LA. Now they don’t exist.

When my own dishwasher at home proved to be useless I just stopped using it and switched to hand washing. I am not sure what the deal is with my dishwasher. I think it has to do with low water pressure? It’s the second one we’ve had. The first one came with the house and was one of those gimmicky “dishwasher drawers” that I don’t think anyone makes anymore because they were so useless. I got a nice LG washer, or so I thought. It worked for a few years but then just stopped washing dishes. They would come out greasy with dried on grit. Fine. I’ll just do it myself. I don’t expect things to work anymore. There was an article I read about why Karen’s go ballistic and it’s because they grew up in a time when things worked and the customer was always right. Those days are long gone thanks to corporate corner cutting, the brain trusts who brought us every financial collapse and a job you never truly get to stop doing at 5PM. Anyhow, when Karen’s butt up against this new reality, “sorry ma’am but I’m not authorized to give you more than one Splenda.” Well they lose it. And instead of going after the men responsible for this new sorry state of affairs, they go after the messenger — most often a low wage employee who doesn’t have health insurance but does have a lot of debt. Karen’s can’t accept that capitalism failed. That the political order failed and that their bubble of privilege has burst. Surely there must be SOMEONE who can HELP ME? No. No there isn’t. We’re on our own.

But at least the oligarchs are finding their yachts seized, their banking difficult if not impossible, their travel restricted and their chickens fully home to roost. I think that greed is finally catching up with the greedy. I mean we’ll all suffer. We might even get to dust off some of those Duck And Cover techniques practiced from 1950 to 1992. Not even the wealth of the super rich will save them from the world they have built.

My boss is always upset that the Dean treats her so poorly. The Dean is kind of a case study in mediocre management. Fear based management? I don’t know. I really wanted to like the Dean when she first started. The fact that she’s not friendly is fine. I don’t need a friend. The fact that she’s kind of cut and dried with her assignments didn’t bother me either. It’s the lack of curiosity about how things run that gets me. The certainty that no one can tell her anything she doesn’t know already — especially when she’s manifestly wrong about many things. She has a difficult and unenviable job to do. I’m sure her email inbox is a firehose of indignation. Every other email from an aggrieved student, “I can’t believe I’m being asked to pay this tuition and yet my thesis script with no story, no characters and nothing to say was not approved by the thesis committee!!” The students believe that because they pay tuition they’re entitled to whatever they want and are outraged that I can’t get them a meeting with the top three agents with a snap of my fingers. You see, Faculty are in the customer service business. I digress. I never expected the Dean to treat us well, I only hoped she would treat us fairly. She hasn’t. My boss is flummoxed by this. She remembers a world when faculty were respected. I expect to be put out on the curb for the Thursday trash pick up once I have reached the end of my usefulness. Most of the time I like teaching. I do. But this new work I’m doing — concierge service disguised as teaching. I’m not crazy about it.