Frowns

I decided to go for the pay-cut job, as it would be a much better working environment, but after being honest with myself I knew that with J out of a job, I couldn't justify a pay cut. Plus, I'd be working for a friend, and if it went south, I wouldn't want a friendship soured.   I'm a little sad, because I think it would have been great.  On the positive side, I got a letter from human resources (re: the big job) saying they were sending my application to the search committee, so it looks like I cleared the first hurdle.

We've been doing a lot of talking about whether to stay or go, meaning, whether J should make more efforts to find something local.  I've been dissecting the chip on my shoulder about a "fresh start". Am I forcing a move?  I was playing the game for years, with moving as the main objective, so if I'm causing friction it's because I've been planning my life around it.  I hate to bring up resentment, but I feel like I'd be resentful if I had martyred myself at my job so he could get a cool one somewhere else, then we stayed.  I know I should let go of that, especially since I know I could.  I could have any of a hundred reasons why I want to move on, and it shouldn't be because THAT WAS THE PLAN.

What do I really want? To be swept away somewhere else so I have no choice but to leave my job and start afresh somewhere else.  But that's a lot of pressure on J.

Status Report

Last night as we were getting ready for bed, J asked me if I had my druthers, would I want to stay here or move.  That's not an easy answer.  From the start of our marriage (and even before) the plan was he'd get his PhD, and we'd travel on his career path together (since I hadn't figured one out yet). So, as he started to get finished up, I started to disconnect myself from my town.  I did not renew my membership on a non-profit board that could probably have used me there, because I didn't want to drop out halfway through the year.  I stopped work on a craft fair I had been wanting to organize.  I refused a nomination to the staff senate at the university where I worked.  Twice.  At one point, even after I realized the poor treatment at my work was not going to change no matter how proactive I became, I refused to find another job that I would just have to quit soon after. At many points in here, I gave up hope.  I packed things up.  I sold 1/3 of my belongings.  I decided not to plant the garden this year.  I have been protesting any large Christmas gifts for YEARS because I didn't want to move with them.  God knows we could have used a new couch a long time ago. I hit pause.

But you can't hit pause on life. It keeps going, things accumulate, experience accumulates until it totally makes sense to go for that better-paying job even if the future is murky.  Submit some artwork to that show*.  Make some new friends and stop acting like they'll just be saying goodbye to you soon.

So, do I want to stay?  If I hadn't spent the last four years preparing to leave, yes. Of course. I'd made good friends, good connections, I love my house.  But I feel like I've spent four years refusing to grow and soiling my reputation with a flaky assertion that I'd be "leaving soon".  That feels really bad.  I have a hang-up about looking like a flake, but I think that's because it's what I'm known for by now.  I'm the one who's always saying she's moving but hasn't gone anywhere.

I shouldn't care what people think.  But I do care about all the wasted time and the negative parts of my reputation caused by it.  I want a fresh start.

That puts a lot of pressure on J.  I know there was always pressure, but I think it's part of the bargain when he's the one leading the charge.  I've got a different kind of pressure, one that isn't as valued or supported, as evidenced by the lack of blogs about trailing/traveling spouses.

I shouldn't be writing this blog-- I should be polishing my resume and writing a cover letter.  I have always been my worst enemy**.


*Somewhat hilariously (not at all) put on by the non-profit I had worked with and resigned from.  But I just got an email saying I'd gotten in but they didn't have a venue, so there wouldn't be a show.  Great.
**I'm not actually having a bad day.  It's just a real thinky day.

Job available-- but am I?

A job I may be quite qualified came open this week.  It pays substantially more and would involve more projects and public relations, and is at my current institution.  Should I apply knowing there's a chance that J might get a job soon?

But haven't I been asking myself that for the past three years?  I have held myself back in my current job by riding my hopes on another person.  And now that it (J's job) may actually happen soon, there's this job. That I would be silly not to go for.

But once again, I will have to bite my tongue and let another opportunity  pass away.  Who knows when J will get a job?   He will be graduating mid-May, but so far we have no bites.  I say "we", but it's starting to grate on me*.  I don't have anything to do with this.  I am completely at the whim of someone else's career.

