On resumes and rediscovering reading

I have a workable draft of my resume finally (erm, well, I've really had one since Sunday evening, but whatever).  So that's good.  That means I can stop with some of the overthinking and the "OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE FOR SEVEN YEARS OF MY LIFE" angsty bullshit that's made the process of writing (and re-writing, and re-writing) it so ridiculous and painful.  Because really, one's spouse's first reaction to reading one's resume should NOT be this:  "this makes you sound like you hate yourself." 

After that reaction, I took a day off and then returned to it.  Rephrased.  Rethought.  Rephrased more.  Talked it out with people.  I feel better now.

Possible interview question: variation on a theme of "what do you consider to be your biggest problem in the workplace?"
Answer:  I overthink things.  I can overthink ANYTHING.  It's like a crippling mental disorder talent.

Resume aside, I'm down to only a couple of classes before the teaching portion of my career is (99% likely) finished.  This puts me at 3 paychecks before I hit the abyss of not knowing where my money will come from.  So that's... terrifying. 

The dissertation really is on hold now, pretty much officially, until Brownie and I are moved wherever we end up moving and I'm in a better head space to deal with it.  The department, bless it, is covering my tuition until it's done.  I actually feel good about this, and in feeling good about this, have been reconceptualizing how I want to go about arguing certain aspects of it.  I had been arguing about institutional change, but what I've really been *trying* (albeit failing) to get across is that the point is to look at the effect of fiction on institutional change, which really then is the effect of fiction on our understanding and creation of reality.  Which, oddly, seems more manageable to me than institutional change itself.  And more fun.  So Imma let that keep simmering in the dark reaches of my brainspace until I'm ready to return.

Meanwhile, I've been devouring books like they're about to poof out of existence.  Lots of books.  The Hunger Games (and Catching Fire)(to feed my Gale crush) and The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Misconception and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You and so on.  And it has been magnificent.  Like rediscovering an old, dear friend.

It feels almost strange to say "I love to read."  In some ways, I've always felt that way - I wouldn't have pursued a Ph.D. in English without loving to read.  In so many other, more important ways, however, it truly has been a rediscovery:  the joys of perusing books in the book store, of losing track of time while completely immersed in another world, of stories, plots and characters.  For so much of graduate school, reading has been associated with guilt:  if I was something I enjoy for the sake of enjoyment, then I felt guilty for it.  If I read something for class/exams/dissertation work, then I didn't enjoy it; in not enjoying it, my ADHD would flare; in the flare of the ADHD would come distraction, lesser comprehension, and more guilt.  Over the past seven years, reading has been so intricately entwined with guilt that I've largely avoided it when unnecessary.  Suddenly (almost unconsciously) letting go of the guilt has let me read again.  And that makes me really, really happy.  (As a side note, this is the first post that has had a reading tag. That says a lot to me.)

On Radiohead and other joys of life

I am boggled by the fact that there has been an In Rainbows Disk 2 for months, MONTHS, now, yet I somehow was unaware of this until about an hour ago.  Having discovered the existence of such an album, I now own it (because Ceiling Cat forbid there be Radiohead that I don't own).  "Go Slowly" and "Last Flowers" are bleeding excellent songs and my initial favorites.  This being Radiohead, my favorite songs on the album a month from now will probably be ones I'm barely paying attention to now.

I am reaching incoherency after a whopping four hours of sleep after last nights' marathon grading session.  I love the marathon grading sessions because it gets the pain over in one swell foop, but I'm not a fan of my exhaustion level right now.  That said, I don't know that I would have gotten to bed any earlier than 2am anyway simply because my sleep schedule had turned to "weekend," meaning I didn't get out of bed until close to 11 yesterday.

