So things are batshit now and have been for a while. I'd apologize for the lack of posting, but I haven't really been in the headspace for it. Anyway, the academic job search thing turned out not the way we'd initially wanted it, so Brownie and I are moving in with my parents in a few days. As my parents live six states away from where Brownie and I currently are, this has been something of an undertaking.
Most of the undertaking is ready to go, at least - 95% of our shit is on a truck in the parking lot right now, rather than in our apartment. All we have to do tomorrow is turn in the cable box/modem, get our tv and mattress on the truck, eat dinner/say goodbye to Brownie's parents, and then go to sleep. So that's tomorrow and it'll be sad and hard to say goodbye to his parents knowing that we won't see them next week as per usual. But for tonight, I'm sad about my bartenders.
Almost exactly two years ago, Brownie and I discovered the bestest little pub in the universe roughly a town over from where we've been living. By the end of the first visit, we'd discovered that they had a good beer selection, knowledgeable bartenders, and at least one bartender that was willing to shoot the shit for a few minutes when he wasn't busy with something else. Within three visits, we knew a few names and had discovered that the on tap beer selection changed frequently. Within a month, we were firmly regulars.
Two years later, we've just said goodbye to a whole bunch of friends and it hurts. I remember this feeling from when I moved 1200 miles away from home the first time - saying goodbye to everyone hurt like hell, and every time I've seen them after that has been slightly off, as though knowing that we're spending time together more because we were friends than because we're still active parts of each others' lives. I guess I'm assuming now that this will happen again, that even with the advent of facebook and whatnot, I'll never be as close to my friends there as I have been. And this is all natural and whatever, and I've got some really amazingly fantastic friends that I'll be going home to as Brownie and I relocate this weekend. And this all reminds me that if next year's job search *is* successful and we end up moving *again* that I'm likely to find friends wherever we go that I will in turn miss if/when we leave them.
But right now I'm sad, and I was half in tears while we were hanging out at the bar tonight, and I'm half in tears now and very, very surprised to find just how much it hurts to leave everyone there. And tomorrow night will be my last night in town, and Saturday night will be spent in a faraway plains state with two very freaked out kitties, and Sunday night will be spent at my parents in yet another, even farther away plains state. And life will move on and maybe someday I'll become gainfully employed and someday even farther away than that, maybe I'll manage to publish a novel. But not right now. Right now I will pet my cat, and I will mope, and I will hope my friends have a good evening.
Showing posts with label moving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moving. Show all posts
Friday, July 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
I promise I'm not dead or anything
I've been out in the great Midwest the past couple of weeks, marrying off a friend (whose hellish wedding probably deserves a post), spending a weekend in Tulsa, hanging out with my brother and so on. It's been a strange combination of hellaciously busy and completely bored while waiting for bridefriend to bother getting back to me, etc.
Anyway, the actual news-not-news is that the university we've been waiting on to find out if Brownie has a job with them this upcoming year has told him they'll get back to him sometime next week. This means two things: 1) after next week, we'll be able to make firm plans on where/when/how we'll move (FINALLY) and 2) next week, until they get back to Brownie, is going to be filled with him being anxious, not sleeping and so on. I'm going to try and suggest he spend most of it cooking or something like that, because the anxiety can be really difficult to cope with (for both of us, honestly - his anxiety has a tendency to fill whatever space he's in) and I'm trying to come up with ways for him to be busy.
As for my preferences, to the degree I'm allowing myself to have any, I'm not sure. On one hand, it'd be awesome if Brownie gets the job because that means we'll have at least one guaranteed income next year *phew*. OTOH, the job is in a small PA town, meaning that it'll be really difficult for me to find a worthwhile job. I don't relish the thought of sitting around endlessly jobhunting next year. Brownie has told me that I can just stay home and write next year if I'd like, and I do relish the thought, but I need to have some sort of job that will allow me to get the hell out of the house sometimes or I'll go batshit insane -- a feeling compounded by the fact that if we end up in said small PA town, I wouldn't know anyone at all besides my husband.
Meanwhile, if we come to the Midwest (back home for me), it'd be much easier for me to find a job, and we've got a huge social network out here, and there's generally more to do. I'd be much happier on a day-to-day basis. However, if we move out here, Brownie won't be teaching anything in any kind of academic capacity unless something really strange happens and he manages not only to get into the adjunct pool at any of the local places, but also manages to get a course or three to teach.
The problem is that being in academics, a year off can be nightmarish to explain on the job market. He says he feels like if we move here, he'll be giving up on a long-fought-for, not-quite-achieved dream. That's understandably difficult, and so while I'd be happier in the Midwest, I kinda hope we end up in PA so that he can have the change to do another round on the academic job market, since that's what he wants. If that round doesn't work out, however, it's over. Period. My choice on that. I can stand to go through this one more time, but after that I'd like to know that we're going to be able to settle down for a while and get around to starting a family and so on. He's agreed. The whole academic job search thing is too big a strain to repeat any more than that.
So that's that for the moment. I hate the waiting, but I'm at least used to it by now. I feel like that's all I've been doing for close to a year now.