It's not a good time to be angry, but I am.  I am my own person and I am good at my job, but I am losing myself in his job search.  Even at work, now that my boss knows he's graduating, it is assumed that we're leaving and I'm being treated differently.  I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THIS. This would have been easier if he wasn't a student, and I wouldn't have had to tell anyone what was happening.  But with working with faculty... they were going to find out.  Now I'm awash in uncertainty not only in my own mind, but coming from those around me.

So, how can I apply for this job and still feel honest?  I don't want to not try, and then six months down the road J still doesn't have a job.  A month ago that thought wouldn't' have even crossed my mind, but who are we kidding?  The economy sucks and no one has contacted him about any of his applications.  It doesn't matter how talented/skilled/educated you are right now.  We could be looking at a long, dark haul.

Can anyone understand why trying to get a new job, especially in the same institution, would be a bad idea right now?  Even if I got it, if we had to move less than a year later, I would be leaving a bad reputation at a place I would have been remembered fondly, if only I hadn't wasted their time.  Plus, it's probably gotten around that J is graduating, so they won't even consider me.  Who would?  I wouldn't.

It's an endless fucking cycle of self-effacement, obnoxious martyrdom and failure.  Failure before I can even try.  I am just so tired of waiting.

*J isn't grating on me. He is wonderful and supportive and working really hard.

Me and the DMV: A taste of what's to come

Today is a university holiday, so I have it off.  I've spent today buying replacement lightbulbs and paying bills, sitting at the DMV trying to smile in order to make myself feel happier.  But it is just not working.  I keep looking at this dreary day and hoping that's not what's making me feel so low.  If it is, Seattle may not be so great for me.  I never noticed how often the sky was just pure, cloudless blue until I started reading about the weather in the Pacific Northwest.  I understand why they have vampires.

J has a short phone interview today with a Google representative.  It is not the big scary one, but it's his first phone interview for a job.  I have promised to be out of the house.  I am feeling his nervousness.  Afterwards I am taking him out for a meal.  I have yet to eat more than a small bowl of oatmeal today.

When I am sad or confused, I can't eat.  I forget how to make food or just get really bogged down in making decisions. I am currently staring at some frozen samosas that I do not want to unfreeze or eat.  A friend tells me I am disassociating from my current situation because it is too much.  I don't want to believe that, because this is just a taste of all the change and stress we'll go through.  All this time hoping and  complaining about moving on, and I freak out the second we start to go forward.  I've  cancelled plans with friends twice and backed out of a creative project just in the past day.  I'll admit I felt a lot better afterwards, but I really hate to disappoint people.

The highlight of my day will be starting a project for a commissioned Halloween hat.  My patron (who purchased my cherry hat previously and wants to collect more of my work ;)) pretty much let me decide what it would be, and I chose a barrel cactus.  I took a stack of newspapers from the DMV and will start making the form today.

Now, I really should eat before I decide to take a nap and waste the day.

The scale of opportunity

More blog-searching today (and somehow this is a productive day at work) and I found a "trailing spouse" blog, albeit an expat* one.  She doesn't like the term trailing spouse either**, but her blog is endlessly positive:

As a trailing spouse, identity can be a tough thing (because if you're like me, that last thing you want to be called is a "trailing spouse"). But if the career you had before isn't going to work out abroad (or you lose yours via a layoff like me), maybe there's something else you'd love to do and try. Maybe, in fact, this is your big opportunity for that something you used to put on hold. 

Chantal at One Big Yodel 

I don't want my opportunity, a positive thing, tinged with the fact that I only have it because it's the consolation prize for having no control***.  Here's my internalized misogyny (it's just popping up way too much this week) again, in that I can't see my worth if I didn't come to it myself, as if taking that opportunity is just backsliding into a dependent female role. I don't, however, feel this way when it comes to education.  If J was working and I was going back to school or taking classes in whatever field I settle on, that feels ok. But if it's to start an Etsy or make Halloween costumes (traditionally female pursuits) it's not.  See what I did there?  Thanks world.  You've made me a woman-hater.