The oddest thing about grading yesterday was that I ended up needing a notebook out for myself so that I could jot down thoughts for noveling.  I typically end up with a notebook nearby so I can scribble notes on what sorts of writing instruction I think the class may benefit from.  I'm not used to reading potato papers and feeling any sort of inspired thought about my own work - the usual thought process is more along the lines of "____________ OMGWTFBBQ DID YOU SRSLY WRITE THAT ______________________________ I'm bored" and etc.  Weirdly, last night, despite the plenty of "WTF" thoughts, I finally managed to figure out how to get the fight between the main characters going - the bit that was giving me problems a few days ago.  So YAY.

I can't wait to have a draft of the whole novel done so that I can completely rip it apart and reorganize it.

Anyway, I'm back to "I need to write my stupid resume for to attempt to find some sort of gainful employment."  And consequently back to "I should probably take some Adderall" (which, despite my last post, I still haven't done).  And back to feeling guilty about my distinct lack of progress in dissertationland, compounded by having run into Hosebeast Advisor in the hall today and her being completely friendly.  So I feel like I'm being lazy and wasting time, which basically means I'm wasting my life. 

Barista friend from a few posts ago bought herself a plane ticket yesterday so she can move to LA at the end of the semester to be with a guy she met and spent about a week with over Spring Break.  She's over the moon happy.  I think it's... well, I think it's awesome.  I feel like I should be thinking that it's not a smart idea, that she shouldn't be tossing grad school in the basket just to try out a relationship etc etc etc., but I can't make myself do it.  She's looking for jobs and I have no idea if she's planning on finishing her MA.  And I think it's awesome because she's doing something instead of locking herself up in the academy.  I think I'm kinda jealous.  I'm not jealous that she's running of to pursue a relationship - I think I'm jealous because she's doing something wild and wonderful and crazy that sounds a lot more like living than my 7 years of doing time in the academy.  And I wish that when I'd found it stifling, I'd done something wild and crazy too.

None of that is fueling my desire to work on my dissertation.  It does, however, fuel my desire to novel more.

some non-sequiturs on life, death and writer's block

Lots of thoughts swirling in my head right now.

Brownie's grandfather finally died late Saturday evening after having a massive stroke on Thursday night.  There's a memorial service on Thursday morning.  I feel funny calling it a funeral or anything else because, although knowing he'll be missed, Brownie and family seem to be having a difficult time going through the "mourning" process.  There isn't really anything to "mourn" - he suffered a catastrophic stroke a few minutes after bowling a turkey.  He was mentally and physically in very good form, and lived a long and very happy life.  Like if anything it's actually something to aspire to.  Live happy and die on a high note.

Meanwhile, the death and surrounding activities have come with the sort of family reunion that these sorts of things tend to have.  Brownie's sister and brother-in-law just got into town today.  She's six months pregnant with their first kid (whom they've nicknamed something utterly unspellable)(and I'm not a bad speller!).  We had dinner at Brownie's parents with them.  The dinner was punctuated by Brownie's sister grabbing the hand of the nearest person and clutching it to her belly, hoping we'd be able to feel the babbybump kick.  It was really fun.

And somewhere in the back of my head I get this horrible thought about "wow, circle of life, how very twee is all of this."  Yes.  It's twee.  Life is actually like that sometimes.  So I'll leave that in its twee-ness and move on to this morning.

One of my sacred rules of life is that I will always treat and tip well the person who serves me a drink, be it caffeinated or alcoholic.  (Obviously the same thing goes for waiters and anyone else in a service type of job - the rule in my head specifically refers to drink-related people as they're who I see most often.)  So maybe a month and a half ago, I had gone in on a Monday morning for my usual coffee run before heading off to tutor.  The barista, whom I'd never met before, was playing Bloc Party on the stereo.  I commented on it, she commented that she didn't know a lot of people who knew the band, we got into a discussion about music we liked to run to (Bloc Party being high on my list).  The next time she was working when I wandered in, we established that we're both in grad school (albeit different disciplines).  Since then we've been really chatty every time I've gone in that she's been working.

