I'm Bored

And it's not to say that I have nothing to do --- I have literally a hundred things I need to do, including a huge stack of grading I just got, plus some old backup stuff to grade --- but rather it is that I have nothing I want to do in that mid- late evening slump.

I just realized that when daylight savings time ended (started? whichever), I continued to slip further and further back and go to bed earlier and earlier, until I am worried that I am going to go to a complete night schedule. Since my classes are late afternoon that seems unwise, but I'm not sure if I can switch back easily. And my sister has been getting tired and going to bed at ridiculously early hours, which is annoying now that I have gotten in the habit of socializing with her of an evening, and also she sometimes falls asleep on the floor out here in the living room with the tv on horrible things, like Tosh 2.0. Or, god help me, the shopping network. Which she is actually invested in and makes color commentary like other people do for sports. Aaaaaaaaaah!

Hrmph. I should get back in the habit of reading, but actually I have been reading plenty of online stuff all day, and besides I don't do well with night reading that is Highly Significant in any way, including really heavy emotionally. (And no, anything scary or thriller-y right before bed is a no-go!)

I just cleaned the dishes and most of the kitchen, for goodness' sake. My sis went to bed at the ridiculously early time of 7 (she did go into work extra extra early today to be sure she was there for some sort of important shipment or something ---- probably something radioactive or giant mutant dinosaur soldiers that they were concerned might escape, I'm sure. Or, you know, something.)

Hmm, all my knitting and crafting stuff is over in The Hot Place, all my books and toys and dvds, also in The Hot Place, my cats are not in The Hot Place but I can't go get them and cuddle them, sigh. I have sent out some job stuff but it never feels like enough, and I have done some informational interviewing but nothing has gone much further than that, and while it may not be as mentally and emotionally wrenching as doing the academic job search, "regular" job searching still always feels unfinished and hanging over you unpleasantly. Thing is, when you are looking for "a job" and casting a pretty wide net, unlike for teaching jobs where you pull a bunch of ads and then you're done, you could pull and pile up potential jobs to apply to for hours and hours and hours, and I get overwhelmed feeling and shut down pretty quickly. Then I'm not capable of much beyond endless games of bejeweled. Ooh, I know what I can do tonight!

Random random thought: did Farmville go out of business or just out of style? There was a time when half the people I knew on facebook were sending me various farmville requests, and I haven't heard anything about that in months. Good thing too. Maybe they turned it off so that other people don't get those announcements any more. Or maybe they have just been replaced in the algorithms by cat pictures and gifs. I guess I could teach myself how to code gifs --- that's as good an evening activity as any.

Sigh.

I haven't got anything to report but complaining. So what will I do? I will complain!

First of all, I hate informational interviews. They are just as nerve-wracking as actual interviews (side note: I am not a good phone interviewer!) but without an actual job on the line. No, indeed, they are like pre-interviews for the interview, in this bizarre recursive process where every step you take requires more preparation than the last and only moves you backward in the hiring progress.

I had a spate of requests for informational interviews get ignored, so then I sent out a huge number across a couple departments at a university, and then all of those requests got responded to and I had the stress and running about and preparation for a whole bunch all in a day. And I had lots of student grading to deal with, too, so I am not a wise planner. Plus, I feel like I am getting a smaller amount of useful tips with each interview --- which, if the point was really to learn about the field and how to get a job, would be progress, but really, these are all about meeting enough people and networking and hoping they will get you past the barriers somehow to actually get considered for a job.  I don't think that this is working for me. Meh. I hate schmoozery.

Also, I had one application "move further forward in the process" and request more stuff, but then promptly get rejected. Sigh. I would expect them to promote up through the ranks anyway. But this was the closest to any sort of interest in my job apps I have gotten, and is also the one most closely matching my prior academic interests. I don't know how anybody does an actual career and field transition --- they must have to know somebody personally and get a pity hire because nobody seems to be looking at resumes that show a trajectory up through a different field. There's "sure, I could do that" and there's, "the best, closest match of resumes in this pile to the job description." Sigh.

I would have thought I could have gotten some better responses to the job apps by now. I am feeling like a failure and that it is futile to even try. It's been 10 months since I knew I would be nonrenewed and, what, 4-5 months I have been unemployed and looking? In the middle of historically low unemployment and job growth around here? I'm sick of it.

Breaking the chain

Goodnight!

A little post before I fall asleep.

A normal person would take someone's writing log/system and actually use it for writing. I used it for planking.

