Hour 5

Oh the beauty of the empty seat on a Thanksgiving bus

Is there anything more glorious than an empty seat to stash your bag and pleasure?

Travel begun

Sunday

Today may be one of the last quiet days until after the new year. There are holidays, weddings, conferences, papers, talks, planning, and trips to come. But today there is quiet, crepes, orange pekoe, reading about readers, yoga, knitting, perhaps some meditation. I'm trying to keep my brain at peace, to store up a bunch of calm for the days and weeks ahead. You can store most things in a crepe, so why not tranquility?

Shh

It's a very quiet morning around these parts. Since working a "real" job over the last year and a half, I've come to relish silent Saturdays in my little urban nest. I have a whole pot of tea steeping, three projects on the needles, two new promising books about panic, a tiny bit of reassuring news about next year, a stack of books to skim for next semester's class, a craving for more lentils, and all day to flitter between them.

{This moment}

{This moment}: When I'm getting better, getting grounded, getting calmer, I start to see more and see better. I think these are weeping cherries and if not, they're just two of the most beautiful trees around.

Note to self

I don't know why you keep forgetting this Anne, but when you can't bear to write a sentence, when there are no thoughts in your head, when you can't stand even the idea of arguing for anything, it's time to turn off the computer. Turn it off. Unplug it. Ignore it. Walk away. It's that damn white screen that's doing it to you.

Now go and find the stack of yellow legal pads. Even the kind with flimsy paper will do. Then dig for your favorite pen, or even choose two. Now it's simple. Just put pen to paper. Don't bother with complete sentences. Don't worry about structure or organization or weak verbs or tentative qualifications. Just scribble. Pretty soon those pretty yellow pages add up and before long, you might just have that talk written. But not if you keep babbling here. Go. Go back to it.

Shuttered from the schoolhouse

As I sent off my most recent application to Eastwestern Praire State University in Somberville, I could help but feel that this is a very good year not to get a job. Imagine it was four years ago and I was brimming with enthusiasm over the 63 jobs in my field, and imagine how disappointing it would have felt not to get even an interview, let alone an offer. That would have been a horrible year to not get a job. This year, though, it’s great. I can fail to get a single MLA interview and no one will dare tell me that it’s because I’m not good enough, because my project is inherently boring, or because I didn’t publish enough. Failure is built right in. With maybe two jobs that really match my interests, I’m almost guaranteed to fail. Oh what a joy!

Somehow I take tremendous comfort in this lousy market. It’s as if all the forces in the academic universe are conspiring just for my benefit, to ensure that I find something better to do with my time. There really seems to be no reason to worry about not getting a job. The real concern is actually getting a job and then having to do all that work of writing lectures, finding new research topics, revising that mildewing dissertation of mine.

So instead of bemoaning this situation, I’m going to embrace it. From now on and for good. Here’s to a great year of not getting a(n) (academic) job.

corners

When you live in a studio apartment, you get just four corners of a home. I guess that technically I have eight, if you count those in the bathroom. With what little space I have, I need to be able to nest in new ways. On Saturday, I decided my lonely windowsills could use some color. A selection of left-overs from my rapidly dwindling yarn stash (could anyone ever have too much of a stash?) did just the trick.