Anyway.  I was working in the Writing Center this morning, and she turned out to be my appointment for the first half hour.  The appointment ended up going an hour and a half.  It turns out she's ADHD as well and has a bunch of the same sorts of organizational difficulties I struggle with.  I ended up sharing every writing strategy I could think of as we worked through sections of her paper, things that have worked for me that might help her as well; we compared Adderall experiences, work habits and patterns.  The writing stuff is what interests me most:  I'm hoping I run into her soon so I can hear if anything that works for me also works for her.  That said, I'm going to throw the ideas out here in the hopes that, as they've helped me, maybe they'll help another ADHD-type brain.

Without further ado (and possibly to be reposted, later, with additions and without the huge run up):
- BRAINSTORM.  Start by mapping/webbing.  This is something that a lot of us (in the 80's, anyway) were trained to do in elementary school.  Take a piece of paper.  Write your main topic in the middle and draw a circle around it.  Then write one of the large supporting ideas that you'll be discussing somewhere else on the paper - say in the upper right corner.  Draw a slightly smaller circle around that.  Connect the circles.  As you have large supporting ideas, do the same with those.  Supporting ideas need support too, so as you come up with smaller supporting ideas, figure out which of the larger supporting ideas the smaller ones fit with, and place the smaller ideas in groupings around the larger ones.  If a smaller idea fits more than one of the larger ideas, connect it with more lines, etc.  What you'll end up with is a series of clusters that are linked together.  You can then transform the giant clusters into a workable outline, and write a paper from there.
              For an ADHD brain, the beauty of the mapping/webbing style of brainstorming is that it allows the flow of thoughts to come in random, scattered, oddly-connected ways rather than in linear ways.  I know lots of people who can think linearly, form linear arguments easily, who see things in very cause/effect-type ways.  Outlining tends to work well for them.  However, for those of us for whom linear thinking is difficult at best and an utterly foreign concept at worst, mapping allows space to write the thoughts wherever they seem to belong whenever they come up (so that there needs be no attempt to force thoughts to stay only on one of the supporting ideas at any given time), and allows, through drawing lines to connect the ideas, a way to "see" the connections more strongly. 
- When writing at a computer and stuck with writer's block, take out some paper and a pen (or crayon or pencil or whatever) and start writing by hand.  Write anything until you get going on a new idea.  N. Katherine Hayles  and Sherri Turkle (among others, but these are the two who come to mind right now) have both argued that the technology we work with affects the way we think.  I've found that, for me at least, this is very much true.  This means that I can, to a degree, manipulate how I think through the material I work with.  Through writing ideas out by hand, I'm forced to slow down significantly from the speed that I'm typing at - this seems to force my thoughts to slow down and settle a bit more than they do on the computer.  I wonder if there's more to it - if the way I'm working with my hands somehow changes my thinking, or if the fact that I can doodle in the margins when I'm using a pen - something that obviously doesn't happen with computers - somehow changes what my brain is doing.  I doodle a lot when I'm writing by hand.  Computers are great because they allow for thoughts to be recorded extremely quickly (and edited just as fast), but they don't allow for some of the right brain-type action that can come out when doodling.  Anyway, if you're at a computer and stuck, take out the pen.
- (This one more super-specifically for ADHD than for any other type of brain)  Plan on a rough draft that is roughly half the length of what you actually need to churn out.  One of the problems that I've seen with many ADHD writers is the tendency to skim along the surface of thinking rather than explain the depth of each thought.  Instructors get really frustrated with this (understandably, I think, coming from the side of the student who has turned in very "surface-y" work and from the instructor who has received it from her students).  The problem with ADHD writing isn't that the depth of thinking isn't there (though this is often what's perceived): the problem is that the depth of thinking often isn't explained fully (if at all).  When pressed on a point, the writer can nearly always explain layers upon layers of thought that went into the final point (the final point being the only part that actually made it into the paper).  When asked why all that thinking wasn't put into the paper as well, the answer is often that either the thought process itself didn't seem all that important or that the connections seemed so obvious to the writer that writer assumed everyone else would see them as well.
              This is why I suggest starting with a rough draft that is only half of the required length.  Once the main ideas have been spelled out, stop writing and start asking questions (or better yet, find someone else to ask the questions - writing is best as a group effort).  The goal is to resemble an eager, why-asking five-year-old as much as possible.  Five-year-olds, when asking "why" about ANYTHING, are inexhaustible: they're trying to understand everything as fully as they possibly can.  In adopting this tactic, the ultimate point is to make sure that the thinking behind every point, every conclusion, every sentence is explained as fully as possible.  (This is another reason why mapping is so helpful - it gives a diagram of the thoughts that went into each major point so that nothing is left out.)  Explain EVERYTHING, even the seemingly most unimportant points and digressions.  Then and only then, go back and edit out the truly extraneous sentences. 