Not the weird internet meme that was going on a while back, but literally doing planks and push-ups. My knee still doesn't feel "normal" --- as in, not reminding me it is there, like most of my other body parts --- and I was trying to increase my every-other-day walks. But if all I am doing is walking, then all my other muscles will melt and dislodge and fall off my body. Or something. Yoga would of course cover the whole body, but it pushes and stretches the knees and my knee still constantly reminds me that I should be careful of it and I should baby it. So I pulled out a link I saved long ago for a plank challenge to work your core.

You find your max time you hold it in good form and then keep it up for a month without breaking your chain. At my start I could only do about 30 seconds and was doing push-ups on my knees. And I  know that is way out of shape but the point is to improve. So I was increasing it a couple seconds every day and tracking my walks at about 4 miles every few days and really liking the accumulation of days in my tracker.

Then the first essays hit.

I hate that 2 classes can swamp me under just as much as 4 but there it is. More worrisome is that I have broken my chain of applying out to jobs and need to get back into things. I managed to wrangle another informational interview but the emotional build-up and then release of it all also contributed to my lackluster progress.

I will get another set of essays pretty soon so this weekend is all about figuring out what we're doing in essay 3. And I need to plan more in this new job siege strategy of interviews.

And, hopefully, fit in the time for another walk.

I dunno about the planking, though. Once you break a chain of that type it's like extra tough to motivate yourself to actually get back into it. Like the extra momentum from before has become extra resistance.

Little Frustrations

How long have I been at my sister's house now? It is starting to wear on me. It is really difficult to grade here, especially when she is at home in the evenings because the place is so small and she blasts the tv on horrible shows. And just having two classes is the same as four --- the grading expands to fill all available time. I haven't been sending out job apps since getting the big pile of midterms and papers and that should have me worried.

And furthermore, after having the two volunteer places both scheduling me on the same days and almost same times for several times in a row, there is now radio silence! I can't tell if that is because of their work loads or because I actually come off as something horrible and they don't want to work with me. (It all sounds believable if you have been fired for unlikeability.) Hrmf.

I need to grade this big stack o crap and do some cleaning and get back to thinking about a job strategy. And kick my sister out of the house ---- I thought her falling asleep to The Great Halloween Bake Off thing was bad enough, but hearing Robertson and all these other old fogeys talk over each other on PBS has got to be worse!

I haven't even told you about her singing, which I have always charitably ignored rather than telling her I loathe choirs and vocal music. But she has now joined a music group which is shaping up to be Bad News in terms of the money outlay and the practicing and the stress, and also she is constantly singing and practicing and bubbling and making weird noises. Meh.

I miss my cats so much

And I feel like the shittiest caretaker ever. There they are locked up in some little storage cage and they think they are abandoned, if they even remember me any more. Will they ever trust me again? Will I even ever see them again? I am so horrible.

Essay Prompt Request

Ok peeps, I'd love a little help here. I'm stuck w what someone else ordered for books which means extra plays and no novels. I planned out 2 short story essays and a drama research paper (much like I've done before). 

What I would *like* is for that second paper be a modified research paper --- I give them some sources about craft or genre more generally and they make arguments about how well it works (or doesn't) in what we have read. I have some intro to narrative theory stuff we could read about narrative gaps or foreshadowing, but would love to have a larger list of good, accessible essays. 

Know of anything? Maybe you can point me towards something in one of those Cambridge Companions or the like? 

I guess CA schools have a "critical thinking" component to their comp classes that also requires them to identify and evaluate logical fallacies in critical writing about literature --- and this place says it is not enough for them to identify fallacies in fellow students' writing. 

Now, I don't think most college freshmen are experienced and sophisticated enough to read criticism and successfully  evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of it, but I think they can learn to read and annotate a critical essay and identify the claims. And it might be a bit of a stretch for them to do what I am suggesting here but it would be good practice for the research paper.

Any creative writing peeps with craft-style  articles would be really helpful!

Progress so slow it might be standing still

Bleah. I should be applying for jobs right now. Muh. Eh. Foo! I just went through and pulled a lot of new openings off of HERC, so ... yeah, eventually. Meh.

I have made a little squidgen of progress on another front for the job search process, and found a couple nonprofit orgs that I would be interested in volunteering for. Funny how quickly people respond to my applications when paying me is not on the line!

Anyway, I have not yet started my volunteering! Argh! Last week I had several face-to-face meetings so people could ascertain that I am in fact not a crazy, and I seem to have passed those. (I guess I need to figure out how to have those meetings with U admin people to get my apps over the hump.) Now I am ready to start doing various orientations and trainings, some of which are this week and which continue next week.

So sloooooooow! Look, this will not help my resume right away, and how long will I have to volunteer with people before I have accumulated the "3 to 5 years progressively responsible experience" in these skills? Arrrgh! (And why do even the jobs listed as "entry level" or "good for a new graduate" also include these insane experience requirements? You can't have it both ways, people!)

