Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

~Dylan Thomas

Maybe this isn’t an appropriate piece for the situation, but it sure feels morbid enough to me to warrant words about growing old and dying.

I spoke to a student today who said, “What am I supposed to do if my major no longer exists?”

I don’t know, I said. I just don’t know.

I know people who have lost their jobs. I know programs that are being erased out of existence. I know the state and the area this university serves. I know that we are perpetually last in everything in the country. Now we plan to operate a university without Latin classes, without religion classes, without an art education program. That’s astounding.

I think it was Flannery O’Connor who described the South as the place where more people could read Latin and Greek than anywhere else in the country and more people couldn’t read at all than anywhere else. Now we don’t teach Latin and Greek. We’re just the place with the highest illiteracy rate in the country, and we’re giving up all pretense of having anything else to distinguish us.

That’s how I feel about my Alma Mater today.

I’m quite disheartened and discombobulated by all of these lost jobs, and yet I get up every day to go to my job wondering how long I can keep doing it. I fantasize about quitting. I look up bank rates wondering if I could handle a reduced salary if I refinanced my house. I look up job ads to see who is hiring and where.

And I’m not the only person who feels that way. I’ve worked at this job for fourteen years. I’ve been there through three presidents, three department chairs, and four deans. In all of that time I never heard anyone talk about looking for another job. For the most part, people have only left when they’ve retired. But this year, I hear another person every day express the sentiment that he or she would be better off working somewhere else.

I started thinking I would be better off looking for another job even if it meant a drastic reduction in pay because I got scared that the job was literally killing me. The work loads are too much. The stress levels are too high. The environment is too unhappy. People all around me are very, very unhappy. This is an unprecedented situation.

In large part, we have the economy to blame. We’ve seen nothing but budget cuts for the past few years. When people have retired, they have not been replaced. The faculty is working with a skeleton crew. Nearly all of the English teachers, for example, are teaching eight classes this semester. That’s 24 credit hours. That’s more hours than a student would ever be allowed to take in one semester, and we have to presume the teachers work harder than the students on each class. On top of that, classes are over filled. Nationwide, colleges typically cap composition classes at 25 students. Many of ours have 45 in them. Therefore, every English teacher is carrying the load of at least two full-time instructors, and some are carrying the load of three or more full-time instructors. And English faculty are not by any means the only ones taking on that kind of work load. Many faculty are.

They are doing this after being hit with a pay cut in the spring that they are still struggling to recover from.

They are doing it in buildings that are miserably hot because the school has turned up all of the thermostats to save money on utilities.

They are doing it after fighting for a parking place every morning because we had a significant enrollment increase, and we really don’t have enough room for everyone and their cars.

They are not just working under all of the pressure they can handle. They are working way beyond that. The stress levels are just plain toxic.

So when I say that I have become scared for my life over this job, I’m being serious. I wasn’t sure I could go back to work this fall without having a stroke or a heart attack. When one of my friends said she too wondered how long she could even survive working like that, and then when another friend actually had to be taken to the hospital with heart problems while she was at work one day, that’s when I decided I had to start putting my own health first. That was one of the big motivators for all of my diet blogging. Something had to change, and that was it.

Now into this environment we are given a new dress code. Faculty cannot wear jeans or athletic shoes, not even on Fridays. Coaches can’t wear athletic shoes to class. It reads like something out of a 1960s handbook, right down to a statement about the length of skirts.

Ironically enough, people weren’t actually wearing jeans. The unspoken dress code by pure social consensus was much more formal than most college campuses ever are. Faculty only wore jeans on Fridays, and that was mostly during football season when they also tended to wear school T-shirts.

Now we have a rule that we actually had no reason to enact, and that rule has basically shattered what was already an extremely demoralized campus.

No one really cares about the clothes per se, however. They care about what the rule represents, and what it represents is an administration that is either completely disconnected from the degree of pressure the employees are under or completely uncaring about it. It represents an administration that does not respect its faculty as professional people capable of making professional choices on their own. It represents an administration that holds no regard for its faculty as human beings.

At least that’s what it feels like to us.

This new rule shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. And it is not only because the rule itself is incredibly ill-advised, but also because the timing couldn’t be worse. You’ve heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back? This was a kick to a dying dog’s head.

We have a campus full of people who absolutely cannot tolerate another hair’s worth of pressure. Not emotionally. Not physically. Not mentally. They can’t tolerate a single thing that feels like harassment or aggravation. They can’t tolerate anything new that comes across as an arbitrary and punitive measure.

I have hesitated over writing about this, but I felt like I had to. Everyone around me is frustrated and upset to the breaking point, but no one feels they have a venue for expressing their pain. Everyone is afraid they will get in trouble if they complain.

I wondered if I would get in trouble for writing this and posting it to my blog, but then I remembered that repercussions for free speech on the part of a public employee are illegal. So that’s that.

