10.22.2010

Keeping On

This month has seen our life explode in a mushroom cloud of hectic deadlines. After giving my brown bag to the department (it went fine, by the way), I had a lot of improvements to make to the "sample of my scholarly writing" (as many of the job postings call it) before I was comfortable showing it to strangers. Thus began what is always a long and painful process, and anyone who says it's not long and painful is either lying or had nothing worth saying in the first place: the rewrite.

There's a sweet spot in between composition from scratch (it's own kind of headache) and mere copy-editing that can paralyze me ("writer's block," if you will). It's that point in a project where you know a lot of it is in place, but there's a lot that has to change, and you're not quite sure if changing the stuff that has to change is going to knock the stuff that's fine out of whack, so it will all have to be redone, and opening the document just greets you with a wall of text and where are you going to start? 

I felt nothing of the sort during my undergrad years, because I knew that deep down nothing I wrote mattered. I took up a position because I had to, wrote it down because I was told to and forgot about it afterward. Grad school is different, because somewhere along the way you become an academic, responsible for the things you say and write down. Papers and arguments follow you around, and people know what you've said and expect you to defend it if they disagree with you. That's a lot of pressure, because the academic career is a long one (the only way out is death).

So that was my October, as it was lived in my head. A lot of other things happened as well, frenetic activity on the outside: the annual job postings in Philosophy were published and I set about seeing what opportunities we would have in parts unknown. I'm happy to report that everyone seems to want Ancient Philosophy scholars, because there are many plum jobs out there for a guy like me. Enough that I'm going to be faintly embarrassed if none of these opportunities come to pass.

Our CSA share dried up as well, which is sad and signals the slow decline into winter. Winter. WINTER. When I first got to Ann Arbor, a colleague from Texas said "by April, you'll be slitting your wrist just to see some color." He felt pities his fellow south-westerner, trapped with him in a frozen wasteland that for some reason people long ago tried to settle. Oh, Michigan makes up for its 6 months of frosty negligence, with its spring flowers and flourishing foodshed. You say to yourself on that first tanktop day: "You know, it's not so bad here." And thus the cycle of abuse continues.

Rachel learned that graduate school is harder than she thought. I remember her sitting at our kitchen table a week before classes started, saying "How hard could it be?" And she sure found out. To be honest, though, observing me is not the way to get a good perspective on how most people make it through grad school. When you get right down to it, I'm paid to do nothing. Sure, if I didn't work hard at my dissertation and make progress, I'd be all kinds of screwed by the end of the year, but no one would come demanding their money back.

But back to Rachel. Being challenged for the first time in several years, she went through something of an adjustment period. She has a lot on her plate: school, a part-time job, ambitions of physical fitness and dietary perfection, a labyrinthine administration which she must navigate for any number of trivial school-related requests, and her own very high standards of excellence. I do what I can to see that she doesn't have to worry about too much besides the cat poop (which is her duty), but occasionally it emerges that we have different thresholds at which clutter and sloth cross from background noise to the whole of consciousness. Putting someone in charge of the housework who does not really consider the tidiness of any space but the area immediately surrounding his desk is not the way to run a tight ship, but we get by.

Rachel's been spearheading the effort to get us some new transportation. We've learned that October is a great time to buy a car, because dealers are getting their new year's inventory in, and our faithful Grand Prix isn't getting any younger (it hit 113000 miles recently). We're thinking a nice compact, like a Fiesta, but God almighty did they have to call it a Fiesta? Might as well have called it a Ford Swirly or a Ford Wedgie.

When you hear from us next, we'll be on Thanksgiving's doorstep and I'll have crossed the job-search Rubicon, all applications out and away, hopefully flying with the angels into the grateful arms of a philosophy department somewhere it doesn't snow half the year. One has so little control over one's fate in the academic job market that any hope is too much to hope for, but I'm pretty accomplished and as entitled to a measure of optimism as anyone.

10.21.2010

Vows

I was just working through my files on this computer and found a copy of them mixed in the files of pictures of flowers and other wedding frivolities I've gladly placed aside. Of course I stopped what I was doing, opened, and read them. And of course I got all got all googly-eyed and squishy-hearted.

We took a lot of time writing our vows. We talked about some essential promises we both agreed were essential, but wrote them separately. I thought it would be fun to throw them up here!

Rachel's Vows to Ian

Ian, thank goodness I accidentally asked you out (or rather, thank goodness you thought I asked you out and ran with it). Thank goodness you had the tenacity to ask me out again after our first date didn’t go so well, and thank goodness I agreed.

Now, after being together for over two years, I cannot imagine my life without you. Our relationship has blossomed in the small moments - shopping at the farmers market on warm summer mornings, making dinner together after I get home from work, laughing together at some silly antic or song. I have grown to love you - your knowledge, your wit, your conversation, your touches, your thoughtfulness and kindness, your goals and your strong work ethic.

You are tender and good to me, and knowing your love and experiencing your love is the absolute best thing in my life. I am blessed and privileged to share each day with you, and cannot wait to grow old with you.

On our wedding day, these are my promises to you:

I promise to encourage and support you. You are my partner, and I will always work with you instead of against you.
I promise to respect you as an individual, to never try and change you, but to love you exactly as you are, as an independent person.
I promise to always try and assume the best of you.
I promise to be completely honest with you.
I promise my faithfulness, in thought and act.
But most importantly, I promise to love you every day, and in this love, to choose you every day, no matter what life my throw at us. I promise to love you and to choose you in the good days and the bad days.

These are my promises, as long as we both shall live. 


Ian's Vows to Rachel

It feels strange, making a life-long promise. Promises are wards against neglect: you ask someone to
promise something that they wouldn’t do otherwise. And it feels strange because our relationship has
been pretty much an uninterrupted stream of joy and belonging.

Even before it was really anything serious—before I would consider, say, dropping everything to spend the day in a damp basement department giving you head rubs to distract you from your migraine or feel I knew you well enough to stop trying to impress you (which never really went away, let’s be honest: your praise still brings out the peacock in me)—before all that, I knew this was the real deal, you and me.

Day after day the delicious meals, quiet evenings, loud evenings, sexy dances, little moments, secret
language and shared affection piled up to the point where I had to see that life without you would be a pale imitation of one spent by your side.

So it feels strange to ward against mistrust, hurt and all the demons of an endangered union. What could we possibly have to worry about?

But, of course, that’s the exaggeration of a love-struck fool. We don’t always click, and there has been tension and hurt and misunderstanding. We’re in this for the long haul, after all. Friction is a fact of life and we’re going to see plenty of it, over where to live, how to raise our children (oh, so you assume we’re having children? For example) and whether we’re going to put chickpeas in the
stew.

Hence the promises: to remind us that we know what we’re doing, we’re at our best when we’re together than that there is nothing we shouldn’t do to share this life. So in that spirit, my darling Rachel, I make you the following promises, cross my heart and hope to die:

1. To lift you up and believe in you, and help you achieve all the great things I know you can;
2.To show you I love you, even if it’s just by washing the dishes you thought you would have to when you got home;
3. To choose you everyday, and always be aware how lucky I am that you’re in my life;
4. To be faithful to you, and be someone you can put your faith in;
5. To respect your decisions and value your input on everything we do together;
6. To assume the best of you always;
7. To keep it fun, even when our lives make it so it isn’t always easy to have fun;
8. To make wherever we go together a home and someplace you’re excited to come back to;
9. To put you first and build my life around you, rather than try to fit you into my life;
10. To continue doing all of the aforementioned for as long as we both shall live or be viably cryo-frozen.