To make things even slower, one of the volunteer positions is for petting cats. Now, petting cats is fun and lovely, but not in demand on job listings. What I would love to do for them is to help them create a newsletter or direct-marketing email campaign and get some nice fundraising and writing clips. But --- and yeah, this makes sense --- they want me to do all the orientations and plenty of on-the-ground standard volunteering before they trust me with their website or creating materials. But that means this could take a long time. Argh.

Teaching is fine ---- though I am getting midterms this week and papers at the end of next week, so I might not be so "fine" after that. I think I am getting evaluated in a couple weeks, and I need to go back through and update the essay instructions for the next sequence. Oh, and I finally got the instructor copy of the book that whoever was supposed to teach this class ordered, which makes life much easier and less anxiety-ridden.

Driving home from my night class, however, is still a stress test, because they do all the damn freeway work at night and I have to drive a gauntlet of eye-blindingly bright lane closures and merges, and also the last couple times they have had closed the interchange ramp exit for the freeway I want. This has sent me through the other freeway route which I don't know as well and which has those nasty super-curvy weird interchanges. Nope. Don't like it one bit. Driving it in the daytime is fine, but at night my eyesight is just a little bit haloed and fuzzy and it is Not Fun. I can't wait until the El Nino deluges me with rain as I try to navigate my way home. Meh.

Reviewing *Home*

On my second trip of the week I finished Toni Morrison's Home, and the experience was so different I started reading again from the beginning, thinking that maybe I was just in a different mood. I re-read the whole  thing today.

Now, I haven't finished writing  any novels, much less any that won major international awards, so maybe I have no right to criticize, but the second half of this book in no way lived up to the first. The novel opens with this amazing italicized memory of horses fighting, written in that totally Toni Morrison, larger-than-life voice, and then goes sort of detective style in the waking up of a vet who needs to break out of a mental hospital. Except, it quickly becomes obvious, this vet has been imprisoned for no more reason than he is black and suffering PTSD, and the way he takes in blame on himself for both of these qualities is heartbreaking. (I must have done something to deserve this. Maybe I was shouting again, or talking to the trees and apologizing to them, or staring at people and crying. You know, the sort of self blame that made Shadrach suicidal in Sula. Wait, that's the novel with Suicide Day in it, right?) 

But the novel doesn't really focus consistently on the vet --- Frank Money --- and his development or breakdown. And it also brings in his younger sister, who similarly must heal herself after a trauma, this one echoing the histories of medical experimentation on black people by doctors. This strand of the story comes at the end of the novel when everything feels rushed and lacking in clear stakes. What happened to her? How is Frank able to rescue her so easy? Why is the doctor doing this and why doesn't he do more to stop their escape? (I understand she's never been all that interested in exploring white racist mind sets, but she's had more fleshed out, more satisfying, villain characters.) Why is the sister --- who is rural, practically illiterate, and barely 15 when this happens --- able to suddenly make self-reliance speeches at the end that wouldn't seem out of place on an Oprah episode? So many strands are closed off or declared "healed" at the end and I don't even know why I should care about them, much less how they are resolved.

The "home" is similarly frustrating, as the town of Lotus, Georgia, is seen by these two characters as only a prison and backwater they never want to return to, justifiably so. And yet they do return and blend in easily and without any resentment at the end. And the women who have had no love and connection with Cee (the sister), are presented at the end as being somehow the answer or solution to these characters' problems, accepted without any railing against it like in the beginning. Why should we care about them or believe that their love is actually love, when it is, like their parents' love, as sharp and thin and cold as a razor blade? (I handed my book to my sis so I can't quote exactly) Now, I understand that people who live in terrible circumstances do terrible things in turn, and their love in these circumstances is warped like a tree bent by the constant ocean winds --- that is the message of Sula, after all --- but nothing about that group of vicious women worked for me. Or the ending, either. Maybe if it had taken extra pages to bring us to that point it could have. 

Now I feel like I should go read her earlier work again and see how much still stands up over time. Of course, those books are all packed into storage, waiting for their own home.