That's the short version of paper writing for the ADHD brain.  Like I said, I'll probably repost and expand it later (like, say, when it's not 1am, I haven't been up since 7, am on more than 4 hours of sleep...) - I have no idea how clear any of that is at this point because I can't see straight for yawning.  But I'll work with it soon - I'm not the only person with ADHD who's found themselves needing to write a paper.  If this has worked for me, then it will work for someone else.

I'd try to come up with some bizarro way to link back to the beginning of this post, to bring it all full circle (again?), but it isn't happening naturally and I don't feel like forcing it.  This should be two posts, really.  However, I've typed it all out and I'm not changing it now.  Enjoy!
(Really, Pandora?  You're advertising CLUB MED to me in between songs? Heh.)

Life

I'm sitting on the futon in my office with a warm orange purring ball of kittyfur curled up next to me and making my left leg warm.  This is inherently soothing.  Purring cats are the best thing on the planet.

As mentioned previously (not that this is in any way escapable outside of the realm of this blog), it's March Madness pt. 1 this week.  And I love March Madness.  And my team played tonight.  Brownie and I spent way too much time coming up with game plans (probably because talking about anything else - aka "where the hell will we get paychecks after May 30th - is too depressing).  We were about halfway into the first half, excited and squealing and cheering, when Brownie got a call from his mother: his grandfather just had a stroke and is now in the hospital.  He'll be there at least overnight, and we have no idea what all is going on.

Poof: the oxygen was sucked out of the room, and we spent the rest of the first half pretty much silent.  Brownie finally managed to get ahold of his mom again during half time.  We found pretty much nothing else - we have no idea what condition he's in exactly, or where they think the stroke hit, or if he's in danger or what.  Brownie then watched about 3 minutes of the second half, cheered some, and packed it off to bed.  His mom called right as the game ended to find out the final score.  I think she and Brownie's dad were leaving the hospital then.  I think. 

Right after we heard, we both settled into the really helpless feeling of knowing that someone's life is in danger, that there's nothing we can do, and that a lot of people are really upset because of this but there isn't really any way to help.  Add to that Brownie dealing with the possibility of losing his grandfather.  He clammed up and didn't really want to talk (he was getting really sleepy), so I don't know exactly what he's feeing.

I'm torn, really.  I started initially to feel guilty for being able to enjoy the game again after halftime, after we'd gotten just enough news to know that his grandfather hadn't died on the way to the hospital.  I don't know if I need to feel guilty though.  I don't really think so.  The thinking goes like this:  if it had been necessary or if us being there would have been able to help anything in some small way, we would have quit the game, hopped in the car, and joined his parents and aunt and uncle at the hospital.  And that would have been more than fine.  However, we were told to stay home and enjoy the rest of the game.  Brownie was tired and went to bed and eventually I really did enjoy the rest of the game.  But I wondered: should I?  or should I worry? or fret? or... what?  There really is nothing I can do for anyone.  Therefore, it's better that I enjoyed the rest of the game, rather than that I sat and worried and did nothing, isn't it?

Brownie's family (very Catholic) is fond of teasing me (Episcopalian) that I have no sense of Catholic guilt whatsoever.  I'm typically very proud of this.  I can't, however, figure out if what I'm feeling right now is a type of guilt, that I'm having fun when something awful has happened to a family member, or if I did the smarter thing by managing to let go of some of the worry once I knew I couldn't do anything, couldn't help anyone, wouldn't be sitting by someone in a hospital waiting room all night.

