Wearing Out

Dualism in all things is the rule, not the exception.  Why I need a frequent reminder of that, I don't know.  But it seems surprising every time I tell myself that.  In this case my recent fascination with early childhood development as a template for how the college student goes about school, including much reminiscing about my own time in nursery school and elementary school, a foreshadowing of The Professor Mind, has its own dual in my current self-perceived decline, of which I will detail a few separate incidents.  Then I will wave my hands and make some not so sweeping conclusions about whether the cause is mainly fear of the inevitable or if it is the inevitable itself.

First let me tell a personal joke that I first used on my then optometrist (he too has retired now) but subsequently have used on several other doctors I visit.  It's clear that some parts of me are slowly wearing out.  For my eyes, in particular, I'm managing that by taking eye vitamins twice daily and by putting drops in during the evening. What I told the optometrist is that my goal would be for all my parts to wear down, more or less, at the same time.  He chuckled at that one.  Be careful what you wish for.

Then, yesterday, I had a little episode with the dishwasher.  I thought I had started it, but four hours later it was still not done, so I opened it up.  The control panel was flashing.  Apparently, I had never pushed the start button.  This very simple thing bothered me because not all that long ago I was a campus administrator with learning technology my domain.  Such a person is supposed to like technology and be comfortable with it.  But more recently I'm vexed by such things, especially our hand control for the big TV in the family room.  There are many different pieces of hardware connected to it and a variety of packages play on it.  So manipulating the hand control is a challenge.  But the real biggie is when a message comes on the screen that says the firmware needs updating and wants to know whether that should happen now or not.  I push the button but there is no response.  Evidently I'm not on the right screen.  I haven't a clue what the right screen is or how to navigate to it.  There's some irony here, given my prior job.

Perhaps my bigger issue with technology is a perception that I'm making more typos than I used to.  Some of these flip letters in a word.  Others put in wrong letters altogether.  I teach in my class on the economics of organizations that there is an issue of alignment between management and the staff.  Apparently my mind and my fingers are having a similar issue.  Proofreading, of course, would negate this problem, or so one would think.  (Homophones survive even a serious proofreading, but the reader may be more tolerant of that sort of error.)  The reality is that the energy to proofread is less than what it used to be, because the generating prose is itself getting harder.  To paraphrase a well-known maxim, all dissipative play and no engaging work makes Lanny a dull boy.  Also, in the type of online chat I do, using Facebook Messenger a fair amount and texting some, the environment itself is not that conducive for proofreading.  (Composing a post in Blogger is better.  The editing window is ample and the normal sentence-paragraph structure is evident.)

I'm also finding that my ability to deal with even minor stress has declined a great deal.  It used to be that minor sources of annoyance would just bounce off and become part of the background noise.  If necessary, they would be dealt with as they came up.  But now I seem to fixate on them and am unable to let go, which I almost certainly should do.  Here's a case in point.  Earlier in the week, I got an email from the Econ Department's HR person about the course I'm supposed to teach this fall.  Apparently, since I didn't teach last year, they have to file an I-9 form for me.  (Though I only had been teaching in the fall and not in the spring, so I don't understand why they have to do that now but didn't each time they did rehired me in the past.)  The email said this had to be done no later than the date my appointment starts, August 16, which is a week from tomorrow.  I will be out of town the first part of next week, so wanted to get this done before I left and responded with that information. Then nada from the person who sent the email.  I also noted, though just to myself, that the offer letter was contingent on doing a background check (which was a non-issue in my case) but didn't mention an I-9 form.  I submitted a signed offer letter, so in my mind, though I'm not a lawyer, that should be a binding contract as the background check was completed in under an hour. Yet it now seems possible that the I-9 will not get done in time.  What then?

My bigger stress with regard to this class is what the ultimate enrollment will be.  When the Department Head asked me to teach the class, where the year before he did not, he told me the class would "border on 60 students" because the department didn't have enough upper level offerings for majors.  So I started to plan for that.  I asked for a classroom in Wohlers Hall, rather than in DKH where the Econ Department is located, because Wohlers has amphitheater classrooms, which are better when the class size is 60.  And I looked to hire a former student as a TA, because I have students do weekly blogging, where I do try to write interesting comments in response on each student post, but 60 is just too many for that. So I was hoping to divide up the commenting work with the TA.  This former student graduated right after my class in 2017, lives elsewhere, and has a full time job. I envisioned the commenting as taking 5-10 hours a week for her and getting her some additional spending money for the effort.  But the department didn't go for it.  They promised me a grad student hourly instead.

So far, I haven't been assigned anyone, and it is unclear to me whether they will follow through on that.  The actual classroom I am in has a capacity of 50 students, which is in Wohlers Hall, and is flat.  (The class is from 9:30 to 10:50 a fairly popular time on campus and I'm guessing the amphitheater classrooms had been previously scheduled at that time.)   Further, the class is cross listed - one section for undergrads, a different section for grads in Econ.  (The department has a big bucks professional masters program and uses the upper level undergraduate offerings to amplify the variety of courses available to those masters students).  In Banner they set the capacities of the undergrad section at 30 and the grad section at 20.  Yesterday, the undergrad section reached capacity.  The grad section has no students registered.  Managing this is the department's issue, not mine, but for planning how to conduct the class I would like to know how many students I will ultimately have.  I would really prefer not to have more than 35 students and in my mind an upper level class should be taught like a seminar, so no more than the mid 20s in enrollment.  But I also try to be a good citizen and accommodate the Department's wishes.  If they need the classroom to be full, I'll figure out some way to conduct the class.  Yet while knowing that, I'm still stressing out about it.  I need to chill out, till the students are back on campus.  I wish I could do that, but it seems outside my control.

Then there is the matter that my mental quickness seems to be on the downs.  This is a simple test of that proposition.  I do the Daily Jumble, which appears in the local paper.  I used to be able to unscramble the words in a snap and then most of the time I could get the theme pretty quickly as well.  I don't know where that skill comes from, it's just one of those things that came easily to me.  But this past week it's been a struggle.  I sit there and ask myself, why am I not getting this?  Eventually I do, but it takes an inordinate amount of time.  Is this a foreboding of all sorts of thinking that requires some insight?    Last week I had a terrible senior moment (that went on for about a half hour) seeing somebody while grocery shopping whose voice was familiar, but I couldn't place him.  It was very disturbing.  (It turned out to be my old optometrist.)  And for quite a while I have been having the issue that I know the famous person, but can't come up with the name.   My memory was once truly great (witness those report cards from nursery school).  It now is beginning to betray me.

I could go on and talk about aches and pains as well as various ailments.  But I think that's enough.  The real issue here is whether this is normal aging combined with perhaps too much time where I'm at home at the computer rather than interacting in some social context or if this is marking an acceleration in my personal decline. The jury is still out on this.   I'm sure I'm not the only person who has been in this situation.  I wonder how others manage it.

Let me close with this point.  The past few years I've noticed an ageism that discriminates against retired people, where if I were still working full time I wouldn't experience this nearly as much.  My ideas are ignored now much more readily than they otherwise would be.  (The low number of hits on this blog is one indicator of that.)  Yet if I am experiencing an acceleration in my own decline, my desire to accomplish something of substance while I still can is all the greater.  The question is how to do that.  My dad read us an abbreviated form of Don Quixote when we were young kids.  Maybe it's time now to read the real thing.