-- There seem to be cottontail rabbits everywhere. Hoppity hop hop. I don't know whether it's a Midwest thing, a New SLAC Town thing, or simply a consequence of the fact that my coffeemaker is with the movers and I have to walk four blocks to the mini-mart to get my morning fix. Maybe I would have seen rabbits all the time in University of Basketball Town if I had been going out for seven o' clock in the morning walks on a regular basis.
-- The farmer's market here? Many different shades of awesome. Of course it's an hour-long train-and-bus ride or a thirty-minute drive into the city, and I miss being able to drive five minutes to the Next Town Over from University of Basketball Town on Saturday mornings and get my fresh tomatoes and pecan pie. They seem to be a bit less fussed about selling only local products than they were back home. At least, I don't think pineapples grow around here, but if the vendors are going to give me free samples of pineapple I am not going to complain. Also, I tried pork rinds for the first time, but wasn't particularly impressed one way or the other. (However, I had a Ren drama prof in grad school who suggested bringing in pork rinds the day we read Bartholomew Fair, and it's nice to know where to get them, in case I decide to do that in the drama class. Assuming that we do get around to reading Bartholomew Fair, of course [it's on the syllabus, but I think that will be the play we drop if we run out of time, because I'm nervous about teaching it].)
-- One of my new colleagues stopped by on Friday and invited me to Faculty Poker Night, a.k.a. Clean the Newbie out of Her Spare Change Night. Hmm. Clearly I am going to have to improve my game if I'm sticking around. (Dammit, why couldn't it have been bridge, or spades, or Trivial Pursuit?) Regardless, they seem like very nice people, and I do hope I end up sticking around -- I feel like I really lucked into this job, because if it weren't for the whole one-year visiting thing, it would be just about perfect. (There's a certain amount of survivor guilt involved, though -- I took Ph.D. comps in Ren lit with two other people, and I think I'm the only one with a full-time job in the field right now; one ran out of funding and has yet to finish his dissertation, and the other couldn't do a full job search last year because of truly horrible, tragic personal circumstances. And I can't shake the feeling that they're both more deserving people than I am; I'm a bit of a slacker, truthfully, and I didn't really get my professional stuff together until the job market scared me into doing something. Probably better not to think too much about this.)
Cripes, how did I ever get onto that subject? Right, well, anyway, I'm settling in, and the movers should be here with some actual furniture later today.
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Yes, rabbits dominate the midwest. We should be regularly trapping and eating them or something. Seriously, we could reduce local hunger, I bet.
One of the hard things about getting an academic job (or being on the other side of a search) is realizing that life sucks, and that some of the very best people won't get academic jobs. I've seen searches where we had two or three candidates who were out of this world, and we could only hire one. There's a pretense that jobs are totally based on merit, but there's nothing about merit in someone having a bad illness or accident, or having other issues.
I hope your friends are doing better and will have good experiences on the market this year.
I hope so, too. Generally, people from my grad program do tend to do well eventually -- it just takes several tries in some cases.
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