Other than certain events happening only on weekends and many of my friends having them off, I now understand this.
Also, having to check my calendar and my pill box to see what day it is. Geez. I guess I need to register for some kind of class to have some structure to my week.
This week I’ve been seriously looking at my budget and the workshops and retreats scheduled for this year that I have any chance of squeezing into it. A perfect life for me would be traveling 2-3 weeks out of every month and filling that travel with art classes and beautiful nature. The downside of this would be that I would miss my cats and that my husband would probably not be willing to go along most of the time so I’d miss him too. However, I have found that I enjoy traveling alone. An odd thing for a recovering agoraphobic, but there you go. Life is weird. Once I get beyond the city limits, I am generally just fine.
I’m not reeling. I’m fine. I’m better than I have been in years. I am happy to be retired now. I don’t think I fully realized how stressful that work situation was for me, although I loved the job itself. Mainly it is a relief to get the sleep that I so desperately needed. (Skip to the bottom if you are still interested in the shitshow at UNCG.)
I got the payment for my unused vacation and bonus time (North Carolina state employees received extra vacation time instead of raises for quite a few years) and the pro-rated longevity bonus I would have gotten in May. I socked most of it away for vacation and will use some of it for bills in February since I won’t get my first social security payment until mid-March.
^El Duderino from my friend Dawn, Big Lebowski mousepad from my friend Ian. Cat hair by Pablocito.
In the meantime, I’m abiding, pushing around art and collage supplies, occasionally printing off some public domain images to use, and putting my new paper cutter to use. I logged into the online class that I bought from Sharon Payne Bolton a couple of years ago to get myself going. I have so many unfinished projects and ideas that it is overwhelming, and Sharon has a clarity that helps cut through that. She isn’t futzy about measuring and I like that too. I had taken this class from her in person, so it is comfortable, and I loved the book that I made then (see below) so it will be fun to do it again.
Other ideas: a tunnel book with a sea biscuit on the bottom layer. A mica covered book on the theme of hands (in progress, actually, because I can’t focus!). I have the Pocosin book to rebind that I made the giant mistake of taking apart, forgetting that I glued together layers so that the sewing was INSIDE the glued pages. I have the Portuguese sea life book to finish as well, which will be fun. The Pocosin book should be moved up on the to do list, since it was one of my best and actually made it to the back cover of the Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft catalog one year.
Guess I’ll leave some writing for tomorrow. Below is the shitshow news.
Those fools in the UNCG administration did it – they axed 19 programs and relegated Religious Studies to a concentration in the Liberal and Professional Studies department. I have an MA in Liberal Studies from UNCG and after working in higher ed for 25 years I can tell you that academics have little respect for degrees with those types of general program titles. They got rid of Anthropology, Physics (even though UNCG has an observatory!) and graduate Math and Language, Literatures, and Cultures (LLC) degrees, among the many smaller programs. Keep in mind that if I had allowed myself to be transferred into that other position, it would have included being the admin for the grad degrees in LLC. I would have been divorced completely from the job duties that I had come to UNCG for – working with grad students – and probably would be gone with the next budget cut.
It really has huge consequences for the whole aspect of academic freedom when senior administration is able to skip any kind of process (even the one in which they set the rules) and university governance rules to arbitrarily close programs without financial exigency or giving the faculty a chance to argue for their continued existence.
What’s most infuriating is the obvious lies that the chancellor tells the press – it reminds me so much of Trump and the fact that he is forgiven for blame shifting. God forbid he be an actual leader and own his mistakes. He’d gain a lot of respect for it, but he crossed the line yesterday and he’ll never get that trust back from most of the faculty. Many of them will be (and have been) job hunting, and believe me, there aren’t a lot of academic jobs out there for the humanities. And these “academic portfolio reviews” led by cost-cutting consultants are spreading like a contagion across this country.
Anyway, I am so sad for the people who will lose their jobs, and the students who aspired to studying/graduating from a robust program of study at a university that used to care about education and not doing the will of politicians. The students and faculty fought so hard against these cuts.
slowly she turned 
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