Baby's first job application

Applause, please. (And I never realized until now how close the word applause is to the word applesauce...)

Well, not quite first---the first one was last winter when I was on heavy narcotics and involved lying through my teeth about how close I was to finishing (as they say: not).

But this is the first real one. I would pat myself on the back, but: (a) I'm sore from Saturday morning yoga; (b) I'm under the gun to wrap up a 25-page writing sample for job application #3, which must go into the mail no later than Wednesday. Fortunately for me, application #2 just requires some more polish on the letter.

the countdown begins

After some fits and starts and shuffling about, we're on:

Defense date: April 4, 2011.

In 1581, Francis Drake was knighted for completing a circumnavigation of the world. In 1851 Napoleon abdicated for the first time. It marks Senegal's independence in 1960. In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and NASA launched Apollo 6. Twenty years later, Evan Mecham was convicted in his impeachment trial and removed from office as Governor of Arizona. (I remember that one.) In 2002, The Angolan government and UNITA rebels signed a peace treaty ending the Angolan Civil War. It's also the feast day of Saint Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – 4 April 636), considered, as the historian Montalembert put it, "le dernier savant du monde ancien," or the last scholar of the ancient world.

I think I can handle that.

reminiscent

Per a conversation today with friends about some repressed (and sometimes not so repressed) misogyny amongst my colleagues, I give you this clip, reminiscent of more than few departmental functions or professional interactions:

today's epiphany

I've finally figured it out. OK, maybe that's overstating the case, but I think I have isolated one of the reasons I've been in the dumps for what feels like weeks. Here's my theory:

The half-drafted dissertation is like a half-assembled set of bunkbeds from IKEA. There you are, surrounded on all sides by a jumble of large, unwieldy objects that are meant to fit together somehow. The directions are all but useless; your only tool is an allen wrench with all the strength of a teaspoon. You're far---FAR---from finished but with slats of wood splayed every which way, it's also far, far, far too late to stop now. Worst of all, there's no way to hide this unfinished job (e.g., under the bed or in a closet). It's going to sit in the middle of the room, staring at you, tripping you up and bruising your ankles every time you walk by. It's so obstreperous, so looming that you want to work on it all the time just to get it out of the way. Equally so do you want to ignore it with every last ounce of strength left to you.

Yeah, so that's the mid-dissertation slump. Hope you like the illustration. This entire image is an homage to "The Pager," episode 5 of season 1 of The Wire.

Kitties!

OK, I don't know what happened to March. It just blew by.

You might remember that last winter and spring I was minding some kitties that belonged to a colleague who was doing her fieldwork in Armenia. Thankfully, when I broke my foot in late August, another colleague took the cats off my hands until their owner returned in early September. But I missed them, and I missed Methodius (my fieldworkin' kitty). Recovering from foot surgery is not the best time to get a new cat, however, so I waited.

Until yesterday.

I had been eyeing the ads on petfinder from time to time, thinking that I would like two cats who could keep each other company, but not entirely sure I wanted to train and socialize kittens.

Then, Saturday afternoon, I found this pair:







That's Simon in the left-most shot, and Sally in the one next to it. In the shot of the two of them, Sally's on the viewer's left. They're just three years old, a brother-sister pair of tabby/Bengal mix who were surrendered by their owners to the shelter (i.e., not street kitties). I emailed the woman who was fostering them. She called me back a few hours later, and we set up a meeting for the following afternoon.

BH and I went to meet them yesterday. The girl kitty was a bit skittish, but much less skittish than I had expected and much more engaged and interested in us than I had anticipated. Her brother is a bit more laid back and seemed ready for a nap while his sister pranced all over the place. She's quite a small kitty, though neither of them is very large. They sleep and eat together and groom each other, so the story goes. I think they're just the right amount of kitty for me right now.

I don't have a thing in place--not a litter pan, not nothing--so while I filled out all the paperwork yesterday, I won't pick them up until the end of next week.

meta-bad

It is frustrating to see one's former cohort-mates in print. It's frustrating to see a c.v. go by that you know yours could best if only you had those three little letters already. It reminds me that the gap between a done dissertation and a not-yet-done dissertation is huge. I wish I could feel an unmitigated happiness for my colleagues. I don't; instead, I'm crabby and resentful and depressed. This is happening on several fronts lately.

It sucks when you feel bad for feeling bad.