Where are They Now?

Alright, so it’s been a while. In tech terms, it’s been forever. And why have I been absent? Life, like the Borg, has a habit of intruding and occupying one’s attention. I’m sure a good psychologist would have a field day with my life/Borg comparison. What have I been doing? That implies an update. After five months and four days, an update is due, to be sure. First, I finished my dissertation! Alright, I nearly finished my dissertation. That is to say, I finished writing the bulk of the thing and survived my doctoral defense on May 2. If you have never had the pleasure of enduring a doctoral defense, imagine a group of four or five professors who have read over a piece of your work and take it upon themselves to ask you the hardest, most trying questions their minds can conceive. Further imagine that your answers determine your fate, and imagine, lastly, that this exercise is done before the merciless gaze of the public. If you can imagine these conditions, you well imagine a doctoral defense. It happened. When it comes to my university endeavors, my wife is the most supportive person I know. Before the defense, she was trying to talk me out of my pessimistic view of the pending exam. She even joked that we would have to work on my “Pollyanna complex.” After the defense which she witnessed, all she had to say was, “I understand now.” Like most other dissertations, mine did not escape unscathed. I have revisions to do which are fairly minor and fairly inescapable. “Wife,” you ask? Alright, I got married. I told you I would, and I did on April 20. My stoner acquaintances were delighted. Being a German scholar, I didn’t think of weed and 4/20; rather, my first thought was that it was Hitler’s birthday. I decided not to let this ruin the day, because it’s also my paternal grandmother’s birthday, may she rest in peace. It was an excellent star trek-themed wedding and reception. We don’t have it on YouTube … yet. Suffice it to say that we chose not to dress up in costume, but all the music was from trek, with all four major series (I reject Enterprise utterly) being represented in the ceremony, and the preacher wove a number of trek references into his sermonette. Good for him! Being a graduate student and living on a graduate student’s pay, the planned honeymoon in Fiji will just have to wait. So, I’m married and the biggest milestone of a Ph.D.’s life, my defense, is behind me. Where are we now? What about the job market? … We’re still here in Illinois. To put it bluntly, this year on the job market has been a near total flop. Apart from the Boston interview (see the blog entry for January 6) nothing else has happened except a pile of reject letters. My professors tell me that this is not unusual, and now that I have defended successfully, I have raised my job prospects for the next round of applications. The department at U. of I., meanwhile, has offered me a final year of teaching so that I can do two things: finish my revisions with the help of Disability Services’ text conversion office, and make another run at the job market. It was kind of them to offer me that year of funding; they did not have to by any means. So this year I will teach and work on turning my dissertation into a pair of publishable articles. At least this year, if there are MLA interviews, they’ll be in Chicago, the site of the 2014 MLA conference. My advisor, meanwhile, is encouraging me to continue bolstering my application by submitting an abstract to the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference, which will happen in March of next year in Portland. I would be thrilled to visit Portland again, as my guide dog came from there and two dear friends live there. Aside from great memories and awesome trekies, this means no massive conference hotel expenses and no overpriced conference hotel food. Lastly, we’re moving. We’re moving into a duplex in Urbana so that we can pay less and get more. It’s a one-bedroom residence with a shared front and back yard. Delaney will be delighted. It’s also within walking distance of several stores and other things that will be worth walking to, not the least of which will be bus stops that will enable me to do certain things such as … going to work? My future students and current employer would appreciate it if I were to do that. Selecting this place proved an exercise in discernment and necessitated a crash course in CU apartment hunting. For example, when one place, a reasonably attractive prospect, waited until the tour to tell us about the mandatory $30 per month water bill, we rejected it. With all of this going, the logical supposition would be that I have not had any time for a social life or hobbies. That would be logical, though incorrect. I am still playing chess, still watching the news for blog topics, and still teaching at church. In fact I’ve recently started playing what may be the only respectable star trek RPG on the web. As someone who has done administrative work on online games, I’m impressed with the massive size and detail work of the gaming environment, especially the Enterprise. And as a footnote, I should add that playing a Vulcan is proving interesting, though with my decade plus of studying that race and its relatives, I should be able to manage it in a way that would be, as a Vulcan would put it, “satisfactory.” So, what topics of note interest me? Edward Snowden? Perhaps. Prop 8? Not really. I always thought that was a states’ rights issue. The George Zimmerman trial? Maybe. We’ll see. But it is time to start writing again. Now that I’m not writing a dissertation, working on this blog has again become possible. PS. I loathe the fact that the appearance of this blog site continues to change. I thought for a few minutes that it was inaccessible now.