Anyway, the actual news-not-news is that the university we've been waiting on to find out if Brownie has a job with them this upcoming year has told him they'll get back to him sometime next week. This means two things: 1) after next week, we'll be able to make firm plans on where/when/how we'll move (FINALLY) and 2) next week, until they get back to Brownie, is going to be filled with him being anxious, not sleeping and so on. I'm going to try and suggest he spend most of it cooking or something like that, because the anxiety can be really difficult to cope with (for both of us, honestly - his anxiety has a tendency to fill whatever space he's in) and I'm trying to come up with ways for him to be busy.
As for my preferences, to the degree I'm allowing myself to have any, I'm not sure. On one hand, it'd be awesome if Brownie gets the job because that means we'll have at least one guaranteed income next year *phew*. OTOH, the job is in a small PA town, meaning that it'll be really difficult for me to find a worthwhile job. I don't relish the thought of sitting around endlessly jobhunting next year. Brownie has told me that I can just stay home and write next year if I'd like, and I do relish the thought, but I need to have some sort of job that will allow me to get the hell out of the house sometimes or I'll go batshit insane -- a feeling compounded by the fact that if we end up in said small PA town, I wouldn't know anyone at all besides my husband.
Meanwhile, if we come to the Midwest (back home for me), it'd be much easier for me to find a job, and we've got a huge social network out here, and there's generally more to do. I'd be much happier on a day-to-day basis. However, if we move out here, Brownie won't be teaching anything in any kind of academic capacity unless something really strange happens and he manages not only to get into the adjunct pool at any of the local places, but also manages to get a course or three to teach.
The problem is that being in academics, a year off can be nightmarish to explain on the job market. He says he feels like if we move here, he'll be giving up on a long-fought-for, not-quite-achieved dream. That's understandably difficult, and so while I'd be happier in the Midwest, I kinda hope we end up in PA so that he can have the change to do another round on the academic job market, since that's what he wants. If that round doesn't work out, however, it's over. Period. My choice on that. I can stand to go through this one more time, but after that I'd like to know that we're going to be able to settle down for a while and get around to starting a family and so on. He's agreed. The whole academic job search thing is too big a strain to repeat any more than that.
So that's that for the moment. I hate the waiting, but I'm at least used to it by now. I feel like that's all I've been doing for close to a year now.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
In Limbo
So grades are done with the exception of two potatoes who haven't gotten around to turning in their final papers. So I await their final papers, sending them nagging emails reminding them that they'll flunk if the papers don't get turned in. Not my fault - department policy. I'd rather they just get them in so I don't have to deal with them anymore. I just want this done and off my back.
Having everything else done and calculated and ready to enter means that I can shower and go buy myself some nail polish, which was the treat I promised myself for getting through the remains of the grading.
Once the grades are in, it's done. Like really, truly done done. And I can find a job doing something else and hope that one day over the next couple of years my motivation to finish the dissertation returns in full enough force that I finish the stupid thing.
I'm still not sad it's over, so I'm assuming at this point that I'm really not going to be. Honestly, though, it's hard to feel much of anything. I have NO idea at this point what's going to happen in my life over the next few months, no idea of what to expect, no real way to make plans. Brownie had an interview with a college in BFE of this state and they called his references, who reported that and sounded as though college in BFE is really interested in him. We haven't been to the town at all, so we're trying to keep an open mind, but the truth is that neither one of us is even slightly excited by this prospect. The idea of packing up and moving back to KC instead sounds so much better, so much more likely to bring employment for both of us, but it doesn't sound definite enough for me to want to hope for it. Not knowing what to think or what to hope for or what not to hope for so that I don't end up disappointed again has become an exercise in teeth-grinding.
I guess what I do for the moment is go shower (finally, at 2:30), drag myself out to the bookstore to look at books on writing resume cover letters for a while, pick up my nail polish, grab stuff to make salmon/asparagus pasta for dinner, and then flop with a book or with my laptop and novel for a while. Something to distract me from me.
Having everything else done and calculated and ready to enter means that I can shower and go buy myself some nail polish, which was the treat I promised myself for getting through the remains of the grading.
Once the grades are in, it's done. Like really, truly done done. And I can find a job doing something else and hope that one day over the next couple of years my motivation to finish the dissertation returns in full enough force that I finish the stupid thing.
I'm still not sad it's over, so I'm assuming at this point that I'm really not going to be. Honestly, though, it's hard to feel much of anything. I have NO idea at this point what's going to happen in my life over the next few months, no idea of what to expect, no real way to make plans. Brownie had an interview with a college in BFE of this state and they called his references, who reported that and sounded as though college in BFE is really interested in him. We haven't been to the town at all, so we're trying to keep an open mind, but the truth is that neither one of us is even slightly excited by this prospect. The idea of packing up and moving back to KC instead sounds so much better, so much more likely to bring employment for both of us, but it doesn't sound definite enough for me to want to hope for it. Not knowing what to think or what to hope for or what not to hope for so that I don't end up disappointed again has become an exercise in teeth-grinding.
I guess what I do for the moment is go shower (finally, at 2:30), drag myself out to the bookstore to look at books on writing resume cover letters for a while, pick up my nail polish, grab stuff to make salmon/asparagus pasta for dinner, and then flop with a book or with my laptop and novel for a while. Something to distract me from me.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
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.
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.
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