Sister update

Still nothing much to report on the job-application-throwing side of things. But in between applications and teaching I have been annoying my sister, so I might as well report on that:

• I went through all of her eleventy billion Tupperware pieces and matched tops and bowls and then left about 6 billion unmatched pieces on the counter for permission to toss. "Oh yeah, ffft, toss whatever of them," she said with a hand wave. So I went back and also tossed all of her old cottage cheese tubs since there were still millions of clear tubs and having leftovers and half used cottage cheese all jumbled in the same type of container was driving me nuts. It is much better in that cabinet and we probably only use 6 or 7 containers a week, so I could easily purge even more. But since it looks fine I will stop. Although it is very dark in there and if I could figure out some sort of lighting situation inside I might do that.
• I tossed a whole bottle of olive oil. It didn't smell all that different from the bottle I just bought, but it did say 2009 best date, and I just wasn't happy with the idea of cooking with it. 2009, people.
• I went to make mac n cheese the other day, driven by a craving for the bad packaged stuff, and when I poured the pasta into the boiling water, I said, "huh. I didn't know it came pre-spiced with pepper flakes." So I grabbed a white ladle and ladled them out and examined carefully. Those were definitely legs on those pepper flakes. Ew. I dumped it all for a grilled cheese sandwich instead. My sis said she had pantry moths a while ago. I tossed a couple more boxes (2010 best date) today when I took out the trash and will do a couple more every week. 
• I washed some parts of the fridge (which is much emptier now that I'm here compared to before). There is a bottle of Gatorade in the fridge door which is perplexing to me as my sis refuses to drink anything besides water or the occasional diet coke. Working my way up to getting rid of that.
• My sis had the plumber and the electrician and the bug control people come out on days when I do not teach --- she loves not having to take a day off work to get that stuff sorted but did not love calling around for it. So we no longer have roaches visible (the downside is I tend to freak out about the gels and chemicals and traps he put down) and can flush the toilet in the other bathroom and can turn on all the lights, which is good. On the downside she bought a vacuum that does not really work on anything but hardwood and then got the place carpeted a few years back. It makes me long to drive all the way out to The Hot Place and bring back a decent vacuum. But then thinking about that makes me sad about my cats and my books and not having a place, so I can't think about that. *sniffle!*
• It has been nice having regular contact with a person and that person not being a random roommate who would have less patience for my annoyingness. I hope I haven't annoyed my sister or overstayed my welcome because the first paycheck I got for adjuncting is nice but nowhere near covering Bay Area rents. Please send winning lotto tickets and catio building materials.

Amusing myself with job titles

Hee.

If I'm too young to be a geriatric director, I want to be a nuclear pet chemist. I will create a breed of superkitties who will annihilate you all with their laser eyes and poisonous breath mwahahahahaha!

Anyway. Back to stuffing applications in online submission systems and not hearing anything back from it. Good day.

ACE ACE baby

So I'm back to teaching. It's nice. It can expand to fill all the time that I'm not faffing about on the Internet, which might become a problem, and we are having some warm weather that is sapping my energy or possibly my knee is tiring me out a bit still, because it still hurts a bit. But really the problem I'm dealing with right now --- as are my students, I'm sure --- is transportation.

Where I live? Over here, on one part of the bay (yes, this counts as the Bay Area you snobs shut up). Where I picked up some classes? Over... there. It's actually not far in miles but then I was listening to the news while driving and the dj guy said "well that's why we never measure anything in miles in the Bay Area, only in minutes." And then it took me 45 minutes to get across my town what with the lights and traffic. Wait, lemme check. 6.4 miles. Oh.

So I don't like driving to Adjunct Town in general and particularly right now it freaks me out because it was my right knee I messed up and it does not like pushing the gas pedal. And it is very swollen when I get out of the car. Plus, I got a night class and I am driving back late in the dark and every freaking freeway or road is full of crazy construction, funneling us down to a single lane and then moving us all from this lane to that lane and back. Yuck.

All is not lost, however ... I can take the train! I'm not far from the ACE train, and Adjunct Town CC is... Not far from the bus you can transfer to from the train. It has its pluses and minuses. But since the bus only comes once an hour in the evenings and likewise the train and then everything shuts down not long after my night class gets out, I think I will stick to driving on night class day.

But my twice a week class day is in the middle of the afternoon! Score!

I have figured out how to do the tickets and transfers (mostly) and I have been taking advantage of the time to prep and grade and read things! Nice, huh? I'm not so good about grading on the way back  (5pm urrrrgh tired) but I have inhaled most of a lovely, devastating Toni Morrison novel: Home

It feels very appropriate for Black Lives Matter, in a very depressing way. It seems almost addressed more to white people ("why do we keep saying black lives matter? Here's where you said they didn't. And here, and here, and here.") and there is something a little bit.... Thin? Underdeveloped? To it, but that might be me wanting or expecting a little more world building and detail. I'm out of practice in reading.

So the good news is that I should be able to get back in the habit of reading things, and maybe even writing things. The bad news is that there is a lot of waiting time and transfer time and the bussing all the hell all over things time. (And I know none of my students read this but, hey students! You should really be thinking about maximizing your time and reading/studying on the public transport rather than playing on your phone! I see you being bored over there.)