Is there a script out there for this sort of thing?  Something out there somewhere that I missed?

A Milestone Birthday

I turned 30 as of a few hours ago. I've yet to be struck by some great profundity of this event, although people keep assuring me it will happen. I can say that my twenties were by and large unrepeatable and that I am really quite happy to be past all that.

I thought of a bunch of different things I could do for a 30th birthday blog posting, but none of them seem all that worthwhile. There's the "accomplishments of my life so far," but beyond listing the grad school stuff which I don't want to list because I'm fairly frustrated with having done it, I don't really know what to list. I know a lot of people who would call getting married an accomplishment, but I think of it as a life choice rather than an accomplishment. As in, I'm happy in my relationship and I like having it cemented as a marriage, but I don't think that makes me somehow better off than someone who's single. That's just a different life choice or circumstance or something. Grad school, OTOH, was a product of being overly idealistic and of receiving a shitton of bad advice. So not entirely an accomplishment, even if I have (and may shortly-ish receive more) letters to shove after my name when I so choose. Meanwhile, do I have a house? No. Financial security? No. A career? No. Does this make me "behind" where I should be by now? Not really, because all of that is from a sort of arbitrary checklist of how to be a successful middle class person, and "successful middle class person" is a goal I'm only half-heartedly pursuing.

Alternatively, there's the "things I'd like to do by the time I turn 31/35/40" type list. However, I didn't have one of those "things I'd like to do by the time I turn 30" type list, and I'm glad for it because I'm not sitting here with the residual guilt or feelings of failure for having not accomplished something. Imposing some sort of structure on my life like that, when not strictly necessary, ends up causing me more stress than it really needs to: in other words, it becomes an imposition rather than a structuring mechanism. Things generally go relatively well when I work with whatever opportunities pop up anyway, so I will continue in that vein. I'm sure it seems aimless to some, but I've learned a lot with the aimlessness.

What I suppose is weird to me (and what is propelling the writing of this post) is that I, who can usually find the significance in anything (given that is ostensibly what studying literature teaches one to do), am lost trying to find the significance in a birthday that is typically seen as being some sort of milestone. I don't feel any older or any wiser than I did yesterday, or last week, or last month, and I suspect I will not feel any older or any wiser tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Life will continue to throw curveballs at me, and I will continue to respond (and occasionally to throw curve balls at it). At some point I will get a draft of my novel finished and decide what next to do with it. At some point I will finally get the dissertation done (or tell it to fuck off forever). At some point I will not feel so lost and confused, and at some other point I will feel just as lost and confused as I do now, or perhaps even moreso.

More quickly than all of that, however, and generally much more certain, is that Brownie will get home soon and we will go get me a birthday beer and then come home and make penne vodka for dinner. And tomorrow I will wake up and still be 30, and that will be okay.

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.

It's ten to midnight on a Sunday. I've been playing MarioKart Wii in hopes of unlocking new characters and eventually getting to the point where I can play the Mirror Mode. I'm starving so I've turned on the oven to heat up some pizza rolls, which I'm not entirely convinced are food, to fuel the rest of my evening.

The gym today was a total bust. You know how people always say that you may not want to go to the gym, but you'll never regret having gone? Today I totally did. I had some sort of nervous pent-up toxic energy that I figured would be awesome for running off on the treadmill (too friggin' cold and rainy to run outside today), but I managed to run the toxic energy off in something like five minutes and was dying for the last ten minutes on the treadmill (that I spent 15 minutes only on the treadmill tells me that I was tired), followed by another 12 or so on the bike, followed by a weak and pathetic attempt to lift weights, all of which ended in me realizing that I was fairly sure my heartrate had been too high for a while and that I was feeling faint and getting dizzy, so I decided to go home rather than risk passing out. On the way home I stopped into the bookstore to get the one book that I didn't receive a desk copy of and stopped again to run into Walgreens to pick up a protein bar. By the end of both trips I was weak and shaky and really ready to sit back down in my car and pant for a moment before driving again. Many hours later I'm not as tired as I was, but I have no idea WTF was going on with me today. I've had bad workouts in the past, but nothing like that.