How do I cleanse my mind of these tendencies?  I feel fucked all-around.  And I haven't even touched upon the stink of privilege in all this.

*I'm more interested in domestic relocation.
**Yeah, I changed my title again, because no one's going to find this blog otherwise.
***I'm speaking for myself, not Chantal.  She has her shit together.

Guest Post: Freeze-dried

Freeze-Dried is a female grad student on-her-way-out-of-the-twenties. She's into SF/F, food, hugs and some (albeit very little) exercise. She is Mostly Harmless and can be reached at frozendry.at.gmail.com.

Dear A.b.,

Ever since you’ve invited me to do a guest post in this space, I’ve been wondering about what I can say as a traveling spouse that you haven’t already – incredibly honestly and eloquently – addressed.  And I’m convinced that I can’t do an abstract idea-post related to being a traveling spouse*. My solution, forgive my indulgence, is to focus on me.

A couple of years ago, I decided to follow my partner, (not just because it is the right thing to do**), but because I wanted to***. At the time, although I was in a job that I thoroughly enjoyed, I hadn’t really begun to think of it as a career. After an initial wave of uncomfortable dependence (that passed with support from the spouse), I eventually maneuvered my way into my first unplanned “home-maker” year. I learnt to cook. I also learnt how not to trip over one’s laundry, and how to fold clothes (no, it is an ancient art, really) and sometime down that road, found out that I really wanted to find a career in the academe.

But more recently - sometime over the Christmas break, actually - I discovered that a lot of who I am has come to be built around one relationship. To most people that meet me now, I’m a spouse before I’m a person, much more in fact than P is. This is significantly different from our pre-travelling situation. Back then (it does feel like ages ago), I was an individual / a woman before anything else. I suspect a lot of this difference has to do with having chosen a dependent life.

Between commuting to work, hanging out with P and getting stuff done for school, for want of both time and interest, I do very little else. Consequently, new people meet me as a role rather than as a person. On the other hand, P, given the nature of his job and of our situation still has a more independent life than me. For instance, he meets people at his workplace as a so-and-so-specialist and the dynamics of a job allow for development of (a certain kind of) familiarity, while grad school can be very immersive and isolating.

Anyway, people meet P as an individual / a man before meeting him as a spouse.

[Okay, now is a good time for that interjection: P works his job (although he’d rather be pursuing his art), so that we can have the life that we do. For this, he has my highest respect. I must clarify that this post should in no way suggest that he is insensitive or otherwise oblivious to my concerns.]

Meet my freaking-the-fuck-out moment: In my own mind, I have become a spouse who is incidentally, doing other things.

Self, meet Insecurity. Insecurity, meet Self.

For me, this realization has been attended by some seriously debilitating angst, helplessness, and – surprise, surprise, possessiveness – the kind that has, in the past, made me run in the opposite direction. Coming to terms with this idea (that despite all the things I do, even I think of myself as a spouse first) hasn’t been easy. It means un-learning some things and re-learning some others. It means walking out of this comfort zone of a secure and familiar identity (that I didn't even realize I was building) and learning to be at home with the unknown. And perhaps most scarily, it means having to do this – being a traveling spouse – without losing myself.

A dear friend (who re-appeared quite of the blue to buoy me through this very personal crisis) said, “Being possessive is okay. But what matters is what you do when they’re around and what you do with yourself when they are not.” All suggestiveness aside, that’s my new goal. Yes, with the traveling spouse deal as it is, I don’t necessarily know how, if at all, I can have a completely independent identity without going back to a non-nomadic lifestyle. Hell, I don’t even know how I’m going to work at this.

But, I’m determined to atleast try.

Footnotes: 

*’cause almost everything about being one is so personal, init?

**Which is an expectation where I come from

*** A complete distrust of long-distance relationships may also have had something to do with this decision.

(Freeze-dried)

28 Days of Blogging

I'm attempting a blog post a day for February, egged on by my friend at Freeze Dried.  I already missed February 1st, but I didn't know about it then, and it was the first snow day so I had s(no)w-work fever.

