The Looming Uncertainty Returns

(side note: finished my essays at the last possible minute and handed them back today. Yay! Still completely buried in other grading and need to get back on that damn article and job app stuff. Need, need, need, need --- I am so sick of what I need to do.)

I just booked a flight to see the fam for thanksgiving (waited too late and it is pricey), and was inspired to grab a flight for winter break too. (Still pricey but way less and probably the best I can manage given I am flying way the hell over there.)

Of course, my fam doesn't live in Seattle, so if I get an MLA interview I would need to go there. I didn't include the trip in my original ticket, which means I will either a) break down and buy another ticket in the next few days, b) get an interview and buy a last-minute-expensive-freakout ticket around December 10, or most likely c) not get any interview and also not have a plane ticket to Seattle. Quel domage. Seattle's a nice city to visit. If you have the reason to go, the time and the money, that is.

My officemate has been annoying me by discussing this issue at length while I am grading. Should I sign up for the grad student or the full time convention rate? We don't make enough to really count as fulltimers even though we are full time. I need to find someone to split a convention hotel room with. Are you going? Are you booking the hotel and registering now? Should I look for other people? I think this officemate has a paper to give and therefore a reason to go regardless. Me, I never get on top of it in time to hit those very early calls for papers for MLA. After far too many years of going, I won't be going to this MLA unless I have an interview.

(And if the luck-givers of the universe want to punish me by granting me an interview and making me pay through the nose for everything, then please, have at it!)

I hope that people have become accustomed to Skype enough to want to do Skype interviews with me instead of me flying out there, 'cause damn, that is a huge expense you are putting on us impoverished jobseekers year after year. If I do get an interview I'll camp out on someone else's floor and borrow a nametag to get me up the elevators. I don't have the money, yo. And my advisors' advice that these expenses are a worthwhile investment in return for a job wears thin after so many years of investing and not getting any job in return. However, I am a pessimist and think that more likely I will be sitting around my parents' house being depressed and interviewless and not spending any money on travel, which is fine if my niece takes me out to this dive bar she has found that she likes (OMG I am old; she is old) but then that raises the question of what I will be doing if I don't get a job this year once my postdoc, which cannot be extended, ends.

What the hell am I going to do?

Eh, I can't focus on that. I am lucky I have managed to get my tgiving and break plane tickets before the prices went through the roof. I have so much stuff to do and so much immediate stuff to worry about I can't be bothered with planning Plans B through Q and a possible Escape from Academia where the Kurt Russel role is played by your humble blogger.

Nope, I'm too busy to think about all that. But that doesn't stop it from looming over me like a dark cloud, like one of many dark clouds creeping up over my horizon. You can't do anything about uncertainty but it weighs on you. You'd think a cloud couldn't weigh anything but it does.