This is one of those posts to get back into the swing of things. The more time passes the more overwhelmed I find the prospect of catching up on all the cat-blog stuff. But then I remember Wes’s Law, which says, more or less, that doing _something_ results, eventually, in accomplishing everything. Or something like that. Which now that I write it doesn’t seem possible, but it made sense at the time, and Wes is usually right. So here you are: something.
Job
I have a job. Or two jobs, sort of, from two labs in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota. The good news is that the work is interesting and cool and important. The bad news is that it pays about a third of what a gentleman and scholar of my caliber could expect to earn. But still, that’s enough to live on, and is a whole lot better than the zero I was getting before.
A million sources are reporting a million different indices of the country’s economic health; and my tiny myopic peephole doesn’t mean much compared to all that. But from my experience, things are pretty fucking bad: in the final analysis I got a shitload of calls from a shitload of recruiters fighting like dogs over the handful of table scraps the different companies would throw them. I started out looking only in Mpls, then both widened the search and narrowed my salary requirements, but to no avail. The one exception is if you have an active security clearance and are willing to travel. I had one job yanked out from under me because my last employer stopped processing my clearance when I left.
House
We bought a house. You wonder how this could possibly have happened, considering the financial situation we were in. Here’s how: we used a combination of the money I made in New Hampshire, some cash from my parents, loans and grants from the city of Minneapolis, and the real estate expertise of my friend Dave Wilson. Result: we bought a foreclosure in the ghetto for $22.5k in cash.
The thinking was this: we weren’t likely to have the opportunity to buy a house again, not for at least five years. Cancer is expensive; and then, in the fall, Monica is going to nursing school. Then, in the fall, I am going to the U (see below.) The housing market is already starting to rebound, meaning that the number of insane lunatic deals are shrinking. If we were gonna do it we had to strike while the iron was hot, so we did.
Hopefully buying the house will turn out to be a good idea. Right now it’s too early to tell. Wilson has been an unbelievable friend throughout the process. According to the estimates we got from various contractors, so far Wilson’s done about ten thousand dollars of labor on our place, for free, with more to come; and that’s not taking into account that he found the candidate houses in appropriate areas, took us to see them, and gave us a builder’s critique of their problems and potential. In return he wants me to make him a web site. I think that’s a deal I can live with.
Heifer has been particularly wonderful during this period – two days of vicious dirty grunt work tearing off our ancient shingles and cedar shakes, two days of moving including hauling away some of our garbage and letting us use his enclosed trailer. DDB came out for one day as well, and then there are all the folks who’ve been bringing us meals in support of Monica’s chemo: Peaches (twice), Alix, and some of Monica’s friends including Rachelle, who sometimes reads LSH.
In all I’m astounded by the efforts my friends have been willing to make on our behalf. I hope that the things I’ve done for them over the years warrants what they’re doing for me, and promise to do my damndest to make sure my efforts going forward are worthy of their efforts now.
The U
I got a Fellowship to take another crack at the PhD thing, this time in the psych department at the U. Economically speaking this is probably an astoundingly stupid decision. But as I was reminded in New Hampshire, you get one life, and you’ve got to make every day mean something. Flushing your time down the toilet chasing dollars is a fool’s game. The question is, after the clusterfuck at USC, is academia another fool’s game? I have reason to think it isn’t, but this has gone on too long already and you’ll have to wait to hear why.