 Today is the first day back on campus since Monday, and we didn't have to be here until 9:30.  That gave me and J time for one last late  breakfast and we got to walk to work together.  Penguin-walking, because this town doesn't have any budget for inclement weather plans, and the roads and sidewalks were still pretty crappy.  As of this writing, it is snowing again.  I'm doing my best to get work done (writing a blog post on the side isn't productive, I know) but it's hard with my student employees yacking about the snow and me wondering if I need to tell other employees to just not come in.  I haven't had to deal with weather safety too much in my time here, but now I feel like it's up to me whether to make these students drive/bus up here.  If the University thinks it's safe enough to be open, I guess I should trust my employees to get here.

J and I talked a little last night about The Future.  He said he felt selfish in his current path.  I think it counts that he actually thinks about that, and it's not selfish if I said I'm ok with it.  Plus, I've gone this far with him, and I want to see it to the end (or at least the beginning of the next step, with a job).  And, on a sort of sad note, I've built my current life around what he's doing, so I'd be totally out to sea if he abandoned it.  I guess if he went into industry we'd still move (I don't like to think about how I would react if I found out we would not leave our current town) so really  he should do what will make him happiest in his career.  He's worked so long I think he deserves to have a job that fulfills him.  Just because I'm unhappy at my job doesn't mean I want him to be brought down with me.    We could both use a change of scenery.

Awesome? Shame? Texas?

I'm sure everybody has seen this by now, the United States of Shame:

I was pretty happy with "Worst Credit Score", as Arkansas is usually the butt of any joke including goats, Billy Bob Thornton or cousin-marrying.  Most Arkansans fall back on Mississippi to make fun of, but unfortunately that's where I was born.  You learn to be tough at the bottom of the barrel.  Ohio is looking even better for us now, since they are worst at "nerds".  How is that bad?  I think it bodes well with J getting a job there.  And Colorado can't be too bad since I don't do cocaine. I have beat the system!

(Also: Delaware is "worst at" abortion? That is a discussion all in itself.)

And the rejoinder, The United States of Awesome:

In J's words, "BROMINE PRODUCTION?"  I agree-- we do lots of stuff ok: state parks, classy parking meters, Cavender's spice, jelly pie(?), first female US Senator, gays and bigots living in peace together, outhouse races, The Gossip, Maya Angelou and the freaking Clintons.

Beth Ditto and Secretary Hillary Frigging Rodham Awesome Clinton

Bromine, since as an Arkansan resident for 17 years I still had to look it up, is a halogen element used in pesticides, flame retardants and Mountain Dew.  Its latin root bromos means "the stench of he-goats".  Awesome.

What does this have to do with Texas, capital of wind power and low high school graduation rates?  This is the next place J is looking at for a postdoc.  I think I said, "TEXAS? TEXAS?" in an excited/anxious high-pitched voice a few times before he calmly answered yes.  Seriously, I have never heard Texas come out of his mouth.  So, it's now France and Texas, though I still think we shouldn't lose hope in Ohio or Colorado until there's an actual rejection letter. 

 I'm realizing just how little I know about what's going on in my spouse's head, how many places we might go that I can't even imagine.  Makes my little searches for library jobs seem futile. Texas. Texas. Seriously, Texas. I know I'm from Arkansas, but Texas seems so weird.   And even stranger, I find I am drawn to this idea.  Things to think about.

New Year's like a Phoenix

I'd like to think I came through the threshold of 2011 like a phoenix, on fire and ready to be reborn, but really I just had the worst hangover of my life (4 drinks! I am serious!) and didn't manage to form complete sentences until 6pm the next day.  On the 31st, I decided that I'd eat more raw food and end the year with a completely raw meal (spring rolls and sun dried tomato brazil nut "cheese") but on the 1st I had a fried cheese melt from Denny's dipped in ranch.  Nothing on earth was going to get me to eat cheese with a Z.  I needed fried.