Mississippi can’t keep going with budget cuts to education. Because of the recession, more people than ever are going back to school. If we want to ever recover as a state, we have to educate them while they are there. To do that, we have to hold on to our teachers and hire some more too. We have to give those teachers decent working conditions.

As for me, I’m going to take a few deep breaths, spend a little time working off anxiety on the treadmill, and try to keep going. I can only hope this is what bottom looks like, and next semester we’ll start seeing the turn around. I have to tell myself that because I have to get up and try again tomorrow. People everywhere are losing jobs. What else can I do?

Here’s what I ate today.

From South Beach Diet Pics

From South Beach Diet Pics

The apple was incredibly sweet after having no sugar for a few weeks.  I think that’s how it’s supposed to taste.

The flat bread has egg salad made with only the white part of the egg inside.

I’m a little bummed about the diet today.  Yesterday, I thought I’d lost two pounds last week.  Today, I got them back.  This is why I have to stay off the scales.  They’re tricky. They’re wily. They are designed only to make you despair.

That’s why dieters always claim they only weigh themselves once a week. My day to weigh in is Monday. Anything that happens between Mondays doesn’t count. Today definitely doesn’t count.

That’s why I’m really hoping that when I pretend not to weigh myself tomorrow, I’ll feel better about the whole thing.

Regardless, my salad was good today, and I finished answering most of my emails today. Life is not so bad.

I could go on. It was just one of those Mondays that I needed about three days to manage. I only had one. What I didn’t make happen today, I’ll make happen tomorrow. Or the next day. The next day after that for sure. It will be okay. Monday just makes you crazy because Sunday lulls you into believing the world is a nice place and then abandons you to have to deal with the fact that it is Monday again. That’s just the way it is.

Maybe if I wanted to vent I would talk about how Mondays are especially hard because that’s when you remember you have to work all day in a place where everyone is working too hard, where everyone is hot and tired and stressed out and uncomfortable in their shoes, and how sometimes it seems like life is just way too weird to cope with when everyone is hot and tired like that.

But I don’t want to vent. I just want to say thank God it is Monday night. Thank God I can just let Monday slide as uneasily as it wants into Tuesday while I rest my weary head.

And I want to say this. I had lunch today in a restaurant for the first time in weeks. I didn’t have time to go to lunch, but I went anyway, and I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all because this is what I ate.

From Cybershot Pics

Rice. Sticky sushi rice, white and refined, stripped of all nutritional value other than its tendency to spike the blood sugar.

It was delicious. It was an oasis of happy in a crazy day.

Carb break over now. Back on your diets.

I didn’t specifically look it up, but something tells me the South Beach Diet frowns on mocha lattes. It actually recommends that you cut out coffee altogether or only drink decaf. I figured this cutting out coffee thing was a matter to be looked at in relative terms. You’ve been drinking a cup of coffee a day? Well, try to quit for this diet. You’ve been drinking a pot of coffee a day? Then let’s just try to get that down to two or three cups.

I cut down to one cup of coffee first thing in the morning. And one more at work. And…um…I really did try to stop there.

But I kept thinking about mocha lattes, and then I started making these protein shakes for my breakfast, and then I got this idea.

It goes like this.

Blend one cup of milk, one cup of coffee, one scoop of sugar free protein powder, one spoon of cocoa, and one spoon of Splenda.

I probably won’t take any business away from Starbucks, but I enjoyed it, and after drinking that for breakfast, I didn’t feel hungry again until lunch time.

And so I forge ahead with South Beach by learning how to make the diet fit my food preferences rather than the other way around. It’s a small victory, but I’ll take them where I can get them.

I stuck some Jimmy Buffet in this post just in case you were expecting him. Otherwise, this post is about the fact that my designated time on Phase 1 of the South Beach Diet expires on Monday. Today, I’m contemplating what I’ll do with my freedom.

I suppose my response should fall somewhere between “do nothing” and “go to the Pizza Hut lunch buffet.”

I feel like I’m only just now getting the hang of Phase 1. I think if I stayed on it another week or two I’d start to get good at it. So I did think about staying on it a bit longer, but…nah.

Then I thought about only very gradually coming off it. Phase 1 cuts out all fruits and all grains. The apple is the fruit that falls the lowest on the glycemic index, and barley is the grain that falls the lowest. I thought maybe I would only add back apples and barley for a couple of weeks.

But…nah.

I’m going to eat rice, and I’m going to eat bread, and I’m going to eat strawberries. Just not all at once.

I’ll stick to whole grain rice and whole grain bread in very modest portions…except for one thing. I plan to eat vegetable sushi on my first day back in carbland. Veg sushi is low in calories and fat, and it is my own special treat food. Through Phase 2 of South Beach, even though white rice is not allowed, and white rice is what comes with sushi, I’m going to allow myself vegetable sushi once a week. It’s my diet, and I can make up the rules if I want.

As for fruit, I’m going to try to stick to the low end of the glycemic index as much as possible, but I have exceptions for that already too. Two of the fruits containing the highest amounts of natural sugars are bananas and watermelons. I’m not going to eat a banana every day, but sometimes they are necessary.

