I have been feeling cruddy all week now ---- right on the edge of a cold but not blowing up into a full-fledged attack just yet. I blame my sister and my dad, who both have colds and who I talked to on the phone this weekend. (What? Reality should be no limit to good blaming.)
Feeling crappy, of course, does nothing to help with the craziness of the job market, which is now in full swing. (Know how I know? Today I just got a rejection letter from last year's job run ---- fuckers. Isn't it in the middle of your fucking next semester already? Haven't you already posted two jobs for your this year's search? Gah. I cough all my germs in your direction.)
So, I have sent out some stuff and am in the mad dash for finalizing more stuff and everything hits the fan almost immediately. I have to try and get a bit more done before collapsing, but in the next day or so I'll bring you a post about hacking up your babies. Till then,
Yours in aches, pains and general job-market bile,
Sisyphus
7 comments:
Don't know if this will make you feel better, or worse.
oh sisyphus, do take care of yourself. i still have lingering sinusitis issues and it sucks. AND, i know how you feel too about the job rejection letters! i just got one like about a month and a half ago. HELLO! do they have nothing better to do over there but catch up on driving nails into coffins? i mean, i did figure that by the time mla came around that i wasn't even being considered for the job, so what is the point besides utter demoralization? so i will use my cyber power to help your germs reach the destination of your job fuckers.
i want to say, too, that i'm so tickled that you read my blog! you and earnest english (in your blogs and comments) are such a support for me and really make this whole academic life bearable--job hunting, dissertating...
besides, you are funny as hell! and terribly smart and witty. i suspect we're not in the same field, so i'm glad that i'm not competing with you for jobs. i'd so much rather be on your team, even if i'm just a bench warmer.
so, take care of yourself there sis.
<3,
ml
Don't know if this will make you feel better, or worse.
Oy. I'll come back to that later, but I must say I haven't always had that much luck figuring out what a search was supposed to do to the dept (is it filling a gap or is this person planning to leave? I can't tell) or what the dept was like from the web site (English departments are still a bit behind the times on websites, and often have only weird stuff on their sites and not useful course information.
Hopefully the fact that I've had to rearrange the shitload of TA experience to get it to fit on my CV will be to my advantage.
I keep telling bloggers with aches/pains: take care of yourselves! This junk that's going around obeys no laws of physics or reality, so you can get it by never leaving your own bed. Which means that if we all breathe in the direction of the idiots who are a year late in sending info, they too shall be sick.
The up side is that blame is similar. Laws of physics need not apply. Reality is over-rated.
Probably at big departments the purpose of the search can be hard to identify, but if there are fewer than 25 full-timers, it shouldn't be that hard. Remember, I'm talking about cash-starved places that may not have been able to hire for a long time, but may have gotten a more favorable state budget environment, or enough retirements to get the administration to pay attention to the department, or enough assistant profs moving on to force new searches, or an embarrassing enough FT-PT ratio that the administration has to stop downsizing the department, or....
But I agree that English departments are still way behind when it comes to publicizing what they do. Probably the public satellites that aren't providing up-to-date faculty lists or descriptions of department goals and requirements on a web site are ones you might consider putting on the lower priority list anyway, unless you want to be the "new person who can become the department webmaster" on top of everything else that goes with the first FT job.
sisyphus,
it does make me feel better. it makes me feel less alone (as in "the only one") in this big bad mire of "job market bile."
<3,
ml
Hope you're feeling better now!
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