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.

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.

Rachel:

I can't believe September is almost over. Looking outside, some trees are already nearly bare, yet it was in the upper 80's earlier this week.

It's been a month of transition and schedules. I was promoted into a new position at my company at the end of August. I'm still a financial counselor, but instead of working in a call center completely over the phone with 60 other counselors in a cubicle farm, I work in a cozy little office in Ann Arbor with three great coworkers. My drive is 15-20 minutes now, instead of the typical 50 minute commute I had before. And I'm part time, working anywhere from 20-30 hours weekly depending on appointments.

I also started my Graduate Assistant (GA) position, which is 10 hours a week. Currently, I'm helping with an honors intro to women's studies course, planning a retreat for the winter for scholars in different Women's & Gender Studies departments across the country, and helping out with a research project.

On top of this, classes started three weeks ago. Let me say this: 9 credit hours of grad school is not 9 credits of undergrad, especially when you are maintaining two part-time positions. I will also admit that there is more work and the work is harder than what I was expecting. It's true, it's a whole lot of theory and philosophy. And if you've ever read any serious feminist literature, it's full of (ridiculous) jargon, such as "othering," "utopic," gendernormativity"... and LOTS more.

Since my starting school, the apartment has fallen into greater chaos than usual. Anyone who knows Ian and I well understand that we're not neat freaks. While we're not what I would call 'dirty' people, we have and maintain a constant flow of clutter. I now have almost no time to help out with any cooking or dishes, let alone other household tasks. Poor Ian is taking on the role of househusband, but with a cheery disposition and a whole lot of love. I am forever grateful I married such a giving, kind man.

Ian:

All of September has been leading up to one big day: September 24th, which is the day I'm supposed to give a "brown bag" talk to my department. We call it that because it happens over lunch time. It'sa practice job talk, the kind we'll be expected to give if any of the departments to which we job-seekers apply like us enough during our interview to fly us out to their campuses.

I've given plenty of talks before, and had even given a version of the paper I'm going to present, but there's a special kind of fear that creeps in when it's your own department, the people you've spent years around but who have, in all likelihood, a minimal idea of the kind of work you do or whether you're any good. I've spent a good deal of the last 5 or so years around many of these people, but it still feels like I'm some kind of debutante (which I am: 6 years of school or no, I've yet no career to speak of).

Well, let's hope it goes well. It's still the calm before the storm: October 10 is the day that the big job posting hits and we all start feverishly scrambling to apply to as many places as possible. Until then, it's like preparing for a siege; ordering envelopes, polishing application materials, and hoping against hope that the market is not as dreary and despondent as the two years past. These things which I have no control over: why must they determine the whole course of my life?

Comin' at Ya from Ypsi!

…and within a single month we jump from the height of Summer to its death throes. Three weeks ago we pulled up stakes and moved 10 miles down the road to Ypsilanti. It's a hobby to compare the poor place unfavorably to Ann Arbor, which isn't fair; there are more outward signs of trouble, true—more homeless scouring the neighborhood for glass bottles, empty storefronts all in a row, more broken glass in the street—but the rent's cheaper, local brew is $2.50 for 22 oz, Ian has a lovely bike commute under broad trees, and it's been scientifically proven that Ypsi is 85% less completely full of itself than AA. So the trade-off is closer to fair than not.
Ian has started to get serious about putting together the materials he'll need for the job market. As with most things, he should have gotten serious about this a good deal earlier, but he'll be none the worse for it. To the casual observer nothing has changed; he still spends long stretches at his computer, still tries his best to produce good prose about Aristotle day after day—but now he's a product and has to think about the packaging.

This kind of thinking is not foreign to him; he has an ideal advisor who has at every chance ushered him toward presentability, and the lessons will serve him well. Ian has an ambitious plan for drafting and redrafting the chapters of his dissertation and the numerous documents that philosophy departments across the nation will want to see from him (teaching dossier, writing samples, CV; it's not so different from applying to any other job that requires one to show something for the time one has spent preparing to apply for it)—ambitious and perhaps a bit insane, but he's only ever done what's expected of him, and the key to his success was always his unreasonable demands.

Today to celebrate our three months of marriage, we cleaned! Well, actually we cleaned before we rewarded ourself with a fun day. We traversed to Ann Arbor to eat at Zingerman's Road House for a late lunch. We've been talking about doing BBQ there for ages, and really, after such a yummy lunch, we shouldn't have put it off so long! After lunch we ran a few errands, then went on a lovely long bike ride on the patch between Ypsi and Ann Arbor. And how nice to come home to a lovely, sparkling apartment—with the cat lolling on the rug by the door—to some refreshing iced tea.

Anyone wishing to see our new place: your long and frustrating wait is over!

The Office, Where Ian Spends Much of His Time

Our Lovely Little Kitchen

Rachel's Chaise, Just to the Left of Ian's Desk

Our New Dining Table

Our Bedroom

Two months married, here we are!
It's been a crazy month.

The highlights:

1. Ian finished his first draft of his dissertation. Yay Ian!
2. Rachel was accepted into a masters program at Eastern University in the Womens and Gender Studies Program. Yay Rachel!
3. We've had crazy housing issues. See below.

Crazy Housing Situation
As few of you are aware, the home we are renting an apartment in was foreclosed on last December. While this was surprising, ...oh wait, no it wasn't, let's see, lack of maintenance, more than an average amount of house inspections, collection/settlement letters...

Anyways, after the six month redemption period ended in late June, we received a letter from a broker representing the new owner (the BANK) telling us NOT to pay our rent moving forward and offering a rather large settlement offer if we were out by July 16th.

We panicked!
We paced!
We went to an attorney.

