Pin my puns to my back.

My equanimity and hope about graduation lasted about as long as it took to write the previous awkward blog post. Not gone entirely -- certainly I'm in better shape than I was -- but it's very hard to see that arc of thought continuing without a tenure-track teaching/research position within which to continue it. I'll do the job market again next year, but since I truly never believed I'd lose out my first time through, all bets are off now.

I think I've mentioned, I have an office job right now. I do web development for the medical school -- mostly I write pages promoting the various programs of study & facilities we have. Some IA, though we have an information architect, some low-level coding, lots of marketing and practical language thinking. It's fine, and I'm reasonably good at it, and the people I work with are great; certainly I don't get along nearly as well with the same proportion of people in any English department with which I've ever been associated as I do with the people in my office now. And speaking of offices, I have a huge one. No windows, but it's bigger than what almost any of our tenured professors in Clemens Hall get, with a kitchen right nearby where people leave baked goods and leftovers from receptions on a regular basis.

They'd like to make me a full-time offer, for apparently kind of a lot of money, and to put me in charge of some things. We're about to become a much bigger deal, doing web ops for all five of the university's health sciences schools, which will immediately necessitate about 15 new positions, and I guess the associate dean who heads us up thinks enough of me that she'd like me to be an upper-ish-level person in that. Upper-ish by my standards, anyway, based on my hazy sense that they'd have me doing more talking to faculty & making decisions & less cut-and-dried office stuff.

I don't want it.

I hate to sound like some stupid, tunnel-visioned brat, but -- I don't want it. I like the ivory tower, as insane and unappealing a person as that probably makes me. I believe in literature and students and the humanities -- it's much more accurate to say that poetry is my religion than to say that paganism is. I will never be able to care about the medical school's website or the millions and millions of dollars it kicks around the way I care about explaining poetry to some young, interested person. I want to be mentoring students on research and dissertations, ideally; I want to be bringing in poets to do readings (for whomever this hypothetical department/school might eventually be), and organizing symposia on aesthetics, and having, yes, fussy, and yes, rarified, and yes, cloistered conversations with other people who do these things. And I want to be teaching classes, mid- to upper-level classes, in this stuff that I love. It's not great politics, at least not great populist politics, but you have to have a serious breadth and depth of knowledge to get hold of all the shorthands that let you, say, make jokes about Kristeva's notion of the chora, or talk about reading The Waste Land as a destroyed but persistent five-act dramatic structure and how that shows a deep structural continuity between early Eliot and late. And. . . again, it makes me an unappealing person, just as a person out in the world, because who cares about any of this stuff? Almost no one. It's where I start to feel alive, though.

I was talking to my immediate boss about the job possibility, and saying that I want to be doing these things, and he suggested that he knows people who have full-time jobs who still organize conferences. First, I think he was envisioning something more real and normal and less ivory-tower than what I actually want to do, and second -- those people are happier and more stable than I am. I've never had anything that even looked like a healthy romantic relationship. I might be finally developing some new local friendships after my salted-earth/Ragnaroked years here, but I've thought that a couple times already and it hasn't taken. I can do an awesome job and be really alone, like I am, or I can handle a shitty job (office or comp slavery, either one) if I had a good partner and some kind of social support, but I can't have a life where there's nothing in it I care about. There may be people who can do that. Personally, I think that's unlikely; I think very few adults live as long as I am without any relationships they can engage in meaningfully, without looking just obviously batshit insane. Most the people I've ever seen be batshit insane have, in fact, had more people in their lives than I do.

While I continue to try to overcome this problem, it's not like I'm fixing it this week, or like I see any reliable way to fix it in the medium term. I'm not easy to get along with; I'm very bitter toward a lot of people I do know and not very positive about meeting new ones. I'm difficult to understand, emotional and stubborn, not all that reliable, perpetually broke (that, I guess, would be relieved, and it would make a difference), uninterested in a lot of normal things, interested in things that bore other people, a bad drunk if I drink. . . . Not that I don't have plenty of good qualities. I do. There are some definite obstacles in the way of me bonding at all with anyone, ever, though, and it's not smart to pretend those aren't there. Given that, the thought of trading off my useful hours from poetry and thought to helping the medical school recruit medical school people -- it doesn't appeal.

In ten years of grad school, I've made myself very good at poetry and very bad at most the other things I'd need to be happy. Even if I got a great position, I'd wonder whether it was a good trade, or just a sacrifice, Bataille-style, into the great unorganized circulation of general economy. Without that. . . I really feel like this situation is telling me I should never have raised my eyes above the horizon of my home town or home culture. I could have done what I'm doing now straight out of undergrad, never gotten as crazy or as angry as I have as a grad student, never broken myself into the pieces into which you have to break yourself to do the things I've done, have married some guy who might be fine or might be some asshole who'd yell at me, but who'd at least be around. People who yell at you will keep you around to yell at you, after all. My life would only be ordinarily miserable instead of extraordinarily miserable. Kind of saying that wryly, but actually meaning it too -- not the level of intensity of misery, but the type of problems. They just aren't ones the human psyche is quite built to have.

I may not have a choice, of course; this isn't about, do I want to take this job if it's offered to me, because if I don't get a teaching job, I guess I have to, and I probably have to in the meantime anyway. It's about how I feel about that future, seeing it immediately ahead.

I wonder, too, whether it's smart for me to take the web job to that level instead of, say, looking at visiting positions & shittier teaching jobs than I had been. This might seem a no-brainer, $24k teaching freshman comp and 1-2 other classes per year vs. some very livable wage doing web stuff -- but a PhD has a kind of freshness date, and if you're not in the academy within a couple years, it gets really hard to get back in. So there are some potential long-term consequences even of treating my current job as a short-term solution, which, psychologically speaking, is the best I can do for myself.

Today's lesson, as mine seems to be in a general sense, is that you should not try for things. You should make what you can of the postage-stamp of earth you get and be very glad that at least it's a place to stand. Step off that and it all goes to hell.