The other bad news is that it's pricey! Yeah yeah I know, it's a public good and nobody is paying the taxes to support those goods, and you think it's mostly tech commuters taking it so what does it matter if it's running like 10 bucks to get somewhere, but really I see a lot of low-wage workers and students on it, and I bet that's one of the million ways the high cost of living in the bay hurts student transfer and graduation rates. GradSchoolLand had subsidized busing with a current student id and I plugged that shit so hard to my students. Here it's 3 bucks to park and then the ticket and then another 2 to bus over to campus. So your minimum-wage shift might just about cover a day's travel to and from campus, and meals. I'm not sure how my driving costs break down but I'm definitely using a half a tank or so for a trip. (That might be for two days, hmm. I'll have to keep track now that I'm not going in every single day to sign paperwork.)

And in other other news, I'm still squeezing out a trickle of job apps every couple of days, with no response, and I guess I have to up those rates if I ever want to actually land a job of some sort. Sigh. That must mean getting off the blog and locking up the internets. Grumble grumble.

The mysteries of FTE

...employment, that is, not enrollment.

Huh, so I have mentally composed a lot of posts about a lot of things but not had the time/energy/ability to close the games on my ipad and actually write them down. I'm starting my classes this week, took a slip and messed up my knee while hiking on Saturday and am trying to rest and recover, and after a whirlwind 10 days or so of rushing about getting paperwork and bureaucracies and signatures and fingerprints and the classes set up and me oriented, I am now trying to go back to applying for job type things.

Job descriptions, both inside and outside academic staffing, have me totally confused. Quite a few positions, when I read them, I say, "that's it? What does this person do all day? What will happen in 2 months when this person has done all the stuff and organized the office out of boredom --- will the position be eliminated?" Maybe these things take longer than I think, or maybe there are tons of constant interruptions that break the chain of work. I dunno. I will point out that it is often "regular business" type jobs I notice this most with.

Then there are the job descriptions that have twenty bullet points and I think about each and go, ok, that one would take me the most of a day to accomplish and I hope that it would only happen once in a week? Because I'd have to write up all the reports and other things that happen in the other bullet points? And some of these job descriptions are not full time! I will point out that this definitely shows up on the nonprofit jobs listed in Idealist, but the university staffing jobs are not exempt.

Also confusing are the staff coordinator positions that will only exist for a year. But....your department/research center/laboratory will still exist after then, right? Will all of this work be done then? Do you have a person lined up who can't take the job for one year? I don't get it. Mind you, there are a lot of part time and temporary positions listed that only want people during the enrollment crush and beginning of the year right now and that totally makes sense to me. But if you are going to, I dunno, staff the Disabled Students Office this year, I presume you are going to continue it next year?

There are even quite a few jobs that I can not for the life of me figure out what they entail. And not, I think, because I am not qualified for them. I can read a description that mentions MySQL and scrum and database development and can visualize what that person should do all day as well as understand that I'm not qualified. But there are other listings .... I will ...optimize excellence all day? I can't even tell what some of these companies do! And I admit, I am not the personality type to work with tech startups. I keep reading about companies and going either, well, that's stupid and pointless and why do you even exist, or going, hmm, I can't tell what you do... do you make anything? sell anything? just burn through venture capital? You're not making the world a better place at all, are you?

This is not the optimistic, can-do attitude the tech startups are looking for --- although when my dad was working as a top manager at a big technology place, his whole job was basically to shit on and tear about all products and proposals to make sure only the ones that would actually be worth it got out to be seen by investors or customers, so I bet that is more standard for "regular" businesses. But the tech/mobile app stuff these days seems much more about suckering in money and blowing it out as fast as possible before anybody realizes you don't have a product or business plan. Hmm. I wish the finance guys would take all these techbros back to Manhattan. Well, not because I want them to ruin the entire global economy again, just because I would hope that the housing costs here would go down a bit and there would be fewer entitled assholes.

Anyways, I am trying to get back into the habit of applying for things and moving way too slow. Interestingly enough, only one of the schools I am shooting stuff off to is getting back to me with rejections. Maybe the others are moving slow too and some of those applications are still in play? I dunno. I wonder if there is a point where the big Us just shut me out of their employment application system because I have tried for too many damn positions?

Update: more of the same

I have now done an informational interview with an acquaintance of my sister's! She told me a little bit about the nonprofit world, where she worked, and gave me a lot of helpful advice thinking through how to pull out my skills and qualifications. She suggested I revamp my resume as a skills resume rather than chronological. Have I done that since talking to her? No. I'm not positive that's what I want to do, but she didn't think not being able to trace through my employment history would be a big deal. But lots of helpful advice and I felt like I was a skilled competent person who could do lots of different jobs, so that's nice!

