DivingBoard

It has been insane, to say the least. I am elbow-deep with job market stuff, on top of teaching and trying to finish my third diss chapter. It has not been easy and well, blogging has been relegated to the bottom of the infinite TO DO list. I will say though that being on the job market, while quite stressful, has made some things more clear to me. One is that yes, I really do want to teach and will jump through some precarious looking hoops in order to keep doing what I love. Two, the endeavor to write and rewrite cover letters and dissertation abstracts in order to make more clear to an audience---that is not me nor my committee chair---is an exercise that is quite painful most times but in the end, totally worth it. Now I feel quite confident about the labor that I'm doing and, more importantly for the job market, I feel more confident in expressing the labor represented in my project. So often as academics, because we don't build anything concrete with our bare hands or we can't point to a tangible thing that we've done at the end of the day that says "Look! That's what I did all day!" or "Look, that's 7 years of my life right there!" that our labor is often disparaged. I do it to myself and certainly those in our lives, whether they be our parents, friends or partners, at some point do it to us too. How do express to someone that you sat on your ass all day staring at the computer screen while trying to unpack or express a particularly difficult concept and that the result of that intellectual labor is represented by this page, or this one paragraph or these scattered notes? It's like those cheesy souvenir t-shirts that say "I went to (insert tourist destination here) and all i got was this lousy shirt!" I went to grad school and all I got is this lousy dissertation. You just gotta laugh sometimes.

All this is to say that soon enough I will be posting more interesting things, so stay tuned and keep checking back. For now (at least until mid-November) I will post some shorter entries, blog site recommendations, job market rants, etc. as I wade through these murky job market waters. I wish you all a productive fall!