And have I mentioned that I have seven small round watermelons currently growing in my yard? I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to break the no watermelon rule and eat some of them after I went to the trouble of accidentally growing them.

It’s a toss up right now whether I eat the sushi or the watermelon first. Either way, that thing about two weeks being long enough to get rid of cravings for carbohydrates turns out to be not quite true. I’m having dreams about toast.

It’s been two lonely weeks in a brown South Beach haze, and…well, you can fill in something appropriately corny here. I just know it’ll be alright come Monday.

I’m still working on that.

Today’s lesson is ranch dressing. I read somewhere–forgive me, I do not remember where–that a typical salad dressing ladle on a salad bar holds three tablespoons of dressing. Now if you’ve ever looked at the back of a salad dressing bottle, you’ll know that they don’t list three tablespoons of dressing as a serving size. The numbers would just be too shocking. A serving of salad dressing on nutrition labels is always one or two tablespoons.

Yet how many times have you dipped that ladle into the salad bar ranch more than once? How many tablespoons do you think you might have slathered on? Six? Nine? More?

Let’s say six so as not to tax my math skills too much.

According to Calorie Count at About.com, two tablespoons of ranch dressing at Shoney’s has 114 calories and 11.9 grams of fat. Thus, your double-dipped portion has 342 calories and 35.7 grams of fat. Congratulations, you’ve just taken your twenty calorie pile of lettuce and given it more fat grams than a Big Mac.

All of the diet books say to ask for salad dressing on the side when you eat in a restaurant. I usually don’t do this because I’m so busy asking them to leave the meat off that I hate to be a bother about anything else. I don’t think they stop at two tablespoons when they make that salad in the kitchen, though. If it isn’t swimming in oils, after all, most people would probably send it back.

Beware the good dressings, my friends, and just remember that a little bit goes a long way.

***

ON July 26, I read Robert St. John’s column, “The Earl of Sandwich,” and decided I was going on a diet. I know it was July 26 because I wrote about it on my blog. I’ve written about my diet nearly every day since. You can follow my triumphs and tribulations at www.writerlyhaphazardry.net if you are so inclined.

Though I was already keeping a daily blog, I did not set out to write daily about dieting. I just started it one day and kept going. Like the blog itself, diet blogging could fade from my focus at any moment. There’s a reason the site is called Writerly Haphazardry.

I’m glad I’m doing it, though, despite the fact that I sometimes find this process of writing out my life in food to be truly and excruciatingly embarrassing. Despite all that, it is keeping me on track. Writing makes me mindful of what I’m doing. It helps me sort out my priorities. It makes me accountable. My mother reads it and then calls to deconstruct the rightness and wrongness of my choices.

The blog also keeps me in a constant process of self-education. I look up information for my posts. I find books to inform and/or motivate me so that I will stick to my diet and will keep having something to say about it.

The blog also challenges me. I started exercising. I wrote about it, and in the act of writing I committed myself to keep going in front of my mother and my three friends who read my blog.

That put me on the treadmill where I started listening to audio books for the sheer purpose of entertaining myself long enough not to quit before a respectable amount of time had elapsed. Then I found myself listening to books like Lance Armstrong’s “It’s Not About the Bike” that were simply motivating in and of themselves.

If the guy recovering from cancer can stay on his bike, the easily distracted English teacher who spends too much time in front of a computer can certainly make it through 10 more minutes on the treadmill.

This is the story I tell myself every day when I try again and every day when I sit down to write. So far it is working out for me, but that may only be because I haven’t seen Robert lately to talk sandwiches.

From South Beach Diet Pics

I had to make it because it has spinach and avocado in it, and those are two foods that my phone Google told me were rich in potassium. I believed I needed potassium.

Maybe Patricia of Next Door put the idea in my head when she had a muscle cramp in her leg yesterday, but today I had one. Tammy of the Workplace and I went to the mall to walk on the air conditioned trails after work. Along the way my leg started cramping.

This could be for any of a number of reasons. I was wearing sandals because I forgot to take any tennis shoes. I may have been trying a little too hard this week to work in my 10,000 steps per day. It was a hot day, and maybe I just didn’t drink enough water even though I thought I did.

But I didn’t diagnose myself with any of that. My mammaw told me when I was a little girl that leg cramps were a sign of a potassium deficiency. She said the cure for that was a homemade banana milkshake.

I didn’t have anyone’s mammaw around to make me a milkshake today, unless you count T, who probably wouldn’t appreciate being called Mammaw by me. I’m also not supposed to eat bananas on Phase 1 of South Beach. I’m not entirely sure I’m supposed to eat avocados, but I don’t know for a fact that I’m not, so that’s why I had to make this taco salad.

The taco part is a crumbled up veggie burger. The peppers are from my backyard. I’m guessing that means this meal was about 5% locally grown.

Sigh. Maybe I’ll do better on that part next time.

And, by the way, my leg does feel better now. Sometimes mammaws just know.