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.