It's really easy to start thinking you are invisible, sending out tons of applications and not hearing anything back. Actually, it's easy to dwindle off and then stop sending out applications because you're not hearing anything back, and to get used to being silent and not really doing anything because you aren't around anybody, and then to prefer it, just living inside your own head, so I think that I will need to do these business-related meetings regularly to practice being business-social and keeping my eye on the ball. I mean, most people might find this whole unemployment state bewildering, but as an academic I have regularly frittered away relaxing summers and gone most of a week without talking to a human being while doing reading and research, so I will have to work against that state.

The other thing this week is I managed to pick up two classes from a local community college, and I need to finish going through the mounds and mounds of paperwork etc. And they start soon. Soon! Urgh. So I have some structure in my days soon and a little cash money and a reason to get out of the house, but I can't rely on this getting me an actual job so I need to be careful not to assume this or let that work overwhelm my job-hunting work.

Also I kind of fell off the wagon regarding walking and meetups so I think I need to actually schedule in a set time each week to plow through the events and pick them. Since the hike groups I keep going on regularly sign up about a hundred people (!) and they fill up to their limit within about a day of being posted (!!) and a lot of them are an hour or two drive from me and plan on being 10 miles long (that makes me too tired to even put in an exclamation point), I can get overwhelmed with making a decision and scheduling something, and also I have cancelled a couple hikes because I just can't handle the thought of driving someplace far and confusing and winding alone. I will need to come up with a way around that problem.

Another nice thing is that my sister's friend wanted to meet at a little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop I have never been to, and I discovered it is a big shabby space filled with old living room furniture and board games and a nice, "real" coffee-shop vibe and I guess it is where a lot of our local nonprofit people and elderly hippies have their meetings. I like it. It is my new go-to spot. I think they do live music there sometimes, and it reminds me of the coffeeshop/bar/laundromat I liked so much in Postdoc City. Now, one of the unexpected advantages of a small conformist town is that if you make one decent alternative spot, everybody goes there and knows each other because there aren't that many weird people around. It's a forced community but it's a community. I don't think it is as easy to find fellow weird people around the Bay Area because it is so big, and I think people are actually less tolerant because you can find about 10 people with *exactly* your fandom or weird interests, so why hang out with the crazy person 15 years older than you who tells weird stories of meeting Johnny Cash? I mean, that person could hang out with 11 other people who want to wear armadillo suits and reminisce about traveling the country following classic country bands. But in Postdoc City, that person would probably be friends with the one Goth kid and the one gay person who tries to put on drag shows and the guy who keeps dressing up like Darth Vader for various events. Just saying that it is nice to find a solid group of people who "get" you instantly but you might gain more from trying to meld your complementary styles of crazy. Anyway, I haven't really found either type of group here yet, ...but I'm not really trying that hard, either. If it comes down between putting my energies into hunting up a job vs. a social scene, I know which I have to prioritize first.

Linked Out

Ugh. UGH. UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!  How much does it suck to apply for jobs? So. Much.

Everything I hate about the shallowness and empty posturing in contemporary life has naturally fucked up the job searching process as well. I understand that my desire for reserve, privacy, an authentic connection to nature comes across, these days, as less "friendly Walden-dwelling hermit" and more like this guy:

But honestly I don't care. The only thing I want to do less than toot my own horn about some meaningless miserable fake accomplishments is to participate in a circle-jerk of meaningless accomplishment-stroking for others. But is that the way to get a job in the twenty-first century? Naw, we got a shitty website for that.

Let me say that the whole experience of That Site is horrifying and everything on it reeks of either desperation or douchebaggery. I know resumes and cover letters have this incredibly stilted and formalistic language to them, but it's like putting on a suit and tie for an interview and everybody knows this is that formal thing you do. Making a website where you strive for language that comes across in that same incredibly stilted and awkward voice but also really really pretends that you believe in that tone and speak that way naturally just seems wrong. Too public, too permanent --- like you're tattooing that suit on out of love for it instead of wearing it only to the interview. Ick.

And I just don't get how you yourself writing words like "loves" "excels at" or "brilliantly exceeds" could possibly make them any more true than someone else writing it for you. They are only words. They are skillsets, not hobbies or fandom. Except for using Microsoft Office. I mean I love demonstrating my expertise at that shit. It's the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning and the the last thing I think of at night. If you offered me a choice between having sex and implementing Exel, I'd have to go with the Excel. Because I am a proactive self-starter with a strong interest in synergizing deliverables in a fast-moving office environment. I am an Office Ninja and I authentically love your shitty and meaningless product.

