OCJ: Disorder or Brilliant Strategy?

I’m tenaciously clinging to summer, in spite of days that smell like back-to-school and 50-degree temps at night. I have a bit less than a month before the fall semester starts at Little Town U, and I have miles to go before I’m even ready to get ready.

Every year around this time, my anxiety level ratchets up. It’s partly school starting, with its attendant meetings, book orders, syllabi & schedule devising, juggling, balancing, tapdancing, impending gradinggradinggrading, and the possibility that if I don’t have everything perfectly prepared and exquisitely executed, I’ll be outted for the sniveling, insecure fraud I surely am. Ratchet.

It’s also a late-summer social calendar that would drag any self-respecting midlife woman through the mire—Jazz Fest, Folk Fest, open mic night downtown, Sisters of Perpetual Disorder dinners, family gatherings, road trips, etc. Because I don’t do much except work while the semester’s on, I have a desperate (probably pathological) need to cram as much fun & frolicking as possible into every single hour of every day, right up to the minute I walk into the classroom on that first day. Ratchet ratchet.

My oldest son, his beautiful wife, and my two superhumanly gorgeous & gifted grandkids have been here for the past week, visiting from WA. And because I don’t get to see them more than once or twice a year, I can’t possibly sacrifice a moment of that time for school prep or house cleaning, causing that nasty procrastination devil to whisper in my ear, “Put…ratchet…it…ratchet…off…ratchet…”

And what about all those handmade Christmas presents I was gonna get started on early this year? What kind of no-good slacker am I not to take my knitting to the Folk Fest so I could work on that alpaca baby sweater while I swill dark beer in my lawn chair? Hear that ratchety sound just under those fiddles?

And although school is still almost a month away, school-related emails have been trickling in for several weeks now, forewarning the unmanageable flood that will soon let loose. Cl-i-i-i-i-i-ck.

Luckily, I have a built-in, self-preserving (bad canning pun) mechanism that kicks in when anxiety reaches critical mass—OCJ (Obsessive-Compulsive Jamming). That’s right, I clear everyone out of the kitchen, crank XM’s “Deep Tracks” over the kitchen speakers, and I jam, man.

Over the past week, I’ve made 32 jars of jelly and jam, starting with grape jelly I made with grapes given to me by a neighbor, which I’ve had in the freezer for 12 years and two moves now (the grapes, not the neighbor, and I see you wincing, but I sampled the grapes and didn’t die, and you boil the stuff hard, twice, in the jam-making process). Digging out the grapes from the freezer, I found black raspberries (probably in there as long), so black raspberry jam was next. Finally, I made strawberry-rhubarb jam, “rhuberry,” after coming across rhubarb in the freezer, too. I wonder if I could make jam out of cornmeal, pesto, and old candles, ‘cause I have loads of that stuff in the freezer, too.

OCJ is a lot like covering your ears with your hands and singing “lalalalala” when someone says they need your syllabi on file ASAP—it doesn’t really work in the long run, but you can live in blissful ignorance for as long as you can keep singing. And, with OCJ, you can sing with your mouth full of sweet, jam-laden toast.

So if you get jelly or jam by the bucketload for Christmas this year from Ray & Marlene, just know that indirectly, at least, you’ve helped me survive late-summer high anxiety. And if you could do something about global climate change and El Niño weather patterns long enough for my wild plums to ripen, I’m sure those book orders will wait a while longer...