Now That It's Raining More Than Ever

Hullo, lovies!

I mentioned JD is very popular. Right? Well, after a month of debating and considering various exciting opportunities, etcetera, a decision has been reached:

JD is going to New Zealand for six months as a consultant. He'll be there November through April and they're putting him up in a furnished apartment and paying him a shitload of money. They're flying me out in December (as his friend put it: "they're paying for a conjugal? That's pretty pimp.") and I'll probably go out another time in March over my spring break. He'll probably go to another conference in Australia in February, and he and I have talked about visiting parts of Fiji, or the Cook Islands, or Easter Island (though that one's a little far-fetched, it's fucking far away from everything).

Decision came down to: 1) Catapult career into high gear in one fell swoop or 2) continue plodding along doing essentially "more of the same" until wife graduates in a few years, then begin trying to move up a peg or two career-wise.

This seems like the most excellent choice, objectively. However, this means all kinds of unpleasant bullshit for us personally. I have to learn how to cook. He has to buy power converters so he can take his PSP. You know, super-huge consequences.

It is fucking incredible that he's been given this opportunity, and fuck if I'm going to let temporary discomfort stop him from doing it. Plus, HELLO, free vacation to New Zealand. Also, I have to advance soon and this lets me be totally up my own ass about that since I don't have to pander to loved ones. har.

So we've got a couple months to arrange these ducks into a pleasing, orderly row. Visitors more welcome than ever now, both here and to NZ. Hope you guys love being emotionally supportive, because I will probably be a huge whiny baby about everything all the time.

Yaaarp. Fuck, it's awesome.

Once, Once I Knew How To Look For You

1. Fuck. Fuck if there is not a shitload of crap happening.

2. I'm constantly reading career-related shit now. Things that sound vaguely like concessions about choosing "alternative" careers from what I'm being groomed to do. To me, these things don't sound like concessions at all. I continually waffle on this topic-- what shall I do with myself?-- yet when we break it down into component pieces, I am not cut out for traditional career choices. I like JD. I like free time. I don't think the intrinsic joy of doing independent research offsets the costs of being so far up my own career's ass for such an extended amount of time still to come. And really, judging from the faculty I know who have recently been tenured, it doesn't let up once you cross that bridge. It's a fat fucking fiction that it's only this heavy for another 8 years (which sounds pretty gruesome anyway). I'm leaning. I'm leaning very decisively this time because I took a look around and it's been 4 years and it's time to get the fuck out of here. It will still take forever and there's a ton of work to do, but my fear and trembling about the next chunk of life has been replaced with steely resolve. Ish.

3. Some of this decisiveness is being prompted by JD's career trajectory. Which has recently become just that, a trajectory. It's shocking to both of us how quickly this happened, but in hindsight I am not totally surprised that he's become a rising star in his field, I think everyone who's ever met him has a strong reaction to him. Right now things are in this somewhat awful state of flux-- he has several offers on the table that we are discussing, the most heart-stopping being the idea that he's already at a point in his career at which he could viably choose to freelance himself out as a temporary consultant/contractor, traveling around the globe for chunks of time. This is totally enthralling, tinged both with selfish little whines like, "but then i would have to learn how to cook" and selfish little secret thoughts like, "oh god I could be so productive if he would go live on another continent for a few months."

Adding to the ambiguity of a career cobbled together with consulting opportunities is the abject terror I feel now that I am in my 5th year and even teaching funding isn't always guaranteed. At any moment (before each quarter, anyway), I can be informed that there isn't work for me. But when you work the uni pays your tuition/fees for you. Which are exhorbitant for people who aren't receiving a paycheck. And you have to pay your tuition/fees and be enrolled full time in order to live on campus. See how this snowballs? So I am contractually forbidden to find outside employment, yet I am no longer guaranteed anything from the school. And I am following a totally average time-to-degree course like everyone else in my program, and I am thus fighting bile about how screwed we will/would be if they yanked my funding and in-campus housing.

There are creative solutions, of course. I have friends, I can sleep on couches, especially if my husbie is traipsing around in the south pacific. But I don't want to deal with all this added uncertainty and shittiness now. Grad school bureaucracy is total bullshit. And some days I feel spiteful enough to think, secretly, "Oh yeah? No teaching funding? No on-campus apartment? Well, suck on this, bitches: ABD! That's right! I fucking said it."

What kind of manky fucking system trains people up this well and refuses to make it reasonable to finish a thesis? Honestly.