Beyond the tone everyone seems to adopt on That Site is the problem with "connections" and "networking." I'm sure that if you, dear reader, are an educator, you have had the experience where some former student signed up for That Site and the first thing that happens is the motherfucking site spams Every.Single.Fucking.Contact --- which means every single person this student has ever emailed with including anyone they have shared an English draft with or had questions about when is the final --- and then fucking. get. hounded. for weeks afterwards because the only option is "accept this connection and join us!" not "I have no clue who this dipshit is I teach at least 120 students every semester." So when I finally bite the bullet and spend 30-40 minutes scrounging the site for a way to turn off the "spam the entire world" option, I finally decide to use my non-pseudonymous gmail rather than making up a new one. Not twenty minutes later as I am scrolling through the horrors of that site, I get a ping from a distant relative: Do I see you have signed up for ______? Is there a problem? Would you like to talk?

Shit. Shitshitshit. Shiiiiiiiiiit. I actually slam down the lid of the laptop, look guiltily around the cafe. I would probably be less embarrassed to be caught downloading porn. Earlier I'd already moved, gunslinger-style, to a table where I can sit with my back to the wall: don't look at meeeeee ohgod don't look at meeeeee! 

Twenty minutes more or so of scrambling frantically around That Site, and I push a button. I block my relative. And I leave everything off my "personal brand" page. I understand that's not how to use the site and it probably looks more creepy than a filled-out page, but how can I "tell my story coherently and persuasively" when I don't know what story I want to tell? What career field am I going into? I don't know! What skills should I emphasize? I don't know! What's my objective? I don't know! What are my previous jobs and why am I leaving them? Uh, I really really don't want to talk about that! 

I dunno what job I could possibly get without eating shit and doing the Unholy Networking Dance. Maybe Artisan Yak Herder? Hmm that whole "cabin in the woods" thing is sounding better and better. If only I could get my mom to bring me lunch every day.

The little things

Luckily, my sister and I are still getting along and still speaking to each other. The weather had even cooled down and made this place bearable (until yesterday). But there are little things that are hard to get adjusted to.

For example, everybody has their own system for storing things and cooking things. If this is your system, this makes sense:

But if you are not the person who bought these measuring spoons, how the hell do you know which size is which now that the labels have rubbed off arrrgh! I am doing a lot of cooking by guesstimating these days.

Other problems just have to do with the limitations of space and cheap kitchens. My sis doesn't want to upgrade her kitchen until she knows what is going on with her daughter, and whether my sis will need to help her with a housing down payment, or possibly my sister will move someplace nicer (and she is definitely worried about all the stairs leading up to her place and getting older.) How can you argue with that kind of logical thinking?

It does mean that she has one cabinet for every single cooking implement and one for her entire dish collection, all stacked atop each other so that whatever you want is at the bottom of a 25-pound pile.

And it also means that there isn't really much room for me to put my stuff away, which is fine since my spices are in cute little shoeboxes:

As a reward/procrastination from the obnoxiousness of job hunting, I am throwing out one thing a day from my sister's fridge or cabinets. This one has a "best by" date of 2010:

So, yeah, I'm fine. Mostly. Little freaked out about cooking/eating here but that's all right. In a month or so I will have completely replaced my sister's systems with my own, mwahahahahahaha!

Databases

First of all, let me say that I'm glad to have helpful and supportive readers! (Or, really, any readers at all.) People have not only posted potential things on this blog for me, but I even got in contact with someone to do a practice informational interview! Or maybe it was even a real informational interview! I don't know; I'm not used to doing these types of things.

Anyway I have sent out a couple more things, slowly and gradually, and I have a lot of stuff prepared for jobs from UCOP (Office of the President) but their stupid website/database thingy isn't letting me upload things right now. Maybe it took off early for the Friday and that's why my files keep getting rejected.

Anyway, it is kind of fun just reading across all the jobs that are posted and imagining what it would be like to do them. Even stuff like "groundskeeper" or "agricultural supervisor" or "naturalist coordinator." The problem is that I can quickly become overwhelmed by the options and spiral down into depression. But before that happens I found "Director of UC Observatories," which is fun to imagine doing in these days of the Pluto fly-by etc. (I'm imagining it requiring wearing goggles and steampunk gear while flying dirigibles between James Lick and the Griffith --- don't bother to correct me; I'm not remotely qualified so I prefer to imagine it this way and that makes me happy.)

The only problem is that after a while I get into the, "ok, yeah, I can do that" mode and feel like I have to apply for everything out there, right now. And then, as I've already mentioned, I feel overwhelmed. I should cheer myself up by buying some steampunk dirigible goggles.