Turns out the offer was legit, but gosh, we weren't ready to move so suddenly, Ian was in the final hours of finishing his first draft of his dissertation, and our new place wasn't available until August first. Luckily, after much back and forth between us and the broker's voice-mail, they finally agreed to give us the full Cash for Keys settlement offer for an August 2nd move out date. So, now we get an extra 2.5 months rent, essentially, for moving when were originally were planning to.

Last Saturday, I woke up to a large truck pulling into the driveway and a crew of men mulling about the house, knocking on doors and peeking in windows. I was trying to get our barfy cat to the vet, I myself wasn't feeling so hot, we had to pick up our food share, and Ian had literally worked all night and had only been asleep for a few hours. The men had been hired by the new owner, per their work order, to remove anyone/anything remaining in our building, even though legally we all had a right to be there until the end of September! As Ian and I were home and our place was clearly "occupied," we were spared their wrath (Process: If tenants are there, they cannot take anything from apartment, must file response to owner of property and try again another day). We were informed if a Sheriff drove by though, they could essentially take all of our stuff to the dump(!) and we couldn't prove we had a right to be there. I'm super glad we were home.

Our downstairs neighbor, poor-dispossessed-law-student-man, has been in Vienna for a few months. They got into his apartment and took everything. We were unable to stop them, had no one we could call that was "on our side" because it was the weekend, and were too scared to call the police, worried that we would then be forcibly removed.

Of course when we shared all of this with our broker on Monday she was horrified. Apparently the request that bank made was to change one set of locks on one of the tenants that had already moved out. Whoops! A stressful day, to say the least. Vixen and I eventually both received appropriate medical care during the day; we're both on antibiotics. Ian eventually calmed down.

The Future Masters Student
I was elated to finally get notification of acceptance to Eastern Michigan University (EMU). The plan is to get all of my classes finished in 3 semesters and graduate Summer 2011. If I'm unable to do this and Ian and I end up moving next summer, I will the ability to write my thesis long distance. I'm also completing an emphasis in Psychological Statistics, which will hopefully gear me up as a great graduate program candidate, or help if I go straight into a research or teaching position after graduation from EMU.

With all of this, I will transition to a part-time position at GreenPath, Inc. I will still work in the housing and debt counseling department while I go to school, because I would miss the long commute. Just kidding. It's for the money.

On May 22nd, 2010, Ian and I "tied the knot." Officially. Like, super-officially. Now we've been married a whole month and I had the idea of checking in once a month, on our lunaversaries, to update our families and friends on our life together.

So, it's been a month, and here we are.

Ian and I spent the first five days of our marriage in Acapulco on our honeymoon. When we realized that the hotel was round the bay and far away from anything remotely urban, we got a two-day rental and spent it driving along the scenic route and becoming steadily less terrified of Mexican traffic (best drivers Ian ever encountered, by the way, way better than in America). During our wanderings, we found several little restaurants, some with excellent seafood, one with tables right on the beach, and Ian's favorite, a taco restaurant that just brought you 5 fresh tortillas, a big pile of meat, and salsas arranged in order of whether a Gringo should even bother. Yum.

The rest of the time we spent lounging about on the beach, getting lost on walks around the beach, and in our hotel room (gasp!). We only got a little pink, a major feat for me, and both worked through several books.

After our honeymoon, we flew to Minnesota to be with my family. We had our second wedding reception at one of my favorite places, Peninsula, a fabulous Malaysian restaurant. Everyone took pictures in silly hats, we ate lots of coconut shrimp and drank lots of Malaysian tea - a good time overall.

Then it was back to Ann Arbor and real life. We asked ourselves, "What will we do with all of our free time now that we no longer have a wedding to plan and activities to organize?" Spoiler Alert: Work. Eat. Sleep. Relax.

The first week we were back in Ann Arbor we signed a lease for our new apartment in Ypsilanti. For those of you not in the area, it's one city over from Ann Arbor. It's not quite as wealthy a city, but is also a University town of sorts, with lots of fun restaurants and ethnic neighborhoods and grocery stores, in which Ann Arbor is seriously lacking. It's also a whole lot cheaper, and our new landlords are a sweet  married couple who also own the properties and maintain them impeccably (unlike our current apartment with its ceiling leak, drafty windows, and ever-growing spider population, not to mention the absentee owner and the foreclosure notice we received last winter.

So Ian and I will be moving the first weekend of August. The new place is a little smaller, but it's a beautiful, sweet little place with two bedrooms, hardwood floors, and, most exciting of all, washer and drier in the unit! Wahoo (we write this currently sitting in the laundromat, which must be at least 90 degrees and more humid than Ian's Vibrams after 8 miles in the Summer sun).

Beth McCready (my wonderful mother) and Matthais (younger brother) came to visit us and bring us our wedding gifts. We spent the couple of days cooking some great food, walking around Ann Arbor, and having a wonderful time. My mom also brought us the quilt she made by hand as a wedding gift. Below is a picture - it's beautiful! (Vixen, our kitty, has adopted the quilt as her own. How very thoughtful she is).

Ian (typing now) closes in rapidly on the academic job hunt, trying day in and day out to bring down the dissertation a few hundred words at a time. His prospects are as good as anyone's, but anyone's is terrible so that's no cause for excitement. He'll pay his money, take his chances and do what it takes.

 We also finally at long last got the first installment of our Community Support Agriculture (hereafter CSA) share through Frog Holler Organic Farm. Garlic scapes, kale, salad mix, strawberries and more, and that's just the first salvo. We weren't good locavores (a word Ian personally hates on a personal and etymological level, but he does not control language) last Summer so we're making up for it. It's also bought and paid for so that frees up money for the grass-fed beef and muscato wine that we so crave. The share will give us a chance to work through our new cookbook season by season. Nice.

That's about all, until another moon's turning...