Anyway. I'm getting fed up, and that irritation is incredibly motivating, and I suppose that's what is important. I'm getting to a good, zen place from which I can crank out a proposal and finish the shit I'm working on, and assume that I'm not destined for a top-tier anything, and be totally content with my 85% effort comfort zone. Even my excellent advice-er has lately expressed intense misgivings about the "crapshoot" that is the trad'l job market. I love her for that. I love the profs who candidly say, "I got a job with 3 publications. you can't do that anymore. you guys are totally fucked." and no, I don't even have three publications. And I'm not holding my breath to have three before I leave here, either.

BOO HISS.

Something's Going to Steal Your Carbon

My meeting went really well. Like, now I am questioning my own sanity because of it well. Did I hallucinate all the shitty, unprofessional rage that I had detected in the last few weeks of gritted-teeth emails and second-hand accounts of how much shit was being talked about me?

Hmmm. No.

Ok, on one hand I am hugely relieved that things are back on track and the project has been salvaged and, apparently, no relationships have been destroyed and some little nuggets of praise and/or understanding were thrown my way ("oh, this IS complicated!" and "I had NO idea this was so complex, no wonder it has been progressing this way") that are kind of making it all better.

On the other hand I am frustrated at the extremely huge expenditure of energy this has demanded, from venting/bitching/kvetching about it to literally everyone I have ever met to the mountains of mental and material preparation I accumulated this weekend, to the psykologikul and biological stress response enactment. All for naught...or at least, all for naught much. haaaaaa.

In other news, JD and I ruined some poor woman's day yesterday at the deli counter of a grocery:

Deli guy (to me, because i am clearly next in line): Hi, what can I get you?
Me: Hi! We just need 2lbs. of this vegan chicken salad, plea--
Lady: EXCUSE ME. I was next. EXCUSE ME? I was waiting!
*a lady has magically appeared, behind us, while I began ordering*
JD: Fine, then. Go ahead.
Lady: Well it's just that I was next. I was waiting and it's MY turn and I
Me: FINE GO AHEAD, WE DIDN'T SEE YOU IT IS FINE JUST GO AHEAD.
Lady: I was waiting over on the other side of the deli counter and I asked them to get someone to help me, so it's MY TUR--
JD: YOU WIN. YOU WIN, WE GET IT, YOU WERE HERE FIRST AND IT IS YOUR TURN
Deli guy (to Lady, after shooting us apologetic look and rolling his eyes): Ok, sure, what can I get you, then?
Lady: Hmmmmmm. Hmmmm. I think I want a sample. Yes.
Me (agog): ---
JD (mouth hanging open in utter disbelief): ----!
Lady: What tofu do you have today?
*there are, literally, twenty dishes with tofu available at this deli*
Deli guy: Uhh, well, this (pointing) and this and this are made with tofu, and this, and this....lots of things, anything that says tofu on the sign will have it in there.
Me (not even bothering to hide my bitchface now, hissing): Is she serious?!?
JD (also hissing): She wants a SAMPLE?!
Lady: ooh, ooh. I want a sample of this BBQ tofu, please. Yes, I want a sample of that.
Deli guy: Here you go. *turns back to us and opens his mouth*
Lady: HMMMMMMMMM.
Me (opening and closing mouth): Harrumph
Lady: Can I also have a sample... (looks at me as though she's just realized I'm there) OH, you can go ahead, I don't even know what I want yet.
Me (dumbfounded): Oh, thanks a lot! If you're sure that's ok? OK, it is? Ok great.
Deli guy (to me again): So what can I get you?
Me: Just 2 lbs. of this
deli guy (smiling): oh yeah, right.
Me: thanks a lot! (to JD): WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!

I felt bad until Jd convinced me that if ever there's a time to put on a bitchface, it's when some crazy lady interrupts my extremely quick, half-syllable away from being completed order so that she can hee haw around asking for samples and not having any earthly idea of what she wants to order, only that she wants to be first. He also told me that after I turned my attention back to the deli guy, she smacked herself full in the forehead like a cartoon and said, "oh, I can't buy groceries today! What is wrong with me!" Which confirms my suspicions that she is a nutter. As did the deli guy's reactions to all of this. Oh and we then continued shopping and she was nowhere to be found in the store. I believe I reacted so bitchily that I scared a woman out of a grocery store.

I felt like my knee-jerking reaction might have been a touch oversensitive. A smidgen off-kilter. A tad overdone. I'll blame it on the stress of waiting for this meeting. but I'll still feel bad, because words can never fully describe the withering eyeball daggers I hurl at people when I get this way.