Still here... starting to apply for things

Well, I must say this sucks. I like orderly, transparent systems and procedures to follow; my sister says that outside of the academic job market, job searching has nothing to do with any of that. If it were a case of typing lots of things or pulling a lever a lot of times, I would put in long hours of work job searching. But it's kind of like job hunting and gathering, when I have no fucking clue what tracks or spoor jobs leave and I'm kind of just wandering around in circles. You know, just like if I were out hunting in the wilderness. I hope I have better luck in this than in, I dunno, duck hunting.

So I'm wandering the hills and woods looking for jobs to apply to. Except, as my sister points out, most of the jobs her company fills never get posted --- they get filled before they are advertised by internal candidates or because someone personally knows a good candidate they should take a chance on. The What Color is Your Parachute book agrees:

Bleah. You know what this means? I will need to find people who are employed and convince them I am a good candidate they should make a job opening for! And that means ---- networking! AKA talking to people I don't know ugh!!!! Or making ... ugh, small talk! Or even asking people for things! BLEAH!!!!

This post might not make any grammatical sense because I have the tv on in the background and I can never write like that. I obviously can't revise or proof either because I keep putting in words from the Daily Show as I read back through.

Anyway, I found three things and applied to them today, so I feel like I have accomplished something. But soon I'm going to have to talk to people and do all that networking shit, and I am so not looking forward to that.

My life as a 10 x 10 storage unit

When I first started carting over my books and boxes to the storage unit, I thought that the cube of space was a little grim, but plenty of room. Then I thought I would never be able to get all my furniture in there, and I waffled back and forth over whether it would be fine or I was going to have to jettison random pieces  at the curb. It turned out that everything fit, with a teeeny bit of leftover space, and mainly because my movers were good at stacking high and Tetris-ing everything in there.

Now I am freeloading off my sister, in the bedroom that holds all her junk and the furniture my niece grew up with (some of which is old crap from my childhood and even handed down from my sister's childhood, which is oddly depressing), and I am struck by how similar the space is to the storage unit and is maaaaaybe 10 x 10. This might be rough.

I am even more struck by how different our priorities are. Sure, she bought a place in the heart of Silicon Valley and I know your money doesn't stretch all that far, but although she bought something cheap, she didn't buy the cheapest --- I know there were places that were cheaper that looked less of a "dungeon" (her words). This place is a bottom floor condo in one of the zillions of apartment complexes built in the late 70s/early 80s that got flipped into condos sometime in the 90s. There are only windows on one side of the unit, and only a couple at that. Other units are on all other sides. Even if access to light and a view was unimportant to her, the closed-in layout means it is over 90 degrees in here most of the time --- and my sis refuses to put in air conditioning. It is tough to fall asleep here at night. Hell, she refused to get a bed and slept on the floor of the living room for years after her divorce --- which she only changed when my brother got a new bunk bed for his son and gave her the old bed! It's like she was punishing herself for the divorce or something.

In return for staying here I agreed to grocery shop and cook (which I like to do and she hates) and I crammed the last bits of my pantry into her crowded kitchen. Dudes. She lives off canned soup and applesauce. All the food in her freezer is over 5 years old. She mentioned the other day that she hates eating. She doesn't like coffee or beer. How are we related?

And this morning while I was making my coffee, a bug sauntered across the stove. Taking his own sweet time. I think it was a roach. I've offered to clean out her freezer, and now I guess I'll do all the pantry cabinets too. How are we related?

Sigh

Ugh, now what?


The easy part's over. Now what do I do with my life?

Would anybody like to borrow some cats?

I still haven't figured out where to store them. Most places that hold cats for you end up costing as much as rent, so I'm not sure that moving in with family is actually the big cost-saving plan they thought it would be. Most places want about 20 per cat per night, which I have always been complaining about whenever I try to visit family for 3 weeks or a month. "You're leaving so soon?" "Maaaa, I've already spent 500 on cat boarding! I need to get back!" My teeny emergency savings pile won't last very long if I shell out 1200 a month for the cats --- again, I could probably be living in a studio somewhere with them for that kind of money! (And if that's the right plan, then why did I bust my hump to haul crap over to the storage unit all week?)

I know what you're going to say --- why not just get rid of them permanently? That's not an acceptable outcome. I know my family is going to start pushing hard for that plan soon but my cats have been there for me and helpful in ways that my family has always let me down, so I'm not about to put them over the cats as a priority. Instead I have been researching chicken runs and catios and their construction costs in the hopes that I can just have them squat in my brother's backyard without being eaten by coyotes. I mean, he never goes outside anyway so why would it bother him to have some cats out back with the other allergens? Although I haven't figured out a way to broach it with them and the timeline is running short. Maybe I could just not tell him? It's not like he ever looks out the back window anyway. He probably wouldn't even notice...right?