If I have one working braincell that still has the desire to finish this stupid Ph.D., I will email my advisor this week. Preferably tomorrow. I need to schedule a meeting with her so we can figure this shit out. I'd love to say I've done something about the diss since the last time I talked to her, but mostly I haven't. Okay, really I haven't at all. I suck. Twenty year old me wouldn't have this problem - twenty year old me would be done by now, or very close to done and about ready to start collecting signatures, because twenty year old me was tenacious and worked on school stuff from eyes opening in the morning until eyes closing at night. Twenty year old me would have fought harder for one of the topics she really wanted to work on, rather than letting my advisors decide what they thought I should be doing and then weakly agreeing with them, hoping that my capitulation would help it all end quicker.

Nearly thirty year old me feels much smarter and more experienced than twenty year old me ever was or could have been, but nearly thirty year old me has zero drive to get anything done. I still have some sort of ambition, I think, however unfocused - I'd like, when near death, to be able to look at my life and say "this was important; I am proud to have done this and proud of how it made a difference for others." I wish the goal of this ambition were rather more in focus - I feel like if it were then I'd have some sort of path to follow, some sort of (however vague) script to run my life along again. When I was still planning on the academic path, I had a script. Diverging from that path feels like the right thing for me to do, but it does leave me scriptless, and I wonder how much of my current lack of motivation to do anything is because I don't feel like there's a reason to do it.

All of this, I presume as well, is exactly why I have such a hard time getting out of bed in the morning (to wrap back around to where I was 11 hours ago). I'm going to hit the vitamin D supplements hard for a while and see if that helps with anything - maybe killing some of the SAD will help me feel a bit more able to accomplish something, I hope.

the (*&^%!#@ing academic job search and life in general

So after much durm and strang and gnashing of teeth and application after application after application sent out, Brownie finally has an interview for a nine-month renewable assistant professorship at Small College in nearby, state next door. In a town he'd never heard of, no less, despite having grown up roughly 20 minutes from the apartment I'm currently sitting in. The only thing we know about the town other than that Small College is located there is that Favorite Bartender apparently grew up one town over and was fully ready to recommend the town as a fantastic place to live because it meant we'd still be close enough to come visit during our drinking times. Beyond that, I'm refusing steadfastly to bother doing any research about the town unless he gets a campus visit because I'm tired of looking at towns and going "ooo, that'd be neat, and that'd be awesomesauce" only to see the rejection letter come floating in via carrier pigeon a few days later. I'm tired of feeling hopeful only to be crushed again.

The worst version of the hope/crush feeling happened today, when I woke up to an email from my MOTHER of all people with a job listing for the community college out by them. I would kill to move back there - not to live even all that close to my parents, per se, but to live around the Kansas City area again and to enjoy the insanity that the Midwest refers to as "weather." (Nothing says "Fantastic Drinking Entertainment" like watching helicopters swarm around tornado-producing thunderstorms!) Anyway, so I got way too excited about the job posting and sent it to Brownie, who promised to apply and who then went straight back to prepping for the job interview tomorrow (which, well, obviously that would be the priority). I come to find out later (as I'm dreaming of starting a KC-centric beer blog) that while he's still planning on applying, it's without much of a hope of actually landing the job since they're asking for someone with different specialties than he has. He's still applying, but it's probably going to end up being a waste of time. And so my first (and thus far only) chance of living in any of the cities I'd actually want to move to has 95% poofed away into thin air yet again. The only reason I like the idea of Brownie getting the job at Small College is because it provides a paycheck and a place from which to launch yet another grueling awful job search. I don't understand anymore why anyone wants to go into academics, because the way the field treats its workers is beyond appalling.

