Apparently I wasn't feeling so ambitious

So much for the "I'll try and post every day between now and turning 30" if this is only my second post of the month - whoops. No guilt, though, because I refuse to allow myself to feel guilty about a blog right now. If I have a blog that becomes important for some strange reason, I'll feel guilty about it (er, I'll probably update more, since that would seem to be important). Anyway.

So let's see. A bio prof in Alabama was denied tenure and shot and killed some of her colleagues. I feel horrible for the families of everyone involved in the tragedy, and I hope that they're able to mourn and to work toward healing in whatever manner they need to and without prying media bullshit surrounding them. I hate that I'm not surprised that it happened, however. What I'm surprised (and thankful) about is that it doesn't happen more often.

Brownie got a signature for his dissertation on Monday, which is bloodyfuckingfantastic in that he's finally relaxed enough that he's been able to talk about things other than his dissertation or the job search for the first time since roughly July. So we topped Monday off by getting into one hell of a "discussion" about acceptable levels of stress, the job market, academics and so on, and somewhere in there Brownie announced that he doesn't think he wants to do the academic thing because he hates what it's been doing to our relationship. I hate it too, and have for a long time, and view the problems academic careers can cause in a relationship as one of my major reasons for getting the hell out, but I've also always figured that him staying in or also getting the hell out is something that he needs to decide for himself. He's always seemed to lean toward staying in, and I've dealt with that as best I can by figuring that we are really happy together and that a lot of that happiness comes from being together at home - all the cooking we do together and so on - so that maybe it doesn't really matter where we live, etc., as his going into academics means that we get no say in where we're living.

So then Monday he announces he thinks he wants out, that it just isn't worth it.

Cue me bursting into eleventy hundred tears, because it's the first time in months (maybe longer) that I've started to feel like maybe I'd get some kind of say about where we'd be living. And all of these realizations I've been struggling desperately not to have - that the whole job search thing has been entirely about him and his career, that I'm shoving my career off to the back burner for him, that I'm having a lot of anger towards myself for doing that, that I've been feeling by and large unimportant for a long time because of all of this - all this comes tumbling down all around me. Suffice it to say it's probably good that I've been sick and snowed in all week. Not that I ever lack for introspection, just that the sick has kept me from wanting to cry as much as I probably would otherwise, and the snowed in has meant that the sick hasn't been as in the way as it usually is.

Anyway, we've pretty much narrowed it down to a move to either KC or to Portland, OR. KC is where I grew up - Brownie loves it out there, I have a ton of friends and most of my family out there, and it would generally be (relatively, anyway) an easy move. Plus: thunderstorms. YAY! Oregon, however, is this place that we've both always kind of wanted to live, despite the fact that neither of us has ever even visited - just from the sheer aspects of food, beer, wine, and love of exercise, we both want to live out there. Plus it's fucking beautiful. So as much as I'd love to be around my family again, there's a part of me that wants to move to Portland too, I guess because I have a sort of feeling that if we don't do it now, we never will.

Brownie tells me today while we're out getting drinks that he's not sure he's ready to give up on academics yet. That he might do the job search again next year. And that he really wants to focus in on moving to KC rather than Portland because of all the pro-KC reasons I just mentioned and because for him, it's an adventure either way, which he then acknowledges (albeit jokingly) as being selfish. I'm objecting to the idea of getting rid of Oregon yet simply because this whole "I get some level of say in this" idea is brand fucking new, and I'm not about to close off options any earlier than I have to.

This is probably not a line of thinking I should continue on, because I'm writing myself into more anger than I felt initially about it, and I probably don't need to do that. It's making me think that I do need to reopen the whole "how I've been compromising v. what I've been getting in return and vice versa" conversation, since I'm apparently still pissed. I'm pissed for two reasons. One, that I had allowed myself to hope that we might end up living someplace I'd actually like to live - really, that I'd allowed myself to hope when hoping in this whole mess has done nothing but make me more disappointed than I'm already typically feeling. Two, that he could change his mind and say sure, maybe we could move halfway (or all the way!) across the country come May (or June or July), but don't consider it to be an assurance that we could actually stay there since he may very well decide to do the academic job search again, meaning we'd just end up moving again in another year.

I think I'm starting to reach the end of my ability to push myself and my career off any more than I already have. I need to figure out exactly where my limit is and draw the line, because I am tired of feeling more excited about nail polish than my future career prospects.