Other than the horrendous pain and lost time, New Year's was super fun.  I got to wear a cool outfit, go to several parties and hang out with lots of friends.  J. got a little grouchy (he's not as much about parties) but by the end of the night everyone went to bed happy. (How they woke up is another story).

We did end the year with some bad news on the job-search front.  J. sent in an application to Colorado over a month ago, and also got work back from a possible job in Ohio around the same time.  Has his advisor written/sent his rec letters yet? No.  J. tried emailing him several times, stuck around his office trying to catch him, but to no result.  J. was pretty disconsolate a few days ago and thought that this apparent disregard for him getting a job was going to cost him the Colorado one.  It's not his fault, but it makes him look bad.  The deadline for the Colorado application has already passed, so it's not a point in his favor if his is incomplete.

He had to send an email to the Ohio job to see if they had all his letters (since his advisor wouldn't even answer an email about whether he had sent it).  The answer was no, and J. tried to be as diplomatic as he could without saying outright his advisor was practically M.I.A.  He tried to get in touch some more, tried to convince himself that it was just the end of the semester/holiday time and things were going slow, but eventually we tried to convince each other that something horrible had happened and that's why there was no letter.  J. got an email a few days ago from the Ohio researcher asking about the letter, and he forwarded that to his advisor.  Guess who finally replied!  Seems there was some vague emergency, and he is now "working on it".

It's making me very nervous, and I can't imagine what's happening in J's head right now.  He's working as hard as he can, and is asking for the bare minimum.  There's nothing I can do really, and that's frustrating.

Also annoying: people asking me where I want to go.  It's a nicety, I know, but do they not understand the concept that I am not the engineer of this move? I don't want to get back into the negative rut of saying, "It doesn't matter where I want to go," but that's the truth, isn't it? Stop asking me!!

Hello? I have good news?

After taking just a few days off posting, I can now tell all my traffic comes from one place: Two Body Problem.  Thank you!  When I update, I go to the top of her blogroll, and people come over.

So, the good news.  The husband FINALLY was able to send out some letters (three to be exact) and he's already heard back from two of them.  Ones a definite no (doesn't have the funding for another scientist) and the other said, "Cool! I know you! Let me get back to you in a prompt manner, but you sound cool!"  This is all very new and exciting, this promptness of communication.  Husband was flabbergasted.

AND luckily, the one that didn't have a job for him was in Madison, WI.  I hear this  place is very cold and the people eat snow and cheese. I like the latter part, but I wasn't made for the former.  I was really looking forward to meeting Joanne from A Mathematician's Wife.  Or, well, asking if she ever wanted to meet up.

Columbus, Ohio, I hear, does have the cold, but it doesn't sound as terribly wintry as Wisconsin. I'm deluding myself before doing the research.  It's cold here in the Ozarks right now, but not terrible.  I am still riding my bike to work, but we rarely have to deal with snow.

I made three small sculptures to give as Christmas presents, and I think I should post some pictures on here.  I don't think the people who I'm giving them to know about this blog, so I think we're safe!  A friend of mine who is building his own portfolio in photography has agreed to take some real pictures of them, which I'll post when they get done. For now, you'll have to do with mine.

Saturn and 63 moons

Trashy park (idea slightly stolen from D. Hayde)

And that's Moon.  The moon. I haven't figured it out yet. Maybe something like The Little Prince?

I'm really just looking for any reason to drill a hole in something.

I feel kind of bad about art-type gifts.  I am not an artist, but I like to make things.  I often give hand-made gifts.  But this time I am experimenting in something I've always wanted to try: sculpture.  And specifically on a very small scale.    So, I'm essentially giving people my experiments, and that doesn't sit right with me.  I feel like something is wrong if a handmade gift wasn't made initially with the person in mind.  Feels kind of dirty.   I don't think the gifts are badly made or my "seconds", but I feel like I am being dishonest.  Giving these as gifts gave me the motivation to try new things, so I think I should stop overthinking it.  I wonder if other artists have these thoughts about giving art as gifts.  I have a few paintings done by friends that they gave to me as a gift, but I didn't see any conflict in their faces.