Meanwhile, his landing of an interview has made me sit back and try and figure out what the hell I want to do with my life since I'll be telling academics to suck it once the dissertation is done (which I should, uh, probably do something about but whatever). I've come to a few realizations:
- I haven't the foggiest fucking clue what I want to be when I grow up
- I do know that I don't want to be an overacheiver anymore, since that hasn't exactly panned out so well for me
- I'm not sure I've done anything of note this entire year except continue on in my existence and be the good, calming, caring wife for my stressed-out, job-seeking husband
- I don't particularly want to be a productive member of society, but I also don't see that as optional
- I hate that general upsetness/disillusionment/disappointment with my career choices thus far radically outweigh everything in my life that's good when I go about taking inventory of my life, but I've yet to figure out how to stop that line of thinking
- I wonder if I'll ever come up with something to do with myself that doesn't make me feel like the last five years of grad school were a complete and total waste (I don't feel that the MA was just for sheer critical thinking/research skills, but I do feel like the Ph.D. has been)

And so all this shit just circles around in my head and I get stuck and spend a lot of time on the forum or crocheting or playing MarioKart or cooking or whatever because I'm lost on trying to find answers. In accordance with the wide world of astrology, I'm mid-Saturn Return right now, which I bring up only because that does feel roughly like my life right now - everything I've held onto as a way to define myself up until now (read: overachiever, student) has disintegrated around me and I'm left standing here thinking "so that's nice and all, but the fuck do I do now?" I typically tell myself that this is in some way good because this opens up new ways for me to define myself or time to focus on areas of my life that I'd generally left unexamined before and all that rot and all of that is good but I still spend far too much time thinking "well, shit" and then finding a beer. Some sense of rebuilding would be nice - even just a glimmer of an idea of a way to begin figuring out how to rebuild would be nice at this point.

Mostly I really hate that every time someone asks me about my life, I'm prone to telling them about Brownie's life rather than my own because there's so much more going on in his. I won't tell more than a handful of people IRL (and the entire fucking internet, apparently) how I'm actually feeling - the last time I told Brownie how I was actually feeling he said "damn, that was a lot to dump on me" before realizing that he sounded like an ass, apologizing, and then admitting he didn't have a clue what to say and giving me a hug. I'm sure the reaction from anyone else would be at least as charming. DNW.

I sort of suspect I'm probably drinking a bit too much lately, but that's neither here nor there and anyway it's the holidaze. Seriously, though, Sunday's been the only alcohol-free night in a week. The holidays have been really lovely. (Er, one huge screaming fit at my father-in-law aside wherein he had no clue the rage he'd produce in me by saying that it was Rihanna's fault that Chris Brown beat her, but everything else really has been great.) I think I've put on five pounds from all the eating - it's way too cold to go outside and run so I'm at the mercy of my brother's WiiFit once we get to KC on Thursday. Here's to going home for a couple of weeks to attempt to decompress...

Buh?

The NaNo verification thing came up with something like 300 more words than I thought I had. Strange. Not complaining, just mildly confused. I still can't believe I have 50k - all I can think about is all the stuff that still needs to happen (like introducing the MC's cat, which does need to happen, or, um, any sort of denouement which is still realistically 15K away at least). Also, I almost don't even want to think about revisions except that I want to keep writing to get the draft done so that I can take some time away from it (er, um - write my dissertation) so that I ca get back to it with better, fresher eyes and revise and revise and revise. And then if my ego has gone insane, see what I can do with it.

Realistically, the story isn't done yet. Not really even all that close. If I keep the word count for the fourth part of the book in the same area as the other three, it should be about 15K or so, but I've already got 5K and it feels like there's more than 10K left to do. We'll see.

Thank goodness for low-key Thanksgiving breaks - that's the only way this thing is as far as it is right now. If I could only have another 3 months of this, I'd be golden. Unfortunately, the emails from students are starting to pile up as they stress out about the last week of classes, and at some point I really do need to remember that I'm *supposed* to be a graduate student.

Real life blows. November has been a fun fake life month.